Commonwealth

4

The music didn’t change. The tape churned out the same two-hour loop again and again. The management figured that either the customer would have paid up and left or be too drunk to notice before the songs began to repeat. A person would have to stay in the bar, sober and attentive, for more than two hours before realizing that George Benson was singing “This Masquerade” for a second time. That meant the only people who could be troubled by the repetition were the people who worked in the bar, and the standard of sobriety and attention knocked several of them out of the running. During the course of an eight-hour shift an employee could expect to hear the tape four times in its entirety, four and a half for whoever was closing. Franny spoke to Fred about it at the end of her first month. Fred, the better of the two night managers, oversaw the bar and the larger, busier, and less profitable hotel restaurant. He told her it didn’t matter.

“It does matter,” Franny said. “It’s driving me batshit.” She was wearing a slim black dress, sleeveless and short, over a fitted white blouse. She was wearing black high-heeled shoes. With her straight blond hair in a single loose braid, she looked like the music-video version of the Catholic schoolgirl she’d once been. Before she took the job she wasn’t sure if she’d be able to bear the indignity of the uniform, but it turned out the uniform didn’t actually bother her. It was the music. It was Sinatra singing “It Was a Very Good Year” that made her feel like she might step into the revolving door at the front of the lobby, a tray of cocktails balanced on her open hand, and swing out into the dark winter night.

Fred gave her a nod. He was not paternalistic or dismissive, though he looked like somebody’s father and gave her an answer that was in no way helpful. “Trust me. I’ve been here almost five years. You get used to it.”

“But I don’t want to be here in five years. I don’t want to get used to it.” The smallest flash of discomfort registered in the night manager’s eyes. Franny tried again. “Couldn’t you just get a couple different tapes? It could be the same people. I’m not complaining about the kind of music. I mean, different music would be appreciated but that’s not my problem. The repetition is my problem. Those people sang other songs.”

“We have more tapes somewhere,” Fred said, glancing around the tiny windowless office, “but no one ever changes them.”

“I could change them.”

He pushed up from his cluttered desk and gave her shoulder a small, conciliatory squeeze. Everyone in this place was a toucher: the waitresses kissed at the end of their shifts, the managers rested their hands on your shoulders, a busboy, not correctly tipped, could deliver a forceful hip check when squeezing past you at the dishwash station. And the customers, Jesus, the customers liked to touch. Two years in law school and not a single person had put a finger on her, but that was law school, where everyone who had made it through the first two weeks understood the concept of liability. Standing this close, she could catch just the smallest trace of vodka in the air around Fred and was surprised that she could still register the smell of alcohol. “Just wait,” he said, his voice full of reassurance. “It goes away.”

Franny trudged down the narrow hallway from the office to the kitchen where the cooks played bootlegged cassettes of NWA on a boom box coated in grease, the volume so low it barely whispered above the clanging of pots, fuck da police. The men mouthed the words and bobbed their heads, all within the low limits of the management’s tolerance.

“Little House,” Jerrell called out to her from the line. “Be sweet and get me some lemonade.” He reached across the searing cooktop and through the pickup window to hand her his jumbo Styrofoam 7-Eleven cup with lid and straw.

“Sure,” Franny said. She took the cup. The cooks, every one of them a large black man, were reliant on the waitresses, every one of them a small white woman, to bring drinks back from the bar to keep them from dying in the Sahara of the fry station.

“I count on you,” Jerrell said, and pointed at her with a raw steak before dropping the meat on the incandescent surface in front of him.

But Franny never forgot the lemonade, nor how many extra packets of sugar he liked, nor the bar pretzels needed to make up for the body’s lost salt, flushed away in the rivers of sweat that dropped onto the cooktop with an explosive sizzle and vanished. She knew what every man in the kitchen wanted in his cup. Franny was a professional. She remembered orders for tables of ten, who got the Ketel One, who got the Absolut. She could soothe a single businessman without letting him monopolize her time. Stepping out into the frozen slap of Chicago in the small hours of the morning, it was not lost on her how much better it would have been to be a bad cocktail waitress and a good law student. She had dropped out of law school in the middle (though closer to the beginning) of the first semester of her third year. She had racked up an enormous debt predicated on the salary of the partnership she would never obtain. For someone who had no skills and no idea what she wanted to do with her life other than read, cocktail waitressing was the most money she could make while keeping her clothes on. Those were her only two criteria at this point: not to be a lawyer and to keep her clothes on. She had tried regular waitressing, wearing black sneakers and hoisting trays of food, but there wasn’t enough money in it to cover the minimum payments in her coupon book. In the dark, velvety plush of the Palmer House bar, men regularly, inexplicably, left two twenties sitting on top of an eighteen-dollar check.

She filled up the Styrofoam cup with crushed ice and lemonade and, seeing that Heinrich the bartender was listening to a customer outline the seven sorrows of the world, laced the frozen slush with Cointreau. Cointreau was the bottle at the very end of the bar near the soda station and was therefore the easiest to snatch, plus she thought it made a certain sense with lemonade. She would have paid for the shot but employees were not allowed to buy alcohol during their shift, and they were especially not allowed to buy alcohol for the men who operated the knives and heated surfaces. Jerrell had told her he’d give her ten bucks any time she could get something extra in the cup, but she wouldn’t take his money. This, too, made her a sort of mythical creature among the members of the kitchen staff, because while the other waitresses would take drink orders from the cooks, they often forgot to fill them, and when they did remember, they never turned down a tip.

Franny ran tort law in her head in an effort to block out the music, covering the thing she hated with the thing she despised. The elements of assault: the act was intended to cause apprehension of harmful or offensive contact; and the act indeed caused apprehension in the victim that harmful or offensive contact would occur. The night was winding down. The high tide of gin and tonics had receded into the quiet ebb of after-dinner drinks: snifters of brandy and small, syrupy glasses of Frangelico purchased by customers who realized they weren’t quite drunk enough to go up to their rooms. It was Franny’s night to close, and for the moment she’d been left alone to oversee the room: two tables of two and one lone soul at the bar. Both of the other cocktail waitresses clocked out, one to pick up her sleeping child from her ex-husband’s couch, the other to have drinks with a Palmer House waiter in some less-expensive bar. They had both kissed Franny before they left, and then they kissed each other. She guessed that Heinrich had gone to smoke in the hallway outside the kitchen, which gave Franny the chance to slip around to the other side of the bar and step out of her shoes. She flexed her toes back before grinding them down against the damp honeycomb of the black rubber bar mat, then she ate three maraschino cherries from the garnish bins along with an orange slice because they were best when chewed up together. That was what she was doing when she saw Leon Posen, her mouth full of chemically altered fruit. She should only have had a glimpse of him but when he looked up she had neither the opportunity nor the will to turn away.

“Hello,” he said. Leon Posen, sitting two seats away from her. He was wearing a dark-gray suit and a white shirt with only the top button of his collar undone. He may well have had a tie folded in his pocket. Had he reached out his hand and she reached out her hand their fingers very easily could have touched. As a rule Franny didn’t pay attention to the people at the bar. They were people who had chosen not to take a table and therefore were not her responsibility. She had no idea how long he’d been sitting there. Ten minutes? An hour?

“Hello,” she said.

“You’re shorter than you were,” he said.

“Am I?”

“You’ve taken off your shoes.”

Franny looked down at the sore red curve bitten into the top of either foot, clearly visible through her stockings. It was an impression that stayed for hours after she was home. “Yes.”

He nodded. His hair was iron gray, sheeplike. Effort must have gone into combing it down. “It’s a nice effect but I’d think it would destroy your feet after a while.”

