Commonwealth by Ann Patchett

Author:Ann Patchett [Patchett, Ann]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi, azw3
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Published: 2016-07-02T07:50:11+00:00

6

Leo Posen had taken a house in Amagansett for the summer. There was no view of the ocean, a person would have to write an entirely different kind of book in order to afford an ocean view, but it was a beautiful house with wide halls and sunny rooms, a porch swing the size of a daybed, a kitchen with an enormous table that looked like it had been pegged together by Pilgrims to celebrate a later, more prosperous Thanksgiving. The house belonged to an actress who was shooting a movie in Poland for the summer, and summer was the only time she used it. The real estate broker had made it clear that this property was never rented, but the actress was a great admirer of Leo’s. In fact, she was hoping for a part in the movie of Commonwealth. She wanted to play the doctor who was having the affair, and hoped that Leo, surrounded by her pretty things, her pictures, would think of her.

In the spirit of full disclosure, Leo told the broker there was no movie deal.

The broker was stopped by this. Even she, who knew next to nothing about the movie business, knew that the rights should have been snapped up before publication. For the briefest instant she wondered if the option for Commonwealth was something she herself could acquire. “Don’t worry about that,” the broker said. “When they do make the movie she’s still going to want the part.”

Leo had rented the house in hopes that he would spend the summer working on a new novel, the one his literary agent had sold to his publisher without so much as an outline while Commonwealth was ringing the slot machines. He had also rented the house in hopes of pleasing Franny. He’d told her she wouldn’t have to do anything but lie on the big down sofa in the front room and read all day, or she could ride her bike to the beach and read. “Sand, waves, beach roses,” he said, picking up a strand of her fascinating hair and letting it fall between his fingers. At night after dinner they would sit together on the porch and he would read her everything he’d written that day. “That doesn’t sound like such a bad vacation.”

But it was a bad vacation. The problem, they realized much too late, was the glorious house itself, which sat atop a hill to catch the afternoon breeze while a great hedge surrounded the property for privacy. The fruit trees scattered over the wide lawn had been late to bloom because of the long, hard winter, so that even now in early June the cherry trees were weighted with dark pink blossoms. The jumbled flower beds that spoke of glorious disarray were tended by a gardener who came on Wednesdays, the same day a Peruvian man with a skimmer net came to remove the cherry blossoms from the swimming pool. There were five bedrooms with variations on the sloping-ceiling-dormer-window theme: window seats, puffy comforters, hand-braided rugs over floors of quarter-sawn oak.

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