Page 8 of The Naughty Ex

"You produce your life, Gregory. It's not a career, it's a condition, and it has never once gotten you anything but trouble." Ice cubes, tinkling in a glass somewhere in the hills. "I'll bet you're in the car and you've got Martin driving you in circles. Martin. Is he making you drive in circles?"

I looked up. Martin, in the mirror, declined to incriminate me, which was itself incriminating.

"He'd never betray me," I murmured.

"Greg." The bandage again, softer now, something pleading sliding in underneath it. "I'm going to say the thing, and I need you to actually hear it and not file it under obstacles, act one. Blaine is not okay. He hasn’t been okay for two years. He has simply gotten extremely good at acting okay, which is a different thing, and you of all people on this earth know it's a different thing." A pause. "This Steven. He's—" a careful beat, a man choosing between two loyalties "—he's safe. He's a man Blaine cannot be hurt by, because there's nothing in there to do the hurting. And I think Blaine knows it. I think that's the reason, not the obstacle. And if you come crashing into that meadow with some enormous—"

"I'm not going to crash into anything."

"—some enormous gesture, some Gregory Normand three-act blockbuster with a rooftop climax and a needle drop, you’re going to blow a hole in the one arrangement keeping Blaine sane. And hasn't he—"

And here the low voice went all the way through. Cracked clean down the middle. And Lance said the thing. The thing that should have stopped me, and didn't.

"Hasn't Blaine been through enough? Because of you? Hasn't he been through enough?"

The car was quiet. Martin drove. The 405 was a parking lot in slow motion, four hundred thousand people going nowhere at eleven miles an hour, and I sat there with my ex-husband's ruined announcement in my lap and my best friend's voice breaking in my ear, and I understood with total clarity that he was right about every part of it.

"You're right," I said.

"Oh, thank God. I thought I was going to have to—"

"You're completely right, and I'm going to do it anyway, and I need your help."

"Gregory!"

"Not to crash it. I would never crash it. Crashing is crude, Lance, and I'm a professional." I was leaning forward now, feeling alive in the specific way I had not felt in two years, blood moving, the whole machine coming back online. "I need to be near it. I need a reason to be at that compound that Harold and Rhoda can't say no to. That's all. I get in the door legitimately, and then I don't do a single thing — I just let Blaine look at me. In daylight. Sober. For the first time in two years. And if he looks at me and feels nothing, I'll go. I swear to you on Mabel's ring. I will dance at the wedding, and I will leave."

There was a silence on the other end that I have thought about a great deal since.

Because here's a thing about Lance Hayworth that I understood then and did not think about for one second longer than it took to have the thought: he has never had to do this. Chase anybody. Argue anybody out of a doorway. Eleven years I've known him, and in eleven years I have never once seen that man want something that didn't simply arrive, dressed and grateful, at his house.

He was the most beloved actor in America and he had absolutely no idea what I was talking about.

"Rhoda Cauthorne says no to just about everybody, and you know it," he said finally. "That woman once told a sitting senator his aura was grabby."

"So what does she say yes to?"

"Nothing. She says yes to nothing. She says yes to—"

And Lance stopped. He stopped the way you stop when you have stepped on something soft in the dark.

"No," he said.

"Tell me."

"No. I didn't say anything. I don't even know why I—"

"Lance Everett Hayworth. What does Rhoda Cauthorne say yes to?"

And I heard it then. The precise sound of a man realizing that in trying to talk me back from the fire, he has handed me the match.

"She loves a healer," Lance said faintly, probably hating himself in real time, unable to stop the words now that they were moving. "This season it's energy. Frequencies. Greg, she's got some man doing her chakras over Zoom from Sedona. She made Harold buy a Tibetan gong. And the Zoom man got exposed last month for also selling supplements, so now she won't stop talking about finding a truly authentic practitioner, and she has been searching, she's been telling everybody she's searching, she wants a real one, a pure one, a—" He stopped again. "Oh my God. Oh my God, I can hear you smiling. Stop smiling. Gregory. Gregory, I can hear it—"

"Martin," I said. "Take us somewhere they do improv. The Groundlings. Somewhere with a black box and a two-drink minimum. I need to hire an actor."

"GREGORY!"

"I love you, Lance." And I meant it entirely. "You've been so helpful."