“Franny, what a day we’ve had without you!” Leo said, as if there had been nothing strange about her leaving or her return.
Astrid, back from Sag Harbor, nodded. “I had to bring the sandwiches for lunch. There’s still some sorbet.”
“And Eric and I went into town and bought things for dinner,” Marisol said.
“Someone’s still going to have to go back into town,” Eric said. “We didn’t get enough.”
Franny looked at them up on the porch, everyone softened by the veil of the screen, by the light that was slanting in behind them, by the bank of yellow lilies that separated them from her. It was not unlike seeing tigers at the zoo.
“Hollinger called,” Leo said. “He’s driving in from the city with Ellen. They should be here in an hour or so.”
“Hollinger?” Astrid said. “You didn’t tell me that. How did he know where you were?” John Hollinger was not Astrid’s client. His novel The Seventh Story had beaten out Commonwealth for the Pulitzer, and both men made a great show of how this fact had not affected their friendship, even though they hadn’t exactly been friends in the first place.
Marisol gave a single, dismissive wave. “It won’t be an hour. He’s always late.”
There was a time when Franny would have been overwhelmed by the thought of John Hollinger coming for dinner, but that time had passed. Now he and his wife represented nothing more than two extra place settings at the table. This brought them up to eight, assuming that Jonas and Astrid would never leave.
“What about you?” Eric said, glancing down at Franny as if finally remembering she’d been gone. “Nice day?”
Franny shaded her eyes with her hand and looked up at him, puzzled. “Sure,” she said. That was all they needed to release her from the conversation.
There were six cardboard boxes on the long wooden table in the kitchen, a half a dozen ears of corn still in their green sleeves. She heard the sound of scratching, and then one of the boxes jerked abruptly forward.
Leo came into the kitchen and stood behind her. “I’m sorry about Hollinger,” he said, kissing the side of her head. “He wasn’t asking. He called to announce his impending arrival. We should have rented a motel room in the middle of Kansas for the summer.”
“They would have found us.”
“I spent the day hiding in the cabin so that everyone would think I was writing a novel. Where did you go?”
“What’s in the boxes?” Franny said, though of course she knew exactly what was in the boxes.
“Marisol thought it would be fun to have lobster.”
Franny turned and looked at him. “She said she was a vegetarian. Does she know how to cook them?”
“I don’t think it’s a science. You just drop them in water. Listen,” he said, putting his hands on her shoulders and looking at her straight on in a way that made him appear very brave. “I have to tell you this and I’d rather not: Ariel is coming out for a couple of days.”
Many things were possible but Franny and Ariel in the same house was not one of them. For Ariel’s sake Franny stayed out of the entire neighborhood surrounding Gramercy Park when she went to New York. It was the single way they respected one another: they did not overlap. “She wouldn’t come out when she knows I’m here,” Franny said. “I answered the phone.”
“I think she really just wants to see the house. I made the mistake of telling her about it months ago. I didn’t think we were going to rent it then. She said she needs a vacation.”
Franny was distracted by the scratching. The boxes, she could see now, were shuffling across the table in microscopic increments. The thought of each separate lobster in the dark was every bit as excruciating as the thought of Ariel Posen coming to Amagansett, either that or she was experiencing some sort of emotional transference. Leo followed her gaze to the table.
“I should have been a pair of ragged claws,” he said, looking at the sad containers trying to get away. “Scuttling across the floors of silent seas.”
“Leo, she hates me. That’s been made clear.”
Leo mustered the energy for a wan smile. “Well, maybe this is the summer she stops hating you and we all get along. It’s got to happen sooner or later.”
“When?” Franny asked. Not When will she stop hating me?—Franny knew the answer to that one—but When is she coming?
He sighed and pulled her to him, the wide, warm chest of literature. “She didn’t know. Probably tomorrow, possibly Tuesday. She said if she got everything together she could come out tonight, but I don’t think we need to worry about tonight.”
