The Dinner List

by Rebecca Serle

  Tobias moved his lips to my cheek. “There are three different kinds of fajitas on that stove,” he told me. “Not a chance.” He grabbed my butt and then gently nudged me away from him as he went back to the food. I didn’t feel rejected, more amused. We were back in the love bubble. I slurped my drink and watched him work.

  After we ate, when we were full of fajitas and tequila, I told him the Berkshires plan. Except I didn’t tell him I wanted to go alone. I said I wanted us to go together.

  “That sounds perfect,” he told me.

  I was thrilled. It felt like we were on our way to reconnecting, that we had set aside the hostility of the last few months and we were moving beyond it, and I knew this trip would be the reset button we needed. We had done so well in the Hamptons, I wanted us to have a little bit of that back—that fun and spunk and spontaneity that I thought defined our relationship. Home had gotten to be so pressurized—money, jobs, life. I wanted us to go somewhere where all that wasn’t hanging over our heads. Where we had more space and clear air. I would have the conversation Kendra and I had rehearsed the week before. In the space and open air, out of the city, Tobias would hear me. We’d figure it out.

  That weekend we rented a car and went up to Lenox. Tobias drove and I rolled the window down. It was early November and still fall—crisp and cool, not yet biting—and the leaves hadn’t completely fallen. Upstate was a wash of gold and red and orange, and I reached out to put my hand over Tobias’s.

  He lifted his thumb and rubbed my pinky. As soon as we left Queens behind us, I felt myself exhaling.

  Jessica called. I hit ignore.

  “You need to get that?” Tobias asked me.

  “Nope,” I said.

  He turned to me and winked.

  Kendra’s parents’ cabin was up a hill that looked over a field of sheep and cows. It was small, one bedroom, one bath, with a little kitchen nook, a fireplace, and a screened-in porch. We had brought up groceries and wine, and I unpacked our provisions while Tobias went about building a fire.

  Jessica called again. I missed it. My phone was now tucked into my purse, on silent, as it would stay for the rest of the weekend.

  “Do you want a glass of red?” I called to him.

  “Open the Nero d’Avola,” he said.

  I found the wine opener in my bag. Kendra had said the cabin was fully loaded, but I didn’t want to take any chances. Forgoing wine for the weekend didn’t seem like it would help things.

  Tobias went outside to gather wood from a pile by the side of the cabin, and I took the Gruyère and Gouda and grapes I’d bought and put them on a cutting board with some crackers and almonds—the spiced kind from Trader Joe’s I knew Tobias loved.

  When he came back in I poured two glasses and brought one out to him, balancing the cheese plate on my wrist.

  “Here, I got it.” He took the cheese board off me and set it on the mantel. I handed him a glass of wine and we settled down in a chair in front of the fireplace as he built the fire.

  “Can I help?” I asked, sipping.

  He cocked his head at me in that way he did that told me he thought I was crazy but he was charmed by it. Head tilted forty-five degrees to the left, one eye closed. “I don’t know, can you?”

  “I’ll blow on it,” I said.

  He arched his eyebrows at me. “Oh, you will, will you?”

  “Maybe,” I said. I took another sip. I let my eyes find his over the glass.

  “I think you should stay right there,” he said. He stood up and came over to me. He slid his hand onto my thigh and brought his lips up to kiss my cheek.

  I pulled him down into the chair with me. We picked up where we’d left off over margaritas. I took his shirt off and ran my hands over his shoulders and down his back. He pulled my sweater over my head and kissed the hollow of my collarbone, the space between my ear and shoulder that drove me crazy.

  All we needed was to stay this close. Right up against each other, without any space between us. If we did that, we were good. It was just the world—with all its loud chaos, its demands and people and air—that made us fight, that made us separate, that was driving us apart.

  Tobias pulled back and looked at me. He hovered over me, so close I could smell the wine on his lips.

  “Did I ever tell you about what happened after we met that day on the train?” he asked me.

  He hadn’t. We had spent some time talking about the beach—our other beginning—but not that one.

