9

Ezra Pierce’s apartment, Hell’s Kitchen

Ezra invited me over for lunch later the following week—which meant I left messages with the front desk of his building until he finally called me back at two in the afternoon on a Monday.

“You’re worse than the IRS,” he snapped before I could even ask who was calling. “Come over tomorrow at one.”

I smiled, smug with victory. “Anything I should bring?”

“I’m low on good booze,” Ezra said, and hung up.

The next afternoon at ten to one, I stood on Ezra’s doormat and held out a bottle of his preferred cognac fresh from the shop around the corner. “Tell me about the festival in New Mexico,” I demanded.

Ezra took the bottle and gestured with it to invite me over the threshold. “Hello to you, too.”

He shut the door behind us and took my hat first, then my jacket. He peered at the lining as he hung it up. “Is this new?”

“I have more time to shop these days,” I said.

“With whose money?”

“Yours,” I said, kissing him hello. “By way of Wesley’s wallet.”

Ezra led the way to the kitchen, where he’d set a spare but quality spread of cold meats and cheeses. He didn’t have a dining room, nor did he ever have need for one as a flighty, terminal bachelor—and even if he had, the space in it would just have been taken up by more books. What Ezra lacked in meaningful human companionship, he made up for in volumes of novels, biographies, bound plays, loose folios, and stacks upon stacks of ancient sheet music for the upright piano tucked into the corner by the only visible window. The young men he fancied only ever saw him as a stepping-stone to the next rung of the show business ladder, but Ezra’s true love was literature. He was never terribly wounded when his young men moved on, for there was always another book.

I sat in the chair Ezra pulled out for me. He uncorked the bottle and poured mine first.

“It was Bishop who spilled, I presume,” he said lightly.

“She does tend to be the most reliable source of news.”

Ezra poured his own glass and sipped with a tight frown. “The old adage used to be that one should only fill her teakettle with secrets if her spout was too distracted by another chorus girl.”

“So it’s supposed to be a secret?” I hummed. I began to serve myself, starting in on a delicate rosette of pastrami.

“It’s supposed to be a very intimate gathering.”

I frowned as I paused in the middle of spooning capers onto my plate. “Ezra, Wesley and I are married.”

“A tabby to a terrier.”

“I would have found out.”

Ezra shrugged, blowing off the fact like unwanted input on his casting decisions. “They’ll be getting paid.”

“Is it some barn-in-the-woods shit that nobody’s going to come to?”

“Concern yourself only with the fact that Wesley will be coming home with more cash than you’ve seen all year,” Ezra said. “You can buy as many chic blazers as you’d like.”

I flattened a look at him across the table. “I just want to understand what he would be getting himself into.”

Ezra regarded me coolly and took a slow sip. His plate was empty. “Are you his keeper, or his agent?”

“Is there a difference?”

“What’s a wife, if not both?”

I snorted. “I don’t make commission.”

“The jacket begs to differ.”

I looked at him until his eyes began to sparkle with mischief. “It’s a favor,” Ezra admitted, embittered by the performance of his weakness against my obstinance.

“When is it not. To whom?” I asked.

“An old colleague.”

“You have colleagues in New Mexico?”

“I do have a private life, you know.”

I raised my eyebrows at the water cracker onto which I’d folded a piece of Swiss cheese. “An enigma, I’m sure.”

Ezra held out his plate for the slab of roast beef I offered him. “One of my lenders is calling in a very old IOU,” he said.

“To do what?”

“He’s in need of a theater troupe, and the compensation is obscenely good for three months of work regurgitating Titus Andronicus for a parvenu in the desert.”

I made a face at the tabletop. “Nobody does Titus.”

“Exactly.”

I watched Ezra assemble a small plate. “You’ve signed the company up to do your dirty work,” I said. Ezra gave me a tired look.

“Don’t be crass. It’s just work.”

“Looks the same from here.”

Ezra propped his elbows on the table and leaned his chin on one hand. He peered at me, cataloging, and said nothing for several long seconds. I chewed uneasily.

“What?” I finally muttered, reaching for a small dish of pitted olives.

“How are you feeling lately? I forgot to ask.”

“Don’t. Not unless you’re going to give me my job back.”

Ezra looked vaguely impressed. “The Sumner outfit isn’t dangerous. You don’t have to worry about Wesley.”

I snorted. “Outfit! What are they, cowboys?”

“Near enough.” He popped an olive into his mouth and stared at my hands, briefly distant, before he resigned to some inward faltering. “If you must know, Margaret, I promise you nobody will get into trouble. My lender is in hot water and appeasing someone higher up the ladder—think of it like a summer season in the Hamptons, being put up by rich patrons.”

I cast him a doubtful look. “Of course, the Hamptons—famously located in the desert.”

Ezra smirked. “They’ll all have a lovely time with the coyotes, I’m sure.”