“Is she bringing Button?” Button was Ariel’s daughter, the four-year-old granddaughter of Leo Posen, the only grandchild.
Leo looked at her, surprised. “Of course she’s bringing Button.”
Of course. “Anyone else?”
Leo went to the refrigerator and found a bottle of pinot gris unfinished from lunch. He poured what was left in a glass sitting out on the sink. “Maybe a boyfriend. There’s someone named Gerrit. I think he’s Dutch. She said she didn’t know what Gerrit’s plans were yet. She might be on better behavior if she has someone to impress.”
“Should I, after tea and cakes and ices, have the strength to force the moment to its crisis?” Franny asked the lobsters.
“And what’s that supposed to mean?” Leo said.
Franny shook her head. “Nothing. It’s the next line.”
“It’s not the next line,” he said, and took his wine out to the porch.
Franny put a pair of scissors in her purse and carried the six boxes out to the car. Franny, who felt herself to be without talent, was very adept at carrying more things than anyone would have thought possible. She could feel the lobsters scrabble as their bodies slid heavily into the dark cardboard corners of the boxes.
“Need a hand?” Jonas said, speeding up his pace when he saw her. He was coming back from the pool, his chest and back unevenly scorched.
“I’ve got it,” she said, setting the boxes down to open the car door.
“Are you going into town?”
“Back into town.” She arranged her passengers on the floor of the backseat—three on either side.
“Let me just run inside and get my shirt,” he said, his face bright with opportunity. “I need some things in town. I’ll keep you company.”
She started to tell him no, to explain, but instead she nodded. She waited until the kitchen door had closed behind him, waited another ten seconds, and then got in the car and drove away.
Franny and Leo didn’t talk about marriage, except sometimes sentimentally in bed, his hands spreading wide across her back, and even then it was only to say how quickly they would have married had it not been for the future and the past. What they never spoke of was the prohibitive element in the present, which was Leo’s daughter.
For the most part, Franny tried her best not to think about Ariel, whom she had met on several disastrous occasions early on in her relationship with Leo. Franny didn’t aspire to like Leo’s daughter, but she hoped to someday achieve a low level of distant compassion towards her. To that end she disciplined herself to think of her own father whenever Ariel came up, to imagine Fix showing up with someone younger than she was, poor dear Marjorie pushed to the side. Fix taking up with his favorite cocktail waitress, not just for the weekend but going on five years. Her father in love with this cocktail waitress who had no means of supporting herself but who would wait for him in motels when he went on stakeouts. When she could think of things that way, the lava of Ariel’s rage against her was easier to bear. The simple truth was that Franny couldn’t stand to be hated. Sacred Heart hadn’t prepared her for it and college hadn’t prepared her for it. Law school had been doing its best to toughen her up but then look how she’d done in law school.
Franny found a parking spot two blocks from the water and carried the six boxes down to the end of the pier, past the fishermen with their buckets and lines, past the tourists holding
hands. She wanted the lobsters in deep water. Maybe they’d be stupid enough to crawl into someone else’s pot tomorrow but she didn’t want them walking straight up on the beach minutes after their exoneration. She set the six boxes out in a line and opened them up. Christmas at the pier. Christmas for crustaceans. They were a dappled black and green now, not the electric red they would have been after boiling. They were still frisky, energized by their proximity to salt water, waving their bound claws in impatience. They would never know what they had missed, though being lobsters, they would probably never know anything. She took the scissors and stuck them in the box, doing her best to cut off the wide rubber bands without nicking a claw or losing a finger. (The first band on each one was easy, the second a challenge.) When she finished, she tipped them one at a time out of their boxes and into the ocean, where they made a pleasing smack against the water and then sank from view.
By the time Franny had loaded down the car with all the necessary provisions and driven back to the house it was late in the afternoon. She caught a glimpse of Leo on the front porch talking to someone by the door (Nine for dinner? She had enough) while the rest of them were off who knows where. There was a sleek silver Audi pulled to the back, the Hollingers must have arrived by now. Franny thought how nice it would have been to have taken a shower before she saw them but that wasn’t going to happen. She started carrying the boxes and bags into the kitchen. She’d made three trips when Leo came in with a tall young man with a long black braid.
