We each busy ourselves with our menus, the heat of the last few minutes hanging in the air between us. The words all swim together until I can’t make them out. He did love me the way I needed to be loved. Being with him was all that ever mattered. And if we can’t figure this out, if we can’t go back, he’s going to be lost to me forever. It doesn’t feel like we’re getting any closer. In fact, it feels like we’re getting farther away.
“Soufflés?” Conrad asks, and the group starts talking about ice cream and sorbet and peach cobbler, and I sit back and wonder what would happen if I just got up and left. If I walked out of the restaurant and home. They’d disappear. My father. Audrey. Conrad and Jessica, too. But then Tobias would be gone for good, and I can’t have that, not with so much still left between us.
FIFTEEN
AFTER THAT SUMMER, AFTER THAT NIGHT of pasta and marriage talk, we settled into a routine for the fall and winter. Work, home, cook, sex (sometimes), sleep. It wasn’t the summer of fun and freedom anymore, it was life—and we weren’t always completely compatible.
We began to fight more than I’d like to admit. That West Village apartment wasn’t always a love shack, and it wasn’t always big enough for both of us; in fact, it rarely was. When we had lived with Rubiah, and even Jessica before her, there had been a buffer. Now it was just the two of us knocking up against each other. Sometimes we crashed.
But it was part of us, I reasoned. It was what made us spark, what made us different from Jessica and Sumir, from me and Paul. We could love and fight in equal measure, and that contact, I told myself, was good. It meant we were passionate. It meant we cared.
Tobias had developed a few habits in the two years he was gone, and so had I. My relationship with Paul had been, if not particularly charged, then definitely full of ease. We never fought, mostly because there wasn’t much to fight about. The relationship was suspended in warm water—impact-proof. We traded off on delivery menus, museums, and movies. We were like teammates passing a baton back and forth without any of the running, stress, shouting, or inevitable wins.
I remember once going over to Paul’s after work and finding him on his computer. I had a key after month two, which had more to do with efficiency than romance or commitment. “What are you doing?” I asked him.
He looked up at me and handed me a glass of wine. He always had one ready when I came over. “Making a spreadsheet,” he said.
He turned the computer around and showed me. “See? Areas of the city, then museums, restaurants, and special events.” He ran his finger along the top of the screen. “So we don’t have to check Time Out so much. I’m condensing everything for our Saturdays. And some weeknight things as well.”
I took a sip of wine. “That’s genius.” It was exactly the sort of thing I would have done, and I liked that I didn’t have to, that he already was. That I hadn’t even thought of it.
He smiled. “Thanks.” He handed me our stack of delivery menus. “Here, your turn.”
Our similarities in lifestyle made it so that we didn’t come up against each other all that often. The only fights, if you could even call them that, we got into were never about our relationship. They were about the background of an actor we’d seen in a play, whether or not he’d been on That ’70s Show (which of course was solved with a quick Google). The Washington Post versus The New York Times. The best place for a weekend away. Him: Fire Island. Me: Berkshires. We cleaned the kitchen before we went to sleep and both set our alarms for 7:10.
Whatever Paul and I were, Tobias and I were the exact opposite. We were all contact. Dirty dishes and piles of laundry and empty toothpaste tubes and broken radiators. We were sweat and spit and heat and thump-thump-thumping. We were so real it drove us crazy.
The first novel I’d edited on my own was coming out in March, and I invited Jessica and Sumir, David and Kendra to come to the launch. It was a middle-grade novel titled The Sky for a Day, and it was about a little boy who discovers he has the ability to fly. I was proud of it and the author—a fifty-year-old debut writer named Tawnya Demarco. I couldn’t wait to share it with everyone, especially Tobias. I wanted him to see that while he was gone I had been working on important things, too.
We all gathered at McNally on a Tuesday at six. It was raining outside, and I feared Jessica might bail out, but she showed up first, and then Sumir twenty minutes later. David came with a new boyfriend, Asher.
David hugged me. “Congratulations, beautiful! I can’t wait to see Tobias,” he said. “It has been actual years.”
We had plans to go to dinner after, a cozy pizza place around the corner called Rubirosa that was impossible to get into. I’d made reservations the month before.
“He’s excited to see you!” I said.
Tobias wasn’t social. He was personable and engaging, and when he met you he was genuinely interested, but he never wanted us to make plans. In the beginning, before California, he had made an effort with my friends, but it seemed his inherent tendency toward isolation had gotten worse as time went on. Why go out? he’d ask me. Everything I want is right here.
Tawnya was nervous. I poured her half a glass of cheap red our publicist had supplied and told her she’d be great. She was doing a short reading and then a Q and A. I went to the mic and told people to take their seats. Jessica, Sumir, David, and Asher sat in the second row. Jessica gave me the thumbs-up. Where was Tobias?
“Thank you all so much for coming,” I said. “I’m so proud to introduce this woman and her beautiful book…”
I spoke about falling in love with the book on my first read and how talented and commited Tawnya was. When I sat down the room broke into applause to welcome her, but Tobias wasn’t there. All through her reading I kept glancing toward the back, expecting him to show, but he didn’t.
Once I’d congratulated Tawnya and set her up signing books, I checked my phone. I had a missed call from him and a text. So sorry baby I’m caught at work. Tell your friends hi and knock em dead. Love you.
I just kept staring at his words. Your friends. Not ours. Not David, Jessica, and Sumir.
“You almost ready?” Jessica asked. She had a signed copy of the book tucked under her arm. “Where’s Tobias? Is he meeting us there?”
I stuck on a smile. “He’s stuck at work. It’ll just be us.”
I saw Jessica send a sideways glance at Sumir. I knew what she was thinking: My husband can make it to your event, why can’t your boyfriend?
We went to dinner and everyone toasted the book, but I was distracted. I wanted him to be there, I wanted him to share this. But more than that, I wanted him to understand how important this was to me. I wanted him to exist in the world with me, the real one—the one made up of my job and friends and life. Not just the one in our apartment.
When I got home he was watching TV on the couch.
“How did it go?” he asked. He shut it off as soon as I walked in. “Tell me everything.” He handed me a bouquet of sunflowers. It was March; I didn’t know how he’d found them.
“Good,” I said. “I missed you.”
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I got caught up taking photos. The sunset was incredible tonight. Did you see it?”
“I thought you were at work,” I said.
“I was working,” he said.
I didn’t feel like fighting. I went to put the sunflowers in water. He hadn’t.
That night I just kept thinking about Jessica’s look to Sumir, about how David had shown up with a man he was just dating.
*
Tobias had taken up Transcendental Meditation in L.A. He liked to wake up in the morning, sit in a chair, and meditate for twenty minutes, as was protocol. But our apartment was tiny, and with two of us, there wasn’t room for both silence and speed in the morning. I had to be at the office at nine, which meant I had to leave at eight-thirty. I tried to walk to work, as my gym time was woefully lacking, but most days I ended up taking the subway. I would stumble around Tobias, opening drawers, trying to find tights and matching shoes, as he sat there with his eyes closed in pursuit of tuning out the world.