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Midge gets back from tour, and everything is different.
It’s harder than she expected, to be back. She expected to feel relieved, to feel at home, but instead she feels that same stifled feeling of returning to her parents’ house she felt after Joel left, of somehow having lost. Having failed. She went on a fucking European tour with fucking Shy Baldwin, yet she’s right back where she started.
Her parents don’t want to hear about the tour, and the kids are too little to know it happened, to know anything other than the fact that Mommy left and they’re still kinda pissed about it. Zelda is sweet, of course, and happy to see her, but she’s too busy to sit around and chat, and Joel—
Well, Midge hasn’t seen much of Joel, since that night. The night. The last night. That last, stupid, selfish night. Just a few brief interactions, the kids changing hands. Him congratulating her on a successful tour, on lots of new bookings now that she’s back.
She hasn’t seen Benjamin at all. After their last conversation, her confession, her explanation, she can’t say she expects to ever again. His mother will probably be furious if he never goes back to the Catskills because of it. Midge’ll have to watch her back in the salon.
Could probably make a funny bit out of that, she thinks, but she doesn’t want to.
It’s midnight and she can’t sleep, so she gets out of bed and pulls a coat over her pajamas, shoes over her bare feet. The kids are with Joel and her parents are fast asleep, so it’s all too easy to tiptoe out the front door without detection, and then she’s just walking. Aimless, directionless, synonym-for-aim-and-direction-less.
She’s really fucking tired. She thought tour would fix that. She thought success would fix that. She thought something would fix that.
She walks far. Farther than she should, out of the neighborhood. The movement is all muscle memory, but she doesn’t let the detachment take her to any old haunts. She doesn’t need visions of her past tonight, doesn’t need visions of Joel.
She finally stops when she finally realizes her feet are starting to hurt and she’s a little freezing. She looks around and she’s in luck—an all-night diner right before her eyes, dingy and dull enough to not quite remind her of her and Joel’s place and all the things she wants to forget. She bursts through the door and plops directly onto a barstool before she has any idea who she’s plopping down next to.
“Well, well,” Lenny drawls, looking her up and down in all her messy-haired, pajama-clad state of near breakdown. “Look who’s back from Europe and already looks fresh out of prison. Who posted your bail?“
Despite herself, Midge can’t help a smile. “Oh, you know me,” she says. “No wasting time on trivialities like bail. This was a full on prison break.”
“Oh?” Lenny presses, eyebrows raising.
“Absolutely,” Midge assures with a nod, feeling the energy return to her voice as she spins the bit. “The feds are after me now, of course. They heard what I said to the Queen about—well, if I told you I’d have to kill you. But it was nothing a winning smile and a brisket won’t get me out of.”
Lenny shakes his head. “Welcome home, Midge,” he says.
He’s smirking that smirk that always tends to look more like a smile by the time he’s done with it, and she realizes she’s missed being able to just—bump into him. At bars, in clubs. At the jail, one of them newly sprung. Tour was amazing, don’t get her wrong, but—so is bumping into Lenny Bruce in shitty diners at one in the morning.
Could make a good bit about bumping into Lenny Bruce, she thinks, and dislikes herself a little.
She orders a sandwich, decides to settle in for a while, and when Lenny follows suit they move to a booth, tucked in the back corner, as if they don’t practically have the place to themselves.
She tells him about tour, about the thrill of it all, about how strange it was. He tells her about his new material, how long it’s been since he got arrested. She tells him old stories about her kids, and he tells her jokes that are too cheesy to ever make it into an act.
And they talk about…life. They keep joking, but they cover the less than funny stuff, too. Not even bad stuff, or upsetting stuff, just—the mundane. The kind of stuff you can’t spin into laughs no matter how hard you try.
They don’t run out of things to talk about, of course. They both love the sound of their own voices too much for that. But they fall into silence anyway, over crumbs on her plate and the last dregs of coffee in their mugs.
“Six months is a long time, huh?” Lenny says, and his voice is softer than she’s used to. She wants to crack a joke, to lighten the mood again, to get away from the deep end.
Not everything has to be a fucking joke, Midge, she thinks, and—
She’s not tired, she suddenly realizes. Not in the same way. She’s tired like it’s the middle of the night and she’s twenty blocks from her bed, but it isn’t quite so bone deep. Not when Lenny is making her laugh and there’s a pastrami sandwich warming up her stomach and Nat King Cole playing on the radio.
It’s nice.
“You wanna go for a walk?” she asks, and Lenny’s left brow climbs his forehead.
---
It’s been a while since Lenny’s just gone for a walk. He walks places, sure. Has destinations that he reaches via sidewalk and loafers. Midge doesn’t seem to have anywhere she wants to go, but on this trip to nowhere, she wanted him along. That’s kinda nice.