“Franny,” Leo said.
Franny put the heavy box she was holding down on the table, half liquor, half wine. There was a second case of wine still in the car. She kept her hands on top of the box to keep them steady. That first moment she saw him she knew exactly what it was she’d done, how serious and wrong it was to have given away what didn’t belong to her. She had known it at the time, too, but she hadn’t cared. It was the way Leo had listened to her, the way he had asked her so many questions and then told her to tell him everything again. There had been nothing in her life to equal the light of his attention.
“Christ,” Albie said. “You look exactly the same.”
He was taller and thinner than she could have ever imagined he would be. He wore a sleeveless T-shirt and some oversized pants covered in pockets. His arms were dark and muscled, his wrists tattooed. He was at once someone she knew as a brother and someone she had never met. “Not you,” Franny said.
Hadn’t she thought he’d show up sooner or later? She had expected him around every corner in those first months after the book came out, but time passed. Did she forget about him then? “How did you find us?”
“I found him,” Albie said, motioning to Leo. “It turns out he’s the easiest person in the world to find.”
“That’s good to know,” Leo said.
“I wasn’t thinking about you,” Albie said to Franny. “But I guess it makes sense. Somebody had to have told him.”
They had wanted to go to the barn and brush the horses. If they brushed the horses and mucked out a few of the stalls then usually Ned would let them take turns riding the mare for the afternoon. But Albie was driving them crazy. What was he doing that was so intolerable? Standing here in front of him now, Franny couldn’t remember. Or maybe he wasn’t doing anything wrong. Maybe it was just that someone had to watch him around the horses and none of them wanted to do it. He wasn’t the monster they told him he was, in fact there wasn’t anything so awful about him. It was only that he was a little kid.
“Albie has terrible breath,” Franny announced. Then she turned to him. “Didn’t you brush your teeth this morning?”
That was how the ball got rolling. Holly leaned in and sniffed the air in front of her brother’s face. She rolled her eyes. “Tic Tac, please.”
Caroline looked at Cal. “You might as well. You know he’s never going to brush his teeth. I don’t think he’s brushed them since we got here.”
Cal pulled the little plastic bag out of his pocket. He had four in there and so he gave him four.
“All of them?” Albie asked.
“You stink,” Cal said. “If you don’t you’re going to scare the horses.”
Jeanette left the room then. She didn’t say where she was going but the rest of them said they had to wait for her.
“I want to go!” Albie said.
Franny shook her head. “Ernestine told us we had to stay together.”
They waited until he fell asleep. It never took that long. Cal carried Albie down to the laundry room and left him under a pile of towels on the floor. It was Sunday and Ernestine was making a big supper. She never did laundry on Sunday.
And now twenty years later here was Albie in the actress’s summer house, having read about that day he had largely slept through in a novel written by someone he’d never met. Franny shook her head. Her hands were cold. She had never been so cold before. “I’m sorry,” she said. The words came without volume and so she said them again. “I know that isn’t worth anything but I’m sorry. I made a terrible mistake.”
“How did you make a mistake?” Leo said. He reached into the box and took out the bottle of Beefeater. “I’m going to have a drink. Would anyone else like a drink?”
“Did you think I was never going to see it?” Albie asked. “I mean, maybe that was a good guess. It took me long enough.”
“I was trying to explain to him before you got here,” Leo said, pouring some gin in a glass. “Writers get their inspirations from a lot of places. It’s never any one thing.”
Franny looked at Leo, willing him to pick up his glass and go back out to the porch to smoke with his guests. “Just give us a minute,” she said to him. “This isn’t about you.”
“Of course it’s about me,” Leo said. “It’s my book.”
“I still don’t understand this,” Albie said, pointing at Franny and then at Leo. “How did he wind up with my life?”
