FIVE
WE HAD THIS GAME WE USED to play, Tobias and me. Five words to describe your life right now, right this minute.
He’d ask me the question anywhere. In the shower, first thing in the morning. Sometimes over text or e-mail. On a rainy Sunday afternoon at his apartment, in an attempt to get me to confess whether I wanted pizza or Chinese. Once right in the middle of a fight.
“Five?”
The first time we played was at the end of our first date. After the Brooklyn Bridge and the movie and two bottles of cheap Spanish red, he walked me home. It felt, at that point, like we had crossed every borough line. We had been traveling forever.
He leaned in. We had been sneaking kisses all night. At the theater, when he put his arm around the back of my chair and cupped my shoulder with his palm. On the walk home. In the street, under the lights of Eighth Avenue.
“Tell me five,” he said.
“Five what?”
“Five words,” he said. “About what your life is like right now.”
“Right now, right now?”
He touched the pad of my nose with his pointer. “Right. Now.”
“What if I only need one?” I asked.
He leaned against the seam of my building door. Some chipped paint unhinged and dusted his jacket. Wool. Frayed at the cuffs.
“Okay,” he said. “What’s your one?”
“Happy.”
We looked at each other. And then he pulled me into the corner with him. He put a hand on either side of my face and he kissed me. I remember feeling grounded, somehow. Like his kiss wasn’t lifting me up but rooting me down. His kiss made me feel like finally, finally, I was in the spot where I belonged.
“Tell me your five,” I said against his lips.
“Warm,” he said, his breath on my cheek. “Open,” he said, kissing my eyelid.
I breathed out against him. I grabbed the sides of his jacket and pulled.
“Fall,” I said.
“Yeah. Fall’s good.”
“Start,” he said. The way my heart felt, when he said it, it was ridiculous. I was a cartoon.
“And the last one?” I asked.
He spun me around. He pressed me against the wood. I felt my spine straighten and contract as his hands moved inside my jacket.
“Now,” he said.
We made out in that doorway for a long time. It was light by the time I stumbled inside and up the stairs. When I got there Jessica was upside down on her yoga mat.
“Where have you been?” she asked me.
“Tobias,” I said.
She flipped right side up. “Wow,” she said. “It’s seven A.M.”
“We saw a movie. We walked all around the city.”
“You’re kidding,” she said. “That’s beyond romantic. I can’t believe it. I can’t believe it’s him.” She wasn’t looking at me anymore. Her gaze was fixed on a spot on the ceiling. “How was it?” she asked, her eyes snapping back down to meet mine.
I sat down next to her. I didn’t say a word.
“That good, huh?” She blew some air out of her lips.
“And then some. I think I’m falling in love with him.” That was a lie, of course. I already had. “I bought his photo,” I continued. “When I went to the photography club? They had an exhibit. He wasn’t there, but I bought the photo. I never told you.”
Jessica eyed me. She shook her head. “All this time,” she said. “He was just out there.”
“Yeah.”
“Isn’t that crazy? Don’t you wonder why it took so long for you to find him?”
I didn’t. I was just glad I had.
Those four years in between Santa Monica and the subway had been filled with reckless decisions on my part. I had moved to New York City in part for Anthony, that college boyfriend whom I didn’t, despite my prior sentiments, end things with. He moved to the city after graduation, and I followed a year later. He ended things for good no sooner than my plane landed. To be fair, we had stumbled through long distance less than gracefully. I cheated. I’m sure he did, too. He was new to New York, working hundred-hour weeks and getting a banker’s paycheck. He was screwing young models and expensing bottles to Goldman. I was about to start assisting at Skyline Magazine, a job I’d keep for approximately three months before moving over to the designer. The magazine job wasn’t even a real gig—the pay was abysmal and left me babysitting nights and weekends.
Anthony and I met at Washington Square Park four days after I arrived. He told me it was over. Actually, that’s not what he said. What he said was: “I’m not ready.” I cried for weeks even though I didn’t care, even though I knew it didn’t mean anything. I listened to bad R&B music. I lost five pounds. But it wasn’t really heartbreak. I wouldn’t know that until Tobias. It was just disappointment. I was going through the motions. Jessica sat on the floor with me and baked pot brownies and we watched Casablanca for reasons I can no longer remember. We’ll always have Paris? There were a string of affairs after that, all of them some shade of wrong. Jessica comforted and quelled. She held on to love like a floatie in a shark-infested ocean. And sometimes I resented her for that—her unfettered belief that it was all going to work out—but not today. Today I loved it.
Jessica twisted her legs underneath her. “This feels like the start, doesn’t it?” she said. “Right now. What if he’s the one?”
For Jessica, everything had always been about some kind of trajectory. Marriage. Kids. A house. Jessica was still with Sumir, and they’d been through every stage of adulthood together—virginity, graduation, first jobs.
But in those early years of Tobias and me, it was never about the way we were going to end up. It was only ever about where we were in the moment.
A sign on our wall mocked me. WHAT YOU PLANT NOW, YOU WILL HARVEST LATER.
Jessica lifted herself up from the floor and went into the kitchen. “Love is in the air!” she called over her shoulder. It was.
8:54 P.M.
“I NEED TO PUMP,” JESSICA WHISPERS to me.
She’s holding her blazer out from her swollen breasts.
“Do you have your thing?” I ask. Despite seeing her walking around with that contraption strapped to her chest that milks her like a cow—swoosh swoosh swoosh—I don’t really have any idea how it works. Or how big it is.
“I’ll just duck into the bathroom,” she says. “I brought it with me.”
“Can you do that?” Tobias asks.
It takes me a moment to realize that he’s talking to us, that he heard and then that he’s referring to Jessica getting up and leaving. If she stands and removes herself from the table, will she be able to come back?
“I’m leaking,” she says. “I guess we’ll find out.”
She pushes back her chair and slings her bag over her shoulder. We all watch her, but nothing happens. She disappears around the corner, and then Conrad calls our attention back.
“I think our theme is getting stale,” Conrad says. “Let’s play a game while we wait for dinner to arrive.”
Tobias puts his elbows on the table. “But we were just getting to the good stuff,” he says. “Love was on deck.”
“Better to feel our way into that one,” Conrad says. “We’ve been talking about it yet, and we will talk about it still.”
“Fair enough.”
Audrey purses her lips. She puts her hand on Conrad’s forearm and he immediately falls quiet. “What happened with you two?” she asks. She’s talking to Tobias and me.
Tobias looks at me. It’s the first time since we sat down that I allow my gaze to meet his.
“I guess we wanted different things,” he says.
I swivel my eyes to the table. I forbid them from rolling. He picks up on my annoyance immediately. I’m not being coy. “Is that not true?” he asks me.
“We wanted different things? You’re serious.”
Tobias crosses his arms against his chest. “I don’t know.”
“We both wanted everything,” I say. “That was the problem.”
“I never had a problem with that.”
“Yes, you did. Do you remember that day in Great Barrington? You told me you were sure we weren’t supposed to have to fight so hard for something.”
“Yeah,” he said. “I stand by that.”
“So how were you okay with it?”
“With what? Us being together?”