It’s been a while since he’s seen Midge, too. The last time was right before she left. A few days before she left. Susie had set up a farewell gig at the Gaslight that morphed into something of a going away party, and Lenny had managed to snag an invite, as it were.
Midge’d seemed a little down when he talked to her at the bar. Off, somehow. She’d smiled at him, quipped back and forth, but nothing quite reached her eyes. Then she’d gone up on stage and killed it, of course, couldn’t have been more on, and he’d chalked it up to his imagination. Then later Susie told him she and her beau, the Benjamin fella, had called it quits, and it seemed reasonable to assume that might have dampened her spirits. Anyway, she was so surrounded by admirers after her set that he didn’t get a chance to talk to her again. Not until she’d flounced onto the barstool next to him tonight. Like magic.
They're quiet again as they walk, and there’s almost a kind of tension to it. Like this act—walking together, changing locations, making a point of continuing to be together, instead of just departing separately from a chance encounter—is a little heavier than either of them anticipated. Not uncomfortable, necessarily. Just...different.
“Hey, so—” he begins.
“Are you—” she says at the same time, and they both break off.
“Sorry, you go—”
“No, I was just—”
Lenny reaches up to his mouth and mimes zipping it shut. Midge shoots him a supremely unimpressed look, but he just smiles, lips pressed together, and gestures for her to speak, and she allows a tiny grin.
“I was just gonna ask if you were cold,” she says. When he doesn’t answer, she rolls her eyes. “You can unzip your lips, Lenny.”
He makes a show of doing just that, with a flourish, and says, “Not a bit.” But it is January, and she is in pajamas and a coat, so he adds, “Are you?”
“No,” she says, and he doesn’t quite believe her, but who is he to make the call for her?
“Alright,” he says, and the quiet returns.
“How’s Honey?” she offers after a few moments, tossing it out like another try.
This pause builds a second too long, gets just a little awkward before he replies. “I, uh. Wouldn’t know. We split up.”
There’s an even longer and even more awkward beat before Midge says, hurried: “I’m sorry. I—didn’t know.”
He smiles, trying to let the curve of his mouth let her off the hook. “How could you have? I didn’t tell you.”
When he glances at her again, her mouth is a flat line, her eyes fixed on the pavement. “You didn’t tell me,” she echoes, a little stiff, and it feels like an accusation. But a begrudging one. Like she’s upset, but doesn’t want him to know. Like she barely even knows.
“It was a month or so after you left.” He shrugs, like, what are ya gonna do? “Didn’t seem worth the long-distance phone fees,” he jokes.
Remember that night? he thinks. In the bar? When you offered to stand outside my playdate? Not like I had just one reason to drink that night.
“That’s what collect calls are for, silly,” she says, and he bumps her shoulder with his, because her tone is light again but it doesn’t quite land.
“C’mon,” he says, flashing her a smile and some puppy dog eyes. “Forgive me? I’m just a foolish bachelor once more, barely able to keep myself in clean socks, much less—”
She rolls her eyes and shoves him toward the street, so he pretends to lose his balance and she giggles, tenseness around her eyes finally starting to loosen.
“You are incorrigible,” she says, but it sounds like, you are lovely.
“Yeah,” he says. “You’re not so bad yourself.”
---
It is cold outside, so they end up at a shitty, divey club where some hack is delivering a truly terrible comedy set, the kind that’s so bad it can’t even circle back around to being amusing. It takes a lot of Midge’s self-control not to heckle the guy, especially when most of his shitty bits center on how his wife is a boring nag with no sense of humor.
She contents herself by mumbling commentary to Lenny under her breath, gratified by the way his grin stretches across his face and sticks there as long as she keeps talking, his eyes on her more than the comic.
When the guy’s set is finally over he’s replaced by a singer who’s about equally bad at his chosen craft.
“For fuck's sake,” Lenny says, eyebrows shooting up at the first mangled high note. “Did we die? When did we die? I thought I would have noticed.”
“Hm?” Midge asks, glancing back at him as she winces, too.
“We’re clearly in one of the circles of hell,” he says, looking around, widening his eyes comically. “I just can’t remember how we got here.”
Midge shrugs. “Doesn’t matter,” she says, rueful. She gestures to the peanuts on the table. “Now that we’ve eaten the pomegranate seeds there’s no escaping.”
Lenny lets his head flop back mournfully. “And what a tragedy that is.”
The singer finishes up and Lenny glances at his watch. The action startles Midge back into some version of reality, the kind where she ought to be in bed, not out cavorting with scandalous comedians in dingy clubs at—what, three a.m.?
She’s not quite sure how her life came to this. She wouldn’t change it, given the chance, but—it's still strange. And difficult. And often lonely.
Not now, though. Not now.
She stands in one swift movement, surprising even herself. “I should probably get home,” she says, and Lenny nods, slow, and gets to his feet, slower.
“Yeah,” he says. “See if we can’t find a cab or two?”
