A Happy Catastrophe

by Dawson, Maddie

  “A fedora with a feather?” she says and laughs again.

  “Don’t be like that. The feather is entirely removable,” I say sternly. “And anyway, I’m aware that it sounds crazy, but I’m a matchmaker. I know things by intuition. I read energy. You know how it is that you can feel when people are looking at you across a room or something? Well, I can feel when people match up.”

  She stares at me for a long time, and then I feel something kind of shift in her, like maybe she remembers that she does believe a tiny bit in intuition and fate. Most people do.

  “Well,” she says and sighs. “Okay, but I want you to know this is nuts.”

  I coach her a little: hang with me, be patient, don’t get upset by any early signs of awkwardness. Sometimes the universe takes a bit of time setting things in motion. Be cool. Don’t worry. I tell her my name is Marnie MacGraw; she says her name is Winnie.

  “Oh God,” she says. “Why am I doing this?”

  Because, I want to say to her, because the universe has gone to a great deal of difficulty to line all this up for you. Just to recap: It required me coming to the restaurant early to rehearse how to ask Patrick a question so major I didn’t want to do it in our house, and then spilling my red wine just so a woman visiting from Florida, who had once seen some household guru explain how to clean up wine, could jump up and embarrass her son by throwing her white wine on me. And you had to endure thirty text messages from a man who wasn’t going to turn out to be anyone important in your life but was just there to somehow get you to come to this very restaurant at this very time. And if we go even further back, it required me moving to Brooklyn because a man jilted me on our honeymoon, which caused his magical matchmaking great-aunt Blix to be so mad at him that when she died that summer, she left me her brownstone in Park Slope along with all her unfinished matchmaking projects, and that’s where I met and fell in love with Patrick, who lived in the basement and was the least likely person for me to love in the whole world, and who I never would have met in a million years because he hates leaving the house. Do you not see how stunning and miraculous this is? And we haven’t even had to go back to all the eggs and sperms that had to meet up since the beginning of time in order to create the humans that are participating in this little dance of ours.

  “You’re doing it because it’s going to be great,” I say, and we walk out into the dining room.

  In the dining room, everything has changed, as though the air itself has softened and become more flexible. People are chatting and drinking cocktails. Patrick is there now, sitting at our table, and when he sees me, he smiles and does his signature ironic wink, which always makes my heart speed up. At the table next to him, the guy, Graham, is sitting alone and scrolling through his phone and picking at an enormous salad and quail egg sliders. When I squint, I can see that he still has the sparkles hovering about him that I saw before. I hold up one finger to Patrick: this may take a second. He nods.

  “You didn’t tell me the guy’s name,” she whispers.

  “I heard his mother call him Graham.”

  “His wine-throwing mother?”

  “The very one.”

  “So, according to you, this may all turn out that I someday have a mother-in-law who’s nuts? Maybe I don’t want that.” But she’s smiling. She’s into it now.

  “On the plus side, she does know how to get rid of stains. And she lives in Florida, which is very far away.”

  “Oh my God, oh my God. What am I doing?”

  “Be cool. It’s showtime.” I intercept Micah as we get closer to the table, and I take him by the elbow and turn my body just so. I want to talk confidentially. I have a whole plan. “Listen, Micah. A favor. Could you move Patrick and me to another table, please? And let this lady sit at our table instead?”

  He’s shaking his head no. He has a whole list of people waiting for tables, he says; she has to put her name on the list, can’t make an exception, blah blah blah.

  “See?” says Winnie. “This isn’t going to work. Thanks, but I’m just going to go.”

  “You stay put,” I tell her. I try to reason with Micah, but he’s not budging.

  Patrick comes over then. He puts his arm around my shoulder and leans in and stage whispers, “Why are we having a high-level conference here? Are we contemplating a pitching change? Or overthrowing the government?”

  “Marnie is being a little impossible, insisting on rearranging the restaurant.”

  “She is quite impossible,” Patrick agrees. “But maybe you needed to have it rearranged, and the universe hadn’t informed you yet.”

