Commonwealth(58)

Of course, when he was writing the book he said that wasn’t the case. He said that what she had told him was nothing but the jumping-off point for his imagination. It wasn’t her family. No one would see them there.

But there they were.

Other than the difference in their ages, and the fact he had an estranged wife, and had written a novel about her family which in its final form made her want to retch even though she had found it nothing less than thrilling when he was working on it, Franny and Leo were great. And it wasn’t as if she begrudged him the novel, it was a brilliant novel, it was the brilliant work of Leon Posen which she had brought down on herself.

But as long as anyone was making a list, there was one other problem that deserved mention, even if Franny refused to acknowledge it as a problem: Franny didn’t drink. Leo felt her abstinence as a judgment no matter how lightly she passed it off. He noticed it when they were with friends, and he noticed it when she went around to the driver’s side of the car after lunch in town because he’d had three lousy glasses of pinot gris. He noticed it when he was alone, when she was on the other side of the country. What she had told him was that she had been in an accident a long time ago, that she had caused the accident because she’d been drinking, and so she stopped drinking. He brought this up again on several occasions but he always felt like he was talking to the part of her that had gone to law school. Franny, he believed, was missing out on a great opportunity by not going back to finish her education.

He would begin: “Did you kill anyone in this car accident?”

“I did not.”

“Injure anyone? Run over a dog?”

“Nope.”

“Were you hurt?”

She gave him a deep sigh and closed the book she was reading, The Radetzky March by Joseph Roth. He had recommended it to her. “Could you give me a pass on this?”

“Are you an alcoholic?”

Franny shrugged. “Not that I know of. Probably not.”

“Then why won’t you just have a drink, keep me company. You could have a drink in the house. I’m not going to ask you to drive the car.”

She leaned over and kissed him then, as kissing was her best means of ending arguments. “Put your big brain to it,” she said kindly. “You can think of something better to fight about.”

Franny went into the kitchen and called her mother in Virginia. “Fish for dinner,” she said, “four people, something I can’t screw up.”

“Can’t you go out?” her mother asked.

“It’s not looking that way. It turns out this house is the Hotel California. People walk in the door and they don’t want to leave again. I’d probably feel the same way if I wasn’t the one doing the cooking.”

“You, cooking,” her mother said.

“I know.”

“Have you looked in her closet?”

Franny laughed out loud. Her mother could go right to the heart of the matter. “Etro bikinis, a fleet of little silk slip dresses, lots of long cashmere sweaters, featherweight, shoes like you have never seen shoes. She must be the size of an eyedropper. You can’t believe how tiny everything is.”

“What size are the shoes?”

“Sevens.” Franny had tried to push her foot into a sandal, Cinderella’s ungainly stepsister.

“If I came up I could help you cook,” her mother said.

Franny smiled, sighed. Her mother had tiny feet. “No more company. Company’s the problem right now.”

“I’m not company. I’m your mother.” She said it lightly.

For a minute Franny thought how nice it would be, her mother on the other end of the sofa reading books. For the most part Franny went home alone to Virginia, or her mother came to visit when Franny was in Chicago working at the bar. The few times Leo and her mother had been together they were cool and polite. Her mother was younger than Leo. She had read Commonwealth, and while she was glad she got to be a doctor, she would have been gladder still to have been left out altogether. Beverly didn’t believe that Leo Posen had her daughter’s best interest at heart. She had told him that once when she and Leo were drinking. Franny’s mother was not what they needed to complete their summer vacation.

“Please,” Franny said. “Just help me with the fish.”

Her mother put the phone down so she could go and get her recipe for seafood chowder. “If you follow my instructions as you have never followed my instructions even once in your life you will be a tremendous success.”

And oh, but her mother was right. They raved and praised. Eric and Marisol said they couldn’t have had a better meal in Manhattan. Franny’s mother had worked everything out, the salad with nectarines, which brand of cheese biscuits to buy, Franny was as impressed as her guests. But Leo again had failed to go to the grocery store with her, and none of them came into the kitchen to ask if they could chop the bell peppers, and when she came out to the porch to tell them dinner was ready, Eric, in the middle of another funny Chekhov story, had held up his hand so that she would know to wait until he was finished, but it took him nearly fifteen minutes to finish, and Franny could not help but think of the shrimp that were only supposed to simmer three minutes. By the end of the meal the guests were tremendously grateful, really, they couldn’t have been nicer, and Eric made a show of rolling up the sleeves of his blue linen shirt before he picked up the plates and put them in the sink, but that was it.