“It isn’t your life,” Leo said. “That’s what I’m trying to explain. It’s my imagination.”
Albie swung around like a whip, his hands coming up to Leo’s shoulders, pushing him back. Leo, startled, dropped his glass on the floor, and for a moment the room was suffused with the clean smell of gin.
“You don’t understand why I’m here, do you?” Albie said. “You have no idea how hard I’m trying not to kill you. I really might. And if you made me up then you’ll understand just how little there is at stake for me here.”
There was a clear case for stepping towards Leo then, for putting her hands on Leo’s arm, but Franny turned to Albie instead. Albie was the one she had wronged. She and Leo had wronged him together.
“Listen to me, let’s go and talk,” she said to Albie. “Come outside and talk to me.”
Leo stumbled back as if struck, his face flushed. Leo—shorter, heavier, more than twice Albie’s age—would later swear there had been a blow. The highball glass rolled past his feet, miraculously unbroken. “I’m calling the police,” he said. He could hear the unevenness in his own breathing.
“Nobody’s calling the police,” Franny said.
“What in the hell are you talking about?” Leo said.
Marisol came in the kitchen through the swinging door, Eric behind her. “Franny, where are my lobsters?” she said.
Franny couldn’t think of what she was talking about at first or why she was even still in the house, but then she remembered. “Go,” she said. She kept her eyes on Albie.
“Do you even know what lobsters cost?”
Eric touched his wife’s shoulder. “Come back to the living room,” he said. “They’ve got company.”
“We’re the company!” Marisol had put on a silk shift dress of emerald green, a flat gold necklace. The Hollingers had come and she was dressed for dinner. Only Hollinger was a bigger name on the marquee than Posen, and some might disagree with that. Hollinger had been more consistent in his career, he’d had the bigger wins. Dinner, unassembled, was on the table in the boxes
, in the shopping bags. “Jonas told me you put them in the car. Was something wrong with them?”
Albie turned to Franny. “Do you work for them?”
Franny took her hand off Albie’s arm and put her hand in his hand instead. “We have to go.”
“Who is this?” Marisol said. Marisol, who wasn’t part of anything, who had never been invited.
“This is my brother,” Franny said.
“He is not your goddamn brother,” Leo said, his voice loud enough to go through the windows and out across the lawns.
Franny had made a mistake when she’d left the house that morning without taking her purse and she did not make the mistake again. “Stay here,” she said to Leo. “Everything’s going to be fine.”
Albie picked up the bottle of gin.
“You’re not leaving with him,” Leo said.
“If I don’t leave here with him I’m going to invite him to dinner. I’m going to put him upstairs in the guest room, okay?”
“I’ll tell you what,” Eric said. “Why don’t we take some drinks out to our guests? Marisol, you get the corkscrew and some glasses. Maybe we should all sit down and have a drink. You’ve got the gin.” Eric nodded at Albie, then he turned to Franny. “The Hollingers are here. They came while you were in town. Just come out and say hello.”
Eric was trying to turn the evening back into a dinner party. It occurred to Franny then that of course he wouldn’t know who Albie was, he wouldn’t know who she was either, other than Leo’s girlfriend. Because when Leo called her his inspiration, and he always did, no one thought he meant it literally. The story of two couples moving in next door to each other, their awful children, that was nothing more than the plot of a novel as far as Eric was concerned. Franny wanted to go to Leo, to reassure him, but Marisol had opened the door from the kitchen. Everyone could hear the voices coming in from the front hallway, so many voices! Hello! Hello! the sound of car doors, of laughter, the sound of Ariel’s voice calling out for her father.
* * *
If Beverly or Bert were to tell the story now, they would say they divorced after Cal died. And of course that was true, they had, but in this instance the word “after” would be misleading. It linked together the death and the divorce as if they were cause and effect, as if Beverly and Bert were one of those couples who, upon a child’s death, are led down such separate paths of grief that they can no longer find their way back to one another. This was not the case.