Love Lettering

by Kate Clayborn

  “Ugh. Is it from ink•scribe again?” Another overly stylized name for a company that’s always sending me free stuff care of the shop, except this free stuff is garbage. Pens that last a literal day and a half, and I think they’ve sent me fifty since the Times article. “I guess hang on to it, if so.” I’ll pick it up tomorrow and donate it to the day care two blocks from me.

  There’s rustling on the other end of the phone. Cecelia mumbles something about needing her glasses, which I know without seeing her are tucked into the neck of her shirt. “Oh, here they are,” she says, a half second later. “No, this one—Sutherland, it says. Who’s that?”

  My face heats. “Oh, uh—”

  “Your date maybe, hmmm?”

  I immediately change direction, heading toward the Smith Street station so I can get over to the shop.

  “No, jeez. I wouldn’t have a date send something there. He’s a—” I break off. Can’t risk it. Out of context, his name isn’t that memorable. But if I say former client maybe it’ll ring a bell for her. “He’s a small business consultant.”

  How annoying, that this is what I’ve said. All his man-terrogating got in my head. That package probably has a bunch of information about health insurance that I already know. What a jerk.

  “Oh, what a good idea,” Cecelia says.

  I tell her I’ll be there soon and for the rest of the trip over, I’m doing that thing I indulge myself in sometimes, where I compose a lengthy, highly organized but incredibly witty lecture of censure to someone who has done me wrong. Except in this version, I’m seeing it all written out. I’d make it chaotic, haphazard, all different fonts blended together. Something that would really annoy Reid. Bubble letters, definitely; that’d probably make his face melt off. I set up the LLC months ago, I’d write. And I have a health savings account. I even looked into one of those asset insurance policies for my hands. I’d leave out the part where those policies are expensive enough to have made me laugh out loud.

  By the time I’m close, my mind has wandered, and all I can do is wonder what that Sutherland looks like on the package. Did he address it himself? Seeing his handwriting—the possibility feels at turns exciting and unnerving. Intimate. It’s rare to see people’s handwriting these days. Surprising as it may sound, no one ever really sees mine, since what I draw isn’t really similar to my natural writing. Even my own planner, it’s stylized—my headers for task lists in a wide, all-lowercase script, no slant, the tasks themselves blocked with a slim, all-caps roman. It looks good in photos.

  But once I have what Reid’s sent in my hands—Cecelia pausing briefly in her consultation with a customer to wave me to where it sits on the back worktable—I see that both the labels on the front have been typed, probably by someone who works for Reid. I ignore the disappointment I feel and tear open the package—it’s slim but stiff, nothing more than a standard, legal-size envelope, the kind of thing a contract comes in. So probably it is annoying I-didn’t-ask-for-this business advice. Well, at least if Cecelia comes back, my lie will be convincing.

  Except it’s not business advice.

  It’s a letter. A4, white, nothing special, though thicker than average printer paper.

  And it’s handwritten.

  it begins, and for a second I can’t get beyond those two words. Despite my Masterpiece Theatre imaginings, Reid doesn’t write in some kind of eighteenth-century cursive; instead, like most people these days, he has a sort of half-print, half-script style—the M of my name separate from the e, but the e joined to the g with a smooth garland. The letters are close together, but the words themselves are given room to breathe—wide, even kernings that make me think of the way Reid’s jaw unclenched outside that crowded scaffold sidewalk.

  Dark black ink. Even pressure. A rightward slant, a low vertical. I resist the urge to trace it with my finger. I force myself to read on.

  I apologize for the questions I asked you on Wednesday.

  I’m sure you’ve noticed that I’m not the most natural conversationalist, and I was nervous. I relied on discussing matters I know more about. Matters I know more about than art, at least. This is no excuse for what bad company I was.

  Yesterday morning I went back to the building we got stuck on. Before 7 a.m., it’s different, as I’m sure you know.

  Traffic noise, construction noise, people noise: It’s all still there, but quieter, which is why I should not have suggested meeting when we did. The light wasn’t great, and the scaffolding is still there, so I still couldn’t see the letters, but

  I made a trip somewhere else after work and found what

  I’ve enclosed here. I hope it helps.

  For whatever it’s worth, I enjoyed watching you work. I wish you every success.

  Reid Sutherland

  I stare at what he’s written for a long time, ignoring for now whatever it is he’s enclosed. I’m not looking for a code, because I know now Reid wouldn’t leave one. If he asks, he wants to know. If he says something, he means it. If he writes to you, he’s written exactly what he wants you to know.

  Instead I pick out the phrases I like most, the ones that make me want to agree with him, answer him, ask him. I was nervous, I read again, and I want to say: I was, too. No excuse, and I think: No, but I forgive you. Before 7 a.m., and I wonder: What time do you get up in the morning? What time do you have to be at your weird calculator job?

  I enjoyed watching you work. I love that word, enjoyed. It sounds small and polite, but it contains something big, passionate. In my head I see it as it should be, I think. The en- and the -ed should be small, but sturdy. Like bookends, or like hands, supporting something that’s lean and tall, but fragile and new. A fawn’s legs. J-O-Y.