“You get used to it,” Franny said, and thought of Fred, and how he had told her she’d get used to it. She made herself listen now as a way of orienting herself in the world, in the bar where she stood across from Leon Posen. Lou Rawls was singing “Nobody But Me,” which was funny because that was the one song in the rotation she never got tired of, the perfect union of nouns and verbs. I’ve got no chauffeur to chauffeur me. I’ve got no servant to serve my tea.

Leon Posen nodded, his fingertips resting on a drained glass of ice. Franny was shaping the story in her head even as he was sitting in front of her. She was thinking of how she would pull out her copies of First City and Septimus Porter as soon as she got home. She would go back over the parts she had underlined in college and read them again. Then she would wake Kumar up and tell him she had talked to Leon Posen in the bar, and how he had asked her about her shoes. Kumar, who was a genius when it came to not being interested in anything, would want to hear every detail, and when she was finished he would tell her to start again. Even as it was happening, she knew that the story of meeting Leon Posen at the Palmer House was one she was going to tell for a long time. If I hadn’t gone to law school in Chicago and then dropped out, I wouldn’t even have been working in the bar. She would tell that to her father and to Bert.

But Leon Posen hadn’t finished. He was still in front of her, waiting for her attention while she imagined him. “Why get used to it?”

“What?” She had lost her place in the conversation.

“The shoes.” He looked like his pictures, the nose taking up all the real estate, and then the soft, hooded eyes. His face was a caricature of his face, a face that was meant to be sketched beside a book review in The New Yorker.

“Well, you have to, the shoes are part of the uniform, and you wear the uniform because you make more money.” And though she wouldn’t mention it, the uniform was polyester, which you can laugh at all you want but it washed really well and didn’t need to be ironed. Franny never had to figure out what she was supposed to wear to work, which had also been the great thing about Catholic school.

“You mean I’ll tip you more for wearing uncomfortable shoes?”

“You will,” she said, because she’d been there long enough to know how things work. “You do.”

He looked at her sadly, or maybe that was just the way he looked, as if he felt the pain of every woman who had ever crammed her feet into heels. It was a beguiling effect. “Well, I haven’t tipped you yet so if that’s the reason you might as well put your shoes back on. We could see what happens.”

“I’m not your waitress,” she said, regretting it deeply. Leon Posen, step away from the bar! Come and sit at one of the little tables with the flickering candles. Make yourself comfortable in the rounded, red leather chairs.

“You could be if I ordered another drink.” He held up his glass, rattled the lonesome ice. “What’s your name?”

She told him her name.

“I never meet Frannys.” He said it like her name was a favor to him. “Franny, I’d like another scotch.”

It was her job to get him a drink if he was sitting at a table but not if he was sitting at the bar. They were not union workers at the Palmer House but the division of labor was ironclad. She knew her place. “What kind of scotch?”

He smiled at her again. Two smiles! “Dealer’s choice,” he said. “And remember, I may be that rare individual who tips off the percentage of the bill instead of your heel height so knock yourself out.”

She had just worked her left foot back into the shoe when Heinrich, fresh from his cigarette and breath mint, rounded the edge of the bar and came towards them. He was raising two fingers to Leon Posen, a gesture that asked if he was ready for another without troubling himself to form the question into words, as if theirs was a relationship so sacred it had transcended language. Franny, stepping out of her left shoe as she rushed to cut him off, all but threw herself into the bartender, who in turn was forced to catch her. He looked down at her stocking feet. Heinrich was a man of Leon Posen’s age, her father’s age, which was to say somewhere in the dark woods past fifty. He came from a more decorous time. She had no business being behind the bar in the first place, she knew that. It was his country.

“I need a favor,” she said. It was easy to be quiet. She was in his arms.

Heinrich turned to Leon Posen and raised his eyebrows slightly, formally, asking the question. Leon Posen nodded.

“Come with me,” Heinrich said. He steered Franny down to the end of the long bar where the curaçao and the Vandermint sat on high glass shelves, waiting to be dusted.

“That’s Leon Posen,” Franny said, keeping her voice low.

Heinrich nodded, though whether the nod meant I know that or What’s your point? there was no way of telling. Franny had heard Heinrich speaking on the phone in German once, his voice more forceful in his native tongue. What language did he read in, or did he read at all? Was Leon Posen well translated in German?

“Just let me take care of him,” Franny said. “I’m asking you.”

Franny’s skin was so translucent it acted more as a window than a shade. She was the only waitress who tipped the busboys out the full ten percent they were due, and she tipped the bartenders with equal consideration. Heinrich had always thought there was something German about her, the yellow hair, the clear blue ice of her eyes, but Americans were never Germans. Americans were mutts, all of them. “You’re not a bartender,” he told her.

“I can pour scotch in a glass.”

“You have tables. I do not serve your tables because I find the customer interesting.” He was wondering how much to ask for. Too much briefly crossed his mind. They wouldn’t be the first ones to retire to the storeroom.

“For Christ’s sake, Heinrich, I was an English major. I can recite the first three paragraphs of Nevermore from memory.”

Heinrich had been an English major himself when he was a student in West Berlin, though for him it had been English literature with a concentration in nineteenth-century British. What a luxury it was to read Trollope, knowing that one wall away such a thing would be impossible. He wanted to say to her, Where have these books gotten us? but instead he reached behind her, between her shoulder blades, and ran his hand down the length of her corn-silk braid. He had always wanted to do that.

It didn’t matter. At that moment she would have cut it off and given it to him as a souvenir. She went back to her place at the bar and took down a bottle of the Macallan, not the twenty-five-year but the twelve. She had no intention of sticking him. She put fresh ice in a fresh glass and covered it over with scotch. The silvered spouts stuck into the top of every bottle made pouring an absolute pleasure. It gave her accuracy, control. No one could convince her that this was the more difficult job.

Leon Posen glanced down to the end of the bar where Heinrich was unloading a rack of wine glasses, wiping out every one for good measure. “So what do you owe him?”

“I’m not sure yet.” She put down the napkin, the glass.

“Always ask the price. That can be the lesson of our time together.” He lifted his glass to her, Thank you, dear Franny, and goodnight. But Franny, who knew that this was the point at which the conversation ended and she was supposed to go and check on her tables, didn’t go. It wasn’t that she wanted to ask him about the books, or what he had been doing with himself since the publication of Septimus Porter twelve years ago. She had no intention of spoiling his night. It was that she could see her own life very clearly standing there in front of him, and her life was boring and hard. Going to law school had been a terrible error in judgment that she had made in hopes of pleasing other people, and because of that error in judgment she was in debt like some sort of Dickens character, like the kind of person who wound up on the Oprah show weeping, without a single skill to show for it, when into the bar of the Palmer House came Leon Posen. He was drinking the drink she had poured in his glass. The brightness of him, the brightness that she felt standing just on the other side of the bar, was more than she was willing to let go of. It was like throwing out breadcrumbs to the birds day after day and then suddenly having a passenger pigeon alight on the back of the park bench. It wasn’t just that it was rare, it was impossible, and she wasn’t going to make any abrupt movements that could startle him away.

“Do you live here?” she said. What’s it been like, she asked the passenger pigeon, the whole world thinking you’re extinct?

He looked behind his shoulder at the room, the great eyelids lifting. “At the Palmer House?”

“In Chicago.”

A couple came in, unbundling a tangle of coats and scarves and hats, and sat at the bar two stools away. Why, she wanted to ask them, with all the empty stools to choose from, would they want to sit so close? She could smell the woman’s perfume, dark and not unpleasantly musky, from where she stood. Then she realized they had meant to sit in front of her. She was the bartender.

“Los Angeles,” Leon Posen said, after a great deal of internal wrestling. “Depending on how you look at it.”

