But then the matchmaker hadn’t been in. It was too early, the person there said. And now Tessa is feeling too dispirited to go back. She needs to take some time and think things through—not simply careen from one possible solution to another. Take a few deep breaths, try to get a grip.
“What is a matchmaker, anyway?” Fritzie asks.
“She’s somebody who helps people who want to fall in love.”
The waitress, gliding by with the check, smiles. “Oh! Wait! Are you going to see the matchmaker? You don’t mean Marnie, by any chance?”
Tessa nods.
“She is totally amazing,” the waitress says. She has eyes that look like Bing cherries, so dark and shiny, and a charmingly messy bun on the top of her head. “Omigod. You’ll totally love her. She got me together with Barney here. One day she came in here to eat breakfast with a friend, and I was working, and Barney was just this guy passing by in the street, and all of a sudden she jumped up and ran outside and chased him down. It was insane! Brought him back here, too. She said she saw sparkles that meant we were supposed to be together. And now here we are. When she’s on her game, there’s nothing she can’t do.” She looks over at the cook. “Isn’t that right, honey? We owe her big-time.”
Fritzie is looking from the waitress to the cook and back to Tessa. Her eyes are wide. The cook, handsome with a face that looks so perfectly stubbled it’s as though he might have painted on his whiskers, is snapping his towel and grinning self-consciously.
The waitress says, “So tell me, are you looking to get matched up with somebody? Because Marnie is the absolute best. I literally don’t know how she does it, but she’s super good.”
“No, no,” says Tessa, flustered now, like she’s been caught hoping for love. “It’s not that. I’m not looking to meet anybody.”
“She’s not looking to meet anybody, because she’s already got a Richard,” says Fritzie. And for once, she says his name in a nice way. She puts one hand on her hip, thrusting out the other hip like an adult would do. “My mum’s in love with Richard, you see, but he’s moved to Italy for the year and she wants to go and be with him, but the trouble is, he doesn’t have room for a kid. So we’re not really sure what we’re going to do with me. We have a lot to figure out.”
Tessa feels a pulse of shock.
“Wow,” says the waitress. She blinks in surprise. “Well, good luck with everything. I’m sure Marnie will help if she can.” She looks at Tessa and smiles.
Tessa busies herself with getting cash out of her purse. Bills are stuffed every which way into her bag, a function of traveling and buying airport snacks. She grabs a wad of cash and gives it over, and the waitress takes it and moves away. Tessa feels a buzzing in her ears.
“Wait,” says Fritzie. “We came all this way to see a matchmaker?”
It’s time, she knows. Time to tell Fritzie the real reason they’ve come to Brooklyn.
But she just can’t seem to bring herself to do it. Not yet. She doesn’t want to blow it. Instead, she says, “It’s a surprise. You’ll just have to wait and see. No more questions.”
CHAPTER FIVE
PATRICK
Two days later, Patrick is out walking Bedford—the third walk of the day, if you please—and he is dedicating this walk to wishing he could be a different sort of man. The kind of man who could simply go into his perfectly nice studio and start creating something that could pass for art.
Also the kind of man who didn’t spend twenty-three hours of the day wishing that the properties of latex were more reliable.
And . . . the kind of man who could bring himself to smile during conversations with his girlfriend about life-changing events like pregnancy and childbirth and fatherhood and how they might turn his life around into something unexpectedly marvelous.
It’s one of those leaden, oppressive August days when the air smells like exhaust fumes and is so thick and heavy it’s like something you’re wearing rather than breathing. The Weather Channel is predicting thunderstorms tonight, and Patrick thinks they can’t come soon enough for him. Across the street from the house, the morning regulars are at Paco’s bodega, grizzled older guys lounging against the building, mopping their foreheads and drinking bottled water and soda. They salute him, holding up their plastic bottles—“Howya doin’, Patrick?”—and Patrick salutes them right back, waving Bedford’s leash at them.