  “Listen,” says Winnie. “I’m going to leave. You’re all very nice and very weird, but this just isn’t my night.”

  “Stay here,” I growl.

  Graham now gets up and joins us. “Um. Not to be paranoid, but is this about me, by any chance? And my mother’s bad behavior earlier?”

  “Your mother?” says Patrick. “Who are you?”

  Both Graham and Winnie turn to look at Patrick, and I see how they slide their eyes away immediately upon realizing that his face isn’t quite what they were expecting. This is why Patrick is an introvert. He was in an awful fire eight years ago or so, and his face is scarred from skin grafts, and his right eye is maybe a little bit crooked. I always have to re-realize how it is that he lives with this every day, with every new encounter—people looking and then flinching. They don’t know how to react to the scars, the pinched, too-shiny skin near one eye, the jawline that’s not quite symmetrical. They are sorry, I know they are. They don’t mean to be cruel, but they’re caught by surprise. They look away. I ache for Patrick every time it happens, and I always want to tell him they don’t mean it, that they can also see the light that shines out from him. That he’s beautiful. Incandescent.

  The moment is over quickly. Graham has recovered. “Oh, sorry. I’m Graham Spalding. And my mother threw some wine on your wife before you got here.”

  Patrick doesn’t explain that I’m not his wife. Instead he just introduces himself, and then he looks at me. “You have wine on you?”

  “It’s better now. Winnie here helped me clean it up.”

  Winnie is looking at Graham Spalding very carefully. “And where is your wine-throwing mom now?”

  “In an Uber, thank God, on the way to the airport,” he says.

  The universe holds its breath . . . one . . . two . . . three . . .

  “Maybe,” Graham says, “since there are no tables, you’d like to share mine?”

  . . . Aaaaand it exhales. We all go to our rightful places. I can almost feel Blix smiling at me from a spot near the little twinkling fairy lights strung behind the bar.

  Now you need to ask him. You’ve got to set this thing in motion, girl.

  I swallow, suddenly nervous.

  Patrick is watching me and smiling. “Here’s to the James Bond of matchmaking!” he says and lifts his glass. “Another successful exhibition of some of your best tactical maneuvers! This one was kind of epic, suspense-wise. I rate it a ten.”

  “You’re too generous. I thought for a while there that Winnie was going to have to come sit with us until Graham noticed how much he needed her. It was a last-minute save.”

  He rolls his eyes. “Sure,” he says. “Just do me a favor and let me know if you see anyone else needing to be fixed up before dessert and you need to go sit at another table, okay? Or if M calls you into headquarters, and you have to leave.”

  I put my bracelet up near my ear and tilt my head like I’m getting a message. “All clear for now. All the romances in here seem to be intact for the moment.”

  He leans forward and whispers, “Nice work. They look like they’re hitting it off. Mission accomplished.”

  “Sssh. Don’t look. It’s too early to evaluate.”

  “Not in this case. He’s complimenting her on her shoes. He’s a goner.”

  “Patrick. We don’t speak of people in love as goners.”

  He smiles at m
e and reaches for my hand. “Nonsense. We’re all goners here. Happy little goners.”

  Andre, our favorite waiter, comes over. Patrick says he’ll have the lemon aioli squid and I say I will, too, and then we’re quiet, and he’s staring at me expectantly, so I drink about four gulps of wine because I know it’s time to say the thing. Patrick is smiling, with his head tilted to the side, waiting. And my heart is beating ridiculously loud. They can hear it across the room, I’m sure.

  “Okay, MacGraw, out with it,” he says. “I can’t stand the suspense.”

  “I can’t. We need to make polite conversation for a while first. What did you do today?” I fold my hands in my lap.

  He exhales. “Okay. What did I do today? Well, let’s see. I went to my studio and I stared at the empty canvas I’ve been staring at all week. And then, let’s see, your mother called.”

  “My mother?” This makes me happy. My mother and Patrick both love to bake, and they’re always exchanging recipes.

  But then I see that he’s frowning. “Yeah,” he says. “Not to be alarming or anything, but she said kind of a weird thing. She wanted to talk to you about it, I think, but I guess when she called your number, you couldn’t pick up . . .”

