The Dinner List

by Rebecca Serle

  I shook my head. “I thought you were doing great.”

  “I was,” he said. “But it wasn’t enough without you.”

  All I knew was that I missed him. Just seeing him there, standing where Paul had stood so many times in the last two years—coming, going, never hesitating—it was everything that I had been missing. It felt like my life for those last two years had been a silent black-and-white movie, and here he was rushing in with sound and color—making the whole thing come alive. He was my destiny returned.

  I kissed him, because I wanted to know that he was real. That he wasn’t some apparition. I had, at times, imagined a reunion exactly like this.

  “Macaroni,” he said, his mouth still on mine.

  I resented how confident he was. But it felt like confidence in me, in us. It wasn’t just his confidence that I’d take him back. It was my confidence that he had come back for me.

  “Are you staying?” I asked.

  “If you’ll have me,” he said.

  That was all I needed. It sounds ridiculous. When it’s isolated it seems like the most clichéd quote in the book. But there you go.

  He dropped his bag in the entrance. He brought me in close to him. We started making out against the closet door. I wound my hands up into his hair—dirty. I felt his move down my back. I’d had sex with Paul for almost two years and hadn’t felt, in all that time, what I did now, fully clothed, with Tobias.

  He angled me toward the living room and then lifted me up and carried me into my bedroom. He knew the apartment. It had once been ours. It was ours again, maybe, already.

  He laid me down on the bed and undressed me. I was hungry for him, impatient—all at once ravenous—but he took his time. He peeled off his shirt and hovered over me. He was tanner than he had been a few years ago, and heavier—denser somehow. I looked up at him.

  “I waited for you,” I said. As soon as I said it I knew it was true—I had. Paul, the apartment, the past two years—they weren’t real. None of it had felt like waiting. It had all felt like the slow slog of moving on. But I had been wrong. I had been struggling against a current that had, all this time, been trying to tow me out to sea. Finally, I let it.

  He kissed me, and I reached up and grabbed on to his shoulders. He moved his lips to my neck and I shifted under him as he slid his hand down to rest in between my legs.

  The touch of his fingers sent me pulling at whatever clothing remained between us. It had been too long.

  “Now,” I said.

  He pressed into me and we both exhaled sharply at the same time. He stopped inside me, unmoving.

  “I missed you,” he said.

  “I missed this.”

  We started moving together. The rhythm of our bodies, the way he knew exactly how to touch me, what my nonverbal cues were. I felt heady, weightless, like I might spontaneously combust at the intensity of being close to him.

  “Sabrina,” he whispered softly. And all I could think was my name, my name, my name—over and over again. I was found.

  Later, wrapped around each other in bed, I told Tobias about Paul. He listened intently as I filled him in. The party, the last nearly two years. He wasn’t jealous; he was Tobias—thoughtful, honest, sincere.

  “Do you want to end it?” he asked me.

  “Yes,” I said. I kissed him again.

  I broke up with Paul the following week. When he was back in town I asked if we could get coffee. We went to this depressing Starbucks on Fifty-seventh Street that was kid-filled and loud. I got there first. I wanted to pick the table.

  I ordered a whole-milk misto for him and a small coffee, black, for me. I think he knew already. Usually when he greeted me he was smiling. Life for Paul was like the chorus of a song. Familiar and melodic. Never any pivotal moments. No inspiring crises.

  But he knew what coffee meant.

  “What happened?” he asked me when he sat down, after thanking me for the coffee. Paul was very polite.

  I thought about telling him I didn’t think we were a match. That I wasn’t where he was. And those things were true, sure. But they still weren’t the answer.

  “He came back,” I said.

  Paul knew enough about Tobias. In the beginning, he caught me crying. After sex, sometimes, which made us both feel pretty awful.

  “I see.” He said a lot of things afterward. About how Tobias would leave again. About how Tobias didn’t deserve me. But none of his arguments were trying to convince me to stay. It didn’t feel like he was campaigning for us. He already knew there wasn’t much worth fighting for.

