Ann Patchett - Commonwealth

“Tell me what you think of that,” one would say, and in return he would smile at her. Albie’s smile was a dazzling thing, the wonders of his childhood orthodontia never what one would expect from the rest of the package. With that smile the receptionist felt that she had been given a gift in return.

One night after midnight in the early part of June, Albie was in a Laundromat in Williamsburg. The taxis still rushed by but they were quieter. The people on the street were quieter. Albie was reading the novel he had started the day before, and in reading it he’d lost track of time. It was considerably better than the usual fare of detective stories and thrillers he read, because the receptionist at Viking tended to give him better books. She didn’t just give him what had come out that week either, though sometimes she gave him those too. She’d given him a copy of David Copperfield once and said she thought he’d like it, just like that, like he was the sort of person someone would look at and think of Dickens, and so he read it. It was a book he was supposed to read for school the year he was in Virginia. He had carried it around with him for a month, just like all the other kids in his class carried David Copperfield around, but he’d never cracked it. “If I’d known you when I lived in Virginia,” he told the receptionist after he’d finished it, “I might have passed the class.”

“You’re from Virginia?” she asked. Maybe she was his mother’s age, maybe a little younger, and she was smart, he could tell that. These conversations never lasted more than two or three minutes but he liked her. Albie had places to go and the telephone at her desk never stopped ringing. She picked it up and asked the person if she could put them on hold, which she did without waiting for an answer.

“Not from there,” he said. “I just lived there for a while when I was a kid.”

“Stay right here,” she said. “One second.” When she came back she gave him a paperback called Commonwealth. “It was a very big deal last year, won the National Book Award, sold through the roof. Do you know it?”

Albie shook his head. Last year he was still in San Francisco, the money from messengering then going to heroin. A meteor could have taken out the Eastern Seaboard and he wouldn’t have known about it.

She turned the book over and tapped the tiny photograph of the man on the back. “It was the first book he’d written in fifteen years, maybe more than that. Everybody here had given up on him.” The phone rang. All the hold lights were blinking now. It was time to go back to work. She handed him the book and waved goodbye. He gave his head a small bow, smiling at her before he left.

In retrospect he would say that he knew right from the beginning, maybe the middle of the first chapter, that there was something going on, though everything is clear in retrospect. The nearer truth was that the book had taken hold of him long before he saw himself in it. That was the part that seemed so crazy, how much he had loved the book before he knew what it was about.

It was about two sets of neighbors in Virginia. One couple has been in their house a long time, the other couple has just moved in. They share a driveway. They get along well. They can borrow things from one another, watch each other’s kids. They sit on each other’s decks at night and drink and talk about politics. One of the husbands is a politician. The children — there are six of them altogether — wander in and out of each other’s houses, the girls sleep in one another’s beds. It was easy enough to see where things were going except that it wasn’t so much about the miserable affair. It was about the inestimable burden of their lives: the work, the houses, the friendships, the marriages, the children, as if all the things they’d wanted and worked for had cemented the impossibility of any sort of happiness. The children, who seem only to be atmospheric and charming at first, are more like a ball of snakes. The oldest and the youngest are boys and there are four girls between them. Two girls in the politician’s house, two girls and two boys for the doctor whom the politician is in love with. An extra husband, an extra wife. The youngest child, a son, is unbearable. Maybe that’s the real problem. He is emblematic of what can never be overcome. The lovers, with their marriages and houses and jobs, employ any trick to find a moment away together, but what they’re really trying to get away from is the children, and that youngest son in particular. The children, who are so often stuck with the youngest one, give him Benadryl in order to ditch him. The older son carries it in his pocket because he’s allergic to bee stings. They feed the little boy Benadryl and stuff him in the laundry basket under a pile of sheets so they can ride their bikes to the swimming pool in town unencumbered. Isn’t that what everyone wants, just for a moment to be unencumbered?

Albie put his thumb on the page and closed the book on top of it. The Laundromat was quite suddenly cold. There were two young punks, the boy with his hair spiked out with glue, the girl with two safety pins through her nose. They sat and smoked while their black laundry made circles in the washer. The girl gave Albie half a smile, thinking maybe he was one of them.

Did he know it was Benadryl? They called them Tic Tacs but did he know? He woke up under the bed, in a field, in the car, on the couch covered over in blankets. He woke up on the floor of the laundry room in Virginia, buried in sheets. He never knew why he woke up in places he didn’t remember going to sleep in. “Because you’re the baby,” Holly said. “Babies need more sleep.”

His hands were cold. He put the book back in his messenger bag and walked his bike out onto the street, hearing the tick-tick of his spokes, the little punks watching him, thinking he was leaving without his laundry. He knew the next part in the book, the part he hadn’t read, how the older son called Patrick would die, how the younger son had been given all the pills so that when they were needed there would be nothing. He knew that wasn’t even what the book was about.

Albie walked his bike down the street. Did he see himself in the Danish detective novels? In the postapocalyptic thrillers? Was there any chance the problem was that he put himself in the center of everything?

That wasn’t the problem.

When he got back to the apartment it was almost two o’clock in the morning. He went into their bedroom and stood at the foot of the bed, Jeanette and Fodé and Dayo all sound asleep. Maybe their subconscious minds had accepted that he lived there now and so no longer heard the sound of his footsteps, or maybe they were so dead tired at the end of their day that anyone could be standing in their bedroom now and they’d sleep right through it. Even with the shades down there was light in the room. That was New York. Nothing was ever really dark. Dayo was in the bed with them, between them, sleeping on his back. Jeanette had her hand on his chest. It was almost unbearable to watch other people sleep. Had she told Fodé what had happened? She would have told him she had a brother who died but what did he know beyond that? Albie had told no one. Not the boys on the bikes or the messengers he had coffee with in the mornings or Elsa in San Francisco with whom he had shared a needle. He had never mentioned Cal. Albie covered his sister’s foot with his hand, her foot and then a sheet, a blanket, a bedspread. He squeezed her foot and in her sleep she tried to pull away but he held on until she opened her eyes. No one wants to wake up to see a man in their bedroom. Jeanette made a noise that was small and choked, a sound of pure fear that broke her brother’s heart. Her husband, her son, they slept right through it.