Commonwealth (22 page)

Marisol shook her head. “Friday was enough for me. I can't even imagine Sunday.” She looked at her husband. “When are you going back?”

Eric tilted his head back and forth as if he were trying to calculate a tip. “Tuesday? Maybe Tuesday. I'll have to check and see.”

Marisol nodded and pulled the style section out of the paper. “Well, I get an extra day. I came out a day later than you did.”

Jonas arrived in the kitchen wearing green swim trunks and a T-shirt. “Can I just have coffee for now?” he said, squinting against the morning light. “I'm going for a swim.”

Franny had so much to say, but in that exact moment she was distracted by the writer's swim trunks, stunned by them. “Where did you get swim trunks?”

Jonas looked down at himself. “These? I don't remember. REI?” In the T-shirt, in the bright light, he looked no more than twenty.

“They're yours? You brought them here?”

They were all looking at her now.

“I brought them here,” he said. He plucked at the fabric with two fingers. “Are they okay?”

“You brought extra clothes?”

He caught her line of questioning and came back at his hostess with an ill-prepared defense. “I get carsick. And I don't like to ride in cars at night. Astrid said it was a big house.”

Franny had been at the market when they arrived. She hadn't seen him come in with a suitcase. She would need to wash the sheets in his bedroom unless he wasn't planning to leave. The phone started to ring and Jonas, in a gesture of independence, poured his own coffee and went out the back door.

“I want to talk to my father,” the voice on the phone said.

“Ariel?”

There was no answer, because the answer would be that Leo had three children and two of them were boys and only the girl was speaking to him these days, so if a woman called asking for her father, then, yes, it was going to be Ariel.

“Hold on a minute,” Franny said. “He's out in the back. I'll have to get him.”

Eric gave her a look to inquire as to the nature of Ariel's call but Franny ignored him. She crossed through the wet grass, beneath the cherry trees and past the pool where Jonas was already lying shirtless on the diving board, the cup of coffee beside his head. When she got to the cabin door she didn't knock.

“Ariel's on the phone,” she said.

Leo was stretched across the single bed with a volume of Chekhov in his hands. He looked up at Franny and smiled. “Would you tell her I'm working? Tell her I'll call her back.”

“Not on your life,” Franny said.

“I can't talk to her now.”

“Well, neither can I, so I suggest you go down to the kitchen and hang up the phone.”

She walked out of the cabin and to the back of the property. She knew where there was a break in the hedge and she took it: through the neighbor's yard, down their driveway, and out onto the street, her flip-flops slapping against her feet. She wished she had her bicycle, a hat, some money, and at the same time she wished for nothing in the world but to be alone. Franny couldn't help but believe that she had brought every discomfort she experienced down on herself. Had she done something with her life no one would be asking her to make them cappuccino, and had she done something with her life she would be perfectly happy to
make them cappuccino, because it would not be her job. She would make the coffee because she was a gracious and helpful person. She could feel good about being kind without continually wondering if she were anything more than a nice-enough-looking waitress. She wished, as she approached thirty, that she had figured out how to be more than a muse, or, as her father had put it the last time she had seen him in Los Angeles, “Being a mistress isn't a job.”

Her father hadn't read
Commonwealth
but her sister had.

“There's nothing particularly libelous about it,” Caroline said to Franny. “He's covered his tracks.”

“I'm grateful that you don't review for the
Times
.”

“I'll put it another way: I didn't enjoy it but I'm not going to sue him.”

“You're hardly even in the book.”

Caroline laughed. “Maybe that's what irritated me about it. Anyway, if I was going to sue I'd make it a class-action case, get the whole family involved.”

“Well,” Franny said, “that would be one way to get us all together again.”

It was funny how much Franny missed Caroline now. For as much as they'd hated each other growing up, a peculiar fondness had crept in somewhere along the way. Franny and Caroline knew all the same stories. Caroline practiced patent law in Silicon Valley. There was nothing harder than that. She was married to a software designer named Wharton. Wharton was his last name but no one ever called him anything else because his first name was Eugene. Franny believed that Wharton had softened her sister up. He made Caroline laugh. Franny had no memory of her sister ever laughing about anything when they were growing up, at least never in front of her. Caroline and Wharton had a baby named Nick.

