“That’s why I haven’t been.”
He nodded. “The bars are full of students. It wouldn’t be my choice to drink in a bar full of students, but that isn’t the real problem.” He stopped there. He was waiting for her. Leo Posen liked a straight man.
“What’s the real problem?”
“It turns out the ice in the drinks contains a certain amount of herbicides—herbicides, pesticides, and what I think must be liquid fertilizer. You can taste it. It’s not just the ice in the bars, of course, it’s in all the water, all the water that doesn’t come from France in bottles. I’ve heard it actually gets much worse in the spring when the snow starts to melt. There’s a higher concentration. You can taste it on your toothbrush.”
She nodded. “So you come to Chicago to have a drink because the ice in Iowa has agricultural chemicals in it.”
“That and the students.”
“You’re teaching there?”
He took a casual pull off his cigarette. “One semester. It was a mistake I made. It sounded like a lot of money at the time but nothing’s a lot of money when you weigh it out against the costs. Nobody sits you down and explains the situation with the water before you sign the contract.”
“Wouldn’t it be easier to make ice at home? Use the water from France. You can brush your teeth with it, too.”
“In theory, yes, but there’s no good way to implement it. Either you have to carry your ice bucket with you to the bar or you have to drink at home by yourself, which I don’t do.”
“So come to Chicago and have a couple of drinks,” Franny said, because she was glad he was there, she didn’t care about his reason. “It’s good to get away.”
“Now you’re seeing it,” he said, slapping the bar with his open hand. “Cedar Rapids doesn’t solve the problem.”
“Des Moines doesn’t solve the problem.”
“You’re shorter again.”
“You told me to take my shoes off.”
“Are you saying that I told you to take your shoes off and you did it?”
“I’d rather have them off.”
He shook his head, though whether to marvel or despair she didn’t know, then he crushed what was left of his cigarette into the small glass ashtray. “Did you ever want to be a writer?”
“No,” she said, and she would have told him. “I only wanted to be a reader.”
He patted the top of her hand, which she had left close by on the bar in case he needed it. “I appreciate that. I’ve come a long way so that I could have a drink and not be anywhere near another writer.”
“Can I get you another drink?”
“You’re a great girl, Franny.”
The problem, and it was one she took seriously, was that Franny didn’t know how long Leo Posen had been sitting at the bar before she saw him, how long Heinrich had been doing his job before she took his job away. Because while Leo Posen appeared to be perfectly sober, she would bet that he seemed that way regardless of how much he had drunk. Some men were like that. They went from sober to more or less dead without intermediate steps. “Are you staying here at the hotel?” she asked, her voice gone small.
He tilted his head ever so slightly and waited, his face full of benevolence.
Franny shook her head. “It’s only because if you were to get in your car and run someone down on your way back to Iowa tonight I might have to go to jail.”
“You’d go to jail? That hardly seems fair.”
“Dram shop civil liability, state of Illinois.” She held up her hand to demonstrate seriousness.
“‘Dram shop’?”
“They should update the name.”
“Are the other dispensers of dram aware of this?”
Only the ones who had dropped out of law school, she wanted to say, but nodded instead.
“Well, not to worry. I only have to get to the elevator.”
Franny brought back the bottle of scotch. “What happens in the elevator is your own business.” Just then the lights came down two settings. Heinrich always shut down the night too abruptly, turning the lights so low so fast that it felt like a straight fall into darkness. Every time it happened she had a split second of wondering if something small and important had ruptured inside her head.
“It’s a sign,” Leo Posen said, looking up at the ceiling. “Make it a double.”
After bringing out a larger glass to hold twice the scotch, Franny stepped into her shoes and went to settle up with her two tables. She felt sheepish about asking them for money when she had abandoned them so long ago, but neither table seemed to hold it against her. One gave her a credit card and the two businessmen handed her a mysteriously large amount of cash and then pulled on their coats to leave. When she came back to the bar, Heinrich was putting plastic wrap over the stainless-steel garnish bins, tucking the maraschino cherries into the refrigerator for the night.
