Ann Patchett - Commonwealth

Leo looked up and smiled. “Now there’s a thought.”

After a very long evening, in which Franny didn’t have to cook but did need to heat and plate and serve, after the consumption of an extraordinary amount of wine and then the raiding of the actress’s Calvados and Sauternes for after-dinner drinks (“Franny, make a note of what we’re stealing,” Leo said, rifling through the rack in the pantry. “I want to remember to replace it.”) when everyone had wandered back out to the side porch to smoke, Franny was left with a dining room that looked like Bacchus had thrown a bash. She drew in her breath and began to stack plates.

The tall young novelist followed her to the kitchen. For a minute she thought he was interested in helping before realizing that he was in fact just interested. He was wearing glasses now, though she didn’t remember him wearing them earlier when he was reading.

“My contract is with Knopf,” he told her, picking up a wineglass and holding it in a dish towel. “ Entre nous , I was hoping for FSG. Ever since I was in college I’ve wanted to be published by FSG, but”—he shrugged at Franny and leaned against the sink—“you know.”

“They didn’t want the book?” she asked.

Jonas looked hurt. “Money,” he said. “Everyone knows FSG never has real money.”

Franny was rinsing the plates when Leo came in. “There you are!” he called to the young novelist. His arms were wide open and he was holding a highball glass in one hand. “I’ve been wanting to show you a tree.” He could bellow sometimes when he was drinking, and Franny wondered, with all the windows open, if the neighbors could hear him.

“A tree?” Jonas said. His glasses were lightly steamed from his proximity to the sink.

Leo put his arm around the young man’s shoulder and led him away. “Come and see it. There’s a beautiful night sky.”

“Really, Leo?” Franny called after them. “A tree? That’s the best you can come up with?”

Astrid didn’t spend the night but somehow the young writer did. Jonas said he was prone to car sickness if he’d been drinking and certainly he’d been drinking. He looked around the house and declared the entire situation straight-up Fitzgerald, so much so that sleeping over would have to be part of it. Astrid, who would have stayed herself had an invitation been extended, volunteered to drive back for him tomorrow around lunch.

When the last of the actress’s Danish china had been returned to the glass-fronted cabinets and the zinc countertops had been wiped down and the trash taken out, Franny stopped to survey her good work. The houseguests had provided her with three days’ hard labor, but it was a kind of labor she was used to. Not the cooking maybe, but the refilling of glasses and the emptying of ashtrays, the straightening and fetching, the quiet audience to conversation. Tomorrow was Sunday and on Sunday it would be over. Franny felt proud of herself: she’d been a good sport. Leo would be grateful for all the many kindnesses she’d shown his friends.

After a hungover breakfast in which everyone who requested eggs requested them cooked a different way, Leo announced that he had to work. He put his legal pad and pens and scotch and two volumes of Chekhov (Eric had convinced him to write the introduction to the new edition, though, of course, not until his own novel was finished) in a canvas tote bag and walked across the lawn to the tiny one-room cottage at the back of the property. With its little desk and single bed and overstuffed chair, its ottoman and floor lamp, it was easy to imagine that the place had been built for exactly this purpose: not to write, because Leo was not writing, but to get away from the hordes of moths that had been drawn to the house’s magnificent flame.

“It’s good that he’s working,” Eric said to Franny. He was holding his coffee cup with both hands, looking wistfully in the direction where Leo had disappeared, the way a woman standing on the beach will look at the place on the horizon where the whaling vessel had disappeared. “We’ve got to encourage him, make sure he keeps at it. He can’t lose his momentum again.”

Franny didn’t mention that there was no momentum because there was no book. She wondered what Leo had told him. “He will,” she said vaguely, “once everything settles down and gets quiet.” Could she ask him what Jitney he was planning to take back to the city? She looked at Eric, his gray hair long and curling, his glasses pushed to the top of his head. “Let me know about the Jitney,” she said. “I’ll drive you down. There can be a line on Sunday if you wait too long.”

Marisol shook her head. “Friday was enough for me. I can’t even imagine Sunday.” She looked at her husband. “When are you going back?”

Eric tilted his head back and forth as if he were trying to calculate a tip. “Tuesday? Maybe Tuesday. I’ll have to check and see.”

Marisol nodded and pulled the style section out of the paper. “Well, I get an extra day. I came out a day later than you did.”

Jonas arrived in the kitchen wearing green swim trunks and a T-shirt. “Can I just have coffee for now?” he said, squinting against the morning light. “I’m going for a swim.”

Franny had so much to say, but in that exact moment she was distracted by the writer’s swim trunks, stunned by them. “Where did you get swim trunks?”

Jonas looked down at himself. “These? I don’t remember. REI?” In the T-shirt, in the bright light, he looked no more than twenty.

“They’re yours? You brought them here?”

They were all looking at her now.

“I brought them here,” he said. He plucked at the fabric with two fingers. “Are they okay?”

“You brought extra clothes?”

He caught her line of questioning and came back at his hostess with an ill-prepared defense. “I get carsick. And I don’t like to ride in cars at night. Astrid said it was a big house.”

Franny had been at the market when they arrived. She hadn’t seen him come in with a suitcase. She would need to wash the sheets in his bedroom unless he wasn’t planning to leave. The phone started to ring and Jonas, in a gesture of independence, poured his own coffee and went out the back door.

“I want to talk to my father,” the voice on the phone said.

“Ariel?”

There was no answer, because the answer would be that Leo had three children and two of them were boys and only the girl was speaking to him these days, so if a woman called asking for her father, then, yes, it was going to be Ariel.

“Hold on a minute,” Franny said. “He’s out in the back. I’ll have to get him.”

Eric gave her a look to inquire as to the nature of Ariel’s call but Franny ignored him. She crossed through the wet grass, beneath the cherry trees and past the pool where Jonas was already lying shirtless on the diving board, the cup of coffee beside his head. When she got to the cabin door she didn’t knock.

“Ariel’s on the phone,” she said.

Leo was stretched across the single bed with a volume of Chekhov in his hands. He looked up at Franny and smiled. “Would you tell her I’m working? Tell her I’ll call her back.”

“Not on your life,” Franny said.

“I can’t talk to her now.”

“Well, neither can I, so I suggest you go down to the kitchen and hang up the phone.”

She walked out of the cabin and to the back of the property. She knew where there was a break in the hedge and she took it: through the neighbor’s yard, down their driveway, and out onto the street, her flip-flops slapping against her feet. She wished she had her bicycle, a hat, some money, and at the same time she wished for nothing in the world but to be alone. Franny couldn’t help but believe that she had brought every discomfort she experienced down on herself. Had she done something with her life no one would be asking her to make them cappuccino, and had she done something with her life she would be perfectly happy to make them cappuccino, because it would not be her job. She would make the coffee because she was a gracious and helpful person. She could feel good about being kind without continually wondering if she were anything more than a nice-enough-looking waitress. She wished, as she approached thirty, that she had figured out how to be more than a muse, or, as her father had put it the last time she had seen him in Los Angeles, “Being a mistress isn’t a job.”