Ezra pushed to his elbows and tried to breathe, tried to stay calm. “What? No. I’m always interested in sex.” He extended his hand to draw her back onto the bed, but he didn’t cover it well, and she stepped back. He inhaled, felt his pulse slow just enough, and tried again. “Mimi, come on. I’m just really wiped. And I feel like I need to shower, brush my teeth. That stuff.” He exhaled, inhaled, exhaled again.
She tapped her foot and crossed her arms.
“Well, were you going to tell me about her? If I hadn’t shown up?”
“Why wouldn’t you have shown up?” Ezra hadn’t meant to ask it. He didn’t want to ask it! His pulse spiked all over again.Shit shit shit shit shit.All he wanted was to kiss his girlfriend, propose at midnight, andmove on.Why were the past twenty-four hours so packed with emotional land mines, when he had spent a perfectly wonderful, perfectly placid thirty-two years avoiding them? He couldn’t even blame Frankie for this last one! He stilled himself and willed Mimi to move on too, not make this any more complicated than he feared it was about to get. They were so compatible, so in sync, that he thought she might float on down the river of denial with him.
“No, I mean, yes, I was always showing up, obviously,” Mimi said. “But I thought we agreed? That you would keep your distance?”
Ezra blinked, surprised at the implication, and something roiled in him. That even while she was concealing something, and Ezra was growing increasingly, uneasily sure that she was indeed concealing something, that she could turn it back on him. He squelched his rising agitation. He had to get through this; he would just press through this.
“Hey,” he said, extending his hand. “Come here. I’ll brush my teeth and all of that later.”
She shook her head. “I’m going to take a shower,” she said. “I didn’t trust the Holiday Inn last night.”
Ezra started to ask her what on earth could be wrong with the water at the Holiday Inn, but he supposed they had grown used to finer things, even though he’d never meant to. He didn’t mind a roadside motel, like the kind he’d stayed at growing up, or a greasy diner with plastic menus, not the farm-to-table brunches they lingered over every Sunday now. He couldn’t fault Mimi for growing used to such things either; what was his was hers, andthe world they ran in now, even if she was still paid in those elusive stock options, didn’t much resemble the worlds of their youth. Besides, it was easier for him to just acquiesce in the moment and play along and say: “Ok, great. Yeah, we have to walk out of here in an hour anyway.” He checked the clock on the nightstand. It was almost four now, and the wedding started at five. Mimi, and this was not a criticism, took forever to get ready.
The bathroom door closed behind her, then he heard the lock spin. He stilled for a moment, waiting to hear the rush of the shower. When he did, he was on his feet, reaching for his laptop, enduring the interminable wait for the hotel internet, and then logging on to the American Airlines site once again. Maybe he’d misunderstood. Maybe he’d been so wonky from the pepper spray and waking up with Frankie and the blackout-drunk situation that he had misread American’s page, and in fact, her flighthadbeen canceled, and then he could put this all behind him. The site took a good minute to load, then another minute once Ezra had typed in the flight details. He kept turning to check the bathroom, but the water was still running, the door still locked. And he hated—hated—that he was doubting Mimi. He hated that he knew he was going to catch her in a lie. He hated even more that this meant that he was going to have to make a fundamental decision: confront her about it or simply live with the knowledge that the untruth existed between them. He did not stop to remind himself that he had plenty of untruths to share with her.
And there it was. Again. Mimi’s flight last night had taken off and landed on time. Ezra considered calling thereservations line just to confirm, but then he further considered how pathetic that was: phoning a call center to ask a stranger if his girlfriend was lying to him.
Ezra shuttered the laptop and ran a hand over his face, which had now settled down and mostly looked normal. Mimi hadn’t even noticed that his eyelids were still a little puffy, the whites of his eyes still a little pink. Maybe if he just told her what he knew, and not just about the flight, but about his own pile of shit—the gambling, waking up in Homer, the kiss—they could mutually agree that they’d each screwed the pooch and live happily ever after (literally).
