I nod.
“Because,” he says. “I was. I just wasn’t okay with how miserable you were.”
Audrey waves her hand. “I’m sorry,” she says. “This is a unique situation. Perhaps we’re getting to the heart too quickly.”
Tobias shakes his head. “It’s all the same now. It’s all the past.”
The past. I want to say something else, but I stop. Because I’m not sure if I want that piece on the table yet. It’s a familiar feeling, this one of hesitation. There were times when dating Tobias felt like playing Jenga. How much can I say? If I reveal this, will the whole tower collapse? If I tell him how I really feel, will that be my last turn? It was terrifying and exhilarating because every time I took another piece out and the tower stood, I felt like I’d won. What I didn’t remember is that at some point in a game, the entire tower falls. It happens every single time. It is the only way the game ends. Why then did I keep playing, knowing that I would be left with rubble?
SIX
THE DAY AFTER OUR FIRST DATE he showed up at my apartment. It was three P.M. on a Saturday. Jessica wasn’t home; she was spending the day driving around upstate with Sumir, looking at country houses they couldn’t afford.
I was painting my toenails in the window. It was a summer encore in fall, and I had on ankle jeans and a tank top. He rang the buzzer; I didn’t hear it. Then he called my name. My bedroom looked out onto Tenth Avenue and I saw him, five floors below, squinting up into the sun.
“Hey,” I yelled.
He waved.
“Do you want to come up?”
He shook his head. “I want you to come down.”
“I’m painting my toes,” I said. I shook the bottle out the window. It was neon blue. Night Racer.
“I’ll wait,” he said. He gestured across the street. “Coffee.” I saw him walk into the Empire Diner and take a seat at a window table. I shuffled my still-wet toes through the straps of flip-flops and raced down the stairs. My heart hum-hum-hummmmmed in my chest as I crossed the street to join him.
“Oh good,” he said when I came in. He got up from the booth, set a five-dollar bill on the table, took my hand, and walked outside.
“I thought you wanted coffee?”
“No way we’re spending today inside,” he said.
He spun me into him. There were times when being with him felt like dancing. The waltz, the two-step, sometimes the jitterbug, always the tango.
“What are you doing here?” I asked, now a bit breathless.
“I was thinking about you. And I thought that was stupid.”
“Stupid?” I stiffened in his arms.
“Yep, stupid. Why sit around and think about you when I could see you?”
He kissed me. We started walking. I didn’t care where we were going, but I asked anyway.
“The water,” he said. “If you want to?” He was sometimes shy like this. A little unsure. It came at the strangest intervals.
We swung hands. We ran across intersections. We veered off after Fourteenth Street and crossed over to the Hudson.
It was almost four by the time we got there. I hadn’t bothered to bring a sweater. We plopped down on the grassy lawn of one of the piers and Tobias took off his sweatshirt. He draped it over my shoulders and I threaded my arms through. It smelled like him. Like cigarettes and honey and a faint ocean breeze. “Thanks,” I said.
I’d keep that sweatshirt even after he left, because it still smelled like him. I didn’t wash it, but I slept in it, and after a while it reeked of sweat and my coconut shampoo and I had to admit it was just a sweatshirt. He was gone.
He lay down on his back. I did the same. We didn’t touch, but I could feel his body next to mine. It felt like we were both sinking down into the earth, becoming a part of it. Like we’d meet there—somewhere at the center among raw, fresh dirt. Where things begin.
“I love New York,” I said. It felt like a really generic thing to say, but it was actually how I felt.
“I think I could live in Portland,” he said. “I have that dream. Wake up and go hiking. Cook. Listen to the rain.”
“Wear a lot of Patagonia.”
“Yeah.” He laced his fingers through mine. “But somewhere with real quality of life. Somewhere quiet. I love Brooklyn, but sometimes I wonder if this is the best version of my life.”
“Of course not,” I say. “The best version is hanging out on some yacht in Monaco, photographing Victoria’s Secret models.”
“Commercial photography isn’t really my thing.”
“I pray that’s sarcasm,” I said. I didn’t bother to turn my head to check, though.
“Fifty-fifty.”
That was something Tobias said. Fifty-fifty. In the beginning, I loved it. It proved he was complicated, that he refused a bottom line. I thought it meant he saw truth in things that were frivolous, and frivolity in things that were fundamental. It was a way of looking at the world that allowed the air in. But after a few years it just began to confuse me. It was like shifting sands—I couldn’t tell anymore what was real to him. When I’d ask if he was mad at me, and he said “fifty-fifty,” what did that mean?
I shivered in his sweatshirt. The wind blew. In front of us Jersey City grew out from the water.
“I have a popcorn maker and Roman Holiday on DVD,” he said next to me. “Let’s blow this Popsicle stand.”
He was compelling and sexy and the universe was working us together and he liked Audrey Hepburn. I felt like I had sidestepped into a different reality—the kind that houses young royals and celebrities. People who were always smiling, because what was there to be concerned about? Life was glorious.
We went back to his apartment. A loft on Woodpoint with bright blue walls and huge, half-painted canvases hanging from them.
“My roommate is an artist,” Tobias said. “Well, one of them.” There were five bedrooms all in a row, but only Tobias and Matty were ever home. Two of the roommates were archaeologists on a dig in Egypt. I only ever met them once, on the day Tobias moved out of the loft. One had a serious girlfriend who lived in Greenpoint (the artist), and the other was Matty, a quiet, nineteen-year-old computer science major at Brooklyn College. Matty’s family had emigrated from the Dominican Republic when he was three months old, and although he looked sixteen sometimes, there was a maturity to him that was always there. Tobias called Matty his best friend, which I came to realize was true. They were an unlikely pair. Tobias was impatient and spontaneous—all curls and gold and air. Matty was methodical and predictable and happy to play the sidekick. Even in college, he was already paying half his parents’ rent in the Bronx.
“Matty boy!” he said when we walked in. “I got a girl.”
I nudged him in the ribs.
Matty poked his head out of the third room. There was a sign on the door that read STUDY SESSION IN PROGRESS with a photo of a girl sitting on a desk, her legs around a guy in a chair. I immediately knew Tobias had bought it for him.
“Hello,” he said to me. He extended his hand, but he didn’t come out from behind the door.
I took it. “Hi.”
“We’re gonna toss on a little Audrey Hepburn. Wanna join?”
Matty poked his head out farther.
“He’s part groundhog,” Tobias said. “Don’t take it personally.”
“I love groundhogs,” I said.
Tobias grinned at me. He slung his arm over my shoulder and squeezed. “So do I, Sabrina. So do I.”
“I have an econ exam tomorrow,” Matty said. “But if you watch at normal volume I’ll be able to hear.”
“Multitasking,” Tobias said. “I love it.”
Matty closed his door.
“Funny,” I mouthed.
“Sweet,” he mouthed back.
Matty was nineteen to our twenty-three, and at the time those four years felt like decades—expanses of time that allowed us to be older, wiser, weathered. Sometimes, we felt like his parents, although we weren’t entitled to. Matty was smarter than both of us.
“Come here,” Tobias said.