“Of what?” I ask.
“Human existence,” Jessica says next to me. She spoons some tomato bisque into her mouth and then waves her hand back and forth across her lips in reaction to its heat.
I give her a weary look. Sometimes I wish she would just, no questions asked, be on my side.
“I’m not saying what I did was right,” Robert says. “But it was necessary. It was the only course of action. I had to leave.”
“Necessity,” Conrad repeats, but that’s it.
“I was five years old,” I say.
“I had to get help. I couldn’t change in the present circumstance. It wasn’t your mother’s fault. It just … didn’t work.”
“And later?” I asked. “What about then? Why didn’t you ever come back once you got better?”
“Because,” he says. “I met her. And then I was afraid.”
No one asks of what. We know. Losing the new life. Losing health. Losing her. Everything he had already lost didn’t factor in.
“It’s going to take more than one dinner,” I say.
“But Sabrina,” Robert says, looking directly at me for the first time since we sat down. “One dinner is all we’ve got.”
THREE
WE WERE STUCK IN THE SUBWAY underground. I’ve had a terrifying fear of small spaces since I was five years old, when I was locked in the cabinet under the sink. It was a babysitting-gone-wrong situation. Not her fault, just a game of hide-and-seek and a jammed door. It only happened once, but once was enough.
I was employing the tools I have. Breathe deep. Do not block your airway. Sit up straight. Keep your mind in check. Focus your breath. Understand that it is only a feeling and that you are safe and secure.
This too shall pass.
“Are you okay?”
There were only four people in our car. Thank God. Even though it was early and I hadn’t yet picked up my morning coffee, I had noticed him when I got on. I nearly dropped my tote bag. At first I thought it couldn’t be, but there was no mistaking him. His shaggy hair, ripped jeans, and scruffy chin. It had been four years since Ashes and Snow in Los Angeles, and now here we were on the other side of the country in New York, and it felt like I had finally arrived at the other point of a straight line.
Life in New York wasn’t all that bad. I was living with Jessica, and our college cohorts David and Ellie were there, too. David, now a banker, was always dating older, powerful, unavailable men. He was one of only three black men in his class at Goldman, which he said gave him an advantage. I’d never seen David not excel or get what he wanted—and the men of the city were no exception. Then there was Ellie, who was perpetually single and worked on the publicity scene for a popular jewelry designer. We went out with them often, to off-off-Broadway plays that were usually shitty but cost only twenty bucks. I had a degree. I was working as an assistant for a fashion designer who was planning a big comeback. She hadn’t been relevant since the late nineties, but she was launching a new line of swimwear that was putting her back on the map.
She would hit it big a year after I left, my timing always spectacular, but at that moment, heading uptown, we were working in the back of a cramped storefront. I wasn’t looking forward to spending the next eight hours in sweaty darkness.
But I also didn’t want to spend my day underground.
“I’m all right,” I said.
I looked up at him, expecting recognition, but nothing registered on his face. He was leaning against one of the metal poles.
“The average time for a train to be stuck is three minutes and thirty-five seconds.” He took out his cell phone. “I think you have about two left. Can you make it to two?”
I couldn’t tell whether he was being sarcastic or not. This was often a problem of ours. I wanted sincerity, just not the way he gave it. Not with that much honesty.
I shrugged and gestured to the empty plastic seat beside me. I always figured when I saw him again, he’d know it, too. He’d say, It’s you, and that would be that.
He sat down. “Do you live here?” he asked.
“Not specifically,” I said. His face was blank. “I mean I live in Chelsea.” I gestured absently toward the outside—whatever tunnel we were currently pinned to.
“Chelsea,” he repeated, like the word was foreign. Saffron. Indonesia.
“You?”
“Williamsburg,” he said.
