Commonwealth(30)

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 cura?ao 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.