The Dinner List

by Rebecca Serle

  “Love,” he says. As if it’s obvious. As if it’s inevitable.

  “Ah,” Conrad says. He sits forward. His eyes flit back and forth from Tobias to Robert to Jessica to me, like he’s watching passing trees out of a moving car window. “We’ve arrived.”

  NINE

  TOBIAS AND I WERE HUDDLED on my fire escape, a cigarette between us. Or I should say between his fingertips. But we were sharing it. This was early. I hadn’t yet admitted that I smoked.

  We had spent the day browsing McNally Jackson, my favorite bookstore, downtown, and walking around SoHo. We’d picked up slices at Ben’s Pizza around eleven A.M., but that was the last time we’d eaten, and it was now close to seven.

  Jessica was out with Sumir for dinner. I was starving, but I hadn’t said anything yet. I didn’t want to risk fracturing the afternoon by tracking down dinner, and I knew all we had in our fridge were mossy pitas and mustard.

  I would come to understand that food was something Tobias didn’t necessarily crave, although he was great in the kitchen. He could cook a perfect meal, but he could also go a full day without eating, only remembering when his body started roaring with hunger. He ate to live. Sometimes I think he was so filled up by other things that there wasn’t any room.

  But not me. My stomach rumbled audibly. Tobias scooted closer to me. “What was that?” He patted my abdomen. It tickled.

  “Hunger,” I said.

  “Hunger is pretty dramatic.”

  “Do not start,” I warned. I was teasing. It was one of our first exchanges of this nature, and the familiarity of mock annoyance filled me with a very specific kind of exhilarating joy.

  Tobias put his hand on the side of my face and kissed me. “It’s my duty to feed you. Let’s go to dinner.”

  He snuffed the cigarette out and climbed back through the window, offering me his hand. The cigarette went into the trash and we followed each other toward the door.

  “Where do you want to go?” I asked, searching for a lone Ugg boot that had drifted behind the little bench we kept in the foyer, if you could call it a foyer. It was a wall and a small bench with some boots underneath, and an umbrella stand.

  Tobias stamped his heel into his sneaker. “There’s this bistro pretty close to here I love. I’d like to take you there.”

  Whatever he loved, I wanted to see. “Sounds great.”

  I found the boot but then decided against it and put on black ballet flats instead. It was a little too cold for such reckless footwear, but I was going to dinner with Tobias … who could care about cold feet?

  We turned the corner on Perry Street and then there we were, right at Hudson. A cute restaurant with a green awning and no more than ten or twelve tables. There were potted plants out front and a small wicker bench.

  “I’ll put our name in,” he said.

  I sat down on the bench. The wind in New York is worse than the weather. It zipped around me and I pulled my hunting jacket closer. I wished I had brought a hat. Or worn different shoes.

  I watched him through the glass window talk to the hostess, a pretty twenty-something. He said something and she laughed, tucking some hair behind her ear. She nodded and Tobias moved toward the door, poking his head out to me.

  “They can take us now,” he said.

  I felt, like the hostess, no doubt, charmed by him—by his magnetic charisma.

  We walked in and sat down on the far side, by the kitchen. It was warm back there, and I shivered in the temperature reversal. “Toasty.”

  “Mm-hm.” Tobias flipped over his menu. I already knew I wanted red wine and the scallops. They were seared in butter and served with a salad of mixed wild greens.

  Instead, I studied Tobias. He was reading like he needed glasses. Holding the menu out, squinting. Between us, the tiny flame of the candle danced.

  “Five,” I said.

  Tobias smiled, but he didn’t look at me. We had been playing for a while now. A shorthand for intimacy. It had stuck, and now it had become about much more. A sort of thermometer—a way to check in on where we were at any given moment.

  “Food,” he said. “Wine.”

  “Duh.”

  His eyes flickered upward. “Cute,” he said. He started studying me back. I felt my face get hot.

  “Back at you.”

  He nodded. “Here.”

  “And.”

  “And.” He set his menu down. He put both his elbows on the table. “I want to say something, but I’m not sure how you’ll take it.” He cleared his throat. He was nervous, I realized. He looked how I felt.