“Sure.” That seemed exactly right. We’d have a lot of arguments over the years about Brooklyn versus Manhattan. It was my feeling that I hadn’t moved all the way here to live outside the city, especially back then, but for Tobias Brooklyn was the city. The only reason he was even on the subway that day, underground on Manhattan soil, was that he had just come from an interview at a gallery and was now headed uptown to go to a photography exhibit at the Whitney.
“Which one?” I asked when he told me. I knew the Chelsea gallery scene. Since I’d heard about Robert’s death, the year before, I had taken to wandering around our neighborhood. It was a thing I did to clear my head. Not that his death should have changed anything—I hadn’t seen him since I was a child—but it did, somehow. Just knowing the chance had been taken away for good.
I’d have dinner at the Empire Diner and stroll down Tenth Avenue, up and down the Twenties, popping into whatever gallery was having an opening. It was a great place to get free wine.
“Red Roof,” he said.
“I hate that place.” I don’t know why I said it. The words just came out. Not that it wasn’t true; I did hate that place. They were always showing experimental art that seemed hyperbolically obvious and simplistic. Nudes made out of candy wrappers. The demise of society at the hands of pop culture. Sugar rot.
“That’s awesome,” he said. “Me too.” And then he smiled and we looked at each other and some coin fell into the slot machine deep inside me. The whole thing got set into motion. I would later look back on that moment and wonder what would have happened if I had lied. If I had told him I knew the gallery and liked it. I’m not sure we’d have been together.
“So why are you applying?”
He shrugged, leaned his head back on the glass window. “It’s a job,” he said.
“You’re an artist.” I knew this, of course, already.
“Yeah,” he said. “I scream ‘starving,’ or something?” I guess it wasn’t a tough thing to intuit. “What’s your name?” he asked me, his head snapping back.
My chest rose then. It expanded so much that I no longer remembered we were underground. There was something about the exchange of a name that made me think—know—that this time would be the start of something.
“Sabrina,” I said.
“Like the witch?”
“Ha. No. Like the mo—”
The train gave a jolt. We started moving again. I was actually disappointed. We were just getting somewhere. But when the train stopped at Forty-second Street he offered me his hand. “Want to get some coffee?” he asked.
“I’m late for work.” I wanted a real date, and we were running out of time. “Here.” I took out a pen. I flipped over his hand. I wrote my number. The doors closed on him. He pressed his palm up against the glass. Don’t smudge, I thought.
He called the next day, and when he did, it was on. It was like I had taken those four years to prepare, and once that time was over, that time of tidying up, sweeping away, clearing, there was all this space. We rushed right in. We filled it up until it was bursting.
8:00 P.M.
WE’RE EATING OUR APPETIZERS IN SILENCE. Jessica keeps spearing my plate with her fork—one habit of hers, of having her around, which I do not miss. Jessica has this knack for always wanting what is on my plate—formed in the trenches of freshman-year cafeterias.
When we lived together, I’d always end up buying enough of whatever I got so we could both eat. Her husband does it now, too. I’m not sure she’s even set foot in a grocery store.
“And your wife?” Audrey asks. “How did y
ou meet her?”
“In rehab,” Robert says, nervously glancing at me. “She’s sober as well.”
Audrey takes a sip of her drink.
I angle my plate closer to Jessica as my mind resets on what Robert has just said. About how he left, met a girl in rehab, and started a new life. All things I knew, but have never heard from him, from the source.
“We understood each other,” he said. “I don’t know how I would live with someone who didn’t know what it was like to be an addict.”
Tobias nods, and I suddenly get the familiar, intense urge to hit him. He was always doing this when we were together—being casually tolerant of things that bothered me, maybe even hurt me.
“Your problem,” he’d tell me, “is that you’re too judgmental.” As if that was supposed to be profound. As if that wasn’t just an insult.
“I understand that,” Audrey says. “I was never much for drugs, but I saw it take many people around me. Pity. I think it had much to do with a lack of companionship.”
Companionship. Let me sit with you in silence. Let me hold your hand and understand.
“Do you have children?” Audrey continues. She picks up an oyster and drops a dollop of horseradish on it.
