Love Lettering

by Kate Clayborn

  “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 “Huge surprise!” 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’s trying. 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 word noise in 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?”

  It is. 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 the S, the foot of the T slanting 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 a great sense 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 . . . ideas idea.” He’s got that block hovering right at the top of the tower.

  I give a dramatic sigh, but on the inside, I’m smiling. I want the ideas idea the same way I wanted to see his handwriting. “Okay. Let’s hear it.”

  He picks up his napkin—which he’d actually draped over one of his thighs, as if we’re somewhere fancy—and swipes it across his mouth before setting it neatly beside his cardboard plate. “I was thinking about your list.”

  I must get a look on my face.

  “Which is a great list,” he adds, hastily. “Very efficient.”

  “Bu-ut,” I say, prompting him before I take my last bite of food.

  “It seemed stressful. Following the list and looking for . . . expected things.” He clears his throat again. “It struck me that—it could be useful to remember that signs are, ah.” He pauses, looks across the street again. “Often unexpected.”

  Like you, I want to say again.

  “I know you have a goal, to get your inspiration. But what if you . . . made it more fun? Like a game.”

  I blink, swallowing my food heavily. Anyone looking at me and Reid right now—anyone who notices his excellent table manners and good posture and tasteful weekend clothing, and my Clever Girl dinosaur T-shirt and the way I slouch over my plate and how I never thought to put my napkin in my lap—anyone would think it’d be me who’d suggest something fun, something light. A game.

  “It isn’t my business,” he says in the silence I leave there. He makes a move to gather his plate.

  “Wait,” I say, and his hands still. Anyone would think that, even me. But having Reid for a fr—for company—it’s probably going to mean that I stop thinking that way. We’ve built up quite a tower of blocks here, the two of us, in this small, inexpensive, delicious restaurant.

  “It’s sort of your business,” I say. “If you’re still doing this with me.”

  For a second, we look at each other, the tower tall and quivering between us. The corners of his mouth are tight, as though he’s making an effort to control his expression. It’s still so noisy in here, but not so much that I can’t hear his next two words, a quiet, simple promise.

  Of company. Maybe even of friendship.

  “I am,” he says.

  “Margaret,” Reid says an hour and a half later, staring down at his phone. “We got it.”

  “All of them?” There’s a note of disappointment in my voice. Over so soon? I’m thinking, even though the light’s fading and my feet are getting tired.

  I move next to him easily, more familiarly now, and peer over his shoulder, but still make sure I don’t let any of my unruly hair blow onto his person. And there it is, spread out over the eight photos on the grid of Reid’s photo library—all the letters of my name, my full name, the one no one ever really uses, but the one that’s been half of our quest since we left the restaurant.

  We’d picked something easy for our first try at Reid’s game idea. Each of us, we’d decided, would have to try to find versions of all the letters
in the other’s name, Reid including his middle name—Hale, from his mother’s side of the family, he tells me—to even things out. The rules were simple: no using the same sign for more than one letter, and nothing that’s not hand-lettered.

  We haven’t really been competing; it’s not the kind of game where we’ve been trying to one-up each other. It’s like sharing the Sunday crossword, I guess—instead of passing the folded newspaper back and forth, trading clues and guesses, Reid and I had pointed out to each other the signs we noticed as we’d walked. And the same way the Sunday crossword-share never finishes without at least one concession to a Google search, Reid and I had adjusted some of the rules as we went along. A particularly impressive H on a vinyl sign inspired the “wild card” exception: one letter from a sign that’s not hand-drawn. A best out of three rock-paper-scissors practice implemented for when one of us would spot a good example that matched with one of the letters—A, E, R—that we both have in our names.

  “The E,” Reid says, nodding up toward the mural he’s standing in front of on Bleecker, an amazing red, white, black, and gold image of Debbie Harry of Blondie wearing a leopard-print blouse and a look of challenge in her black-rimmed eyes. There’s a lot of lettering on this mural—a crooked version of the CBGB logo minus the decorative serifs, a narrow black script against a deep-red background, a blocky, clean all caps in the lower right corner.