  “No. I couldn’t because—get this, Patrick—there was an old man in the store who hadn’t talked to his daughter in five years, and he heard that she had a baby last week, and he wanted to send her flowers and also tell her that he is so sorry for all the times in her life when he wasn’t there for her. We all worked for an hour on the note. Everybody in the whole place was in tears by the time we got it written.”

  “Nothing like a day when the whole shop bursts into tears.”

  “Oh, stop. You know. It’s the best possible kind of tears. Everybody was hugging the old guy and giving him tips on what he could say. It was like pure joy, the whole community helping him.” I take a sip of wine. “So, what’s going on with my mother? Did I do a terrible thing not picking up?”

  “No, I think it’s probably fine. She says your dad won’t get off the couch. She wants to travel and go places, and he says he’s too tired for all that. She sounded a little sad, is all.”

  I am sure this is no big deal. My parents have been married for forty years, ever since they were teenagers, and they live in the suburbs of Florida (they happen to be actual Florida natives and not transplants), and he likes to play golf and she swims at the Y and they finish each other’s sentences, and bicker in the irritating way of people who have long ago turned their differences into what they consider a kind of amusing road show, for the benefit of an audience, usually my older sister Natalie and me. My parents are fine. Their marriage is an example to all their friends. They’re an institution.

  “Tell me what else you did today. Did you take Bedford for a walk?”

  “Oh God. It was awful.” He laughs. “We went to the park, and Bedford dragged me over to the playground, where he took a kid’s sneaker and ran off with it. So when I brought it back, the kid started screaming bloody murder at the sight of my scary face. And then the mom got all upset, and she yelled at the kid, which was terrible because he has the perfect right to be freaked out by my frightfulness. And then Bedford took the opportunity to grab the baby’s shoe out of the diaper bag, and he runs off with it, and she and I both start running after him, but then the kid starts crying to be picked up, and I don’t even know how it happened, but suddenly the mom just handed over her baby to me and picked up the older kid and went to get the shoe back!” He shakes his head. “Can you imagine? She just gives me her baby, and you know me—I don’t do babies, and I didn’t know how to hold the baby right, and so it stared right at my face in shock for about ten seconds and then it just let out this bloodcurdling scream and started wailing like the end of the world, and then the mom came running back without the baby’s shoe that Bedford took, probably realizing what a crazy thing it was to just hand a weird man her most prized possession—so I had to go find the baby shoe, and bring it back, which made everybody start crying again at the sight of me, and my new position is that dogs and babies are the worst.”

  My heart sinks. I put down my wineglass.

  “Um, so . . . what just happened?” he says. “What did I say? Tell me.”

  There’s no choice. I have to come out with it, even though my voice is suddenly clogged in my throat, and my heart is hammering away something awful. “Patrick,” I say, “I-I want a baby. I need to have a baby.”

  He stares at me. “Wait. So this is what you were going to ask me?”

  “Yes. Listen to me. I need us to have a baby, Patrick. And you would be such an amazing father, and our lives would be so full and wonderful, and I can’t imagine not having a baby with you, and I’m thirty-three, and I want this so much, so very much.”

  I’m ignoring the fact that his eyes have gone opaque and that he has put his napkin down.

  He laughs, one of those hollow laughs that makes me want to hide my head. “What is this ludicrous idea you have that I would be an amazing father? You should ask the woman in the park today how amazing I am with children. Marnie, honey, I am useless when it comes to kids. Beyond useless.”

  “You know that’s not true,” I say. “That one baby was not a referendum on you.”

  “No. It is true,” he says. “It is definitely true. You love me, and so you choose to overlook a million things about me that are ruined. But look at me, Marnie. Honestly. Look at my face and my arms and try to tell me I’m a person who should be a father. I’m not father material. And the thing is, you really do know this. Which is why you’re so nervous.”

