“Fuck,” she said quietly, and tried again. Red light.
“What if I came home with you?”
“That wouldn’t work.”
“I could sleep on the couch.”
“I sleep on the couch,” she said, except for the nights she slept with Kumar, which weren’t many because that was not the nature of their relationship. He was a friend. She needed a place to stay.
“Eighteen twelve,” he said, straightening himself imperceptibly. “That’s what it is.”
She could take him back to that lovely lozenge-shaped sofa; a place to relax if the wait for the elevator became too strenuous. It was plenty big enough. She could leave him there. She could go downstairs and call the front desk from the house phone, explain that she had seen a man sleeping on the eighth-floor sofa.
“Eighteen twelve.”
Franny shook her head. “You’re thinking of the overture, or you’re thinking of the war. You’re not staying in room 1812.”
He considered this, still looking at the locked door in front of them. “I could be thinking of the war,” he said. “Could we stop for a while? I need a little rest.”
“I do too,” Franny said. She had clocked in for her shift at four-thirty. She wasn’t going to the eighteenth floor. They might as well start on two and dip the key in every lock in the hotel.
“You seem nervous,” he said, his voice coming up as if from sleep. “Have you been in trouble before?” He was getting more comfortable with the transference of his weight across her shoulders, and he wasn’t doing as good a job picking up his feet, which made it feel like she was dragging him over an uneven path of rocks. Franny passed the elevator bank and kept going.
“I’m in trouble right now,” she said. She would give him one more chance and then she would leave him. He wouldn’t blame her. He wouldn’t even remember her. Were they to fall in the hallway that would be it for both of them. He was ten inches taller, eighty pounds heavier. She would be pinned beneath him, broken ankle, broken wrist, until the kid who slid the bills beneath the doors at three a.m. came down the hall and found them there. She didn’t have health insurance. When they got to room 821 she took the key out of her coat pocket and dipped it. It flashed red, red, then green. The lock clicked and she turned the handle. Eight twenty-one. She was thrilled that at the very least she understood the nature of mistakes.
Leo Posen hadn’t thought to leave a light on. Franny walk-dragged him over to the bed and sat him down on the edge while she clicked on the lamp. A pretty room, padded headboard, heavy drapes, an imitation of a fine desk where a famous novelist might sit and write a novel. All in all too nice a room if its only purpose was to sleep off a drunk. There was an overnight bag on the overstuffed chair with a topcoat draped over the back. The good and merciful turn-down service had come before them and folded back the bedspread, exposing the white pillows, white sheets, the deep envelope of sleep so inviting that she wondered if she were to lie down on the far side of the king-sized mattress for an hour whether anyone would know the difference. It would make the case much harder for legal aid after she’d been fired for solicitation, finding her hair on the pillow. “Help me with your arm.”
Leo Posen leaned forward and held his arm back, and with that adjustment she was able to work him out of his suit jacket. He was a man who had been helped out of a suit jacket before. He gave a long, tired sigh, as if the world’s weight had finally caught up with him.
She laid the jacket on top of his coat and then leaned down for his shoes. Leo Posen had lovely lace-up shoes, polished and worn soft as gloves. She put them far enough away from the bed that he wouldn’t trip on them in the night. Then she picked his feet up off the floor and put them in the bed with the rest of him, turning him around in the process. The pants, the belt, she didn’t even consider them.
“Next time I’ll know,” he said, sinking into all that softness, cool sheets, warm blankets.
She put her hand on his shoulder just to call him back for a moment. “Sleep well,” she said. She made her voice as soft as the pillows because now that this was over and he was safely in bed she could love him again. She covered him up.
“You can stay for a while, can’t you?” There was no embarrassment there, only peace, only enough time left to ask for one more favor, which Franny thought was the deepest difference between women and men. His eyes were closed and by the end of the sentence he was asleep, and so she said nothing. She pulled the spread over him and turned off the lamp, then she sat down on the edge of the bed in the dark, on the far far side, and changed her shoes. She kept a pair of flats in her bag. The soles of her work shoes had only touched the carpet of the hotel and so they were as good as new. She would have them for years.
* * *
Had anyone asked Fix Keating and Bert Cousins what they agreed on, neither man would have been able to come up with much of a list. Still, without ever having discussed the matter (without ever having discussed any matter) they had both decided that Caroline and Franny should go to law school. The girls were very young when this idea first took hold, Caroline was in middle school and Franny still sleeping with dolls, but Fix and Bert had mapped out the future like generals in their separate camps. Neither Caroline nor Franny exhibited any interest in American history. They were not particularly given to rational thought. They showed no skills at debate, though their energy for screaming at one another was limitless. But then again it wasn’t about what either man had seen in Caroline or Franny. It was about what each had seen in himself.
Bert held similar expectations for all the children in the family, even Jeanette, who he thought could at least do title searches if she ever made it through school. By expecting the same thing of everyone he saw himself as fair-minded and devoid of favoritism, and by coming up with a plan so many years before it would need to be implemented he figured he was bound to have at least some measure of success. The law, after all, was what Cousinses did. Bert’s great-grandfather had been a lawyer for the Pennsylvania Railroad, and his grandfather had been a circuit court judge. Bert’s father, William Cousins, called Bill, had practiced a gentleman’s version of real estate law out of substantial offices in downtown Charlottesville, mostly drawing up contracts for friends who bought swaths of Virginia farmland, waited for the zoning to change, and then turned the land into strip malls. It was a good source of income from which Bill retired early, his wife having come into the Coca-Cola bottling rights for half of the commonwealth through the bequest of her childless uncle. Bill Cousins liked to stand in his living room and look out the front window, down the allée of noble sycamores that lined the drive, and think the world was beautiful and should never change.
Bert held a Jeffersonian belief that a basic understanding of the law was the foundation for any successful life, so even if one of the children wanted to be a nurse or teach school he expected they should secure law degrees first. His belief that a person without an understanding of the law could actually be intelligent or interesting had been a problem in both of his marriages.
Fix’s take on the law was more straightforward: he wanted his girls to be lawyers because lawyers made money. If Caroline and Franny made money themselves there would be a smaller chance that they would one day leave the guy they were married to for a guy who was rich. Fix was a great believer in history repeating itself, and he never tried to dress it up as anything else. If it happened once, it could damn well happen again.