8:38 P.M.
“TOBIAS, WHAT DO YOU DO?” Conrad asks. He’s ordered another bottle of Merlot and is filling a glass for Audrey, despite her mock protestations. Jessica is glancing at her watch and looking around for our server.
“I’m a photographer,” he says.
Next to me, Jessica shifts in her chair.
“A man of the arts,” Audrey says. “How lovely.”
“You worked with some of the greats,” Tobias tells her.
Audrey smiles. For the first time all night I find myself inexplicably and uncontrollably drawn to her. The way her lips part, just slightly, like she’s about to spill an age-old secret.
“Bob Willoughby was my favorite,” she says. “He worked for Paramount. We had quite a relationship. He had such a way with light. He used to shoot me in the very early mornings. Can you imagine? It was always dawn.”
Tobias sits back. He looks satisfied. I think he told me this once about Willoughby. Sometimes Tobias would drag me out of bed in the very early mornings, too. He was always chasing the light.
“What about William Holden, really,” Conrad asks. “I always wanted to know.”
Audrey blushes at the mention of her rumored lover. She holds out her wineglass. Conrad chuckles. “Complicated,” she says.
“That’s it?” Conrad asks.
“No,” she says. “But a lady never tells.”
“Well, sometimes after two glasses a lady does,” Conrad says.
Audrey pretends to be insulted, but I can tell she isn’t, not really. She’s warming to him. I can tell she likes him, and that makes me feel good—that she has someone here who can make her comfortable, make her laugh.
Audrey coughs a bit.
“What do you remember most?” Robert asks her.
She takes a small sip. She’s thoughtful. It’s a look that works well on her. “The early years with the children,” she says. “That was all I ever wanted, really. To be a mother.” She stops then, holding up her pointer finger. “Well, wait, are you asking me what I remember most, or what I enjoyed the most?”
Robert looks baffled. I realize, to him, they are, of course, the same.
“Either,” he says.
“Both!” Conrad says.
“I loved Tiffany’s,” she says. “Most people think I didn’t; I never really knew why.” She’s opening up here. She’s like a drop of dye in water that begins to change the liquid. Slowly, fluidly, she becomes colored. “It was a hard shoot. I had a lot of trouble being that outgoing because I’m quite an introvert…” She trails off before picking back up. “But it’s maybe my proudest picture. Capote and all.”
“You don’t say,” Robert says.
“Roman Holiday is my favorite,” Jessica says. “Sabby and I used to watch it all the time.”
“It’s true,” I say. I remember us curled up on the couch. Burnt popcorn between us. It seems like so long ago now.
“That’s very flattering,” she says. “That was my first film. I remember the project fondly. Thank you.”
And then, as if remembering herself, she waves her hand. “I’ve been going on,” she says.
Conrad shakes his head. “Nonsense,” he says. “We want to know.” He looks straight at me.
“It’s fascinating,” I say. “We’re all very big fans.”
Tobias nods. It’s true, of course. He is one. But who isn’t a fan of Audrey Hepburn?
“And I would just like to say we have yet to talk about your global service,” Conrad says, tapping the notebook. “Quite the humanitarian.”
“No, no, it’s just what we must do. Especially now.”
“Especially,” Conrad echoes.
“The world has become a dark place in recent years,” Robert says.
Conrad shakes his head. “It always was. People are just paying attention.”
“You cannot have good without evil,” Audrey says. “They are like DNA strands. Intricately and irrevocably spun together. Sometimes good wins, sometimes evil does. We do not fight for good’s permanent triumph, but for the balance. And so it goes.”
“And so it goes,” Conrad echoes.
FIVE
WE HAD THIS GAME WE USED to play, Tobias and me. Five words to describe your life right now, right this minute.
He’d ask me the question anywhere. In the shower, first thing in the morning. Sometimes over text or e-mail. On a rainy Sunday afternoon at his apartment, in an attempt to get me to confess whether I wanted pizza or Chinese. Once right in the middle of a fight.