“Did they tip you for the shoes?” Leo Posen asked. The scotch was gone and now he was leaning into the bar. His eyes weren’t focused on anything.
“They did.”
“How much?”
Heinrich looked up from his work. He didn’t mind that it was an inappropriate question. No one ever asked about tips and he wanted to know.
She hesitated. “Eighteen dollars.”
“That tells us nothing unless we know the amount of the check. They could have been drinking a vintage montrachet, in which case they stiffed you.”
“It wasn’t montrachet,” Heinrich said.
Franny sighed. There was no way to explain that she needed the money, that she was sleeping on Kumar’s couch so that she could pay the next coupon in her loan booklet. “Twenty-two dollars.”
A small, involuntary sound passed Heinrich’s lips, the puff of air that comes after the punch but without the punch itself.
“I picked the wrong business,” Leo Posen said.
Heinrich looked at him doubtfully. “That’s not what they would have tipped you.”
“What about the other table?” Leo said.
Franny held up her hand, enough.
“I never would have guessed it,” he said to Heinrich. He reached into his pocket and pulled out a brown leather wallet thick with credit cards, photographs, cash, folded receipts. He dropped it on the bar, where it made a soft thud like a baseball falling into a glove. “Here,” he said. “Take the whole thing. I can’t do the math.”
Franny rang up his check, folded the little piece of paper, and left it there in a clean highball glass. That’s the way they did it at the Palmer House, just to remind you how you came to rack up such a magnificent bill in the first place. The passenger pigeon had stayed beside her on the bench all evening, but then what do you do? You can’t stuff the thing in your purse and take it home with you, and you can’t sleep in the park, waiting for it to go on its own. It was cold now, it was dark.
Leo Posen sighed and opened his wallet. “You aren’t even going to help?” he asked.
Franny shook her head and started wiping down the bar. She did suspect that math was part of the problem, that the drunker people were the more they struggled with percentages and so decided to err on the side of extravagance. But then she also wondered if they tipped her more because they felt embarrassed for their drinking. Or they tipped her more in hopes she might run after them and suggest that for eighteen dollars she would like to have sex.
Leo Posen continued to sit, though he had stacked his money neatly over the top of his bill and his glass and napkin were gone. Every other customer in the bar of the Palmer House Hotel was gone. Jesus, a busboy, had come over from the restaurant to make sure that everything was off the tables. He had his eye on Leo Posen’s back. It was time to run the vacuum.
After Franny had clocked out and put on her coat, she came back to the bar. It was the long puffy coat her mother had bought for her when she got into law school, a sleeping bag with sleeves, her mother had called it, and it was true, many were the nights she threw it on top of the bl
ankets on the couch before climbing in. She stood next to Leo Posen’s chair. “I’m going now,” she said, wishing for the first time since taking the job that the night were longer. “It’s really been something.”
He looked at her. “I’m going to need your help,” he said in a level voice.
The pigeon fluttered off the back of the park bench and into her lap, pushing its head against the folds of her coat.
“I’ll get Heinrich.” Her voice was very quiet even though it was just the two of them there. This was why she shouldn’t take Heinrich’s customers, even the famous novelists, because in the end they would still be his responsibility. “He can take you to the elevator.”
He turned his head slightly to the left, as if he had meant to shake it no and then lost his train of thought. “Don’t get the German. I just need—” He waited, looking for the word.
“What do you need?”
“Guidance.”
“We’ll find someone bigger.”
“I’m not asking you to carry me.”
“It would be better.”
“Is the elevator not on your way?”
Wasn’t it a sort of honor to be asked? It would be the most interesting part of the story and the part she wouldn’t tell—that Leo Posen was too drunk to walk himself out of the bar and so she had to help him. It wouldn’t be the best decision Franny had ever made, but it wouldn’t even be in the running with the worst. And he’d done so much for her already in the years before they met, those beautiful novels. She took his hand off the bar and pulled it around her shoulder. He gave himself over to her. “Stand up,” she said.
