Commonwealth(36)

“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.