Obviously, there was still the mess of last night to sort out before her arrival. Ezra was not in the habit of keeping secrets. If anything, he opened himself up quickly. Too quickly. Gregory used to rib him that he fell in love with anyone who loved him back. This had been true his whole life through, so he couldn’t even blame his mother’s diagnosis, which would be the easy thing to point to. Fear of abandonment and all of that. But this was simply how he was wired. He wanted a partner; he liked the notion of companionship. He pulled back from the window of Waverly’s and stared at himself and was honestly astonished that he ever thought he’d get that from Frankie Harriman.
He turned and headed back toward campus. It was almost 1 p.m. by now. Surely, Gregory would be awake. Surely, someone must know if he’d gotten married last night.But at least we didn’t sleep together, he told himself as he crossed back onto Middie Walk. At least I don’t have to tell Mimi about that. Sleeping in a bed with Frankie was not the same thing assleeping with Frankie. He’d gotten in over his head with that Portland booze (he really needed to speak with Gregory), which, he realized now, he certainly shouldnothave combined with his emergency Xanax, and had been swept up in a wave of nostalgia and broken into Homer. But that was it. That was it! That was not a reason not to get engaged to the woman he loved. He knew, granularly, like he knew when he had a winning hand, that this was all horseshit: that Mimi was not the type of woman who excused falling asleep in the same bedwith an ex-girlfriend as anoops. He couldn’t expect her to be, wouldn’t have wanted her to be. They’d said as much on their questionnaires: that when faced with infidelity, they’d each have a no-tolerance policy. But Ezra had to cling to something. He was a relentless optimist right up until the cancer spread to the bones.
Ezra slowed as he passed Burton Library, but even with his relentless optimism, he couldn’t ignore that his stomach curled at the notion of going in: he was wise enough to know that something had probably happened there last night, because you almost always inevitably return to the scene of the crime, and this was where he had been robbed of Frankie.No, he wasn’t robbed of her. He was freed from her.He didn’t even know why he thought of it in those terms in the first place.
Screw it.He doubled back abruptly and scaled the library steps two by two, his back barking, but nothing was going to stop him now. Face your demons head-on,that’sreally how you free yourself. His mom had said something along those lines when it became clear she was dying, and Henry had moved to London for work, and so it really was just the two of them and the grief of knowing that time was finite. She was wisp-thin and had nothing more than downy hair by then, but she took his cheeks in her frail hands and told him:Don’t shy away from the darker corners, love. Life is hard. Face it anyway.He was trying but suspected he wasn’t quite there.
He swung the door open, and the first thing he noticed was the smell. How a decade had passed, and it still smelled exactly the same. Like floor wax and old books and a faint note of burned coffee because somewhere sometime enough students had spilled their to-go cups here and there that the scentstuck. Ezra stood in the open foyer with its marbled floors and its rotunda ceiling, and for the first time all morning, he allowed himself to breathe.
A security guard sat at a desk about ten feet away and glanced his sleepy eyes upward.
“ID?” he asked.
“Oh,” Ezra said. “I’m not a student. I mean, I was but—”
“Visitors’ passes have to go through the alumni office.” He flipped over his wrist and checked his watch. “But it closes in fifteen minutes. So.”
“Can’t I...” Ezra put on his most pleasant face, the one he used to woo investors, the one he wore at all of those ridiculous events with Mimi where he was shuttled to the front of the crowd and made an example of. (In the best of ways, Mimi thought.Who wouldn’t want to be us?she always said.) “I was here last night. I think. For a dinner? I may have dropped my phone.” Ezra flashed a grin, which almost always worked. “I’ll be in and out.”
The guard squinted. “I worked last night. I don’t remember anyone complaining about a lost phone.”
“Right,” Ezra said, relaxing. Finally! He found someone who could be helpful. “I only just realized this morning.”
The guard had already lost interest. “Lost and found is closed.”
“Yes, sure, but if I could just have five minutes.”
“Visitors’ pass required.” He shrugged like he didn’t make the rules but was more than happy to refuse to bend them.
“Ok, but I just—I’m proposing to my girlfriend, and I really need my cell to reach her. Come on, surely you can make an—”
The guard picked up his newspaper and put on his reading glasses, so Ezra stopped talking. If he were Frankie, he’d probably just blow right past him. He’d probably get a running start and hurdle the turnstile and leave the security guard wondering just what the hell happened, like he’d mistakenly seen the flash of a superhero. And by the time he tracked Ezra down in the stacks of the microfiche or the open reading room, he would have solved all of his problems. But he was not Frankie. His shoulders sagged, and he turned to leave.
To his right was a bank of pay phones.
“Can I at least make a phone call?” Ezra said. My God, he knew he sounded pathetic.
“You can do whatever you want,” the guard said without even looking up from his crossword. “As long as it’s on the other side of this line.” He pointed toward an imaginary border between the lobby and the actual library.
Boundaries, Ezra thought. Something he’d respect even if he didn’t want to. He nodded to himself, as if he’d found the key to the differences between him and his ex.
He dug into his pocket and found three dimes, then flipped through the white pages that were discarded on the floor of the booth. He dialed the hotel and again asked for Gregory’s room. He had a vague memory that Gregory was training for the Portland biathlon or half-marathon or something. He hadn’t read the fundraising email closely and hadn’t figured it really mattered, since he’d typed in his credit card number and donated a hundred dollars. But whatever it was, even in this weather, Gregory, who was part of the reason Ezra had blacked out, could get his ass out of bed and over to campus. It was a three-mile jog. He could be here in twenty minutes.
Gregory grunted upon answering on the fourth ring.
“I’m at Burton,” Ezra said. “I need your help.”
Gregory groaned then said: “Fucking A, fine. Give me a few.” Then he clicked off.
Ezra hung up and felt more settled, more assured that this was all going to be ok. There must have been some sort of giant misunderstanding, but there was nothing he couldn’t solve if he really put his mind to it.
As he strolled out of the foyer toward the front steps to wait for Gregory, he happened to glance upward and was surprised to see a big bushel of mistletoe. How he even recognized it as mistletoe was only coincidence: he was not generally known to be savvy in the ways of horticulture. But he and Mimi had attended a holiday party sponsored by Datify just a few weeks back. It was bonus season, and Mimi’s bosses had upped their cash promises from in-person matches to extra incentives for anyone she signed up, so she was even more romantically ravenous than usual. The theme was “Anything for a Kiss,” which Ezra thought was a little predatory, but since Mimi had organized the whole thing, he stayed mum. He knew how much she needed the cash, and besides, he didn’t want to be the guy who took one look at something and deconstructed all the ways it wasn’t working. He’d save that for Google. The ballroom had TV screens running famous movie kisses on loop; the corners of the room had spin the bottle stations set up for anyone who was brave enough; the bar served a heavy pour of a peppermint schnapps drink called “Minty Kisses” (everyone would have fresh breath, Mimi said); and of course, there was mistletoe in every doorframe. Mimi put on such a display for the potential registrants that Ezra’s lips wereswollen from all the kissing. By the end, he had extremely minty breath and absolutely no desire to go home and sleep with her.
Today, Ezra glanced upward. “This seems like a lawsuit waiting to happen.”
The guard floated his eyes toward the bushel. “I didn’t hear any complaints from you people last night.”
Ezra opened his mouth to ask more, but then panic set in: he knew himself well enough to know that he wasn’t prepared enough, steely enough to hear whatever came next. Instead, he quickened his step and scurried out into the winter storm.