He clomps along, stopping as Bedford lifts his leg at all the usual spots. He takes time out from thinking about condom breakage to ponder the usual question he has during dog walks, which is how any one physical beast could possibly hold so much liquid.
He remarked on that once, and Marnie said, “Oh, he’s not really letting much out. Basically he’s just leaving text messages for the other dogs,” as if this was something everybody knew but Patrick.
“Really? Text messages?” He’d been astonished yet again at the way she sees the world.
The truth is he can’t get over how she lives her life, bouncing from thing to thing with the most open heart of anyone he’s ever met. She actually looks for complications to concern herself with, which baffles him. She will stop all their forward progress just so she can dig through her purse for money to give to homeless people on the street; she often carries cookies she’s baked (both the wheat kind and the gluten-free kind) to give to strangers—and, oh yes, she talks about the universe like it’s a personal friend of hers, as in, “Well, we’ll have to see what the universe has to say about that.” And when people are maddeningly late, she shrugs and says Mercury is probably in retrograde, and when objects are lost, she has this chant she says, and 90 percent of the time, the lost things obediently come right back from wherever they were escaping to. She says you sometimes have to “beam energy,” like that’s a thing. As near as he can tell, she actually thinks that Blix’s spirit hangs out near the toaster in their kitchen.
He can’t quite believe how much he has let himself love her. He can’t help it. Being loved by Marnie feels like he’s stumbled out of the attic where the crazy person lives, and now he’s allowed to go outside and breathe in the fresh air. He can smile. Make love. It’s like experiencing color again, after living in a world that had mostly faded to gray.
But then, once he finds himself basking in it, even the smallest bit, the bad thoughts show up in his head.
Hi, Patrick. Have you given any thought to the fire today? You haven’t? Well, try thinking about this, you with your happy, satisfied little life. All of this, may we remind you, can be taken away from you in the flash of a nanosecond. Every single shred of happiness—poof!
Her name was Anneliese Cunningham.
It’s a name he doesn’t ever say aloud anymore. No one says it. She had long black hair and big green eyes and one dimple, and she was an artist, and she wore black leggings and long black T-shirts and a silver chain with a crescent moon every single day along with ballet slippers, except in the winter when she wore furry boots. And she was twenty-four years old on the day it happened.
She didn’t believe in magic or Mercury in retrograde. She believed in art and in hard work that might pay off over time but probably wouldn’t. She had silences he couldn’t penetrate.
And now those silences stretch out inside him, like they have become a big nothingness existing among his organs and muscles. A black hole at his center.
He woke up in a hospital. He will always remember the way the room smelled and how the light felt like knives when they told him that Anneliese was dead. He politely asked if they could kill him, too, but they ignored that because they wouldn’t, and he couldn’t figure out how to change their minds. It would be so easy for them to do it, a little overdose, a willingness to look the other way. No one would report them. And he would be so grateful to them. But no deal. He had to get up; he had to learn to walk again, and there were painful surgeries and therapies to get through, and he couldn’t even move his face, couldn’t cry. But then—and he was supposed to be happy about this, ever
yone said this was wonderful, the miracle he’d been waiting for—he got a big settlement check. A payoff. What a rip-off, to take away his girlfriend’s life and his livelihood and then think that money could make up for even one second of it.
Here, my son. Here is what your girlfriend’s life was worth. Here’s what your well-being was worth, your joy, your face.
Die, he said to that face every day and every night. The face in the mirror.
He had a therapist for every part of him. Body, mind, and spirit. He went through the motions. And later, when the whole medical establishment said he was well enough—or as good as he was going to get anyway—he moved into a luxury hotel, because he was rich and so why not, and he ordered room service whenever he thought of it. He didn’t go outside for months, just ordered the filet mignons and the salmon mousses because he could afford them, and he threw most food away and spent his time watching daytime television and late-night movies and trying to figure out how to die without doing anything truly violent to himself because he didn’t have the stomach for that. People from his old life came and tried to reach him—even Anneliese’s parents, Grace and Kerwin—but he turned them all away. He couldn’t face them. He feels bad about that now; he should have summoned the courage to face them, and now it’s way too late. He wanted to be alone while he waited for death.