“Whiskey sour,” the man said, heaping their winter wear on the stool beside them. The pile of woolens immediately began to slide off and he grabbed onto the sleeve of a coat and then tipped his head in the direction of the woman. “Daiquiri.”

“Up,” the woman said, pulling off her gloves.

Franny wasn’t sure how to tell them that this wasn’t her job, but Leon Posen knew how to say it. “She doesn’t mix drinks,” he told them. “She can pour scotch in the glass but if it’s got two ingredients or more you’re going to need someone else.” He looked at Franny. “Is that fair?”

Franny nodded. She represented herself falsely just by standing there.

“I could make you a whiskey sour,” he said to the man, then, looking at the woman, shook his head. “But not a daiquiri. I bet you there’s a mix back there somewhere.”

“I don’t know,” Franny said.

“You should ask the German.” Leon Posen pointed the couple to Heinrich, who was still polishing glasses at the far end of the bar, ignoring with intent. “It would be a gift to him. He’s had his feelings hurt.”

“You know a lot about this place,” the woman said. It was very late. Underneath her glove there was no ring.

“It isn’t this place,” Leon said. “It’s bars.” He asked Franny the name of the bartender, and Heinrich, with ears pitched to frequencies higher than a dog could imagine, heard the question and put his towel down.

“Whiskey sour,” the man began again.

When they had placed their orders and Heinrich had made a tasteful showing of his skills with a cocktail shaker, the couple did indeed gather up their belongings and carry them off to a small table in the corner, a table that would have been Franny’s except for some unspoken exchange in which it was decided that Heinrich would serve the drinks as well, taking both the table and the tip.

“I was born in Los Angeles,” Franny said, once the couple were mercifully gone. She’d been waiting such a long time to say it she wasn’t sure the point still had any conversational relevance.

“But you had the sense to get out.”

“I like Los Angeles.” In Los Angeles she was always a child. She swam the length of Marjorie’s mother’s pool, skimming its blue bottom in her two-piece bathing suit. The shadow of Caroline, half-asleep on her inflatable raft, was a rectangular cloud above her. Their father was just at the water’s edge in a lounge chair reading The Godfather.

“You say that because we’re in Chicago and it’s February.”

“If L.A.’s so awful why do you live there?”

“I have a wife in Los Angeles,” he said. “That’s something I’m working on.”

“That’s why people come to Chicago,” Franny said, “To get away from wives.” She was thinking of divorce law, thinking now there was a practice she’d never touch, before she remembered that she’d never touch any of them.

“You sound like a bartender.”

She shook her head. “I’m a cocktail waitress. I can’t mix a drink.”

“You’re the bartender to those of us who don’t need their drinks mixed, and I’d like another scotch. You did a very good job getting that first one in the glass.” He studied her then as if she had only now stepped in front of him. “You’re taller again.”

“You told me it might improve my tip.”

He shook his head. “No, you told me it might improve your tip, and it won’t. I don’t actually care how tall you are. Take off your shoes and I’ll buy you a drink.”

When had Leon Posen finished his scotch? It was a remarkable trick. She hadn’t seen a thing and she’d been watching. Maybe it had happened while the whiskey sour was being made. She had been distracted for a minute. Franny took the bottle from the counter behind her. “You can’t buy me a drink. It’s against the rules.”

Leon leaned forward. “Verboten?” he asked quietly.

Franny nodded. The ice in the glass looked bright and undiminished so she didn’t see the point in changing it. She didn’t measure out the scotch either, she just poured it in on top of what had been there before. The silver spout made her overconfident and she poured the scotch from too great a height and spilled some on the bar beside the glass. She wiped up her mistake and set the glass on a fresh paper napkin. In truth, she wasn’t a good bartender, even for drinks containing a single ingredient. “So why are you in Chicago?”

“Maybe you’re an analyst.” He took his cigarettes out of his jacket and shook one free from the pack.

“When I tell people I waited on Leon Posen they’ll ask me what he was doing in Chicago.”

“Leon Posen?” he asked.

This was a possibility she hadn’t considered, but it wasn’t as if she’d ever met him. She was working off jacket photographs, old ones at that. “You’re not Leon Posen?”

“I am,” he said. “But you’re younger than my regular demographic. I didn’t think you’d know.”

“Did you think I was just an extraordinarily helpful cocktail waitress?”

He shrugged. “You could have been trying to pick me up.”

Franny felt herself blush, something that didn’t usually happen in the bar. He waved his hand as if to dismiss the observation. “Strike that. A ridiculous thought. You’re a smart girl, you read books, and now you’ve poured a scotch for Leon Posen, but you should call me Leo.”

Leo. Could she call Leon Posen Leo? “Leo,” she said, trying it out.

“Franny,” he said.

“It isn’t just that you’re Leon Posen,” she said. “Leo Posen. I’m interested in people in general.”

“You’re interested in why I’m in Chicago?”

Somehow this wasn’t going the way she had intended it. “All right, I’m not interested. I’m conversational.”

He lifted his glass and took the smallest sip, dipping in his upper lip as if he were only tasting it to be polite. “Are you a journalist?”

She put her hand on her heart. “Cocktail waitress.” Actually, Franny had been saying this to herself every day in front of the bathroom mirror, after she brushed her teeth, before she left for work, I am a cocktail waitress. Practice had made perfect. She took the heavy Zippo lighter out of her apron pocket and flipped open the lid with her thumb. He leaned forward and then back, shaking his head.

“No, you don’t look at the cigarette, you look at me. When you light a cigarette you have to look the person in the eyes.”

So Franny did this, even though it was nearly impossible. Leo Posen leaned towards the little flame in her hand and kept his eyes steady on her eyes. She felt a rocking in her chest.

“There,” he said and blew the smoke aside. “That’s how you get a better tip. It isn’t the shoes.”

“I’ll remember that,” she said, and shut down the flame.

“So I’ve come to Chicago to have a drink,” he said. “I’m living in Iowa City for now. Have you ever been to Iowa City?”

“I thought you lived in Los Angeles.”

He shook his head. “Don’t be slippery. I asked you a question.”

“I’ve never been to Iowa City.”

He took another sip to see if his drink had improved now that he had a cigarette, and obviously it had. “It’s not the kind of place you go unless you have specific business there. If you grow corn or trade in pigs or write poetry then you go to Iowa City.”

“That’s why I haven’t been.”

He nodded. “The bars are full of students. It wouldn’t be my choice to drink in a bar full of students, but that isn’t the real problem.” He stopped there. He was waiting for her. Leo Posen liked a straight man.

“What’s the real problem?”

“It turns out the ice in the drinks contains a certain amount of herbicides — herbicides, pesticides, and what I think must be liquid fertilizer. You can taste it. It’s not just the ice in the bars, of course, it’s in all the water, all the water that doesn’t come from France in bottles. I’ve heard it actually gets much worse in the spring when the snow starts to melt. There’s a higher concentration. You can taste it on your toothbrush.”

She nodded. “So you come to Chicago to have a drink because the ice in Iowa has agricultural chemicals in it.”

“That and the students.”

“You’re teaching there?”

He took a casual pull off his cigarette. “One semester. It was a mistake I made. It sounded like a lot of money at the time but nothing’s a lot of money when you weigh it out against the costs. Nobody sits you down and explains the situation with the water before you sign the contract.”

“Wouldn’t it be easier to make ice at home? Use the water from France. You can brush your teeth with it, too.”

“In theory, yes, but there’s no good way to implement it. Either you have to carry your ice bucket with you to the bar or you have to drink at home by yourself, which I don’t do.”

“So come to Chicago and have a couple of drinks,” Franny said, because she was glad he was there, she didn’t care about his reason. “It’s good to get away.”

“Now you’re seeing it,” he said, slapping the bar with his open hand. “Cedar Rapids doesn’t solve the problem.”