  Reid’s zoomed in and snapped the E in BLONDIE as it appears on a rendering of a concert ticket—1979; gates open at 6 p.m.; no bottles, cans, coolers, or pets. It’s red, the E, and the top arm is shorter than the bottom, a sturdy-looking thing, and even though all the images on his phone are out of order—no rule for having to find consecutive letters—it’s easy to reconstruct my name from these eight snapshots, to rearrange them. Here, Margaret doesn’t look so old-fashioned. It looks bright, colorful, cheerful. It somehow looks more Meg than Margaret.

  I swipe my thumb over my own screen, tip it toward Reid so he can see the various building blocks of my own take. Reid Hale. His name, it sounds kind of . . . new-fashioned. And also stuck-up. But as with the letters from my own name, R-e-i-d looks different in the pictures. Noisy and alive and fun, like the game itself and the Bowery around us, coming to life on a Saturday evening.

  My hands feel restless to sketch. I don’t even notice that my hair’s blown against him again until he clears his throat and straightens.

  “I can send these to you,” he says, moving to tug down the sleeve of his jacket again. It’s stayed warm tonight, warm enough that I’ve never even taken my own be-buttoned jacket from where it’s stuffed inside my bag, but Reid has left his on the whole time.

  “Yeah, that would be great!” I’ve basically cheered it, because now that the game is over, Reid and I seem to have slipped back into our familiar roles. I resist the urge to sigh. During our walk, Reid wasn’t exactly loose, but he was engaged, and interested, and determined. His version of excitement is basically—pointing, I guess, with the occasional attractive eyebrow raise, but still, there’s something about it. Something friendly, and comforting, and nice to be around.

  “That was a really good . . . ideas idea,” I say.

  “It helped?”

  “It did.”

  Reid nods once, that firm tip of his head, a piece of punctuation. An end to the sentence we’ve kept going between us for a while now.

  We’ve moved back to the corner, where a crowd is waiting to cross Bowery. We could say our goodbyes here and I could turn, keep walking, see a few more signs on my own, walk through a neighborhood where the letters change, become characters for a language I don’t know. I could call for a Lyft when I get to the Manhattan Bridge. An indulgence, surge pricing for sure, but I feel I’ve earned it.

  Except . . . I also want to stop for a few minutes. Take in the results of the game, look over the pictures and see what strikes me as interesting, as inspiration. There’s a coffee shop beside us—quite late for coffee—and I look toward it, see tables open. Even as I’m picturing it, as I’m thinking of me and my notebook and my Staedtler and these pictures, a familiar pressure builds. That twitching in my hands—what if I sit there, and it all comes to nothing? What if it’s another block, and I can’t—

  “You should choose one of the letters,” Reid says, interrupting my thoughts. I blink away from the coffee shop and look up at him. “Choose one, and do one of our names, or—a month name, for your project. All from that one letter’s style. Another game.”

  “Wow,” I say, chuckling at the way he seems to have read my mind. “Maybe you should be a business consultant.”

  “Maybe,” he says, with a small, self-deprecating smile.

  I stare down at my phone again, my grid of pictures. The nice thing about the game was the way we created it together, played it together, the way neither one of us was following or playing along. I wonder whether it feels as good to him as it does to me.

  So before I can think about it too hard, I push my phone into his hands.

  “Pick one,” I say. “Pick one, and follow me.”

  Then I move past him into the coffee shop, not ready for the game to be over yet.

  “You are not serious,” I say, looking down at Reid’s selection.

  He shrugs, lifts his cup, and takes a sip of the herbal tea he ordered. Across the small, round table, his posture is nearly as impeccable as it had been the first time we sat together in a place like this.

  But it’s not like that time. For one thing, I have also ordered an herbal tea, and even though I think it tastes like licking the bottom of a flowerpot, at least I know I won’t wake up tomorrow with a caffeine hangover.