“Five?”
The first time we played was at the end of our first date. After the Brooklyn Bridge and the movie and two bottles of cheap Spanish red, he walked me home. It felt, at that point, like we had crossed every borough line. We had been traveling forever.
He leaned in. We had been sneaking kisses all night. At the theater, when he put his arm around the back of my chair and cupped my shoulder with his palm. On the walk home. In the street, under the lights of Eighth Avenue.
“Tell me five,” he said.
“Five what?”
“Five words,” he said. “About what your life is like right now.”
“Right now, right now?”
He touched the pad of my nose with his pointer. “Right. Now.”
“What if I only need one?” I asked.
He leaned against the seam of my building door. Some chipped paint unhinged and dusted his jacket. Wool. Frayed at the cuffs.
“Okay,” he said. “What’s your one?”
“Happy.”
We looked at each other. And then he pulled me into the corner with him. He put a hand on either side of my face and he kissed me. I remember feeling grounded, somehow. Like his kiss wasn’t lifting me up but rooting me down. His kiss made me feel like finally, finally, I was in the spot where I belonged.
“Tell me your five,” I said against his lips.
“Warm,” he said, his breath on my cheek. “Open,” he said, kissing my eyelid.
I breathed out against him. I grabbed the sides of his jacket and pulled.
“Fall,” I said.
“Yeah. Fall’s good.”
“Start,” he said. The way my heart felt, when he said it, it was ridiculous. I was a cartoon.
“And the last one?” I asked.
He spun me around. He pressed me against the wood. I felt my spine straighten and contract as his hands moved inside my jacket.
“Now,” he said.
We made out in that doorway for a long time. It was light by the time I stumbled inside and up the stairs. When I got there Jessica was upside down on her yoga mat.
“Where have you been?” she asked me.
“Tobias,” I said.
She flipped right side up. “Wow,” she said. “It’s seven A.M.”
“We saw a movie. We walked all around the city.”
“You’re kidding,” she said. “That’s beyond romantic. I can’t believe it. I can’t believe it’s him.” She wasn’t looking at me anymore. Her gaze was fixed on a spot on the ceiling. “How was it?” she asked, her eyes snapping back down to meet mine.
I sat down next to her. I didn’t say a word.
“That good, huh?” She blew some air out of her lips.
“And then some. I think I’m falling in love with him.” That was a lie, of course. I already had. “I bought his photo,” I continued. “When I went to the photography club? They had an exhibit. He wasn’t there, but I bought the photo. I never told you.”
Jessica eyed me. She shook her head. “All this time,” she said. “He was just out there.”
“Yeah.”
“Isn’t that crazy? Don’t you wonder why it took so long for you to find him?”
I didn’t. I was just glad I had.
Those four years in between Santa Monica and the subway had been filled with reckless decisions on my part. I had moved to New York City in part for Anthony, that college boyfriend whom I didn’t, despite my prior sentimen
ts, end things with. He moved to the city after graduation, and I followed a year later. He ended things for good no sooner than my plane landed. To be fair, we had stumbled through long distance less than gracefully. I cheated. I’m sure he did, too. He was new to New York, working hundred-hour weeks and getting a banker’s paycheck. He was screwing young models and expensing bottles to Goldman. I was about to start assisting at Skyline Magazine, a job I’d keep for approximately three months before moving over to the designer. The magazine job wasn’t even a real gig—the pay was abysmal and left me babysitting nights and weekends.
Anthony and I met at Washington Square Park four days after I arrived. He told me it was over. Actually, that’s not what he said. What he said was: “I’m not ready.” I cried for weeks even though I didn’t care, even though I knew it didn’t mean anything. I listened to bad R&B music. I lost five pounds. But it wasn’t really heartbreak. I wouldn’t know that until Tobias. It was just disappointment. I was going through the motions. Jessica sat on the floor with me and baked pot brownies and we watched Casablanca for reasons I can no longer remember. We’ll always have Paris? There were a string of affairs after that, all of them some shade of wrong. Jessica comforted and quelled. She held on to love like a floatie in a shark-infested ocean. And sometimes I resented her for that—her unfettered belief that it was all going to work out—but not today. Today I loved it.
