Commonwealth (15 page)

“I should have called sooner.”

“Why?” she said.

“I put you in a bind. I never checked to see if you got in any trouble.”

“Oh, no trouble,” she said. She looked out over the bar and imagined they were his characters drinking there, Septimus Porter himself holding a highball glass, his girls making all the racket.

“I didn't hear you.”

“I said it was
no trouble
. It's really noisy in here. It's happy hour.” Heinrich was staring at her and she put her hand over the receiver. “Leon
Po
sen
,”
she said to him, but he only shook his head and turned away.

“Could you come to Iowa City on Friday?”

“Iowa?”

“There's a party I have to go to and I thought you might like it.” He stopped for a minute and Franny strained to hear any noise from where he was calling but the bar was too loud. She pressed the receiver even harder against her poor ear.

Finally he started to speak again. “Actually, that's not true. I don't think you'd like it, but I thought I might be able to stand it if you came. I'd get you a room at the hotel. It's not the Palmer House but it would be okay for the night.”

“I don't have a car,” Franny said.

“I'll send you a bus ticket! That's even better. You never know about the weather out here. I'd worry about you if you were driving. Would you mind taking the bus? I could send the ticket to you in care of the hotel. Franny of the Palmer House bar. What's your last name?”

From across the room she could see a man at one of her tables holding up a glass, tilting it side to side. It should never come to that, customers having to beg for a drink. “Keating. Listen, I have to run,” she said, her eyes fixed on that one glass, how the ice caught the light above the heads of the crowd. “I'm going to lose my job again. I can take a bus.”

Franny was on the schedule but there was never any problem getting someone to take a Friday. That's where the money was, and as soon as she had given the night away she felt the loss of it. Even if she wasn't paying for her ticket or her room, the trip was going to cost her.

“He wants to sleep with you,” Kumar said when she told him about the phone call. He was still up when she came home from work, sitting at the kitchen table amid piles of books and Post-its. He seemed the slightest bit dejected, even though he had to expedite a review of an article that was a hundred pages long with over a hundred footnotes. He didn't have the energy to think about Franny, much less sleep with her.

Kumar was right, of course—why else would anyone import a cocktail waitress from another state?—but somehow that wasn't what it felt like. Leo Posen had waited two weeks before he'd called her, which meant what? That he'd tried to forget her and couldn't? That the cocktail waitresses in Iowa weren't putting out? “Maybe he likes my mind,” she said, and laughed at her own cheerful stupidity. “My charming company.”

He gave her a small, conciliatory shrug but said nothing.

She had woken Kumar up the night she met Leo Posen and told him the story just like she knew she would. It was nearly two o'clock in the morning when she'd climbed into his bed in the dark room and shaken his shoulder. “Guess who I met! You have to guess!” Kumar loved those books. They had talked about them not long after they'd met. He'd been looking at her bookshelves when she went into the kitchen to make a pot of coffee and when she returned with the cups he was holding her copy of
Septimus Porter
. He left the Updike on the shelves, the Bellow and the Roth.

“You read Leon Posen?” he said, just to make sure they hadn't been left behind by some old boyfriend.

Franny and Kumar had met not long after coming to the University of Chicago. They sat beside each other in torts and decided to study together. They had become friends without realizing that soon there would be no time for friendship. Now that Franny was broke and sleeping on his couch, it was hard to say what was bothering him most about her trip to Iowa, that a woman he would have liked quite a bit had there been time was going to a party in another state with another man, or that he wished he were going with her, or that he wished he were going instead of her.

Leo Posen was waiting for her in the bus station in Iowa City. He was wearing his black topcoat and gray felt hat, studying the bus
schedule that was mounted under Plexiglas on the wall as if he might be thinking about going somewhere himself. When he saw Franny coming towards him he smiled a smile much larger and more grateful than any he had given her at the bar.