He tapped his fingers in a pattern over the desk, unable to slow his brain. The more he thought about it, the more outraged he was at Frankie. She had kissed him! As an experiment!Like he was a frog in biology class who she had the luxury of poking and prodding until she just sliced him straight open. Ezra so rarely found himself angry, but instantly, immediately, he felt a burst of fury run through him. His cheeks ran hot; his guts roiled. He wanted to recoil from the feeling—Ezra was not in the habit of leaning into his rage—and inexplicably, he found that he could not. It was there, like a fever, pulsing stronger and stronger with each heartbeat.
He reached for the phone to call her room, to tell her... well, he wasn’t exactly sure what he was going to tell her, but he figured he would work it out when the moment came. Something about her selfishness and her audacity and that he was not a frog there for her dissection! But then he heard the shower turn off behind the bathroom door, and he tried to ease the phone back into its cradle as quietly as possible. He didn’t want to lie to Mimi any more than he’d already done. What hewanted was to go back in time and refuse Gregory’s alcohol and certainly skip the Xanax and have a perfectly normal evening out with his old college friends that didn’t involve Frankie Harriman.
He told himself that he could still make this right. That all he had to do was get through a few more hours, and then he’d never have to think about Frankie again. But his anger churned in his belly, and he wondered, if Frankie did dissect him like a frog, if she’d open up his insides and find a red-hot bomb of rage. Then Mimi emerged from the bathroom, and he tried to swallow this all down, as if you could do such a thing with a ticking time bomb, as if he weren’t poised to explode.
TWENTY-NINE
Frankie
Frankie lay on her bed with a pillow over her face and replayed the scenes from the past hour again and again, starting with the kiss and ending with the hotel’s revolving doors that gulped up Mimi and Ezra without even a glance back. Then she flung the pillow across the room and pressed her hand over her mouth in astonishment. She had willingly kissed, trulykissed, Ezra Jones. Forget being married, forget the rest of it. She had been sober and cogent and still possibly concussed (but definitely recovering), and she had leaned into him, raised her face to his, and kissed him. And Ezra! He had kissed her back. Sober and cogent and all the rest of it. She wasn’t sure if she were unsettled or comforted by the unexpected turn of events; for Frankie, those two sentiments were so closely aligned that maybe they were interchangeable.
She thought about calling down to his room. She knew they should probably discuss it, come up with some sort ofterms for the rest of the night. But Ezra would never want to get into it, and besides, now Mimi was here, and it was probably easiest to just pretend that whatever had happened... hadn’t. They’d each gotten good at that in their own way, and for a long time, Frankie had blamed Ezra. But she could call him now, she could say difficult things, she could ask herself difficult questions. But to what end? For what purpose? He was going to propose to Mimi and that was that.
Frankie righted herself and headed to the bathroom. She peeled off her clothes, the J.Crew fisherman sweater that had been such a comfort a decade ago, the Levi’s from the vintage store that made a decent enough replacement for the Levi’s she’d lived in at Middleton. She stood in front of the vanity mirror naked and marveled at all the ways she could dress herself up: as a pianist in a dress from Bloomingdale’s as a child, as a moody but autonomous college kid in her oversize wool sweaters, as a slick music manager in baby-doll dresses and blazers that she bought at Urban Outfitters on Beverly. Frankie had always loved this notion: that you could cast aside whoever you were before and reinvent yourself into someone entirely new. She’d done it at Middleton so well that maybe Ezra hadn’t even realized what he was getting into. Maybe she hadn’t told him or maybe he didn’t want to know. For a long time, she’d thought this part was important: the blame of it all. Why her parents had used her as a Band-Aid for their marriage, why no one stopped to ask her if she truly loved performing, whether Ezra’s proposal had been an innocent misunderstanding or a grievous fundamental difference between the two of them.