“Des Moines doesn’t solve the problem.”

“You’re shorter again.”

“You told me to take my shoes off.”

“Are you saying that I told you to take your shoes off and you did it?”

“I’d rather have them off.”

He shook his head, though whether to marvel or despair she didn’t know, then he crushed what was left of his cigarette into the small glass ashtray. “Did you ever want to be a writer?”

“No,” she said, and she would have told him. “I only wanted to be a reader.”

He patted the top of her hand, which she had left close by on the bar in case he needed it. “I appreciate that. I’ve come a long way so that I could have a drink and not be anywhere near another writer.”

“Can I get you another drink?”

“You’re a great girl, Franny.”

The problem, and it was one she took seriously, was that Franny didn’t know how long Leo Posen had been sitting at the bar before she saw him, how long Heinrich had been doing his job before she took his job away. Because while Leo Posen appeared to be perfectly sober, she would bet that he seemed that way regardless of how much he had drunk. Some men were like that. They went from sober to more or less dead without intermediate steps. “Are you staying here at the hotel?” she asked, her voice gone small.

He tilted his head ever so slightly and waited, his face full of benevolence.

Franny shook her head. “It’s only because if you were to get in your car and run someone down on your way back to Iowa tonight I might have to go to jail.”

“You’d go to jail? That hardly seems fair.”

“Dram shop civil liability, state of Illinois.” She held up her hand to demonstrate seriousness.

“‘Dram shop’?”

“They should update the name.”

“Are the other dispensers of dram aware of this?”

Only the ones who had dropped out of law school, she wanted to say, but nodded instead.

“Well, not to worry. I only have to get to the elevator.”

Franny brought back the bottle of scotch. “What happens in the elevator is your own business.” Just then the lights came down two settings. Heinrich always shut down the night too abruptly, turning the lights so low so fast that it felt like a straight fall into darkness. Every time it happened she had a split second of wondering if something small and important had ruptured inside her head.

“It’s a sign,” Leo Posen said, looking up at the ceiling. “Make it a double.”

After bringing out a larger glass to hold twice the scotch, Franny stepped into her shoes and went to settle up with her two tables. She felt sheepish about asking them for money when she had abandoned them so long ago, but neither table seemed to hold it against her. One gave her a credit card and the two businessmen handed her a mysteriously large amount of cash and then pulled on their coats to leave. When she came back to the bar, Heinrich was putting plastic wrap over the stainless-steel garnish bins, tucking the maraschino cherries into the refrigerator for the night.

“Did they tip you for the shoes?” Leo Posen asked. The scotch was gone and now he was leaning into the bar. His eyes weren’t focused on anything.

“They did.”

“How much?”

Heinrich looked up from his work. He didn’t mind that it was an inappropriate question. No one ever asked about tips and he wanted to know.

She hesitated. “Eighteen dollars.”

“That tells us nothing unless we know the amount of the check. They could have been drinking a vintage montrachet, in which case they stiffed you.”

“It wasn’t montrachet,” Heinrich said.

Franny sighed. There was no way to explain that she needed the money, that she was sleeping on Kumar’s couch so that she could pay the next coupon in her loan booklet. “Twenty-two dollars.”

A small, involuntary sound passed Heinrich’s lips, the puff of air that comes after the punch but without the punch itself.

“I picked the wrong business,” Leo Posen said.

Heinrich looked at him doubtfully. “That’s not what they would have tipped you.”

“What about the other table?” Leo said.

Franny held up her hand, enough.

“I never would have guessed it,” he said to Heinrich. He reached into his pocket and pulled out a brown leather wallet thick with credit cards, photographs, cash, folded receipts. He dropped it on the bar, where it made a soft thud like a baseball falling into a glove. “Here,” he said. “Take the whole thing. I can’t do the math.”

Franny rang up his check, folded the little piece of paper, and left it there in a clean highball glass. That’s the way they did it at the Palmer House, just to remind you how you came to rack up such a magnificent bill in the first place. The passenger pigeon had stayed beside her on the bench all evening, but then what do you do? You can’t stuff the thing in your purse and take it home with you, and you can’t sleep in the park, waiting for it to go on its own. It was cold now, it was dark.

Leo Posen sighed and opened his wallet. “You aren’t even going to help?” he asked.

Franny shook her head and started wiping down the bar. She did suspect that math was part of the problem, that the drunker people were the more they struggled with percentages and so decided to err on the side of extravagance. But then she also wondered if they tipped her more because they felt embarrassed for their drinking. Or they tipped her more in hopes she might run after them and suggest that for eighteen dollars she would like to have sex.

Leo Posen continued to sit, though he had stacked his money neatly over the top of his bill and his glass and napkin were gone. Every other customer in the bar of the Palmer House Hotel was gone. Jesus, a busboy, had come over from the restaurant to make sure that everything was off the tables. He had his eye on Leo Posen’s back. It was time to run the vacuum.

After Franny had clocked out and put on her coat, she came back to the bar. It was the long puffy coat her mother had bought for her when she got into law school, a sleeping bag with sleeves, her mother had called it, and it was true, many were the nights she threw it on top of the blankets on the couch before climbing in. She stood next to Leo Posen’s chair. “I’m going now,” she said, wishing for the first time since taking the job that the night were longer. “It’s really been something.”

He looked at her. “I’m going to need your help,” he said in a level voice.

The pigeon fluttered off the back of the park bench and into her lap, pushing its head against the folds of her coat.

“I’ll get Heinrich.” Her voice was very quiet even though it was just the two of them there. This was why she shouldn’t take Heinrich’s customers, even the famous novelists, because in the end they would still be his responsibility. “He can take you to the elevator.”

He turned his head slightly to the left, as if he had meant to shake it no and then lost his train of thought. “Don’t get the German. I just need—” He waited, looking for the word.

“What do you need?”

“Guidance.”

“We’ll find someone bigger.”

“I’m not asking you to carry me.”

“It would be better.”

“Is the elevator not on your way?”

Wasn’t it a sort of honor to be asked? It would be the most interesting part of the story and the part she wouldn’t tell — that Leo Posen was too drunk to walk himself out of the bar and so she had to help him. It wouldn’t be the best decision Franny had ever made, but it wouldn’t even be in the running with the worst. And he’d done so much for her already in the years before they met, those beautiful novels. She took his hand off the bar and pulled it around her shoulder. He gave himself over to her. “Stand up,” she said.

Men can be surprisingly tall once they’ve been unfolded from the high bar chairs. Franny’s shoulder, raised by the height of her heels, barely came to his armpit. He put more weight on her than she would have expected but she could hold him up. “Just stand here for one second and get your balance,” she said.

“You’re good at this.”

She tried to rearrange his hand, which covered her left breast without intention. Where was Heinrich now? Mercifully smoking? He could use this against her, though with the German it was always hard to say what would offend him. Franny had her arm around Leo Posen’s waist as she steered the course between the dark icebergs of her tables.

“Wait,” he said. Franny stopped. He raised his chin. He looked like he was trying to remember something, or that he was going to ask for another drink. “That song,” he said.

Franny listened. The tape was playing to the empty room. Gladys Knight and the Pips were singing. The gist of the story was that the relationship was over and neither party was willing to own up to it. The first thirty times she heard that song she’d loved it. Then she didn’t anymore. “What about it?”

Leo lifted his hand from Franny’s breast and pointed at the air. “That’s the song that was playing when I came in. I keep wondering what I’m going to do without you,” he sang lightly.

The bar, Heinrich liked to say, was West Germany, and Franny understood its progressive, flexible approach to the workforce. But the lobby was under the control of the East, full of Soviet spies you never suspected. “Stay out of the lobby,” Heinrich had told her when she’d first taken the job. “Once you’re in the lobby, you’re on your own. The bar can’t save you.”

