He considered lying again, but since he often forgot what he’d told people, he tried not to lie very often.
“No, ah, it was Boyd’s.”
“Oh, wow,” Rosie said, eyes widening. She covertly sniffed the fur around the hood.
Boyd who?she did not ask. So she had heard. She lookedaround the apartment as though wondering if the man in question was hiding in his bedroom. Her face registered a number of new questions.
“I mean, people give him lots of free stuff they want him to promote. Clothes, cologne, watches, that sort of thing. And we’re actually the same shirt size now, so he passed some extra swag to me,” Tom said, aware that he was protesting too much.
“No, I get it,” Rosie said. “That’s really nice of him though.” If anything, his disclosure seemed to have subdued her. She rubbed the side of her face, looking tired but no longer fearful. She took him in again from bare feet to boxers to rumpled T-shirt, then made a small, firm smile appear on her face.
“You look really good, Tom,” she said, gesturing at him and the apartment both. “And I’ve heard nothing but good stuff. I’m glad. Really happy for you.” Her tone had calmed.
“You look good too,” he quickly said.You still look like my wife.“I mean, you always did though.”
Rosie chuckled in response. “No,Ilook like a guinea pig that just went through a car wash, but thank you.”
They were now doing the thing other people did when they met their exes in public. Little jokes before they could skid to the drink station on the other side of the room. He didn’t like it.
“Okay, so, do you want to meet up tomorrow and go over the plan?” he asked, trying to prolong the interaction. “Do you want to go to dinner? Or lunch? Sometimes I work at a steak place in Washington Heights, and I can get us into a chef’s table—”
If he couldn’t keep her here, his caveman brain insisted he put a date and time on the next time he’d be with her.
“It’s okay,” she said, shaking her head. “I’ll just text you. Thanks. Sorry again for the hour.”
She hesitated, clearly considering the feasibility of hugging him or perhaps patting his arm but ultimately deciding against it.
She grabbed her suitcase and quickly let herself out, and Tom was as powerless to stop her as the last time they saw each other.
3
The next morning was a sodden gray with the previous night’s chill, but Tom could practically hear the major-key orchestral theme following him down the street to Juilliard for a photo call at Ximena’s alma mater. Before falling asleep, he’d worried that maybe he shouldn’t have promised that he was going to be really helpful with the inn repairs. But this morning? It felt like the first day of an endless summer vacation. Everything was going to work out.
The big lobby was noisy and crowded with photographers and their equipment, and there was a happy background din made by Boyd’s fans outside, who pressed their faces and handwritten signs to the glass windows. Tom was normally skittish near the people who followed Boyd around to take pictures of him, but today they merely seemed like the joyful chorus to his mood.Hello, weirdos! Yes, everything is beautiful today.
Tom checked in with the photographer and Ximena’s publicist, kissed Ximena herself on the cheek, and stepped onto the set. He hoped the shoot didn’t take too long—he wanted tostop by a hardware store afterward and osmotically absorb some construction knowledge before he talked to Rosie again.
Boyd rose from the makeup station when he spotted Tom, an out-of-character expression of uncertainty creasing his famous, Byronic features.
“You shaved!” he said. “Wait, are we not doing the mustache thing in the new script? Are we going back to the dick thing? I thought you said the dick thing was gross?”
Boyd looked vaguely like Tom if their height difference was ignored: dark hair and eyes, strong features, muscular build. Their play,All’s Well That Bends Well, was an adaptation of Shakespeare’s least famous comedy, and its central conceit was that Boyd, the real love interest, might be mistaken for Tom, the decoy boyfriend, in dim lighting. In the first version of the script, Ximena’s character figured out the switch when she stuck her hand down Boyd’s pants. She and Tom had both objected: the original play was vaguely rape-y upon any amount of scrutiny, and swapping the genders of the main characters didn’t help. Also, shaming people with tiny dicks, even if Tom was very much not one of them, wasn’t a great look. Tom had been told to grow a thick, seventies-style porn mustache as a compromise to preserve the plot beat.
“The dick thing was gross,” Tom confirmed, taking a step back. “I’ll grow the ’stache back before rehearsals start. It was just getting itchy.”
If Rosie didn’t like it, off it went. God willing, everything else she wanted was that easily handled.
“Oh, yeah, okay,” Boyd said with a great deal of doubt, looking Tom up and down. “It was just, you know, a big partof your character. Did you get the fish I sent? Have you been sticking to the diet?”
Tom tried not to squirm under Boyd’s scrutiny. “I got the fish. I’ve been eating the fish.”
He’d eaten some of the fish.
Boyd’s gaze was assessing. In the lead-up to their Off Broadway run, Tom had been obliged to spend several hours a day lifting weights on the ancient 1990s infomercial torture devices of a local gym in order to force his body into a facsimile of his Hollywood action movie colead’s.
He wondered if Rosie had been at all impressed, what with most of him on display when he’d opened his door. Hopefully a little impressed? He needed all the advantages he could get.
“You could come to my training sessions now that I’m back in town,” Boyd said, face brightening. “I started seeing a new trainer. He’s not just about fitness. He’s also a healer.”