  For another, Reid and I are playing.

  “This is extremely unexpected,” I say, tapping my pencil against my open notebook.

  His mouth curves fleetingly as he sets down his cup. “If you’ll recall, unexpected was the point.”

  The lowercase a that’s pictured on my phone is strange, misshapen. It’s a double-storey, the kind of a with a hook-and-eye look to it that’s common in roman fonts but uncommon in handwriting. But where most double-storey a’s have a circular counter, this one’s counter is triangular, made that way by the odd proportions elsewhere in the letter. Flat along the bottom, thick and blocky outlines, not at all consistent or familiar.

  I’m surprised he picked it—orderly, well-shaped Reid—but I’m not displeased. In fact, as I still my pencil and flip it easily to rest in my usual drawing grip, a smile tugs at my mouth, because I already know what I’ll do with it. A month name, the first I’ve attempted outside of client jobs for weeks.

  Within two minutes I’ve copied the a—I’m quicker, usually, but it takes me a couple of tries to get the proportions right, and by the time I’ve got a version I’m satisfied with, I’m working on the lower quarter of the page. I can feel Reid’s eyes on my hands, and while it sometimes makes me self-conscious to have people watch me work, I find I don’t mind. He’s so quiet that it’s not all that different from when I set my phone up on its tiny stand and take a video of myself sketching.

  The hard part—the game, really—is not the copying, but the mimicking, the way I’m supposed to take this one letter and use it as inspiration for something new. That takes me longer—more experimentation, more mistakes as I struggle to get those over-broad shoulders on the top edges of the letters right, as I play with options to give them more dimension, more texture. I feel my mind going blank, my hand working more smoothly, confidently.

  Ten minutes and two pages later, I’ve got a rough sketch of it. This isn’t where I’d stop—if I were home, if I had more time, if I had all my stuff with me. I’m already thinking of colors I’d use to fill it in, and of how those big shoulders could become tiny canvases all their own, the tiny, clever sketches I could put inside....

  “March?” Reid says, reading what I’ve written. It’s the first time he’s spoken since I started sketching.

  I blink up at him. He’s leane
d forward, elbows resting on the table, his empty cup of tea in the space between. If this is how he sat while I worked, then I guess our heads were bent together, and it makes me feel strangely powerful, to know that my sketching was drawing him closer. Now that I’m finished, I’m free to notice things about close-up Reid: In the low light of this place, his eyes are darker blue. The lashes that frame them are long, but they aren’t showy about it—dark blond, lighter at the tips so that the true length of them is hidden from the casual observer. He has a single, small light brown freckle on his left cheekbone.

  I realize, snapping myself out of it, that his lean-back method is very effective for stopping spontaneous face-pressing feelings—not that he has those to worry about.

  “March,” I repeat. “Only sensible choice, for this kind of letter.”

  His brow furrows, his mouth pulling to the side. “How do you figure?”

  I shift in my seat, unsure about how to explain this part to someone else, how I try to read letters for more than the words they spell out.

  “Did you notice the store this came from?”

  He opens his mouth, then closes it again before making that furrow in his brow even deeper. Then he says, even more formally than usual, “I did not.”

  I resist the urge to smile. “I mean, don’t worry about it. It’s not as if that was one of the rules.”

  “Right.”

  “Anyway, the store was for western-style clothing. Boots, and clothes, and those—you know those ties that aren’t ties? With the . . . leather, and the thingy.” I gesture at my neck.

  “Those don’t sound like something I’d wear.” He seems disgusted by the very idea, and I have to bite my lip to keep from laughing.

  “The point is,” I say, once I’ve got it under control, “the store is sort of . . . odd. What it sells, in this city, in that neighborhood—you wouldn’t think of it, would you? So the sign, the letters—they should feel that way, too. Unexpected.”

  “Okay.” Somehow he makes it sound like Go on.

  “And March, that’s definitely the most unexpected month. So it had to be March.”