Franny ran tort law in her head in an effort to block out the music, covering the thing she hated with the thing she despised. The elements of assault: the act was intended to cause apprehension of harmful or offensive contact; and the act indeed caused apprehension in the victim that harmful or offensive contact would occur. The night was winding down. The high tide of gin and tonics had receded into the quiet ebb of after-dinner drinks: snifters of brandy and small, syrupy glasses of Frangelico purchased by customers who realized they weren’t quite drunk enough to go up to their rooms. It was Franny’s night to close, and for the moment she’d been left alone to oversee the room: two tables of two and one lone soul at the bar. Both of the other cocktail waitresses clocked out, one to pick up her sleeping child from her ex-husband’s couch, the other to have drinks with a Palmer House waiter in some less-expensive bar. They had both kissed Franny before they left, and then they kissed each other. She guessed that Heinrich had gone to smoke in the hallway outside the kitchen, which gave Franny the chance to slip around to the other side of the bar and step out of her shoes. She flexed her toes back before grinding them down against the damp honeycomb of the black rubber bar mat, then she ate three maraschino cherries from the garnish bins along with an orange slice because they were best when chewed up together. That was what she was doing when she saw Leon Posen, her mouth full of chemically altered fruit. She should only have had a glimpse of him but when he looked up she had neither the opportunity nor the will to turn away.
“Hello,” he said. Leon Posen, sitting two seats away from her. He was wearing a dark-gray suit and a white shirt with only the top button of his collar undone. He may well have had a tie folded in his pocket. Had he reached out his hand and she reached out her hand their fingers very easily could have touched. As a rule Franny didn’t pay attention to the people at the bar. They were people who had chosen not to take a table and therefore were not her responsibility. She had no idea how long he’d been sitting there. Ten minutes? An hour?
“Hello,” she said.
“You’re shorter than you were,” he said.
“Am I?”
“You’ve taken off your shoes.”
Franny looked down at the sore red curve bitten into the top of either foot, clearly visible through her stockings. It was an impression that stayed for hours after she was home. “Yes.”
He nodded. His hair was iron gray, sheeplike. Effort must have gone into combing it down. “It’s a nice effect but I’d think it would destroy your feet after a while.”
“You get used to it,” Franny said, and thought of Fred, and how he had told her she’d get used to it. She made herself listen now as a way of orienting herself in the world, in the bar where she stood across from Leon Posen. Lou Rawls was singing “Nobody But Me,” which was funny because that was the one song in the rotation she never got tired of, the perfect union of nouns and verbs. I’ve got no chauffeur to chauffeur me. I’ve got no servant to serve my tea.
Leon Posen nodded, his fingertips resting on a drained glass of ice. Franny was shaping the story in her head even as he was sitting in front of her. She was thinking of how she would pull out her copies of First City and Septimus Porter as soon as she got home. She would go back over the parts she had underlined in college and read them again. Then she would wake Kumar up and tell him she had talked to Leon Posen in the bar, and how he had asked her about her shoes. Kumar, who was a genius when it came to not being interested in anything, would want to hear every detail, and when she was finished he would tell her to start again. Even as it was happening, she knew that the story of meeting Leon Posen at the Palmer House was one she was going to tell for a long time. If I hadn’t gone to law school in Chicago and then dropped out, I wouldn’t even have been working in the bar. She would tell that to her father and to Bert.
But Leon Posen hadn’t finished. He was still in front of her, waiting for her attention while she imagined him. “Why get used to it?”
“What?” She had lost her place in the conversation.
“The shoes.” He looked like his pictures, the nose taking up all the real estate, and then the soft, hooded eyes. His face was a caricature of his face, a face that was meant to be sketched beside a book review in The New Yorker.
“Well, you have to, the shoes are part of the uniform, and you wear the uniform because you make more money.” And though she wouldn’t mention it, the uniform was polyester, which you can laugh at all you want but it washed really well and didn’t need to be ironed. Franny never had to figure out what she was supposed to wear to work, which had also been the great thing about Catholic school.
“You mean I’ll tip you more for wearing uncomfortable shoes?”
“You will,” she said, because she’d been there long enough to know how things work. “You do.”
He looked at her sadly, or maybe that was just the way he looked, as if he felt the pain of every woman who had ever crammed her feet into heels. It was a beguiling effect. “Well, I haven’t tipped you yet so if that’s the reason you might as well put your shoes back on. We could see what happens.”
“I’m not your waitress,” she said, regretting it deeply. Leon Posen, step away from the bar! Come and sit at one of the little tables with the flickering candles. Make yourself comfortable in the rounded, red leather chairs.
“You could be if I ordered another drink.” He held up his glass, rattled the lonesome ice. “What’s your name?”
She told him her name.
“I never meet Frannys.” He said it like her name was a favor to him. “Franny, I’d like another scotch.”
It was her job to get him a drink if he was sitting at a table but not if he was sitting at the bar. They were not union workers at the Palmer House but the division of labor was ironclad. She knew her place. “What kind of scotch?”
He smiled at her again. Two smiles! “Dealer’s choice,” he said. “And remember, I may be that rare individual who tips off the percentage of the bill instead of your heel height so knock yourself out.”
She had just worked her left foot back into the shoe when Heinrich, fresh from his cigarette and breath mint, rounded the edge of the bar and came towards them. He was raising two fingers to Leon Posen, a gesture that asked if he was ready for another without troubling himself to form the question into words, as if theirs was a relationship so sacred it had transcended language. Franny, stepping out of her left shoe as she rushed to cut him off, all but threw herself into the bartender, who in turn was forced to catch her. He looked down at her stocking feet. Heinrich was a man of Leon Posen’s age, her father’s age, which was to say somewhere in the dark woods past fifty. He came from a more decorous time. She had no business being behind the bar in the first place, she knew that. It was his country.
“I need a favor,” she said. It was easy to be quiet. She was in his arms.
Heinrich turned to Leon Posen and raised his eyebrows slightly, formally, asking the question. Leon Posen nodded.