Men can be surprisingly tall once they’ve been unfolded from the high bar chairs. Franny’s shoulder, raised by the height of her heels, barely came to his armpit. He put more weight on her than she would have expected but she could hold him up. “Just stand here for one second and get your balance,” she said.
“You’re good at this.”
She tried to rearrange his hand, which covered her left breast without intention. Where was Heinrich now? Mercifully smoking? He could use this against her, though with the German it was always hard to say what would offend him. Franny had her arm around Leo Posen’s waist as she steered the course between the dark icebergs of her tables.
“Wait,” he said. Franny stopped. He raised his chin. He looked like he was trying to remember something, or that he was going to ask for another drink. “That song,” he said.
Franny listened. The tape was playing to the empty room. Gladys Knight and the Pips were singing. The gist of the story was that the relationship was over and neither party was willing to own up to it. The first thirty times she heard that song she’d loved it. Then she didn’t anymore. “What about it?”
Leo lifted his hand from Franny’s breast and pointed at the air. “That’s the song that was playing when I came in. I keep wondering what I’m going to do without you,” he sang lightly.
The bar, Heinrich liked to say, was West Germany, and Franny understood its progressive, flexible approach to the workforce. But the lobby was under the control of the East, full of Soviet spies you never suspected. “Stay out of the lobby,” Heinrich had told her when she’d first taken the job. “Once you’re in the lobby, you’re on your own. The bar can’t save you.”
Still, she had to figure they didn’t know her any better than she knew them. Her cocktail uniform would have sold her out but it was hidden by her coat, and the shoes could have been the shoes of any foolish woman in the hotel. The Palmer House had a grand lobby with massive chintz sofas both overstuffed and piped; some were circular, with a tall middle section pointing up to the chandeliers like a fez. The oriental carpet could have covered a basketball court. The ceiling, which opened through the second floor, was a small-scale Sistine which traded Adam and God for the stars of Greek mythology: Aphrodite and random nymphs tucked between wandering clouds. It was the kind of lobby where tourists came and took pictures of one another standing in front of the towering floral arrangements. Peonies in February. Even at one o’clock in the morning there were people milling around aimlessly, and a line of young men and women in smart dark suits waited behind the marble counter to help them. At least the bar closed. The front desk staff stood there all night.
Franny and Leo had a moment to consider their reflection in the brass elevator doors after she pressed the arrow pointing up. “You don’t look like you should be with me,” he said, falling into the enchantment of the movie they made together. He was starting to sway a little so that he could watch them sway, left to right, right to left.
In a whispered voice she told him to hold still. The numbers lit up as the elevator came for them—five, four, three, two—and then the doors slid open. “There you go,” she said, and tried to move him forward on his own. She was not hopeful.
He looked at her under his arm. “There I go where?”
“Into the elevator, like you said.” But he hadn’t taken an ounce of his weight off her, and she had to say the inability felt sincere. She didn’t think he could actually walk into the elevator without her. Leo Posen said nothing. The doors started to close and, in a perilous demonstration of balance, she pushed them open again with one foot.
“Okay,” she said, though she was talking to herself. “Okay, okay, okay.” She pulled them both inside and the doors slid closed. “What floor are you on?”
“Okay what?”
“What floor are you staying on?”
“I have no idea.” His words were heavy but distinct, each one a cannonball dropped into dust.
“Do you have a room at this hotel?”
“I’m sure I do,” he said, though with a slight trace of defensiveness that planted a seed of doubt in her mind.
The doors started to open again and Franny pushed the Door Closed button, then the button for the twenty-third floor. There was a twenty-fourth floor but it was a penthouse. The twenty-fourth floor required its own elevator key. “Do you have the key in your pocket? Check your pocket.”
“Do you not want to be seen with me?”
Franny leaned Leo Posen into the corner of the elevator and he balanced there nicely. She went through the pockets of his suit jacket, inside, outside, and then his pants pockets. These were the games she and Caroline had played with their father in the summers: how to question the suspect, how to pat him down, how to pop the lock on a car door. Fix saw everything as a learning experience for police procedure. In Leo Posen’s pockets she found a folded handkerchief (pressed, no monogram), a pair of readers, a roll of wintergreen Life Savers (two missing), a baggage check for a flight to LAX, and his wallet. She proceeded to go through his wallet. The hotel’s keys looked like credit cards now. Sometimes people put them in there.
