Chapter II
II
“And your major?” he asks, his hand hovering behind my lower back. He’d successfully guessed I was an NYU student.
“English. Mainly to please my mom. She’s an antiques dealer—a successful one—but she regrets that she didn’t have a proper liberal arts education.”
“But I’m minoring in fine art photography, for myself,” I say.
Even though he’s behind me, I can sense his bottled-up energy, feel that he’s reining in his pace to match mine.
I let myself say the whole truth. “But also to please my father. He’s an art appraiser for an insurance company.
By day. But he’s also an avid collector.
You know Jerry Saltz of The Village Voice?
He once called my dad’s eye ‘Nostradamusian.’”
I catch a hint of Reid’s scent and feel the impression of his upper arm as his hand reaches for the railing. “Seems like you lucked out with your parents,” he says. “A good combination of cool and stable.”
Inside the apartment, a series of warren-like rooms is choked with people our age clutching Yuenglings and cigarettes. Sweat and smoke throw a dim fog over the place.
We’re trailing behind Nisha and Cat as they scan the rooms for the musician. When they keep not finding him, Nisha’s disappointment is discernible, even on the back of her head.
“What about your parents?” I ask Reid. “Too much of one thing?”
“My mom was a backup singer for Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, which should tell you pretty much everything you need to know about her.”
“I disagree. I absolutely need to know more about her.”
After we’ve made a tour of the entire apartment—playing it cool is obviously not the goal here—Nisha turns back to me. “It wasn’t meant to be.” She does a cartoonish shrug-and-pout thing, but I know she feels betrayed by the workings of fate, which earlier had seemed to be on her side.
Cat slings an arm over her shoulder. “It’s still early.
Drinking will make the time go faster.” She starts to steer Nisha toward the galley kitchen, then stops herself, turning to address Reid: “Don’t fuck this up.
” She swings her finger between the two of us, indicating exactly what it is that Reid must not fuck up.
It seems we’ve picked up a second wingwoman. I feel my face flush, though whether it’s in embarrassment or anticipation, I’m not sure.
“Sorry about my cousin,” Reid says when they’re out of earshot. He gives me an aggrieved look. “She wouldn’t understand subtlety if it punched her in the gut.”
I laugh. “Nisha is a lot like that too.”
Reid nods toward the kitchen, where we can just make out Cat’s buzzed red head over the crowd, then Nisha’s cackle, flitting through the crunchy bass of “Cannonball,” the new Breeders song I keep hearing on K-Rock. “Kindred spirits. I love my cousin, but I know she can be a lot for some people.”
“I like her a lot–ness. Nisha’s too. She absorbs the attention from the room, and that leaves me free to be kind of anonymous. Which I want to be, sometimes.” I tug at the ends of my hair, which fall almost to my waist, loose and sun bleached.
His eyes skim over my bare shoulders. “Why would you want to be anonymous?”
“So that I can exist without the pressure of performance. I’ve been trying to let go of that, though.”
He considers me, his brows pulled together. “I can see why you’re a good photographer.”
I raise an eyebrow at him. “You’ve never seen my photography.” My voice has a playful edge, but something in me is giddy at the prospect of Reid seeing my work.
“I don’t need to see it to know you’re good at it.” He reaches up to knead the back of his neck. “For what it’s worth, I don’t think you could be anonymous if you tried.”
A man in a leather bomber jacket and a beret accidentally backs into Reid, which sends him colliding into me. My face presses against the buttons of his shirt. On an inhale, I take in his up-close scent: Underneath the pine, there’s something quieter, like laundry detergent rolled in a bed of musk.
This, I think, is what a man smells like.
Two big, warm hands wrap around my upper shoulders. Reid is righting me again. “Should we go somewhere we can actually hear each other?”
I gesture to the chaos around us. “Do you think that exists?”
“If you want it, I’ll find it.”
I nod. He takes my hand and coaxes me through the crowd, eventually leading me to a tiny bedroom in the back of the apartment.
It’s oddly austere: a twin mattress made up in hospital-cornered maroon sheets with a Reservoir Dogs poster hung over it.
The only other furniture is a complicated-looking boombox that takes up an entire wall. Miraculously, the room is empty.
“Do you want to keep this open?” He puts his hand on the door.
“You can close it,” I nod, but he still leaves it ajar.
