Chapter V
V
On Thursday, Cat gets a hold of her dad’s platinum card and takes Reid, Nisha, and me out for cocktails at Bemelmans Bar, the storied lounge inside The Carlyle Hotel.
Reid doesn’t even ask what underhanded methods she used to secure it, and I take his lack of concern as an indicator of how soon he’s really leaving.
His time here is too precious to play the role of moral compass, to keep us away from a good time.
In his work suit and with his impeccable manners, Reid is the only one of us who looks marginally at home in this hushed, elegantly perfumed room.
I barely had time to change when Cat called with the news that she’d absconded with the card and to meet her uptown in twenty minutes, before her father discovered his wallet a few grams lighter.
I threw on a black jersey boatneck minidress—one of the nicer things I own—but I didn’t have a chance to brush my hair.
On the sidewalk outside, Reid had attempted to unravel the tiny knots from the fine wisps at my nape.
The ma?tre d’ stashes us in a booth in the back corner. We all order martinis. Reid stops Cat from adding Ossetra caviar.
We carefully clink the edges of our glasses together, trying so hard not to lose any of our ten-dollar cocktails to the table. Still, the toast sends a glug of Cat’s drink over the edge of her glass.
“To this summer,” Cat declares. “Thanks for the opportunity to smoke pure Sour D on various river-view rooftops. You’ve been good to me.”
“To the Urban Homesteading Assistance Board,” Nisha says. “May they one day grant us the ability to run electric legally.”
After her Jeff Buckley moment at the party, Nisha met a trombonist named Pepper, who lives in C-Squat.
Over the past few days, she’s been spending most of her time over there, helping the tenants repair the broken staircase and prep the radiators ahead of winter.
She’s energized by communal living, says she’s found purpose in contributing her time and energy to a greater cause.
She recruited me to volunteer my own skills too, which in my case means documenting the scene with my camera.
Yesterday I captured one of the tenants, a hardcore guy with a tattooed skull and pet rat perched on his shoulder, delicately tending to a row of lemon balm growing in the community garden.
“Brew this shit up, add some local honey, and it’ll cure all your ills,” he told me after giving me permission to take his photograph.
Then he snipped off a fistful of leaves and stuffed them in my hand.
Does imminent heartbreak count? I’d wanted to ask him, but stopped myself from being so dramatic.
As much as I love Nisha’s passion, I also worry, selfishly, that she will abandon me for her newfound community—she’ll move out of our apartment, spend her time on nobler causes and with people with so much more purpose than me. I worry that I’ll be left behind.
Time rushes through my hands, impervious to my feelings about it. But I am desperate for more of it—with my friends, next to Reid, at this beautiful bar with its tinkling piano and a very full glass.
“To Christian Slater hosting the VMAs,” I say, refusing to let myself go maudlin. “Surely the most boring choice of a host in awards show history. May he prove us all wrong with his wit and charm.”
This is not the time for melancholy. This drink is too expensive to cry into.
“Whatever the MTV execs are snorting is really not working for them,” Nisha agrees.
“To the New Yorkers at the table,” Reid says. He looks at each of us for a beat, and then his gaze lingers on mine. “Thank you for making me feel at home here.”
Cat pats Reid’s cheek with the back of her hand. “Good boy,” she says. Reid swats her away.
“This is cute as hell for us.” Nisha takes a loud slurp. “Let’s do it again next week.”
We keep going like that—shooting the shit, making jokes, ribbing each other.
But I latch on to what Nisha just said, surely by accident.
My attention keeps drifting forward. Reid pulls my hand into his lap.
I know what he’s doing: He’s comforting me.
We don’t talk about next week. Next week he’ll be gone.
The next morning, Reid gets ready to leave my apartment at the usual predawn hour to head back uptown for work.
He may be on his way out of this job, he tells me, and he might hate it with every fiber of his being, but he refuses to start looking sloppy now.
It would reflect badly on his uncle. He can’t show him that kind of disrespect.
I catch his hand before he climbs out of bed. The sun is just beginning to reveal itself through my flimsy white curtains, and the light catches Reid’s form in a brilliant outline.
“Why don’t you just stay here this weekend?” I say. “Nisha’s planning to sleep at the Squat until they finish the radiator installation.”
“You wouldn’t mind a six-foot dude in your five-hundred-square-foot apartment?”
