Chapter X
X
“Tell me honestly,” I say. “How bad were my parents?”
“What kind of scale are we talking?” Reid asks.
“Classic one to ten.”
“Ten being?”
“You’re on an unairconditioned plane to Florida. Middle seat, screaming baby behind you, you can’t get the WiFi to work, and your TV is broken.”
“And what’s one?”
“Whatever is your bliss.” I shrug. “You tell me.”
We cross Waverly, heading into Washington Square Park.
Predictably, it is mobbed—it’s the first sunny Saturday afternoon in June, which is, as Emme would say, when people get feral.
There is something elemental in the energy, the scent of weed and warm pretzels playing on a nostalgic loop, and delicate piles of white and pink cherry blossoms mounding on the pavement.
Reid is about to walk underneath the arch—the triumphal, ornate marble portal that stands sentry at the entrance to the park—but I grab hold of his bicep and steer him around it, taking us in the long way.
“Sorry,” I say, when he raises an eyebrow at me. “There’s this NYU superstition that if you walk directly underneath it, you’ll fail your finals. I obviously have no finals left to fail, but it still feels ominous.”
“Old habits die hard.”
Which is when I realize that I’m still holding on to his arm. I let go, pretending to readjust my bag. I notice Reid shrug a shoulder, like he’s acclimating to the lack of my presence there.
“Your parents weren’t nearly as bad as you worry they were,” Reid continues.
“Even with the third degree?”
Reid laughs. “I can handle two octogenarians.”
We wind around the fountain, and I remember the way we walked down the street together before, a tangle of arms and hands, how Reid would sometimes trip over himself when he forced his long legs to meet my smaller steps.
He was all forward movement then, desperate to capture what he could of the city while he had the chance.
Now he moves with more intention, with less urgency to prove and conquer and taste, as if the years have given him permission to take up space differently.
Now he trusts that the world will come to him.
Eventually, we find an open bench around the perimeter of the fountain. I sit, and Reid sits beside me.
“I think this is pretty blissful.” Reid rests his elbows on his knees.
“That guy is your bliss?” I cock a thumb toward a man in a rainbow knitted cap and a pair of beat-up Nikes who is standing on a literal soapbox, bellowing about ascending from the sins of the flesh in a divine spaceship.
“Who, the Heaven’s Gate guy? I love that guy.”
“It is very nineties. Fitting.”
I don’t have my camera with me, but this is too good not to document.
I dig out my phone from my bag and take a picture of the man, who stands with his arms outstretched, as if conducting an invisible symphony, his mouth an open rictus.
His posture brings to mind the weather-beaten statues of ancient Roman orators.
But draped in his layers of mismatched fabrics, he looks as if he’s somehow emerged not from the museum’s galleries but from its lost and found.
I glance up at Reid and find that he’s been watching me. “I like seeing what you see,” he says.
“Well, there’s a lot to see here.” I put my phone back in my bag and turn my attention fully toward Reid.
In the sunlight, the gold flecks in his eyes seem to glow, and now I notice in more detail the way that time has carved into the architecture of his face, sharpening and hollowing and sanding down.
The change doesn’t diminish him; it only makes him a more honest version of who he once was, when he was only potential.
“Does the city feel the same as it did back then?” I ask.
“It’s a little slicker now. More commercialized, more polished.
But I think, at its core, it still feels like a wildly fucked-up place to live.
” We both laugh. “I say that with respect. You know, working in entertainment . . . sometimes I wonder whether I’m becoming habituated to the facade of it all.
Numbed to anything real.” Reid gestures toward the fountain, overrun by screeching kids, darting in and out of the jets of water.
“New York wears its heart on its sleeve. I like that about it.”
“I think it suits you.”
Reid pauses, his head tilted in thought.
“I hope so. Or—I’ve always wanted it to.
I work with smart, substantive people, and I’m proud of what I’ve made.
But at the end of the day, LA is built on smoke and mirrors.
I understand this—I am one of the guys making the smoke and hanging the mirrors—but sometimes I catch myself giving into the illusion.
Believing that it’s concrete.” He sighs deeply.
“I don’t know. With Gracie leaving soon, I’m starting to see that I’ve pinned everything, my entire identity, on being her dad and writing movies.
