“That’s all?” I ask.
She smiles. “Oh, plenty of things,” she says. “But it was a good life. It’s best not to dwell.”
She turns to me abruptly and I am caught again by the profound beauty of her features here together. She is stunning, radiant. A delicate rose petal—perfect in its symmetry. One that does not ever fade. And she hasn’t, has she? I wonder what it must have been like for her at the end, if she ever withered. I can’t imagine it.
“I was a romantic,” she says. “Until the very end. People always associate me with romance, but I don’t know if they think I was. I was often considered the object, not the one longing, so to speak. I think when people watch my films that’s the image they get.”
I think about her films. About my father’s collection. About Roman Holiday that first afternoon with Tobias. The myth, the magic, of this movie star. But Audrey Hepburn isn’t Holly Golightly, in the little black dress and trench coat in the rain. She isn’t Nicole, in Paris, planning a museum heist and falling in love with the handsome burglar. She isn’t Eliza Doolittle, climbing the ranks of society. All that was fiction. Ideas concocted in the minds of studio heads. Audrey Hepburn is simply the woman standing beside me now.
She looks at me curiously, like she’s waiting to see if I’ll ask it. The reason we’re out here together. The reason, perhaps, she’s here tonight. Her advice, finally.
“What do I do?” I ask her.
“Do you have a choice?” she says.
I look back inside. I see Tobias.
“I don’t know,” I say. “I thought I could…” I trail off.
Audrey puts her hand on my shoulder. It startles me. Her fingers are light, cool in the night air. They feel like raindrops.
“Sweetheart,” she says. “You could not wish me alive.”
“I know,” I say. “Of course. But Tobias … It wasn’t supposed to happen like this. We weren’t supposed to end like this.”
“Maybe,” she says. Her hand is still there. I have a feeling that the punch line hasn’t been delivered yet—she’s trying to soften the blow. “But knowing what I do,” she says, “having a partner you can exist in the world with, not one who you need to tuck away with, makes life a lot easier.” She threads her thumb across my shoulder. “What’s done is done.”
“No,” I say. I have the urge to throw her hand away, to stomp off, to yell at Audrey Hepburn. “It was my fault.…” All of a sudden I’m crying. Big, hiccuping tears, and Audrey takes me in her arms. She’s a tiny woman, of course, all bones, but she still feels nurturing—bigger and softer than her frame.
“What I’m telling you,” she whispers, rubbing my back in small circles, “is that it’s not your place. You do not get to reignite someone else’s life.”
“But what about all of this?” I say. “How is this happening? And why?”
“My love,” she says. She pulls me back. She holds me at arm’s length. “You know why.”
“No,” I say again. I step back from her, but she holds me steady, and I feel it rising, that tide of water—threatening to carry me out to sea.
“You need to,” she says. “You asked me what you do?”
I nod.
“You say good-bye.”
TWENTY-THREE
WE DECIDED TO DRIVE INTO Great Barrington the next day and have lunch at this pizza place we heard was great, Baba Louie’s. Post-vegetarianism, Tobias had decided to see if the gluten-free lifestyle would suit him (it didn’t), and they made a wheatless crust there. Plus we wanted to enjoy the town—walk around, shop, take advantage of the fresh air and the fact that there wasn’t yet snow on the ground. We were still buoyed by the previous night, by the closeness we felt being alone together.
“Do you want to eat or walk around first?” Tobias asked me.
“Eat,” I said. We had forgotten breakfast food on our grocery list, and I was starving.
They didn’t open until eleven and we got there at ten forty-five. We huddled outside the door, Tobias rubbing his hands up and down my arms even though it wasn’t that cold out.
“Should we get coffee?” Tobias asked me.
“Need sustenance,” I said. “If we stand here, maybe they’ll open sooner.” There was no one in sight and the lights weren’t on, but I didn’t want to miss our window. Tobias laughed, then obliged.
Finally, a stout man in a white apron came out from the back, flipped on the lights, and let us in. We claimed a table by the window that had a stencil of a pizza pie in it. I felt déjà vu come on the moment we sat—the calm, funny memory of being here before, right like this. We’d never been to the Berkshires before together. I’d come once with my mother, when I was a kid, and once while Tobias was gone, with Paul. But I loved it here, I decided. Forget the beach—this was our place. My mind started to sprint. Maybe we’d even change our plans and get married here. I had this image of me at the Wheatleigh, dressed in a pale lilac dress, a flower crown on my head. Sum mer. Our friends seated in white wooden chairs as I floated down the aisle toward Tobias.
“What are you thinking about?” he asked me. It was something he asked frequently at the beginning of our relationship, almost never anymore. I took this as a sign that he didn’t really want to know, but here, now, it felt like salvation.
“That it would be really beautiful to get married here.”
He sat back in his chair. It was a sign of withdrawal, but how big I couldn’t tell.
“I thought we were doing Park Slope with just the six of us?”
We had decided on: Tobias, me, Jessica, Sumir, Matty, my mom. Tobias didn’t want his parents there, so I didn’t press. He wasn’t particularly close with them, but he never had been.
“I know,” I said. “I was just thinking it’s really beautiful up here. And there would be room for so many more people we love.”
“I thought Park Slope was our compromise,” he said. He was a little irritated, a little agitated. “I told you I wanted to elope.”
“And I told you I don’t,” I said. His irritation beckoned a response from me. It was like all I had been burying, suppressing, came rumbling to the surface—a rupture, a fault line.
“Right. That’s why we’re doing the church.”
The waitress came over then. She had large holes in her ears from piercings and purple hair and looked to be about twenty. I wondered if she was in high school or college and whether she lived at home. At that moment, I thought of my dad.
“Are you guys ready to order?” she asked.
We asked for a minute. Maybe we shouldn’t have. Maybe we should have ordered our pizza. Maybe she would have brought it at just the exact right time to prevent what happened next.
That’s the thing about life—these moments that define us emerge out of nothing. A missed call. A trip down the stairs. A car accident. They happen in a moment, a breath.
“So you want a big wedding?” Tobias asked. It wasn’t an accusation, not exactly, but I could hear the bubble of animosity under his question. A big wedding. It was like wanting tax cuts for the rich. More than frivolous—a show of privilege that was not only unnecessary and gaudy, but detrimental.
“Yes,” I said. “I want a big wedding.” I was challenging him. It wasn’t even true. I didn’t want a big wedding. I didn’t even have that many friends and barely any family, but I wanted to expose his mentality to the light. I wanted to point to it and say, See? This is why we’re here. It’s not me, it’s you.
“Okay,” he said. “Fine. We’ll have a big wedding. We’ll do it up here. Can we have lunch now?”
It was what I had wanted to hear, but it was all wrong. We were sacrificing ourselves in order to one-up each other.