Commonwealth

  Franny was just glad to step out of the weather. The wind blew in the door behind them, making an arctic puff across the tables and causing the other diners to look up. The restaurant, unlike the bus station, had a zealous heater. “I’ll manage fine.” She started to zip herself out of her coat and unwrap her scarf, pull off her hat. She wore boots with rubber soles and rubber covering over the toes. They were lined with the pelts of cast-off teddy bears. There was no vanity in winter.

  The bartender was a woman who could have been on either side of sixty, with a swept-up pile of blond curls nested on the top of her head and a black vest which nearly failed at its job of containing her bust. The name Rae was stitched across the left breast in looping cursive.

  “There he is!” Rae said. “Ducking in before you have to go to work?”

  “I thought I should,” Leo said.

  “I tried to get off,” she said to Franny, her eyes bright inside their spiky cages of dried mascara. “but I couldn’t do it. What are you going to have, darling?”

  “The same,” Franny said, tilting her head to Leo. “And maybe some breadsticks and a glass of water.”

  “That’s good thinking,” the woman said, taking a bottle of scotch from the shelf behind her. “That soaks it up. Are you going to introduce him?”

  “Have you not met?” Franny asked, confused. It seemed the barmaid had mistaken her for someone else. She held out her hand to the man beside her. “Do you know Leo Posen?”

  This pleased them both to no end, Leo and the bartender, and they both gave a nice big laugh that brightened up their end of the bar in this dismal little restaurant. “Rae,” she said, and held her hand out to Leo, who took it in both of his hands for a shake, hail fellow well met.

  “She makes me ice,” he said.

  “I keep it in a Ziploc bag.” Rae reached into the freezer beneath the bar and pulled out the bag on which she had written No Touch with a heavy black marker. “He thinks that Iowa is trying to poison him with bad ice.”

  “He told me,” Franny said, nodding.

  “I told you that?” Leo asked, taking off his scarf and helping himself out of his coat. He was wearing a suit again, this one dark blue, and a regimental tie.

  “Who am I supposed to introduce you to?”

  “You introduce him to the audience at the reading tonight,” Rae said, and used a highball glass to scoop up two servings of the ice. “Big-deal famous writers hardly mean anything in this town but I like to go when I’ve got a free night. I’ve been going for years. That way I get to see all my customers while they work. And you know what all of them tell me? They say, Rae, you should be the one writing books.”

  Leo nodded his head in sincere agreement. “You should.”

  Rae smiled at him and then turned her attention back to Franny. “Sometimes they have one of the kids in the program introduce the old men. Speaking of, I should get a look at your ID.”

  Franny rummaged around in her purse for her wallet and then handed her driver’s license to the bartender, who took a pair of readers out of her pants pocket and actually looked at it, which was more than Franny ever did. Franny almost never carded anyone, and when she did, she figured that someone handing you identification was tantamount to being of age.

  When Rae was satisfied she handed both the glasses and the license to Leo. “Look at this,” she said. “Frances is almost twenty-five. Honest to God, I would have thought you were seventeen. That’s the thing about getting older. Everybody else starts looking younger.”

  Leo took the glasses and looked for himself. “The Commonwealth of Virginia?” he said, and turned the license over, maybe wondering if she had chosen to donate her organs. “I thought you were from Los Angeles.”

  “I am, but I learned to drive in Virginia.”

  “So if she isn’t your student and she doesn’t know you’re supposed to start reading in twenty minutes, who is she?” Her tone was still jolly but Rae was looking only at Leo now, and Leo continued to look at the driver’s license.

  “She’s my bartender,” he said in distraction, and then, remembering himself, he looked up at Rae and smiled. “My other bartender.”

  Franny didn’t correct him. The woman behind the bar did not wish to hear another word from her. Rae poured Dewar’s in two glasses and pushed them forward. “That’s eight,” she said. The breadsticks and water were not her problem. A crowd was starting to form at the warm end of the bar, farthest away from the door, and she went to attend to them.

