The Dinner List

by Rebecca Serle

  I felt my chest pull. I knew he did. I knew he meant it.

  “Love,” I said.

  “Love last,” he said. “First sex.”

  He pitched me back onto the bed. We didn’t talk about marriage for another year.

  9:58 P.M.

  “OF COURSE WE WERE HAPPY,” Tobias says. He’s still holding my hand. “But sometimes it felt like we left too much up to fate.”

  “Interesting,” Conrad says. He’s leaning forward, his elbows on the table. Audrey swats them off.

  “Sabby had this idea that we were fated to be together.”

  I try to pull my hand away. It feels like he’s exposing me in public here tonight. I don’t like it. I thought we had a contract to stay in that place together.

  “Stop,” he says, holding my palm steady. “It’s true. You were always pissed I didn’t remember you from Ashes and Snow.”

  He’s not wrong, strictly speaking. Although pissed isn’t the right word. Sad is probably closer to it.

  “She had this sense it was just supposed to work, and you weren’t supposed to have to work for it,” Jessica says. “Like their love story was so epic the day-to-day didn’t matter. But that’s what relationships are. They’re the day-to-day.”

  “I’m right here,” I tell her. I pull my hand out of Tobias’s so I can more properly face Jessica. “Can you please stop talking about me as if I’m a child in the other room?”

  Jessica rolls her eyes. “I didn’t say that. I just…”

  “What?” I snap at her. “You didn’t want me to be with him. Just admit it. You act like you loved him.”

  “I went with you!” Jessica says. She’s gesturing wildly now. “I practically pushed you. I was the one who found that photography club. I was the one who drove you to UCLA.”

  Tobias is looking at me curiously. “You never told me how you got that photo.”

  “Of course I did. After Ashes and Snow I didn’t even know your name. I went to UCLA. I found the photography club. You weren’t there, but I bought that photo.”

  “No,” Tobias says. “You never told me that.” He looks concerned, stressed. Flushed like he’s just come in from running.

  “See this, right here? This is what I mean!” Jessica says. “You both always thought it was coincidence, but it wasn’t. You needed everything to seem like magic. You couldn’t accept that you were both human.”

  We found each other again, against all odds. In New York City! We were magic.

  “I didn’t need magic,” Tobias says, mostly to me. He still looks alarmed.

  “Where did you think she got the photograph?” Audrey interjects. “Surely…”

  “You knew,” Robert says. “You just didn’t want to admit it to yourself, because of the responsibility it would mean, because of what you’d owe her.”

  Robert’s tone has changed. There is something almost paternal in it. It makes us all stop and look at him.

  “No,” I say. “Come on.” Because if I’m going to defend one of them, it’s going to be Tobias.

  Tobias exhales. “He’s right,” he says. “I think so, anyway.” He runs his hands over his face. I feel my body tighten next to him. “Sometimes I was scared of letting you down,” he says. “You thought so highly of me. I wasn’t always that person.”

  “I saw you,” I say. “I saw us. I saw this whole future.…”

  Tobias looks at Robert. The two of them exchange a glance, and for the first time tonight I take them in like this, sitting next to each other. They look nothing alike. Tobias with his big head of curls and bright green eyes, my father with his near-balding head, patched skin, and sunken chest. But there’s a nervous quality to them both. They’re on high alert. I remember a still image, like a snapshot, of my father pacing in the kitchen, his fingers nipping at one another. An uncomfortable thought presents itself. I push it back down.

  “Fine,” I say. “You were human. I was wrong about you. It was my fault.”

  “That’s not what I said,” Tobias says. “It wasn’t your fault.”

  I hold my arms out. “Well, if it wasn’t my fault and it wasn’t your fault, then what?”

  Silence falls over the table. I hear Audrey clear her throat. Finally, Conrad leans forward.

  “Then we order dessert,” he says. Audrey shakes her head at him. “What?” he says. “I need something sweet.”