“Three girls,” Robert says. “Sabrina, of course, Daisy, and Alexandra.”
“Alexandra,” Audrey repeats dreamily.
“Seventeen and twenty-four. The little one likes to sing. The older one…” Robert’s voice trails off, and then he shakes his head and chuckles. I feel something pull so tight in my chest I’m afraid it’s going to snap.
Conrad, it seems, is the only one who notices. “That is not much by way of an apology,” he says. He takes a deep sip of wine and then sits back.
“No,” Robert says. “It’s not.”
“I don’t want an apology,” I say. “There isn’t anything you could say that could make up for it anyway.”
“Why was I on the list?” he asks. He asks it so suddenly I’m tempted to answer honestly.
I’d put him on before he died. I left him on because I wanted to know. Because I have the same question he does: Why?
“She wants you to try,” Jessica says, almost desperately.
“Aha,” Conrad says. “Family.” He looks at Jessica. She gulps some water. “Astute contribution.”
She swallows. “Thank you.”
“You missed all the stories, every memory,” I say. “You missed everything.”
“Yes.” Robert shuffles his lips. I have a flash—déjà vu—of the same mannerism. Pot of coffee on the counter. Some breakfast morning among bills and cartoons. “Did your mother ever tell you how we got you home from the hospital on the night you were born?”
I shrug. “I don’t know. I don’t remember. Probably.”
“Go on,” Conrad says. “We’re listening.” He gestures him on with his hand.
“It was snowing,” Robert says.
“Lovely,” Audrey says.
“Sounds fictitious,” Conrad says. “But please continue.”
“It was. It was back when we lived in that little farmhouse in Pennsylvania. Do you remember that farmhouse?”
“Two chickens, one goat, three hamsters, because Sabby wanted them.” This from Tobias.
Robert looks impressed. He has yet to really acknowledge Tobias. Who he is. I wonder if he knows.
“Yes. Okay. Well, we were thirty miles from the hospital.”
I’ve heard this story from my mother. He’s right. There was a storm and they had to pull over because driving conditions were so bad. My mom held me in the car and my dad went into a nearby barn to use their phone. The heat wasn’t working, or they didn’t have it in the car, I’m not sure. I fill the table in on this now.
“No.” Robert shakes his head. “Your mother didn’t stay in the car. She came inside and we spent that first night there, in the barn.”
“Jesus be damned,” Conrad exclaims. “Sabrina could have been the true child of God.”
“You used the phone, you waited out the storm for an hour, and you drove home,” I say. “That’s not what happened.”
“We waited out the storm all night. And there was no phone. The lines were dead.”
“Why would Mom lie about that?”
Robert grazes his plate with his fork. It makes a ch-ch-ch sound on the ceramic. “Maybe she forgot.”
I thought you were supposed to remember only the good. When I look back at my relationship with Tobias, I know I tend to do that. It’s our highlights reel. Our greatest hits. The stuff that crept in, the stuff that drove us apart, I too easily forget.
“You slept on the floor with an infant?” Jessica asks. Her son, Douglas, is seven months old. Jessica is still breastfeeding. She likes to talk about it a lot. Not that I mind. Or, I should say, not that I’m not used to it. Jessica was always much more open than I am. She’d walk around our apartment topless. Bras cause cancer, apparently.
“There were blankets,” Robert says. “Marcie was up all night feeding Sabrina. The farmer gave us food and drink.”
“Was I born in the fourteenth century?” The vision of me, newly birthed, swaddled in burlap and lying in the arms of my adoring parents in a barn is becoming a little too much to stomach. I push some stray Parmesan toward some greens, lift the whole thing up, and chew.
“We were happy,” Robert says.
“Just the one night, then,” I say.
“A year,” he says. “We were happy for a year.”
It’s true that I don’t know a lot from my infancy. I guess I never asked and my mother never volunteered. I know why now, though. When someone leaves, remembering the joy is far more painful than thinking about the misery.
