The Dinner List

by Rebecca Serle

  On the corner of Washington and Perry a man shouted Tobias’s name. We turned around. A guy was jogging over—late thirties, maybe—dressed in a suit. Tobias smiled.

  “Jeremy,” he said. “No way.” They exchanged a hug. “How have you been?”

  “Good, work is wild. Irena is still traveling like a crazy person.”

  Jeremy looked to me, and Tobias slipped an arm around me. “This is my girlfriend, Sabrina,” he said. I loved hearing him say girlfriend. I could have played it on a loop.

  I held out my hand. “Nice to meet you.”

  “We’re gonna take off,” Jessica said next to me. We hugged and I waved good-bye to the two of them. Tobias was still engrossed with Jeremy.

  “So how do you two know each other?” I said, turning back to them.

  “Jeremy was my boss when I was at UCLA. We worked for Irena Shull. She did a lot of travel pieces. I was only an intern, but this guy let me come on shoots. He even convinced the magazine to fly me to Zimbabwe.” Tobias smiled wide. “I can’t believe you’re still in that game, man.”

  He was lit up. I felt my stomach squeeze. I’d never seen him this animated talking about anything he was doing now.

  “How about you?” Jeremy asked.

  Tobias shrugged. “Working, which is good. It’s not particularly stimulating, but life is good.” He tugged me in closer to him and rubbed his thumb back and forth on my waist.

  “We should grab a drink sometime. You still have my number?”

  Tobias nodded. “Yeah, I’ll hit you up.”

  Jeremy left, and Tobias and I started walking again arm in arm. “I didn’t know you went to Zimbabwe to shoot. That’s really cool.” It sounded so silly. I was fishing for something, I just wasn’t sure what.

  “Well, I didn’t shoot. But it was fun.” He paused. “Jeremy’s great. He’s going to be a huge deal someday.”

  “So will you,” I said.

  Tobias spun me around and kissed me. “I love you,” he said. “So much. I don’t know what I’d do without you. You’re it for me, Sabrina.”

  “Me too,” I said. There weren’t big enough words. I pressed my lips to his again, satisfied.

  * * *

  Jessica got married sometime later. The wedding was at the Central Park boathouse. It was beautiful, but it poured rain, and they couldn’t take any pictures outside—something that visibly upset Jessica. She cried half her makeup off before the ceremony. The makeup artist kept running around with a blotting pad, muttering, “It’s good luck.”

  David came and brought a Vanity Fair writer who Refinery 29 had put on their Hot Single Men list three years running. He hadn’t been invited with a plus-one and the events coordinator had to scramble for seating. Ellie didn’t bring a date, but she had just started seeing a guy she’d met on JDate. He was a pharmacist. They stayed together for four years before she married his friend after the least-scandalous breakup ever. The ex even came to the wedding.

  Jessica doesn’t have any sisters, just much younger brothers, and I was her maid of honor. We’d gotten ready at the Essex House on Central Park South. I wore a lavender silk dress with a lace trim belt Jessica had picked out. She wore an ivory taffeta gown with a smattering of sequins at the waist. When I first saw her, standing there fully dressed, I teared up. She was so beautiful. She had on tiny sapphire earrings that were her mother’s and blue satin shoes that she kicked off midway through the dance party.

  “You should get married every weekend!” Ellie sang. She was twirling to Robyn, and too drunk. That was the problem with throwing a wedding in your early or mid-twenties—no one was reasonable with an open bar.

  Ellie was inches away from the DJ when Tobias caught her and spun her back toward the floor. The song changed to Sinatra, and I watched them sway together. From over the top of her curls, Tobias smiled at me, and my heart tugged at this—this man who loved me and was looking after my friend.

  I gave a toast. In high school I had taken speech, and from that point on I liked speaking in public. I was good at presentations in college, and was comfortable pitching books to my bosses in meetings. But when I got up there and looked down at Jessica, I started shaking. There was too much I wanted to say. I couldn’t fit it all.

