Chapter 7
Final Cut
The good news came at eleven on Sunday morning, which was the problem, because good news was supposed to feel good.
Malcolm stood in his room at the Wardell with the phone to his ear and his suitcase open on the bed like an accusation, and listened to Renata be happier than he'd heard her in years.
"Two buyers, Malcolm. Two. The Odessa thing screened for eleven minutes and now I've got two serious people circling, and one of them wants to talk about the feature — the Macon feature, the one you've been too scared to say out loud for three years — they want to talk about financing it.
Monday. In the room. Everybody who matters is going to be in that room Monday and they are going to be talking about your film.
" A pause, and then, gentler, because she'd known him fifteen years and could hear a silence the way he could read a face: "This is the thing, Malcolm.
This is the whole thing you flew up here hoping for and didn't let yourself want. It's happening. Get on the plane."
"I'm getting on the plane," Malcolm said. "Car's booked for six."
"Good. Because this — the momentum, the buzz, it's got a shelf life measured in days, and it lives down here, in your actual life, in the rooms where the money is.
You know that. You've built a whole career knowing that.
" A beat. "So whatever's been keeping you in the east end all week — and I'm not asking, I'm genuinely not — just. Don't let it cost you this.
You waited your whole life to want something.
Don't fumble it now that you've got it."
She meant it kindly. That was the terrible thing about Renata; she was almost always right, and she was right now, and Malcolm hung up and stood in the expensive quiet and felt the whole weight of his correct, sensible, waiting life reach up out of the phone and take hold of his ankles.
He sat down on the edge of the bed. Nigel climbed into his lap uninvited, and Malcolm rubbed the dog's ridiculous ears and tried to feel the way a man was supposed to feel when the thing he'd wanted for three years finally showed up at the door.
Buyers. A feature. His father's number, at last. It was everything.
He'd built a whole careful life to be ready for exactly this phone call.
Which made no sense of the only clear thought in his head, which was of a grooming shop twenty blocks east, and the man who'd be closing it alone tonight, and how few hours were left before Malcolm did the sensible thing and flew away from the first place he had ever, in forty-four years, felt entirely like himself.
Because here was the truth he'd been not-looking at, the way he'd spent forty-four years not looking at things: it wasn't just a plane.
It was a Monday, and a slate, and a feature that might actually happen, and a father in Atlanta who'd finally, finally have a return to point to, a number, a reason the laundromat thing hadn't been a midlife embarrassment.
It was his entire life, the one he'd built board by careful board, and it was down south, and it was good, and it was real, and it did not have a grooming shop in it.
His phone buzzed again. Not Renata this time.
Dad. He watched it ring — could hear the message before it even landed, the quiet baritone, how's the festival, son, your mother wants to know if you've come to your senses about the little movie — and he did not answer, and hated that not answering was the bravest thing he'd managed all morning.
He packed Nigel's things while the phone went dark.
The travel bed. The ridiculous harness. The chew toy shaped like a baguette that Frankie had taken one look at and pronounced "a little on the nose.
" Nigel supervised from the pillow with the grave concern of a dog who did not understand suitcases but grasped their consequences, and Malcolm found he couldn't quite handle the harness for a second — because Frankie had re-clipped it that first skunked night with quick clever hands, muttering there, monster, try not to die — and now it was going into a bag bound for Atlanta, and something about that was too large to hold at eleven in the morning.
His father had married Malcolm's mother because it was sensible, stayed fifty-one years, and called that love.
Maybe it was. Maybe that was the whole of the thing.
Be solid, son, the baritone had said his entire life.
Solid's what people can count on. Nobody ever thanked a man for being interesting.
And Malcolm had been exactly that man for forty-four years — dependable, smooth, easy to sit beside, the one who made everything simple for everyone and never once asked the loud question — right up until eleven days ago, when a French bulldog met a skunk and a copper-haired man in an apron looked at him like he was a problem worth the trouble of solving.
He zipped the bag. Six hours. He'd spend the good ones with Frankie, get on the plane a better man than he'd landed, and figure out the rest — the distance, the what next — later, from down south, once his head cleared and the momentum stopped roaring in his ears.
It was a reasonable plan. He was a reasonable man.
He rode the cab east through the Sunday-quiet city, the glass towers thinning into streetcar wire, and told himself the tightness under his ribs was just the coffee, and did not once let himself finish the thought that had started forming somewhere around Broadview — the one that went you are about to be very sensible about the best thing that ever happened to you.
He should have known better than to carry a reasonable plan into that shop.
***
Frankie was doing the rescue's demat when Malcolm came in, and he didn't look up, and something in the set of his shoulders was already wrong — already braced, already halfway gone — but Malcolm, full of good news and bad fear, read it as concentration and not what it was, which was a man who'd spent the whole night doing math and had arrived at the answer hours ago.
"Hey." Malcolm set down the coffees. "You will not believe the morning I've had.
Renata called — the short, it's — there are buyers, Frankie, two of them, and one of them wants to talk about the feature.
The Macon one. The one I've been scared of for three years.
" He heard himself, bright, breathless, a kid with a report card.
"It's happening. The whole thing. It's actually—"
"That's great." Frankie's voice was even. Warm, even. He worked a mat out of the little gray dog's flank, gentle as ever. "That's really great, Malcolm. You earned it. Told you the movie was good."
"It's because of you," Malcolm said, and meant it. "I mean it. I don't make it through this week without— I was going to hide at that festival and shake the right hands and go home, and instead I— you happened. You're all over this. You're in every good thing about this trip."
And Frankie went still over the dog. Set the comb down. And when he looked up his face was doing something Malcolm had never seen on it — not the flat guard, not the sparkle, something in between and worse, something hoping and hating itself for it.
He wiped his hands on the apron, slow, buying a second. And Malcolm watched him gather it — watched the most guarded man he had ever met wind all the way up to do the single hardest thing Malcolm had seen him do, which was want something out loud, in front of another person, on purpose.
"Okay," Frankie said, low and fast, like a man stepping off a ledge before he can talk himself down.
"Then — okay. I wasn't going to do this.
I swore I wasn't. But you're standing there saying I'm in every good thing, and you fly out in six hours, and I—" He dragged in a breath.
"Screw the rule. What if I'm not just a festival thing.
" His voice cracked right down the middle of it.
"What if you didn't have to be gone. What if we actually tried.
I don't— I'm bad at this, I haven't wanted to try anything in two years, I built a whole life out of nobody's name being next to mine on anything — and I'm standing here about to put mine next to yours anyway, which should tell you something.
" He swallowed. "That's me asking, Malcolm. Out loud. For once in my life. So."
There it was.
The door Malcolm had spent a whole week coaxing open, all the way open, the guarded man standing in it with his hands empty and his whole chest exposed, asking — Frankie, who never asked, who'd built a life around never asking — asking him.
And Malcolm wanted to say yes so badly his teeth ached with it.
He wanted to say: yes, God, yes, I'll blow the whole thing up, I'll move the feature north, I'll learn the streetcars, I'll put a photo on your wall and never take it down.
He could feel the yes right there, the unreasonable, life-detonating, gut-loud yes, the one thing he'd flown to this country to learn he was allowed to want.
For one held breath he could see the whole of it, laid out clean the way he'd lay out a budget — bringing the feature north, learning which streetcar, bad coffee in a too-small kitchen, a rescued dog in the good chair, this exact impossible man across a grooming table for years, for good, the sparkle and the wall and every hard-won inch of him.
It was right there. He could almost close his hand around it.
All he had to do was be, one time in forty-four years, a man who blew something up on purpose because he wanted what was on the other side.
And forty-four years of being the solid one reached up and closed his throat.