Commonwealth(57)
“This place is gorgeous!” Marisol said, smiling as she took the glass from Franny’s hand. “But then I’ve never known anyone as lucky as Leo.”
For much the same reason as the night before, it was decided that they wouldn’t go out for dinner that night either. Marisol gestured in the direction of the cherry trees. “Leave this place and go into town? Have dinner with all those people from the Jitney? Not on your life.” Marisol managed an art gallery in SoHo. The thought of staying in the actress’s house, listening to the actress’s crickets, was enchanting.
Franny kept her face neutral but Leo was able to catch just a flicker of the problem. He clapped his hands in a single burst of good cheer. “We can do the exact same thing we did last night. Last night’s dinner was perfect. We’ll have it again. That shouldn’t be any problem, do you think?” he said to Franny.
“Marisol doesn’t eat meat,” Eric said, using his nicest smile. Eric and Marisol were more or less Leo’s age, in the general camp of just past sixty. They had a son who was completing his residency in dermatology at Johns Hopkins and a daughter who was home with a baby.
“Fish,” Marisol said, holding up her hand in a Girl Scout pledge. “I’m really a vegetarian but I’ll eat fish socially.”
They looked at Franny, all innocence and expectation, the three of them nestled into the soft ivory cushions that covered the wicker chairs. She couldn’t call Jerrell again. He’d just tell her she was a fucking idiot. For fish she’d have to call her mother. “Anything else?” Franny asked.
Eric nodded. “Something crunchy? Some nuts or little crackers, maybe a mix?”
“Bar snacks,” Franny said, and went to the kitchen to find her keys.
This was not the way things went between Leo and Franny. Their relationship, which had been going on five years, was built on admiration and mutual disbelief. After all this time he could not believe that she was with him: not only was she young (not just younger but categorically young) and more beautiful than he had any right to deserve at this point, but she was the cable on which he had pulled himself hand over hand back into his work: she was the electricity, the spark. Franny Keating was life. For her part, Franny could say the name Leon Posen, like she was saying Anton Chekhov, and find him there in the bed beside her. It did not cease to be astonishing with time. And more than that, he had found her life meaningful when she could make no sense of it at all.
Which was not to say they were without problems: there was the future, always unknowable but, realistically speaking, doomed at some point by the thirty-two-year spread in their ages, and the past, because Leo was still technically married. His wife in Los Angeles was holding out for a cut of future royalties, a touchingly optimistic demand considering how long it had been since he’d published a book. Leo flatly refused to give up any piece of work he had not yet written. Then he had published a best seller that came with a sizable advance which had already earned out, prize money, and extensive foreign sales. As they entered into the new phase of royalty checks, his wife confirmed her belief to her lawyer that she had been right to dig in her heels.
Leo should have been rich at this point but he had to keep accepting prestigious visiting-author positions at various well-heeled institutions just to make ends meet, and these positions made it nearly impossible for him to work on his new book. Yes, there was a tremendous amount of money but it flowed from a single river and into countless tributaries. He already had one ex-wife, truly divorced and behind him, to whom he paid a significant alimony, as well as payments to the wife who should have been his second ex-wife. She cost him a fortune. His daughter from the first marriage always needed money because she needed so much more than money but money was the easiest way for her to express those needs, and then there were two sons from the second marriage who refused to speak to him at all—one a sophomore at Kenyon and the other a junior at Harvard-Westlake in Los Angeles. Their tuition, along with their every wish, was Leo’s command.
Franny knew it was past time for her to figure out her life but Leo clung to her like a child to a blanket, and honestly, it was a wonderful thing to be needed by the person she most admired, to be told she was indispensable. It was infinitely preferable to applying to graduate schools when she didn’t know what she wanted to study, and so she tended to go with him, showing up in pretty dresses to faculty dinners at Stanford or Yale. Sometimes she would go back and work at the Palmer House for a couple of months, living in the apartment they kept on North Lake Shore Drive. Leo made the payments on her loans so she was safe, but she missed making money of her own. Anyway, it was good to see her friends. The Palmer House would always take her in.
“This is madness,” he would say to her over the phone, too many drinks past the point at which he should have been calling. “I’m here by myself so that you can be a waitress? Go to the airport, please, tonight, first thing in the morning, just get on a plane. I’ll send you a ticket.” It was something of a joke between them, him sending her a ticket, though in this case he wasn’t joking.
“You’re going to be fine.” Franny made a point not to say anything that mattered in conversations like these. Tomorrow he wouldn’t remember a word of it. “And this is good for me. I need to work every now and then.”
“You have worked! You have consistently inspired me when the entire world failed at the job. I’ll give you a salary. I’ll write you a check. It’s your fucking book, Franny. It’s you.”