I love his voice. Deep, self-assured, but still with a boyish, Southern California lilt to it. His lips, his teeth. I want to take them all in my mouth, to consume the mint and the velvet and the sunshine. The sound of him alone is enough to send a pulse thrumming between my legs.
“Not if the six-foot dude smells as good as you do.”
He grins at me. “OK, yeah. I’ll bring some stuff over after work.”
He plants a kiss on my forehead, then turns to head to the bathroom. But the sensation of unfinished business nags at me. There is something I haven’t asked him yet, and I can’t focus on anything else until I do.
I think back to the vow I made to myself on the fire escape: Start being braver than you feel. At least pretend. Reid has made this experiment easier, but he’s leaving so soon, and I worry that without the shine of him, all that courage will wilt.
I prop myself up on my elbows. “If circumstances were different, do you think you would want to stay in New York?”
This is not the most direct way to say what I mean—Do you want to be my boyfriend?
Do you want to try this for real?—but he reads between the lines.
Reid comes back into the bedroom, shirtless and clenching my toothbrush in his mouth.
Then he removes it and assumes a theatrically contemplative pose: resting one knee on the bed, crossing his arms over his bare chest. He looks pensively out the window.
“I’ve thought about this a lot. How easily or not easily certain circumstances can be changed.
There are the logistical ones, like finding a place to live and getting a job, which are daunting, but doable.
But I also worry about leaving my mom alone on the West Coast. I know this sounds ridiculous, but it’s just been me and her ever since my dad left when I was a baby.
I know she’s capable of doing things on her own.
But I also think she needs me more than she would ever admit. ”
Then he looks at me directly. His candor ends the game. I feel my face heat beneath his gaze.
“I would do it, though. Despite all that, I would take the risk.”
What I hear: Yes, I would want to be your boyfriend. I would take the risk for you.
Suddenly, he turns to rifle through his bag, then comes back to the bed with a slim white envelope. It’s addressed to him at his work address in blocky, all-caps handwriting.
He hands me the piece of mail, silently offering me permission to open it. I don’t know why, but my hands are shaking as I pull out a sheet of folded-up paper, ripped neatly from a yellow legal pad.
I realize, suddenly, that I barely know Reid at all. What secrets has he hidden from me? What terrible truth might he reveal to me now, when he knows he can escape in a few days?
I unfold the paper and scan it, picking up on a handful of words: Brilliant. Promising. Shades of. Would you. New work.
All at once, I understand what I’m looking at: It’s a letter from Jake Bellingham, the screenwriter Reid reached out to earlier this summer and from whom he never expected to receive an answer.
His personal hero. I read the letter more closely.
Bellingham likes his script, sees promise in his work, and is now inviting Reid to come on as a research assistant for a new Miramax project he’s leading.
The rate is negotiable. He’d need to start on Monday, August 30. That’s just over a week from today.
I don’t say anything as I try to recenter myself. I’m overwhelmed with pride, and that alone is so alarming. I think back to Nisha explaining the concept of compersion to me: feeling authentic joy for another person’s joy.
But I’m also crushed. I see our potential future fade from view. I’m envious of Jake Bellingham, and Reid’s mother, and—don’t think it, don’t say it—whatever girl he’s surely going to fall in love with as soon as his plane touches down at LAX. All the people who get to have him instead of me.
When I look up, I find Reid searching for me, a mixture of pride and anticipation in his expression.
“It came in the mail yesterday,” he explains.
He’s speaking in gentle, measured tones, the way someone might talk to a wild horse.
Just this once, I wish he wouldn’t be so nice to me.
It would make everything so much easier.
“I don’t know why I didn’t tell you about it sooner.
I guess I just knew it would make it all real if I did. ”
“It’s amazing,” I say, and I really, truly mean it. “It’s your dream, right?”
He huffs out a laugh. “Yeah. I guess it is.”
“You deserve it. Your script is so interesting and smart. I’ve never read anything like it before. I’m glad he saw that too.”
“So you think I should do it?”
“How could you not do it?”
He flops onto the bed against the pillows, then runs his hands over his face. “Yeah. How could I not.”
I can hear the hesitation in his tone, and I am in an impossible position: I know that he would stay here, and try this, if only I would tell him not to take the job. I wish that I could do that.