  I didn’t blame him. He only knew the worst of Tobias. Half truths and some complete fictions concocted in the heart of someone who was heartbroken. The real flesh-and-blood man was nothing like the fractured image Paul had in his mind. I couldn’t hold his distorted picture against him. And of course, plenty of it was true, too.

  I left the Starbucks and called Tobias. He came uptown and met me. When he saw me standing by the door he put his arms around me. “I’m sorry,” he said. That was all. I let the sorry extend out. I let it blanket the whole last two years.

  We went home, ordered in dosas, and ate on the floor. We were twenty-seven. At the time, it felt close to thirty. But now, here, it seems far closer to twenty.

  We had twenty-four months left. The clock was on. But I didn’t know it. There, in the dead of winter with him, it felt like the start of forever.

  9:48 P.M.

  TIME IS DOING THIS STRANGE THING right now. We’re finishing our dinner. Sharing bites. Jessica passes some pasta to Audrey, who trades her for a scallop. The wine has sunken things into a casual intimacy, but for the first time since we sat down, I feel the immediacy of tonight. The need to solve and rectify what I must before the clock strikes what, midnight? Whenever it is that we will get up from the table and go our separate ways.

  “You still have the pocket watch,” I say to Tobias at the same time Jessica asks, “Why am I here?”

  I’m so caught off guard by the question that I turn away from Tobias. “What do you mean?”

  Jessica tears off a piece of bread and soaks it in sauce. “I know the list; I was there when you made it. I wasn’t on it. I mean, I live forty-five minutes away, barely. You could see me anytime.”

  Nearly two years ago, I crossed out my grandmother’s name and wrote in Jessica’s. It was born out of anger. I still had the Post-it—tattered and curled at the edges. A reminder of the Jessica who used to be there, who used to fill our living room with papier-mâché and her.

  Jessica isn’t used to this much alcohol and I see the telltale signs of her wine-honesty. Cheeks pink. Eyes slightly unfocused.

  “Because I could see you, but I never do.”

  Jessica sets down her fork. “That’s not fair.”

  Jessica and I didn’t have a falling-out—I still think of her as my best friend. There was no big fight, no disagreement. But sometimes it feels like something so irrevocable happened between us, and the fact that I can’t put my finger on when makes it worse. If there was a fight, we could make up, apologize, recover. But you can’t say sorry for a slow dissolve.

  “But it’s true,” I say. “You’re always too busy. When was the last time you were even in the city?”

  “I have a baby,” she says.

  “You were too busy way before Douglas.”

  Jessica has this “out of sight, out of mind” mentality. In moments throughout our friendship she has expressed to me, always prompted, that it didn’t mean she loved me any less. “I forget,” she told me. “But it doesn’t mean I don’t need or care about you.”

  We barely have a real friendship anymore. I think the last time I saw her was three months ago, at Douglas’s baptism. She has a seven-month-old baby whom I’ve only met twice.

  “Since you moved out of our apartment,” I say. “It’s like you disappeared into the atmosphere. You never call me. You say I’m your best friend, but by what standard?”

  �
�Were you there?” She turns to face me, all of her. I see, for a moment, the woman I used to know at twenty-two. Who was passionate and alive. Who would write You are today in lipstick on the tile of our kitchen floor. “You were so caught up with Tobias. I moved out, but you moved on, too. You were barely there when I was planning the wedding. And I didn’t blame you. I wanted you to be happy. I still do.”

  “But I’m not,” I say. “I haven’t been.”

  Across the table, I see Audrey lean forward, but Conrad nudges her gently back.

  “You still think I can fix it for you,” Jessica says quietly.

  “I don’t think you can fix it.” My lip has started to tremble. I know she knows I am about to cry. She knows all my tells, just like I know hers. “I just want you to still want to try.”

  And that’s it, right there. The thing that hurts the worst. Not the action, of course not. Not the missed dinners and calls. Not the rescheduled plans. But the ache, deep down, that she no longer wants things to be any different than they are. That she’s so immersed in her life she never thinks about what it’s like to be in mine.

