But it was a moment I wanted to make more of, and we went looking. We couldn’t find him online (searching “green eyes” and “UCLA” on Facebook did not give us very positive results—and something told me he wasn’t the sort of guy who had a profile), so we drove up to the UCLA campus in Sumir’s Toyota Corolla, which wouldn’t go more than forty on the freeway.
“What’s your plan when we get there?” I asked Jessica. “Start yelling ‘boy with brown hair’ loudly?”
“Relax,” she told me. “I’m not yelling anything.”
She parked in Westwood and we walked to the north side of campus, where the row houses and student apartments were. They all sat on tree-lined streets that poured out onto Sunset and up into the impeccable hills of Bel Air. I followed behind, grateful that it was a sunny day, there were a lot of people around, and we were blending in well.
“I know we’re not supposed to say this,” I said. “But UCLA is way nicer than USC.”
“In location only,” Jessica said. She stopped in front of a bulletin board posted outside a campus building—library? I wasn’t sure.
“Aha,” she said. “As I’d hoped.”
I peered closer. It was a club board. The Food Club, Poetry Club. I followed Jessica’s finger. It tapped a yellow flyer lightly. “The Photography Club,” I read.
Jessica beamed. “You’re welcome.”
“I’m impressed,” I said. “But this doesn’t mean anything. He probably doesn’t belong to it. He didn’t really seem like a club kind of a guy. And what would we do, crash their meeting?”
Jessica rolled her eyes. “As charming as I find your negativity, they’re holding an open house next Tuesday, so you can just go to that.”
I shook my head. “If he was there, I’d seem crazy.”
Jessica shrugged. “Or you’d live happily ever after.”
“Right,” I said. “One of the two.” But I felt excitement spring a leak in me. What if I saw him again? What would I say?
My stomach growled then.
“Want to go to In-N-Out?” Jessica asked.
“Definitely.”
We started to wander back to the Corolla, but before we did I snatched the flyer and stuffed it into my bag.
“I saw nothing,” Jessica said, looping her arm through mine.
When we got home I took out the Post-it and added a fifth. Him.
7:45 P.M.
“DOES ANYONE ELSE LIKE CARP?” Conrad is asking. We haven’t ordered yet because no one can agree on what to do. Conrad is determined to share, Robert wants to order separately, Audrey is displeased with the menu, and Jessica and Tobias have eaten two breadbaskets already. It irritates me that he has an appetite.
“I’m still breastfeeding,” Jessica says to no one in particular. “I need the carbs.”
The waiter comes over for the second time and I just jump in. “I’ll have the frisée salad and the risotto,” I say. I send Conrad a look. He nods.
“The scallops,” he says. “And some of those aphrodisiacs.”
The waiter looks confused. He opens his mouth and closes it again.
“Oysters,” Audrey clarifies wearily. “I’ll have the same, with the frisée salad.”
Professor Conrad elbows her. “Audrey, I never,” he says.
She isn’t having it. She’s still irritated.
It strikes me as everyone places their orders—pasta and soup for Jessica, steak and salad for Robert—that I didn’t really think this through. When I chose each of these five people to be on my list, it was entirely about me. My issues with each of them, and my mixed desires to be in their presence. I didn’t think of how they’d get along together.
I permit myself a glance to my left, to Tobias. I already know what he’ll order. I knew it the instant I opened the menu. I do this sometimes, now, when I’m at a restaurant. I’ll scan the menu and choose what he would want. I know he’ll get the burger and fries, extra mustard. And the beet salad. Tobias loves beets. He was a vegetarian for a while, but it didn’t stick.
“The crudo and the scallops,” he says.
I whip my head to look at him. He raises his shoulders up back at me. “The burger looked good, too,” he says. “But I just ate all that bread.”
Tobias was concerned about his health in odd ways. Sometimes I thought he had a thing for staying thin—maybe because it made him look like a starving artist? He didn’t work out, he wasn’t a runner, but he’d skip meals sometimes or he’d come home with a new juicer and declare he didn’t want to eat processed foods anymore. He was an excellent cook. The crudo. I should have figured.