  “You’re an inquisitive person,” I had written to her. “You question everything. But you never questioned Sumir.”

  I said some more stuff then, about meeting her freshman year in the dorms, about her coming home to tell me she had met someone—Sumir. I left off her bathroom-mirror quotes, even though I’d put them down in the speech. I’m not sure why.

  We danced to Motown and Tobias and I shared a slice of carrot cake (Sumir’s favorite) and afterward, when we were stuffed inside the twin room we’d rented at the Radisson on West Thirty-second Street (I can’t quite remember why it seemed important to stay at a hotel when we had an apartment ten blocks south, but it did), Tobias asked me whether I thought never questioning was good.

  “What you said in your speech,” he said. “Do you think asking questions is a bad thing?”

  I hadn’t specified either way. When I wrote it, I had wondered how I felt about it. Is “just knowing” something that happens when you meet the right person? Or is it a personality thing? Do some people still constantly question?

  But then I thought about it: I had questions with Tobias. Tons of them. But they never made me question how I felt about him. I knew he asked himself all sorts of things. Was he ever going to make it as a photographer? Would we ever make any money? Did he belong in New York?

  I didn’t want to think that meant something specific about us as a couple. I didn’t want to think his questions ever ended in the rightness of me.

  “I’m not sure,” I said. “I think maybe different people do it different ways.”

  “Different people definitely do it different ways,” he said. He seemed irritated. It wasn’t an emotion I had ever registered on him before, and I felt my stomach bottoming out. Anger I had a framework for, but irritation seemed like a first step into something else—distaste, removal, maybe. With anger, there was heat, emotion. With irritation there was just distance. I wanted us to stay close, to stay sealed against each other. Our relationship seemed dependent on it.

  “Is there something you want to say?” I asked. I remember thinking I could blame it on too much champagne if we argued. In the morning I’d wake up and roll over and kiss his neck and pretend like nothing had ever happened. If he asked, Are you still mad? I’d keep kissing him. About what? Did we talk about something? I had way too much to drink last night.

  “I got offered a job in Los Angeles.”

  “What?”

  Tobias rolled me on top of him. “I love you,” he said. “That first, before we talk about anything else.”

  My head was spinning. California? “What is it?” I asked.

  “Wolfe needs a new assistant.”

  I knew how much Tobias admired Andrew Wolfe. He was an up-and-coming Patrick Demarchelier, but more grunge. He mostly shot models or up-and-coming starlets in see-through gauze tops and underwear. It was art. I could see that. His pictures were ethereal—beautiful in the way the human body is—simple, perfect, nubile. But I knew the effect Tobias had on women. I had seen it since our first afternoon together.

  We’d be eating at a café, and the waitress would fill his wineglass just a little bit higher. He was always getting touched. By baristas, women of all ages, gay men in my neighborhood. People gravitated to him like he was a twenty-four-hour diner at four A.M. It was like he had a neon sign above his head: OPEN.

  I knew Tobias was slowly becoming ensconced in cement at his job. Day after day he took pictures of Windex and vacuums. The most exciting shoot he’d been a part of in months was for sugar. I didn’t want that for him—I wanted him to follow his dreams. I just didn’t want them to lead him away from me.

  “Wow.” That was all I could say. We’d been together for two years then. It felt like much longer.r />
  “Jeremy?” I asked.

  He nodded.

  I hadn’t even known he’d followed up with him.

  “I can’t turn this down,” he said. “It’s too big. It’s the opportunity I need to do what I want.” He touched my cheek. His fingertips were cold. “What if you came with me?”

  I had just started my first job in publishing. I loved it, and I wanted to climb the ladder there. It was totally different from the designer. I felt like I was actually, finally good at something.

  “I can’t,” I whispered. I thought if I opened my mouth too wide I’d start sobbing and never be able to stop.

  “We’ll figure it out,” he said. He leaned his forehead down to mine. He was crying. “We have to.”

  We slept entwined in each other that night, but when we woke up the next morning everything had changed. We would fight constantly for the next ten days. Starting with: Why didn’t he tell me sooner? It turned out he’d known about the job for two weeks.

