Two friends, out for an early dinner.Company.
I finally find an outlet for my face-pressing once we’re settled, forks in hand, bending my head to take in the smells of my food—the best-looking falafel I’ve ever seen, garlicky sautéed carrots, a tomato-and-cucumber salad that I plan to mix with the hummus that’s sitting right beside it.Yum.
“Is your name Megan?” Reid says, interrupting my small ritual. I straighten in my seat and look over at him. He’s got his fork poised right above his plate, as though knowing my full name is really necessary for going forward. I super-hope he isn’t asking so he can do some kind of formal prayer involving me, or else this meal is going to feel extremely weird. Extremely weird-er, I guess.
“Uh. No,” I say, starting the hummus-cucumber-tomato stir-up. I can feel Reid watching me do it, and I’d bet the farm he thinks it’s disgusting. I shrug. “It’s Margaret.”
“Margaret,” he repeats.
“Old-fashioned, I know.” A family name, sort of, though who wants to get into it. I take a bite of my food. Holy smokes. Maybe we should do a prayer. These carrots taste like an orgasm feels.
“I like old-fashioned,” says Reid, and I think about offering up a jokey, flippant “Hugesurprise!” in response. But when I look over at him, I see he’s stirring his hummus into his salad, his brow-furrow in full force, and I turn back to my food, letting my hair fall over my shoulder so I can hide my smile.
He’strying. Trying again.
For a few minutes, we eat in silence, and maybe that wouldn’t be so bad except that it’s not silence at all. The line’s still out the door and there’re people on either side of us, the pair beside me punctuating their conversation with boisterous laughter. Outside the window, a dump truck rumbles by, releasing puffs of dark smoke into the air behind it, all the pedestrians in its wake ducking their faces as they walk. I feel oddly, uncomfortably responsible—I want to say,Do better, New York, so that Reid doesn’t get that look on his face from last time. That tense, I’m-barely-tolerating-this look. I think about his letter to me, all the times he wrote the wordnoisein his tidy half-script.
This city’s noise is all caps, all the time. Written with a big, chisel-tip, permanent black marker. Impossible to ignore.
“Hey,” he says, surprising me. “Look over there.” He’s gesturing out the window, not to where the dump-truck smoke lingers, but across the way, to a somewhat run-down-looking bar catty-corner to where we sit. “That’s hand-lettered, isn’t it?”
Itis. The awning is black vinyl, and that’s obviously been screen-printed, but below the molding that separates the building’s brick upper floors from the bar beneath, there’s a length of faded black paint, not far off in color from the chalk paint I’ll use in Lark’s kitchen. Painted across it is the bar’s name in an inexpert serif, uneven beaks on theS, the foot of theTslanting upward. The letters are filled in a dark marigold, traced out with a brick red that picks up the color from the building above. I feel the nudge of an idea—this rich, unexpected color scheme and that elegant script from the photo Reid sent me.
“Good eye,” I say, reaching for my phone to snap a photo. I could wait until we’re outside again, but this has the echo of one of those rare moments, the ones that sometimes come when I’m in the thick of a project—when my mind is so busy that I’ve got to sleep with my sketchpad by my bed in case I wake up in the night inspired. I haven’t had that kind of moment in a long time.
When I set down the phone, I think I might wriggle on the stool. “Thank you,” I say, picking up my fork again.
Reid clears his throat. “Have you ever heard of John Horton Conway?”
I’ve got a mouth full of falafel so I can’t really answer. I shake my head and hope that John Horton Conway is not a Founding Father or any other historical person I should definitely know about but can’t remember because this food is so good.
“He’s a mathematician.”
“Like you,” I say, or sort of mumble around the falafel.
Reid shakes his head. “No, he’s a professor.” He pushes his hummus-tomato-cucumber mixture around—I don’t think that was a successful endeavor for him—looking wistful for a second. But then he speaks again. “He’s brilliant. He can do the kind of math that seems unbelievable.”
“Huh,” I say, not acknowledging that I’m pretty unsure about what qualifies as “unbelievable” math. Long division, probably.
“He also plays a lot of games. They say he’s always got dice, or a Slinky, or playing cards. For years, when he was first starting out, it’s how he would spend all his time. Backgammon. Chess. New games he’d make up.”
“He sounds fun.” I pause for a half second before I add something, a tentative effort. This meet-up, this meal—it’s a game all its own, the one with the long, rectangular blocks you pull from the bottom and stack on top, making a taller and taller tower. Taking a risk, watching to see if it’ll topple. “Probably has agreatsense of humor.”
Reid looks over at me, gives me that crooked almost smile. The tower holds, and I could clap for myself.
“People used to think—even he used to think—he was wasting time, playing games. But he was really . . . he was working out math all along. Loosening up his mind for ideas that were on their way.”
“Do you do that?”
“No, not lately. But I was thinking about your . . .” He trails off.
I can almost see it, him pulling his own block from the bottom. “Reid. Are you about to give me a business idea?”
He shifts on his stool. “No.”
I wait. He was absolutely about to give me a business idea.
“It’s more of an . . .ideasidea.” He’s got that block hovering right at the top of the tower.
