“I hate that place.” I don’t know why I said it. The words just came out. Not that it wasn’t true; I did hate that place. They were always showing experimental art that seemed hyperbolically obvious and simplistic. Nudes made out of candy wrappers. The demise of society at the hands of pop culture. Sugar rot.
“That’s awesome,” he said. “Me too.” And then he smiled and we looked at each other and some coin fell into the slot machine deep inside me. The whole thing got set into motion. I would later look back on that moment and wonder what would have happened if I had lied. If I had told him I knew the gallery and liked it. I’m not sure we’d have been together.
“So why are you applying?”
He shrugged, leaned his head back on the glass window. “It’s a job,” he said.
“You’re an artist.” I knew this, of course, already.
“Yeah,” he said. “I scream ‘starving,’ or something?” I guess it wasn’t a tough thing to intuit. “What’s your name?” he asked me, his head snapping back.
My chest rose then. It expanded so much that I no longer remembered we were underground. There was something about the exchange of a name that made me think—know—that this time would be the start of something.
“Sabrina,” I said.
“Like the witch?”
“Ha. No. Like the mo—”
The train gave a jolt. We started moving again. I was actually disappointed. We were just getting somewhere. But when the train stopped at Forty-second Street he offered me his hand. “Want to get some coffee?” he asked.
“I’m late for work.” I wanted a real date, and we were running out of time. “Here.” I took out a pen. I flipped over his hand. I wrote my number. The doors closed on him. He pressed his palm up against the glass. Don’t smudge, I thought.
He called the next day, and when he did, it was on. It was like I had taken those four years to prepare, and once that time was over, that time of tidying up, sweeping away, clearing, there was all this space. We rushed right in. We filled it up until it was bursting.
8:00 P.M.
WE’RE EATING OUR APPETIZERS IN SILENCE. Jessica keeps spearing my plate with her fork—one habit of hers, of having her around, which I do not miss. Jessica has this knack for always wanting what is on my plate—formed in the trenches of freshman-year cafeterias.
When we lived together, I’d always end up buying enough of whatever I got so we could both eat. Her husband does it now, too. I’m not sure she’s even set foot in a grocery store.
“And your wife?” Audrey asks. “How did you meet her?”
“In rehab,” Robert says, nervously glancing at me. “She’s sober as well.”
Audrey takes a sip of her drink.
I angle my plate closer to Jessica as my mind resets on what Robert has just said. About how he left, met a girl in rehab, and started a new life. All things I knew, but have never heard from him, from the source.
“We understood each other,” he said. “I don’t know how I would live with someone who didn’t know what it was like to be an addict.”
Tobias nods, and I suddenly get the familiar, intense urge to hit him. He was always doing this when we were together—being casually tolerant of things that bothered me, maybe even hurt me.
“Your problem,” he’d tell me, “is that you’re too judgmental.” As if that was supposed to be profound. As if that wasn’t just an insult.
“I understand that,” Audrey says. “I was never much for drugs, but I saw it take many people around me. Pity. I think it had much to do with a lack of companionship.”
Companionship. Let me sit with you in silence. Let me hold your hand and understand.
“Do you have children?” Audrey continues. She picks up an oyster and drops a dollop of horseradish on it.
“Three girls,” Robert says. “Sabrina, of course, Daisy, and Alexandra.”
“Alexandra,” Audrey repeats dreamily.
“Seventeen and twenty-four. The little one likes to sing. The older one…” Robert’s voice trails off, and then he shakes his head and chuckles. I feel something pull so tight in my chest I’m afraid it’s going to snap.
Conrad, it seems, is the only one who notices. “That is not much by way of an apology,” he says. He takes a deep sip of wine and then sits back.
“No,” Robert says. “It’s not.”
“I don’t want an apology,” I say. “There isn’t anything you could say that could make up for it anyway.”
“Why was I on the list?” he asks. He asks it so suddenly I’m tempted to answer honestly.
I’d put him on before he died. I left him on because I wanted to know. Because I have the same question he does: Why?
“She wants you to try,” Jessica says, almost desperately.
“Aha,” Conrad says. “Family.” He looks at Jessica. She gulps some water. “Astute contribution.”
She swallows. “Thank you.”
“You missed all the stories, every memory,” I say. “You missed everything.”
“Yes.” Robert shuffles his lips. I have a flash—déjà vu—of the same mannerism. Pot of coffee on the counter. Some breakfast morning among bills and cartoons. “Did your mother ever tell you how we got you home from the hospital on the night you were born?”
I shrug. “I don’t know. I don’t remember. Probably.”
“Go on,” Conrad says. “We’re listening.” He gestures him on with his hand.
“It was snowing,” Robert says.
“Lovely,” Audrey says.
“Sounds fictitious,” Conrad says. “But please continue.”
“It was. It was back when we lived in that little farmhouse in Pennsylvania. Do you remember that farmhouse?”
“Two chickens, one goat, three hamsters, because Sabby wanted them.” This from Tobias.
Robert looks impressed. He has yet to really acknowledge Tobias. Who he is. I wonder if he knows.
“Yes. Okay. Well, we were thirty miles from the hospital.”
I’ve heard this story from my mother. He’s right. There was a storm and they had to pull over because driving conditions were so bad. My mom held me in the car and my dad went into a nearby barn to use their phone. The heat wasn’t working, or they didn’t have it in the car, I’m not sure. I fill the table in on this now.
“No.” Robert shakes his head. “Your mother didn’t stay in the car. She came inside and we spent that first night there, in the barn.”
“Jesus be damned,” Conrad exclaims. “Sabrina could have been the true child of God.”
“You used the phone, you waited out the storm for an hour, and you drove home,” I say. “That’s not what happened.”
“We waited out the storm all night. And there was no phone. The lines were dead.”
“Why would Mom lie about that?”
Robert grazes his plate with his fork. It makes a ch-ch-ch sound on the ceramic. “Maybe she forgot.”
I thought you were supposed to remember only the good. When I look back at my relationship with Tobias, I know I tend to do that. It’s our highlights reel. Our greatest hits. The stuff that crept in, the stuff that drove us apart, I too easily forget.
“You slept on the floor with an infant?” Jessica asks. Her son, Douglas, is seven months old. Jessica is still breastfeeding. She likes to talk about it a lot. Not that I mind. Or, I should say, not that I’m not used to it. Jessica was always much more open than I am. She’d walk around our apartment topless. Bras cause cancer, apparently.
“There were blankets,” Robert says. “Marcie was up all night feeding Sabrina. The farmer gave us food and drink.”
“Was I born in the fourteenth century?” The vision of me, newly birthed, swaddled in burlap and lying in the arms of my adoring parents in a barn is becoming a little too much to stomach. I push some stray Parmesan toward some greens, lift the whole thing up, and chew.
“We were happy,” Robert says.
“Just the one night, then,” I say.
“A year,” he says. “We were happy for a year.”
It’s true that I don’t know a lot from my infancy. I guess I never asked and my mother never volunteered. I know why now, though. When someone leaves, remembering the joy is far more painful than thinking about the misery.
“Then what happened?” I ask.