Chapter XIX
XIX
In the afternoon, Emme comes into my office and tells me we need to do something fun. “To celebrate your music job thing.”
I take a sip of my third cup of coffee. I’ve been holed up in here, pulling artistic references from my design library, cataloging the gear I’ll need, and emailing with Resonance’s creative director to ensure our visions align.
Now I check the time on my computer: It’s already close to two. I’ve been so consumed with the work and how much there is to do to prepare for this project, but I’ve also been avoiding the thing that is actually weighing down my conscience.
As soon as I shut my laptop, the argument with Reid barrels back into my mind. So does the full force of my regret. The finality of his words loops endlessly: I thought we would both be willing to fight for this. At least I have my answer now.
But those photos on Gracie’s Instagram also won’t leave me alone. Was Reid trying to channel something? Or was this just a farewell tour?
The hope and despair war inside me, leaving me paralyzed. I want to call him, to own up to my behavior and tell him that I don’t just want to do better by him, but that I will. For him, I will.
I shake my head, trying to dislodge my thoughts. “What’d you have in mind?” I ask Emme.
She counts on her fingers. “Lunch. Vintage store. Another vintage store. Another vintage store. Bakery. Come home. Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers. Chinese food.”
“I’m ready to go when you are.”
“Give me fifteen minutes.” She looks me up and down. “Is that what you’re wearing?”
I let out a choked laugh. Mentally, I reevaluate my outfit: a pair of worn-in jeans, a white T-shirt, and my usual tangle of gold necklaces. “Yes, this is what I’m wearing. Is there a problem?”
“I think we should look cute today,” she says. “This is a celebration. Maybe wear that blue top?” Then she steps closer to me, inspecting my face. “You could also use some blush.”
I shoo her away, but when she leaves, I step close to the mirror hanging on my office wall.
Unfortunately, Emme isn’t entirely wrong—I still look drained.
I head to my bedroom, slip into a cream silk camisole and a slouchy linen blazer, add a swipe of lipstick and a coat of mascara. Finish with the recommended blush.
When we meet downstairs, Emme gives me a satisfied smirk.
We walk toward the East Village, partly because the neighborhood has the highest density of vintage stores and bakeries, but also because even now, twenty years after moving out, I still feel magnetically drawn to my old stomping grounds.
I may have grown up on the Upper West Side, but the East Village is where I became myself.
When I lived here, I was on the edge of the rest of my life.
When I come here now, I feel it still, even though, somehow, I have found myself in the middle of my life.
Emme emerges from the dressing room at a vintage store on Tenth Street in a calico minidress with a starched Peter Pan collar—the kind of thing my mother forced me into as a kid, but that looks perfectly irreverent on her.
I wonder if she can sense the internal alchemy that arises when we’re in this part of the city—the origami folding of my younger self into my older self.
Part of me hopes that she can’t, that I can keep this just for myself.
Emme tries on a few more things, and when we head back out onto the street, she’s chatting about an audiobook she’s been listening to about Indigenous plant medicine, and I realize we’ve rounded the corner onto St. Mark’s and are heading east toward Tompkins Square Park.
Emme’s pace slows, and then she stops near the end of the block.
“Well,” she says. “This is where I leave you.”
“What?” We’ve only gone to two vintage stores so far.
Emme gestures to the building we’re in front of. It’s a cozy pub with a low green-and-white-striped awning and an outdoor seating area, where most of the tables are already taken. An hour from now, every streetery in the city will be packed.
Then it dawns on me: This was Sin-é’s original location, before they closed in the mid-nineties.
“You’re going in there,” Emme says, “and I’m staying out here. I mean, I’m not gonna stand here the whole time, but you know what I mean.”
“Do I know what you mean?” Then I feel my heart kick harder at my chest and my tongue go numb, like my body knows what’s happening before my mind does.
“Do you trust me?” Emme asks.
“Of course I do.”
She nods toward the door. “Go inside. I’ll see you at home later.”
I watch her turn and head in the opposite direction. After a few steps, she yells over her shoulder, “Enjoy your intervention!”
At one of the tables outside, a pair of twentysomething women sipping cold goblets of white wine are staring at me, and I can’t parse whether their expressions hold amusement or judgment.
