*
Almost two weeks after Franny had so miraculously deduced that Leo Posen’s room number was 821, and had gotten him to that room and gotten herself out of the hotel without anyone’s being the wiser, she got a phone call at the bar. Ten minutes past six and every table was full, every barstool taken. People stacked up behind the people in the chairs, drinks in hand, laughing and talking too loudly while hoping that a seat would open up. One of the other waitresses, the girl named Kelly who had the ex-husband and the child, put her hand on the small of Franny’s back and nearly touched her lipsticked lips to Franny’s ear while whispering to her. Everything these people did was intimate, even the delivery of messages. “Phone call,” she said, her voice slipping beneath the din.
Franny had never gotten a phone call at the bar. Kelly got them all the time, from her ex-husband and her babysitter and her mother, who sometimes watched the baby. The child was never able to make it through the entire shift without facing some unsolvable need. Franny did a quick scan in her mind of all the people who might be dead, then realized there was no guessing. The room was so loud—competing voices, the eternal clink of glasses, Luther Vandross on the goddamn tape which meant that Bing Crosby was coming next. Heinrich held the phone straight out to his side as if it were some nasty bit of carrion scraped up off the road, while continuing his conversation with a customer. He kept his chin down slightly, his shorthand for disapproval. He didn’t need to say it. She put a hand over one ear as if that could actually block out the noise.
“It’s Leo Posen,” the voice said.
“Really?” she said. It’s not what she would have said had she taken a moment to think about it. She had reread First City since escorting him to his bed and that had kept him very present in her mind. Franny doubted he would have remembered any aspect of that evening, and even if he had, it would never have occurred to her that she would hear from him again. Thinking that Leo Posen might call her required a level of self-aggrandizement that Franny Keating did not possess.
“I should have called sooner.”
“Why?” she said.
“I put you in a bind. I never checked to see if you got in any trouble.”
“Oh, no trouble,” she said. She looked out over the bar and imagined they were his characters drinking there, Septimus Porter himself holding a highball glass, his girls making all the racket.
“I didn’t hear you.”
“I said it was no trouble. It’s really noisy in here. It’s happy hour.” Heinrich was staring at her and she put her hand over the receiver. “Leon Posen,” she said to him, but he only shook his head and turned away.
“Could you come to Iowa City on Friday?”
“Iowa?”
“There’s a party I have to go to and I thought you might like it.” He stopped for a minute and Franny strained to hear any noise from where he was calling but the bar was too loud. She pressed the receiver even harder against her poor ear.
Finally he started to speak again. “Actually, that’s not true. I don’t think you’d like it, but I thought I might be able to stand it if you came. I’d get you a room at the hotel. It’s not the Palmer House but it would be okay for the night.”
“I don’t have a car,” Franny said.
“I’ll send you a bus ticket! That’s even better. You never know about the weather out here. I’d worry about you if you were driving. Would you mind taking the bus? I could send the ticket to you in care of the hotel. Franny of the Palmer House bar. What’s your last name?”
From across the room she could see a man at one of her tables holding up a glass, tilting it side to side. It should never come to that, customers having to beg for a drink. “Keating. Listen, I have to run,” she said, her eyes fixed on that one glass, how the ice caught the light above the heads of the crowd. “I’m going to lose my job again. I can take a bus.”
Franny was on the schedule but there was never any problem getting someone to take a Friday. That’s where the money was, and as soon as she had given the night away she felt the loss of it. Even if she wasn’t paying for her ticket or her room, the trip was going to cost her.
“He wants to sleep with you,” Kumar said when she told him about the phone call. He was still up when she came home from work, sitting at the kitchen table amid piles of books and Post-its. He seemed the slightest bit dejected, even though he had to expedite a review of an article that was a hundred pages long with over a hundred footnotes. He didn’t have the energy to think about Franny, much less sleep with her.
Kumar was right, of course—why else would anyone import a cocktail waitress from another state?—but somehow that wasn’t what it felt like. Leo Posen had waited two weeks before he’d called her, which meant what? That he’d tried to forget her and couldn’t? That the cocktail waitresses in Iowa weren’t putting out? “Maybe he likes my mind,” she said, and laughed at her own cheerful stupidity. “My charming company.”
He gave her a small, conciliatory shrug but said nothing.
She had woken Kumar up the night she met Leo Posen and told him the story just like she knew she would. It was nearly two o’clock in the morning when she’d climbed into his bed in the dark room and shaken his shoulder. “Guess who I met! You have to guess!” Kumar loved those books. They had talked about them not long after they’d met. He’d been looking at her bookshelves when she went into the kitchen to make a pot of coffee and when she returned with the cups he was holding her copy of Septimus Porter. He left the Updike on the shelves, the Bellow and the Roth.
“You read Leon Posen?” he said, just to make sure they hadn’t been left behind by some old boyfriend.
Franny and Kumar had met not long after coming to the University of Chicago. They sat beside each other in torts and decided to study together. They had become friends without realizing that soon there would be no time for friendship. Now that Franny was broke and sleeping on his couch, it was hard to say what was bothering him most about her trip to Iowa, that a woman he would have liked quite a bit had there been time was going to a party in another state with another man, or that he wished he were going with her, or that he wished he were going instead of her.
Leo Posen was waiting for her in the bus station in Iowa City. He was wearing his black topcoat and gray felt hat, studying the bus schedule that was mounted under Plexiglas on the wall as if he might be thinking about going somewhere himself. When he saw Franny coming towards him he smiled a smile much larger and more grateful than any he had given her at the bar.
“I didn’t think this would actually work,” he said, showing her for just a second the sweet, awkward overlap of his lower teeth. He held out his hand to shake her hand. She would remember to tell this to Kumar because if the plan was to sleep with her, if that was his sole intention, he would have kissed her right off.
“It was an easy trip,” she said.
“You don’t understand,” he said with great cheer. “I thought I was going to sit here freezing my ass off and watch every person get off the bus from Chicago and that none of those people would be you. I might even have come back to check the next bus from Chicago just to see if maybe I’d gotten the time wrong. After that I was going to feel like an idiot, tell myself how ridiculous it was to think I could send a bus ticket to a stranger and expect that she would get off the bus just because I wanted her to. I had it all planned out. In fact, I was so sure that you weren’t coming I had thought about not even coming to the station just to show you.”