The waiter takes our menus and then Audrey leans forward. For the first time I catch small little lines around her eyes. She must be in her late forties.
“I came with some conversation topics,” she tells me. She speaks in that low, hushed voice we all know so well. She’s delicate, so feminine it pains, and I have a pang of regret that she is seated at this table with us. She shouldn’t be here; it’s not worth her time.
“We don’t need topics,” Conrad says, brushing her off. “We just need wine and a theme.”
“A theme?” asks Robert. He looks up from his water. He’s a small man, short. Even seated you can tell. My mother had two inches on him. I always thought I fell somewhere in the middle based on the small pile of old photographs, but looking at him now I know I’m all his.
We have the same green eyes, the same long nose, the same crooked smile and reddish-brownish curly hair. He didn’t go to college. No one in his family did either. He got tuberculosis when he was nineteen and spent a year and a half in a hospital. Solitary confinement. His own mother could only visit through a glass wall.
My mom told me that story years later. Years after he had left, after he was already dead and I couldn’t ask him any follow-up questions myself. I never knew whether it was supposed to humanize him, or make him seem more obtuse, abstract—untouchable. But I also never knew if she kept on loving him. I still don’t.
“Theme!” Conrad calls. “Let’s have a theme.”
“Global service,” Audrey says.
Conrad nods. He takes a notebook and pen out of his breast pocket. He always kept a notebook there, should he be inspired. He used to take it out periodically during class and scribble things inside.
“Julie!” Conrad says. “You’re up.”
Jessica looks at him, a piece of baguette in her mouth. “It’s Jessica,” she says.
“Jessica, of course.”
“Family,” she says, sighing. “But I don’t think this is the point.”
“Responsibility,” Robert adds. I do an inadequate job of choking back a laugh. Responsibility. How ridiculous.
Then Tobias. He sits back in his chair. He loops his hands behind his head. “Love,” he says. He says it so simply, so easily. Like it’s obvious. Like it’s the only possible answer to Conrad’s question.
But it isn’t, of course. Because if it was I wouldn’t need him at this dinner. If that were true, we’d still be together.
I clear my throat. “History,” I say, as if to counter.
Conrad nods. Audrey sips. Jessica balks.
“We’ve been over this,” she says, glaring at Tobias and me. “You guys can’t keep living in the past.”
Let go and let God.
“Sometimes it is impossible to move forward without understanding what happened.” Conrad.
“What did happen?” Audrey says.
I keep my eyes on the table, but I still feel his on me. I wish he were seated where Conrad is. I wish I couldn’t smell him—heady and dense—or find his foot under the table, so close that if I wanted to I could hold it against mine.
“Everything,” I say after a moment. “Everything happened.”
“Well,” Conrad says. “Let’s start there.”
TWO
THE TUESDAY AFTER OUR UCLA INVESTIGATION, I was in Professor Conrad’s office trying to argue my way up to a C-plus for a written exam I had completely tanked
. I was always doing terribly in his class. I couldn’t quite get there. Not that I was trying that hard. Admittedly, I had let all my grades slip. I had no good reason besides the fact that I was tired of school, of homework and lectures and tests. I didn’t want to do it anymore. And the ongoing drama with Anthony wasn’t helping things.
“Maybe you’re in the wrong major,” Jessica told me, but it was too late to change. If I did, I’d be there for another three years, and that wasn’t an option—financially or any way else.
“You’ve gotten used to the idea that outcomes are irrelevant,” Conrad said. “In my class, I do not believe that’s true.”
“Please.” I was close to tears. “Can I do extra credit?”
Conrad shook his head. “I don’t offer extra credit.”
“I can’t get a D.”
“You can,” he said. “Matter of fact, you did.”
Fear coiled in my stomach. “I’m sorry,” I mumbled.
Conrad put a hand on my shoulder. It felt fatherly. I was unaccustomed. “You can do better on the next one and raise your average up,” he told me. “This is not your final ticket.”