  We each busy ourselves with our menus, the heat of the last few minutes hanging in the air between us. The words all swim together until I can’t make them out. He did love me the way I needed to be loved. Being with him was all that ever mattered. And if we can’t figure this out, if we can’t go back, he’s going to be lost to me forever. It doesn’t feel like we’re getting any closer. In fact, it feels like we’re getting farther away.

  “Soufflés?” Conrad asks, and the group starts talking about ice cream and sorbet and peach cobbler, and I sit back and wonder what would happen if I just got up and left. If I walked out of the restaurant and home. They’d disappear. My father. Audrey. Conrad and Jessica, too. But then Tobias would be gone for good, and I can’t have that, not with so much still left between us.

  FIFTEEN

  AFTER THAT SUMMER, AFTER THAT NIGHT of pasta and marriage talk, we settled into a routine for the fall and winter. Work, home, cook, sex (sometimes), sleep. It wasn’t the summer of fun and freedom anymore, it was life—and we weren’t always completely compatible.

  We began to fight more than I’d like to admit. That West Village apartment wasn’t always a love shack, and it wasn’t always big enough for both of us; in fact, it rarely was. When we had lived with Rubiah, and even Jessica before her, there had been a buffer. Now it was just the two of us knocking up against each other. Sometimes we crashed.

  But it was part of us, I reasoned. It was what made us spark, what made us different from Jessica and Sumir, from me and Paul. We could love and fight in equal measure, and that contact, I told myself, was good. It meant we were passionate. It meant we cared.

  Tobias had developed a few habits in the two years he was gone, and so had I. My relationship with Paul had been, if not particularly charged, then definitely full of ease. We never fought, mostly because there wasn’t much to fight about. The relationship was suspended in warm water—impact-proof. We traded off on delivery menus, museums, and movies. We were like teammates passing a baton back and forth without any of the running, stress, shouting, or inevitable wins.

  I remember once going over to Paul’s after work and finding him on his computer. I had a key after month two, which had more to do with efficiency than romance or commitment. “What are you doing?” I asked him.

  He looked up at me and handed me a glass of wine. He always had one ready when I came over. “Making a spreadsheet,” he said.

  He turned the computer around and showed me. “See? Areas of the city, then museums, restaurants, and special events.” He ran his finger along the top of the screen. “So we don’t have to check Time Out so much. I’m condensing everything for our Saturdays. And some weeknight things as well.”

  I took a sip of wine. “That’s genius.” It was exactly the sort of thing I would have done, and I liked that I didn’t have to, that he already was. That I hadn’t even thought of it.

  He smiled. “Thanks.” He handed me our stack of delivery menus. “Here, your turn.”

  Our similarities in lifestyle made it so that we didn’t come up against each other all that often. The only fights, if you could even call them that, we got into were never about our relationship. They were about the background of an actor we’d seen in a play, whether or not he’d been on That ’70s Show (which of course was solved with a quick Google). The Washington Post versus The New York Times. The best place for a weekend away. Him: Fire Island. Me: Berkshires. We cleaned the kitchen before we went to sleep and both set our alarms for 7:10.

  Whatever Paul and I were, Tobias and I were the exact opposite. We were all contact. Dirty dishes and piles of laundry
and empty toothpaste tubes and broken radiators. We were sweat and spit and heat and thump-thump-thumping. We were so real it drove us crazy.

  The first novel I’d edited on my own was coming out in March, and I invited Jessica and Sumir, David and Kendra to come to the launch. It was a middle-grade novel titled The Sky for a Day, and it was about a little boy who discovers he has the ability to fly. I was proud of it and the author—a fifty-year-old debut writer named Tawnya Demarco. I couldn’t wait to share it with everyone, especially Tobias. I wanted him to see that while he was gone I had been working on important things, too.

  We all gathered at McNally on a Tuesday at six. It was raining outside, and I feared Jessica might bail out, but she showed up first, and then Sumir twenty minutes later. David came with a new boyfriend, Asher.

  David hugged me. “Congratulations, beautiful! I can’t wait to see Tobias,” he said. “It has been actual years.”

