Ezra
Ezra tried Mimi’s phone from a pay phone on the corner, but she wasn’t picking up, and there was no shuttle back to the hotel in sight. Ezra paced back and forth on the sidewalk, his breath all around him pillowing in the bitter night air, and tried,tried, to pull back from the swirl of combustible emotions that were boiling over inside of him.
So Gregory had seen her stealing. That wasn’t great. It wasn’t the end of the world, but it admittedly wasn’t great.But we all have our quirks, he thought. Ezra’s quirks were decidedly noncriminal, barring the Bellagio and MGM, but still. This was petty stuff, nothing major. He had his grandmother’s engagement ring in his pocket again, and all he wanted to do was propose at midnight and start the next phase of his life.
It was really goddamned freezing out now, he noticed. His ears stung, and his dress shoes were not meant for subarctic temperature, so his toes cried out too. He tried to considerwhere he would go if he were Mimi. She couldn’t make it back to the hotel on foot in her high heels, and from the look of it, the entirety of campus was shuttered for the night. A few stragglers wandered past, on their way to Lemonhead or someone’s dorm to celebrate the turn of the new year, and from a distance, a girl shouted to another, “Happy Y2K, bitch!” And someone whooped a reply.
Ezra tucked his hands into his pockets and headed north. He didn’t know where he was going, but then what else was new. He was out here, chasing a girl like he’d chased his high school girlfriend before she dumped him, like he’d chased Bethany before she disappeared for one time too many, like he’d chased Frankie, and now Mimi. Why was it so difficult for him to find someone who stayed? He stopped and stared up at the now cloudless sky. The storm had moved through, and the spread of stars above him nearly took his breath away. He’d forgotten how beautiful it was. In New York, there were lights for miles and miles but no stars.
Ezra picked up his pace and saw a light on in the distance and slowed. Burton Library appeared to be open. Which of course it was: Burton was always open, a safe harbor when students needed to pull all-nighters or retreat from a horrible roommate who didn’t shower or just lose themselves in the stacks stocked with history. He sped up again, the wind gusting and chapping his cheeks, blowing his hair aloft too.
He swung open the door, and Mimi was there in the lobby, sitting on a low windowsill, staring out at the unfamiliar campus. Bruno, evidently working a double shift, still sat at the security desk and looked up, his reading glasses low on hisnose, and said, “Oh, I see you’re back. Zoe’s gone, so I’m not giving you special access.”
And Mimi turned to him, her face ruddy and streaked with mascara, and said, “Zoe? I thought this was about Frankie!” And her voice bounced off the rotunda, and Bruno sighed loudly.
“No, Zoe’s just a girl I met—” Ezra stopped. He didn’t even know how to explain it. Zoe was just a girl he met when he woke up in her dorm room where he fell asleep spooning Frankie? “Anyway, she’s not important. And this isn’t about Frankie either, Meems.”
“I came all this way for you!” Mimi hiccupped. “You have no idea how difficult it was for me to get here!”
And Ezra didn’t; that was true. She still hadn’t told him the truth of why she’d missed her flight. What else didn’t he know? He felt an uneasy bubble of anxiety rise through him.No no no.That was only supposed to be a Frankie Harriman side effect. If he had a full-blown meltdown here, in the marbled lobby of Burton, who would talk him down? Mimi didn’t know about the breathing technique. Mimi didn’t know how to handle him at his most undone because she’d never had to; he’d never shown her his vulnerabilities.
Maybe we tell each other a multitude of lies, he thought,just so we can find someone to love us.
“Why didn’t you get on the plane last night, Mimi?” he heard himself ask.
“Because it was canceled! I told you this! You weren’t picking up, probably I realize now because you were with her—Zoe or Frankie or whatever—and I had to try to figureit out on my own,” she cried. “I mean, which is fine! I’m an independent woman or whatever, but I’m here, and I did the best I could!”
“But I know your flight wasn’t canceled,” Ezra said quietly because it was the thing he didn’t want to say.
“What are you talking about?” Mimi was on her feet now, half crying, half shouting, and Ezra’s instinct was to apologize to Bruno for the disturbance. Not because he was sorry but because he didn’t want Bruno to see Mimi this way; he didn’t want this stranger to see her at her worst. What he wanted to do was protect her, when maybe, it occurred to him suddenly, Ezra Jones should stop trying to look out for everyone else and start looking out for himself.Maybe he should be in control of his own destiny.
“Mimi, I checked with the airline. Your flight took off and landed, and I’m not angry, I’m not upset, I’m just trying to understand why there’s this gap between us that I wasn’t even aware of until now.” He paused. “Gregory told me about Kmart.”
Mimi’s face froze and then crumbled, and she sank back on the windowsill. “Kmart? This is about Kmart?”
And at this Bruno said, “As intriguing as this is, I’m gonna need you to keep your voice down. This is still a library, miss.”
And she turned to him and bleated, “It is New Year’s Eve and we are the only ones here, so please forgive me!”
And now Ezra was truly mortified. “Mimi, please,” he whispered. “Please, let’s just sit calmly and talk about this.”
“Talk about what?” she cried. “Kmart? That, like, yourfriend ‘Gregory,’ ”—she said that like it wasn’t really his name, which Ezra really did not understand—“saw me taking, like, a lipstick. A lipstick! Who cares? It’s Kmart; they have a billion dollars, and I do not!”
“I’m not upset about Kmart,” Ezra said.
“Then maybe we should talk about Frankie!” Mimi said, and Ezra saw Bruno cock his head like this was getting interesting. “What ever happened to loyalty? What ever happened to honesty?”
Ezra knew she was deflecting because it was easier to point fingers than be pointed out. He’d never taken the bar, but he’d been to law school, and he recognized the technique. He breathed in, breathed out. Did it one more time. He could do this on his own. He didn’t need Frankie there to calm him.
“Mimi, this is about honesty, actually. Just tell me why you didn’t get on your flight,” he said. “It’s a simple question with a simple answer.”
Mimi was truly beside herself now. Her cheeks were raging red, her nose dripping, and she was practically levitating with indignation. She reminded Ezra of a cornered animal who was willing to lash out at anything, anyone, even those who meant it no harm.
“Fine!Fine!I didn’t get on the flight because I missed it, ok?”
Ezra felt his stomach unwind. That was reasonable. That was believable! Then it occurred to him that if the explanation were simply this innocuous, she would have told him. And in the past, he realized, he would have accepted such things: that she’d answered his question, and even if something about it didn’t sit quite right, he didn’t want to peel back any otherlayers because he intuitively knew that he wouldn’t like what he’d find. He thought again of Frankie, how when she’d told him she was pregnant, he’d started making plans. Maybe he should have peeled back some of her layers. Maybe then he’d have seen the whole of her, and even if it had been ugly, uglier, he could have loved that part of her too. He would have, he knew now, watching Mimi. He would have loved the whole of it, the whole of her.
“If you just missed your flight, why didn’t you tell me?” Now, even if it meant confrontation, even if it meant saying difficult things, he wanted to know the truth. He was keenly aware of how profoundly different this was for him, how profoundly new.