  It’s a photograph he’s enclosed, or a photocopy of one, but I can tell that the original is black and white. On the bottom right corner I can see a snippet of a label, something that must’ve gotten caught in the copier, a YPL that I know must have an N before it. Photo archives in the New York Public Library. That’s the trip Reid took after work. To the library.

  It’s a ribbon cutting of some sort, though it must be a pre–big scissors and smiles moment, men in dark suits standing around behind a long, thin line of fabric. Behind them is a newer version of the building that had, only a few days ago now, been covered in scaffolding. But if you let your eyes drift up, up and over, you can see it. Top left corner. Three-quarters of the sign we squinted at. Not freshly painted, I don’t think, but newish. Clear and bright, and though I can’t see it all, I can see enough of what we’d missed on the street. The script I’d strained so hard to see is for a brand of men’s clothing, nothing I’ve heard of before, but I can picture the clothes, somehow, from that script—cap lines and ascender lines almost the same, swooping cross-strokes that nevertheless stay within the boundaries. Organized and elegant and aspirational.

  Beneath it, the line of lettering that had faded almost completely, that I almost hadn’t known was there. An unassuming, narrow all caps. What’s written there makes me smile, and I wonder if it made Reid do the opposite. I wonder what this line of text means to him.

  it reads.

  A literal sign, but maybe the other kind, too.

  I stall on the way home, not wanting to seem too eager. I stop for a few groceries and get caught up talking to Trina, who works the register most Fridays and who was hilariously insistent about showing me the infection she’s got from her belly button ring. On my walk home I bump into one of my clients who’s coming out of her Zumba class, and when I compliment her on her extremely fashionable exercise outfit, she is thrilled to give me a coupon code for a friends and family event at her favorite athleisure store. When I’m finally on my street, I see my neighbor Artem crouched outside the front door with his young daughter, valiantly attempting to draw a unicorn for her with sidewalk chalk. The head resembles a thigh with a dagger sticking out of it, so I am professionally obligated to take over, fixing it up and drawing his daughter’s name so it curve
s over the unicorn’s back, all the way down its windswept tail. She claps and hugs my knees, and Artem gives me a grateful smile, and for the first time in a while I feel as if I’ve had a good hour of my own brand of .

  Upstairs I carefully unpack my groceries, not giving in to the petty temptation I have to put a few of my things on Sibby’s side. I make my notes for the job with Lark, catch up with a few social media comments, sort a giveaway for a new set of notebooks.

  Then I take out the envelope and set the photograph Reid sent me on the center of my bed. I sit on my desk chair, put my feet up on the mattress, and take a deep breath.

  He answers on the first ring. His hello is exactly as I’d expect it. It’s a declarative rather than an inquisitive hello.

  Hello, period.

  “Hi. I got the photograph.”

  “Good,” he says. “I’ll thank my guy.” The messenger, I guess he means. I wonder what people who work for Reid think of him. Probably they think a lot of wrong things, like that he’s never, ever nervous.

  “Thank you. For the photograph, and for the letter.”

  There’s a couple of seconds of silence, and I wonder if he’ll repeat the apology, say it out loud, too. The thought is so jarring that I reach a hand beside me, absently feeling for the cord of my headphones. If he says it when I have the phone pressed right up against my ear—I don’t know. It feels too close.

  He only says, “You’re welcome.”

  But I still put in the headphones, set my phone on the desk so I don’t stare at the shape of his name on my screen.

  “So. You went to the library.”

  “I did.” After a beat, he adds, “I like research. I did a lot of it, in graduate school.”

  “You went to graduate school?”

  “Yes. Masters and doctorate. Both in mathematics.” It’s not a boast, just a completion, an anticipation of the follow-up I would’ve certainly asked if he’d only said yes. I know I’m not great at numbers, and it’s not that I think he’s lying, but it’s hard to believe that Reid—who doesn’t look much over thirty—has both of those degrees. Maybe I am also not great at estimating age.

  “Will it be helpful?” he asks, before I can follow up. “The picture, I mean.”

  “Oh, yes. It’s amazing. I can’t imagine doing something this big.”

  “You could, though. You could do it.”

  I feel a warm flush of pleasure at his quick, unfiltered confidence in me, but deflate when I think of that big, blank wall in Lark and Cameron’s bedroom. “I like the scale I work in, usually. But these, they have something to teach me.”

  “How do you mean?”

  “They have to make such an impact, so quickly. Striking enough to make a pedestrian look up, but not so striking that they have to stop and decode it. Memorable but simple. There’s a real balance to that.”

  Reid makes a slight humming noise, a thoughtful assent. “The librarian I spoke to—she had a lot of materials to recommend about sign painters. Books about the profession, and also some old volumes about the craft itself. I could send you her information. I should have done that.”

  I’m quiet for a few seconds, and so is he. If I say, Yes, send it to me, I think this would end with an e-mail, or a text message, my last communication from Reid the name and number of a librarian. He wouldn’t push it. He thinks he’s done enough to end this. I wish you every success.