We finished the rest of the lunch with the usual chatter—who’s-whos, what’s-whats, and did-you-hears in surplus—and I tucked away all my questions about exactly what kind of man it was whose pockets Ezra had gotten himself into; deep down, somewhere in the marrow of the years before Richmond, I already knew the type.

I had met loads of them at Mr. Matthews’s church once he married Mama, where they shook his hand after service and accepted thick envelopes from Mr. Matthews at his rectory desk. They were well-dressed men with shiny shoes and nice cars, and they always chucked my chin as they passed me, bent over my Bible at the edge of the room after I helped count the money. She’s gonna be awful pretty, they’d call over their shoulders as they left, ain’t she, Charlie?

I took the stairs back to the ground floor of Ezra’s building after lunch and stopped in the privacy of the second floor landing to steal down a sniff of powder.

In the lobby, lined with long mirrors to throw the shapes of us in hundreds of shivering figures, Lady Macbeth walked beside me through my periphery on my way back out to the street.

I caught her gaze. She smiled at me. I ducked around the corner into the mail room, where the reflective wall gave way but a small mirror hung above the outgoing postbox. The Lady stood at my shoulder, giving me an appraising look through the glass.

“What do you want?” I whispered sharply. The Lady raised her thick, dark brows.

“You were me, for a time. You tell me,” she said, her voice like clattering river stones.

I glanced over my shoulder to ensure I was alone and drew closer to the mirror with my voice dropped low. “I was acting. You aren’t real.”

The Lady looked impassive. She wasn’t buying it. “What I want is the same thing you always have.”

“And what would that be?”

She smiled. Every angle of her face came alive with smug conviction. “Power.”

I turned from the mirror and hurried out to the street. I focused not on the chill of the word—Power, sticking to the back of my neck, echoing through the heart of me—and stepped into the glittering sun.

Summer was coming. I would face it fully, on my own terms.

---

◆ ◆ ◆

After hounding the truth out of Ezra, I watched Wesley move through the ensuing week without saying a word about it. I didn’t want to come off as the helpless, mewling damsel who always needed her husband near, so I was patient. I waited for the right moment.

I wanted to go with him. I needed a break from routine, to spend time with the company again. But the last thing I intended to be was dead weight on his career. I had to be tactful.

Wesley approached the den on his next free afternoon looking charged, driven by a fretting anxiousness. “Did you have plans for dinner?”

I looked up from my book. I had worked my way twice through Wesley’s collection of crime serials. He liked stories about jaded, gray-moraled heroes with strong jawlines and very specific taste in women, so by proxy now I did as well.

“Takeout,” I suggested. “Any preference?”

“I was rather thinking we could go see a show somewhere.”

He was bursting with a sharp energy of the unsaid. I stood and took my time smoothing my skirt. “Sure. I could wear that new shirtdress.”

Wesley put his hands in his pockets. “I was hoping a little more…to-do, than a shirtdress?”

“You want to go out, out?”

“Why not? It’s been a little while.”

He looked sheepish, but his eyes were full of nervous hope.

“Give me an hour,” I said, closing the book and brushing past to kiss him on the cheek.

“Two hours it is,” he sallied over his shoulder as I made for the closet.

I exhumed a magenta A-line I hadn’t worn since before we got married and a pair of mostly matching silk gloves. I laid them out on the bed to stare at the empty shape waiting to be occupied by a body, and frowned—Schrödinger’s savoir faire, both myself and not at once.

“Chin up, woman,” I grumbled, and slipped into the bathroom to tease some life back into my hair.

We left the apartment just over an hour later, with no small amount of self-satisfaction from me.

Wesley helped me out of the cab to the curb outside of the Stork Club. He led us down to the good seats inside, deep in the roar of a crowd at full bray.

“You didn’t have to splurge,” I muttered at his ear, as he pulled out my chair for me.

“Who said I splurged?” he muttered back, and pointedly shared a thankful look with the waiter setting a fresh tea candle on the table between us.

“If there’s anything at all I can do for you tonight,” the waiter chirped, “don’t hesitate to let me know.”

Wesley tried to slip him a ten, which the waiter smoothly slipped right back into Wesley’s breast pocket as he moved to the next table. I dug a cigarette from my purse and held it out for a light.

The performance tonight featured a few newer talents. Wesley and I ordered drinks and food as the show began, and we dished about what we did and didn’t like in low voices between each act—someone’s sense of timing in the band was off; the dancer with the stoned tights had the tiniest waist either of us had ever seen; the comedian who came on after the dancer with the heart-shaped pasties put himself across as everyone’s favorite gentleman, but off the stage he was an absolute dog with a penchant for dope; we both had stories about him.

I was enjoying myself. Thank God. I missed picking apart a production with Wesley. It had been a long time since I’d felt so comfortable in public.