Jessica twisted her legs underneath her. “This feels like the start, doesn’t it?” she said. “Right now. What if he’s the one?”
For Jessica, everything had always been about some kind of trajectory. Marriage. Kids. A house. Jessica was still with Sumir, and they’d been through every stage of adulthood together—virginity, graduation, first jobs.
But in those early years of Tobias and me, it was never about the way we were going to end up. It was only ever about where we were in the moment.
A sign on our wall mocked me. WHAT YOU PLANT NOW, YOU WILL HARVEST LATER.
Jessica lifted herself up from the floor and went into the kitchen. “Love is in the air!” she called over her shoulder. It was.
8:54 P.M.
“I NEED TO PUMP,” JESSICA WHISPERS to me.
She’s holding her blazer out from her swollen breasts.
“Do you have your thing?” I ask. Despite seeing her walking around with that contraption strapped to her chest that milks her like a cow—swoosh swoosh swoosh—I don’t really have any idea how it works. Or how big it is.
“I’ll just duck into the bathroom,” she says. “I brought it with me.”
“Can you do that?” Tobias asks.
It takes me a moment to realize that he’s talking to us, that he heard and then that he’s referring to Jessica getting up and leaving. If she stands and removes herself from the table, will she be able to come back?
“I’m leaking,” she says. “I guess we’ll find out.”
She pushes back her chair and slings her bag over her shoulder. We all watch her, but nothing happens. She disappears around the corner, and then Conrad calls our attention back.
“I think our theme is getting stale,” Conrad says. “Let’s play a game while we wait for dinner to arrive.”
Tobias puts his elbows on the table. “But we were just getting to the good stuff,” he says. “Love was on deck.”
“Better to feel our way into that one,” Conrad says. “We’ve been talking about it yet, and we will talk about it still.”
“Fair enough.”
Audrey purses her lips. She puts her hand on Conrad’s forearm and he immediately falls quiet. “What happened with you two?” she asks. She’s talking to Tobias and me.
Tobias looks at me. It’s the first time since we sat down that I allow my gaze to meet his.
“I guess we wanted different things,” he says.
I swivel my eyes to the table. I forbid them from rolling. He picks up on my annoyance immediately. I’m not being coy. “Is that not true?” he asks me.
“We wanted different things? You’re serious.”
Tobias crosses his arms against his chest. “I don’t know.”
“We both wanted everything,” I say. “That was the problem.”
“I never had a problem with that.”
“Yes, you did. Do you remember that day in Great Barrington? You told me you were sure we weren’t supposed to have to fight so hard for something.”
“Yeah,” he said. “I stand by that.”
“So how were you okay with it?”
“With what? Us being together?”
I nod.
“Because,” he says. “I was. I just wasn’t okay with how miserable you were.”
Audrey waves her hand. “I’m sorry,” she says. “This is a unique situation. Perhaps we’re getting to the heart too quickly.”
Tobias shakes his head. “It’s all the same now. It’s all the past.”
The past. I want to say something else, but I stop. Because I’m not sure if I want that piece on the table yet. It’s a familiar feeling, this one of hesitation. There were times when dating Tobias felt like playing Jenga. How much can I say? If I reveal this, will the whole tower collapse? If I tell him how I really feel, will that be my last turn? It was terrifying and exhilarating because every time I took another piece out and the tower stood, I felt like I’d won. What I didn’t remember is that at some point in a game, the entire tower falls. It happens every single time. It is the only way the game ends. Why then did I keep playing, knowing that I would be left with rubble?