I gathered up my things and left his office—entitled, annoyed, angry. I checked my watch. If I left now I could make it to UCLA’s campus by seven. The crumbled piece of yellow paper at the bottom of my book bag informed me that the photography open house wasn’t until seven.
I called Jessica. “I have to study,” she said. “But Sumir is in class and I have his car keys here waiting for you.”
“Meet me downstairs.”
There was traffic on the 405. I sat and flipped between 98.7 and NPR. They were doing some special on NASA protocol. They had someone on who had just returned from a space tour. “The thing that struck me the most,” he said, “was how in some capacity of measurement the universe is actually finite. How do we possibly wrap our heads around the end of the end?”
I changed the radio back to Britney Spears.
The flyer said the show was going to be in the Billy Wilder Theater. I asked directions from a security guard when I got to UCLA and after a few wrong turns managed to find a parking spot on the street. My watch read 6:57 P.M. Just in time.
My heart started to pump as I took the sidewalk and then steps leading to the theater. What if he was actually there? What would I say? How would I explain my presence? Act surprised. A friend told me to come. That wasn’t strictly untrue. He might not even recognize me.
I found a lip gloss in my bag. I swiped it across, took a deep breath, and pulled the door open.
The show was set up onstage. Photographs hung from partition boards and people in the aisles held plastic cups filled with red wine. I made my way closer to the stage. So far, no him.
“Are you one of the artists?” a girl with a long braid said. She had on bell-bottom jeans and a peasant blouse I recognized from Forever 21. Jessica had tried on the same one at the Beverly Center last weekend.
It felt like she was onto me. “No,” I said. “No, just looking.”
She nodded, took a sip of wine.
“You?”
“That’s my stuff up there.” She gestured to a partition wall on the far left-hand side of the stage. I saw color. Tons of it.
“Mind if I go check it out?”
“Just as long as you don’t ask me to come with you. My stuff works better if I don’t speak for it.”
I left her and moved up onto the stage. I took a quick scan. Nowhere. Not in the aisles, either. The crowd wasn’t big, maybe thirty people in all. I thought about leaving, but I could see my new friend’s eyes on me, and so I decided to go over to her work.
But something caught my eye on the way over. It was a photograph of a man. He looked tribal. Moroccan, maybe. It was from the torso up and he was smoking a cigar, mid exhale. His eyes were wide open and gray and the lines on his face were like tally marks of chalk on a board.
I knew it was his. I don’t know how, but I did.
“Excuse me,” I asked a kid in low-slung jeans and a baseball hat who was standing next to the board. “Whose work is this?”
He shrugged and then pointed to a plaque midway down the wall. TOBIAS SALTMAN. Next to a photo of the guy from Ashes and Snow. I was right.
I could feel the blood pumping through the veins in my neck. “Is he here?” I asked.
He squinted at me. “Don’t think so,” he said.
“Is there someone who would know?”
He peered down into the aisles and cocked his head in the direction of the girl I had just spoken to. “Ask his girlfriend,” he said.
Heat. That’s what I felt. Embarrassment and shame. Of course he had a girlfriend. It was obvious, and stupid to think he didn’t. I wanted to take off as soon as possible.
But then I saw a number by the photograph of the man: $75. It was for sale.
I didn’t have seventy-five dollars. There were only forty-nine in my checking account and maybe two hundred in savings.
But I knew I had to buy it anyway. He was already mine.
I fumbled in my bag for my checkbook. By some stroke of luck, I had it on me.
“How do I buy a photograph?” I asked a girl standing beside a photo display of sunflowers. “Can I use a check?”
“Jenkins will help you.” She gestured toward a young woman in jeans and a brocade top, pixie cut, leaning against the far wall and talking wildly with her hands. I went over.
“I’d like to buy that photograph,” I said, pointing at Tobias’s piece.
She unhinged herself from the wall. “You got it,” she said. “His work is pretty great, huh?”
