Ann Patchett - Commonwealth

“I need a favor,” she said. It was easy to be quiet. She was in his arms.

Heinrich turned to Leon Posen and raised his eyebrows slightly, formally, asking the question. Leon Posen nodded.

“Come with me,” Heinrich said. He steered Franny down to the end of the long bar where the curaçao and the Vandermint sat on high glass shelves, waiting to be dusted.

“That’s Leon Po sen,” Franny said, keeping her voice low.

Heinrich nodded, though whether the nod meant I know that or What’s your point? there was no way of telling. Franny had heard Heinrich speaking on the phone in German once, his voice more forceful in his native tongue. What language did he read in, or did he read at all? Was Leon Posen well translated in German?

“Just let me take care of him,” Franny said. “I’m asking you.”

Franny’s skin was so translucent it acted more as a window than a shade. She was the only waitress who tipped the busboys out the full ten percent they were due, and she tipped the bartenders with equal consideration. Heinrich had always thought there was something German about her, the yellow hair, the clear blue ice of her eyes, but Americans were never Germans. Americans were mutts, all of them. “You’re not a bartender,” he told her.

“I can pour scotch in a glass.”

“You have tables. I do not serve your tables because I find the customer interesting.” He was wondering how much to ask for. Too much briefly crossed his mind. They wouldn’t be the first ones to retire to the storeroom.

“For Christ’s sake, Heinrich, I was an English major. I can recite the first three paragraphs of Nevermore from memory.”

Heinrich had been an English major himself when he was a student in West Berlin, though for him it had been English literature with a concentration in nineteenth-century British. What a luxury it was to read Trollope, knowing that one wall away such a thing would be impossible. He wanted to say to her, Where have these books gotten us? but instead he reached behind her, between her shoulder blades, and ran his hand down the length of her corn-silk braid. He had always wanted to do that.

It didn’t matter. At that moment she would have cut it off and given it to him as a souvenir. She went back to her place at the bar and took down a bottle of the Macallan, not the twenty-five-year but the twelve. She had no intention of sticking him. She put fresh ice in a fresh glass and covered it over with scotch. The silvered spouts stuck into the top of every bottle made pouring an absolute pleasure. It gave her accuracy, control. No one could convince her that this was the more difficult job.

Leon Posen glanced down to the end of the bar where Heinrich was unloading a rack of wine glasses, wiping out every one for good measure. “So what do you owe him?”

“I’m not sure yet.” She put down the napkin, the glass.

“Always ask the price. That can be the lesson of our time together.” He lifted his glass to her, Thank you, dear Franny, and goodnight. But Franny, who knew that this was the point at which the conversation ended and she was supposed to go and check on her tables, didn’t go. It wasn’t that she wanted to ask him about the books, or what he had been doing with himself since the publication of Septimus Porter twelve years ago. She had no intention of spoiling his night. It was that she could see her own life very clearly standing there in front of him, and her life was boring and hard. Going to law school had been a terrible error in judgment that she had made in hopes of pleasing other people, and because of that error in judgment she was in debt like some sort of Dickens character, like the kind of person who wound up on the Oprah show weeping, without a single skill to show for it, when into the bar of the Palmer House came Leon Posen. He was drinking the drink she had poured in his glass. The brightness of him, the brightness that she felt standing just on the other side of the bar, was more than she was willing to let go of. It was like throwing out breadcrumbs to the birds day after day and then suddenly having a passenger pigeon alight on the back of the park bench. It wasn’t just that it was rare, it was impossible , and she wasn’t going to make any abrupt movements that could startle him away.

“Do you live here?” she said. What’s it been like, she asked the passenger pigeon, the whole world thinking you’re extinct?

He looked behind his shoulder at the room, the great eyelids lifting. “At the Palmer House?”

“In Chicago.”

A couple came in, unbundling a tangle of coats and scarves and hats, and sat at the bar two stools away. Why, she wanted to ask them, with all the empty stools to choose from, would they want to sit so close? She could smell the woman’s perfume, dark and not unpleasantly musky, from where she stood. Then she realized they had meant to sit in front of her. She was the bartender.

“Los Angeles,” Leon Posen said, after a great deal of internal wrestling. “Depending on how you look at it.”

“Whiskey sour,” the man said, heaping their winter wear on the stool beside them. The pile of woolens immediately began to slide off and he grabbed onto the sleeve of a coat and then tipped his head in the direction of the woman. “Daiquiri.”

“Up,” the woman said, pulling off her gloves.

Franny wasn’t sure how to tell them that this wasn’t her job, but Leon Posen knew how to say it. “She doesn’t mix drinks,” he told them. “She can pour scotch in the glass but if it’s got two ingredients or more you’re going to need someone else.” He looked at Franny. “Is that fair?”

Franny nodded. She represented herself falsely just by standing there.

“I could make you a whiskey sour,” he said to the man, then, looking at the woman, shook his head. “But not a daiquiri. I bet you there’s a mix back there somewhere.”

“I don’t know,” Franny said.

“You should ask the German.” Leon Posen pointed the couple to Heinrich, who was still polishing glasses at the far end of the bar, ignoring with intent. “It would be a gift to him. He’s had his feelings hurt.”

“You know a lot about this place,” the woman said. It was very late. Underneath her glove there was no ring.

“It isn’t this place,” Leon said. “It’s bars.” He asked Franny the name of the bartender, and Heinrich, with ears pitched to frequencies higher than a dog could imagine, heard the question and put his towel down.

“Whiskey sour,” the man began again.

When they had placed their orders and Heinrich had made a tasteful showing of his skills with a cocktail shaker, the couple did indeed gather up their belongings and carry them off to a small table in the corner, a table that would have been Franny’s except for some unspoken exchange in which it was decided that Heinrich would serve the drinks as well, taking both the table and the tip.

“I was born in Los Angeles,” Franny said, once the couple were mercifully gone. She’d been waiting such a long time to say it she wasn’t sure the point still had any conversational relevance.

“But you had the sense to get out.”

“I like Los Angeles.” In Los Angeles she was always a child. She swam the length of Marjorie’s mother’s pool, skimming its blue bottom in her two-piece bathing suit. The shadow of Caroline, half-asleep on her inflatable raft, was a rectangular cloud above her. Their father was just at the water’s edge in a lounge chair reading The Godfather.

“You say that because we’re in Chicago and it’s February.”

“If L.A.’s so awful why do you live there?”

“I have a wife in Los Angeles,” he said. “That’s something I’m working on.”