“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.”
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.”