I loved my mom’s mom. Her name was Sylvia, and she had passed away the year before. I missed her. I wrote her name down. I couldn’t think of a fifth.
I looked over at Jessica, intently making a list on a giant piece of parchment paper in red and gold pencil.
I handed the note to her. She looked it over, nodded, and handed it back to me. I stuck it in my pocket and went back to my book. She seemed placated.
But now, about Tobias, she was not. “I do believe in fate,” I told her. I hadn’t, but I did now. It was hard to explain. How big ideas about life and love had solidified in ten minutes of standing next to him. “I shouldn’t have said anything. It was stupid. It was a moment.”
But it was a moment I wanted to make more of, and we went looking. We couldn’t find him online (searching “green eyes” and “UCLA” on Facebook did not give us very positive results—and something told me he wasn’t the sort of guy who had a profile), so we drove up to the UCLA campus in Sumir’s Toyota Corolla, which wouldn’t go more than forty on the freeway.
“What’s your plan when we get there?” I asked Jessica. “Start yelling ‘boy with brown hair’ loudly?”
“Relax,” she told me. “I’m not yelling anything.”
She parked in Westwood and we walked to the north side of campus, where the row houses and student apartments were. They all sat on tree-lined streets that poured out onto Sunset and up into the impeccable hills of Bel Air. I followed behind, grateful that it was a sunny day, there were a lot of people around, and we were blending in well.
“I know we’re not supposed to say this,” I said. “But UCLA is way nicer than USC.”
“In location only,” Jessica said. She stopped in front of a bulletin board posted outside a campus building—library? I wasn’t sure.
“Aha,” she said. “As I’d hoped.”
I peered closer. It was a club board. The Food Club, Poetry Club. I followed Jessica’s finger. It tapped a yellow flyer lightly. “The Photography Club,” I read.
Jessica beamed. “You’re welcome.”
“I’m impressed,” I said. “But this doesn’t mean anything. He probably doesn’t belong to it. He didn’t really seem like a club kind of a guy. And what would we do, crash their meeting?”
Jessica rolled her eyes. “As charming as I find your negativity, they’re holding an open house next Tuesday, so you can just go to that.”
I shook my head. “If he was there, I’d seem crazy.”
Jessica shrugged. “Or you’d live happily ever after.”
“Right,” I said. “One of the two.” But I felt excitement spring a leak in me. What if I saw him again? What would I say?
My stomach growled then.
“Want to go to In-N-Out?” Jessica asked.
“Definitely.”
We started to wander back to the Corolla, but before we did I snatched the flyer and stuffed it into my bag.
“I saw nothing,” Jessica said, looping her arm through mine.
When we got home I took out the Post-it and added a fifth. Him.
7:45 P.M.
“DOES ANYONE ELSE LIKE CARP?” Conrad is asking. We haven’t ordered yet because no one can agree on what to do. Conrad is determined to share, Robert wants to order separately, Audrey is displeased with the menu, and Jessica and Tobias have eaten two breadbaskets already. It irritates me that he has an appetite.
“I’m still breastfeeding,” Jessica says to no one in particular. “I need the carbs.”
The waiter comes over for the second time and I just jump in. “I’ll have the frisée salad and the risotto,” I say. I send Conrad a look. He nods.
“The scallops,” he says. “And some of those aphrodisiacs.”
The waiter looks confused. He opens his mouth and closes it again.
“Oysters,” Audrey clarifies wearily. “I’ll have the same, with the frisée salad.”
Professor Conrad elbows her. “Audrey, I never,” he says.
She isn’t having it. She’s still irritated.
It strikes me as everyone places their orders—pasta and soup for Jessica, steak and salad for Robert—that I didn’t really think this through. When I chose each of these five people to be on my list, it was entirely about me. My issues with each of them, and my mixed desires to be in their presence. I didn’t think of how they’d get along together.
I permit myself a glance to my left, to Tobias. I already know what he’ll order. I knew it the instant I opened the menu. I do this sometimes, now, when I’m at a restaurant. I’ll scan the menu and choose what he would want. I know he’ll get the burger and fries, extra mustard. And the beet salad. Tobias loves beets. He was a vegetarian for a while, but it didn’t stick.
“The crudo and the scallops,” he says.
I whip my head to look at him. He raises his shoulders up back at me. “The burger looked good, too,” he says. “But I just ate all that bread.”
Tobias was concerned about his health in odd ways. Sometimes I thought he had a thing for staying thin—maybe because it made him look like a starving artist? He didn’t work out, he wasn’t a runner, but he’d skip meals sometimes or he’d come home with a new juicer and declare he didn’t want to eat processed foods anymore. He was an excellent cook. The crudo. I should have figured.
The waiter takes our menus and then Audrey leans forward. For the first time I catch small little lines around her eyes. She must be in her late forties.
“I came with some conversation topics,” she tells me. She speaks in that low, hushed voice we all know so well. She’s delicate, so feminine it pains, and I have a pang of regret that she is seated at this table with us. She shouldn’t be here; it’s not worth her time.
“We don’t need topics,” Conrad says, brushing her off. “We just need wine and a theme.”
“A theme?” asks Robert. He looks up from his water. He’s a small man, short. Even seated you can tell. My mother had two inches on him. I always thought I fell somewhere in the middle based on the small pile of old photographs, but looking at him now I know I’m all his.
We have the same green eyes, the same long nose, the same crooked smile and reddish-brownish curly hair. He didn’t go to college. No one in his family did either. He got tuberculosis when he was nineteen and spent a year and a half in a hospital. Solitary confinement. His own mother could only visit through a glass wall.
My mom told me that story years later. Years after he had left, after he was already dead and I couldn’t ask him any follow-up questions myself. I never knew whether it was supposed to humanize him, or make him seem more obtuse, abstract—untouchable. But I also never knew if she kept on loving him. I still don’t.
“Theme!” Conrad calls. “Let’s have a theme.”
“Global service,” Audrey says.
Conrad nods. He takes a notebook and pen out of his breast pocket. He always kept a notebook there, should he be inspired. He used to take it out periodically during class and scribble things inside.
“Julie!” Conrad says. “You’re up.”
Jessica looks at him, a piece of baguette in her mouth. “It’s Jessica,” she says.
“Jessica, of course.”
“Family,” she says, sighing. “But I don’t think this is the point.”
“Responsibility,” Robert adds. I do an inadequate job of choking back a laugh. Responsibility. How ridiculous.
Then Tobias. He sits back in his chair. He loops his hands behind his head. “Love,” he says. He says it so simply, so easily. Like it’s obvious. Like it’s the only possible answer to Conrad’s question.
But it isn’t, of course. Because if it was I wouldn’t need him at this dinner. If that were true, we’d still be together.
I clear my throat. “History,” I say, as if to counter.
Conrad nods. Audrey sips. Jessica balks.
“We’ve been over this,” she says, glaring at Tobias and me. “You guys can’t keep living in the past.”
Let go and let God.
“Sometimes it is impossible to move forward without understanding what happened.” Conrad.
“What did happen?” Audrey says.