  We had plans to go to dinner after, a cozy pizza place around the corner called Rubirosa that was impossible to get into. I’d made reservations the month before.

  “He’s excited to see you!” I said.

  Tobias wasn’t social. He was personable and engaging, and when he met you he was genuinely interested, but he never wanted us to make plans. In the beginning, before California, he had made an effort with my friends, but it seemed his inherent tendency toward isolation had gotten worse as time went on. Why go out? he’d ask me. Everything I want is right here.

  Tawnya was nervous. I poured her half a glass of cheap red our publicist had supplied and told her she’d be great. She was doing a short reading and then a Q and A. I went to the mic and told people to take their seats. Jessica, Sumir, David, and Asher sat in the second row. Jessica gave me the thumbs-up. Where was Tobias?

  “Thank you all so much for coming,” I said. “I’m so proud to introduce this woman and her beautiful book…”

  I spoke about falling in love with the book on my first read and how talented and commited Tawnya was. When I sat down the room broke into applause to welcome her, but Tobias wasn’t there. All through her reading I kept glancing toward the back, expecting him to show, but he didn’t.

  Once I’d congratulated Tawnya and set her up signing books, I checked my phone. I had a missed call from him and a text. So sorry baby I’m caught at work. Tell your friends hi and knock em dead. Love you.

  I just kept staring at his words. Your friends. Not ours. Not David, Jessica, and Sumir.

  “You almost ready?” Jessica asked. She had a signed copy of the book tucked under her arm. “Where’s Tobias? Is he meeting us there?”

  I stuck on a smile. “He’s stuck at work. It’ll just be us.”

  I saw Jessica send a sideways glance at Sumir. I knew what she was thinking: My husband can make it to your event, why can’t your boyfriend?

  We went to dinner and everyone toasted the book, but I was distracted. I wanted him to be there, I wanted him to share this. But more than that, I wanted him to understand how important this was to me. I wanted him to exist in the world with me, the real one—the one made up of my job and friends and life. Not just the one in our apartment.

  When I got home he was watching TV on the couch.

  “How did it go?” he asked. He shut it off as soon as I walked in. “Tell me everything.” He handed me a bouquet of sunflowers. It was March; I didn’t know how he’d found them.

  “Good,” I said. “I missed you.”

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “I got caught up taking photos. The sunset was incredible tonight. Did you see it?”

  “I thought you were at work,” I said.

  “I was working,” he said.

  I didn’t feel like fighting. I went to put the sunflowers in water. He hadn’t.

  That night I just kept thinking about Jessica’s look to Sumir, about how David had shown up with a man he was just dating.

  * * *

  Tobias had taken up Transcendental Meditation in L.A. He liked to wake up in the morning, sit in a chair, and meditate for twenty minutes, as was protocol. But our apartment was tiny, and with two of us, there wasn’t room for both silence and speed in the morning. I had to be at the office at nine, which meant I had to leave at eight-thirty. I tried to walk to work, as my gym time was woefully lacking, but most days I ended up taking the subway. I would stumble around Tobias, opening drawers, trying to find tights and matching shoes, as he sat there with his eyes closed in pursuit of tuning out the world.

  “Can’t you do that the night before?” he’d ask.

  “Can’t you do that once I leave?” I’d fire back. Tobias had a flexible schedule. This job was turning out to be more mind-numbing gigs than Digicam, and as fall turned to winter and winter turned to spring even the commercial work waned and waned. He was still employed, but they assigned other people to cover the ad work probably, I thought but kept to myself, because Tobias wasn’t very good at hiding his disdain for it. His boss started traveling more and bringing another assistant on shoots. I didn’t bring it up to Tobias because I knew it was a sensitive subject, but more than once I wondered why he didn’t look for another gig. These jobs weren’t easy to come by, I knew that, and I knew it’s what he would say if I brought it up to him. He was becoming increasingly deliquent in rent, something he paid me, because my name, for logistical reasons, was on the lease. Sometimes he forgot entirely, and when I’d remind him of it, weeks later, he’d be incredibly apologetic. “I’m so sorry,” he’d say. “I forgot. I’ll have it next week.”