  Leo Posen put a ten-dollar bill on the bar. If he understood what had just happened with his friend who made him ice at home and brought it to work in a baggie, he gave no indication. He was paying attention to his drink. “I have to give a reading and then there’s a party for me afterwards. It’s one of the obligations. There aren’t many of them and they’re all written down in my contract. I don’t have to go to any of the other parties.”

  “Were you going to tell me about the reading?”

  Leo gave his head a small shake. “The way I was figuring it, I didn’t think I’d have to. In the first place, I didn’t really think you’d come from Chicago on a bus, and if you did come, then you’d be tired and want to rest in your hotel room. I’m always tired when I come to a new place. Travel makes me tired, newness makes me tired, and I never go anywhere on a bus, so I was thinking that if you came you’d need to go straight to bed. Clearly, you have more resources than I do.”

  “Even if you managed to ditch me at the hotel while you read and picked me up afterwards for the party, wouldn’t you think that someone might say, ‘Didn’t you enjoy the reading?’” If she had never met him she would have come. Had she known that Leon Posen was giving a reading in Iowa City, she would have come by herself on the bus. Kumar would have shirked his responsibilities as editor of the law review, something he’d never done, for the chance to go with her. That was the thing Leo Posen didn’t understand.

  “Or they would say, ‘My God, what an interminable reading.’ And by the way, I wouldn’t be ditching you. I would be sparing you. The impulse was polite.”

  Franny smiled and Leo Posen looked at his watch, then he stretched his neck in Rae’s direction. She was laughing with her new customers at the other end of the bar, the broad beam of her back squarely towards them. “You’re a professional. What’s the best trick you know for getting your bartender back when you’re in a rush?”

  “Take them to your reading as your date,” Franny said. “It works every time.”

  He tapped the face of his watch as if questioning the news. “It’s just that it would be so helpful to have one more before we go.”

  Franny slid her glass over to him. The ice, so thoughtfully made, was just beginning to melt, softening the Dewar’s with water bottled from an ancient spring in France. “I don’t actually drink,” she said. “This is a trick I figured out a long time ago. It makes people like me.”

  Leo looked at the glass, and then he looked at Franny. “My God,” he said. “You’re a magician.”

  5

  An unfamiliar bicycle was parked in the hallway outside her apartment where people were not supposed to park their bikes but of course that did nothing to tip her off. Jeanette opened the door, the grocery bags cutting into her wrists, her coat and boots made heavy and hot by the four flights of stairs, and found her brother sitting on the couch with her son in his lap.

  “Look! Look!” her husband said. In his excitement Fodé hugged her before thinking to free her from the plastic bags. Bintou, their babysitter, rushed to wrestle the bags from her other arm and then helped her out of her coat. They treated her like this, the two of them, like she was the queen of Williamsburg.

  “Albie?” There was no question that this was her brother but it was the difference between seeing a boy and a man. Albie’s hair, which had been a sweet mess of dark curls, was now a thick braid long enough to make Jeanette wonder if he’d cut it even once since she’d seen him last. And where had the cheekbone
s come from? There were rumors of the Mattaponi tribe slivered into the DNA on their mother’s side. Maybe the Mattaponi had risen again in the youngest Cousins child. He looked like he was playing the part. “My wild Indian,” Teresa used to say when he would run through the house screaming. Now here he was, as thin and as quiet as a knife.

  “Surprise,” Albie said, the word a flat statement of fact: I am surprised to be in your living room. You are surprised that I’m here. Then he added the thing that had been the most surprising to him, “You have a baby.” Dayo, the baby, was holding on to the rope of Albie’s hair. He gave his mother an enormous smile, both to say he was glad she had come back to him and also he was very pleased with their exotic guest.

  “Scarf,” Bintou said, and unwound the damp wool from Jeanette’s neck. She plucked the hat from her head and shook off the melted snow. It was February.

