The Dinner List by Rebecca Serle
For my grandmother Sylvia Pesin, who taught me that first, baby, you gotta love yourself.
And for her Sam—the first person on my list.
How many miles to Babylon?
Three score miles and ten— Can I get there by candlelight?
Yes, and back again—
If your feet are nimble and light You can get there by candlelight.
—TRADITIONAL NURSERY RHYME
The stars you see at night are the unblinking eyes of sleeping elephants, who sleep with one eye open to best keep watch over us.
—GREGORY COLBERT, Ashes and Snow
7:30 P.M.
“WE’VE BEEN WAITING FOR AN HOUR.” That’s what Audrey says. She states it with a little bit of an edge, her words just bordering on cursive. That’s the thing I think first. Not Audrey Hepburn is at my birthday dinner but Audrey Hepburn is annoyed.
Her hair is longer than the image I’ve always held of her in my mind. She’s wearing what looks to be a pantsuit, but her legs are hidden under the table, so it’s hard to tell. Her top is black, with a crème-colored collar, three round buttons down the front. A cardigan is looped over the back of her chair.
I step back. I take them in. All of them. They’re seated at a round table, right in the center of the restaurant. Audrey is facing the door, Professor Conrad to her right and Robert to her left. Tobias sits on the other side of Robert, to his left is Jessica, and in between her and Tobias is my empty chair.
“We started without you, Sabrina,” Conrad says, holding up his wineglass. He’s drinking a deep red; so is Jessica. Audrey has a scotch, neat; Tobias has a beer; Robert has nothing.
“Are you going to sit?” Tobias asks me. His voice cracks a little at the edges, and I think that he’s still smoking.
“I don’t know,” I say. I’m surprised I have the ability for words, because this is insane. Maybe I’m dreaming. Maybe this is some sort of mental breakdown. I blink. I think maybe when I open my eyes it will be just Jessica seated there, which is what I’d been expecting. I have the urge to bolt out the door, or maybe go to the bathroom, splash some cold water on my face to determine whether or not they’re really here—whether we’re all really here together.
“Please,” he says. There is a hint of desperation in his voice.
Please. Before he left, that was the word I used. Please. It didn’t make a difference then.
I think about it. Because I do not know what else to do. Because Conrad is pouring Merlot from the bottle and because I can’t just keep standing here.
“This is freaking me out,” I say. “What’s going on?”
“It’s your birthday,” Audrey says.
“I love this restaurant,” Conrad says. “Hasn’t changed in twenty-five years.”
“You knew I’d be here,” Jessica says. “We’ll just make room for a few more.” I wonder what she said when she got here. Whether she was surprised or delighted.
“Perhaps we could talk,” Robert says.
Tobias says nothing. That was always our problem. He was so willing to allow silence to speak for him. The frustration I feel at him next to me overwhelms my disbelief in my situation. I sit.
The restaurant bustles around us, the diners undisturbed by what’s going on here. A father tries to quiet a small child; a waiter pours wine into glasses. The restaurant is small, maybe twelve tables total. There are red potted hydrangeas by the doorway and a soft sprinkling of holiday lights line the place where the wall meets the ceiling. It’s December, after all.
“I need a drink,” I declare.
Professor Conrad claps his hands together. I remember he used to do that right before class would let out or he’d assign a big project. It’s his way of anticipating action. “I came all the way from California for this blessed event, so the least you could do is catch me up on what you’re doing now. I don’t even know what you ended up majoring in.”
“You want an update on my life?” I ask.
Jessica rolls her eyes next to me. “Communications,” she says.
Professor Conrad puts a hand to his chest in a show of feigned shock.
“I’m a book editor now,” I say a bit defensively. “Jessica, what is going on?”
Jessica shakes her head. “This is your dinner.” My list. She knows, of course. She was there when I made it. It was her idea. The five people, living or dead, you’d like to have dinner with.
“You don’t think this is insane?” I say.
She takes a sip of wine. “A little. But crazy things happen every day. Haven’t I always told you that?”
When we lived together, in that cramped apartment on Twenty-first Street, she had inspirational quotes everywhere. On the bathroom mirror. On the Ikea desk that held our television. Right by the door. Worrying is wishing for what you don’t want. Man plans and God laughs.
“Is this everyone?” Robert asks.
Audrey flips over her wrist. “I’d hope so,” she says.
I take a sip of wine. I take a deep breath.
“Yes,” I answer. “This is everyone.”
They look at me. All five of them. They look expectant, hopeful. They look like I’m supposed to tell them why they’re here.
But I can’t do that. Not yet, anyway. So instead, I open my menu.
“Why don’t we order,” I say. And we do.
ONE
I FIRST SAW TOBIAS AT AN art exhibit at the Santa Monica Pier. Four years later we exchanged names on the subway stuck underground at Fourteenth Street, and we had our first date crossing the Brooklyn Bridge. Our story spanned exactly one decade, right down to the day we ended. But as it’s been said before—it’s easier to see the beginnings of things, and harder to see the ends.
I was in college, my sophomore year. I was taking Conrad’s philosophy class. Part of the course was a weekly field trip organized by students on a rotating basis. Someone took us to the Hollywood sign, another to an abandoned house on Mulholland designed by a famous architect I had never heard of. I’m not sure what the point was except that Conrad, self-admittedly, liked to get out of the classroom. “This is not where learning takes place,” he often said.
For my outing I chose the art exhibit Ashes and Snow. I had heard about it from some friends who had gone the weekend before. Two giant tents were erected on the beach by the Santa Monica Pier, and the artist Gregory Colbert was showing his work—big, beautiful photographic images of human beings living in harmony with wildlife. There had been a giant billboard that sat on Sunset Boulevard the entire year of 2006—a small child reading to a kneeling elephant.
It was the week before Thanksgiving. I was flying home the next day to Philadelphia to spend the holiday with my mother’s extended family. My mom was contemplating a move back East, where she was from. We’d been in California since I was six years old, since right after my father left.
I was flustered. I remember cursing myself that I’d signed up to organize this event when I had so much other stuff going on. I was fighting with Anthony—my on-again, off-again business-major boyfriend, who rarely left the confines of his fraternity house except for “around the world” parties, where the only traveling was to the toilet after mixing too many different kinds of booze. The whole relationship was fiction, comprised mainly of text messages and drunken nights that we somehow cobbled into togetherness. In truth, we were biding our time. He was two years older, a senior with a finance job in New York already lined up. I thought, loosely, we’d someday transition this playing pretend into playing house, but of course we never did.
Ashes and Snow was stunning. The indoor space was dramatic and yet serene—like practicing yoga at the very edge of a cliff.