Still, she had to figure they didn’t know her any better than she knew them. Her cocktail uniform would have sold her out but it was hidden by her coat, and the shoes could have been the shoes of any foolish woman in the hotel. The Palmer House had a grand lobby with massive chintz sofas both overstuffed and piped; some were circular, with a tall middle section pointing up to the chandeliers like a fez. The oriental carpet could have covered a basketball court. The ceiling, which opened through the second floor, was a small-scale Sistine which traded Adam and God for the stars of Greek mythology: Aphrodite and random nymphs tucked between wandering clouds. It was the kind of lobby where tourists came and took pictures of one another standing in front of the towering floral arrangements. Peonies in February. Even at one o’clock in the morning there were people milling around aimlessly, and a line of young men and women in smart dark suits waited behind the marble counter to help them. At least the bar closed. The front desk staff stood there all night.

Franny and Leo had a moment to consider their reflection in the brass elevator doors after she pressed the arrow pointing up. “You don’t look like you should be with me,” he said, falling into the enchantment of the movie they made together. He was starting to sway a little so that he could watch them sway, left to right, right to left.

In a whispered voice she told him to hold still. The numbers lit up as the elevator came for them — five, four, three, two — and then the doors slid open. “There you go,” she said, and tried to move him forward on his own. She was not hopeful.

He looked at her under his arm. “There I go where?”

“Into the elevator, like you said.” But he hadn’t taken an ounce of his weight off her, and she had to say the inability felt sincere. She didn’t think he could actually walk into the elevator without her. Leo Posen said nothing. The doors started to close and, in a perilous demonstration of balance, she pushed them open again with one foot.

“Okay,” she said, though she was talking to herself. “Okay, okay, okay.” She pulled them both inside and the doors slid closed. “What floor are you on?”

“Okay what?”

“What floor are you staying on?”

“I have no idea.” His words were heavy but distinct, each one a cannonball dropped into dust.

“Do you have a room at this hotel?”

“I’m sure I do,” he said, though with a slight trace of defensiveness that planted a seed of doubt in her mind.

The doors started to open again and Franny pushed the Door Closed button, then the button for the twenty-third floor. There was a twenty-fourth floor but it was a penthouse. The twenty-fourth floor required its own elevator key. “Do you have the key in your pocket? Check your pocket.”

“Do you not want to be seen with me?”

Franny leaned Leo Posen into the corner of the elevator and he balanced there nicely. She went through the pockets of his suit jacket, inside, outside, and then his pants pockets. These were the games she and Caroline had played with their father in the summers: how to question the suspect, how to pat him down, how to pop the lock on a car door. Fix saw everything as a learning experience for police procedure. In Leo Posen’s pockets she found a folded handkerchief (pressed, no monogram), a pair of readers, a roll of wintergreen Life Savers (two missing), a baggage check for a flight to LAX, and his wallet. She proceeded to go through his wallet. The hotel’s keys looked like credit cards now. Sometimes people put them in there.

“Hey,” Leo said in a tone of small amusement that was just about to flicker out, “do you not want to be seen with me?”

The elevator made an unassuming ding to herald their arrival. The doors opened up to show them the enormous elevator bank of the twenty-third floor: it contained a long lozenge-shaped sofa with seating on all four sides, ten-foot mirror, and an old-fashioned house phone on a table. Franny punched five. “I don’t want to be seen with you.”

He lightly touched the pockets of his jacket to see if there was anything she had missed. “I’m a nuisance.”

“You made a show of giving me a pile of money in the bar and now I’m going to your room. They fire the cocktail waitresses for that.” Of course she could call the office of student legal aid at the University of Chicago, where third-year law students offered free legal advice that was worth exactly what you paid for it. She had friends there. They might move her to the top of the pro bono pile. She could explain that she had been fired for solicitation when in fact all she was doing was what any English major would have done: seeing that Leo Posen made it safely back to his room (though was that a convincing case? Wouldn’t many English majors want to have sex with Leon Posen? Did she? Not at the moment, no. No she did not). It was, after all, in the university’s best interest to see that she kept her job so that she could pay back her loan, but then she remembered that she didn’t owe them money anymore. Her loan had already been sold twice and was now held by the Farmers’ Trust of North Dakota. It was her loan that had been forced into prostitution. The fifth floor came and went: the doors opened onto an identical elevator bank and then the doors closed. They were headed back to twenty-three. Did anyone in the lobby monitor suspicious elevator activity? In his wallet: a Pennsylvania driver’s license in the name of Leon Ariel Posen; American Express, MasterCard, Visa, Admirals Club, and a Pasadena Library card; several school pictures of a little red-haired girl who aged as Franny flipped ahead; folded receipts she didn’t unfold; and a Palmer House Hotel key card. Bingo. Franny looked at it, the pleasant hunter green, the hotel’s name printed in an overly ornate script, a magnetic stripe on the back that would unlock the door to one of the rooms in this hotel. “What’s your room number?”

“Eight twelve.”

The doors opened again. Hello, twenty-three. Franny pushed eight. “You said before you didn’t know.”

“Before I didn’t know,” he said, looking away. The ride wasn’t agreeing with him. There was that little jostle with every stop and start, two fast inches up and then down again to remind the passenger of the cable from which the box hung. He may have come up with a number just so she would take them back onto solid ground. The doors opened again and he struggled forward as if trying to leave without her. She draped his arm around her shoulders again. It was hot inside her coat, which had been designed to sustain human life at twenty degrees below zero. A sheen of sweat brightened her face. Sweat ran down the backs of her legs and into her shoes.

“You wouldn’t lose your job,” he said. He kept his voice down and for this Franny was grateful. Not all drunks were capable of such restraint. “I’ll tell them we’re friends. That’s what we are.”

“I’m not sure they would appreciate our friendship,” she said. The halls, like the elevator banks, were very wide. So much wasted space was an Old World luxury. She had never been upstairs before, and what she was feeling she imagined must be akin to breaking and entering. The halls were endless, seemingly without a vanishing point, and were lined with black-and-white photographs of famous people at the height of their beauty: Dorothy Dandridge, Frank Sinatra, Judy Garland. They went on and on. Franny kept her eyes on them. Hello, Jerry Lewis. The carpet was dizzying, a mash-up of peacock feathers in yellow and peach and pink and green. It was hard to look down for very long, and she was sober. It couldn’t have been a good match for scotch. There was a room-service table in the hall, a half-eaten Reuben sandwich, scattered fries, a single rose in a bud vase, the bottle of wine upended in its silver bucket… 806, 808, 810, 812. Home. She shifted her hip into Leo Posen to balance his weight, then dipped the key in the lock. A small red light flashed twice and then disappeared.

“Fuck,” she said quietly, and tried again. Red light.

“What if I came home with you?”

“That wouldn’t work.”

“I could sleep on the couch.”

“I sleep on the couch,” she said, except for the nights she slept with Kumar, which weren’t many because that was not the nature of their relationship. He was a friend. She needed a place to stay.

“Eighteen twelve,” he said, straightening himself imperceptibly. “That’s what it is.”

She could take him back to that lovely lozenge-shaped sofa; a place to relax if the wait for the elevator became too strenuous. It was plenty big enough. She could leave him there. She could go downstairs and call the front desk from the house phone, explain that she had seen a man sleeping on the eighth-floor sofa.

“Eighteen twelve.”

Franny shook her head. “You’re thinking of the overture, or you’re thinking of the war. You’re not staying in room 1812.”

He considered this, still looking at the locked door in front of them. “I could be thinking of the war,” he said. “Could we stop for a while? I need a little rest.”

