FOR FIVE MONTHS, RUBIAH, TOBIAS, and I lived together. Rubiah and Tobias got along. She was rarely there, but on the occasion she was I’d come home to find them drinking beers or playing a board game. Matty had gotten Tobias into Risk years ago, and sometimes the two of them still met at Uncommons in the West Village to play together.
Rubiah’s like of Tobias was cozy, and convenient, and allowed me to miss Jessica a little bit less. She was happy when Tobias came back—I knew she had wanted us to make it work the first time—but she was married now, and as time went on more and more judgmental, I thought, about choices that were different from her own. She had grown up faster, faster than Tobias and me, certainly, faster than any friends I knew. She was playing house now, and the realities of twenty-something life, the roller coaster I often felt like I was on—it seemed like she had skipped that altogether. So we lived with Rubiah, and it worked. But our updated Three’s Company, if you could call it that, was short-lived. In the summer of 2015, Rubiah got a place up by Columbia, and Tobias and I decided to move, too.
I had been at that apartment on Tenth Avenue since the beginning, almost five years, and I was equally as sick of it as I was in love with it. I loved how much had happened there. How Jessica and I had moved in with nothing more than two suitcases apiece and a box of books mailed from school. The memory of our first Ikea trip, convincing our super to rent us a car because we weren’t yet twenty-five. Scooting Jessica through the aisles on the pull cart, arguing over whether to get a sofa or two club chairs (we settled on a love seat and one chair). The late nights watching Friends reruns and that first year when Jessica used to wake up before me and go to the corner deli and get us both coffee—hazelnut creamer and one Splenda.
But I hated the rust-rotted sink, and how the bathroom flooded every time the upstairs neighbors took a shower, and how noisy it was with our street-facing bedrooms. I was ready for something else in the way you’re ready to move from middle school to high school. Not because it’s a personal choice, necessarily, but because it’s time.
Tobias and I found a one bedroom on Eighth Street between Sixth Avenue and MacDougal. It was small and old, the stove rusted and the walls cracked despite a fresh coat of paint. But our bedroom faced the back and was relatively quiet. It was the third apartment we saw, and we took it on the spot.
Tobias had gone out looking when I was at work. He’d wanted to move to Brooklyn, but I’d won out. I felt certain that I didn’t want to leave Manhattan, and Tobias relented. He didn’t even really fight me on it. I think he knew he didn’t stand a chance.
“This is the one,” he’d said when he called me.
I checked the time: 11:38 A.M. “Is this the first place you’ve seen?” I asked.
“It’s perfect,” he said. “Trust me.”
I snuck out half an hour later for lunch and met him on the front stoop. He had a bouquet of sunflowers. It was the season. “Welcome home,” he said when I got there.
We went upstairs together (six flights), and as soon as I stepped inside I saw that he was right. It wasn’t that it was perfect, not by a long stretch, but it was ours. Tobias was excited. “We can paint the living room,” he said. “Maybe yellow.” He snuck his hands around my waist.
“It’s great,” I said. “How much?”
He squinted at me. “Twenty-four, but I figure that’s only three hundred over budget, right? And the broker said she’d cut her fee in half for us.” He shrugged. For a brief moment I imagined some leggy brunette with a briefcase in our apartment, rubbing up against Tobias on the kitchen counter.
I didn’t have the heart to tell him our budget was already two hundred over what we could realistically afford. I wanted that yellow living room, too.
Matty helped us move. He’d borrowed his father’s van, which he lined with blankets. Tobias had sold his Prius in L.A. Matty was out of school then and working for a bank. “Overpaid and overstimulated,” was how Tobias described Matty at his new gig. “He’s like a puppy in heat.”
“He’s excited,” I said. We were stacking boxes. Tobias gingerly set a lamp on the floor. Matty was downstairs, watching the double-parked van.
“Nah,” he said. “He’d be excited if he were doing his own thing. He’s just running full-blast on a hamster wheel.”