“Hey,” Leo said in a tone of small amusement that was just about to flicker out, “do you not want to be seen with me?”
The elevator made an unassuming ding to herald their arrival. The doors opened up to show them the enormous elevator bank of the twenty-third floor: it contained a long lozenge-shaped sofa with seating on all four sides, ten-foot mirror, and an old-fashioned house phone on a table. Franny punched five. “I don’t want to be seen with you.”
He lightly touched the pockets of his jacket to see if there was anything she had missed. “I’m a nuisance.”
“You made a show of giving me a pile of money in the bar and now I’m going to your room. They fire the cocktail waitresses for that.” Of course she could call the office of student legal aid at the University of Chicago, where third-year law students offered free legal advice that was worth exactly what you paid for it. She had friends there. They might move her to the top of the pro bono pile. She could explain that she had been fired for solicitation when in fact all she was doing was what any English major would have done: seeing that Leo Posen made it safely back to his room (though was that a convincing case? Wouldn’t many English majors want to have sex with Leon Posen? Did she? Not at the moment, no. No she
did not). It was, after all, in the university’s best interest to see that she kept her job so that she could pay back her loan, but then she remembered that she didn’t owe them money anymore. Her loan had already been sold twice and was now held by the Farmers’ Trust of North Dakota. It was her loan that had been forced into prostitution. The fifth floor came and went: the doors opened onto an identical elevator bank and then the doors closed. They were headed back to twenty-three. Did anyone in the lobby monitor suspicious elevator activity? In his wallet: a Pennsylvania driver’s license in the name of Leon Ariel Posen; American Express, MasterCard, Visa, Admirals Club, and a Pasadena Library card; several school pictures of a little red-haired girl who aged as Franny flipped ahead; folded receipts she didn’t unfold; and a Palmer House Hotel key card. Bingo. Franny looked at it, the pleasant hunter green, the hotel’s name printed in an overly ornate script, a magnetic stripe on the back that would unlock the door to one of the rooms in this hotel. “What’s your room number?”
“Eight twelve.”
The doors opened again. Hello, twenty-three. Franny pushed eight. “You said before you didn’t know.”
“Before I didn’t know,” he said, looking away. The ride wasn’t agreeing with him. There was that little jostle with every stop and start, two fast inches up and then down again to remind the passenger of the cable from which the box hung. He may have come up with a number just so she would take them back onto solid ground. The doors opened again and he struggled forward as if trying to leave without her. She draped his arm around her shoulders again. It was hot inside her coat, which had been designed to sustain human life at twenty degrees below zero. A sheen of sweat brightened her face. Sweat ran down the backs of her legs and into her shoes.
“You wouldn’t lose your job,” he said. He kept his voice down and for this Franny was grateful. Not all drunks were capable of such restraint. “I’ll tell them we’re friends. That’s what we are.”
“I’m not sure they would appreciate our friendship,” she said. The halls, like the elevator banks, were very wide. So much wasted space was an Old World luxury. She had never been upstairs before, and what she was feeling she imagined must be akin to breaking and entering. The halls were endless, seemingly without a vanishing point, and were lined with black-and-white photographs of famous people at the height of their beauty: Dorothy Dandridge, Frank Sinatra, Judy Garland. They went on and on. Franny kept her eyes on them. Hello, Jerry Lewis. The carpet was dizzying, a mash-up of peacock feathers in yellow and peach and pink and green. It was hard to look down for very long, and she was sober. It couldn’t have been a good match for scotch. There was a room-service table in the hall, a half-eaten Reuben sandwich, scattered fries, a single rose in a bud vase, the bottle of wine upended in its silver bucket . . . 806, 808, 810, 812. Home. She shifted her hip into Leo Posen to balance his weight, then dipped the key in the lock. A small red light flashed twice and then disappeared.