Midge shakes her head, feeling something thrum in her chest. “I’d rather walk, I think. You wanna join me?”
So that’s how they end up walking back to her apartment. They debate halfheartedly about hailing a cab, but they don’t. Midge thinks about pointing out that he doesn’t live anywhere near her, but she doesn’t.
It doesn’t feel like very long before they’re back outside her building. Her parents’ building. Not like she owns an apartment there. She feels a certain kind of dread when she thinks about going back inside. Sneaking back in. Getting back in her bed. Staring at the ceiling. Living in black and white, waiting for her next gig. Going to pick up the kids, seeing Joel—
She pushes the thought away.
Midge feels, strangely, nervous. She can’t really pin down why until she looks at Lenny, really looks at him, and realizes it feels like—he's dropping her off after a date. Or something. Because it wasn’t a date. Not at all.
He looks completely oblivious to her inner turmoil, pulling out a cigarette and fiddling with it. He doesn’t light it right away.
“Well,” he says. “Goodnight, Midge. Don’t be a stranger now you’re back stateside, yeah?”
“Yeah,” she says, but her mind is still whirling. Her heart is racing, she realizes.
She wants to make a joke. Wants to diffuse the tension, because Lenny still isn’t lighting his cigarette. He's looking at her, and his gaze is kind of soft. Kind of different than he usually looks at her. But kind of the same. Kind of...amplified.
Then he blinks, or maybe she does, and whatever strange moment was happening fizzles out. Lenny moves to put the cigarette between his lips, and Midge—
She gets there first. She kisses him.
She grabs his coat and she rises up on her toes and she kisses him. Kisses Lenny.
He’s clearly startled, but it doesn’t take him long to react, and then his hands are pressed into the small of her back, drawing her close against him, and he’s kissing her back like it’s the most obvious thing in the world.
Breathless, they break apart, and he fixes her with an inscrutable look. “Well,” he says.
“Yeah,” she agrees, and pulls his mouth back to hers.
---
Lenny didn’t go into this evening planning to kiss anybody. Least of all Midge. But now that it’s happened, he can’t say he’s too upset about it.
Her lips were soft against his, her fingers gripping tight to the front of his coat, pulling, and for a moment he was completely and utterly lost in her. It was shocking and surprising and somehow completely obvious all at the same time. Inevitable, somehow, despite the fact that, well, he wasn’t expecting it. Wasn't pursuing it.
He hasn’t been pining after Midge Maisel this whole time. At least, he thinks he hasn’t. If he has, he hasn’t noticed.
For one thing, he was married, up until a few months ago. Lenny’s been a lot of shitty things, but so far, he hasn’t been a cheater.
But he’s always liked Midge. In some way or another. Ever since she was just some cute uptown chick who got arrested nearly as much as him. He liked her jokes. He liked her spunk. He liked her smarts and her snark and her refusal to take shit and her passion. Her drive. Her loyalty.
He might be in this a little deeper than he thought. He hadn’t noticed. Hadn't noticed she’d become one of his closest friends, perhaps his most trusted confidant. Hadn't really noticed how much he missed her, while she was gone, too bogged down in the rest of the shit going on in his life.
He’s really glad she’s back. And he’s glad she kissed him, even though—
Well, he’d like to do it again. But he’s not sure exactly how that’s gonna work out for him. He’s a little concerned Susie would cut his balls off for even considering it. Not to mention Midge’s parents. He'd thought he’d passed the point in his life he had to worry about a girl’s dad coming after him with a loaded gun, but a girl as mildly terrifying as Midge didn’t come from nowhere.
And there’s her career to consider. The implications of a relationship with someone like him, given their history, and her history, and her ongoing rise to fame.
And maybe after one kiss—two kisses—it's too early to think about this, but. He thinks about all the people who’ve assumed he and Midge had fucked, at some point or another. All the men who’d shot him knowing looks or punched his arm or asked if she was that feisty between the sheets. Even if he had feelings for Midge back then—or realized he had feelings, or whatever the case may be—his reaction would have been the same as it was: a firm no, we didn’t and a cold way forward if they pushed the subject.
He of all people knew how hard it was to make it in comedy. He knew it was twice as hard for her, being a woman. Scratch that. Ten times as hard. Twenty. And he knew that as much as his endorsement helped her claw her way up, here and there, there were plenty of people who would never be convinced she hadn’t bought his approval in bed instead of in front of the mic.
“Bastards,” he mumbles under his breath.
“What’s that?” Midge asks, eyes bright and alert as ever.
She’s beautiful. Of course she’s beautiful. But it's not her pretty face that makes it impossible for him to take his eyes off her.
“I said I think I could use a drink,” he says, turning to face the full force of her against his better judgement. “Interested?”
But when she says, “I think I could be,” with an all-too-innocent smirk, he slings an arm around her shoulders and thinks, well, good judgement might be overrated anyway.