SIX
THE DAY AFTER OUR FIRST DATE he showed up at my apartment. It was three P.M. on a Saturday. Jessica wasn’t home; she was spending the day driving around upstate with Sumir, looking at country houses they couldn’t afford.
I was painting my toenails in the window. It was a summer encore in fall, and I had on ankle jeans and a tank top. He rang the buzzer; I didn’t hear it. Then he called my name. My bedroom looked out onto Tenth Avenue and I saw him, five floors below, squinting up into the sun.
“Hey,” I yelled.
He waved.
“Do you want to come up?”
He shook his head. “I want you to come down.”
“I’m painting my toes,” I said. I shook the bottle out the window. It was neon blue. Night Racer.
“I’ll wait,” he said. He gestured across the street. “Coffee.” I saw him walk into the Empire Diner and take a seat at a window table. I shuffled my still-wet toes through the straps of flip-flops and raced down the stairs. My heart hum-hum-hummmmmed in my chest as I crossed the street to join him.
“Oh good,” he said when I came in. He got up from the booth, set a five-dollar bill on the table, took my hand, and walked outside.
“I thought you wanted coffee?”
“No way we’re spending today inside,” he said.
He spun me into him. There were times when being with him felt like dancing. The waltz, the two-step, sometimes the jitterbug, always the tango.
“What are you doing here?” I asked, now a bit breathless.
“I was thinking about you. And I thought that was stupid.”
“Stupid?” I stiffened in his arms.
“Yep, stupid. Why sit around and think about you when I could see you?”
He kissed me. We started walking. I didn’t care where we were going, but I asked anyway.
“The water,” he said. “If you want to?” He was sometimes shy like this. A little unsure. It came at the strangest intervals.
We swung hands. We ran across intersections. We veered off after Fourteenth Street and crossed over to the Hudson.
It was almost four by the time we got there. I hadn’t bothered to bring a sweater. We plopped down on the grassy lawn of one of the piers and Tobias took off his sweatshirt. He draped it over my shoulders and I threaded my arms through. It smelled like him. Like cigarettes and honey and a faint ocean breeze. “Thanks,” I said.
I’d keep that sweatshirt even after he left,
because it still smelled like him. I didn’t wash it, but I slept in it, and after a while it reeked of sweat and my coconut shampoo and I had to admit it was just a sweatshirt. He was gone.
He lay down on his back. I did the same. We didn’t touch, but I could feel his body next to mine. It felt like we were both sinking down into the earth, becoming a part of it. Like we’d meet there—somewhere at the center among raw, fresh dirt. Where things begin.
“I love New York,” I said. It felt like a really generic thing to say, but it was actually how I felt.
“I think I could live in Portland,” he said. “I have that dream. Wake up and go hiking. Cook. Listen to the rain.”
“Wear a lot of Patagonia.”
“Yeah.” He laced his fingers through mine. “But somewhere with real quality of life. Somewhere quiet. I love Brooklyn, but sometimes I wonder if this is the best version of my life.”
“Of course not,” I say. “The best version is hanging out on some yacht in Monaco, photographing Victoria’s Secret models.”
“Commercial photography isn’t really my thing.”
“I pray that’s sarcasm,” I said. I didn’t bother to turn my head to check, though.
“Fifty-fifty.”
That was something Tobias said. Fifty-fifty. In the beginning, I loved it. It proved he was complicated, that he refused a bottom line. I thought it meant he saw truth in things that were frivolous, and frivolity in things that were fundamental. It was a way of looking at the world that allowed the air in. But after a few years it just began to confuse me. It was like shifting sands—I couldn’t tell anymore what was real to him. When I’d ask if he was mad at me, and he said “fifty-fifty,” what did that mean?
I shivered in his sweatshirt. The wind blew. In front of us Jersey City grew out from the water.
“I have a popcorn maker and Roman Holiday on DVD,” he said next to me. “Let’s blow this Popsicle stand.”
The Dinner List Page 4