“I didn't think this would actually work,” he said, showing her for just a second the sweet, awkward overlap of his lower teeth. He held out his hand to shake her hand. She would remember to tell this to Kumar because if the plan was to sleep with her, if that was his sole intention, he would have kissed her right off.

“It was an easy trip,” she said.

“You don't understand,” he said with great cheer. “I thought I was going to sit here freezing my ass off and watch every person get off the bus from Chicago and that none of those people would be you. I might even have come back to check the next bus from Chicago just to see if maybe I'd gotten the time wrong. After that I was going to feel like an idiot, tell myself how ridiculous it was to think I could send a bus ticket to a stranger and expect that she would get off the bus just because I wanted her to. I had it all planned out. In fact, I was so sure that you weren't coming I had thought about not even coming to the station just to show you.”

“That would have been awful,” Franny said, because she realized now she didn't have his phone number or his address.

He shook his head. “I was going to feel terrible and foolish and old for the rest of the day, and then I was going to call the department chair and tell him that given the circumstances I couldn't possibly come to his party.”

“Well,” Franny said, not quite understanding any of it, “I guess I ruined your plans.”

“Oh, you did, you did! You shot the entire day.” He rubbed his hands together to warm them up and then sank them deep into his pockets. It was a nicer bus station than she expected to see, the
floors were swept and there was no one sleeping on the benches in the waiting area, but it was nearly as cold inside as it was outside, the deepest cold of the windswept midwestern prairie in late February. The one ticket agent in his window wore a hat and gloves along with his heavy coat.

“Do you want to go to your hotel first, freshen up? Take a rest?”

Franny shook her head. “Not particularly.” It didn't make any sense that he should be so surprised: of course Franny Keating would visit Leo Posen. The question then, she supposed, was to what extent did he see himself as Leon Posen? If he saw himself as a famous novelist then he would have known she would be there, but if he saw himself as someone she had met in the bar, well, he was right. She never would have gotten on a bus for anyone she'd met in the bar, not for a single other circumstance that she could think of. She wouldn't have taken anyone else to his room either, in fact the thought of it gave her a chill that was in no way connected to the freezing bus station. Still, when she looked at him, she didn't feel that familiar sensation of having made a real mistake. She only saw Leo, and was glad to be in Iowa.

He took the canvas bag off her shoulder, the one she'd used to carry her schoolbooks in back in her school days. It had always been so heavy. Now there was just a nightgown and toothbrush, a change of clothes for tomorrow, the volume of Alice Munro stories she'd been reading on the bus.

“It doesn't seem like you're planning to stay,” he said.

“Just the night.”

“Well then, I should show you a little bit of Iowa before it gets any darker.”

“I saw an awful lot of it on the bus coming in. It looks like Illinois, the parts that aren't Chicago.” The ride had taken five and a half hours. In between the Munro stories, she'd watched all of
those endless snowy fields poked through with a hundred thousand broken stalks of corn, and the long shadows those stubbled cornstalks threw across the snow in the late-afternoon light. She'd leaned her head against the window. Field after field after field, and not an inch of space wasted on something as decorative and meaningless as a tree.

“You've already figured it out then,” he said, and pointed to the big double doors that led out to the parking lot. “I'll take you to dinner instead.” Together they stepped into frozen air, a soft sweep of snow just beginning to cover the recently shoveled walks.

Old snow was layered over the ground, the parked cars that hadn't been disturbed, the tough little shrubs that would bear the snow's impossible weight until spring. She could feel her own brittleness as the frozen air did battle with her coat. It was no worse than Chicago, it might even have been two degrees warmer, and still it was like walking into a wall of broken glass. She pictured those early settlers in their covered wagons crossing the prairies in search of a better life. Why did they stop here? Were the horses lame? Was it springtime? Were they so hungry that they brought their wagons to a halt and said,
This is far enough
?

“Tell me again why this is better than Los Angeles?” Franny asked. She wished she could put her arm through his arm and lean into him. He was tall enough to block the wind.