  “I got off at the next stop. I walked the rest of the way. I had to call Matty.”

  “Why?” I asked.

  “Because,” he said. “I had to tell someone I had met her.”

  “Who?”

  “You.” He cupped my chin and brought his lips to brush over my eyelids, my cheekbones, the pad of my lips.

  “Stay close to me,” I told him.

  “Always,” he said.

  He kissed my ear, then dropped his lips into the dip of my collarbone. I took his hand and led him into the bedroom.

  Afterward we played Monopoly and drank two bottles of wine. Tobias made us pesto pasta with grilled chicken. I knew we needed to talk, but we needed this night more. We needed to remember what made us special and different and together. I wanted to make love and pasta and hold him in my arms.

  We’d talk tomorrow, I reasoned.

  Tomorrow.

  11:05 P.M.

  JESSICA IS HOLDING HER SHIRT OUT, and when I look over at her I see that her top is soaking. She’s leaking again and trying to conceal the milk stains.

  “Excuse me,” she says. She collects her bag from where it sits on the floor and scurries into the bathroom. Watching her scuttle away, holding out her top, hits me straight in the gut. I wish we hadn’t fought just now.

  “I need some air again,” I say. Conrad makes a move to stand, but Audrey puts a hand firmly on his shoulder.

  “I’ll go,” she says.

  It’s the first time she’s stood up tonight, and I notice her crisp black pants end at her ankles and she’s wearing a pair of black patent-leather ballet flats. She unhooks her Chanel sweater from where it sits on the back of her chair and loops it over her shoulders.

  “After you,” she says, gesturing toward the door.

  Once we’re outside, I want a cigarette. The one from earlier, with Conrad, has reignited my craving. I feel like I want to peel off my skin, roll it up, and burn it when Audrey takes out a pack.

  “I don’t think this could possibly hurt me now,” she says, echoing Conrad earlier. “Would you like one?”

  Her whimsical drawl has me nervous. I am alone with Audrey Hepburn.

  “Please,” I say.

  She lifts one, hands it to me, and takes one for herself. She lights mine first, then hers. We both inhale what can only be called excessively. Audrey exhales first; a cloud of smoke envelops her.

  “That’s better,” she says, coughing a bit. “Non?”

  I smile and follow suit.

  “Do you know much about me?” she asks. She wants to know why she’s here.

  “A little,” I say. “Mostly your work.” I know more—I know a lot—but it seems a strange thing to say, standing outside with her now. Because the truth is I don’t know, not entirely, why I chose to include her. Except that her movies represented something to me. Not just with Tobias, but with my father. One of the only things I had from him besides the watch was an old movie collection: Charade, Breakfast at Tiffany’s, and Sabrina.

  She nods. “Did you know I was in Holland during World War Two? We thought it would be safe there, you see. We didn’t think they’d invade…” She trails off and puffs again. “It was a terrible time. Those five years we were barely fed. We used to crush up tulip bulbs and bake with them. I watched friends get carted off. My own brother was shipped off to work in Germany. Had we known what was coming, we may have all shot ourselves.”

  “I’m so sorry,” I say. “I did know, a bit. That must have been horrific. I
can’t imagine.”

  “But do you want to know what was worse?” she asks me.

  “What could be?”

  She shifts her weight, what little there is, delicately from one foot to the other. I’m transfixed—all at once reminded of her riding around Rome, singing in a flat in Paris.

  “Decades later I started work with UNICEF, and before I died I traveled to Somalia. Seeing that famine, those children starving…” She swallows and I see, even in the lamplight, her eyes filled with tears. “It was worse,” she says. “Because I wasn’t in it with them. And I couldn’t fix it. Two million people starving.” She shakes her head and wipes at her eyes. “When you suffer alone it’s terrible,” she says. “But when you watch other people suffer, innocent people, those that cannot help themselves—it is worse.”

  She looks at me, and I know what she’s saying, what she’s trying to convey. “Thank you,” I say. “For sharing that with me.”

  “I was an introvert my whole life,” she says. “Quiet, reasoned. Perhaps it’s time to open up a bit.”

