13. Frankie
Frankie
My notes app has a new section which is a problem.
It sits right under STOLEN and it’s called ROSTER, and it exists because I have spent three weeks embedded in a professional hockey team the way war correspondents embed, except with better catering, and a novelist dropped into a locker room ecosystem does what novelists do. She tags the wildlife.
Karlsson: himbo with hidden depths. Reads Proust on the charter inside a Sports Illustrated. Do not blow his cover.
Sully: class clown, dad energy, would die for any of them, deflects with bits exactly like somebody else I know, do not examine.
Rory: cinnamon roll, golden retriever, the only person alive with no subtext. Writing him would be like writing a sunbeam.
Micah: the sentinel. Brooding keeper archetype, knows where every body is buried because he dug. DO NOT ENGAGE. He reads you back.
Marisa: the wife who runs the actual franchise. Spin-off potential: enormous.
Research. That’s the word I’ve stapled over the door of this entire month.
I’m around the team because the contract requires visibility, and I take notes because I’m a writer and the world is material, and if my embed has produced forty times more affection than journalism, that’s between me and the app.
The other manuscript is the bigger tattletale.
Because I do still have a contracted book, the one from before my life became a broadcast, due in ninety days, a perfectly nice enemies-to-lovers about a restaurateur named Dominic.
I know exactly who Dominic is. I built him over the summer: Italian, expansive, talks with his whole body, the anti-Beau, a man made specifically out of not-thinking-about-anyone.
And I opened the file this week to discover that Dominic has, in my absence, gone quiet and enormous.
Dominic now answers questions with four words.
Dominic stands very still when the kitchen catches fire.
In Tuesday’s pages, Dominic, an Italian chef, muttered something in French, and on Wednesday, I swear before God and my editor, Dominic looked at a burnt risotto and thought, in his own point of view, that it had lied to everyone.
I sat at the Pines and stared at that sentence for a long time.
“So kill it,” Cami says, when I read it to her across the booth, because I read her everything, that’s the whole arrangement: hash browns and full disclosure. “Cut the line. Fix the chef.”
“I can’t fix the chef. I’ve fixed the chef four times. He heals wrong. He keeps coming back six-two with a bad hip.”
“Frankie.”
“It’s cross-contamination. It’s a hazard of proximity, it’s like when you work at a bakery and everything you own smells like—” I stop, because her glasses are coming off, and the glasses coming off is the diner equivalent of the seatbelt sign.
Cami folds them, sets them on the table between us like a gavel, and looks at me with a dozen years of friendship and zero available exits.
“You didn’t write a stranger,” she says.
Flat. Gentle. The worst combination. “Eighteen months ago you wrote four hundred pages in six weeks about a man you knew for one night, and I watched you do it, and I told myself, okay, that’s grief with a word count.
But I’ve now watched you around the actual man, Frankie.
At the game. On my phone, in the pictures, in the video some teenager took of you two outside the practice rink where nobody knew you were being filmed.
You didn’t write a stranger, babe. You wrote a man you love.
Past tense the day you typed chapter one.
Present tense at this table, right now, with your thumbnail halfway to your teeth. ”
My thumbnail is halfway to my teeth. I put my hand in my lap like it belongs to someone else.
“It’s research,” I say.
“Sweetheart. You have never once researched anything you could instead invent. You wrote three books set in Portugal sight unseen. You gave a duke a fictional disease rather than google a real one, and the disease trended.” She leans in.
“You’re at hockey practice, Frankie. Voluntarily.
It’s December, the rink is a meat locker, and you sit there with your little coffee, watching a man skate in circles, glowing. ”
“The circles are tactical.”
“You’re glowing about the tactical circles.”
“Everyone glows in cold weather, that’s just circulation—” and I hear it as it leaves me, the deflection arriving a half beat early, laughing on the wrong side of the sentence, every tell I own firing at once, and Cami, who has read every draft of me since we were nineteen, doesn’t even bother to smile.
She just waits, both of us listening to the echo, and the diner clatters on around the crater.
“Okay,” I say. Quietly. To the Formica. “Okay.”
“Okay,” she says, and puts her glasses back on, and mercifully, because she’s the best of us, flags the waitress for pie and changes the subject to her sister’s divorce, while she lets the true thing sit there between us. Not defused. Named. Present tense at this table.
