Commonwealth(55)

Albie put his thumb on the page and closed the book on top of it. The Laundromat was quite suddenly cold. There were two young punks, the boy with his hair spiked out with glue, the girl with two safety pins through her nose. They sat and smoked while their black laundry made circles in the washer. The girl gave Albie half a smile, thinking maybe he was one of them.

Did he know it was Benadryl? They called them Tic Tacs but did he know? He woke up under the bed, in a field, in the car, on the couch covered over in blankets. He woke up on the floor of the laundry room in Virginia, buried in sheets. He never knew why he woke up in places he didn’t remember going to sleep in. “Because you’re the baby,” Holly said. “Babies need more sleep.”

His hands were cold. He put the book back in his messenger bag and walked his bike out onto the street, hearing the tick-tick of his spokes, the little punks watching him, thinking he was leaving without his laundry. He knew the next part in the book, the part he hadn’t read, how the older son called Patrick would die, how the younger son had been given all the pills so that when they were needed there would be nothing. He knew that wasn’t even what the book was about.

Albie walked his bike down the street. Did he see himself in the Danish detective novels? In the postapocalyptic thrillers? Was there any chance the problem was that he put himself in the center of everything?

That wasn’t the problem.

When he got back to the apartment it was almost two o’clock in the morning. He went into their bedroom and stood at the foot of the bed, Jeanette and Fodé and Dayo all sound asleep. Maybe their subconscious minds had accepted that he lived there now and so no longer heard the sound of his footsteps, or maybe they were so dead tired at the end of their day that anyone could be standing in their bedroom now and they’d sleep right through it. Even with the shades down there was light in the room. That was New York. Nothing was ever really dark. Dayo was in the bed with them, between them, sleeping on his back. Jeanette had her hand on his chest. It was almost unbearable to watch other people sleep. Had she told Fodé what had happened? She would have told him she had a brother who died but what did he know beyond that? Albie had told no one. Not the boys on the bikes or the messengers he had coffee with in the mornings or Elsa in San Francisco with whom he had shared a needle. He had never mentioned Cal. Albie covered his sister’s foot with his hand, her foot and then a sheet, a blanket, a bedspread. He squeezed her foot and in her sleep she tried to pull away but he held on until she opened her eyes. No one wants to wake up to see a man in their bedroom. Jeanette made a noise that was small and choked, a sound of pure fear that broke her brother’s heart. Her husband, her son, they slept right through it.

“It’s me,” Albie whispered. “Get up.” He pointed to the bedroom door and then went out into the living room to wait for her.





6

Leo Posen had taken a house in Amagansett for the summer. There was no view of the ocean, a person would have to write an entirely different kind of book in order to afford an ocean view, but it was a beautiful house with wide halls and sunny rooms, a porch swing the size of a daybed, a kitchen with an enormous table that looked like it had been pegged together by Pilgrims to celebrate a later, more prosperous Thanksgiving. The house belonged to an actress who was shooting a movie in Poland for the summer, and summer was the only time she used it. The real estate broker had made it clear that this property was never rented, but the actress was a great admirer of Leo’s. In fact, she was hoping for a part in the movie of Commonwealth. She wanted to play the doctor who was having the affair, and hoped that Leo, surrounded by her pretty things, her pictures, would think of her.

In the spirit of full disclosure, Leo told the broker there was no movie deal.

The broker was stopped by this. Even she, who knew next to nothing about the movie business, knew that the rights should have been snapped up before publication. For the briefest instant she wondered if the option for Commonwealth was something she herself could acquire. “Don’t worry about that,” the broker said. “When they do make the movie she’s still going to want the part.”

Leo had rented the house in hopes that he would spend the summer working on a new novel, the one his literary agent had sold to his publisher without so much as an outline while Commonwealth was ringing the slot machines. He had also rented the house in hopes of pleasing Franny. He’d told her she wouldn’t have to do anything but lie on the big down sofa in the front room and read all day, or she could ride her bike to the beach and read. “Sand, waves, beach roses,” he said, picking up a strand of her fascinating hair and letting it fall between his fingers. At night after dinner they would sit together on the porch and he would read her everything he’d written that day. “That doesn’t sound like such a bad vacation.”

But it was a bad vacation. The problem, they realized much too late, was the glorious house itself, which sat atop a hill to catch the afternoon breeze while a great hedge surrounded the property for privacy. The fruit trees scattered over the wide lawn had been late to bloom because of the long, hard winter, so that even now in early June the cherry trees were weighted with dark pink blossoms. The jumbled flower beds that spoke of glorious disarray were tended by a gardener who came on Wednesdays, the same day a Peruvian man with a skimmer net came to remove the cherry blossoms from the swimming pool. There were five bedrooms with variations on the sloping-ceiling-dormer-window theme: window seats, puffy comforters, hand-braided rugs over floors of quarter-sawn oak. Leo Posen had told the broker that he was looking for something considerably smaller but she dismissed the idea. “Smaller will still be more expensive because of the deal you’re getting,” she told him. “You cannot imagine what this house would cost you if you were renting at fair market value. If you don’t want to use the extra rooms I suggest you close the doors.”