Or just the detached curiosity that all New Yorkers eventually adopt.
Still, their looks are enough to get me off the street.
Inside, the cool, dark air is a reprieve from the noise and heat.
I haven’t set foot in this building since ’96, but it still feels charged with the promise of its former inhabitants, like Jeff Buckley’s chords still reverberate off the walls.
Near the door, there’s now a built-in banquette and a few stools where I once sat on the floor in front of Reid.
Where the mere presence of him at my back was almost enough to eclipse the legendary performance unfolding twenty feet from me.
And there, settled into the booth, is where I find Reid now.
The light from the window emphasizes the salt in his hair, the burnished bronze of his skin.
A glass of beer sits on the table in front of him.
He looks up, and his expression opens when he sees me.
We consider each other for several seconds, and the same sensation that I experienced when I saw him for the first time overcomes me: the uncanny inevitability of encountering this person here.
But now, I understand that fate will only chaperone you partway to your destination before it releases your arm. Right now, I’m choosing to take myself the rest of the way there.
I gesture toward the empty stool across from him. “Can I sit down?”
He gets up from the bench, and for a moment, I wonder if he’s going to bail. I couldn’t blame him if he did. But he puts a hand on my back, nudging me toward the seat he’d occupied, then takes the backless stool I’d just pulled out.
It’s such a sweet, gentlemanly move, and I wonder whether I am going to start crying. I pull myself together and sit, aware of the distance he maintains between us.
A waitress comes over for our drink orders. I feel Reid’s eyes skimming over me as I ask for an iced tea, but when I look back at him, his expression is shuttered. He’s holding himself close.
“I’m guessing Gracie lured you here.”
“Under false pretenses.” His tone is carefully neutral. “She told me she wanted to have lunch here, let me order a beer, then bolted.”
I can’t help but laugh. “She didn’t give you an excuse?”
The ghost of a smile crosses his lips, but it quickly disappears. “She told me she had cramps, because she knows I can’t argue with that.” He ventures a look at me. “How did Emme get you in here?”
“We were shopping in the neighborhood, and she kind of just . . . left me outside.”
Reid shakes his head with the same mixture of admiration and exasperation that I feel toward my daughter. “Gracie would never admit it, but The Parent Trap is one of her favorite movies of all time.”
“Emme’s too.” I sense an opening. “I have to say, though, I’m relieved. They kind of threw me a line. I’ve been wanting to reach out to you, to apologize for last night. I just . . .”
The waitress delivers my drink, cutting off my speech. After she leaves, Reid quietly surveys the room around us, once again deliberately avoiding my gaze.
“Have you been back here?” he asks.
I tamp down my disappointment. Reid doesn’t want to hear my apology. Maybe he just needs more time—or maybe I really have messed things up beyond repair. But he’s still here, talking to me, making a stab at conversation. That has to count for something.
“No. Nisha and I saw a show when Sin-é reopened on Attorney Street in the early 2000s. It was great, but it just didn’t have the same specialness this place did.
” I shake my head. “I don’t know if this is overly dramatic, but I think when Jeff Buckley died, some of the magic of that time died with him. ”
“Yeah. We’ve changed a lot, haven’t we?”
There’s a pause while we sip our drinks. I hate the distance between us, the loss of our camaraderie and ease.
I want to get us back to where we were. I think of what Emme said about putting herself in time-out yesterday.
I think of my younger self, too, her guileless zeal.
And now, the complications, the fears, the hypotheticals .
. . they’re all flimsy when confronted with the sheer strength of my feelings for this man, my desire to have him again.
Reid clears his throat. “So what’s happening with the Resonance gig?”
“They accepted the new terms.”
For the first time since I sat down, Reid’s face breaks into a smile, revealing the chip in his tooth I’ve come to find devastating. “That’s amazing, Lili. You’re taking it, right?”
Warmth floods my chest. Speaking it aloud to him makes it real.
Historically, this is the point at which I would start second-guessing, but the anxiety has melted out of me.
I’m no longer projecting into the future, mentally constructing an ideal version of myself and worrying about all the things I need to do to meet myself there.
I’m content in this moment, relishing the accomplishment, happy that I get to share it with Reid.
That I’m getting one more moment with him.