“Is a challenging word,” Robert says.
Jessica leans over me toward him. “No,” she says. “It’s the easiest word in the world. Love isn’t hard.”
It’s funny, I think, how she can vacillate so readily between the hopeless romantic of our early twenties and realist woman she’s become.
Conrad and Audrey exchange a glance. He tilts his head toward her, encouraging her to speak for the both of them.
“Like I said, I never found love easy,” Audrey says. “But then again, I don’t think it was supposed to be.”
I remember, now, once watching a documentary on Audrey Hepburn. She grew up in Germany during World War II. She was in hiding from the Nazis; her parents were sympathizers. She developed asthma due to poor conditions. I realize she’s been coughing periodically throughout our meal. Did she always do that?
The documentary, a special on E!, I think, was titled Audrey: The Pain Behind Perfection. Not exactly an authoritative biography, but a fun way to spend two hours. Black-and-white reenactments were included, even if most of the details were wrong. The documentary surmised that she was modest about her EGOT awards, but she only received her Emmy and Grammy after she died. And it spoke of her rumored eating disorder, which was patently false. Her frame was a product of childhood malnourishment, not regimentation.
“What do you mean?” Jessica asks.
Audrey interlaces her fingers in front of her chin. Her delicate features sing out like stars, and I see that the lighting scheme in the restaurant has changed—we’re operating on a lot more candles now.
“Fame came easy to me. Not understanding it, mind you, but having it.”
“Important distinction.” Conrad.
“I suppose. I think maybe in my heart I believed I could only have one. That certainly didn’t help.”
“Love or success?” Tobias asks.
“Oh, I think more like love and Audrey Hepburn.” She twirls a gold ring around her middle finger. It doesn’t look like a wedding band, but it might be. She seems like the kind of woman who would move it over, keep it close, change it into something else. Wear it as a reminder, maybe not even of him. “Being successful is so much about the self,” she says. “Particularly in a profession where one must be the face of their product.” She holds a hand up to frame her face. “This is me.”
Conrad pats her shoulder. “Lovely, indeed,” he says.
She waves him off. “I tried, but I could never figure out how to be what I needed to be for my career and simultaneously for a man. I wanted a family so much. It was the only thing that really ever mattered to me—I sacrificed a lot of my happiness in pursuit of something I believed would make me happy.”
“But in the best relationships, that’s the point,” Jessica says. “You don’t try and make each other weaker. You’re not supposed to have to choose. You support each other.”
Jessica all at once sounds very young. Naive, even. I can tell by the way her voice trails off at the end that she’s heard it, too.
“That’s true, Jessica,” Audrey says. “But over time it is sometimes difficult to maintain. Maybe it was my era, too.”
“Certainly couldn’t have helped,” Conrad offers.
Audrey drops her eyes to the table. I am concerned she is crying. The lighting is too low for me to tell. “For a long time I was wracked with guilt. I thought I could have tried harder, I could have done more.” Her eyes meet mine. They are, in fact, saucer-wide and wet. “I don’t want you to feel the same way. I don’t want you to carry that.”
Something so tender tugs at my heart as I watch her. “Can I ask you something?” I say. “All of you?”
“Absolutely,” Conrad says. His hand hasn’t left Audrey’s shoulder and now he is offering a handkerchief from his inside pocket. She declines.
“Did I…” I’m not sure how to phrase this. “Did you have a choice? About coming here?”
“Oh,” Audrey says at the same time Robert says, “Of course.”
I look at Tobias. I know I’ll find the answer there.
“A little of both,” he says, which is as good as saying no.
“I think it was different for all of us,” Audrey says.
“Well, I was always in,” Conrad says. “I don’t get back East nearly enough these days. Or see my old students. Or meet Audrey Hepburn.” He winks at her.
Audrey flutters her hand. “Sh, sh. I don’t think any of us have done something like this before.” She looks at Robert. Her eyebrow is cocked in a gesture of impertinence. Go on.
“No,” he says. “Never.”
I all at once understand the implication here. He’s never done it before, which means since dying he has only ever seen me. Since he’s been gone he’s never visited his wife or Daisy and Alexandra or met the new baby.
I see him sitting here, nervous, upright, and I know when this is all over, when they leave and go back, respectively, to wherever they came from, I will point to this as the first moment of softening. The first rounding of a once harsh corner.
Something has begun to change.
“Robert,” I say, and he looks up at lightning speed. “What happened after you brought me home?”
His face registers a momentary surprise, like a flickering light, and then it settles on hesitant joy. It’s strange to see, particularly here and now. I’ve asked him to tell me about the beginning of the end, how it happened, when he got sick, in what way he left, but on his face—the way his eyebrows arch up, up! The way his cheeks sink backward, away. Lips slightly parted. I may as well be asking him to read me a bedtime story. The one with the little girl who has a shit father who in the end, the final, magical moments, redeems himself. It doesn’t seem impossible right now. It seems like it’s maybe even something I might have heard before.
TEN
IT WAS A NASTY WINTER, the one Tobias and I lived through right at the start of our relationship. Record number of snowstorms, frigid-cold temperatures, the kind that make going outside, even for an around-the-corner coffee, nearly impossible. Objectively, it was bad. But when I think of it I can only remember the good. The cold was cause for us to stay inside together. The snow days were stretches of time in which we didn’t need to get out of bed. We barely saw anyone else, and I barely noticed, if at all.
At the time, Tobias was working for a commercial photography company called Digicam. He’d quit the job at Red Roof after Digicam had offered him a full-time photography gig. He’d been pounding the pavement for months, sending his résumé everywhere, and finally someone bit.
It was commercial work, but they promised him they’d throw him some “real” shoots—hard creative stuff—in between. He was thrilled. He’d finally have a chance to produce real work and get paid for it. But over time, their promise turned out to be empty—the job proved to be nearly all mass-market stuff—cleaning products, paper towel ads. He was hawking Fit Tummy Tea.