***
Nick flies back from a three-game swing that night, and here is where I’d normally schedule the moment for maximum genre efficiency: the airport reunion, the rain, the run.
Instead, what happens is he texts: up? from the tarmac like a college sophomore, and forty minutes later he’s standing in my doorway at eleven p.m. in travel clothes with his garment bag still over his shoulder, gray-templed and hollowed out, three time zones deep in exhaustion, no appearance scheduled, no camera within miles, nothing to sell to anyone.
“Hi,” he says. “Ignore me. I just—” and he doesn’t finish it, per the house style.
I make tea he won’t drink. He sits on my couch, a life-size man in a quarter-size apartment, and asks about my day, and I tell him about Dominic’s risotto but not about what Cami took off her glasses to say, and somewhere in the middle of my sentence, between one clause and the next, Nico Lachance falls asleep on my couch.
Mid-sentence. Mine, not his. Head back, mouth soft, hands finally still, three hundred games of tape running behind his eyelids, asleep in a fourth-floor walk-up furnished in cat hair and old paperbacks, with his knee against my knee.
And then Fabio, who has hated every man to enter this apartment on principle, and on one occasion drew blood on a UPS driver, gets up from the windowsill, crosses the room on his three legs with the gravity of a papal procession, and installs himself on Nico Lachance’s chest.
The cat looks at me. I look at the cat. Neither of us narrates.
I sit there for an hour, my tea going cold, a professional author of romantic moments in the presence of the least constructed one I’ve ever witnessed, and I do not take a photo, and I do not take a note, and my fingers itch for Sharon the whole time, but I win, barely, on points.
But I memorize it. I can’t not. The weight of his knee.
The sound of a man breathing who doesn’t breathe carefully anywhere else.
The little furnace of a cat rising and falling on his sternum.
It goes into the permanent collection, the one I can’t delete, the one that doesn’t sync to any cloud, and I understand, watching him sleep, what I actually confessed at the diner today with my hand in my lap.
Research concludes. Findings as follows: the woman is in love with the subject. The woman has been in love with the subject for eighteen months and two chapters of third-person deniability. Recommend immediate—
Recommend nothing. I don’t have a recommendation.
For the first time in twelve years, I am in a story I cannot outline, and the not-knowing, which should be my whole nightmare, feels instead like being handed a book I have never read and wanting, for once in my life, to start at page one. Awake in every cell.
He wakes at one, all at once, the way athletes do, and stares at my ceiling for a moment like it owes him an itinerary. Then he finds my face, and winces.
“Tell me I didn’t snore.”
“Like a Zamboni.”
“Lie to me.”
“You snored beautifully. Fabio wept.” The cat has already decamped to the bookcase to pretend none of it happened.
He scrubs a hand down his face, sits up, and surveys the evidence: the dead tea, the blanket I apparently put over him at some point and will be denying forever, the notebook on the arm of my chair. His eyes stop on the notebook. “You watched me sleep and took notes.”
“I did not take notes.” I itched to take notes. “I conducted observational research. There’s a difference. It’s methodological.”
“Research.” He says the word slowly, turning the alibi over in his mouth. He’s rumpled and sleep-creased and three time zones deep, and something about one a.m. has burned off every careful thing he usually does with his face. “Okay. Interview me, then.”
“What?”
“You’re embedded. I’m awake. Ask.”
So I pick up the notebook, because a woman holding a notebook is a woman in control of the situation, and I begin, very professionally.
Pregame meal: salmon, the chicken and he have history.
Superstition: left skate first, twenty-five years, it has never once helped.
Most overrated virtue in a teammate: speed.
Most underrated: showing up early. He answers with his head back against my couch and his eyes half closed, and I write down every third thing, because the interview has a second track running underneath it and we can both hear it.
“What do you notice first about a person?” I ask.
“Hands.” His eyes open. They land on mine, on the pen. “Yours were white on an armrest, eighteen months ago. First thing I ever knew about you.”
The pen stops. “That’s— you can’t just say things like that in an interview.”
“Ask a safer question, then.”
I do not ask a safer question. “What would you do right now, if there were no rules?”