There’s a window over the flaking radiator. I open it, letting in a gentle rush of humid air and summer city sounds—promise, in audio form.
The window leads out to a fire escape. I’ve lived in New York for my entire life but somehow have never been out onto one.
It’s always just felt easier to play it safe.
Among other dangers (taper candles, the invisible filth on hotel bedspreads), my mother raised me to believe that you must have a death wish to traverse a fire escape voluntarily.
Terrible things are always going to happen, so why make it so easy for them to come to you?
Now I can practically hear her yelling at me as I climb out onto the landing, my platform sandals clanging on the metal.
Reid stays inside the room, leaning cautiously against the windowsill.
“Heights aren’t my thing.” He reaches out a hand toward me, seemingly on impulse. It brushes the ends of my hair, as if to make sure I’m really there, sitting on a sort-of-sturdy surface and not tumbling five stories down onto the sidewalk.
“Didn’t you say you’re a screenwriter? You’re missing out on some good material here.”
“I didn’t call myself a screenwriter. My cousin did.”
Clearly, though, he takes this as a challenge. Behind me, I hear a low fuck and feel the metal underneath me vibrate with his added weight.
When he sits next to me, he folds his long legs into his chest and loops his arms loosely around them. He takes a deep inhale and closes his eyes, steadying himself.
“Not so bad, right?” I say.
“Not if I can’t see that we’re fifty feet off the ground.”
“If you keep your eyes closed, you’ll miss the little community garden down here. Also the people having sex in front of their window.”
It’s not an unheard-of thing in New York, to see people having sex in full view of the street, but the timing of it adds something surreal and cinematic to the moment.
Reid’s eyes are closed, but I still motion across the way, to where a woman’s bare breasts are on display.
Even from here, I can make out the sated glaze in her eye, her wet mouth half open.
I feel a slickness between my legs. I’ve never considered voyeurism a turn-on, but I’ve also never had Reid beside me, the coiled promise of his body within reach.
He opens one of his eyes to squint at me. “You’re fucking with me.”
“I’m not the one fucking right now.”
He braves a glance across the street, then turns to look at me again.
“Well, you’re right about the material.” He rasps a hand over his face. In the failing light, I can see a layer of stubble coming in across his jaw.
“Why are you still looking at me,” I say, “and not the woman spread-eagled in plain sight thirty feet across from you?”
He laughs. “Because I don’t know her.”
“You don’t know me either.”
“It feels . . . weird. To watch them without their permission. I don’t know, I think I need to have more of an emotional connection with someone before anything sexual happens with them.”
“That’s suspiciously noble of you.”
“Must be all the classic movies my mom forced me to watch as a kid.”
“Reid.” I put a hand on his arm. “I’m going to ask you a serious question: Are you being forced to work in finance against your will?”
A lopsided smile. “My uncle didn’t need to give me this job.
He probably shouldn’t have. But he knew I didn’t have anything lined up yet and that I’m reasonably capable of following orders.
I think my mom pushed him into it. She knows I’ve always wanted to live in New York, and I just graduated.
Also, Jewish guilt is a powerful thing. If I were to walk back a commitment to her brother, my mom would work it into every single one of our conversations until one of us dies. ”
“I’m well acquainted with the feeling. So you’re not from New York?”
“Is anyone really from New York?”
“I am.” I point skyward, the universal sign of uptown. “I grew up on West Eighty-Sixth Street.” He makes a hm sound, silently taking in this new information about me. “What about you?”
“I’m from LA.” I notice him hesitate for a moment. “My contract at the firm ends next Monday. I only have one more week in New York before I head back.”
Monday, which also happens to be my first day of classes. It is rapidly promising to be a terrible day.
“So we’re both from places that no one is really from,” I say while my mind contemplates whether it is possible to miss a person you barely know. It’s sort of an insane thought. “Did you consider going to school here? In New York?” I ask.
“Sure, but money was an issue. When I was in middle school, my mom got a job as an administrative aide at an elementary school. You’d be surprised how many transferable skills she picked up from her groupie days.”
“I thought you said she was a backup singer?”
“Technically. But that wasn’t the extent of her job description.”
He laughs, so I do too. I feel a prick of curiosity about who his dad is. Am I shooting the shit with David Crosby’s son right now? My own father would actually die of happiness.