Franny got to spend a lot of time with Caroline the semester
Leo was teaching at Stanford. Caroline still badgered her about going back to law school, and Franny was able to believe that the badgering came from a place of affection.

“Believe me,” Caroline said, “I know school is miserable. I even know that practicing law can be miserable. But sooner or later you have to do
something
. If you think you're going to find one thing that will be perfect for you, you're going to spend your eightieth birthday reading the want ads.”

“You sound like you're trying to talk me into a bad marriage.”

“But it doesn't have to be a bad marriage. Why can't you see that? Get a law degree and go fight housing discrimination, or go get a job for a publisher and write book contracts for authors.”

Franny smiled and shook her head. “I'll figure it out,” was what she had said to her sister.

But she hadn't figured it out, and now she was in Amagansett walking through town in order to avoid the man she loved and his friends. Franny looked in shop windows, and when she saw a newspaper on a bench she sat down and read the entire thing. The light was so soft, so honeyed, that she could almost forgive her houseguests for wanting to stay. She waited until she was sure it was too late for anyone to ask her to make them lunch. She passed the restaurant she and Leo liked, hoping that by some chance she would see him there. Finally she decided to go back. There was nothing else to do. She had planned to sneak up to the bedroom undetected, but they saw her from the side porch and waved.

“Franny, what a day we've had without you!” Leo said, as if there had been nothing strange about her leaving or her return.

Astrid, back from Sag Harbor, nodded. “I had to bring the sandwiches for lunch. There's still some sorbet.”

“And Eric and I went into town and bought things for dinner,” Marisol said.

“Someone's still going to have to go back into town,” Eric said. “We didn't get enough.”

Franny looked at them up on the porch, everyone softened by the veil of the screen, by the light that was slanting in behind them, by the bank of yellow lilies that separated them from her. It was not unlike seeing tigers at the zoo.

“Hollinger called,” Leo said. “He's driving in from the city with Ellen. They should be here in an hour or so.”

“Hollinger?” Astrid said. “You didn't tell me that. How did he know where you were?” John Hollinger was not Astrid's client. His novel
The Seventh Story
had beaten out
Commonwealth
for the Pulitzer, and both men made a great show of how this fact had not affected their friendship, even though they hadn't exactly been friends in the first place.

Marisol gave a single, dismissive wave. “It won't be an hour. He's always late.”

There was a time when Franny would have been overwhelmed by the thought of John Hollinger coming for dinner, but that time had passed. Now he and his wife represented nothing more than two extra place settings at the table. This brought them up to eight, assuming that Jonas and Astrid would never leave.

“What about you?” Eric said, glancing down at Franny as if finally remembering she'd been gone. “Nice day?”

Franny shaded her eyes with her hand and looked up at him, puzzled. “Sure,” she said. That was all they needed to release her from the conversation.

There were six cardboard boxes on the long wooden table in the kitchen, a half a dozen ears of corn still in their green sleeves. She heard the sound of scratching, and then one of the boxes jerked abruptly forward.

Leo came into the kitchen and stood behind her. “I'm sorry
about Hollinger,” he said, kissing the side of her head. “He wasn't asking. He called to announce his impending arrival. We should have rented a motel room in the middle of Kansas for the summer.”

“They would have found us.”

“I spent the day hiding in the cabin so that everyone would think I was writing a novel. Where did you go?”

“What's in the boxes?” Franny said, though of course she knew exactly what was in the boxes.

“Marisol thought it would be fun to have lobster.”

Franny turned and looked at him. “She said she was a vegetarian. Does she know how to cook them?”

“I don't think it's a science. You just drop them in water. Listen,” he said, putting his hands on her shoulders and looking at her straight on in a way that made him appear very brave. “I have to tell you this and I'd rather not: Ariel is coming out for a couple of days.”