  “I didn’t want to ruin the time we had,” he said.

  Be here now.

  * * *

  I realize we’ve skipped ahead, but that’s probably for the best. Consistent contentment so rarely makes for good storytelling.

  In those two years in the beginning I was happy, and happiness has a way of quickening. Grief marks things. Joy lets them through. Days and months can pass in the blink of an eye. I was happier than I ever remember being in my life. Things changed. Jessica and I moved out. Tobias and I moved in. She got engaged. Then married. And then, he left. We were two years in, six since Santa Monica.

  What I didn’t know then was that we were only halfway there.

  9:31 P.M.

  “THE FIRST SIX MONTHS ARE THE hardest,” Conrad says. “I remember when we took my daughter home, my wife would barely let me touch her. All she did was cry.” He motions to the waiter for more wine. His cheeks are rosy, and he puts a hand to his chest when he laughs.

  “A whirlwind,” Audrey adds. “Feedings and sleepless nights.” She looks sympathetically at Jessica, who nods.

  “I’m out of that part, mostly.” She hasn’t quite recovered from her previous embarrassment, I can tell. Jessica retreats fairly easily, but she doesn’t stay down long. I know she’ll be back and engaged soon enough.

  “How old is the baby?” Audrey asks.

  “Seven months,” Jessica says. “Although he looks like he’s two years old.” She looks at me to corroborate.

  “It’s true,” I say. “He’s big! And both his parents are so tiny.”

  Jessica laughs. “I don’t know where he came from. Sometimes I tell my husband I had an affair with a linebacker.”

  When Jessica first started using the term my husband, I thought it was so crazy. We were just twenty-five, we were babies. The biggest thing I did was purchase a new Brita filter.

  “But Conrad’s right,” Jessica says quietly. “I barely know where I am right now.”

  “We were happy,” Robert says, steering us back. “You were the most beautiful baby either one of us had ever seen. Your mother used to say you looked like a little doll.”

  “She still calls me that,” I say. Baby doll. I always figured it was just a term of endearment.

  “Cabbage Patch Kid,” Jessica says. “I can see it.”

  “Freckle face.” From Tobias.

  “You used to like them,” I say. I’m being candid.

  He raises his eyebrows at me. “Did I say freckles are a bad thing?”

  Are we flirting? How is it always so easy to get back here?

  Habits make of tomorrow, yesterday.

  “You were beautiful,” Robert says. He clears his throat. Takes a big gulp of water. “I was working. I made enough so that your mother didn’t go back after her maternity leave. Things were difficult, but still okay.”

  Conrad adjusts his notebook in his pocket. Audrey keeps looking at Robert encouragingly. I can tell it’s taking effort for him to continue.

  “What happened was we got pregnant with another baby.”

  The table falls silent. Only Audrey says, “Oh dear.”

  “Mom never said that,” I say, as if trying to prove him wrong. Another baby?

  “She was excited, naturally. She was already three months when we found out. We weren’t trying. You were three years old and a handful.”

  I’m looking at Robert, who appears older all of a sudden. Like he’s not the age he was when he died, but the age he would have been had he lived.

  “There was no heartbeat at the five-month checkup. It was a girl.” The staccato sentences come one after the other. They seem to hit me straight in the chest like skipping stones. Not for what they lost, so long ago. But for the history I’ve been missing. The key passage torn out of the book.

  “So you started drinking to numb the pain?” I ask. Because regardless, we still ended up here. That hasn’t changed.

  “We had all the usual issues a couple does when they go through something like this. I was already sick; I mentioned that. It’s a lifelong disease. The circumstances just heightened it.”

  “That’s understandable,” Audrey says. I feel Jessica glare at her next to me, and I feel a rush of affection for my best friend.

  “The thing that I regret is that I didn’t realize what I did have. I lost sight of you. I was so busy mourning one thing, I forgot about the other.”

