“Can’t you do that the night before?” he’d ask.
“Can’t you do that once I leave?” I’d fire back. Tobias had a flexible schedule. This job was turning out to be more mind-numbing gigs than Digicam, and as fall turned to winter and winter turned to spring even the commercial work waned and waned. He was still employed, but they assigned other people to cover the ad work probably, I thought but kept to myself, because Tobias wasn’t very good at hiding his disdain for it. His boss started traveling more and bringing another assistant on shoots. I didn’t bring it up to Tobias because I knew it was a sensitive subject, but more than once I wondered why he didn’t look for another gig. These jobs weren’t easy to come by, I knew that, and I knew it’s what he would say if I brought it up to him. He was becoming increasingly deliquent in rent, something he paid me, because my name, for logistical reasons, was on the lease. Sometimes he forgot entirely, and when I’d remind him of it, weeks later, he’d be incredibly apologetic. “I’m so sorry,” he’d say. “I forgot. I’ll have it next week.”
“He needs to step up,” Jessica told me on a rare lunch we had in the fall. We were eating at a chain Greek place we both liked. “You want to have kids. Who is going to provide?”
“Provide?” I said. “Do we even use that word anymore?”
“I do.” Jessica looked right at me. “You earn like four cents an hour.” She paused. “How is everything else?” she asked.
“Good,” I said. I shifted under her gaze.
“Do you want Sumir to talk to him? You know he loves Tobias; we both do. I just think it’s time you guys face facts.”
“And what facts would those be?” I asked.
“That you’re going to need to grow up one of these days.”
I thought about Jessica in college—lighting incense in our kitchen and charging crystals on our bedroom windowsill. What would she think about herself now? Would she be disappointed? Angry? Would she feel betrayed?
That was so much of it—I didn’t want to betray Tobias and me. We were meant to be epic. We were meant to hover above the normalcy. I didn’t blame Jessica for not seeing that, but I also didn’t know how to explain it to her—the same rules didn’t apply to us.
On one particular day in late April I was running late. Random House was having a big launch meeting at nine A.M., a quarterly meeting where editors present their upcoming titles to sales and marketing. I had a PowerPoint to finish for my boss and was supposed to get in at eight A.M. but had overslept.
I was rattling around the bedroom, yanking open drawers, trying to find my brown corduroy pants.
“Can you please keep it down?” Tobias asked from his meditative perch.
“No,” I said. “I can’t. I’m late for work. My job actually has prescribed hours.” I knew as soon as I said it that it was the wrong move, but it was too late. It was already out there.
“Wow,” Tobias said, opening his eyes. “Way to get that out there.”
“I just mean your shoot isn’t until one,” I said. “You can meditate once I’m gone.”
“This is my apartment, too,” Tobias said. “Even if you never fucking act like it.”
He left the bedroom. I remember watching his foot at the door. He was still in his sweatpants.
I didn’t act like this was my place. It was ours. We had moved in together. But I had taken on this role of being the responsible one. Sometimes I even felt like a parent. I cleaned the dishes when they piled up, and I noticed when the milk was bad or empty. I called the super when the radiator stopped working and bought the lightbulbs when the kitchen went dark.
I came home that night and found him in the kitchen. His sweatpants were on; I didn’t know if he’d been to work that day or not. But he was making lasagna, my favorite. I smelled the garlic and bubbling tomato sauce, and when I dropped my bag down and went into the kitchen he held out a wooden spoon for me to taste.
“It’s perfect,” I said. We didn’t talk about the morning, but I knew that this was his way of apologizing, of making it right.
“More salt?”
I shook my head. I kissed him with tomato sauce lips. “Perfect.”
I made a salad with arugula and onions and some pine nuts I found in our cabinet. Tobias was always buying food supplies I didn’t think we could afford, but this time I didn’t care. I was grateful for all of it, for the way the food was bringing us back together. We ate on the living room floor because we didn’t have a table, and because there was something romantic about being young and broke and in love. And when you’re young and broke and in love you eat lasagna on the floor. Although it didn’t escape me that there was a difference between being broke at twenty-two and at twenty-eight.
I didn’t mention the job because I knew we agreed—this wasn’t what Tobias wanted either. I knew that, for him, it was the worst kind of settling. It wasn’t creative, and it wasn’t sexy. It didn’t even pay well. What I didn’t know, and what terrified me, was whether he blamed me. If the opportunities he could have had if he’d stayed in L.A. weighed on him, and if I was on the other side of that scale.
We had sex in the one club chair, which had traveled with us from the old apartment, and left the dishes in the sink. The next evening, when I got home from work, they were cleaned and put away.
10:10 P.M.
WE ORDER DESSERT. FOUR SOUFFLéS. Jessica gets ice cream. Audrey and Robert order cappuccinos, and Tobias and I get espressos.
“You know what I think we need?” Conrad says. “A time-out.”
“We don’t have time,” I say. “This can’t possibly go past midnight.” One night only. It’s only poetically fair.
“That’s two hours from now,” Robert says, as if to say that’s plenty.
“What are you suggesting?” Audrey asks Conrad. “A conversation on politics would hardly be a break.”
“In this climate, no.” Conrad shakes his head. “Although I do often wonder what those of your generation who are gone would think about the world now.”
“Nothing good,” Audrey says. “It’s quite appalling.”
“Indeed,” Conrad says.
“Everything moves so fast now,” Robert says. “It’s impossible to keep up.”
“What’s it like?” Conrad asks. I expect him to take out his pocket pad, but he doesn’t.
“Good,” Robert says. “Not bad.”
“No,” Audrey says. “Not bad. The getting dead I could have done without, but the rest of it is … kind of lovely. You needn’t fear it.”
“No!” Robert says, as if this point is obvious. “There is no need to fear it.”
Tobias is quiet. Conrad looks to him. “And for you?”
“Different,” Audrey says. Her tone has changed. It’s more empathetic.
Tobias nods. “Yeah.”
“What do you mean?” I ask. My heart starts racing. Is Tobias somewhere he doesn’t want to be? Is he in pain?
“More in-between,” he says. He smiles at me, the kind of smile I know takes effort, the one he puts on for my benefit and mine alone.
“What does that mean?” I ask.
He leans over and tucks my hair behind my ear, even though none of it has fallen in my face. “You want to know what I remember?” he asks me.
“What?” I say. I feel close to crying. He’s so near, and his words are so tender.
“Those days with you at the beach.”
“Where are you?” I ask him again. But then I think of something. If he’s not there, if he’s not wherever Audrey and Robert are, then there really is a chance for us. I really can get him back. He’s not as far away as they are.
“My early years with the children,” Audrey says, from across the table. “If we’re doing a highlights reel.”
Tobias blinks back from me, and I have the urge to leap across the table and throttle Audrey. We were so close, a whisper from something, before she spoke.
“And Paris,” she says, taking us further and further away from the moment before. “I miss it.”
“Of course,” Conrad says. He taps her wrist gently. “Robert?”
“My highlight?” he asks.