“I'm not married to anyone in Iowa.”

“Let's hope that's true for most of the states.”

“That's what I like about you. You have a positive take.” He put his hand flat on her back and steered her into an Italian restaurant which looked like it might have recently been a diner. “I'm overestimating,” Leo said, looking at his watch. “There probably isn't time for dinner. There's probably only time for a drink. Can you manage with just a drink for now? There'll be plenty of food later on.”

Franny was just glad to step out of the weather. The wind blew in the door behind them, making an arctic puff across the tables and causing the other diners to look up. The restaurant, unlike the bus station, had a zealous heater. “I'll manage fine.” She started to zip herself out of her coat and unwrap her scarf, pull off her hat. She wore boots with rubber soles and rubber covering over the toes. They were lined with the pelts of cast-off teddy bears. There was no vanity in winter.

The bartender was a woman who could have been on either side of sixty, with a swept-up pile of blond curls nested on the top of her head and a black vest which nearly failed at its job of containing her bust. The name
Rae
was stitched across the left breast in looping cursive.

“There he is!” Rae said. “Ducking in before you have to go to work?”

“I thought I should,” Leo said.

“I tried to get off,” she said to Franny, her eyes bright inside their spiky cages of dried mascara. “but I couldn't do it. What are you going to have, darling?”

“The same,” Franny said, tilting her head to Leo. “And maybe some breadsticks and a glass of water.”

“That's good thinking,” the woman said, taking a bottle of scotch from the shelf behind her. “That soaks it up. Are you going to introduce him?”

“Have you not met?” Franny asked, confused. It seemed the barmaid had mistaken her for someone else. She held out her hand to the man beside her. “Do you know Leo Posen?”

This pleased them both to no end, Leo and the bartender, and they both gave a nice big laugh that brightened up their end of the bar in this dismal little restaurant. “Rae,” she said, and held her
hand out to Leo, who took it in both of his hands for a shake, hail fellow well met.

“She makes me ice,” he said.

“I keep it in a Ziploc bag.” Rae reached into the freezer beneath the bar and pulled out the bag on which she had written
No Touch
with a heavy black marker. “He thinks that Iowa is trying to poison him with bad ice.”

“He told me,” Franny said, nodding.

“I told you that?” Leo asked, taking off his scarf and helping himself out of his coat. He was wearing a suit again, this one dark blue, and a regimental tie.

“Who am I supposed to introduce you to?”

“You introduce him to the audience at the reading tonight,” Rae said, and used a highball glass to scoop up two servings of the ice. “Big-deal famous writers hardly mean anything in this town but I like to go when I've got a free night. I've been going for years. That way I get to see all my customers while they work. And you know what all of them tell me? They say, Rae, you should be the one writing books.”

Leo nodded his head in sincere agreement. “You should.”

Rae smiled at him and then turned her attention back to Franny. “Sometimes they have one of the kids in the program introduce the old men. Speaking of, I should get a look at your ID.”

Franny rummaged around in her purse for her wallet and then handed her driver's license to the bartender, who took a pair of readers out of her pants pocket and actually looked at it, which was more than Franny ever did. Franny almost never carded anyone, and when she did, she figured that someone handing you identification was tantamount to being of age.

When Rae was satisfied she handed both the glasses and the
license to Leo. “Look at this,” she said. “Frances is almost twenty-five. Honest to God, I would have thought you were seventeen. That's the thing about getting older. Everybody else starts looking younger.”

Leo took the glasses and looked for himself. “The Commonwealth of Virginia?” he said, and turned the license over, maybe wondering if she had chosen to donate her organs. “I thought you were from Los Angeles.”

“I am, but I learned to drive in Virginia.”

“So if she isn't your student and she doesn't know you're supposed to start reading in twenty minutes, who is she?” Her tone was still jolly but Rae was looking only at Leo now, and Leo continued to look at the driver's license.