“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 underneathit, 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 andout 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 seenNotting Hill?”
“Surely that’s a rhetorical question.”
