Love Stories is a series about love in all its forms. For this year’s installment, Vogue partnered with the publisher 831 Stories on a collection of essays and excerpts celebrating the art of romantic fiction. So break out the chilled red wine and silky pajamas, and read on.
I gently push my way toward the stage, which is really just a few square feet of floor with a banner reading “Sin-é” hanging on the wall above it. Two years ago, I would have been trailing Nisha, but I’m trying to be bolder. Since the moment she came blazing into my room to introduce herself on move-in day of our freshman year, I knew I needed her kind of energy in my life. She was already glimmering then, and tonight, she is incandescent in her silver-foil minidress with a hot-pink bindi gleaming between her brows.
I’ve been to Sin-é once or twice, but never when the narrow, brick-walled room has been so full. It’s mostly fellow NYU students, moonlighting actors, and some grizzled old Irish men, but over in the corner, at the table closest to the door, I spot two people, maybe in their midtwenties, locked in a conversation. Their heads are bowed over their steaming mugs—they famously don’t serve hard liquor here, only tea, coffee, and cans of Rolling Rock—and the woman has a blood-red buzzcut and a slash of lipstick to match. She looks like a regular.
But the man is clean-cut, clad in a full suit despite the heat. Conspicuous among this sea of denim and facial hair. When he picks up his coffee cup, his watch flashes. He looks like a limousine rider.
All the tables are taken, the walls already lined with spectators, so Nisha and I have no choice but to sit on the floor, right in front of this duo. I shudder to think of dry-cleaning my dress, which will likely cost three times as much as the actual garment.
The toe of the man’s dress shoe nudges my butt cheek. I feel my face burn. He quickly retracts his foot.
“Sorry,” he mumbles. I pick up his scent, distinct even over the aroma of spilled beer that’s soaked into the floorboards. Something piney. A sharp contrast to the sweltering day.
Nisha taps my knee and gestures to the stage. Jeff Buckley has appeared underneath the banner, his white Telecaster hanging across his chest. He’s probably just come out of the bathroom, but it’s like he conjured himself into being.
Now I understand what Nisha has been banging on about these past few months. This guy glows.
He steps in front of the mic and slings his guitar behind his back. He stomps his boot on the floor in a rhythmic beat. To someone offstage, he says, “Oh, you’re rolling. Goodness. Is there any reverb to roll with?”
Then he begins punctuating his stomps with claps, and the song takes shape: Nina Simone’s “Be My Husband.” Nisha squeezes my knee in silent alarm. This is her favorite song, from her favorite Nina Simone album. This, the squeeze implies, is fate at work.
Jeff pulls his guitar around to play the second song, something I have never heard before but which evokes a familiar emotion: the irresistible melancholy of longing. Encountering this kind of sublimity is so overwhelming that it makes me want to capture it in an image. Discreetly, I take a single photo, the click of the shutter buried in the reverb. Then I abandon the camera and give myself over entirely to the moment. Over the course of the set, Jeff sometimes leans against the wall, like he’s fiddling around in his own living room, casually being a genius. Sometimes he cradles his guitar closer to his chest, turning its face up so he can gaze upon it with more attention, as if it were a lover.
When the set ends, I look over at Nisha. Her face is streaked with tears.
“I think I just saw God,” Nisha says.
For once—and just this once—Nisha is not overreacting. “Go talk to him,” I urge her. “Do it now, before he gets too famous.”
At the front of the room, Jeff is already being swallowed up by the crowd. Nisha moves, zombie-like, into the fray. I peel myself off the ground, unsticking my dress from the unswept floor. When I stand, my knees buckle underneath me. My legs have fallen asleep. How much time just passed?
“What’d you think?”
The guy in the suit. Over the past however long, I had been so fixated on the music, and the musician, that I’d almost forgotten he was just above me.
Earlier, I could tell that he was handsome, if out of place. Now I see that he’s unbearably hot—and also, somehow, intensely familiar. As if I’ve previously seen the way his forearms flex under his rolled-up shirtsleeves, and already know how a section of his dark hair falls, curling over one eye. Like I’m familiar with how the corners of his mouth turn downward, not up, when he smiles, which makes it seem like he’s harboring a secret I’m desperate to be in on. As though I’ve already heard the deep rumble of his laugh. And felt the weight of his body pressing me up against a wall.
It doesn’t make sense. But to question it—I don’t know where to start.
“I thought... I don’t know what I thought,” I say. “I have nothing to compare it to.”
“In a good way or a bad way?” he asks.
For a moment, I wonder if I have the future of Jeff Buckley’s career in my hands. “Definitely in a good way. I don’t think he’s signed yet, but if he’s not, he should be.”
“I agree.”
I shift on my feet, still trying to get the blood moving in my legs. I touch the back of the man’s chair for balance, accidentally brushing against his suit jacket, which he’s folded and neatly draped over the back. His eyes shift to my fingers, then trail up my arm, my shoulder, my neck. I force myself to blink.
He nods at the red-haired girl. “You ready to go, Cat?”
