Toby remembers the first time he gusted into the Dragon and Bottle on a cold wind, high on his own hopes — and probably other things. He’s slowed down a considerable amount since then. Now, instead of sitting at the bar and making friends with every pretty boy who walks in, he takes up one of the dark wood booths near the back.
Zara’s face is kissed with shadows from the hurricane lamp. The waitress slaps two beers on the table and gives Toby a hug so handsy that it might be scandalous if they weren’t both quite so gay.
Toby nudges one of the pints — unnecessarily frosted on this winter night — toward the nervous girl on the other side of the booth. She looks into it like it she’s staring down a dark fate.
“Drink up, my dear,” Toby says, polishing off most of his pint in one go. He needs the oomph of courage. When he found Zara pawing through Carl’s bag, he should have told Carl straightaway.
This isn’t part of the script.
“I want to be very clear with you about something,” he says, wagging a finger at Zara. It’s his best I’m-a-wise-adult-so-you-must-listen gesture. “Carl is my greatest and truest friend. Our friendship is antediluvian. Do you know what that means? When the world flooded, Carl and I were already close.” He stops long enough to finish his pint, noting how bitter it always gets toward the end. “If you’re digging around in the hopes that you can find something bad about Carl, you’re going to be disappointed. He wanted only the best for all of us. Including Enna.”
Zara lifts her eyes — large, bitten with dark lashes. “Kestrel told me they hated each other.”
“No, no, no,” Toby says, feeling his inner pendulum swinging from sober to tipsy. It takes so little these days. “Kestrel has it backwards and upside down. Carl worshipped Enna. It hurt him so much, to see her like that.” Toby takes a long draught from Zara’s pint since she doesn’t seem interested. “I hated her sometimes.” He shouldn’t have admitted that — but oh well. No taking it back now.
The look Zara’s giving Toby is a bit strange, so he tries to explain himself. Possibly also a bad idea. “Enna was a cloud — gentle and lovely until she was storming all over you. And then there were the drugs.” Toby looks around at the bar, layering it with other nights, other people. “Enna and I used to come in here for a friendly pint or twelve, but she had stopped. Same with the pills. Xanax, Oxy — she used to gobble them like cut-rate candy. And when you go off such things, your tolerance is destroyed. Getting clean can be more dangerous than staying dirty. Enna must have had a little drink, a pill or two to relax — nothing that would have hurt her five years ago — and the way things were, it tipped her over the edge.” Another round of drinks appears. Another kiss from the sweetheart waitress. As soon as Toby and Zara are alone again, more words fly out, as if the truth is a glass he’s accidentally backhanded off the table. “In the end, what happened to Enna wasn’t really her fault.”
“What do you mean?” Zara asks.
“Oops,” Toby says, burying himself in the second drink. “I’ve said quite a lot, and I won’t say any more.”
“Toby.” Zara tugs at his name. “Please.”
He doesn’t want her to look at him with those big, bruising eyes. There’s no reason Zara shouldn’t know this — in fact, it might save her life. “Enna went off the cliff, but there was someone right behind her. Pushing.”
“Who?”
“Leopold,” Toby says evenly, to make up for his slight drunkenness. “That man is an art monster.”
Zara pushes away the second pint. She’s drinking in his words, ignoring the beer. “What does that mean?”
“An art monster is someone who gives his entire life over to creation. Leopold Henneman doesn’t give a shit about the people he uses, or the problems he creates.”
Zara is silent.
“And he’s brilliant,” Toby plows on. “We don’t think we’re supposed to stop brilliant men. We think we’re supposed to worship them. We all play our roles so well.”
Zara’s phone goes off in her pocket. She does the thing that all young people do — takes it out without worrying that Toby might feel suddenly invisible. He is just drunk enough to reach out and pluck it from her hands.
“Come back to the theater,” Toby reads from the little screen in his most dramatic voice. “I think I figured something out. Now who is this from?” He looks all over until he finds what he’s looking for.
Zara. Eli.
A smile spreads over his face, to see the names all snuggled up like that. Toby shouldn’t love this idea as much as he does — not after what happened with Michael. They used to sit at this very booth, on this very bench, hip to hip, kissing when they thought nobody was paying attention, dropping whispers into each other’s ears, drinking each other’s Dark and Stormys.
If Leopold has plans for this girl, she shouldn’t be foolish enough to fall in love. Not with another girl. Not with anyone.
But Toby doesn’t have the heart to stop it.
“Let me tell you a story,” he says. Their cramped little booth isn’t much of a stage, but it will do in a pinch. “Let’s start at the beginning. God created men and women and trees and snakes and it got very nasty for a bit. Skipping forward — I was a grocery boy here in New York. I craved the spotlight. It’s an old story. Not quite Faust. Faust’s gay cousin. Someone should have slapped me and said ‘Go back to your cabbages!’ But there are no time machines, and hindsight is a know-it-all prick.” Toby holds for a laugh, but Zara is staring at him, solemn. He rushes on. “Leopold gave me a chance. A tiny role. Which turned into a larger role, which became regular employment. Soon enough I was kissing my cabbages good-bye. And that, young lady, is not a euphemism.”
Toby runs a hand over the rough wood of the table. He wishes they could stay in the nice part of the story for a while.
“It might have been easier if Leopold thought I was out there kissing every lad in Midtown, turning myself into a scandal. But I did something worse, at least in his eyes. I fell in love.” Zara holds herself across the middle, as if those words have stabbed her in a soft place. “Leopold made it clear that this, of all things, was a conflict of interest. I couldn’t be ‘committed to the Aurelia’ if I was always running off to be with someone.”
Toby can see Zara’s breath rise in her throat and stay there. “Did you break his heart?”
“No,” Toby says. “No, I tried to keep him. And it got very nasty for a bit.” He wants to skip forward again, but this is the part of the story that Zara has been waiting for. The tragic ending.
“It was a particular time in the history of New York City, and Leopold chased away Michael by telling him — by lying — he said that I was sick.” Toby won’t use the A word. He doesn’t have to; from the frozen-eyed look on Zara’s face, she’s got that much figured out. “Apparently Michael wanted to stay, stand by me and all that. He was a good man. It’s likely he still is, somewhere. With someone else. Leopold told him that I didn’t want to see him anymore. That I . . .” Toby breathes. “That I thought it was his fault.”
Zara is staring at him, stricken.
Toby holds out the phone. He’s been keeping it hostage this whole time. He’s done what he came here to do — told her that Carl is a good man and she has nothing to worry about. Except for Leopold, of course.
“Go,” Toby says, and Zara pulls on her coat. If these two girls are really in love, he won’t be able to stop them. Nobody will. “Just take my word,” he adds. “If you have anything to hide, keep it hidden.”