  “More wine?” Audrey offers. I see her standing next to me, holding the bottle. She must have wriggled out of Conrad’s grasp lightning quick. She puts a hand on the top of my head, and the gesture is so maternal that for a moment it’s too much to bear. Audrey isn’t that much older than I am, here wherever we really are, and yet it’s like she’s compressed her whole life down into this body. She’s sixty and twenty-three and seventeen, all at once.

  She fills my glass. She pours for Jessica and Tobias, too.

  “I’m sorry,” Tobias says slowly.

  “This isn’t about you,” I say.

  “You can’t fix it,” Jessica says to Tobias. “I can’t, and you can’t, either. Why are you here? Why did you come tonight? I love you, Tobias, but you’re making it worse, you realize that, right?”

  “I’m trying,” Tobias says. I feel something cheer in my heart. He knows what has to happen here tonight. He wants to find his way back, too. To rectify what went wrong and start over again.

  “No,” Jessica says. “You’re not. You’re here and you’re talking about things and you’re remembering things, and what do you think is going to happen?”

  “Why does that have to be a bad thing?” I ask her. “Why can’t we go back and fix what went wrong? Isn’t that why we’re here?”

  “You don’t understand anything,” Jessica says. “And I’ve already been the one to explain it to you too many times.”

  “Explain what?” I ask. “That we’re not living up to your standards of a relationship? That if I get back together with him you won’t be there this time to pick up the pieces?”

  “No,” Jessica says. She looks into her wineglass, like maybe she expects to find the answer there.

  “Please,” Tobias says. “Jessica.” There is a warning to his voice. It sounds, all at once, completely unfamiliar.

  “I’m sorry,” Jessica says. She looks at me, and her eyes are wet, wide. “Tobias is dead.”

  THIRTEEN

  FOR FIVE MONTHS, RUBIAH, TOBIAS, and I lived together. Rubiah and Tobias got along. She was rarely there, but on the occasion she was I’d come home to find them drinking beers or playing a board game. Matty had gotten Tobias into Risk years ago, and sometimes the two of them still met at Uncommons in the West Village to play together.

  Rubiah’s like of Tobias was cozy, and convenient, and allowed me to miss Jessica a little bit less. She was happy when Tobias came back—I knew she had wanted us to make it work the first time—but she was married now, and as time went on more and more judgmental, I thought, about choices that were different from her own. She had grown up faster, faster than Tobias and me, certainly, faster than any friends I knew. She was playing house now, and the realities of twenty-something life, the roller coaster I often felt like I was on—it seemed like she had skipped that altogether. So we lived with Rubiah, and it worked. But our updated Three’s Company, if you could call it that, was short-lived. In the summer of 2015, Rubiah got a place up by Columbia, and Tobias and I decided to move, too.

  I had been at that apartment on Tenth Avenue since the beginning, almost five years, and I was equally as sick of it as I was in love with it. I loved how much had happened there. How Jessica and I had moved in with nothing more than two suitcases apiece and a box of books mailed from school. The memory of our first Ikea trip, convincing our super to rent us a car because we weren’t yet twenty-five. Scooting Jessica through the aisles on the pull cart, arguing over whether to get a sofa or two club chairs (we settled on a love seat and one chair). The late nights watching Friends reruns and that first year when Jessica used to wake up before me and go to the corner deli and get us both coffee—hazelnut creamer and one Splenda.

  But I hated the rust-rotted sink, and how the bathroom flooded every time the upstairs neighbors took a shower, and how noisy it was with our street-facing bedrooms. I was ready for something else in the way you’re ready to move from middle school to high school. Not because it’s a personal choice, necessarily, but because it’s time.

  Tobias and I found a one bedroom on Eighth Street between Sixth Avenue and MacDougal. It was small and old, the stove rusted and the walls cracked despite a fresh coat of paint. But our bedroom faced the back and was relatively quiet. It was the third apartment we saw, and we took it on the spot.

  Tobias had gone out looking when I was at work. He’d wanted to move to Brooklyn, but I’d won out. I felt certain that I didn’t want to leave Manhattan, and Tobias relented. He didn’t even really fight me on it. I think he knew he didn’t stand a chance.