  “Try me.”

  “Love,” he said. He paused after he said it, looking at me. There was something so wonderfully open about his face. Even his features looked wider, like they had softened, spread out.

  “Do you mean that?”

  “You can’t lie in Five,” he said, his face still soft. “That’s the number one rule.”

  My thoughts wanted control over my mouth. It’s only been a few weeks. It’s too soon. But what I said was, “Me too.”

  “Those are two words,” Tobias said. His eyes crinkled up at the sides. I found him spectacularly beautiful.

  “It wasn’t my turn to play.”

  We leaned across the table, Lady and the Tramp–style.

  The word I was thinking of wasn’t love. If he had asked me right then I would have said something different. I would have said lucky. I was so lucky. I was lucky fate had taken such an interest in me. Me! Who was I to have such a story with the universe? But here he was, sitting before me. Living, breathing proof that my life was extraordinary.

  “You act like being with him is winning some kind of prize,” Jessica would say to me later—much later. “That’s not what relationships are about.”

  But weren’t they? Wasn’t love about feeling like the luckiest woman on the planet? Wasn’t it feeling like the whole world was conspiring for your happiness, and yours alone?

  We didn’t say “I love you” for another six months, but I didn’t even notice. By that point the words were irrelevant. They only ever mattered in Five. And we always used love. Always.

  Sometimes we’d tease it out. I’d say like a lot. We’d pretend we’d forgotten. But it was always there. The last, most important word.

  It’s fitting, then, that love was the last thing to go.

  We had dinner that night. Scallops and linguini with clams in a lemon-oil sauce and the burger. We filled each other in on our pasts. More than we’d shared before. Tobias had grown up in Northern California. “I love the rain,” he said. “Did I already tell you that?”

  We wanted to be thorough. We wanted to make sure we left nothing out.

  I told him about my father at that dinner. About how he’d left, about how he’d died not too long before. It felt important, so I told him. He listened without sympathy or judgment. Tobias was always profoundly good at that: listening. If I had a crappy day at work or got caught in the rain without an umbrella, Tobias would listen with the patience of a poetry professor. At first I loved it—he was so giving. But as time went on I found that I wanted him to talk more. It was like he thought it was enough to know me for the both of us, but it wasn’t. I wanted to know what went on inside him, too.

  9:23 P.M.

  “LOVE.” I REPEAT IT AGAIN. The table falls silent. The clatter of plates even dims around us. A thirty-something lesbian couple has occupied the table where Tobias and I once sat, uttering this very same word. They’re holding hands. I wonder if it’s new, if something special will happen here tonight for them, too. The table with the champagne has settled into coffee and dessert. The people with the child have departed.

  “Is a challenging word,” Robert says.

  Jessica leans over me toward him. “No,” she says. “It’s the easiest word in the world. Love isn’t hard.”

  It’s funny, I think, how she can vacillate so readily between the hopeless romantic of our early twenties and realist woman she’s become.


  Conrad and Audrey exchange a glance. He tilts his head toward her, encouraging her to speak for the both of them.

  “Like I said, I never found love easy,” Audrey says. “But then again, I don’t think it was supposed to be.”

  I remember, now, once watching a documentary on Audrey Hepburn. She grew up in Germany during World War II. She was in hiding from the Nazis; her parents were sympathizers. She developed asthma due to poor conditions. I realize she’s been coughing periodically throughout our meal. Did she always do that?

  The documentary, a special on E!, I think, was titled Audrey: The Pain Behind Perfection. Not exactly an authoritative biography, but a fun way to spend two hours. Black-and-white reenactments were included, even if most of the details were wrong. The documentary surmised that she was modest about her EGOT awards, but she only received her Emmy and Grammy after she died. And it spoke of her rumored eating disorder, which was patently false. Her frame was a product of childhood malnourishment, not regimentation.

  “What do you mean?” Jessica asks.

  Audrey interlaces her fingers in front of her chin. Her delicate features sing out like stars, and I see that the lighting scheme in the restaurant has changed—we’re operating on a lot more candles now.