  Jeanette turned to her husband. “This is my brother,” she said, as if he were the one who had just walked through the door. It felt almost accidental seeing Albie in her living room, the way some other long-lost siblings might run into one another in an airport, at a funeral.

  “I saw him on the street!” Fodé said. “He was walking a bicycle away from our building just as I was coming home from work.”

  Albie nodded to confirm the implausible story. “He came running after me. I thought he was some crazy guy.”

  “New York,” Bintou said.

  The good news washed over Fodé, poured from him, the thrill of it still so fresh. “Except I was calling your name, Albie! Albie! The crazy guys don’t know your name.”

  Jeanette wanted nothing but to step into the hallway for five minutes and pull her thoughts together. The room was too cramped: Albie and Dayo sat on the couch like guests while she and Fodé and Bintou remained standing. Had they just now come in the door or had they been waiting for her for a while? How much of their discussion had she missed?

  “You were just walking down the street?” she said to Albie, My street, of all the streets in all the world?

  “I was coming to see you,” he said. “I rang the bell.” He shrugged as if to say that was it, he’d tried.

  “But he rang the wrong bell,” Bintou said. “It didn’t ring here.”

  Then Jeanette turned to her husband. None of this made sense. “So how did you know it was my brother?” There were no pictures of Albie in their apartment, and certainly Fodé had never met him. Jeanette tried to think of the last time she’d seen her brother. He was getting on a bus in Los Angeles. He was eighteen. Years and years and years.

  Fodé laughed, even Bintou covered her mouth with her hand. “Look at yourself,” he said.

  She looked at her brother instead. He was an exaggeration of her: taller, thinner, darker. She wouldn’t have said they were too much alike except when compared to the West Africans in the living room. Funny to think of someone in the apartment looking like her when Dayo looked like no one but his father and babysitter. When Bintou met her at the door at night, Dayo bound to her chest ingeniously with yards of bright-yellow cloth, Jeanette couldn’t help but think, Really? This is my son?

  “Do we look that much alike?” she asked her brother, but Albie didn’t answer. He was trying to unlace the tiny fingers from his hair.

  “I wanted to wait and see you so happy,” Bintou said, squeezing Jeanette’s arm. “Now I’ll go. Family time.” She leaned over the baby and kissed the top of his head repeatedly. “Tomorrow, little man.” Then she added something else in Susu, a few swooping words of birdsong meant to connect him to Conakry and the motherland.

  “I’ll walk her,” Fodé said. “Then you’ll have time.” He had to leave them. He could not possibly contain his good cheer another minute, his elation in the face of visiting family. He put on Jeanette’s coat and hat and scarf because they were there, because Fodé had very little sense of what was his and what was hers. “Goodbye, goodbye!” he said, waving and then waving again, as if he would be walking Bintou back to Guinea. There was pageantry in the smallest of Fodé’s departures.

  “Explain this,” Albie said once the door was closed, the two sets of footsteps receding down the stairs, the animated elegance of French drifting behind them. Fodé and Bintou spoke French when they were alone. “They’re a couple?”

  Jeanette hated to admit it but it was better once they’d gone, just having the extra space in the cramped room, the extra air. “Fodé’s my husband.”

  “And he has two wives?”

  “Bintou’s our babysitter. They’re both from Guinea, they both live in Brooklyn. It doesn’t make them a couple.”

  “You believe that?”

  Jeanette did believe that. “You don’t need to look for ways to make me crazy. Just seeing you is enough. Does Mom know where you are?”

  He ignored her. “So this one’s really yours.” He held out his arms as far as his braid would allow and waggled Dayo back and forth while the baby laughed and pumped his legs up and down. “Can’t you just imagine what those old Cousinses would have to say about this? They’d make you give him to Ernestine.”

  “Ernestine’s dead,” Jeanette said. It was the diabetes—first her foot, then she was blind. Her grandmother had tallied Ernestine’s losses in her annual Christmas letter until finally the news came of the housekeeper’s death. Jeanette hadn’t thought about Ernestine much since then, and in the clear picture of Ernestine’s face so suddenly returned she could see her own disloyalty. Ernestine had been the only person in her grandparents’ house Jeanette had ever liked.

