Rob, looking resigned, as if he gets this often, eyes Madeline, who may be doing her own blushing now. "I have very little to say. He is happily married, and they have a nine-month-old daughter."
Madeline definitely blushes. "Okay," she says. The waiter puts down her caffé Americano. "Okay." She tosses that ironed hair over her shoulder.
Rob looks around the table. "Favorite book? Favorite movie?"
"Hemingway's A Moveable Feast." Madeline examines her drink for accuracy. "I always wanted to be an expatriate."
"You are an expatriate," I say.
Books and movies are mentioned ( Crime and Punishment, The Graduate), hometowns are acknowledged (only Rob is from nearby with Providence, Rhode Island). A nod to God, a political stance (some kind of amalgam of multiculturalism, democracy, and moral relativism), a sexual preference (heterosexual!). All of us have seen The Rocky Horror Picture Show, but none of us cares. Madeline has done acid, Rob's been married, and I've taken ice-skating lessons. Two of us have seen Stomp, and all three of us have seen Blue Man Group. We can all sing the theme to The Love Boat. My first concert was Captain and Tennille, Madeline's was David Lee Roth, but Rob's was the Moody Blues.
We are the freakin' world.
Our long-suffering waiter presents my salad, which is huge. Madeline steals a bite of my baguette. "And we were all English majors," I say, going for the salad. With great deliberation, I have to eat as if I'm not overly anxious, as if I haven't been thinking about sun-dried tomatoes and goat cheese all day. I have to tell myself to put my fork down occasionally, take little breaks, act carefree as opposed to behaving like a stray dog hovering over leftovers in an alley behind a grocery store. It's like having a Beatles song sung to you by the lead singer of a small rock 'n' roll band. These things happen. No need to gobble down the greens. No need to color wildly.
Rob sighs. "If we're really going to be friends— if this isn't just a one-night thing— we shouldn't spend too much time on character sketches, on histories." He sips his drink. "It's way too easy and sad and self-indulgent to get mired in the past. We'll become sentimental."
Madeline bristles. "Rob, we're sentimental girls. You must know that."
"It'll weigh you down." He looks solemn. "The eighties are over. You can't celebrate them for the rest of your lives. Sentimentality is evil. Nostalgia is forgetful. Reagan was president when Wham! made it big."
Still bristling, Madeline leans in. "Excuse me, but aren't you the one wearing your wedding ring after seven years of being a widower?"
I quickly say, "I have a BA from UCLA. I'm from San Diego—"
Rob covers his ring finger with his right hand. "I know people talk."
Madeline's voice returns to a normal pitch. "I'm sorry. I shouldn't have said that."
"Yeah, I still wear the ring." His eyes dash between us.
I reach out and touch his arm. I remove my hand, embarrassed by the gesture.
"So I'm sentimental too." He regains some lost composure and scolds us with his finger. "But it's fucked in the head— it's no way to live."
Madeline straightens. "I went to Berkeley, I'm from D.C., and I believe in a higher being." She isn't religious, but she expects to become so later, when she has kids.
"It sounds like you're trying to be P.C. about God." I pop a tomato into my mouth.
"I am," she admits.
Rob puts his napkin on the table. He adjusts his Roy Orbison glasses on the bridge of his nose. "Your borough? Your 'hood?"
"I live five minutes from here, off Greenwich Ave., near Benji's Quesadillas." I throw my thumb over my shoulder. Then I return to spreading goat cheese on a baguette. My Beautiful Baguette.
Madeline crosses her arms in front of her chest. "Brooklyn. Fort Green, but I say Park Slope. With a girl who doesn't look anyone in the eye. I think she has A.D.D."
Rob turns east. "I live above Bombay Café on Sixth between First and Second."
"We like Indian a lot, Rob." Madeline drains her water and looks for the waiter.
Rob asks, "What's something you want to do but probably never will?"
Madeline and I are dumbfounded. There are so many things. It's part of being sentimental. One romanticizes a bittersweet past while craving an unrealizable future. "You go first," I tell him.
"I'd like to play Madison Square Garden," he says.
"It's not out of the question." Madeline tilts her head.
"I'm upset about missing Woodstock. Even Live Aid," he adds. "I missed them all."
"What was it you said about nostalgia?" Madeline cocks her head.
I fold my arms on top of the table. "I'd like something really, truly, completely unique to happen to me— something utterly unexpected—"
Madeline stretches her hand out and quickly grabs Rob's wrist. "Get ready."
Rob eyes the twisted fabric of his sleeve clasped between her fingers. "For what?"
As if I weren't even there, Madeline whispers, "Sybil's grandeur riff—"
I roll my eyes. "Not fair. Not fair at all."
Madeline lets go of his wrist. " After a well-articulated discourse on the need for grandeur, we will be treated to a soliloquy on why Sybil Weatherfield will soon be leaving New York City for greener, grander pastures."
I look around, putting my fork down because I genuinely want to stop eating now. "Madeline is misrepresenting me." I melodramatically twist my body around in her direction. "Why are you misrepresenting me?"
"Sybil," she begins, "he said he wants to get it all on the table."
Rob flips both hands over, his palms up, his fingers moving as if to say bring it on. "Give me the riff. I wanna hear the riff."
A theatrical silence hangs over our Michelangelo table of or
nate iron and cool marble. Quite lovely for a monologue on grandeur, really. Both of them stare at me. I stare at them. Okay, I'll do it. "I just want the extraordinary," I say to Rob, appealing to Rob, elucidating for Rob. "I mean, here I am. I'll never know what it was like to be a flapper. I'll never live in New Orleans in the French Quarter. I'll never walk around my French Quarter hotel room in a slip, fanning myself in front of an old fan with those metal blades spinning like an ancient propeller on a rusty plane. I'll never do those things. I just want something grand to happen." My face heats up. "You know?"
Rob, the rock 'n' roll prophet who first appeared in a Burger Christ t-shirt, spouting off knowing words about love slaves, says, "That sentimentality really will kill you." He speaks with his mouth full of cheesecake. " Maybe something grand is happening right now."
I look at the mushed-up cheesecake in his mouth. "But maybe it isn't," I say.
He looks at me intently. "I'm the one in a band called Glass Half Empty, Sybil Weatherfield."
"Madeline hasn't told us her unrealizable dreams yet." I turn to her, sweating.
"And you didn't give us the I' m– leaving– New York follow-up." She chomps on an ice cube. "I don't think I'll ever hike the Appalachian Trail, though."
I swing around to face her. "I never knew you wanted to."
"Well, I do," she says. "Preferably with a man I love who owns a two-man sleeping bag and good raingear."
"And a dog," I say. "You forgot the dog. A golden retriever?"
Rob, who barely even knows me, says, "I doubt you'll ever leave Manhattan, Sybil." It's after two in the morning, and Rob rips his paper napkin into tiny pieces.