“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 calledCommonwealth.“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 thetick-tickof 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.
“It’s me,” Albie whispered. “Get up.” He pointed to the bedroom door and then went out into the living room to wait for her.
6
Leo Posen had taken a house in Amagansett for the summer. There was no view of the ocean, a person would have to write an entirely different kind of book in order to afford an ocean view, but it was a beautiful house with wide halls and sunny rooms, a porch swing the size of a daybed, a kitchen with an enormous table that looked like it had been pegged together by Pilgrims to celebrate a later, more prosperous Thanksgiving. The house belonged to an actress who was shooting a movie in Poland for the summer, and summer was the only time she used it. The real estate broker had made it clear that this property was never rented, but the actress was a great admirer of Leo’s. In fact, she was hoping for a part in the movie ofCommonwealth.She wanted to play the doctor who was having the affair, and hoped that Leo, surrounded by her pretty things, her pictures, would think of her.
In the spirit of full disclosure, Leo told the broker there was no movie deal.
The broker was stopped by this. Even she, who knew next to nothing about the movie business, knew that the rights should have been snapped up before publication. For the briefest instant she wondered if the option forCommonwealthwas something she herself could acquire. “Don’t worry about that,” the broker said. “When they do make the movie she’s still going to want the part.”
Leo had rented the house in hopes that he would spend the summer working on a new novel, the one his literary agent had sold to his publisher without so much as an outline whileCommonwealthwas ringing the slot machines. He had also rented the house in hopes of pleasing Franny. He’d told her she wouldn’t have to do anything but lie on the big down sofa in the front room and read all day, or she could ride her bike to the beach and read. “Sand, waves, beach roses,” he said, picking up a strand of her fascinating hair and letting it fall between his fingers. At night after dinner they would sit together on the porch and he would read her everything he’d written that day. “That doesn’t sound like such a bad vacation.”
But it was a bad vacation. The problem, they realized much too late, was the glorious house itself, which sat atop a hill to catch the afternoon breeze while a great hedge surrounded the property for privacy. The fruit trees scattered over the wide lawn had been late to bloom because of the long, hard winter, so that even now in early June the cherry trees were weighted with dark pink blossoms. The jumbled flower beds that spoke of glorious disarray were tended by a gardener who came on Wednesdays, the same day a Peruvian man with a skimmer net came to remove the cherry blossoms from the swimming pool. There were five bedrooms with variations on the sloping-ceiling-dormer-window theme: window seats, puffy comforters, hand-braided rugs over floors of quarter-sawn oak. Leo Posen had told the broker that he was looking for something considerably smaller but she dismissed the idea. “Smaller will still be more expensive because of the deal you’re getting,” she told him. “You cannot imagine what this house would cost you if you were renting at fair market value. If you don’t want to use the extra rooms I suggest you close the doors.”
That might have solved the problem were it not for the fact that nature abhors an empty bedroom in summer in Amagansett, especially when those rooms are owned by an actress and rented by a novelist. People wanted to visit. Eric, his editor, who should have been the one to hire a sentry to patrol the property line with a gun, was the first to call and say how nice it would be to get together outside of the city and talk over Leo’s ideas for the new book. Eric could come out Thursday, beating the rush, but Marisol, his wife, had an opening she needed to go to that night. He supposed that Marisol would have to brave the Jitney on Friday.
Marisol? Leo stumbled for an instant but then agreed pleasantly to everything—yes, yes, a great time would be had by all. He hung up the phone and looked at the yellow legal pad in front of him, then he looked out the window. It was raining, and for a while he sat and admired the cherry trees, wondering if anyone had ever made a legal pad out of a cherry tree. Then he went downstairs to see if Franny thought they should drive into town for lunch.
“It’s good that Eric’s coming,” Leo said to Franny. The rain was light and they sat outside under an awning at the café where they’d had lunch three days in a row. It was extremely pleasant. “I can ask him about finding you a job. You’re a terrific editor, you know, better than he’ll ever be, not that I’d mention that.”
Franny shook her head. “Don’t ask him.”
The waitress came by and Leo touched the rim of his empty wineglass. It was after two o’clock, a very late lunch. “If I don’t ask him he’ll figure it out himself. I might just mention that you’re looking for something. Or maybe I’ll mention it to Marisol.”
“Eric knows me,” she said. “If he wants to hire me he knows where I am.” Of course, Eric had probably noticed that Leo and Franny didn’t live in New York, and in fact didn’t live anywhere for more than four months at a time, which would make taking on a regular job difficult. Anyway, Franny wasn’t sure she wanted to be an editor.
“Eric knows you from dinner parties. He hasn’t gotten to spend any real time with you. That’s why this is going to work out so well.”
When Eric came on Thursday afternoon he said he’d rather stay in for dinner. He’d been out every night that week, and anyway it would be so much easier to talk at the house. Eric was in every sense a wiry man, a runner with a small frame who must have once been told that blue complemented his eyes. Franny had never seen Eric in anything other than blue. He looked up the staircase, touching the banister with affection.
Leo looked at Franny. “That would be all right, wouldn’t it?”
She should have seen it right then but she didn’t. She was thinking in terms of one dinner, one night. Franny went into the kitchen and called Jerrell at the Palmer House to ask him how to cook steaks. He would just be at the beginning of his shift now. He would be chopping parsley.
“Little House,” he said. “Get the fuck back here. You know can’t nobody else fill my cup.”