  “Fame came easy to me. Not understanding it, mind you, but having it.”

  “Important distinction.” Conrad.

  “I suppose. I think maybe in my heart I believed I could only have one. That certainly didn’t help.”

  “Love or success?” Tobias asks.

  “Oh, I think more like love and Audrey Hepburn.” She twirls a gold ring around her middle finger. It doesn’t look like a wedding band, but it might be. She seems like the kind of woman who would move it over, keep it close, change it into something else. Wear it as a reminder, maybe not even of him. “Being successful is so much about the self,” she says. “Particularly in a profession where one must be the face of their product.” She holds a hand up to frame her face. “This is me.”

  Conrad pats her shoulder. “Lovely, indeed,” he says.

  She waves him off. “I tried, but I could never figure out how to be what I needed to be for my career and simultaneously for a man. I wanted a family so much. It was the only thing that really ever mattered to me—I sacrificed a lot of my happiness in pursuit of something I believed would make me happy.”

  “But in the best relationships, that’s the point,” Jessica says. “You don’t try and make each other weaker. You’re not supposed to have to choose. You support each other.”

  Jessica all at once sounds very young. Naive, even. I can tell by the way her voice trails off at the end that she’s heard it, too.

  “That’s true, Jessica,” Audrey says. “But over time it is sometimes difficult to maintain. Maybe it was my era, too.”

  “Certainly couldn’t have helped,” Conrad offers.

  Audrey drops her eyes to the table. I am concerned she is crying. The lighting is too low for me to tell. “For a long time I was wracked with guilt. I thought I could have tried harder, I could have done more.” Her eyes meet mine. They are, in fact, saucer-wide and wet. “I don’t want you to feel the same way. I don’t want you to carry that.”

  Something so tender tugs at my heart as I watch her. “Can I ask you something?” I say. “All of you?”

  “Absolutely,” Conrad says. His hand hasn’t left Audrey’s shoulder and now he is offering a handkerchief from his inside pocket. She declines.

  “Did I…” I’m not sure how to phrase this. “Did you have a choice? About coming here?”

  “Oh,” Audrey says at the same time Robert says, “Of course.”

  I look at Tobias. I know I’ll find the answer there.

  “A little of both,” he says, which is as good as saying no.

  “I think it was different for all of us,” Audrey says.

  “Well, I was always in,” Conrad says. “I don’t get back East nearly enough these days. Or see my old students. Or meet Audrey Hepburn.” He winks at her.

  Audrey flutters her hand. “Sh, sh. I don’t think any of us have done something like this before.” She looks at Robert. Her eyebrow is cocked in a gesture of impertinence. Go on.

  “No,” he says. “Never.”

  I all at once understand the implication here. He’s never done it before, which means since dying he has only ever seen me. Since he’s been gone he’s never visited his wife or Daisy and Alexandra or met the new baby.

  I see him sitting here, nervous, upright, and I know when this is all over, when they leave and go back, respectively, to wherever they came from, I will point to this as the first moment of softening. The first rounding of a once harsh corner.

  Something has begun to change.

  “Robert,” I say, and he looks up at lightning speed. “What happened after you brought me home?”

  His face registers a momentary surprise, like a flickering light, and then it settles on hesitant joy. It’s strange to see, particularly here and now. I’ve asked him to tell me about the beginning of the end, how it happened, when he got sick, in what way he left, but on his face—the way his eyebrows arch up, up! The way his cheeks sink backward, away. Lips slightly parted. I may as well be asking him to read me a bedtime story. The one with the little girl who has a shit father who in the end, the final, magical moments, redeems himself. It doesn’t seem impossible right now. It seems like it’s maybe even something I might have heard before.

  TEN

  IT WAS A NASTY WINTER, the one Tobias and I lived through right at the start of our relationship. Record number of snowstorms, frigid-cold temperatures, the kind that make going outside, even for an around-the-corner coffee, nearly impossible. Objectively, it was bad. But when I think of it I can only remember the good. The cold was cause for us to stay inside together. The snow days were stretches of time in which we didn’t need to get out of bed. We barely saw anyone else, and I barely noticed, if at all.