  Albie sat with this information for a minute. “Anybody else?”

  Other people had died, of course they had, but she couldn’t think of any people who were Albie’s people. She shook her head. The baby began to stuff her brother’s braid in his mouth and so she took him, not sure that Albie would want the baby’s saliva in his hair, not sure she wanted that hair in the baby’s mouth. She offered Dayo her wrist and immediately he began to work it over with his sore gums, his few teeth cutting against her skin. He turned his eyes up to stare into her eyes as he sucked and chewed. There was something about the gnawing that settled her, brought her back to herself, to this room, this moment.

  “If you were going to have an African baby, couldn’t you at least have named him something a little less African?”

  Jeanette brushed her fingers along the plush density of her son’s hair. “To tell you the truth I named him Calvin, but it turns out I could never bring myself to call him that. For a long time we just called him ‘the baby.’ Fodé was the one who started calling him Dayo.”

  Albie’s spine straightened involuntarily, then he leaned down to look into the baby’s eyes. “Cal?”

  “Where have you been?” Jeanette said.

  “California. It was time to go.”

  “California all this time?”

  Albie gave a small smile at such an impossible thought, and in that smile she saw something of the brother she had known. “Not even close,” he said. The sleeves of his black sweater were pushed up towards his elbows, showing off patterned bands of black tattoos that circled his wrists in wide bracelets. Everything was black: the tattoos, the sweater, the jeans, his work boots. Jeanette wondered if he had kohl around his eyes or if his lashes were just very dark.

  “So do you live here now?” That wasn’t the question, but then there was no single question.

  “I don’t know.” He reached out and touched his finger to Dayo’s chin, making the baby laugh again. “We’ll see how it goes.”

  Then she saw the duffel bag in front of the couch, inches away from the toe of her winter boots. She had somehow overlooked it by looking so intently at him.

  Albie shrugged as if none of it had been his idea. “Your husband said I could sleep on the couch until I find a place.”

  It would have to be the couch, unless it was the coffee table or the single armchair where Fodé studied or their tiny kitchen table. The baby slept with them in the bedroom in a bas
sinet wedged in between the bed and the wall. If she had to go to the bathroom in the middle of the night she worked herself out of the blankets and crawled off the foot of the bed. Jeanette sat down on the couch, and the baby, who was just starting to crawl, stretched his arms away from her in an effort to get to the floor. She put him down.

  “It’s not like I’ll ever be here,” Albie said.

  It was the closest he could come to an apology and it startled her, because even though they didn’t have the room or the time or the money to keep him, even though she did not forgive him for disappearing for the last eight years with only the occasional postcard to let them know he wasn’t dead, the thought of his going made her want to get up and lock the door. How many nights must he have needed a place to go but never called her or Holly or their mother? If he was with her now it meant that something had changed. The baby had hold of the zipper on the duffel and was trying to figure it out. “You’ll be here,” she said.

  * * *

  Albie and Jeanette were not from Virginia. They had both been born in California and in that sense the two of them had been a team, albeit a team neither one of them wanted to be on. Jeanette had applied for her first passport when she was twenty-six, after she had gotten pregnant, after she and Fodé were married. He wanted to take her to Guinea to meet his family. The question that made her stop as she filled out the forms in the post office was Place of Birth. What she wanted to write was not Virginia. Not Virginia was where she was from. Cal had tortured Albie and Jeanette with the lesser state of their birth. “Take a good look around,” Cal had said once when they were driving to Arlington from Dulles, the passing landscape a multidimensional shade of green never witnessed in Southern California. “They only let you in now because you’re little. Dad got permission. Once you’re older they’ll stop you in the airport and put you back on the plane.”

  “Cal,” their stepmother said. Just his name. She was driving and she didn’t want to get into it but she flashed her big Jackie Onassis sunglasses in the rearview mirror to show him she meant business.