“No,” I say. “He doesn’t.”
Tobias and I knew each other in big ways, sweeping ways, ways that felt eternal and unchanging. Fate. Destiny. The current of life pulling pulling pulling. But in the minutiae, in the day-to-day, in the coffee and poppy-seed bagel and Friends reruns and ballpoint over felt tip, it’s her. She’s always been my in-case-of-emergency person. I never wrote Tobias’s name down. It was always Jessica.
“Please,” I say. “I need you. And I need you to stay.”
She looks at me. Her eyes tell me that she’s tired, that she doesn’t want to do this, that she knows it’s a mistake, that we’ll never figure our way back out. But she nods. “Fine,” she says. “It’s your dinner.”
I feel Tobias’s hand squeeze mine.
Conrad clears his throat. “You were telling us about how he came back from L.A.,” he says.
“We were happy,” I say. I pause, because for the first time I don’t just want to relive my experience, I want to hear his, too. I want to know what this was like for him, all of it. “Weren’t we?”
Tobias looks at me suddenly, almost violently. “Of course,” he says. “How can you even ask me that?”
“Many things can be true at the same time,” Jessica says.
FOURTEEN
THAT SUMMER AFTER HE CAME BACK, when we were living on Eighth Street, rivaled our first year together for our happiest stretch of time. We rode around the city on bikes, ate ice cream from Big Gay on the High Line, spent whole afternoons on a blanket under the shade of a tree in Prospect Park. When I look back on it now, it’s as if we were alone in the city, but of course that wasn’t true. I had my job, and I was starting to find that children’s publishing might be where I belonged. I had pushed for a middle-grade manuscript about an eleven-year-old Anne Hathaway, Shakespeare’s wife, that my boss had bought and fast-tracked. I felt like maybe I had a knack for it.
Matty was dating a grad student at the New School, a writer by the name of Beth Sterns, and the four of us spent a lot of time together. She had an odd obsession with sunflower seeds. She was never without them. Subways, museums, even restaurants. There was a trail of shells wherever she went. She was nice. Whip-smart, too. Matty was still at the bank and was now considering a turn at a hedge fund, a pivot Tobias was, of course, against. But he had begun to share his thoughts less and less with Matty. “He doesn’t want to hear it,” he’d say after voicing a concern.
“I know he’s disappointed in me,” Matty said to me one night in August. We were in the kitchen of Matty’s apartment, a new place in Midtown with sleek appliances and a wide view. He held the trash bin up as I shoveled empty takeout containers into it. Beth and Tobias were in the living room, setting up a board game.
“He’s not,” I said. “You know Tobias, he has impossible expectations.”
Matty nodded. “It’s not like he’s out there on his own. He’s doing ads for air freshener.”
I winced. I hated being reminded of the reality of Tobias’s career. The one where he was sacrificing his artistic merit to be here, to be with me.
“I worry about him sometimes,” Matty said. Some curry had gotten on my hand, and I went to the sink to run water over it and to put some space between Matty and me. We were still in that perfect summer. I didn’t want to know what he saw. The dinner I’d shared with Matty nearly two years ago flashed in my mind. How proud he’d looked. How he’d told me that maybe it was for the best.
“He’s good,” I said, my back still turned. “The job is temporary.” I believed that it was. Tobias was too talented. Something else would come along, and this time, it would be here. I shut the water off. “Beth is great.”
The pivot was not lost on Matty, who sighed deeply and handed me a dish towel. “Yeah,” he said. “She is. Kinda wish she’d switch to almonds, though.” We both laughed.
Matty and I went back to the living room. Tobias had joined Beth, and the two were black-toothed and grinning.
My friend Kendra, at work, was doing even better. She hadn’t yet found the next Harry Potter, but she had brought over a British series by an author who had previously (and famously) refused to publish in the States. She had been promoted on the spot for it to Associate Editor. She had an office now, and although I missed her in the bullpen, the office came in handy for us.
It was a Thursday. Kendra and her boyfriend had a summer share in the Hamptons—or rather, he did. Our publishing salaries barely covered rent, let alone a beach house. She was dating a finance guy named Greg who seemed like an odd fit for her—I had met him, once, at a work BBQ our boss hosted at her house in Westchester, which had a proper backyard and grill. He rarely got off his phone the entire time.
“I need to lose ten pounds,” Kendra said. We were in her office eating our lunches. It occurred to me that Kendra was, in fact, at least ten pounds thinner than she had been that past winter. Since she’d gotten with Greg, she barely ate anymore. I had lived in the city long enough to understand that WASPy finance guys often liked stick-thin pretty blond girls. Kendra was none of those things, and it seemed to me that if that’s what Greg wanted, he would have gone out and found himself that. I didn’t understand Kendra’s spontaneous obsession with changing.
“I just don’t want to be thirty and single,” she said to me when I asked her about it. “I mean, do you?”
Having Tobias in the atmosphere since I was barely nineteen meant I didn’t think about being single. I knew, as long as he was on this earth, I wouldn’t be, not really.
“Have you guys talked about getting married?” Kendra pushed on.
I looked down at my wilted greens. We hadn’t. We talked about the future. We wanted to travel. Sometimes we fantasized about a kid—his hair, my sense of balance. It was always hypothetical.
“We’re just enjoying where we are now,” I said to Kendra. “We’re not in any rush.”
But the truth was, of course, I had been thinking about it—alone, in secret. Tobias coming back felt significant in a way I wanted to make real. Marriage didn’t mean any promise of togetherness. I had learned that lesson young from my mother. But even so, I wanted it to be official. I wanted to stand up and make known those commitments to each other, in front of the people who mattered. There was paperwork and a community, a shared life. I wanted that tether to him. And Jessica had been on me lately. You’ve basically been together for five years, she’d say. What’s his plan?
I didn’t know, and I didn’t feel I should ask. I wanted to believe he’d make it, that we’d someday have money to do the things our friends were starting to do, but he’d left his job to be with me. I wasn’t going to start in on him now.
“You’re so confident,” Kendra said. She was dabbing at her eyes with some smoky charcoal pencil she now carried around. “I wish we had that in common.”
I shrugged. I didn’t feel confident. Most of the time I felt completely unsure. But I loved him, and he loved me. That had to be enough.
That night, a week after the night at Matty’s apartment, Tobias and I cooked pasta and ate in bed. It was dripping hot outside and the air conditioner only worked in the bedroom. The rest of the apartment hung at a cool ninety degrees. I never knew if having the windows open or closed made it worse.
“Where do you see yourself in five years?” I asked Tobias.
He burst out laughing. His fork went flying and hit the pillow. A smattering of tomato sauce looked like a mini crime scene.
“Here.” I dipped a dishcloth in my water glass and handed it to him. “I’m serious.”
“With you,” he said, sensing what this was about.
“I know,” I said. “And work?”
Tobias scrubbed at the pillow. “I don’t know. This gig is fine. Why are we playing this game?”
I took a breath. I plucked up the courage. “Because Kendra asked me today if we’re getting married, and I didn’t know what to tell her.”