  At the time, Tobias was working for a commercial photography company called Digicam. He’d quit the job at Red Roof after Digicam had offered him a full-time photography gig. He’d been pounding the pavement for months, sending his résumé everywhere, and finally someone bit.

  It was commercial work, but they promised him they’d throw him some “real” shoots—hard creative stuff—in between. He was thrilled. He’d finally have a chance to produce real work and get paid for it. But over time, their promise turned out to be empty—the job proved to be nearly all mass-market stuff—cleaning products, paper towel ads. He was hawking Fit Tummy Tea.

  But the gig also wasn’t particularly demanding, and in the beginning that was nice—it gave us plenty of time together. Tobias would come over on a Thursday and spend the weekend straight through. We ordered the requisite greasy pizza and Chinese and watched 24 on television in the living room when Jessica wasn’t there—which was a lot. Jessica was mostly at Sumir’s, but when she did hang out, it was always fun. She and Tobias were developing their own relationship, their own unique language. They’d e-mail each other articles about tennis or music, two things I couldn’t keep up with the way they could. But mostly she wasn’t there; mostly it was just the two of us. I am embarrassed to admit how fine that was for me. How much I didn’t miss her.

  Especially because now that she’s gone, and that it has been her choosing and not mine, I miss her terribly. Not every day. Not constantly. But in moments when I come home and the apartment is dark, or when there is a great rerun of Friends, or a new episode of The Real Housewives, or I’ll find a dried-up face mask in the back of my medicine cabinet—the missing stings like a slap. Not that she’s not there, although I feel that, too. It’s more that I can’t call and tell her these things. I could, of course, but it would make it worse, because I know she doesn’t care. The baby would cry and Sumir would shout, Who is it? and she’d say, Sabby, what’s up? I can’t talk. And the loneliness I’d feel from that particular interaction—her life so fu
ll, mine still so microscopic—all the same misfit details—would be enough to send me back to bed.

  I introduced Tobias to David and Ellie during that winter. I wanted him to be a part of the fold.

  “I don’t know why he does it,” Jessica said in regard to David on one rare night the six of us had gone to dinner. Tobias, Jessica, Sumir, and I were walking home from the East Village. Tobias and I had pushed the dinner three times. He never wanted to go out—All I need is here with you—and I wasn’t one to argue, but Jessica had finally insisted.

  “He deserves to be with someone who can love him in a real way.”

  “Maybe he doesn’t want that right now,” Tobias said. It was cold out, our breath was making short, fast-moving clouds in front of us. My fingers were numb. We had spent all our money on dinner, though, and besides we weren’t far from the apartment.

  “Everyone wants that,” Jessica said. It was dismissive. Tobias shrugged it off, but I could tell it irked him.

  “The last guy seemed nice,” Sumir said absently.

  “No, he didn’t,” Jessica said. “He seemed like all the rest.”

  “Maybe he’s happy,” Tobias said. He knew Jessica, knew that she was opinionated, that she liked things to be her way. He even joked about it with her. I was surprised when he pushed back.

  “He’s not,” Jessica said, a little bit angrily. She was unaccustomed to being challenged, too. She didn’t like it.

  “Babe, you don’t know,” Sumir said. We glanced at each other. The two peacekeepers thrust into roles we didn’t want.

  David was Jessica’s friend in college, but I suspected over time, as we moved to New York and life evolved, he had grown to like me more. He called me sometimes to make plans without her. Jessica could be intense. Her constant pursuit of self-improvement wasn’t everyone’s bag, I knew that. She’d want to have deep, intellectual talks in the back of dimly lit bars when other people didn’t want to talk at all. She had sweeping ideas about love and life and she was still, in those days, talking in generalities. She hadn’t yet been married, hadn’t yet had a baby, hadn’t folded to the practicalities of life. She liked to talk, which is maybe why I missed her so much in those first years without her—she left such a big, quiet space.