  “I know the opposite.” I reach over and take his hand, which makes him flinch just the slightest bit. His hands are scarred and they hurt him, because when the fire came, he ran toward it, holding his hands out, trying to save his girlfriend. He is the best person in the world. “Patrick, please. This is so important to me. It’s everything. All the magic, all the possibilities of life—it’s all right here for us. I need a child. I need us to be parents of a child. I want to do this with you. You’ll be a wonderful father. You have so much to give. You’ll see. It’s life. It’s us—it’s you, coming back to life. Affirming what’s good—”

  He interrupts me. “But I’m happy, Marnie,” he says quietly. “I like our lives just the way they are. I don’t need another affirmation of what’s good. I have what’s good.”

  I lean forward, as if I can persuade him by getting closer. “But this will bring us so much more happiness! Think of it. We can take this next big step. I know we can do it. I just know we can.”

  He’s silent for a long time. “I-I don’t know what else I can say to you. I can’t do it.”

  “I haven’t ever led you astray, have I? We’ll be together through this. It’ll be wonderful. Trust me.”

  He picks up my hand and kisses it. Kisses every knuckle while he looks into my eyes. My heart is like a trapped little bird in my chest; it thinks—it hopes—that there could be a shift, just like earlier. That the universe can show up at the right time and bring light to a situation, to an impasse. I can’t be the one to convince him, but something else can.

  And then, wouldn’t you know, the molecules do shift, and suddenly Graham and Winnie are standing there, looming like happy idiotic bobbleheads right at our table. They are leaving, and they are just so happy and they want to thank us for making sure they got introduced—and oh, they couldn’t help but sense that something special was happening at our table, too! What is it? Can we talk about it?

  “Not sure we should discuss it just yet,” says Patrick in a low voice, “but we may be considering running for president. Or buying the Knicks basketball team. One or the other.”

  Winnie’s mouth makes an O, and Graham laughs and pulls her to him. “In other words, Win, it’s none of our business.”

  Win. He calls her Win already. You see? They’ll be engaged by tomorrow night, the wedding will take place next Tuesday, and by a week from Saturday th
ey’ll own a house and she’ll be pregnant. With twins.

  I beam them over some scraps of love that seem to be floating around the table, and she leans over and gives me a quick hug and whispers, “Thank you, I’ll never forget this,” and I tell her I have a flower shop, Best Buds, and if she ever wants to, she should come and tell me what happened—and after they leave, Patrick and I ask Andre to pack up our food, which we now know we cannot eat.

  It’s a hot, humid night outside, almost like a jungle, and we decide, without even talking about it, to walk all the way home to Park Slope. It’s as though we know that all these intense feelings can’t fit inside our house. We need to work some of them off before we get there.

  He holds my hand, but his back is stiff and his eyes look straight ahead, and I’m not at all sure if he’s holding my hand like he’s going to change his mind and be the father of my child, or if he’s holding my hand like he’s comforting me before announcing once and for all his final answer that he can’t give me what I want.

  I know deep down inside me that I am going to need to be able to live with whichever this is going to be, which is something that I really, really hate about life. The way you know exactly what would make you happy and what you need, but you still might not get it. This just doesn’t work for me at all. That’s where Blix was such an expert: she said you just have to keep going toward what you want and being open to surprise—because maybe, just maybe you’re really not the expert, and there might be something better you haven’t thought of.

  Still, I would just like to put the universe on notice that I might not be able to give up the idea of having a baby and remain a mostly pleasant person.

  When we get home, he goes upstairs and runs a bath, and while I’m brushing my teeth, he comes in, strips down, and gets in the tub.

  “Wait,” I say. “I want to get in, too.”

  “You should.” He pours in some divine-smelling bubble bath. Lavender, I think.

  I set up little tea lights all around the edge of the tub, turn off the overhead light, and then climb in next to him—it’s a huge claw-foot tub from probably 1900, so we both fit—and I lie back against his strong chest, my hair drifting in the water, fanning out around my shoulders. This is what I like about Patrick—the way that when things are tough between us, he doesn’t look for reasons to keep things bad. He wants to find the place where we can be okay again. His heart is beating underneath me, and even just the sound of it is so lovely and reassuring.