“We had all the usual issues a couple does when they go through something like this. I was already sick; I mentioned that. It’s a lifelong disease. The circumstances just heightened it.”
“That’s understandable,” Audrey says. I feel Jessica glare at her next to me, and I feel a rush of affection for my best friend.
“The thing that I regret is that I didn’t realize what I did have. I lost sight of you. I was so busy mourning one thing, I forgot about the other.”
I look down at my plate. My risotto appears cold and plastic, like the for-show plates that sit outside Italian restaurants in Little Italy. It makes my stomach turn just looking at it.
I feel a hand on my shoulder. I know it’s Tobias’s. I wonder if that ever fades. The feeling of his touch, like this. As if my skin is some kind of memory foam.
“She asked me to leave, but I would have gone anyway,” Robert says. “After another year, she could barely stand to be in the same room as me. And I had turned into a monster.”
“But you got help. After you’d already left us.”
Robert closes and opens his eyes. “Shortly after, yes. I rented a small room at a motel. The woman who ran the front desk took a liking to me, bless her. She found me in the closet, high off heroin, three days after I checked in. By some miracle she got me into a clinic. I barely remember that time.”
My sinuses start throbbing. I can feel them behind my eyes like hot pokers. This happens sometimes. I get brutal, debilitating headaches. When I was in college I would have to lie in a dark room for days, sometimes, with a cold compress on my face. They’re better now, manageable, but there is never any telling when one might completely knock me off my feet. I pray it’s not now.
“Headache?” Tobias says next to me. His tone has dropped, the decibel he used to use in the mornings when he’d bring me coffee or want sex. Sweet, languid. Like we had all the time in the world.
I press a thumb to my eyebrow and exhale the pressure. “I need some air,” I say. If I have any hope of this not spiraling, I need to move.
I push back my chair and stand up. Conrad stands up, too. “I’ll accompany you,” he says. “Let’s go outside.”
I want to be alone, but I’m not sure that’s an option, and anyway the way he says it, fatherly, authoritative, like a professor, which he is, makes me nod in agreement. I grab my bag to take with me.
“Are you sure you can…” Robert looks concerned. He knows we’re not finished yet.
“Jessica went to the bathroom,” Conrad says. “We’re fine.” And that’s that.
Conrad holds open the door for me, and we step outside. The air is cold, and I wish I had brought out my coat. It hasn’t snowed yet, but I get the sense it might. Not tonight, but soon. Holiday decorations are up. The city is in the jovial, neighborly phase it enters every year from Thanksgiving through New Year’s. It can be the loneliest season, December in New York.
I pull my scarf around me. I stick my fingers in my bag and root around for the pack. I offer Conrad one. I didn’t start smoking alone until Tobias left, and then I never stopped.
“What the hell,” he says. “This can’t possibly count.”
We inhale and exhale together. Smoke fills the air around us.
“How are you doing?” Conrad asks.
His arms are crossed and he’s looking at me with his head tilted. His lips shift side to side subtly and I have a wave of nostalgia for his class—the mentor I found nearly ten years ago.
“You know it was originally Plato,” I tell him.
He raises his eyebrows at me like go on.
“On the list,” I say, inhaling.
He nods, recognition dawning. “I would have liked to see that.”
“Me too,” I say. I laugh, and the smoke exits my lungs in a hurry.
“Why did you swap him out?” he asks.
“After class was over,” I say, “I always felt like you had more to teach me.” I want to add something more. Something about how he was a grown man who was there for me, and I’d never had that before, not really. Something about missing him, but I don’t want it to come out wrong.
“So how are you doing?” he asks me after a moment. “I’m going to keep asking.”
“Not so great,” I say. I move my thumb back and forth from my temple to the top of my nose. I take another drag. Hold it. “I have a headache,” I say through my exhale.
“Indeed.”
“I get them sometimes,” I say.
“I remember a particular midterm where you had taken to your sickbed for this very condition.”
“Out of hundreds of students, you remember that?”
“I do,” he says, chuckling.
“I was lying,” I say. “I was so behind in your class. I missed half the lectures.”
Conrad laughs. “Then what, might I ask, am I doing here?”
The smoke dances in the night air. “It wasn’t about your class,” I say. “I loved you.”
I look over at him. He nods. He knows this. Conrad seems, all at once, to know everything. What has happened, how all this will end. So I ask him.
“What is going to happen in there?”
He taps some ash down. I watch it fall. “I think you will remember some things.”
“Like that I love my father?”
“Maybe.” He inhales. “It might help.”
“It might hurt,” I say. “He is, after all, dead.”
Conrad laughs. It’s another hearty belly laugh. “And?”
I look inside. Jessica is leaning over the table, showing her wedding ring to Audrey. Robert is saying something to Tobias.
“And.”
If our relationship could be described in one word, it would be that. Never final. Never just this. Always and what if? And next. And after. There was always a sequel.
“I don’t know,” I continue.
“Now, that’s not true.”
Tobias leans over Robert. He pulls something out of his pocket. A watch. I take a step closer to the glass. Robert holds it in his hand. It’s a gold pocket watch. I gave it to Tobias for his twenty-ninth birthday. It was my father’s. It was the one thing I had of his, that he’d worn, and I gave it to Tobias. It was half compass, half watch. I remember saying to him: So we can always find our way back.
He brought it here tonight.
“We’re not finished,” I say.
Conrad takes another inhale and then snuffs his cigarette out on the pavement. He holds open the door. It’s only nine-thirty. We have food still on the table. But that’s not what I mean.
We’re not finished. We’re here to find our way back.
ELEVEN
TOBIAS LEFT TEN DAYS LATER. He moved out and into a beat-up Prius he had bought with a cash advance and drove out to California with three boxes of things I helped him pack. I even labeled them. Clothes. Odds and Ends. Art. He kissed me and said he’d call from the first stop. I told him not to. We’d gone back and forth about this over the last week. He wanted to stay together; I wanted to break up. It wasn’t that I didn’t want to be with him. Every cell in my body wanted to cling to his irrevocably. It was that I couldn’t put myself through the kind of heartbreak I knew was waiting for me. When my father left, my mother changed our locks and that was that. I knew I hadn’t escaped that particular programming. I didn’t know how to do it differently. I had to cut the cord.
“You’ll come visit next month and then I’ll fly back the one after. We’ll alternate.”
I imagined the worst, on repeat. I’d call and Tobias wouldn’t pick up and I’d see him on the beach with some bikini babe. I didn’t think he’d cheat on me, but I didn’t want to find out. If I ended it now he’d be free to do whatever he wanted in California, and maybe I could spare myself some pain. What I said to him was this: “Long distance doesn’t work. If it’s meant to be, it will be later.”
“You don’t believe that,” he said. “Why are you doing this to us?”
He was right, I didn’t. That was something Jessica would say, something she’d write in steam on the bathroom mirror. I subscribed more to look out for number one. After all, he was. He was leaving. I resented that he was trying to make me the responsible party.
“I do,” I said.