Commonwealth(34)

“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.