And that’s it, right there. The thing that hurts the worst. Not the action, of course not. Not the missed dinners and calls. Not the rescheduled plans. But the ache, deep down, that she no longer wants things to be any different than they are. That she’s so immersed in her life she never thinks about what it’s like to be in mine.
“More wine?” Audrey offers. I see her standing next to me, holding the bottle. She must have wriggled out of Conrad’s grasp lightning quick. She puts a hand on the top of my head, and the gesture is so maternal that for a moment it’s too much to bear. Audrey isn’t that much older than I am, here wherever we really are, and yet it’s like she’s compressed her whole life down into this body. She’s sixty and twenty-three and seventeen, all at once.
She fills my glass. She pours for Jessica and Tobias, too.
“I’m sorry,” Tobias says slowly.
“This isn’t about you,” I say.
“You can’t fix it,” Jessica says to Tobias. “I can’t, and you can’t, either. Why are you here? Why did you come tonight? I love you, Tobias, but you’re making it worse, you realize that, right?”
“I’m trying,” Tobias says. I feel something cheer in my heart. He knows what has to happen here tonight. He wants to find his way back, too. To rectify what went wrong and start over again.
“No,” Jessica says. “You’re not. You’re here and you’re talking about things and you’re remembering things, and what do you think is going to happen?”
“Why does that have to be a bad thing?” I ask her. “Why can’t we go back and fix what went wrong? Isn’t that why we’re here?”
“You don’t understand anything,” Jessica says. “And I’ve already been the one to explain it to you too many times.”
“Explain what?” I ask. “That we’re not living up to your standards of a relationship? That if I get back together with him you won’t be there this time to pick up the pieces?”
“No,” Jessica says. She looks into her wineglass, like maybe she expects to find the answer there.
“Please,” Tobias says. “Jessica.” There is a warning to his voice. It sounds, all at once, completely unfamiliar.
“I’m sorry,” Jessica says. She looks at me, and her eyes are wet, wide. “Tobias is dead.”
THIRTEEN
FOR FIVE MONTHS, RUBIAH, TOBIAS, and I lived together. Rubiah and Tobias got along. She was rarely there, but on the occasion she was I’d come home to find them drinking beers or playing a board game. Matty had gotten Tobias into Risk years ago, and sometimes the two of them still met at Uncommons in the West Village to play together.
Rubiah’s like of Tobias was cozy, and convenient, and allowed me to miss Jessica a little bit less. She was happy when Tobias came back—I knew she had wanted us to make it work the first time—but she was married now, and as time went on more and more judgmental, I thought, about choices that were different from her own. She had grown up faster, faster than Tobias and me, certainly, faster than any friends I knew. She was playing house now, and the realities of twenty-something life, the roller coaster I often felt like I was on—it seemed like she had skipped that altogether. So we lived with Rubiah, and it worked. But our updated Three’s Company, if you could call it that, was short-lived. In the summer of 2015, Rubiah got a place up by Columbia, and Tobias and I decided to move, too.
I had been at that apartment on Tenth Avenue since the beginning, almost five years, and I was equally as sick of it as I was in love with it. I loved how much had happened there. How Jessica and I had moved in with nothing more than two suitcases apiece and a box of books mailed from school. The memory of our first Ikea trip, convincing our super to rent us a car because we weren’t yet twenty-five. Scooting Jessica through the aisles on the pull cart, arguing over whether to get a sofa or two club chairs (we settled on a love seat and one chair). The late nights watching Friends reruns and that first year when Jessica used to wake up before me and go to the corner deli and get us both coffee—hazelnut creamer and one Splenda.
But I hated the rust-rotted sink, and how the bathroom flooded every time the upstairs neighbors took a shower, and how noisy it was with our street-facing bedrooms. I was ready for something else in the way you’re ready to move from middle school to high school. Not because it’s a personal choice, necessarily, but because it’s time.
Tobias and I found a one bedroom on Eighth Street between Sixth Avenue and MacDougal. It was small and old, the stove rusted and the walls cracked despite a fresh coat of paint. But our bedroom faced the back and was relatively quiet. It was the third apartment we saw, and we took it on the spot.
Tobias had gone out looking when I was at work. He’d wanted to move to Brooklyn, but I’d won out. I felt certain that I didn’t want to leave Manhattan, and Tobias relented. He didn’t even really fight me on it. I think he knew he didn’t stand a chance.
“This is the one,” he’d said when he called me.
I checked the time: 11:38 A.M. “Is this the first place you’ve seen?” I asked.
“It’s perfect,” he said. “Trust me.”
I snuck out half an hour later for lunch and met him on the front stoop. He had a bouquet of sunflowers. It was the season. “Welcome home,” he said when I got there.
We went upstairs together (six flights), and as soon as I stepped inside I saw that he was right. It wasn’t that it was perfect, not by a long stretch, but it was ours. Tobias was excited. “We can paint the living room,” he said. “Maybe yellow.” He snuck his hands around my waist.
“It’s great,” I said. “How much?”
He squinted at me. “Twenty-four, but I figure that’s only three hundred over budget, right? And the broker said she’d cut her fee in half for us.” He shrugged. For a brief moment I imagined some leggy brunette with a briefcase in our apartment, rubbing up against Tobias on the kitchen counter.
I didn’t have the heart to tell him our budget was already two hundred over what we could realistically afford. I wanted that yellow living room, too.
Matty helped us move. He’d borrowed his father’s van, which he lined with blankets. Tobias had sold his Prius in L.A. Matty was out of school then and working for a bank. “Overpaid and overstimulated,” was how Tobias described Matty at his new gig. “He’s like a puppy in heat.”
“He’s excited,” I said. We were stacking boxes. Tobias gingerly set a lamp on the floor. Matty was downstairs, watching the double-parked van.
“Nah,” he said. “He’d be excited if he were doing his own thing. He’s just running full-blast on a hamster wheel.”
Tobias chided Matty for not holding out for a start-up gig, or not developing an app on his own. He thought he was selling out. But Matty was twenty-three years old. “First money, then independence,” he said whenever Tobias brought it up.
To me, Matty seemed happy, but by this point I understood Tobias’s complicated relationship with success, money, and working for other people. He had done it in L.A., and he had enjoyed it—but only because he found the work to be creative, and important. He was a true artist—commercial success wasn’t the point; often it was problematic. More than once I heard him tell Matty he’d stopped listening to a band after they’d made it. “The sound changes,” he’d said. “It stops being pure.”