Many things were possible but Franny and Ariel in the same house was not one of them. For Ariel's sake Franny stayed out of the entire neighborhood surrounding Gramercy Park when she went to New York. It was the single way they respected one another: they did not overlap. “She wouldn't come out when she knows I'm here,” Franny said. “I answered the phone.”

“I think she really just wants to see the house. I made the mistake of telling her about it months ago. I didn't think we were going to rent it then. She said she needs a vacation.”

Franny was distracted by the scratching. The boxes, she could see now, were shuffling across the table in microscopic increments. The thought of each separate lobster in the dark was every bit as excruciating as the thought of Ariel Posen coming to Amagansett, either that or she was experiencing some sort of emotional transference. Leo followed her gaze to the table.

“I should have been a pair of ragged claws,” he said, looking at the sad containers trying to get away. “Scuttling across the floors of silent seas.”

“Leo, she hates me. That's been made clear.”

Leo mustered the energy for a wan smile. “Well, maybe this is the summer she stops hating you and we all get along. It's got to happen sooner or later.”

“When?” Franny asked. Not
When will she stop hating me?
—Franny knew the answer to that one—but
When is she coming?

He sighed and pulled her to him, the wide, warm chest of literature. “She didn't know. Probably tomorrow, possibly Tuesday. She said if she got everything together she could come out tonight, but I don't think we need to worry about tonight.”

“Is she bringing Button?” Button was Ariel's daughter, the four-year-old granddaughter of Leo Posen, the only grandchild.

Leo looked at her, surprised. “Of course she's bringing Button.”

Of course. “Anyone else?”

Leo went to the refrigerator and found a bottle of pinot gris unfinished from lunch. He poured what was left in a glass sitting out on the sink. “Maybe a boyfriend. There's someone named Gerrit. I think he's Dutch. She said she didn't know what Gerrit's plans were yet. She might be on better behavior if she has someone to impress.”

“Should I, after tea and cakes and ices, have the strength to force the moment to its crisis?” Franny asked the lobsters.

“And what's that supposed to mean?” Leo said.

Franny shook her head. “Nothing. It's the next line.”

“It's not the next line,” he said, and took his wine out to the porch.

Franny put a pair of scissors in her purse and carried the six boxes out to the car. Franny, who felt herself to be without talent,
was very adept at carrying more things than anyone would have thought possible. She could feel the lobsters scrabble as their bodies slid heavily into the dark cardboard corners of the boxes.

“Need a hand?” Jonas said, speeding up his pace when he saw her. He was coming back from the pool, his chest and back unevenly scorched.

“I've got it,” she said, setting the boxes down to open the car door.

“Are you going into town?”

“Back into town.” She arranged her passengers on the floor of the backseat—three on either side.

“Let me just run inside and get my shirt,” he said, his face bright with opportunity. “I need some things in town. I'll keep you company.”

She started to tell him no, to explain, but instead she nodded. She waited until the kitchen door had closed behind him, waited another ten seconds, and then got in the car and drove away.

Franny and Leo didn't talk about marriage, except sometimes sentimentally in bed, his hands spreading wide across her back, and even then it was only to say how quickly they would have married had it not been for the future and the past. What they never spoke of was the prohibitive element in the present, which was Leo's daughter.

For the most part, Franny tried her best not to think about Ariel, whom she had met on several disastrous occasions early on in her relationship with Leo. Franny didn't aspire to like Leo's daughter, but she hoped to someday achieve a low level of distant compassion towards her. To that end she disciplined herself to think of her own father whenever Ariel came up, to imagine Fix showing up with someone younger than she was, poor dear Marjorie pushed to the side. Fix taking up with his favorite cocktail waitress, not just for
the weekend but going on five years. Her father in love with this cocktail waitress who had no means of supporting herself but who would wait for him in motels when he went on stakeouts. When she could think of things that way, the lava of Ariel's rage against her was easier to bear. The simple truth was that Franny couldn't stand to be hated. Sacred Heart hadn't prepared her for it and college hadn't prepared her for it. Law school had been doing its best to toughen her up but then look how she'd done in law school.