I nodded.
“I think this might be his first sale. Too bad the kid isn’t here.”
I wrote her a check, determined to somehow put the money needed into the account so it wouldn’t bounce, and she wrapped it for me—brown paper and string, no tape. “Shit,” she said. “I forgot to buy some. This is our first sale.”
I waved to his girlfriend on the way out. She smiled. She had a gap between her two front teeth. It made my affection for him grow even greater.
I put the photo on the passenger seat on the drive home. When I got back to the apartment, Jessica was out. I knew I wouldn’t hang it up. Later, when she asked, I told her he hadn’t been there, he must not belong.
“At least you tried,” she said.
I kept the photograph under my bed wrapped in the brown paper for the next two years. Sometimes at night I would sneak it out of its foldings and hold it in my hands like something I had stolen.
7:52 P.M.
“HISTORY,” CONRAD SAYS, TAPPING HIS PEN against the table. “It’s an interesting choice.”
“I was a history teacher,” Robert says.
“Seriously?” I say.
Robert fixes his gaze on his water glass. “For ten years,” he says.
Conrad claps his hands together. “Wonderful!” he says. “Jump on in. You can get us started.”
“We should choose a focus,” Audrey says. “What era? American? European? This is far too wide.”
“Personal,” Tobias says next to me. It feels like the first thing he’s said since we sat down, even though I know it’s not; we went over the crudo, and then there was love.
I close my eyes. I open them. One thing at a time. “Where?” I ask Robert.
“Sherman Oaks,” he says.
“California.”
He nods. “My wife—”
“No.” I cut him off. I don’t want to hear about his wife. Or his kids. Or his other life.
“We were in Fresno,” I say. “Mom only moved back to Philly ten years ago. All that time…”
“I didn’t know,” Robert says.
“Yes,” I say. “And yet you never thought to come back, to check on us, to even ask? You never thought maybe you owed us some of your newfound good fortune?”
Audrey smiles and leans forward. “Friends,” she says. “Let’s keep it civil.”
“Why?”
I ask. My eyes are fired up, but when they land on her soft, brown ones I find myself melting backward.
“Because we haven’t even gotten our starters yet,” she quips. “And no one is going anywhere.”
“I didn’t know you’d died until six months after,” I say. “Six months.”
“I got what I deserved,” he says.
“Don’t say that,” Tobias interjects. He’s staring at Robert with a mixture of benevolence and some kind of intensity I can’t place, and I realize, like so many times before, I don’t know what he means. Whether he’s being sympathetic or challenging.
“Look,” Jessica says. “Food.”
Three waiters appear with our starters. I instantly regret the salad. It looks like a piece of modern art. Sprigs of microgreens intercepting shavings of Parmesan. I wonder if Tobias will give me some of his crudo. He used to do that—put food on my plate without my asking.
“I would very much like to explain what happened,” Robert says when everyone’s starter has been set down.
“We’re still in history,” Conrad says. “I think that would be fine.”
I look across the table at him, and he raises his eyebrows at me. “What?” he says. “Is this all to talk about the weather?”
I shake my head. It’s not a yes or no—more like a giving in.
“Go ahead,” Audrey says. “We’re all listening.”
“I never had the chance to say good-bye,” he starts. “She kicked me out. Your mother never wanted me to come back.”
“You were a drunk,” I say.
I lift a sprig of greenery off my plate and put it in my mouth. It tastes like sand.
“I was,” he says. “Marcie wanted to have another baby. She wanted this whole life I couldn’t give her.”
“So you went and gave it to someone else?”
“I got help,” Robert says.
“That’s good,” Conrad interjects. “A man should be marked by his ability to grow.”
Life is growth. If we stop growing, we are as good as dead.
“Not all change is growth,” Audrey says. I look up at her. I feel like thanking her.
“I disagree.” This from Tobias. “The mere act of taking a chance, of changing, is by definition an act of evolution. And when we evolve, we grow. And that’s the point.”
The Dinner List Page 2