Chapter 4 #2
Before he could find a deflection, the headset woman reclaimed Malcolm — Mr. Reeves, two minutes — and off he went, with a backward look Frankie felt somewhere structural, and Frankie was alone again with a drink he hadn't ordered and a theory in ruins.
"So you're the dog man."
Frankie turned. A sharp woman in her fifties had appeared at his elbow, silver bob, a martini she clearly wasn't going to spill on anyone, eyes doing the fast expensive math he recognized because he did it too.
"I groom dogs, yeah. Frankie."
"Renata. I sell his films so he can afford to make ones like tonight's.
" She sipped. "Which nobody will buy, God help him.
Eleven minutes about a laundromat. I could kill him.
" But she said kill him the way you say it about someone you'd take a bullet for, and Frankie clocked that too.
"He's been different this week. Distracted.
Keeps disappearing to the east end." She looked at Frankie over the rim of the glass, not unkind, just accurate. "You're the east end."
"I'm the east end," Frankie agreed.
"He flies home Sunday," Renata said. Light.
Pleasant. A woman laying a fact on the table like a card, face up, so nobody could say later they hadn't seen it.
"Big meeting Monday. Whole slate. His actual life.
" A small shrug. "I only mention it because he's a good man who gets attached, and good men who get attached on location tend to leave a mess behind them they don't have to clean up. Since they leave."
Sunday. Not "end of the festival," some comfortable abstract week-ish away that he'd been careful not to count. Sunday. Three days.
"Thanks for the mess warning," Frankie said, and his voice came out cool and level, the shop voice, the one he used on people who wanted him to feel small in his own body. "I'm real good at not being a mess. It's kind of my whole thing."
Renata studied him another second, then — unexpectedly — something in her face softened, like she'd come over intending to dislike him and hadn't quite managed it.
"He made that laundromat film against every piece of advice I gave him," she said, quieter, apropos of nothing.
"Threw his own money at eleven minutes that will never earn it back.
And it's the best thing he's ever made — and he's lighter this week than I've seen him in years, and I've known him fifteen.
" She let that land. "So maybe I'm wrong about the mess.
I'm usually not. But maybe." She lifted her martini a half inch, a toast to nothing.
"For whatever that's worth. Which, down here, tonight, isn't much. "
Then she drifted off to go sell something to someone, and left Frankie standing there holding two facts that refused to sit together and a drink he no longer wanted.
***
He found the exit to the rooftop because he needed air that didn't have three hundred people's cologne in it, and he'd been out there maybe ninety seconds — the city spread out cold and enormous, the CN Tower doing its slow color change like it had nowhere to be — when the door opened behind him and he didn't have to turn around to know.
"You found the good spot," Malcolm said, coming to the rail beside him. Close. Not touching. Just close. "I've been in that room forty minutes and said nothing I'll remember."
"You said a lot of things. I watched. You're very good at it."
"That's not a compliment, the way you say it."
"It wasn't an insult either." Frankie kept his eyes on the skyline.
His pulse was doing something undignified and he was choosing to blame the elevation.
"Your movie was good. That's the thing I actually came out here to not say to you, and now I've said it, so.
There. It was good. It was — you saw her.
The laundromat lady. You actually saw her. "
Malcolm was quiet a second. "Yeah," he said. "That's the whole job. Seeing the person everybody's decided not to look at."
And then he turned, and Frankie turned, and they were close, closer than the rail required, and Malcolm was looking at him with none of the room-warmth left on his face — just the still, direct, private version, the one Frankie was starting to understand was the real one — and his eyes went down to Frankie's mouth and back up, unhurried, deliberate, a man reading the last line of something.
Up close he smelled like cedar and cold air and, faintly, underneath, the blueberry finishing spray off Nigel's coat — which must have gotten onto everything Malcolm owned — and Frankie found that unbearable in both directions at once: that this beautiful downtown man was standing on a rooftop full of buyers smelling very slightly of Frankie's shop.
Frankie's whole body went quiet. The way it did over a frightened animal. That low frequency below hurry.
Don't, said the soundproofed voice, weakly. Three days. Sunday. You know how this—
Malcolm's hand came up, slow, and his knuckles just barely found the edge of Frankie's jaw, and Frankie — God help him — leaned into it a half degree, tipped his chin the smallest fraction, the whole of him narrowing to the two inches of cold air still left between them—
"There you are." The rooftop door banged. Renata's voice, brisk, apologetic and not apologetic at all. "Malcolm. Halveson's leaving and he wants to say goodbye to you specifically, which is a miracle, and if you're not down there in ninety seconds it un-happens."
The two inches became a mile.
Malcolm's hand dropped. He didn't step back — Frankie gave him that — but something in him went back on duty, the machine of the evening reaching out again to reclaim him, and Frankie watched it happen in real time: the still private face resurfacing into the warm public one, because there was a buyer, and a slate, and an actual life, and a plane on Sunday.
"I'll be right there," Malcolm said to Renata, but he was looking at Frankie.
"Go," Frankie said. Easy. Cool. Already stepping back, already reaching for the good jacket's armor, already — because this was the thing he was best at, the only thing, the thing he'd rebuilt himself around — leaving before he could be left.
"Go close your deal. That's your actual life, right? Go."
Something crossed Malcolm's face. But Halveson was leaving, and ninety seconds was ninety seconds, and Frankie had just handed him the door with a smile on, and Malcolm — reasonable, warm, plane-having Malcolm — took it.
The rooftop door shut behind him.
For one second Frankie let himself feel the whole ridiculous size of it — the wanting, up on a roof he had no business being on, in a jacket that was wrong for the room, with three days on the clock and a plane at the end of them.
Then he did the thing he was built to do.
He folded it up small and put it somewhere it couldn't reach him, the way you'd fold and put away a knife.
Frankie stood alone at the rail with the cold city and his own hammering pulse and the exact ghost of two knuckles along his jaw, and thought, with the bottomless calm of a man who has just confirmed something he already knew:
See. Told you. That's how this ends.
He did not believe himself even a little, which was new, and so much worse.