  “He needs to step up,” Jessica told me on a rare lunch we had in the fall. We were eating at a chain Greek place we both liked. “You want to have kids. Who is going to provide?”

  “Provide?” I said. “Do we even use that word anymore?”

  “I do.” Jessica looked right at me. “You earn like four cents an hour.” She paused. “How is everything else?” she asked.

  “Good,” I said. I shifted under her gaze.

  “Do you want Sumir to talk to him? You know he loves Tobias; we both do. I just think it’s time you guys face facts.”

  “And what facts would those be?” I asked.

  “That you’re going to need to grow up one of these days.”

  I thought about Jessica in college—lighting incense in our kitchen and charging crystals on our bedroom windowsill. What would she think about herself now? Would she be disappointed? Angry? Would she feel betrayed?

  That was so much of it—I didn’t want to betray Tobias and me. We were meant to be epic. We were meant to hover above the normalcy. I didn’t blame Jessica for not seeing that, but I also didn’t know how to explain it to her—the same rules didn’t apply to us.

  On one particular day in late April I was running late. Random House was having a big launch meeting at nine A.M., a quarterly meeting where editors present their upcoming titles to sales and marketing. I had a PowerPoint to finish for my boss and was supposed to get in at eight A.M. but had overslept.

  I was rattling around the bedroom, yanking open drawers, trying to find my brown corduroy pants.

  “Can you please keep it down?” Tobias asked from his meditative perch.

  “No,” I said. “I can’t. I’m late for work. My job actually has prescribed hours.” I knew as soon as I said it that it was the wrong move, but it was too late. It was already out there.

  “Wow,” Tobias said, opening his eyes. “Way to get that out there.”

  “I just mean your shoot isn’t until one,” I said. “You can meditate once I’m gone.”

  “This is my apartment, too,” Tobias said. “Even if you never fucking act like it.”

  He left the bedroom. I remember watching his foot at the door. He was still in his sweatpants.

  I didn’t act like this was my place. It was ours. We had moved in together. But I had taken on this role of being the responsible one. Sometimes I even felt like a parent. I cleaned the dishes when they piled up, and I noticed when the milk was bad or empt
y. I called the super when the radiator stopped working and bought the lightbulbs when the kitchen went dark.

  I came home that night and found him in the kitchen. His sweatpants were on; I didn’t know if he’d been to work that day or not. But he was making lasagna, my favorite. I smelled the garlic and bubbling tomato sauce, and when I dropped my bag down and went into the kitchen he held out a wooden spoon for me to taste.

  “It’s perfect,” I said. We didn’t talk about the morning, but I knew that this was his way of apologizing, of making it right.

  “More salt?”

  I shook my head. I kissed him with tomato sauce lips. “Perfect.”

  I made a salad with arugula and onions and some pine nuts I found in our cabinet. Tobias was always buying food supplies I didn’t think we could afford, but this time I didn’t care. I was grateful for all of it, for the way the food was bringing us back together. We ate on the living room floor because we didn’t have a table, and because there was something romantic about being young and broke and in love. And when you’re young and broke and in love you eat lasagna on the floor. Although it didn’t escape me that there was a difference between being broke at twenty-two and at twenty-eight.

  I didn’t mention the job because I knew we agreed—this wasn’t what Tobias wanted either. I knew that, for him, it was the worst kind of settling. It wasn’t creative, and it wasn’t sexy. It didn’t even pay well. What I didn’t know, and what terrified me, was whether he blamed me. If the opportunities he could have had if he’d stayed in L.A. weighed on him, and if I was on the other side of that scale.

  We had sex in the one club chair, which had traveled with us from the old apartment, and left the dishes in the sink. The next evening, when I got home from work, they were cleaned and put away.

  10:10 P.M.

  WE ORDER DESSERT. FOUR SOUFFLÉS. Jessica gets ice cream. Audrey and Robert order cappuccinos, and Tobias and I get espressos.

  “You know what I think we need?” Conrad says. “A time-out.”