  “This is the one,” he’d said when he called me.

  I checked the time: 11:38 A.M. “Is this the first place you’ve seen?” I asked.

  “It’s perfect,” he said. “Trust me.”

  I snuck out half an hour later for lunch and met him on the front stoop. He had a bouquet of sunflowers. It was the season. “Welcome home,” he said when I got there.

  We went upstairs together (six flights), and as soon as I stepped inside I saw that he was right. It wasn’t that it was perfect, not by a long stretch, but it was ours. Tobias was excited. “We can paint the living room,” he said. “Maybe yellow.” He snuck his hands around my waist.

  “It’s great,” I said. “How much?”

  He squinted at me. “Twenty-four, but I figure that’s only three hundred over budget, right? And the broker said she’d cut her fee in half for us.” He shrugged. For a brief moment I imagined some leggy brunette with a briefcase in our apartment, rubbing up against Tobias on the kitchen counter.

  I didn’t have the heart to tell him our budget was already two hundred over what we could realistically afford. I wanted that yellow living room, too.

  Matty helped us move. He’d borrowed his father’s van, which he lined with blankets. Tobias had sold his Prius in L.A. Matty was out of school then and working for a bank. “Overpaid and overstimulated,” was how Tobias described Matty at his new gig. “He’s like a puppy in heat.”

  “He’s excited,” I said. We were stacking boxes. Tobias gingerly set a lamp on the floor. Matty was downstairs, watching the double-parked van.

  “Nah,” he said. “He’d be excited if he were doing his own thing. He’s just running full-blast on a hamster wheel.”

  Tobias chided Matty for not holding out for a start-up gig, or not developing an app on his own. He thought he was selling out. But Matty was twenty-three years old. “First money, then independence,” he said whenever Tobias brought it up.

  To me, Matty seemed happy, but by this point I understood Tobias’s complicated relationship with success, money, and working for other people. He had done it in L.A., and he had enjoyed it—but only because he found the work to be creative, and important. He was a true artist—commercial success wasn’t the point; often it was problematic. More than once I heard him tell Matty he’d stopped listening to a ban
d after they’d made it. “The sound changes,” he’d said. “It stops being pure.”

  He hadn’t parted ways well with Wolfe (quitting wasn’t part of the gig), and he was now working for one of Wolfe’s rivals in New York—a practice, he said, that was all too common. He wasn’t traveling as much, which I loved, and he was fine with it. Most of the shoots they did were for big ad firms in the city. It was a step down in sexy, but not as bad as the Digicam days, and the pay was decent, it was a job, and we were together. I knew he wasn’t entirely happy with work, though, and it nagged at me. My defense of Matty often felt like a way to quell my guilt about Tobias—It’s okay to grow up.

  I stood in the small, wood-floored apartment as Matty and Tobias took turns running up and down the stairs with boxes. I played director. “To the left.” “In the bedroom.” “By the far wall.” We had too much stuff for this tiny place, which was, all in, about a third of the size of our old apartment. Things had accumulated over the years. Old chairs and throw pillows and small stools purchased at thrift stores on Second Avenue. Prints picked up on New York City sidewalks. Odd Ikea furniture (is it a TV stand or a desk?). Kitchenware caught between Tupperware and frying pan. Rubiah took little, and Tobias couldn’t throw anything out (what if we needed that second egg beater?). It was a strange trait of his—out of character—this need to hoard. I tried to suggest cuts, but the move was stressful enough, so most everything made its way over.

  Except, strangely, the photograph of his I had bought all those years ago. The tribal man. I couldn’t find it anywhere. Not in the boxes when we unpacked, not misplaced in with the toilet articles, or stuffed in a bag of clothes. As the days went on and we broke down the boxes and stacked the dishes in the kitchen, I started to panic. I stopped by the old apartment—no one had seen it. I called Matty to check the van—nothing. I sat down on the bedroom floor one week after move-in and stuck my head, for the twentieth time, under the bed.

  “Give it a rest,” Tobias said. He had seemed less than curious about where it had gone. It occurred to me that maybe he had gotten rid of it.