“Did she?” Jessica asks. “Because I’m sitting here, ten years later, and I still don’t know for sure.” Jessica looks back to me. “You wanted what people want. You wanted to get married. You wanted to know you could pay the rent. You wanted someone who showed up. That wasn’t a crime. It still isn’t.”
I look to Tobias. I feel ashamed all of a sudden—exposed. Like this conversation should be happening in private. Not in front of Robert and Conrad and Audrey Hepburn.
“Is that true?” Tobias asks.
“Sometimes,” I say, because it’s all I can say, barely above a whisper. “I wasn’t sure we’d ever get there together.”
Tobias looks devastated. It makes me want to weep.
“I need you to know you were always more than enough for me,” he says. He swallows. “Now. Tonight.”
“It doesn’t have to be tonight,” I say. “I…”
“How delusional are you?” Jessica asks. She raises her voice until she’s practically screaming. A few lingering diners even look over. “You’re not getting him back! You can’t fix it, and you know that, and I can’t sit by and let you delude yourself anymore. Take responsibility or don’t. But when tonight is over you’ll be alone again.”
Her words tear through me like teeth. I feel like I’ve had the wind knocked out of me.
“Jessica,” Tobias cuts in. “I think that’s enough.”
Jessica looks at Tobias. I swear I think she might leap over me and pummel him.
“I’m sorry,” Tobias continues. “I never apologized to you. After L.A. I’m sure it wasn’t easy having to pick up the pieces.”
“That’s such a convenient narrative,” Jessica says. Her tone is bitter. “The sad young artist who needs to go off and find himself, and the woman who cries herself to sleep at night missing him. You’re not characters in a novel. You’re human. And neither of you will just fucking admit it.”
“You’re an artist? I thought you were a photographer,” Conrad says, interrupting the tension.
“It’s a category!” Jessica snaps. She’s getting even more worked up.
Tobias puts his hand up to his forehead and holds it there. “I don’t know what you want us to say.”
“Something!” Jessica says. “Anything. You heard Robert.” She gestures to him with her head. “We only get this one night. Do you want to go back over every detail, or do you want to try and help Sabby move on?”
“No,” I say. “Don’t help me move on.” She’s leading us off course. I have to right the ship.
It’s now that our dessert arrives. The waiter appears with a tray and starts setting things down. Soufflés and the ice cream and a complimentary sorbet. He asks if we need anything else, and when no one answers Audrey politely waves him off.
My words are still hanging there. I feel Jessica, tense, next to me. All other eyes are on Tobias.
He shifts toward me, and I think he’s going to take my hand again—I want him to take my hand again—but instead he kisses me. He puts one hand firmly on the side of my face, right up against my ear, and his lips on mine. They’re cool—like he’s just taken a sip of ice water. But soon the sensation gives way to a folding so big it feels like collapse. It’s like I’m being sucked through a vortex to a place that is him. He’s not there; it is him. And then it’s us. Alone together in some suspended place. And it’s then that I realize the collapsing isn’t space at all but time. Here, now, he’s still alive; we’re still together. There is no separation. There is no before or after. There’s just us on the beach in Santa Monica, us in our apartment, us playing Scrabble with Matty, cooking dinner with Jessica. Memories piled high on top of one another, and the moment stretched so big it covers them all.
NINETEEN
A MONTH LATER WE GOT A ring. It was a Sunday afternoon in late September, and we were uptown. It was quiet. The weather was still nice, and on the Upper East Side people were taking advantage of the extra warm weekends out East. It felt like we had all of Park Avenue to ourselves—as if that was in some way desirable. We had just come from the Guggenheim. There had been a retrospective on Edward Hopper that Tobias wanted to see, and afterward we decided to stroll. We may have had lunch at Serafina or picked up bagels at Murray’s, but for right then we were just walking. It was a bright, cloudless afternoon, just bordering on skin-burning but not quite there. There was still movement on the street and we were both wearing hats. Invincible.
Our hands were intertwined and I remember looking down at them. Pure skin. No metal or even plastic. We hadn’t talked about the wedding at all in the last month. In fact, with the exception of a few key friends and family—Kendra at work, my mom, who miraculously asked nothing; I had the sneaking suspicion Jessica had gotten to her first—we didn’t talk about the engagement at all. It was starting to feel as if it had never happened.
“I think we need a ring,” I said. Tobias was looking in the direction of a French bulldog that had become untethered from its owner. I could tell he hadn’t heard me.
“Tobias,” I said. He spun his head to look at me. “We’re engaged. We should get a ring.”
I wasn’t sure how he would take it. He had been so irritated on the phone when I had brought it up weeks ago that I hadn’t wanted to again. But I was beginning to feel like if I didn’t mention it, no one would, and we’d forget and the engagement would never have happened.
“Okay,” he said. “What do you want?”
I swung our hands, still interlaced, around me. I pulled myself into him and kissed him on the cheek. “I don’t know. I just know I want something.”
I hadn’t really thought about it. I wasn’t one of those girls who dreamed about the big diamond ring. Even if we could have afforded it, which we couldn’t, that wouldn’t have been for me. I thought maybe a colored stone—amethyst or ruby. Something deep in color and ancient-looking.
“Come on,” Tobias said, tugging me forward now. “I know a place we can check out.”
We walked down to Seventy-first Street and then made a left. Between First and Second Avenues was this tiny antiques shop. Tobias had never taken me, but he’d mentioned it before as somewhere he sometimes went. He had sold an old leather briefcase there when I’d first known him in New York—back when he needed a quick hundred bucks. I guess he still did; I just didn’t think he pawned things anymore.
The shop was down a flight of stairs in an old brownstone building on a modest block. The owner, a woman named Ingrid who appeared to be in her seventies, let us in when we buzzed. She kissed Tobias twice—once on each cheek. She seemed happy to see him but not surprised.
“Handsome,” she said, holding him at arm’s length. “With a little bit of the devil.”
Tobias smiled. “Ingrid, this is Sabrina. Sabrina, Ingrid.” He leaned in close to her like he was revealing a secret. “Sabrina is my fiancée.”
Ingrid’s eyes went wide, and she clasped her hands together, turning to me. I was hanging back, letting them have a moment, but Ingrid extended her hand out to me and I stepped toward.
“You,” she said to me, patting my hand, “are a charmed woman.”
I shook my head. I could feel Tobias’s hand find my waist. “She is,” he said. “I’m very lucky.” He spun his thumb up under my shirt. “And now we need a ring.”
This was the most we’d talked about the engagement since he’d proposed. I felt dizzy, delighted. Like everything I needed was right there in that little shop on Seventy-first Street. Ingrid included.
“Let’s look,” she said. She took my hand in hers and with the other she took her glasses from where they dangled around her neck and put them on. The closer I got, the more I could smell her—the headiest, sweetest vanilla fragrance I’d ever encountered.
Ingrid peered down at my hand. “Beautiful,” she said. “Very del icate extensions.” She picked up a finger and wiggled it around like she was testing it, like she was trying to find a loose piece. “Follow me.”