But I’ve been in the Hollywood machine for so long—”
“And you won an Oscar.”
Reid laughs. “I did do that.” He glances at me. “Have you seen Notting Hill?”
“Surely that’s a rhetorical question.”
“So you’ll remember when Julia Roberts says that the men she dates go to sleep with the character she plays, and they wake up with the real person.
That’s almost what it felt like to win. That night was .
. . a circus. It was surreal. But I still had to get up the next morning, shave, make coffee, take my kid to school.
Figure out what to work on next, what will actually make me happy, because expecting to reach that level of recognition a second time is fucking insanity.
And even if I did . . . what would it mean, what would it change?
” He runs a hand over his face, and I catch a glimpse of aggrieved exhaustion.
“Anyway, I just happened to have a very nice decorative object on my bookshelf while I did those things.”
“Ah. So that’s where you keep it.”
“A less creative choice than Kate Winslet. She keeps a few in her bathroom.”
I put a hand on his arm, giving it a reassuring squeeze. I can’t seem to help myself. “One day, you, too, will have so many Oscars that you’ll have no choice but to put some above your toilet.”
He knocks his knee into mine, letting it linger there for a few seconds.
My body instinctively remembers the weight of his, the singular way we align together.
I inch closer to him and catch another whiff of his skin—it’s warm and musky, with the barest hint of white flowers.
This must be the hotel body wash, I think, and then I’m assaulted with an image of him in the shower—
“I appreciate your belief in me,” Reid says, bringing me back to our bench.
“But I’ve made peace with the fact that I don’t need that to happen again.
In a lot of ways, the best thing that award did for me was free me up from the pressure to prove myself.
Now I can just try to make good stuff. Whatever that means these days.
” He shrugs. “Besides, stepping on Cate Blanchett’s train on the red carpet once was enough. ”
I inhale sharply. “You didn’t.”
“I sure did. She gave me this look like I’m not angry, I’m just disappointed.” He shakes his head. “I will see that look on my deathbed.”
I laugh. “That thing you were saying about compartmentalizing—I know how you feel. Since my divorce, I think I’ve kept my world pretty small.
Funneling all my energy into Emme. Taking on projects that pay the bills but don’t really challenge me creatively.
Focusing on being high functioning. Protecting myself from pain but also any real shot at happiness. ”
“About that divorce.” Reid picks a piece of lint off the knee of my pants. “I’m sensing there’s a bigger story there.”
Usually I would shrink away from answering, allowing myself all the excuses: It’s boring.
It hurts too much. It’s in a past I deeply regret.
But Reid was honest with me, and even with my parents, despite how hard it clearly was for him to share.
The least I can do is return the trust. I want to do that for him. I take a deep breath.
“So, everything you need to know about James and me, you can probably learn from our wedding,” I start. “It was this big, lavish affair that somehow snowballed from a city hall ceremony to a two-hundred-person blowout. James and I only danced together once, during our first dance—”
“What was the song?”
“Sade’s ‘By Your Side.’”
“Ironic.”
“Oh, you don’t even know. I barely saw him the rest of the evening.”
He asks, What could he have possibly been doing? with his brows.
I shrug. “Schmoozing. I had to tug at his coattails to get his attention.”
“Tails, huh?”
“It was Tavern on the Green in 1998.”
“What’d you wear?”
When I eye him thoughtfully, curious about his interest in the minute details of one of my more haunted memories, he just shrugs. “I’m a visual learner,” he explains.
Still, I choose to take this curiosity personally. “An ivory silk slip dress, cut on the bias. Buttons running down the back. We all wanted to be Carolyn Bessette back then.” I sigh, remembering the way the fabric flowed over my hips like cool water. “That was the one decision I got to make.”
I feel Reid’s eyes skim over me. “I wish I’d seen you in that.”
My skin heats underneath his gaze. “You can, actually. I kept the dress, chopped the train, and dyed it black. It was too beautiful to give away.”
“You do look good in silk. I recall.”
When I look at him again, he seems . . . bashful. An expression I may have seen on him as a twenty-two-year-old, but not as a full-blown adult. It’s adorable.
“You recall me in silk?” My voice is so quiet, I wonder if I’ll have to repeat myself.
“That dress is seared into my memory, Lili.”