Amid the applause at the end of the first act, the crowd still laughing at Chap’s last quip about tipping the waitstaff, I realized I couldn’t remember the last time I’d scratched my arms to ribbons.

The lights went up for intermission. Wesley smiled at me with a moony grin I hadn’t seen from him in months. The surprise of its reappearance made me return it reflexively. “What?” I asked, halfway laughing.

“I missed this,” Wesley admitted. He reached across the table and took my hand. “It’s nice.”

I hid in a sip of my drink. “Sorry I’ve been a drip lately.”

Wesley waved off the idea and leaned back in his seat. He lit a fresh smoke for himself, offering the flame before he doused it. I demurred and smiled at him again, more subtly. He peered at the empty stage, awash in the sound of the milling crowd again. As usual, Wesley wasn’t going to be the first to broach an uncomfortable truth.

I waited until he tapped out the cigarette. “I know about the summer contract, Wes.”

He set off into a minor coughing fit. “What?”

“The new company, the job in the desert. Edie told me. Are you taking it?”

Wesley wiped at the watery corners of his eyes. “Damn it,” he wheezed. “Well, I’m not sure.”

“You love Titus, and nobody ever does it these days. You’ll kick yourself if you don’t go.”

Wesley peered at me strangely across the table. I leveled a look at him.

“I would have found out eventually,” I said.

“I know. I just—well.”

“Well, what? It’s money, and apparently a lot of it. Why even think twice?” I sipped from the shallow dish of my martini glass and watched Wesley, who seemed to squirm lightly under the scrutiny.

“I want to be very…careful,” Wesley said with clear evenness, “not to jar you. You’ve been doing so much better lately, really moving in a—a good direction, and I don’t want to disrupt that.”

“And that’s very sweet of you. But you know what would help more than worrying about me?” I looked pointedly at Wesley, who returned the look. “An obscene amount of money.”

Wesley snorted. “It is obscene.” He fussed with the lay of his jacket lapels. “And I’m not worrying about you, I’m looking after you.”

“Same thing.”

“Patently not.”

I shook my head. “I want to come with you.”

Wesley stared at me. He ground his back teeth ever so slightly, the angle of his jaw bending.

“Is that really what you want, Jack?”

I turned the foot of my glass around atop the tablecloth and managed not to look away from him—those bright, quick eyes of his weren’t difficult to look at, but the gravity of them watching me with such keenness woke a fire in my core.

Power.

“I need some time outside the city,” I said. “I haven’t had an open space to…relearn how to breathe since this whole business started. I want to come with you.”

Wesley’s gaze softened. The tenderness worked in between my organs like a knife. I looked away.

“If it’s not possible,” I amended, “if the director is stingy, that’s fine. I only—”

“No, you’re right. It isn’t fair. It hasn’t…been fair.” Wesley turned his hand over, palm-up under mine. “Of course you’ll come. I’ll make it happen.”

I sent him a conspiring smirk and hooked the edges of our thumbs together. “Are you sure I won’t be invading on your plans for a sordid summer fling?”

“Just look the other way if you don’t think he’s handsome enough.”

Wesley stood up and held me close by the waist for an extra moment when I rose to make for the ladies’ room, passing behind his chair. I kissed him in keeping on the cheek.

“We’ll figure it out, Jack,” he murmured low at my ear.

“I don’t doubt us for a second,” I mock-whispered, and went to fix my face before the second act.

I slipped into a stall to draw out my powder and take a quick sniff, to assure myself I could get through the rest of the evening without any hiccups. I avoided looking at my scar as I pulled off my glove, like an old acquaintance crossing on the opposite side of the street with whom I had nothing of substance to talk about any longer.

I flushed after shutting my purse again, just to keep up appearances.

A small gaggle of women were gathered at the mirror. We said nice things about one another’s dresses and jewelry and hair, and when I was the only one left primping, I looked around to make sure I was alone before smiling a glittery practice smile at my reflection.

It looked happy. I looked happy.

As I turned away to leave, the briefest flash at the corner of the mirror clung to my periphery—the feeling of being watched, sized up from a distance through my own reflection.

Power.

I returned to the table as the lights went low once more. Wesley took my hand with the band’s wailing introduction, and as the curtain flew upward, he kissed my palm.

A feeling of falling very slowly plummeted through me at once. It was nothing. Only the powder hitting.

I settled in to watch the rest of the show. By the time we were standing backstage with Chap and a few of the dancers, sharing some hash and listening to Chap tell the stories the owner of the club wouldn’t let him tell onstage anymore since he got slapped with a nasty fine, I was entirely apart from myself. Wesley’s arm was around my shoulders. He was solid and warm, and we were going to go on an adventure together. I could be there. I could support him. It wouldn’t hurt me at all.

I looked over at him and smiled, the one I had practiced earlier in the mirror, and loved myself when he smiled right back.