“I do too,” Franny said. She had clocked in for her shift at four-thirty. She wasn’t going to the eighteenth floor. They might as well start on two and dip the key in every lock in the hotel.

“You seem nervous,” he said, his voice coming up as if from sleep. “Have you been in trouble before?” He was getting more comfortable with the transference of his weight across her shoulders, and he wasn’t doing as good a job picking up his feet, which made it feel like she was dragging him over an uneven path of rocks. Franny passed the elevator bank and kept going.

“I’m in trouble right now,” she said. She would give him one more chance and then she would leave him. He wouldn’t blame her. He wouldn’t even remember her. Were they to fall in the hallway that would be it for both of them. He was ten inches taller, eighty pounds heavier. She would be pinned beneath him, broken ankle, broken wrist, until the kid who slid the bills beneath the doors at three a.m. came down the hall and found them there. She didn’t have health insurance. When they got to room 821 she took the key out of her coat pocket and dipped it. It flashed red, red, then green. The lock clicked and she turned the handle. Eight twenty-one. She was thrilled that at the very least she understood the nature of mistakes.

Leo Posen hadn’t thought to leave a light on. Franny walk-dragged him over to the bed and sat him down on the edge while she clicked on the lamp. A pretty room, padded headboard, heavy drapes, an imitation of a fine desk where a famous novelist might sit and write a novel. All in all too nice a room if its only purpose was to sleep off a drunk. There was an overnight bag on the overstuffed chair with a topcoat draped over the back. The good and merciful turn-down service had come before them and folded back the bedspread, exposing the white pillows, white sheets, the deep envelope of sleep so inviting that she wondered if she were to lie down on the far side of the king-sized mattress for an hour whether anyone would know the difference. It would make the case much harder for legal aid after she’d been fired for solicitation, finding her hair on the pillow. “Help me with your arm.”

Leo Posen leaned forward and held his arm back, and with that adjustment she was able to work him out of his suit jacket. He was a man who had been helped out of a suit jacket before. He gave a long, tired sigh, as if the world’s weight had finally caught up with him.

She laid the jacket on top of his coat and then leaned down for his shoes. Leo Posen had lovely lace-up shoes, polished and worn soft as gloves. She put them far enough away from the bed that he wouldn’t trip on them in the night. Then she picked his feet up off the floor and put them in the bed with the rest of him, turning him around in the process. The pants, the belt, she didn’t even consider them.

“Next time I’ll know,” he said, sinking into all that softness, cool sheets, warm blankets.

She put her hand on his shoulder just to call him back for a moment. “Sleep well,” she said. She made her voice as soft as the pillows because now that this was over and he was safely in bed she could love him again. She covered him up.

“You can stay for a while, can’t you?” There was no embarrassment there, only peace, only enough time left to ask for one more favor, which Franny thought was the deepest difference between women and men. His eyes were closed and by the end of the sentence he was asleep, and so she said nothing. She pulled the spread over him and turned off the lamp, then she sat down on the edge of the bed in the dark, on the far far side, and changed her shoes. She kept a pair of flats in her bag. The soles of her work shoes had only touched the carpet of the hotel and so they were as good as new. She would have them for years.

* * *

Had anyone asked Fix Keating and Bert Cousins what they agreed on, neither man would have been able to come up with much of a list. Still, without ever having discussed the matter (without ever having discussed any matter) they had both decided that Caroline and Franny should go to law school. The girls were very young when this idea first took hold, Caroline was in middle school and Franny still sleeping with dolls, but Fix and Bert had mapped out the future like generals in their separate camps. Neither Caroline nor Franny exhibited any interest in American history. They were not particularly given to rational thought. They showed no skills at debate, though their energy for screaming at one another was limitless. But then again it wasn’t about what either man had seen in Caroline or Franny. It was about what each had seen in himself.

Bert held similar expectations for all the children in the family, even Jeanette, who he thought could at least do title searches if she ever made it through school. By expecting the same thing of everyone he saw himself as fair-minded and devoid of favoritism, and by coming up with a plan so many years before it would need to be implemented he figured he was bound to have at least some measure of success. The law, after all, was what Cousinses did. Bert’s great-grandfather had been a lawyer for the Pennsylvania Railroad, and his grandfather had been a circuit court judge. Bert’s father, William Cousins, called Bill, had practiced a gentleman’s version of real estate law out of substantial offices in downtown Charlottesville, mostly drawing up contracts for friends who bought swaths of Virginia farmland, waited for the zoning to change, and then turned the land into strip malls. It was a good source of income from which Bill retired early, his wife having come into the Coca-Cola bottling rights for half of the commonwealth through the bequest of her childless uncle. Bill Cousins liked to stand in his living room and look out the front window, down the allée of noble sycamores that lined the drive, and think the world was beautiful and should never change.

Bert held a Jeffersonian belief that a basic understanding of the law was the foundation for any successful life, so even if one of the children wanted to be a nurse or teach school he expected they should secure law degrees first. His belief that a person without an understanding of the law could actually be intelligent or interesting had been a problem in both of his marriages.

Fix’s take on the law was more straightforward: he wanted his girls to be lawyers because lawyers made money. If Caroline and Franny made money themselves there would be a smaller chance that they would one day leave the guy they were married to for a guy who was rich. Fix was a great believer in history repeating itself, and he never tried to dress it up as anything else. If it happened once, it could damn well happen again.

The year that Caroline was thirteen and Franny was ten, Fix bought them each a Kaplan study guide to the LSAT. He wrapped them up in red foil paper and mailed them to Virginia for Christmas along with the regular presents that Marjorie had picked out: board games, a stuffed rabbit, a watercolor set, a sweater, two music boxes.

“It’s a little crazy but it’s not a bad idea,” Bert said, picking up Franny’s copy while she scratched around in the piles of crumpled wrapping paper, searching for some overlooked present that might have gotten lost under the tree.

“Are you serious?” Beverly said. She was wearing a zip-up floor-length robe of dark-green velour, a homemade Christmas present from her own mother. On any other mother in the world it would have looked dumpy, but on their mother it was startlingly chic.

“If they read one chapter a month,” Bert said, flipping through to the index, “that wouldn’t be too much. They don’t have to understand it. At this point it would just be a matter of familiarizing themselves with the vocabulary, but if they really stuck with the program they’d wind up with perfect scores someday.” He had yet to articulate his own plans to raise up an entire firm of lawyers, but he saw Fix’s initiative as a good place to start.

Caroline, in her red-flannel reindeer pajamas and fluffy socks, was torn between the desire to tell Bert to go fuck himself and remembering that the gift was from her father. She decided she would look at the book later when Bert wasn’t around to take any pleasure in seeing her do it. Franny on the other hand was just now opening the hardback copy of A Tree Grows in Brooklyn from her grandmother. Even from the first sentence, from the look of the words on the page, she could tell that that was what she would be reading over Christmas vacation, not an LSAT prep book. But when their father called later that morning to wish them a merry Christmas and to tell them he missed them more than anything in the world and wished that they could all be together (which made the girls cry on their separate extension phones, Caroline in the kitchen, Franny sitting on the floor beside the bed in Bert and her mother’s room), he also broke the news that he had gotten into law school. Starting in January, Fix Keating would be attending Southwestern College of Law at night. Going at night meant it would take four years instead of three, but that was okay, that was the way Dick Spencer had done it. He wished he’d started earlier, the way Dick had, but you can’t spend your life regretting things.

“If I’d started when I was your age I’d be a senior partner by now,” he said to the girls. When I was a boy I took a turn, as an office boy in an attorney’s firm their father liked to sing in the morning. “You two have all the time in the world to study. If you start now and I start now then we could all study together when you come out next summer.”

