We danced to Motown and Tobias and I shared a slice of carrot cake (Sumir’s favorite) and afterward, when we were stuffed inside the twin room we’d rented at the Radisson on West Thirty-second Street (I can’t quite remember why it seemed important to stay at a hotel when we had an apartment ten blocks south, but it did), Tobias asked me whether I thought never questioning was good.
“What you said in your speech,” he said. “Do you think asking questions is a bad thing?”
I hadn’t specified either way. When I wrote it, I had wondered how I felt about it. Is “just knowing” something that happens when you meet the right person? Or is it a personality thing? Do some people still constantly question?
But then I thought about it: I had questions with Tobias. Tons of them. But they never made me question how I felt about him. I knew he asked himself all sorts of things. Was he ever going to make it as a photographer? Would we ever make any money? Did he belong in New York?
I didn’t want to think that meant something specific about us as a couple. I didn’t want to think his questions ever ended in the rightness of me.
“I’m not sure,” I said. “I think maybe different people do it different ways.”
“Different people definitely do it different ways,” he said. He seemed irritated. It wasn’t an emotion I had ever registered on him before, and I felt my stomach bottoming out. Anger I had a framework for, but irritation seemed like a first step into something else—distaste, removal, maybe. With anger, there was heat, emotion. With irritation there was just distance. I wanted us to stay close, to stay sealed against each other. Our relationship seemed dependent on it.
“Is there something you want to say?” I asked. I remember thinking I could blame it on too much champagne if we argued. In the morning I’d wake up and roll over and kiss his neck and pretend like nothing had ever happened. If he asked, Are you still mad? I’d keep kissing him. About what? Did we talk about something? I had way too much to drink last night.
“I got offered a job in Los Angeles.”
“What?”
Tobias rolled me on top of him. “I love you,” he said. “That first, before we talk about anything else.”
My head was spinning. California? “What is it?” I asked.
“Wolfe needs a new assistant.”
I knew how much Tobias admired Andrew Wolfe. He was an up-and-coming Patrick Demarchelier, but more grunge. He mostly shot models or up-and-coming starlets in see-through gauze tops and underwear. It was art. I could see that. His pictures were ethereal—beautiful in the way the human body is—simple, perfect, nubile. But I knew the effect Tobias had on women. I had seen it since our first afternoon together.
We’d be eating at a café, and the waitress would fill his wineglass just a little bit higher. He was always getting touched. By baristas, women of all ages, gay men in my neighborhood. People gravitated to him like he was a twenty-four-hour diner at four A.M. It was like he had a neon sign above his head: OPEN.
I knew Tobias was slowly becoming ensconced in cement at his job. Day after day he took pictures of Windex and vacuums. The most exciting shoot he’d been a part of in months was for sugar. I didn’t want that for him—I wanted him to follow his dreams. I just didn’t want them to lead him away from me.
“Wow.” That was all I could say. We’d been together for two years then. It felt like much longer.
“Jeremy?” I asked.
He nodded.
I hadn’t even known he’d followed up with him.
“I can’t turn this down,” he said. “It’s too big. It’s the opportunity I need to do what I want.” He touched my cheek. His fingertips were cold. “What if you came with me?”
I had just started my first job in publishing. I loved it, and I wanted to climb the ladder there. It was totally different from the designer. I felt like I was actually, finally good at something.
“I can’t,” I whispered. I thought if I opened my mouth too wide I’d start sobbing and never be able to stop.
“We’ll figure it out,” he said. He leaned his forehead down to mine. He was crying. “We have to.”
We slept entwined in each other that night, but when we woke up the next morning everything had changed. We would fight constantly for the next ten days. Starting with: Why didn’t he tell me sooner? It turned out he’d known about the job for two weeks.
“I didn’t want to ruin the time we had,” he said.
Be here now.
*
I realize we’ve skipped ahead, but that’s probably for the best. Consistent contentment so rarely makes for good storytelling.
In those two years in the beginning I was happy, and happiness has a way of quickening. Grief marks things. Joy lets them through. Days and months can pass in the blink of an eye. I was happier than I ever remember being in my life. Things changed. Jessica and I moved out. Tobias and I moved in. She got engaged. Then married. And then, he left. We were two years in, six since Santa Monica.
What I didn’t know then was that we were only halfway there.
9:31 P.M.
“THE FIRST SIX MONTHS ARE THE hardest,” Conrad says. “I remember when we took my daughter home, my wife would barely let me touch her. All she did was cry.” He motions to the waiter for more wine. His cheeks are rosy, and he puts a hand to his chest when he laughs.
“A whirlwind,” Audrey adds. “Feedings and sleepless nights.” She looks sympathetically at Jessica, who nods.
“I’m out of that part, mostly.” She hasn’t quite recovered from her previous embarrassment, I can tell. Jessica retreats fairly easily, but she doesn’t stay down long. I know she’ll be back and engaged soon enough.
“How old is the baby?” Audrey asks.
“Seven months,” Jessica says. “Although he looks like he’s two years old.” She looks at me to corroborate.
“It’s true,” I say. “He’s big! And both his parents are so tiny.”
Jessica laughs. “I don’t know where he came from. Sometimes I tell my husband I had an affair with a linebacker.”
When Jessica first started using the term my husband, I thought it was so crazy. We were just twenty-five, we were babies. The biggest thing I did was purchase a new Brita filter.
“But Conrad’s right,” Jessica says quietly. “I barely know where I am right now.”
“We were happy,” Robert says, steering us back. “You were the most beautiful baby either one of us had ever seen. Your mother used to say you looked like a little doll.”
“She still calls me that,” I say. Baby doll. I always figured it was just a term of endearment.
“Cabbage Patch Kid,” Jessica says. “I can see it.”
“Freckle face.” From Tobias.
“You used to like them,” I say. I’m being candid.
He raises his eyebrows at me. “Did I say freckles are a bad thing?”
Are we flirting? How is it always so easy to get back here?
Habits make of tomorrow, yesterday.
“You were beautiful,” Robert says. He clears his throat. Takes a big gulp of water. “I was working. I made enough so that your mother didn’t go back after her maternity leave. Things were difficult, but still okay.”
Conrad adjusts his notebook in his pocket. Audrey keeps looking at Robert encouragingly. I can tell it’s taking effort for him to continue.
“What happened was we got pregnant with another baby.”
The table falls silent. Only Audrey says, “Oh dear.”
“Mom never said that,” I say, as if trying to prove him wrong. Another baby?
“She was excited, naturally. She was already three months when we found out. We weren’t trying. You were three years old and a handful.”
I’m looking at Robert, who appears older all of a sudden. Like he’s not the age he was when he died, but the age he would have been had he lived.
“There was no heartbeat at the five-month checkup. It was a girl.” The staccato sentences come one after the other. They seem to hit me straight in the chest like skipping stones. Not for what they lost, so long ago. But for the history I’ve been missing. The key passage torn out of the book.
“So you started drinking to numb the pain?” I ask. Because regardless, we still ended up here. That hasn’t changed.