  “Can I ask you something?” I say.

  She puffs again. “Of course.”

  “If you could do it all over again, all of it, what would you change?”

  Audrey considers this. “I would have gotten married again,” she says. “A third time, to Robert. I loved him dearly. If I had to do it again I would.”

  “That’s all?” I ask.

  She smiles. “Oh, plenty of things,” she says. “But it was a good life. It’s best not to dwell.”

  She turns to me abruptly and I am caught again by the profound beauty of her features here together. She is stunning, radiant. A delicate rose petal—perfect in its symmetry. One that does not ever fade. And she hasn’t, has she? I wonder what it must have been like for her at the end, if she ever withered. I can’t imagine it.

  “I was a romantic,” she says. “Until the very end. People always associate me with romance, but I don’t know if they think I was. I was often considered the object, not the one longing, so to speak. I think when people watch my films that’s the image they get.”

  I think about her films. About my father’s collection. About Roman Holiday that first afternoon with Tobias. The myth, the magic, of this movie star. But Audrey Hepburn isn’t Holly Golightly, in the little black dress and trench coat in the rain. She isn’t Nicole, in Paris, planning a museum heist and falling in love with the handsome burglar. She isn’t Eliza Doolittle, climbing the ranks of society. All that was fiction. Ideas concocted in the minds of studio heads. Audrey Hepburn is simply the woman standing beside me now.

  She looks at me curiously, like she’s waiting to see if I’ll ask it. The reason we’re out here together. The reason, perhaps, she’s here tonight. Her advice, finally.

  “What do I do?” I ask her.

  “Do you have a choice?” she says.

  I look back inside. I see Tobias.

  “I don’t know,” I say. “I thought I could…” I trail off.

  Audrey puts her hand on my shoulder. It startles me. Her fingers are light, cool in the night air. They feel like raindrops.

  “Sweetheart,” she says. “You could not wish me alive.”

  “I know,” I say. “Of course. But Tobias … It wasn’t supposed to happen like this. We weren’t supposed to end like this.”

  “Maybe,” she says. Her hand is still there. I have a feeling that the punch line hasn’t been delivered yet—she’s trying to soften the blow. “But knowing what I do,” she says, “having a partner you can exist in the world with, not one who you need to tuck away with, makes life a lot easier.” She threads her thumb across my shoulder. “What’s done is done.”

  “No,” I say. I have the urge to throw her hand away, to stomp off, to yell at Audrey Hepburn. “It was my fault.…” All of a sudden I’m crying. Big, hiccuping tears, and Audrey takes me in her arms. She’s a tiny woman, of course, all bones, but she still feels nurturing—bigger and softer than her frame.

  “What I’m telling you,” she whispers, rubbing my back in small circles, “is that it’s not your place. You do not get to reignite someone else’s life.”

  “But what about all of this?” I say. “How is this happening? And why?”

  “My love,” she says. She pulls me back. She holds me at arm’s length. “You know why.”

  “No,” I say again. I step back from her, but she holds me steady, and I feel it rising, that tide of water—threatening to carry me out to sea.

  “You need to,” she says. “You asked me what you do?”

  I nod.

  “You say good-bye.”

  TWENTY-THREE

  WE DECIDED TO DRIVE INTO Great Barrington the next day and have lunch at this pizza place we heard was great, Baba Louie’s. Post-vegetarianism, Tobias had decided to see if the gluten-free lifestyle would suit him (it didn’t), and they made a wheatless crust there. Plus we wanted to enjoy the town—walk around, shop, take advantage of the fresh air and the fact that there wasn’t yet snow on the ground. We were still buoyed by the previous night, by the closeness we felt being alone together.

  “Do you want to eat or walk around first?” Tobias asked me.

  “Eat,” I said. We had forgotten breakfast food on our grocery list, and I was starving.

  They didn’t open until eleven and we got there at ten forty-five. We huddled outside the door, Tobias rubbing his hands up and down my arms even though it wasn’t that cold out.