It was Christmas vacation and Franny didn’t want to study, nor did she want to commit to studying in the summer. He had already told them he’d take them to Lake Tahoe that summer and rent a pontoon boat they could swim off of. She wasn’t about to trade that in for all of them sitting around the kitchen table quizzing each other for what amounted to a giant spelling test.

But when Caroline hung up the phone she might as well have already filled out her application. She went to her room, the Kaplan guide under her arm, and closed the door. She was going to law school with her father.

Franny blew her nose and wiped her eyes and went back to the living room. Her mother was gathering the trampled paper scraps and dazzling end-bits of curled ribbon into a Hefty bag while Bert sat on the couch with a cup of coffee and gazed at the holiday tableau: Christmas tree, beautiful wife, fire in the fireplace, sweet stepdaughter.

“Daddy’s going to law school,” Franny said, making herself comfortable with her novel in the blue armchair. “That’s why he wants us to study. He wants us to go to school with him.”

Beverly stood up, her leaf bag overstuffed and featherweight. “Fix is going to law school?”

Bert shook his head. “He’s too old for that.”

“He isn’t,” Franny said, glad to be able to explain. “He’s going like Dick Spencer.” Franny liked the Spencers, who took them all to lunch at Lawry’s every summer when they were in Los Angeles.

The name rang its small bell in the back of Bert’s mind. Dick Spencer from the DA’s office who had once been a cop; in fact, Dick Spencer who had invited him to come along to the christening party at Fix’s house. Franny’s christening party.

“Where’s he going?” Bert asked. He seemed to remember Spencer had gone to UCLA.

“Southwestern College of Law,” Franny said, impressed with herself for having committed it to memory.

“Dear God,” Bert said.

“Well,” Beverly said, brushing a strand of yellow hair out of her eyes. “I say good for him.”

“Sure,” Bert said. “It’s going to be tough though, trying to go to law school every night after work. I don’t know when he’ll have time to study.”

Franny looked at him, her own yellow hair long and slightly stringy. She hadn’t bothered to brush it this morning in her rush to get down to the presents. “Didn’t you go to law school?”

“Sure I did,” Bert said. “I went to the University of Virginia. But I didn’t do it at night. I went the regular way.”

“So that wasn’t hard,” Franny said. She felt proud of her father, who would be doing two things at once. The nuns had led her to believe that God gave preference to people who did things the hard way.

“It was hard enough,” Bert said and took a sip of coffee.

Caroline came back downstairs and stalked through the living room on her way to the kitchen to get a snack, a second piece of Christmas coffee cake which she felt would aid in her studying.

“So your father’s going to law school,” Beverly said to her, smiling. “That’s great.”

Caroline stopped dead, as if her mother had shot her in the neck with a blowdart tipped in neurotoxins. The expression on her face blossomed into something between horror and rage. They could all see the mistake had been made and that there would be no undoing it. “You told them?” Caroline said, turning the full force of herself onto Franny.

“I didn’t …” Franny’s voice started small and then trailed into nothing. She meant to say she didn’t know she wasn’t supposed to tell, or she didn’t know it was a secret, but the words just dried up in her mouth.

“Did you think Dad wanted them to know? Did you wonder why he didn’t just call and ask to talk to them?” Caroline took two fast steps to Franny and struck her sister’s bony shoulder with an open hand, the blow knocking the younger girl sideways out of the chair. It hurt, both the arm that was hit and the arm that she fell on. Franny couldn’t help but think that Caroline must have really been mad at her, madder than usual even. Caroline almost never hit her in front of people.

“Jesus, Caroline,” Bert said, putting down his cup. “Stop it. Beverly, don’t let her hit Franny like that.”

Christmas is particularly hard. All four of them were thinking some variation of that same sentence. Beverly leaned imperceptibly away. Nobody liked to see Franny hurt, but the truth was that Beverly was afraid of her older daughter and she didn’t step in unless there was blood.

“Don’t tell me anything,” Caroline said to Bert, spitting just the tiniest bit in her fury. “Tell your snitch.” Franny was crying now. The red imprint of her sister’s hand would be a purple bruise by the time she went to bed. Caroline turned around and pounded up the stairs, every step a blow. She would be forced to study without her piece of cake.

Once Fix started law school, his conversations with the girls revolved around torts. “Mrs. Palsgraf was in the East New York Long Island Rail Road Station standing next to a scale,” he said conversationally, like he was telling them a story about his neighbor. He was only saying it to Caroline because Franny had put the phone down and gone back to reading Kristin Lavransdatter. During the “Law School Summers,” as they would later be remembered, Caroline and Fix sat together at the kitchen table, Fix explaining the cases. He said it helped him, that if he could explain a case to the girls then he would have learned the law that was embedded in it. “People will tell you that law school is about learning to think, but it’s not. It’s about learning to memorize.” He held up his hand and counted off on his fingers, “Negligence, wrongful death, invasion of privacy, libel, noncriminal trespass…” Caroline took notes. Franny read. Franny credited her father’s time in law school for her reading David Copperfield and Great Expectations, all of Jane Austen, the Brontë sisters, and, eventually, The World According to Garp.

There had always been a particular bond between Caroline and Fix, only now that they had the ten exceptions to the Dead Man’s Rule to discuss they were closer. Caroline and Fix agreed there was nothing as boring as property law, with five times the details and little intuitive reasoning to help them. There was nothing to do but plow through the cases with endless repetition and clever mnemonics. What’s an offer? What’s an acceptance? What’s a contract? What creates a third-party beneficiary? Property law required vigilant attention.

“It’s a good thing there’re going to be two lawyers in the family,” Fix said to Franny over dinner, meaning Caroline and himself. “Somebody’s going to have to make the money to buy you all those books.”

“They’re free,” Franny said. “I check them out of the library.”

“Well, thank God for libraries,” Caroline said.

Astonishing how much condescension could be packed into the words Thank God for libraries. Fix laughed, and then caught himself. Franny didn’t think he meant to laugh.

Fix had favored Caroline even before he started law school. It was because she was older, because they’d had more time to get to know one another before the divorce. It was because Caroline’s hatred for Bert burned like a clean white flame, and because she went out of her way to make their mother’s life miserable and then report the whole thing back to her father. Fix would tell her to ease up, while at the same time enjoying the meticulous detail of her reportage. He would have liked to have had the chance to make Beverly’s life miserable too. Caroline looked like Fix — the brown hair, the skin that tanned to gold the minute they hit the beach. Franny was too much like their mother, too delicate and fair and uncoordinated. Too pretty while at the same time never as pretty. When their father took the girls to the alley behind the grocery store at six o’clock in the morning with their racquets and fresh cans of tennis balls, Caroline would have as many as twenty-seven consecutive hits without missing. Thwack, thwack, thwack, into the blank wall that was the back of the A&P, her long arms intuitively graceful in their swing. Franny’s personal best was three consecutive hits, and that had only happened once. But the real difference between Caroline and Franny was that Caroline cared. She cared about the law and tennis and her grades in classes she didn’t even like. She cared what their father said about their mother, what he said about everything. Franny just wanted to go back to the car and read Agatha Christie. Most of the time they let her go.

After their father had finished the second day of the California State Bar Exam, he called the girls in Virginia to tell them how crazy people were. They came into the test lugging their own desk chairs, their lucky study lamps. One guy was so superstitious he came with a friend and together they dragged in the guy’s desk. Crazy! The test was long and hard, like running all the way from MacArthur Park to the police academy in summer, but that’s why you practice, so that when the time comes to perform you’ll be ready. Fix had been ready, and the test was behind him now. He was done.

Franny told Bert. She went into his study and shut the door before she told him, and even then she kept her voice down. “Dad took the bar.”