She ran her hands over her hips, up over her breasts, and cradled her cheeks. The steam from the shower was rising, the mirror fogging along with it. Frankie, she couldn’t help but nearly laugh, was disappearing. She’d tell her artists that maybe that lyric was a little too much of a trope, but still, she was astute enough to recognize its prescience. Frankie had always assumed she knew exactly who she was, exactly what she wanted. But what if she’d gotten that wrong? What if, just as Ezra had gotten some things wrong and her parents had gotten things wrong, she had just misunderstood herself? And since she didn’t want to lay blame at her feet for the destruction of her past, maybe she shouldn’t lay blame at their feet either.
This felt heady, too big to embrace right here at the Inn at Middleton, with the shower running and a wedding to get to and a New Year’s Eve to celebrate. But it was fodder, food for thought, and Frankie considered that this was something. This was a start. She wondered now if kissing Ezra out there on Middie Walk wasn’t meant to be closure. They’d never gotten it, or at leastshe’dnever gotten it, even if she’d tricked herself into believing that by running from Middleton to Los Angeles, that by building an expansive, successful existence for herself where she rarely thought of his proposal and the untruths they’d both told themselves about it, she had successfully shed that chapter of her life. So perhaps that’s all the kiss was. She nodded to herself in the mirror through the steamy haze. Closure. No one could blame her for that.
She spun the sink faucet on and reached for the bar of hotel soap still in its packaging. She unwrapped it gently, as if itwere a Christmas gift, then plunged her left hand under the water and rubbed the soap against her ring finger.
Ezra’s grandmother’s ring slipped off after just a few seconds. It was easier than she had thought it would be. She placed it by the soap dish and stepped into the shower, the water nearly scalding now. She leaned into it and let it burn.
THIRTY
Ezra
FIVE P.M.
The sun was setting by the time Ezra and Mimi descended from the room to the wedding shuttle that took them to the Middleton Chapel. Ezra had forgotten how early campus grew dark during the winter months: it wasn’t yet five o’clock, and the shadows were long all around them, the temperatures dipping too. Mimi, it must be said, looked stunning, as if she knew she were putting on a show. An emerald-green dress with a furry little shoulder thing (Mimi informed Ezra this was called a stole, and she’d laughed because she found it adorable that he didn’t know such things, and then she’d kissed him, which alarmed the bejesus out of Ezra because he was now borderline manically both jumpy and furious about the kiss with Frankie), and open-toed heels that seemed ridiculous for the frigid air and the snowy ground. But Mimi, despite her midwestern roots, had never been one for practicality.
The invite had called for New Year’s Eve formal, and Ezra didn’t know how that was any different than regular formal, so he’d packed his tux and thought he’d cleaned up ok too. Back in college, he hadn’t owned a tux—no use for one and too expensive to buy, though he’d rented one for his high school prom, which was all a blur anyway because his mom was sick and like he gave a shit about anything else beyond that. Well, he had given a shit about his high school girlfriend, of course, but she was off to Pomona, and she’d been very clear that they had no future once she hit the state border. Ezra had tried to plead otherwise, but she was firm, and in the end, it had been for the best for him to have a fresh start. He couldn’t see that at the time, but Ezra was beginning to understand that he couldn’t see a lot of things at the time. Maybe that’s what he loved so much about cards: he was fully present, choices made had immediate consequences, and when you walked away from the table, everyone, even if they’d lost, had understood the rules of the game. He lumbered onto the shuttle, his hand on Mimi’s back, and wondered why he, a grown adult with a quick brain and an open heart, felt like he so often misunderstood the rules of the game. Why he had so few hobbies other than whatever Mimi was dragging him to for work. Why he so easily acquiesced into abandoning his own life—his harmless poker games with friends, his weekend runs in the park, visits to London to crash with Henry, whom he hadn’t seen in months—for things that were of no importance to him like brunches that took up half his Sundays and business class flights to San Francisco to interview for jobs he probably didn’t even want.
Frankie was nowhere to be seen when they took their seats in the back of the van, and unlike so many years ago, Ezra wasrelieved that she was chronically late. Gregory bounced out of the lobby and hopped on too. He was looking dapper in a bow tie and a suit and a bowler hat, though he had slung his red parka on top. He noticed Mimi give him the once-over and said, “This is how we roll in Portland. It’s like fusion but for my clothes.”