  I look down at my plate. My risotto appears cold and plastic, like the for-show plates that sit outside Italian restaurants in Little Italy. It makes my stomach turn just looking at it.

  I feel a hand on my shoulder. I know it’s Tobias’s. I wonder if that ever fades. The feeling of his touch, like this. As if my skin is some kind of memory foam.

  “She asked me to leave, but I would have gone anyway,” Robert says. “After another year, she could barely stand to be in the same room as me. And I had turned into a monster.”

  “But you got help. After you’d already left us.”

  Robert closes and opens his eyes. “Shortly after, yes. I rented a small room at a motel. The woman who ran the front desk took a liking to me, bless her. She found me in the closet, high off heroin, three days after I checked in. By some miracle she got me into a clinic. I barely remember that time.”

  My sinuses start throbbing. I can feel them behind my eyes like hot pokers. This happens sometimes. I get brutal, debilitating headaches. When I was in college I would have to lie in a dark room for days, sometimes, with a cold compress on my face. They’re better now, manageable, but there is never any telling when one might completely knock me off my feet. I pray it’s not now.

  “Headache?” Tobias says next to me. His tone has dropped, the decibel he used to use in the mornings when he’d bring me coffee or want sex. Sweet, languid. Like we had all the time in the world.

  I press a thumb to my eyebrow and exhale the pressure. “I need some air,” I say. If I have any hope of this not spiraling, I need to move.

  I push back my chair and stand up. Conrad stands up, too. “I’ll accompany you,” he says. “Let’s go outside.”

  I want to be alone, but I’m not sure that’s an option, and anyway the way he says it, fatherly, authoritative, like a professor, which he is, makes me nod in agreement. I grab my bag to take with me.

  “Are you sure you can…” Robert looks concerned. He knows we’re not finished yet.

  “Jessica went to the bathroom,” Conrad says. “We’re fine.” And that’s that.

  Conrad holds open the door for me, and we step outside. The air is cold, and I wish I had brought out my coat. It hasn’t snowed yet, but I get the sense it might. Not tonight, but soon. Holiday decorations are up. The city is in the jovial, neighborly phase it enters every year from Thanksgiving through New Year’s. It can be the loneliest season, December in New York.

  I pull my scarf around me. I stick my fingers in my bag and root around for the pack. I offer Conrad one. I didn’t start smoking alone until Tobias left, and then I
never stopped.

  “What the hell,” he says. “This can’t possibly count.”

  We inhale and exhale together. Smoke fills the air around us.

  “How are you doing?” Conrad asks.

  His arms are crossed and he’s looking at me with his head tilted. His lips shift side to side subtly and I have a wave of nostalgia for his class—the mentor I found nearly ten years ago.

  “You know it was originally Plato,” I tell him.

  He raises his eyebrows at me like go on.

  “On the list,” I say, inhaling.

  He nods, recognition dawning. “I would have liked to see that.”

  “Me too,” I say. I laugh, and the smoke exits my lungs in a hurry.

  “Why did you swap him out?” he asks.

  “After class was over,” I say, “I always felt like you had more to teach me.” I want to add something more. Something about how he was a grown man who was there for me, and I’d never had that before, not really. Something about missing him, but I don’t want it to come out wrong.

  “So how are you doing?” he asks me after a moment. “I’m going to keep asking.”

  “Not so great,” I say. I move my thumb back and forth from my temple to the top of my nose. I take another drag. Hold it. “I have a headache,” I say through my exhale.

  “Indeed.”

  “I get them sometimes,” I say.

  “I remember a particular midterm where you had taken to your sickbed for this very condition.”

  “Out of hundreds of students, you remember that?”

  “I do,” he says, chuckling.

  “I was lying,” I say. “I was so behind in your class. I missed half the lectures.”

  Conrad laughs. “Then what, might I ask, am I doing here?”

  The smoke dances in the night air. “It wasn’t about your class,” I say. “I loved you.”

  I look over at him. He nods. He knows this. Conrad seems, all at once, to know everything. What has happened, how all this will end. So I ask him.