I keep my eyes on the table, but I still feel his on me. I wish he were seated where Conrad is. I wish I couldn’t smell him—heady and dense—or find his foot under the table, so close that if I wanted to I could hold it against mine.
“Everything,” I say after a moment. “Everything happened.”
“Well,” Conrad says. “Let’s start there.”
TWO
THE TUESDAY AFTER OUR UCLA INVESTIGATION, I was in Professor Conrad’s office trying to argue my way up to a C-plus for a written exam I had completely tanked. I was always doing terribly in his class. I couldn’t quite get there. Not that I was trying that hard. Admittedly, I had let all my grades slip. I had no good reason besides the fact that I was tired of school, of homework and lectures and tests. I didn’t want to do it anymore. And the ongoing drama with Anthony wasn’t helping things.
“Maybe you’re in the wrong major,” Jessica told me, but it was too late to change. If I did, I’d be there for another three years, and that wasn’t an option—financially or any way else.
“You’ve gotten used to the idea that outcomes are irrelevant,” Conrad said. “In my class, I do not believe that’s true.”
“Please.” I was close to tears. “Can I do extra credit?”
Conrad shook his head. “I don’t offer extra credit.”
“I can’t get a D.”
“You can,” he said. “Matter of fact, you did.”
Fear coiled in my stomach. “I’m sorry,” I mumbled.
Conrad put a hand on my shoulder. It felt fatherly. I was unaccustomed. “You can do better on the next one and raise your average up,” he told me. “This is not your final ticket.”
I gathered up my things and left his office—entitled, annoyed, angry. I checked my watch. If I left now I could make it to UCLA’s campus by seven. The crumbled piece of yellow paper at the bottom of my book bag informed me that the photography open house wasn’t until seven.
I called Jessica. “I have to study,” she said. “But Sumir is in class and I have his car keys here waiting for you.”
“Meet me downstairs.”
There was traffic on the 405. I sat and flipped between 98.7 and NPR. They were doing some special on NASA protocol. They had someone on who had just returned from a space tour. “The thing that struck me the most,” he said, “was how in some capacity of measurement the universe is actually finite. How do we possibly wrap our heads around the end of the end?”
I changed the radio back to Britney Spears.
The flyer said the show was going to be in the Billy Wilder Theater. I asked directions from a security guard when I got to UCLA and after a few wrong turns managed to find a parking spot on the street. My watch read 6:57 P.M. Just in time.
My heart started to pump as I took the sidewalk and then steps leading to the theater. What if he was actually there? What would I say? How would I explain my presence? Act surprised. A friend told me to come. That wasn’t strictly untrue. He might not even recognize me.
I found a lip gloss in my bag. I swiped it across, took a deep breath, and pulled the door open.
The show was set up onstage. Photographs hung from partition boards and people in the aisles held plastic cups filled with red wine. I made my way closer to the stage. So far, no him.
“Are you one of the artists?” a girl with a long braid said. She had on bell-bottom jeans and a peasant blouse I recognized from Forever 21. Jessica had tried on the same one at the Beverly Center last weekend.
It felt like she was onto me. “No,” I said. “No, just looking.”
She nodded, took a sip of wine.
“You?”
“That’s my stuff up there.” She gestured to a partition wall on the far left-hand side of the stage. I saw color. Tons of it.
“Mind if I go check it out?”
“Just as long as you don’t ask me to come with you. My stuff works better if I don’t speak for it.”
I left her and moved up onto the stage. I took a quick scan. Nowhere. Not in the aisles, either. The crowd wasn’t big, maybe thirty people in all. I thought about leaving, but I could see my new friend’s eyes on me, and so I decided to go over to her work.
But something caught my eye on the way over. It was a photograph of a man. He looked tribal. Moroccan, maybe. It was from the torso up and he was smoking a cigar, mid exhale. His eyes were wide open and gray and the lines on his face were like tally marks of chalk on a board.
I knew it was his. I don’t know how, but I did.
“Excuse me,” I asked a kid in low-slung jeans and a baseball hat who was standing next to the board. “Whose work is this?”
He shrugged and then pointed to a plaque midway down the wall. TOBIAS SALTMAN. Next to a photo of the guy from Ashes and Snow. I was right.
I could feel the blood pumping through the veins in my neck. “Is he here?” I asked.
He squinted at me. “Don’t think so,” he said.
“Is there someone who would know?”
He peered down into the aisles and cocked his head in the direction of the girl I had just spoken to. “Ask his girlfriend,” he said.
Heat. That’s what I felt. Embarrassment and shame. Of course he had a girlfriend. It was obvious, and stupid to think he didn’t. I wanted to take off as soon as possible.
But then I saw a number by the photograph of the man: $75. It was for sale.
I didn’t have seventy-five dollars. There were only forty-nine in my checking account and maybe two hundred in savings.
But I knew I had to buy it anyway. He was already mine.
I fumbled in my bag for my checkbook. By some stroke of luck, I had it on me.
“How do I buy a photograph?” I asked a girl standing beside a photo display of sunflowers. “Can I use a check?”
“Jenkins will help you.” She gestured toward a young woman in jeans and a brocade top, pixie cut, leaning against the far wall and talking wildly with her hands. I went over.
“I’d like to buy that photograph,” I said, pointing at Tobias’s piece.
She unhinged herself from the wall. “You got it,” she said. “His work is pretty great, huh?”
I nodded.
“I think this might be his first sale. Too bad the kid isn’t here.”
I wrote her a check, determined to somehow put the money needed into the account so it wouldn’t bounce, and she wrapped it for me—brown paper and string, no tape. “Shit,” she said. “I forgot to buy some. This is our first sale.”
I waved to his girlfriend on the way out. She smiled. She had a gap between her two front teeth. It made my affection for him grow even greater.
I put the photo on the passenger seat on the drive home. When I got back to the apartment, Jessica was out. I knew I wouldn’t hang it up. Later, when she asked, I told her he hadn’t been there, he must not belong.
“At least you tried,” she said.
I kept the photograph under my bed wrapped in the brown paper for the next two years. Sometimes at night I would sneak it out of its foldings and hold it in my hands like something I had stolen.
7:52 P.M.
“HISTORY,” CONRAD SAYS, TAPPING HIS PEN against the table. “It’s an interesting choice.”
“I was a history teacher,” Robert says.
“Seriously?” I say.
Robert fixes his gaze on his water glass. “For ten years,” he says.
Conrad claps his hands together. “Wonderful!” he says. “Jump on in. You can get us started.”
“We should choose a focus,” Audrey says. “What era? American? European? This is far too wide.”
“Personal,” Tobias says next to me. It feels like the first thing he’s said since we sat down, even though I know it’s not; we went over the crudo, and then there was love.
I close my eyes. I open them. One thing at a time. “Where?” I ask Robert.
“Sherman Oaks,” he says.
“California.”
He nods. “My wife—”
“No.” I cut him off. I don’t want to hear about his wife. Or his kids. Or his other life.
“We were in Fresno,” I say. “Mom only moved back to Philly ten years ago. All that time…”
“I didn’t know,” Robert says.
“Yes,” I say. “And yet you never thought to come back, to check on us, to even ask? You never thought maybe you owed us some of your newfound good fortune?”
Audrey smiles and leans forward. “Friends,” she says. “Let’s keep it civil.”