Frankie
What had happened was Frankie’s doing, Frankie’s fault.
She ran down the aisle of Steinway, with Bono belting at her back, and knew this with complete certainty.
Gregory had been wrong. Ezra hadn’t been playing poker because of him; Ezra had been playing poker because of her.
By the time they got to Lemonhead, the two of them—Gregory and Ezra—had been quite obviously drunk. She was still sober, but the spill at Abel and the lump on her skull had the world spinning. And Ezra, alternately hysterical and self-soothing from Mimi’s voicemail, decided that, in lieu of being able to channel his energy into theworld’s most perfect proposal—she remembered he’d said that as they scurried from Abel Rink:it was going to be the world’s most perfect proposal and now she can’t get here?—he was going to channel his energy into ensuring that she, Frankie, did not die of a head injury.
She wouldn’t. She kept telling him.I won’t die of a head injury. This has happened before.Frankie didn’t quite know howthat was meant to be reassuring: that she’d previously been concussed. Why did she live a lifestyle that led to such things?
They’d made it to Lemonhead for their ice packs, and eventually, it became obvious that Gregory was not emerging from inside the bar. Ezra could have left her too, after also heading inside to grab her the ice. He could have disappeared into the thicket of students who descended from their dorms through the snow to drink pitchers of beer because that’s what you did on frigid winter nights in Western Massachusetts. He could have sat her down in the little folding chair by the entrance and plopped the ice pack in her hand and said:Best of luck, Frankie Harriman.But that was not Ezra Jones.
With the clock ticking down to a new century, Frankie made it to Steinway’s lobby and stopped to catch her breath, a cramp building in her side. No, that would never be Ezra Jones. A swell of emotion rose up in her. Was it gratitude? Was it nostalgia? She shook her head. She didn’t know. This was new territory for her: seeking something, someone, out instead of waiting for it to find her.
“I still hate you,” Frankie had mumbled last night at the entrance to Lemonhead as she leaned into him, her chin heavy on his chest. Though visibly intoxicated, he was solid on his feet, and he held her weight on him assuredly.
“And I still hate you,” Ezra replied, but Frankie hadn’t thought it really sounded like he meant it. Perhaps these were just lies they told themselves so that their wounds healed faster. Perhaps when you told yourself a story long enough, often enough, you tricked your mind into believing that it was true. Frankie slid down to the sodden floor of the bar and plopped her head into her hands.
“I would really like to go to sleep,” she said.
Ezra lowered himself into a crouch in front of her, then wobbled, then steadied himself.
“No, no, that’s the one thing I know: you can’t go to sleep. If you have to go to sleep, we have to go to the ER.”
“But I did this in Bangkok!” Frankie bleated. Ezra grabbed both of her elbows and pulled her up like she was weightless. She marveled at the feeling: of simply letting someone else literally carry your load. She reminded herself that she had vowed that Ezra Jones was an enemy for life and there had to be something utterly Machiavellian about his behavior.
“Shit, I can’t believe this about Mimi,” he said.
And Frankie said, “Forget Mimi! All you have done is whine about Mimi! Why don’t you take—”
“Don’t start with me about ‘destiny’ and ‘taking charge of my life,’ Frankie,” Ezra snapped. “I’m a grown adult man!”
And Frankie retorted: “Those are all synonyms,” and she thought this was a truly great burn, but Ezra looked at her like she was crazy, so she said, “I have a concussion. What do you want from me?!”
The bouncer shuffled his feet and cleared his throat, then said, “If you’re not coming in, then you can’t clog the door. Fire hazard.”
So Ezra said, “Fine, man, just fine! We were leaving anyway.”
And Frankie yelled, “No, we weren’t. It’s, like, negative thirty degrees out!”
And Ezra said, “It’s not my fault that you didn’t pack for the weather.”
Frankie didn’t have an answer for this, because she wantedto blame him for everything, but alas, on this (and probably on many other things), he was correct.
“Let’s go to Waverly’s,” she said. “I want to see my Boy Scout ex-boyfriend play a hand.”
Ezra squeezed his eyes closed and swung his head back and forth. “No, no, no.”
“So, you’renotthe card legend you are rumored to be?”
They were outside now, the snow just starting to fall, the wind swirling, a harbinger of what came next. The ground tilted beneath Frankie, and she reached for a lamppost to steady her.
“I don’t have anything to prove to you,” Ezra said, and even though she knew this was true, she couldn’t keep herself from pushing the point. If her judgment hadn’t been so clouded, maybe she would have considered that part of the reason she kept drawing Ezra into a fight was because something inside of her still sparked around him. But she didn’t see any of this then because that would have been a progression toward clarity, and no one finds clarity from a concussion. “And I told Mimi I wouldn’t gamble again,” Ezra added. “And even if she’s not here, I still keep my promises.” The intimation was there:unlike you.But he was still tap-dancing around confrontation, so he added, just as a buffer, “I mean, it’s not her fault her flight got canceled because of a storm.”
And Frankie, not thinking clearly and not at all appreciative of his intimation, said: “Or maybe she just didn’t want to be blindsided by a proposal she wasn’t ready for.”
There. She had said it. And as soon as she had, she knew it was cruel; she knew that if she had the chance, she would retract it and bottle it up and send it out to sea.
