Commonwealth(64)

Cal pulled the little plastic bag out of his pocket. He had four in there and so he gave him four.

“All of them?” Albie asked.

“You stink,” Cal said. “If you don’t you’re going to scare the horses.”

Jeanette left the room then. She didn’t say where she was going but the rest of them said they had to wait for her.

“I want to go!” Albie said.

Franny shook her head. “Ernestine told us we had to stay together.”

They waited until he fell asleep. It never took that long. Cal carried Albie down to the laundry room and left him under a pile of towels on the floor. It was Sunday and Ernestine was making a big supper. She never did laundry on Sunday.

And now twenty years later here was Albie in the actress’s summer house, having read about that day he had largely slept through in a novel written by someone he’d never met. Franny shook her head. Her hands were cold. She had never been so cold before. “I’m sorry,” she said. The words came without volume and so she said them again. “I know that isn’t worth anything but I’m sorry. I made a terrible mistake.”

“How did you make a mistake?” Leo said. He reached into the box and took out the bottle of Beefeater. “I’m going to have a drink. Would anyone else like a drink?”

“Did you think I was never going to see it?” Albie asked. “I mean, maybe that was a good guess. It took me long enough.”

“I was trying to explain to him before you got here,” Leo said, pouring some gin in a glass. “Writers get their inspirations from a lot of places. It’s never any one thing.”

Franny looked at Leo, willing him to pick up his glass and go back out to the porch to smoke with his guests. “Just give us a minute,” she said to him. “This isn’t about you.”

“Of course it’s about me,” Leo said. “It’s my book.”

“I still don’t understand this,” Albie said, pointing at Franny and then at Leo. “How did he wind up with my life?”

“It isn’t your life,” Leo said. “That’s what I’m trying to explain. It’s my imagination.”

Albie swung around like a whip, his hands coming up to Leo’s shoulders, pushing him back. Leo, startled, dropped his glass on the floor, and for a moment the room was suffused with the clean smell of gin.

“You don’t understand why I’m here, do you?” Albie said. “You have no idea how hard I’m trying not to kill you. I really might. And if you made me up then you’ll understand just how little there is at stake for me here.”

There was a clear case for stepping towards Leo then, for putting her hands on Leo’s arm, but Franny turned to Albie instead. Albie was the one she had wronged. She and Leo had wronged him together.

“Listen to me, let’s go and talk,” she said to Albie. “Come outside and talk to me.”

Leo stumbled back as if struck, his face flushed. Leo—shorter, heavier, more than twice Albie’s age—would later swear there had been a blow. The highball glass rolled past his feet, miraculously unbroken. “I’m calling the police,” he said. He could hear the unevenness in his own breathing.

“Nobody’s calling the police,” Franny said.

“What in the hell are you talking about?” Leo said.

Marisol came in the kitchen through the swinging door, Eric behind her. “Franny, where are my lobsters?” she said.

Franny couldn’t think of what she was talking about at first or why she was even still in the house, but then she remembered. “Go,” she said. She kept her eyes on Albie.

“Do you even know what lobsters cost?”

Eric touched his wife’s shoulder. “Come back to the living room,” he said. “They’ve got company.”

“We’re the company!” Marisol had put on a silk shift dress of emerald green, a flat gold necklace. The Hollingers had come and she was dressed for dinner. Only Hollinger was a bigger name on the marquee than Posen, and some might disagree with that. Hollinger had been more consistent in his career, he’d had the bigger wins. Dinner, unassembled, was on the table in the boxes, in the shopping bags. “Jonas told me you put them in the car. Was something wrong with them?”

Albie turned to Franny. “Do you work for them?”

Franny took her hand off Albie’s arm and put her hand in his hand instead. “We have to go.”

“Who is this?” Marisol said. Marisol, who wasn’t part of anything, who had never been invited.

“This is my brother,” Franny said.

“He is not your goddamn brother,” Leo said, his voice loud enough to go through the windows and out across the lawns.

Franny had made a mistake when she’d left the house that morning without taking her purse and she did not make the mistake again. “Stay here,” she said to Leo. “Everything’s going to be fine.”

Albie picked up the bottle of gin.

“You’re not leaving with him,” Leo said.

“If I don’t leave here with him I’m going to invite him to dinner. I’m going to put him upstairs in the guest room, okay?”

“I’ll tell you what,” Eric said. “Why don’t we take some drinks out to our guests? Marisol, you get the corkscrew and some glasses. Maybe we should all sit down and have a drink. You’ve got the gin.” Eric nodded at Albie, then he turned to Franny. “The Hollingers are here. They came while you were in town. Just come out and say hello.”