“Must be all the classic movies my mom forced me to watch as a kid.”
“Reid.” I put a hand on his arm. “I’m going to ask you a serious question: Are you being forced to work in finance against your will?”
A lopsided smile. “My uncle didn’t need to give me this job. He probably shouldn’t have. But he knew I didn’t have anything lined up yet and that I’m reasonably capable of following orders. I think my mom pushed him into it. She knows I’ve always wanted to live in New York, and I just graduated. Also, Jewish guilt is a powerful thing. If I were to walk back a commitment to her brother, my mom would work it into every single one of our conversations until one of us dies.”
“I’m well acquainted with the feeling. So you’re not from New York?”
“Is anyone reallyfromNew York?”
“I am.” I point skyward, the universal sign ofuptown. “I grew up on West Eighty-Sixth Street.” He makes ahmsound, silently taking in this new information about me. “What about you?”
“I’m from LA.” I notice him hesitate for a moment. “My contract at the firm ends next Monday. I only have one more week in New York before I head back.”
Monday, which also happens to be my first day of classes. It is rapidly promising to be a terrible day.
“So we’re both from places that no one is really from,” I say while my mind contemplates whether it is possibleto miss a person you barely know. It’s sort of an insane thought. “Did you consider going to school here? In New York?” I ask.
“Sure, but money was an issue. When I was in middle school, my mom got a job as an administrative aide at an elementary school. You’d be surprised how many transferable skills she picked up from her groupie days.”
“I thought you said she was a backup singer?”
“Technically. But that wasn’t the extent of her job description.”
He laughs, so I do too. I feel a prick of curiosity about who his dad is. Am I shooting the shit with David Crosby’s son right now? My own father would actually die of happiness.
“Anyway,” Reid is saying, “my uncle helped us out sometimes, but my mom was too proud to let him fully fund my tuition. It was easier for everyone if I went to a state school. And UCSD has a solid screenwriting program, which is pretty hard to find.”
“So what are you going to do when you’re home? In LA, I mean.”
“Hug my mom.”
“And then what?”
I notice it again—his hesitation. I’m starting to sense that he’s an overthinker like me. According to my parents, this is also part of what makes me an artist: that I possess an excess of empathy but maintain a clinical, observational distance from all that emotion.
I see myself in him, which means I can tell he’s holdingback. I am desperate to get closer to his core, to unearth what it is that’s causing a crease to form between his brows.
But also—I’m starting to feel protective of him.You can do it, I want to say to him, just like I often want to tell myself.You can say the hard thing.
He sighs. “I don’t really have a plan. This is kind of embarrassing, but at the beginning of the summer, like in my first week of working at the firm, I was making a hundred copies of a case I could barely understand, and what I did understand of it was so crushingly dull that I could actually feel a part of my soul dying. There was no art in it. I hadn’t had a creative thought in weeks. I realized I was miserable. I missed writing. I missed who Iwaswhen I was writing. So I decided to do something sort of risky.”
He looks over at me, like he’s making sure I’m still with him. In the distance, I hear the twinkle of a glass breaking, a muffled cackle, and something too fast and violent playing on the sound system—Minor Threat or Circle Jerks, one of the older hardcore bands. I can’t explain it, but I already know that this will be one of those moments I’ll feel nostalgic for in years or decades to come—that this is one of those instants from which the rest of my life will unfurl.
I nod at him, coaxing him along.
On a breath, he says, “I sent the screenplay I’d submitted as my thesis to Jake Bellingham.”
I find it ridiculously sweet that he considers mailing a screenplay to a stranger “risky.” Especially because I have never heard that name in my life.
When I don’t respond, he cocks his head. “He wroteForgive Me?”
I know this one, of course—the movie about the lapsed Catholic priest who descends into a sex addiction. It swept the Oscars a couple years ago.
“He writes scripts that read like novels. His characters are super complex, and it’s like every word they say has a second, deeper meaning beneath it. He’s the kind of artist who depresses me a little, because I know I’ll never be that good, but it’s also exciting—he’s making the format feel so much more expansive.” He runs a hand over his face and sighs. “So, yeah. I sent him the script with a cover letter that was probably way too fawning. I told myself I wasn’t expecting an answer, but now it’s been over two months, which probably means an answer is never coming. I’m disappointed, and I feel stupid for being disappointed.”
“So you really are a rebel.”
“And I used the office machine to make a copy.”
