Chapter Text
Frank was alone.
The house was silent, but his ears were still ringing with piercing screams; acid-bitter fragments of words all swirling and pounding in his head at once. Everything was dark and still. A breeze was blowing over the twinkling lights of the valley. It smelled of expensive alcohol from the shattered bottles still strewn across the ground. Frank, suddenly feeling very sick, sank down to the floor of the patio.
After several minutes, the reality of the situation began to coalesce in Frank's mind with a cold finality. Something - and he wasn't sure what it was, but something - had just been done, he thought, that couldn't be undone. Because what was he supposed to do? Clean up the mess in the house and sit up all night in case Gussie came back to take pity on him? Pick up the phone and start leaving repentant voicemails? No. He was sure he was going to vomit if he had to look in the faces of any of those goddamn people again and try to smooth things over after he'd been humiliated like that (after you humiliated yourself, said a little voice in his head). He was done trying to smooth things over.
Frank staggered inside as if in a trance. Without any real idea of why, he found himself sitting at the bench of his grand piano. The keys looked oddly blurry, and he couldn't figure out why until he realized with a strange detachment that he was crying. And then - out of sheer instinct, perhaps, or just desperation, his fingers found their way to the keys and began to play a familiar tune.
Sometime before sunrise that morning, Frank's car, packed hastily with a single suitcase, pulled out of the driveway and headed down the 405 towards the airport.
Frank didn't know where he was going. He didn't care. He just had to get out, get away, like a drowning man swimming desperately for air. It was perhaps out of instinct again that when he arrived at the American Airlines ticket counter at LAX he asked for the soonest flight to New York City. I need to get out, his mind kept playing on repeat. It kept flashing with images from the night before. Mary trembling with anger. Meg screaming. Gussie screaming over her. The phone ringing. The cicadas droning. Champagne, Mexico, Paramount. You deserve them. It was still dark out when the flight boarded at 7:30 AM. Frank caught a glimpse of his reflection in the gate windows as he handed over his boarding pass. He looked like shit. He felt like it, too. On the plane, he ordered a strong black coffee and promptly passed out before he had time to drink it. All the way to New York, he slipped in and out of odd dreams that only half-formed in his head before dissolving. He tried very, very hard not to think. If he did, he might feel guilty about it all.
It was pouring rain at LaGuardia when the plane landed at 4 in the afternoon New York time. Hailing a cab was hell, but Frank managed, and soon he was on his way to the Midtown pied-a-terre he hadn't used in God knows how long. When was the last time he'd been in the city, anyways? He couldn't think of it if you put a gun to his head. It didn't really matter, but it suddenly felt very important to remember. Feeling somewhat carsick, he asked the taxi driver to let him out a block early.
Frank felt uncomfortably conspicuous, and not just because he was walking through a deluge of October rain without a coat or umbrella. It was all so familiar - of course it was, it was home, wasn't it, from the cigarette butts in puddles on the sidewalk to the lights shining through the thick haze of rain, it was home, he assured himself - and yet Frank felt distinctly like a child waiting to be caught somewhere he isn't supposed to be. He arrived, dripping from every limb, at his building, mostly relieved that he'd remembered where the damn place was. He stepped through the door of the apartment, tossed his suitcase down unceremoniously, and threw himself violently into the nearest chair. His body felt like it was made of lead. Running a weary hand down his face, Frank sighed deeply. Fuck. What the hell had he done? What the hell was he doing? He thought with a slight pang of guilt that the phone in Bel Air was probably ringing to wake the dead. Well, they could all go fuck themselves, he decided. He would deal with them later. For now, he took a burning hot shower and made another cup of black coffee.
That evening, Frank made three phone calls and prayed that nobody would answer any of them. Call one: Gussie. No response. He left a message. "I'm at the New York apartment so you can send all my things there if you're not planning on burning them." Call two: Jerome. No response. "Hope you don't mind drawing up some divorce papers if Gussie hasn't beaten me to it." Call three. His hand hovered over the numbers. He swallowed. His throat was dry. He dialed the number. A nervous voice came through the speaker. "Hello?" Shit. "Hello, who is this? This is Meg Kincaid speaking. Is somebody there?"
Frank hung up.
It was getting late. He decided to finish unpacking. At the bottom of the suitcase, beneath the last layer of crumpled shirts, lay something he'd forgotten he packed. He didn't entirely know why he'd done it. Frankly, he didn't know why he'd done anything he'd done in the last 24 hours. Maybe he had just been drunk and emotional. Maybe it was out of a fear Gussie might actually burn all of his belongings (which, to be fair, still seemed entirely possible). But either way, he wasn't going to think about it now, and he certainly didn't want to look at it, so before he turned off the lamp on his nightstand and collapsed into bed, he threw a suit jacket haphazardly over the dusty little red folder with Take A Left scribbled on the front cover.