The Dinner List

by Rebecca Serle

“WE’VE BEEN WAITING FOR AN HOUR.” That’s what Audrey says. She states it with a little bit of an edge, her words just bordering on cursive.

Worrying is wishing for what you don’t want. Man plans and God laughs.

The most important thing in communication is hearing what isn’t said.

“Swani asked us to make a list of the five people living or dead we’d like to have dinner with.”

The first few were easy: Audrey Hepburn, because I was a nineteen-year-old girl. Plato, because I had read The Republic four times since high school and was riveted—and because Professor Conrad spoke of his contributions often. I wrote Robert’s name down without even thinking. As soon as I saw it I wanted to cross it out, but I didn’t. He was still my father, even if I could barely remember ever knowing him. Two more. I loved my mom’s mom. Her name was Sylvia, and she had passed away the year before. I missed her. I wrote her name down. I couldn’t think of a fifth.

When I chose each of these five people to be on my list, it was entirely about me. My issues with each of them, and my mixed desires to be in their presence. I didn’t think of how they’d get along together.

“It’s going to take more than one dinner,” I say. “But Sabrina,” Robert says, looking directly at me for the first time since we sat down. “One dinner is all we’ve got.”

“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.

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.

“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.”

“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?

When someone leaves, remembering the joy is far more painful than thinking about the misery.

“It means that wasn’t her only shot at happiness, and that maybe she wasn’t happy, either.” “So?” “So you can’t just blame the person who leaves. If two people are unhappy, clocking the person who actually walks out the door is just getting them on a technicality.”

It wasn’t a wild kiss. We’d have plenty of those. It was a benchmark. A chalk line on the asphalt. Start. His lips were soft and warm and I remember he tasted like cigarettes and honey. I never knew it was a combination I loved, but soon after I took up smoking, because Tobias did. It was something we’d do together—huddle on the fire escape of my fifth-floor walk-up, our hands chapped and shaking. It was winter by then. He was practically living with me. And we were in love.

“You cannot have good without evil,” Audrey says. “They are like DNA strands. Intricately and irrevocably spun together. Sometimes good wins, sometimes evil does. We do not fight for good’s permanent triumph, but for the balance. And so it goes.”

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.

“Life is forward moving,” Jessica says. “I’m not saying you had to get married. I’m just saying you needed to be evolving, and you weren’t.”

Jessica has this theory that people in relationships are either flowers or gardeners. Two flowers shouldn’t partner; they need someone to support them, to help them grow.

When Jessica and I were twenty-three, we went and saw His Holiness the Dalai Lama speak in Times Square.

Kindness before honesty. We are taught that honesty is the most important quality. Tell the truth. Do not lie. Etc. But there are so many instances when honesty isn’t kind. When the kinder thing to do is to keep what you have to say to yourself.

“Sometimes I think that the only true way we can ever know a thing’s value is by losing it.”

Will we work out? Can we sustain this? How could I possibly be with anyone else? Those were the questions I used to ask myself all the time. I asked them constantly. I asked them at the door to this restaurant and I am asking them now, with him sitting beside me still.

In those two years in the beginning I was happy, and happiness has a way of quickening. Grief marks things. Joy lets them through. Days and months can pass in the blink of an eye.

“The person who believes they love more believes they give more,” Jessica says. Her tone takes on a wilting, guru quality reminiscent of our early years. “And that can lead to resentment.”

I’d want to know what happens when you die, whether you pass through a tunnel, whether there’s a light. I’d like to know if you can hang out with people, if you see everyone you lost again—and what the deal with reincarnation is

It’s this realization—that this dinner, whatever it may not be, is a stroke of luck, of fate, of fortune

“We only get this one night. Do you want to go back over every detail, or do you want to try and help Sabby move on?”