“Yes.”
Conrad and Audrey are watching us with a quiet curiosity. I don’t look at Jessica; she knows the game. I’m surprised when she volunteers one.
“Memory,” she says.
“Okay. Memory. You need one more.”
I inhale. I remember the first time we added this word to our five. I see the scene in my mind. I know he’s seeing it, too. Before I have a chance to say it.
“Love,” he says. As if it’s obvious. As if it’s inevitable.
“Ah,” Conrad says. He sits forward. His eyes flit back and forth from Tobias to Robert to Jessica to me, like he’s watching passing trees out of a moving car window. “We’ve arrived.”
NINE
TOBIAS AND I WERE HUDDLED on my fire escape, a cigarette between us. Or I should say between his fingertips. But we were sharing it. This was early. I hadn’t yet admitted that I smoked.
We had spent the day browsing McNally Jackson, my favorite bookstore, downtown, and walking around SoHo. We’d picked up slices at Ben’s Pizza around eleven A.M., but that was the last time we’d eaten, and it was now close to seven.
Jessica was out with Sumir for dinner. I was starving, but I hadn’t said anything yet. I didn’t want to risk fracturing the afternoon by tracking down dinner, and I knew all we had in our fridge were mossy pitas and mustard.
I would come to understand that food was something Tobias didn’t necessarily crave, although he was great in the kitchen. He could cook a perfect meal, but he could also go a full day without eating, only remembering when his body started roaring with hunger. He ate to live. Sometimes I think he was so filled up by other things that there wasn’t any room.
But not me. My stomach rumbled audibly. Tobias scooted closer to me. “What was that?” He patted my abdomen. It tickled.
“Hunger,” I said.
“Hunger is pretty dramatic.”
“Do not start,” I warned. I was teasing. It was one of our first exchanges of this nature, and the familiarity of mock annoyance filled me with a very specific kind of exhilarating joy.
Tobias put his hand on the side of my face and kissed me. “It’s my duty to feed you. Let’s go to dinner.”
He snuffed the cigarette out and climbed back through the window, offering me his hand. The cigarette went into the trash and we followed each other toward the door.
“Where do you want to go?” I asked, searching for a lone Ugg boot that had drifted behind the little bench we kept in the foyer, if you could call it a foyer. It was a wall and a small bench with some boots underneath, and an umbrella stand.
Tobias stamped his heel into his sneaker. “There’s this bistro pretty close to here I love. I’d like to take you there.”
Whatever he loved, I wanted to see. “Sounds great.”
I found the boot but then decided against it and put on black ballet flats instead. It was a little too cold for such reckless footwear, but I was going to dinner with Tobias … who could care about cold feet?
We turned the corner on Perry Street and then there we were, right at Hudson. A cute restaurant with a green awning and no more than ten or twelve tables. There were potted plants out front and a small wicker bench.
“I’ll put our name in,” he said.
I sat down on the bench. The wind in New York is worse than the weather. It zipped around me and I pulled my hunting jacket closer. I wished I had brought a hat. Or worn different shoes.
I watched him through the glass window talk to the hostess, a pretty twenty-something. He said something and she laughed, tucking some hair behind her ear. She nodded and Tobias moved toward the door, poking his head out to me.
“They can take us now,” he said.
I felt, like the hostess, no doubt, charmed by him—by his magnetic charisma.
We walked in and sat down on the far side, by the kitchen. It was warm back there, and I shivered in the temperature reversal. “Toasty.”
“Mm-hm.” Tobias flipped over his menu. I already knew I wanted red wine and the scallops. They were seared in butter and served with a salad of mixed wild greens.
Instead, I studied Tobias. He was reading like he needed glasses. Holding the menu out, squinting. Between us, the tiny flame of the candle danced.
“Five,” I said.
Tobias smiled, but he didn’t look at me. We had been playing for a while now. A shorthand for intimacy. It had stuck, and now it had become about much more. A sort of thermometer—a way to check in on where we were at any given moment.
“Food,” he said. “Wine.”
“Duh.”
His eyes flickered upward. “Cute,” he said. He started studying me back. I felt my face get hot.
“Back at you.”
He nodded. “Here.”
“And.”
“And.” He set his menu down. He put both his elbows on the table. “I want to say something, but I’m not sure how you’ll take it.” He cleared his throat. He was nervous, I realized. He looked how I felt.
“Try me.”
“Love,” he said. He paused after he said it, looking at me. There was something so wonderfully open about his face. Even his features looked wider, like they had softened, spread out.
“Do you mean that?”
“You can’t lie in Five,” he said, his face still soft. “That’s the number one rule.”
My thoughts wanted control over my mouth. It’s only been a few weeks. It’s too soon. But what I said was, “Me too.”
“Those are two words,” Tobias said. His eyes crinkled up at the sides. I found him spectacularly beautiful.
“It wasn’t my turn to play.”
We leaned across the table, Lady and the Tramp–style.
The word I was thinking of wasn’t love. If he had asked me right then I would have said something different. I would have said lucky. I was so lucky. I was lucky fate had taken such an interest in me. Me! Who was I to have such a story with the universe? But here he was, sitting before me. Living, breathing proof that my life was extraordinary.
“You act like being with him is winning some kind of prize,” Jessica would say to me later—much later. “That’s not what relationships are about.”
But weren’t they? Wasn’t love about feeling like the luckiest woman on the planet? Wasn’t it feeling like the whole world was conspiring for your happiness, and yours alone?
We didn’t say “I love you” for another six months, but I didn’t even notice. By that point the words were irrelevant. They only ever mattered in Five. And we always used love. Always.
Sometimes we’d tease it out. I’d say like a lot. We’d pretend we’d forgotten. But it was always there. The last, most important word.
It’s fitting, then, that love was the last thing to go.
We had dinner that night. Scallops and linguini with clams in a lemon-oil sauce and the burger. We filled each other in on our pasts. More than we’d shared before. Tobias had grown up in Northern California. “I love the rain,” he said. “Did I already tell you that?”
We wanted to be thorough. We wanted to make sure we left nothing out.
I told him about my father at that dinner. About how he’d left, about how he’d died not too long before. It felt important, so I told him. He listened without sympathy or judgment. Tobias was always profoundly good at that: listening. If I had a crappy day at work or got caught in the rain without an umbrella, Tobias would listen with the patience of a poetry professor. At first I loved it—he was so giving. But as time went on I found that I wanted him to talk more. It was like he thought it was enough to know me for the both of us, but it wasn’t. I wanted to know what went on inside him, too.
9:23 P.M.
“LOVE.” I REPEAT IT AGAIN. The table falls silent. The clatter of plates even dims around us. A thirty-something lesbian couple has occupied the table where Tobias and I once sat, uttering this very same word. They’re holding hands. I wonder if it’s new, if something special will happen here tonight for them, too. The table with the champagne has settled into coffee and dessert. The people with the child have departed.