Still, she had to figure they didn’t know her any better than she knew them. Her cocktail uniform would have sold her out but it was hidden by her coat, and the shoes could have been the shoes of any foolish woman in the hotel. The Palmer House had a grand lobby with massive chintz sofas both overstuffed and piped; some were circular, with a tall middle section pointing up to the chandeliers like a fez. The oriental carpet could have covered a basketball court. The ceiling, which opened through the second floor, was a small-scale Sistine which traded Adam and God for the stars of Greek mythology: Aphrodite and random nymphs tucked between wandering clouds. It was the kind of lobby where tourists came and took pictures of one another standing in front of the towering floral arrangements. Peonies in February. Even at one o’clock in the morning there were people milling around aimlessly, and a line of young men and women in smart dark suits waited behind the marble counter to help them. At least the bar closed. The front desk staff stood there all night.
Franny and Leo had a moment to consider their reflection in the brass elevator doors after she pressed the arrow pointing up. “You don’t look like you should be with me,” he said, falling into the enchantment of the movie they made together. He was starting to sway a little so that he could watch them sway, left to right, right to left.
In a whispered voice she told him to hold still. The numbers lit up as the elevator came for them—five, four, three, two—and then the doors slid open. “There you go,” she said, and tried to move him forward on his own. She was not hopeful.
He looked at her under his arm. “There I go where?”
“Into the elevator, like you said.” But he hadn’t taken an ounce of his weight off her, and she had to say the inability felt sincere. She didn’t think he could actually walk into the elevator without her. Leo Posen said nothing. The doors started to close and, in a perilous demonstration of balance, she pushed them open again with one foot.
“Okay,” she said, though she was talking to herself. “Okay, okay, okay.” She pulled them both inside and the doors slid closed. “What floor are you on?”
“Okay what?”
“What floor are you staying on?”
“I have no idea.” His words were heavy but distinct, each one a cannonball dropped into dust.
“Do you have a room at this hotel?”
“I’m sure I do,” he said, though with a slight trace of defensiveness that planted a seed of doubt in her mind.
The doors started to open again and Franny pushed the Door Closed button, then the button for the twenty-third floor. There was a twenty-fourth floor but it was a penthouse. The twenty-fourth floor required its own elevator key. “Do you have the key in your pocket? Check your pocket.”
“Do you not want to be seen with me?”
Franny leaned Leo Posen into the corner of the elevator and he balanced there nicely. She went through the pockets of his suit jacket, inside, outside, and then his pants pockets. These were the games she and Caroline had played with their father in the summers: how to question the suspect, how to pat him down, how to pop the lock on a car door. Fix saw everything as a learning experience for police procedure. In Leo Posen’s pockets she found a folded handkerchief (pressed, no monogram), a pair of readers, a roll of wintergreen Life Savers (two missing), a baggage check for a flight to LAX, and his wallet. She proceeded to go through his wallet. The hotel’s keys looked like credit cards now. Sometimes people put them in there.
“Hey,” Leo said in a tone of small amusement that was just about to flicker out, “do you not want to be seen with me?”
The elevator made an unassuming ding to herald their arrival. The doors opened up to show them the enormous elevator bank of the twenty-third floor: it contained a long lozenge-shaped sofa with seating on all four sides, ten-foot mirror, and an old-fashioned house phone on a table. Franny punched five. “I don’t want to be seen with you.”
He lightly touched the pockets of his jacket to see if there was anything she had missed. “I’m a nuisance.”
“You made a show of giving me a pile of money in the bar and now I’m going to your room. They fire the cocktail waitresses for that.” Of course she could call the office of student legal aid at the University of Chicago, where third-year law students offered free legal advice that was worth exactly what you paid for it. She had friends there. They might move her to the top of the pro bono pile. She could explain that she had been fired for solicitation when in fact all she was doing was what any English major would have done: seeing that Leo Posen made it safely back to his room (though was that a convincing case? Wouldn’t many English majors want to have sex with Leon Posen? Did she? Not at the moment, no. No she did not). It was, after all, in the university’s best interest to see that she kept her job so that she could pay back her loan, but then she remembered that she didn’t owe them money anymore. Her loan had already been sold twice and was now held by the Farmers’ Trust of North Dakota. It was her loan that had been forced into prostitution. The fifth floor came and went: the doors opened onto an identical elevator bank and then the doors closed. They were headed back to twenty-three. Did anyone in the lobby monitor suspicious elevator activity? In his wallet: a Pennsylvania driver’s license in the name of Leon Ariel Posen; American Express, MasterCard, Visa, Admirals Club, and a Pasadena Library card; several school pictures of a little red-haired girl who aged as Franny flipped ahead; folded receipts she didn’t unfold; and a Palmer House Hotel key card. Bingo. Franny looked at it, the pleasant hunter green, the hotel’s name printed in an overly ornate script, a magnetic stripe on the back that would unlock the door to one of the rooms in this hotel. “What’s your room number?”
“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.”