“Then what happened?” I ask.
“Responsibility,” Audrey says. She looks a little bit sad when she says it, and I make a note to talk about her. To ask about her life. I once again feel bad for pulling her into this—my personal drama.
“It was always there,” Robert says. “It got worse, not better. We fought all the time. I wasn’t around as much as I should have been. She wanted me to leave.”
“Not like that.”
“No,” he says. “Not like that.”
“She remarried,” Jessica says. I look at her. She shrugs. “What?” she says. “She did. And I think she’s happy.”
“Yeah?” Robert looks at me. He looks so hopeful it almost makes me crack.
“Doesn’t make any difference,” I say.
“Yes, it does,” Tobias says. “It means that wasn’t her only shot at happiness, and that maybe she wasn’t happy, either.”
“So?”
“So you can’t just blame the person who leaves. If two people are unhappy, clocking the person who actually walks out the door is just getting them on a technicality.”
“Convenient,” I say.
Conrad clears his throat. “We’re getting ahead of ourselves,” he says.
“Impossible not to,” Audrey says. She looks entertained now. A little bit perkier.
“Everything is happening at once,” Jessica says. She puts a hand to her forehead and holds it there.
“That is true, my dear,” Conrad says. “And it’s all happening right now, so we may as well figure out what it is.”
FOUR
HE WAS LATE. I WAS STANDING at the mouth of the Brooklyn Bridge, on the Manhattan side. This was going to be our first date. He had called and asked me if I wanted to go for a walk. And now here we were.
It was a fall day. September twenty-third. It was chilly, but not cold. I wanted to move, though. I was anxious for him to get there.
He jogged over thirty-three minutes after we had planned to meet. He came up from the Brooklyn side, a sheepish smile on his face.
“We were on opposite ends,” he said. “I guess I should have specified.”
He grinned at me. I grinned at him. We started walking.
The walk over the Brooklyn Bridge is spectacular anytime, but at sunset it’
s really something. It was like the universe had put us on opposite sides so we could walk together then, in that moment, with the sky turning from rage (red, orange) to surrender (blue, yellow) right around us.
Somewhere in the middle he slipped his hand into mine. It was thrilling.
“Tell me about you,” I said.
“I’d rather hear about you,” he said.
“I’m not that interesting,” I said.
“Not true.” He reached over with his free hand and brushed some hair out of my face. “You’re the most interesting girl in the world.”
I swallowed. “Well, I graduated from USC and I moved here immediately after. I live with my best friend.”
“In Chelsea,” he said.
“Right. In Chelsea. And I work for a crazy fashion designer.”
“What do you want to do?” he asked.
“I’m not sure,” I said. “I guess that’s the problem.” He squeezed my hand. I squeezed back. “What about you?”
“I got the job.”
“Red Roof?”
He nodded. “I took it,” he said, like he was confessing something.
“That’s great.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah. It’s a block away from my apartment.”
I laughed then, embarrassed at what I had just implied. He held my hand a little bit tighter.
“Want to see a movie?” he asked me.
“Yes.”
“You pick, I’ll buy.”
We ended up seeing a showing of North by Northwest at a theater in Williamsburg I had never been to where they served up independent and second-run movies on a pull-down screen along with cheap red wine and four-dollar beers.
We bent our heads together. He put his arm around me. When Cary Grant said, “Apparently the only performance that will satisfy you is when I play dead,” Tobias tilted my head back and kissed me.
It wasn’t a wild kiss. We’d have plenty of those. It was a benchmark. A chalk line on the asphalt. Start. His lips were soft and warm and I remember he tasted like cigarettes and honey. I never knew it was a combination I loved, but soon after I took up smoking, because Tobias did. It was something we’d do together—huddle on the fire escape of my fifth-floor walk-up, our hands chapped and shaking. It was winter by then. He was practically living with me. And we were in love.
The Dinner List Page 3