“That’s okay,” Chantal said, adding, coyly, “So what’s behind Door Number One?”
Clive offered a half-coherent explanation about logistics that were causing him grief. Something about how you should never put your fate in other people’s hands when they have their wallet in yours. I could tell he was lying about something. But Chantal dropped it. Just like that, she turned a dewy cheek. I could see what it was he saw in her. She knew when to tease him, when to compliment him, how to parse out her own upset so that he listened when a crisis arose but never felt the burden of girlfriend maintenance. I had no faucet like that, not with Clive, not with Boots, not with anyone. It was a point of pride. It had also never gotten me what I wanted, not once.
As we walked back toward the entrance, Vadis feigning interest as Chantal explained how she lost followers every time she appeared to be “taken,” Clive hung back with me and whispered.
“Who’d you see?”
“Knox.”
“The guy who decked you?”
“That’s Phillip.”
“I always liked Phillip.”
“You would. Knox is the librettist with mommy issues.”
“Oh, right. We won an ASME for that issue.”
“Clive.”
“Anyway, we have a teensy problem. But maybe it’s a good problem. And maybe not so teensy. Entirely up to you.”
“You say ‘free will’ and I swear to God, I will slap you in a synagogue.”
“I’m getting some pushback from a couple of key investors.”
“What’s their problem? Aside from a stunning lack of moral instinct.”
“I—we—may have bitten off a tad more funding than we’re prepared to chew on the projected timeline, so we need to press pause before we can explore another round of packages.”
“What do you need rounds of funding for?”
He arched his back like he wanted to crack it.
“They just want to see more proof that this is working. Money people have no vision, you know this. You thought the magazine biz was bad? Try the real world.”
“I never thought it was a ‘biz.’”
“Anyway. The idea was that the Classic would be like a man blizzard. Like the painting. Your life imitating art. An exquisite corpse of sorts.”
“A corpse of sorts?”
“But we gotta step on it a bit. Or step off it, rather. We’re gonna have time for exactly one more subject.”
“What does that mean?”
“Only one more Lola lovah!”
Clive started to strut down the hall, calling after Chantal. But I lunged for him, grabbing at his jacket. He moved like he was shaking off a beggar, surveying the material for signs of disruption.
“Clive!”
“I thought you’d be relieved. You’re not even part of this, remember?”
“I—I am relieved. I just thought the point of this was that I was supposed to have time to come to terms with the past. What if I’m not, like, cooked? What if it, I don’t know, grows back?”
“I don’t know what to tell you. Cook faster? You want to be done before your fiancé gets back. Which is when?”
“Two days from now.”
“Well, my advice would be to take a night off anyway. Your package is almost complete. And you don’t look so good.”
Did I feel the completeness of my package? I planned to tell Boots about approximately none of this, to put it in a box as Willis had done with me and as I had done with the ephemera of every single man I’d ever dated. I could do it. I could lie about these weeks for the rest of my life, about how they’d made my head spin and only managed to confuse me more than I was before I started. I envisioned myself as a ballerina on a stage in the moments after a performance; her chest moves like a hummingbird but she conceals all other evidence of her effort.
“It’s not my fault,” Clive continued, “that you’ve dated, like, a billion people.”
“Sometimes I think it is.”
He looked wounded. Clive’s eyes inspired an assumption of soulfulness the same way the weight of his hand on a shoulder gave off an air of empathy. But these were physical traits that had little to do with his actual personality.
“You can be a real piece of shit, you know that?”
“And yet,” he said. “And yet.”
Chantal stopped ahead of us. She called to Clive, waving her phone in the air like a flare. A car was waiting for them outside so we all filed out, gingerly, through the rotted chamber of the lobby. The atmosphere made it feel like we were a team, but we were a team only from here to the door. Chantal tiptoed past her bottle of coconut water but did not pick it up. Vadis and I watched her fold herself into the car, tucking the light load of her legs inside while Clive went around.