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 animpossible 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.
But I can’t. I may have hardly any experience with relationships, but I’m smart enough to know that depriving someone of their dream is not a good start.
And what if staying in New York didn’t work out? What if he struggled to find a job? Or, what if he did find a job, but it was another one that sapped his joy? What if he didn’t end up actually liking New York? What if the noise and the pace grated on him? Our sunsets don’t even come close to California’s. Our winters are a horror show. Two weeks ago, a man tried to pee on me in the subway.
And what if he started to dream of the life he could have lived in LA, and he became resentful that I encouraged him to make the wrong decision, and his resentment turned us bitter, then tore us apart, then left him with nothing, stranded on the other side of the country, so far away from home?
No. I can’t.
My eyes are unblinking, and that’s when I know it: I’m falling in love with him. Not keeping him here will inflict a kind of emotional violence on me, but I’d rather take on that pain than hold him back from what is very clearly a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.
I run my hand along his arm, bringing its soothing weight down across my stomach. “You’re going to be famous,” I say.
He laughs. “I would be the worst famous person.” Thenhe’s quiet, contemplative for a beat. “All my paparazzi shots would just be me going to my mom’s house and Ralphs.”
“But you’d be looking so cool and aloof while you’re doing it.”
We lay there in mutual silence, the wooden floorboards catching the first spears of light, collecting in pools around my stacks of paperbacks, the piles of clothes we discarded so urgently last night. We don’t need to say anything else. The decision has been made, and we both know that it’s a terrible one. But it’s the right one too.
I tell myself that I don’t need to start saying goodbye to him now. That it’s not the end yet.
But time is a bandit, a slippery motherfucker. Over the next three days, we try to pin it down and magnify it. We sip wine from juice glasses on my fire escape, which we’re no longer afraid to enjoy. We sun ourselves on the stoop of the Ukrainian church on Seventh Street. We play rainy-afternoon pool at Doc Holliday’s against a pair of friendly Hell’s Angels. We see a punk show at C-Squat, led by Pepper on his squealing trombone. We squeeze ourselves into a listening booth at Generation Records, sharing a pair of headphones and making out.
There are meals we make in the single pot I own: spaghetti with breadcrumbs, white chicken chili, cold borscht that stains our fingers electric pink. There is stumbling out of Pyramid Club just as a pair of early morning joggersswish by in their neon-yellow shorts. There is a trip to the gem hall at the Natural History Museum, which feels like the inside of a black velvet jewel box. We kiss in the shadow of a gigantic amethyst slice.
There is the feeling of my heart splitting apart when I watch him scrub my pot with a checkered towel thrown over his shoulder. There is the reading I avoid so I can look at him instead. There is the plane ticket he’s using as a bookmark that I pretend not to notice.
There’s riding the F all the way down to Coney Island, where we take in a sword-swallowing sideshow and watch the hot orange sun flicker beneath the horizon on the boardwalk. Reid looks at home here, with the water and the sunset, so close to the sand. A California boy after all. I have my proof.
I wish I had met you earlier, I want to say.I wish we hadn’t wasted so much of our summer not knowing each other. I wish I could have liberated you from that crushing Midtown high-rise, that I could’ve shown you the fucked-up beauty of this city from the start, the way it spits its life at you. That you would’ve fallen in love so hard that you had no choice but to stay.
There is a marathon walk uptown, ducking into the luxury department stores for the bracing refuge of their air-conditioned lobbies. There is regret that I wore my stupid jelly sandals that make my feet sweat and squeak and rub blisters into my heels, a pain that’s at least familiar.
There is waiting outside his uncle’s building while he packs the rest of his stuff. There is worry. There is berating myself for not being selfish enough to make him stay, thenberating myself some more for such a stupid line of thought. There is chipping my green nail polish with my teeth. There is Cat, emerging from the marble building like a Cherry Cola fairy, embracing me in a musky hug, and telling me that this is not a death, even though it kind of feels like it is.
There is splurging on a cab back downtown, Reid’s suitcase stuffed into the trunk like a shameful secret. There is the two of us, not leaving my apartment for the rest of the day so that we can sleep and talk and fuck and not think about a single thing.
And then there is Monday. And then he is gone.
Part II2023
VI