But when he didn’t die, when eons had passed and it looked like he was so incompetent at wishing for things that he was going to have to stay alive forever, he took a little research job, writing descriptions of diseases for a medical website, a job as distant from art as possible. He was irrationally angry with art, like that had been the thing that betrayed him. He wanted a job he could do from his hotel room, without any conversations with human beings. The website was designed for people who had some kind of distressing symptom, who were probably up in the middle of the night typing in things like: “black mole on armpit” or “headache after sex.” Patrick’s job was to get them to seek medical attention, so he wrote things like, “Possible malignancy” or “Possible brain infarction.” He took a kind of pleasure in ringing the warning bells for others. “This could be a sign of serious disease. You should see a medical professional immediately,” he would type. “DO NOT LET THIS GO UNTREATED.”
He could make anything sound dire, because to him, everything was dire: an ingrown toenail can lead to an amputation, a twitch might be a stroke, and a young woman in an artist’s apartment might turn on a stove to make a simple cup of coffee and that little surge of gas might trigger an explosion that kills her.
That is the world we live in, folks. Get used to it.
He can’t really explain the thing that happened next. He ventured outside one day, called there by a force he still doesn’t understand. As he stood there blinking in the sunlight, unsure of what to do, suddenly there was an elderly hippie woman walking toward him, smiling. She was wearing all kinds of scarves and jewelry and a pair of embroidered pants that looked like they’d once belonged to either a toreador or Liberace. She said her name was Blix, and she greeted him like she’d been waiting for him, as though they might have been old friends. He wasn’t used to people coming up and talking to him, particularly ones who didn’t look at all surprised by his appearance. He didn’t really want to talk to her—or anyone—but she wasn’t having anything that sounded like no.
So that was the day he learned, over a cup of coffee in the darkest corner of a New York deli, an elemental fact about life: that there are certain people in the world who find you and lather you up with so much love that you don’t even realize how it is that suddenly you belong to them in ways you could not have predicted. Like it or not, they get underneath all your carefully built defenses, and your whole fort just crumbles at their feet and all your foot soldiers hang up their weapons and retire. You try to call them back, and they say, “Nah. We’re good. See ya.”
She somehow wormed out of him the whole sorry story of his life, and then insisted that he come along and live in her building, a brownstone in Brooklyn. Hotel life was getting monotonous and boring, and Blix was very persistent. Much to his own surprise, that next month he gave in and moved into her basement apartment with a newly purchased bank of computers, and he adopted a ferocious cat who was hanging around the garbage cans. Most days Blix would come pounding down the stairs, ignoring every single signal he gave to her that he did not want to talk, and when he’d give up and let her in, she’d sit on the floor and tell him her philosophy of life, which mostly included a whole lot of fantastic swear words as well as some fairly insane talk about love and forgiveness and the universe and souls. The swear words were colorful and made him laugh. He had forgotten the sound of his own laughter. She had a book of spells, which he did not think she was serious about, but she told him she made good use of them, especially when people needed a little assistance in finding the right person—a concept he rejected. There is no right person, he told her, and she said that there absolutely was. Someone for everyone. Maybe several people. Everybody could have love. He just had to wait. In the meantime, she said, they could dance and eat great food. She had spectacular friends, including her boyfriend, Houndy, who was a lobsterman. There were times they all ate lobsters for breakfast, lunch, and dinner up on their rooftop looking out over Brooklyn—just like Patrick preferred it: close enough that they could watch the city unfolding but with enough distance that he didn’t have to interact with it.
He would protest to her that he was ugly and wretched and that he hated what his life had become, and she’d say, “So what, Patrick? We still have to dance.”