  I hate thinking of him out there, miserable in his misunderstanding of this city.

  “Reid,” I say, not ready yet to hang up, but also not ready yet to ask him what I want to ask him. I look down at the photograph, at the letters there. “Tell me one thing you like about it here. One thing.”

  I hear him take a breath. A big inhale, a quick, almost frustrated-sounding exhale. Damn these earphones. They’re just as intimate.

  “I like the food,” he finally says. His voice—I’d thought of it as flat before. But it’s not, not really. It’s deep and quiet and purposeful, nothing wasted. “Not the fancy, expensive restaurants. I like that you can walk into some tiny place that’s three-quarters kitchen and get a huge plate of food for cheap, and it’s good, too. It has to be good, for it to survive in this city. The food here, in those kinds of places—it’s a meritocracy.”

  I can picture the exact kind of place Reid is talking about. I’ve been in and out of those places the whole time I’ve lived here, and I like them, too. Places so worn-out and dumpy looking you can’t imagine at first why your mailman or your bodega guy or your brow waxer or your boss basically shouted in your face about how you have to try it; you’re an absolute philistine because you haven’t yet.

  But then you do. You wait in the long line, you stumble through your order while all the regulars are rolling their eyes at what a rookie you are. You stand at a narrow counter inside with a plastic fork and taste food that’s better than anything you’ve ever eaten, or at least anything you’ve ever eaten before the last place you went into like this. You get ready to shout in the face of the next person you see.

  Reid probably doesn’t do that last part, but still. Handwritten letter of apology, photocopied photograph from the library, phone pressed to my ear: None of it makes me feel more connected to Reid than this small piece of information about his preferences in this place he says he hates so much.

  “Okay,” I say softly, and I wonder if he can hear the smile in my voice. “You want to try again?”

  Chapter 7

  “I admit,” he says dryly, hunching his wide shoulders yet again to let another customer by, “that I generally get the food to go.”

  Reid and I are standing—standing close—inside a narrow corner storefront in Nolita, an Israeli place that ticks every box he and I discussed on the phone last night: tiny place. Big portions. Cheap. It’s a place he comes to somewhat regularly, he’d told me, and I’d checked my list and said I was certain I could find some good signs in the area.

  It’d all seemed a good start for my suggestion to try again, a way for us to loosen up around each other with a meal we’re both likely to enjoy before we get out on another letter quest.

  But now I suspect, given how stiffly both of us are taking the forced proximity, that neither of us really thought about the practical consequences of this reboot, because in the last five minutes alone, we have learned things about each other that are probably, at the very least, second-date territory for me personally. Reid, for example—thanks to the line that at first extended out the propped-open front door and a strong, warm spring breeze—knows how it feels to have a strand of my long hair against the skin of his neck, a development he greeted with what can only be described as aloof tolerance. He may have even winced as he leaned back on the heels of those same gray sneakers.

  As for me? I now have been adjacent to Reid’s body for long enough to realize that there’s a faint smell of chlorine on him, a summer-day-at-the-pool smell, and between that and the light, spicy scent of his soap, I feel sort of the same way I did the first time I slow-danced with a boy in seventh grade. Boys smell like this? I’d thought, new to the wonders of a modestly applied cologne, new to the feeling of wanting to press my face into another person’s skin.

  “Do you live near here?” I say, determined not to think about pressing my face anywhere untoward, but when Reid looks down at me, his brow furrowed, I can only think about pressing my face into an ice bucket or an invisibility cloak. My cheeks heat in embarrassment.

  “I mean, not because we’d take the food back there! I wasn’t . . . inviting myself over. Or trying to get into your business.”

  His lips twitch, an almost smile. “Business,” he says, deadpan. “Dicey territory.” The almost smile grows. Crooked and a little sheepish. God, he is handsome.

  “Reid,” I say, fighting my own smile and further face-pressing thoughts. “Did you make a joke?”

  “Probably not,” he says, ducking his head and tugging on the sleeve of his jacket, pulling it over his watch. “I’m not known for
my sense of humor.”

  What are you known for? I’m thinking, but before I can ask anything, a loud voice shouts “MAG!” in our general direction.

  I roll my eyes. “Mag,” I mumble to myself, moving through the crowd toward the counter, where a young man has set two gigantic cardboard squares of food. I’m pretty sure he knows my name isn’t “Mag,” but I’ve learned that mispronunciation of this nature is some kind of New York food-service ritual. I feel Reid at my back, hear him say “Pardon me,” as we move through a particularly dense clump of teenagers near the register. They’ll probably have to Google what that means.

  We luck out, finding two stools side by side along the shop’s front window, the bar in front of us exactly deep enough for our plates. Despite our general awkwardness together, I’m comforted by the way we competently perform a familiar, casual-dining-out routine: I set my bag on Reid’s stool when he goes to the counter along the wall and grabs us napkins and plastic forks; I straighten our plates and reach an arm down the bar and grab one of the bottles of extra hot sauce that rests there, while Reid makes his way back and distributes his take between us.

  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.