“What time is it?” Cat runs her hand over her head. He checks his watch. Up close, I see that it’s a scuffed Timex. Not fancy after all. “Seven fifteen.”
“Dinner’s not until eight. Dad can wait.”
Dad. My gaze darts between them.
“The express is running local,” the guy says. “It’ll take an hour to get up to Park.”
“So you don’t have a limo,” I start. When they look at me blankly, I add, “So you can whisk Jeff Buckley away and offer him a million-dollar record deal? With a golden tablespoon of coke as a signing bonus?”
Cat cackles and elbows the guy. “I told you, you look like a fucking suit.”
“Well, I am one, for the summer.”
“Not record-label people, then.” I feel foolish, out of sorts.
I look out the window. The limo is gone. So are the musician and his gear, I discover as I glance around the room. Patrons are slowly making their way out to the street, into the hot, real world.
I feel a flicker of panic. I’m not ready to go back out there. I’m not ready to face the impending school year— or the fact that I desperately need to get a job this semester after spending the summer doing nothing other than sunning myself in Tompkins Square Park and sneaking photographs of the leftover eighties punks, their mohawks drooping in the heat. I’m not ready to replace the feelings this night elicited with the avalanche of things I need to do.
“I’m definitely not cool enough to be a record-label person,” the man says. “I have a temp gig at my uncle’s investment firm.”
“Which means he’s basically working for free,” Cat cuts in.
“I’m making enough to get myself this suit.” He brushes his hands down his pant legs.
“My point exactly,” Cat says. “Ten dollars an hour, Reid. I’d make more as a waitress at Veselka.”
Reid. So the man has a name. A good one too.
“You’re a waitress at Veselka?” I ask. If so, it would be a little like encountering East Village royalty.
“No.” Cat smirks. “But I did fuck a line cook one time.”
Reid laughs, then he turns back to me, his eyes studying something. I’m suddenly very aware that I’m not wearing a bra, and that the hard peaks of my nipples are likely making this obvious to him as well.
He clears his throat. “I like your camera.”
I fiddle with the strap. “Are you into photography?”
“Looking at it, sure. But I can’t be the one doing it, assuming you want your head in the photo.”
I try to fight a smile.
“Reid does write screenplays in secret, though. And they’re actually not terrible.” Cat arches her brows. I give Reid a glance that says, Really? and he returns one that says, Up for debate. “Which makes it even more of a shame that my dad has him identifying acquisition targets for IBM.”
“I’m not actually identifying acquisition targets,” Reid says to me, as if I know what those words mean. “I’m making photocopies and binding books out of research that other people did about identifying acquisition targets.”
“Yes, but what beautiful binding skills you have.” Cat grabs his chin between her thumb and her forefinger, giving it a squeeze. “My dad is no less immune to this punim than those girls are.”
She motions to the table behind them. The two women sitting there look away quickly, caught.
“They’ve been staring at you this entire time,” Cat stage-whispers.
Inexplicably, I feel a flare of jealousy.
That’s when Nisha reappears, announcing her return with a forceful “Lili!” Her usual entrance.
“Did you get to talk to him?” I scan her face.
“He left with some people from Columbia Records,” Nisha says. I exchange inside-joke glances with Cat and Reid. Reid’s gaze lingers on mine.
“But guess what I got?” Nisha asks.
“His panties?” Cat quips.
“Almost better.” Nisha waves a crumpled napkin in front of my face. “The address of someone who knows Jeff Buckley’s manager. Apparently the manager is having a party right now, and this girl said Jeff might come later. We’re going.” She cocks her head, addressing Cat and Reid. “You guys could come, if you want to.”
I’m not surprised by Nisha’s invitation—this is not the first time my ever-magnanimous friend has encouraged strangers to tag along with us. Or the first time that a stranger has been a hot guy who I’m too shy to ask out myself.
“We have to go to dinner at my uncle’s apartment.” Reid looks at me like this warrants an apology. “I owe him... well, a lot. But at the very least showing up for dinner at his apartment.”
Before I can consider a response, Cat is shaking her head. Her stack of silver earrings clacks vigorously. “One does not just pass up an opportunity to party with Jeff Buckley. Let me call my dad and get us out of it.” She turns to Nisha. “Where is this thing?”
“520 East Fifth.”
Cat claps her hands together once. “I’ll use the pay phone on Sixth. We’re good to go. Allons-y.”
Already Cat and Nisha are halfway out the door. Reid is frozen in place on his stool, and I watch his face closely, attempting to read whatever he’s thinking.
He smiles, then stands. He’s taller than I would have thought. Towering. “I’ll come for thirty minutes, then I’ll head uptown.”
“Sure,” I say, like we both already know this bit. Like it’s a regular game we play.
His eyes soften when he looks down at me; it’s as if I’ve elicited that response in him a thousand times before, and now I am simply remembering it.
Then I feel a falling sensation in my stomach. A plummet.
That is new.
“Lili,” he says, and I can’t even remember whatever Jeff Buckley just did with his magic hands and his enchanted tongue—my name in Reid’s mouth is the most beautiful thing I have ever heard. I would do anything to make him say it again.
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