Tobias chided Matty for not holding out for a start-up gig, or not developing an app on his own. He thought he was selling out. But Matty was twenty-three years old. “First money, then independence,” he said whenever Tobias brought it up.
To me, Matty seemed happy, but by this point I understood Tobias’s complicated relationship with success, money, and working for other people. He had done it in L.A., and he had enjoyed it—but only because he found the work to be creative, and important. He was a true artist—commercial success wasn’t the point; often it was problematic. More than once I heard him tell Matty he’d stopped listening to a band after they’d made it. “The sound changes,” he’d said. “It stops being pure.”
He hadn’t parted ways well with Wolfe (quitting wasn’t part of the gig), and he was now working for one of Wolfe’s rivals in New York—a practice, he said, that was all too common. He wasn’t traveling as much, which I loved, and he was fine with it. Most of the shoots they did were for big ad firms in the city. It was a step down in sexy, but not as bad as the Digicam days, and the pay was decent, it was a job, and we were together. I knew he wasn’t entirely happy with work, though, and it nagged at me. My defense of Matty often felt like a way to quell my guilt about Tobias—It’s okay to grow up.
I stood in the small, wood-floored apartment as Matty and Tobias took turns running up and down the stairs with boxes. I played director. “To the left.” “In the bedroom.” “By the far wall.” We had too much stuff for this tiny place, which was, all in, about a third of the size of our old apartment. Things had accumulated over the years. Old chairs and throw pillows and small stools purchased at thrift stores on Second Avenue. Prints picked up on New York City sidewalks. Odd Ikea furniture (is it a TV stand or a desk?). Kitchenware caught between Tupperware and frying pan. Rubiah took little, and Tobias couldn’t throw anything out (what if we needed that second egg beater?). It was a strange trait of his—out of character—this need to hoard. I tried to suggest cuts, but the move was stressful enough, so most everything made its way over.
Except, strangely, the photograph of his I had bought all those years ago. The tribal man. I couldn’t find it anywhere. Not in the boxes when we unpacked, not misplaced in with the toilet articles, or stuffed in a bag of clothes. As the days went on and we broke down the boxes and stacked the dishes in the kitchen, I started to panic. I stopped by the old apartment—no one had seen it. I called Matty to check the van—nothing. I sat down on the bedroom floor one week after move-in and stuck my head, for the twentieth time, under the bed.
“Give it a rest,” Tobias said. He had seemed less than curious about where it had gone. It occurred to me that maybe he had gotten rid of it.
“I can’t,” I told him. “It’s the first thing I have of you.”
“Who cares?”
“It was there in the beginning,” I said.
“So were we.”
“You’re kidding, right?”
Matty was in the kitchen, trying to make a meal of condiments. We’d ordered pizza every night that week; I was sure we would again. Tobias took me in his arms. “Who cares about a photograph when I have you?”
“You never liked it,” I told him.
He went back to arranging books on the shelf. “It wasn’t my favorite, and I had better work. I was nineteen years old. I sucked.”
He didn’t understand. Who cared about the quality of the work? The point was the story. It was our bread crumb, maybe even our grail. I couldn’t lose it. I felt, for some reason, like losing it would mean something significant for our relationship—some bad omen. Like the photograph was our lucky charm and without it we’d be doomed.
“Did you get rid of it?” I asked. “You can be honest with me.”
“No,” he said. And left the room.
That night, one of the first in our new place, I couldn’t sleep. I kept thinking about the photograph, about where it could be. About how, of all the things we moved over, all the useless, random appliances and furniture, that had to be the thing to go missing. I had been so careful with it. I took it down and wrapped it in that same paper—the sheets that had housed it for two years. I folded it and locked it with tape. What had happened to it?
Tobias snored next to me, unconcerned. His head was on my chest and his curls tickled my neck. I thought about the boy who had taken that photograph. Who I had gone to see all those years ago. I didn’t find him then, but I found that photo, and for all the things I didn’t have, I still had that. Or had. That grainy man. I wondered if I had been holding on to the wrong thing.