Franny and Bert got along, even when Bert and Beverly no longer got along, even though Caroline and Bert had never gotten along. Bert looked up from the stack of file folders in front of him. “Did he pass?”

“He just took the test,” she said. “But I’m sure he passed.” Four years of doing nothing but working and studying and going to school, sacrificing vacations and what money he had — he had passed. There was no other possible outcome.

Bert shook his head. “California’s tough. A lot of people have to take the bar a couple of times before they pass.”

“Did you take it a couple of times?”

Bert, who was quick to be brash with everyone else, was kinder to Franny. He looked at her there, her very straight shoulders, and gave his head a shake as if he were sorry about it, then he went back to his work.

Fix didn’t pass the bar.

Marjorie was the one who called and told the girls. “Nobody passes the first time. I know plenty of lawyers and they all say forget it. Your dad is just going to have to take it again. The second time you know what you’re up against. The second time it all makes sense.”

“Will it be the same test the second time?” Caroline wanted to know. Caroline was crying and she was trying to be quiet about it, keeping her hand over the receiver.

“I don’t think so,” Marjorie said with hesitation. “I think the test is always different.”

“So what did he do?” Franny said from the extension, knowing that it was up to her to carry the conversation now. “What happened when he found out?” Fix had asked Franny and Caroline to pray for him on the day of the test, and they had. They had asked the nuns at Sacred Heart to pray for him too, and still he hadn’t passed.

“We went to my mom’s and she made your dad a nice dinner.”

“Oh, that’s good,” Franny said, because Marjorie had a mother who could make anybody feel better about anything.

“She made him a gin and tonic and fixed a meatloaf. She told him it was a shame that he didn’t pass the test but at least he’d get to take it over. She said most of the tests you take in life you only get one shot at. I think that made him feel better.”

For the second test Fix made index cards. He knew a guy who had done that the second time and that guy had passed. Fix showed the cards to the girls that summer. He kept them lined up in a shoebox, divided by topic. There were more than a thousand cards. Caroline quizzed him even when the car was going through the car wash, except she wasn’t quizzing him. She was telling him the answers, holding the card flat against her chest. “The doctrine under which a person in possession of land owned by someone else may acquire a valid title to it, so long as certain common law requirements are met, and the adverse possessor—”

Franny stood at the long set of windows and followed the car as it passed down through the slapping clothes that dangled from the ceiling (continuous), through the soap suds (hostile), the rinse (open and notorious), the spray wax (actual). She let the car wash fill her, every part of her, but still it was not enough to bear away the four elements of adverse possession.

As brilliant as the index cards were they didn’t work, even though the second time he took the test he brought his own desk lamp. Marjorie’s mother made him dinner again and told him he was going to have to take the bar a third time, nothing to be ashamed of, plenty of people had, and so Fix sat for the test the third time, and when he didn’t pass it then, he stopped. No one talked about law school anymore, except insofar as it applied to Caroline and Franny.

By the time Caroline took the LSAT her senior year at Loyola, her Kaplan guide was held together by duct tape, highlighted in three colors, and bristling with Post-it notes. Test takers are a superstitious breed, so while she was careful to read updated versions in her study groups, the copy she read in bed in her dorm room before going to sleep was the one her father had given her that Christmas in Virginia. Fix’s and Bert’s mutual theory that a consistent practice over so many years would result in a perfect score had not been correct. A perfect score on the LSAT is 180. Caroline Keating came in at 177. She didn’t know where she had lost those three points but she never forgave herself for them.

* * *

Almost two weeks after Franny had so miraculously deduced that Leo Posen’s room number was 821, and had gotten him to that room and gotten herself out of the hotel without anyone’s being the wiser, she got a phone call at the bar. Ten minutes past six and every table was full, every barstool taken. People stacked up behind the people in the chairs, drinks in hand, laughing and talking too loudly while hoping that a seat would open up. One of the other waitresses, the girl named Kelly who had the ex-husband and the child, put her hand on the small of Franny’s back and nearly touched her lipsticked lips to Franny’s ear while whispering to her. Everything these people did was intimate, even the delivery of messages. “Phone call,” she said, her voice slipping beneath the din.

Franny had never gotten a phone call at the bar. Kelly got them all the time, from her ex-husband and her babysitter and her mother, who sometimes watched the baby. The child was never able to make it through the entire shift without facing some unsolvable need. Franny did a quick scan in her mind of all the people who might be dead, then realized there was no guessing. The room was so loud — competing voices, the eternal clink of glasses, Luther Vandross on the goddamn tape which meant that Bing Crosby was coming next. Heinrich held the phone straight out to his side as if it were some nasty bit of carrion scraped up off the road, while continuing his conversation with a customer. He kept his chin down slightly, his shorthand for disapproval. He didn’t need to say it. She put a hand over one ear as if that could actually block out the noise.

“It’s Leo Posen,” the voice said.

“Really?” she said. It’s not what she would have said had she taken a moment to think about it. She had reread First City since escorting him to his bed and that had kept him very present in her mind. Franny doubted he would have remembered any aspect of that evening, and even if he had, it would never have occurred to her that she would hear from him again. Thinking that Leo Posen might call her required a level of self-aggrandizement that Franny Keating did not possess.

“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 Posen,” 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.

“She’s my bartender,” he said in distraction, and then, remembering himself, he looked up at Rae and smiled. “My other bartender.”

Franny didn’t correct him. The woman behind the bar did not wish to hear another word from her. Rae poured Dewar’s in two glasses and pushed them forward. “That’s eight,” she said. The breadsticks and water were not her problem. A crowd was starting to form at the warm end of the bar, farthest away from the door, and she went to attend to them.

Leo Posen put a ten-dollar bill on the bar. If he understood what had just happened with his friend who made him ice at home and brought it to work in a baggie, he gave no indication. He was paying attention to his drink. “I have to give a reading and then there’s a party for me afterwards. It’s one of the obligations. There aren’t many of them and they’re all written down in my contract. I don’t have to go to any of the other parties.”

“Were you going to tell me about the reading?”

Leo gave his head a small shake. “The way I was figuring it, I didn’t think I’d have to. In the first place, I didn’t really think you’d come from Chicago on a bus, and if you did come, then you’d be tired and want to rest in your hotel room. I’m always tired when I come to a new place. Travel makes me tired, newness makes me tired, and I never go anywhere on a bus, so I was thinking that if you came you’d need to go straight to bed. Clearly, you have more resources than I do.”

“Even if you managed to ditch me at the hotel while you read and picked me up afterwards for the party, wouldn’t you think that someone might say, ‘Didn’t you enjoy the reading?’” If she had never met him she would have come. Had she known that Leon Posen was giving a reading in Iowa City, she would have come by herself on the bus. Kumar would have shirked his responsibilities as editor of the law review, something he’d never done, for the chance to go with her. That was the thing Leo Posen didn’t understand.

“Or they would say, ‘My God, what an interminable reading.’ And by the way, I wouldn’t be ditching you. I would be sparing you. The impulse was polite.”

Franny smiled and Leo Posen looked at his watch, then he stretched his neck in Rae’s direction. She was laughing with her new customers at the other end of the bar, the broad beam of her back squarely towards them. “You’re a professional. What’s the best trick you know for getting your bartender back when you’re in a rush?”

“Take them to your reading as your date,” Franny said. “It works every time.”

He tapped the face of his watch as if questioning the news. “It’s just that it would be so helpful to have one more before we go.”

Franny slid her glass over to him. The ice, so thoughtfully made, was just beginning to melt, softening the Dewar’s with water bottled from an ancient spring in France. “I don’t actually drink,” she said. “This is a trick I figured out a long time ago. It makes people like me.”

Leo looked at the glass, and then he looked at Franny. “My God,” he said. “You’re a magician.”