  “Should we get coffee?” Tobias asked me.

  “Need sustenance,” I said. “If we stand here, maybe they’ll open sooner.” There was no one in sight and the lights weren’t on, but I didn’t want to miss our window. Tobias laughed, then obliged.

  Finally, a stout man in a white apron came out from the back, flipped on the lights, and let us in. We claimed a table by the window that had a stencil of a pizza pie in it. I felt déjà vu come on the moment we sat—the calm, funny memory of being here before, right like this. We’d never been to the Berkshires before together. I’d come once with my mother, when I was a kid, and once while Tobias was gone, with Paul. But I loved it here, I decided. Forget the beach—this was our place. My mind started to sprint. Maybe we’d even change our plans and get married here. I had this image of me at the Wheatleigh, dressed in a pale lilac dress, a flower crown on my head. Summer. Our friends seated in white wooden chairs as I floated down the aisle toward Tobias.

  “What are you thinking about?” he asked me. It was something he asked frequently at the beginning of our relationship, almost never anymore. I took this as a sign that he didn’t really want to know, but here, now, it felt like salvation.

  “That it would be really beautiful to get married here.”

  He sat back in his chair. It was a sign of withdrawal, but how big I couldn’t tell.

  “I thought we were doing Park Slope with just the six of us?”

  We had decided on: Tobias, me, Jessica, Sumir, Matty, my mom. Tobias didn’t want his parents there, so I didn’t press. He wasn’t particularly close with them, but he never had been.

  “I know,” I said. “I was just thinking it’s really beautiful up here. And there would be room for so many more people we love.”

  “I thought Park Slope was our compromise,” he said. He was a little irritated, a little agitated. “I told you I wanted to elope.”

  “And I told you I don’t,” I said. His irritation beckoned a response from me. It was like all I had been burying, suppressing, came rumbling to the surface—a rupture, a fault line.

  “Right. That’s why we’re doing the church.”

  The waitress came over then. She had large holes in her ears from piercings and purple hair and looked to be about twenty. I wondered if she was in high school or college and whether she lived at home. At that moment, I thought of my dad.

  “Are you guys ready to order?” she asked.

  We asked for a minute. Maybe we shouldn’t have. Maybe we should have ord
ered our pizza. Maybe she would have brought it at just the exact right time to prevent what happened next.

  That’s the thing about life—these moments that define us emerge out of nothing. A missed call. A trip down the stairs. A car accident. They happen in a moment, a breath.

  “So you want a big wedding?” Tobias asked. It wasn’t an accusation, not exactly, but I could hear the bubble of animosity under his question. A big wedding. It was like wanting tax cuts for the rich. More than frivolous—a show of privilege that was not only unnecessary and gaudy, but detrimental.

  “Yes,” I said. “I want a big wedding.” I was challenging him. It wasn’t even true. I didn’t want a big wedding. I didn’t even have that many friends and barely any family, but I wanted to expose his mentality to the light. I wanted to point to it and say, See? This is why we’re here. It’s not me, it’s you.

  “Okay,” he said. “Fine. We’ll have a big wedding. We’ll do it up here. Can we have lunch now?”

  It was what I had wanted to hear, but it was all wrong. We were sacrificing ourselves in order to one-up each other.

  And then I saw the truth: We didn’t know how to make each other happy.

  I thought he knew what I needed. That I wanted to believe we were moving forward, that we’d grow up and out of this stage, that we’d build a life together that had some stability—but he didn’t. Or maybe he saw it but he couldn’t give it to me. All our fights, all our snips and groans and frosty mornings were over this simple fact. He wanted to make me happy, and I wanted him to be happy, and the two weren’t compatible.

  “No,” I said. “I don’t think we can.”

  “Jesus, Sabrina, what do you want?”

  “I want us to be on the same page. And we’re not. We haven’t been in a long time.”

  “So this is my—”

  “No,” I said. “It’s not. It’s not anyone’s fault. But we do this all the time. We just keep poking and poking and poking each other. We don’t want the same things. We have never even talked about kids.”