But then the very next year, Blix had to go and get cancer, and she did not consult medical professionals like Patrick advised because she had magic spells that were supposed to heal her, and besides, she said she was eighty-five years old and that was enough of a life for anybody, and maybe the whole planet needed to accept the idea that life ends and when the time comes to say good-bye, maybe folks could just throw themselves a big party instead of spending all that precious dwindling time chasing down a painful cure and having parts of themselves frozen or amputated. It sounded so plausible when she’d say it that way. She wasn’t one little bit afraid of dying. And he helped her. He was there with her when she died, holding her hand.
She left this beautiful, rundown brownstone building to a stranger who turned out to be Marnie, a person who seemed to come parachuting in from out of nowhere. She was the jilted ex-wife of Blix’s truly horrible grandnephew—and just when Patrick had figured out how to cope without Blix, there Marnie was, barging into his life, banging on his door with her problems and her secrets and her laughter and klutziness and tons of bad boyfriend stories. Go away, he wanted to say. But Marnie needed his help fixing things. She needed advice about the neighbors. She was from Florida so she was baffled by the noises the radiators make and what a cellar was for. She didn’t know about taxicabs, bodegas, or winter boots.
It was like a firecracker in his life, meeting her. Just the way she pulled him out of himself. He began to suspect that Blix might have sent her. Yes, it’s preposterous, but he has found himself believing in some impossible things over the last few years.
But now he knows for sure: he’s come as far as he can come. It may have been magic that brought him into this new life, and if that’s true, he’s fine with it. But he personally is at the end of what he can do. And he doesn’t want or need to go any further, thank you very much.
He stops walking now while Bedford investigates an old bagel that’s lying on the sidewalk, and Patrick has to pull on his leash to get him to leave it alone. Take that little struggle and multiply it by millions, he thinks, if there’s a baby. If there’s a baby—oh God, he can’t even go there.
His phone dings. Marnie.
I’m watching two guys playing with a toddler in the shop, and I have to say it again: you are going to be such a wonderful father. He waits a moment, and she sends a photo: two smiling male-model types, playing peekaboo wit
h some towheaded kid. It looks unreal, like an advertisement.
He tries not to answer, but then he can’t help it. These guys may think they’ve conquered parenthood, but we must not overlook the horrors that await them. Three words, Marnie. REPORT CARD CONFERENCES.
She replies immediately. LOL. What about them?
Right now we have none of those in our lives. This is a blessing we fail to appreciate enough. Sitting in a little classroom hearing the news about disappointing test scores, uncompleted homework, tardiness. Tardiness! Does anybody ever use the word “tardy” unless it’s about school? I could go my whole life without ever hearing the word “tardy” again.
Done! I’ll go to the conferences!
Also. Sleepless nights, Marnie. Those will affect the entire household. All of us. You, me, Bedford, Roy. If nothing else, think of poor Bedford.
There’s a long silence. He goes into Paco’s. He needs a bottle of antacids and another cup of coffee, and he hangs out for a bit to talk to Paco about the Mets, who are perhaps showing a little bit of promise this season. Back when Patrick first moved here and was so screwed up he couldn’t even go outside, Paco used to take care of him. When Patrick couldn’t face meeting people, Paco would bring him ready-made meals, knock twice at the door, and leave the food for him. Some things you never forget.
His phone beeps. Marnie again.
Only eighteen years of sleepless nights. We’ll be fine.
It’s time to be serious, he thinks. His tactics to discourage her aren’t working. Aren’t our lives perfect as they are? Child-free? We go up on the roof and nobody goes over to the edge and falls off. We sleep soundly all night long. We complete most of our sentences. No one needs a sippy cup. Or a Boppy, whatever that is.
She starts typing right away. Typing and typing and typing. The three little dots go on forever. He’s talked baseball scores with the guys, and he’s tasted a sample of Paco’s newest creation, a guacamole quesadilla, admired it and encouraged him to make more, and is back at home by the time she’s come out with her latest message.
A Happy Catastrophe Page 5
