A Happy Catastrophe

by Dawson, Maddie

  We all have our things. Fritzie does cartwheels and draws us pictures. My contribution is that I know how to cook and also I have a million stories about life and matchmaking, and Ariana knows a hundred ways to tie scarves. She also has a skincare product that makes your face look shiny and glittery called—unbelievably—Unicorn Snot. She has no fewer than four different packages of hair chalk in primary colors, which I am so far avoiding using, but the time may be coming close when I succumb. What’s a little light purple hair chalk among friends, after all?

  “How is it you live in Brooklyn and don’t know about all these products?” she asked me one night. We were standing in front of the bathroom mirror while she curled my straight hair into little ringlets of joy, and then she helped me massage some gelatinous sparkly gunk into my cheeks. “To bring out your inner unicorn,” she said.

  I tried to explain, that in my nerdish circle of friends growing up, we didn’t have inner unicorns; we wanted to look natural. “Even admitting you put on lotion could be construed as trying too hard,” I told her. It was important to look plain and unvarnished. Sometimes you could put on a little bit of mascara to enhance yourself, but you would go to your grave rather than admit you had done so.

  “Trying too hard is wonderful!” she said breathlessly. “You think plain and unvarnished is going to bring you any real joy?”

  And that is what I love about having Ariana here. She reminds me of everything I truly believe.

  This is especially good for me now that I don’t have Patrick around so much. I know he’s doing what he needs to be doing. I know that the art show will be the very best thing for him. At night I love when he finally leaves the studio and sleeps next to me, even though we’re not talking then.

  I miss his texts and his jokes and his funny little dances.

  My sister calls me one evening while I’m making red curry for dinner. As I’m sautéing the chicken breasts and onion, Ariana is helping Fritzie with what seems to be step twenty-seven of a routine math problem. And then there’s Natalie on the phone.

  “Mom’s gone mad,” she says without preamble.

  Let me just say that Natalie and I don’t talk so much on the phone anymore. She’s busy with her two kids, our parents (who live in her neighborhood), her job as a very important scientist, her husband, Brian, and her obsession with housecleaning, blah blah blah—and I live in the North, a place where no self-respecting Southerner would have dared to venture, in Natalie’s private opinion. According to the plan she had, Natalie and I were supposed to be having babies together and living a block or so apart, but then I inherited this house and came here.

  But sometimes she calls. Rarely.

  “Oh dear. What’s she doing?” I say.

  “Well, for one thing, she’s let herself go. She’s not getting her hair done anymore.”

  “Uh-huh.” I put my hand over the phone so I won’t laugh. I decide to go the impersonating-a-police-officer way. “Yes, ma’am, we’re writing this down. Not. Getting. Hair. Done. Anymore. Anything worse than that, ma’am, before we arm an officer and send him over to the house?”

  “Stop it! You see how you are? That is a big deal, believe me. Mom’s been going to see Drena since forever.”

  “I always thought Drena was too heavy-handed with the hairspray, to tell you the truth.”

  My sister is silent, and I can tell she’s seething. When she can regain her composure, she says, “Would you listen to me, please? This is serious. I think not getting her hair done is a sign of depression in a woman her age. She also won’t even commit to coming to my house for Thanksgiving—when she knows how important that is to me, to have traditions for my kids. And she says Dad doesn’t talk to her anymore, but honestly, she’s so crabby I don’t blame him. And last week when I asked her why she’s acting this way, she said I didn’t understand what it’s like to turn sixty.”

  “Huh. So maybe this is just her version of a midlife crisis.”

  “It’s a little late for that, don’t you think? Sixty is hardly midlife unless you’re going to live to be one hundred twenty.”

  “Yeah, but she missed the one you’re supposed to have at forty. She was too busy driving us places.”

  “Do you ever even talk to her? I notice you don’t call me anymore.”

  “I’m sorry,” I say.

  And I am sorry. A little bit. It’s just that life is so much more interesting than Natalie could ever guess. Sweeter and messier, both.

  Then I have to hang up, because the doorbell is ringing. Lola and William have arrived for dinner, with Charmaine and Justin and Mookie coming up right behind them. They’re here to see Ariana—but teenagers are always hungry, and I’ve got plenty of red curry, so I invite them to stay. I love how they troop inside, laughing and joking and teasing each other. Mookie lifts Fritzie in the air and spins her around, and then she teaches him one of those clapping games that only third graders know.

  For a while, we’re all talking and laughing and doing Common Core math problems, and Lola shows me the scarf she’s knitting for William. For the second time this week, Justin and Mookie try to teach us all how to do the Floss, which is a dance that looks simple but defies my attempts to master it. Fritzie is the only one who catches onto it immediately. Lola shows us how to do the Charleston, because she actually remembers learning it from her mom, and amid all the laughter, I actually have to take a moment to look around me at this delightful assortment of human beings. All of them perfect and hopeful and yet just the slightest bit sad from missing somebody who can’t be there.

  Sad, but soldiering on anyway. I think I might burst from how much I love them all.

  After dinner, when I come back from tucking Fritzie into bed, Lola takes me aside. “What’s up with Patrick?” she says. “Why isn’t he out here with us?”

  “He’s working on paintings for his show. He grabs dinner later. Doesn’t like interruptions when he’s creating.”

  “Hmm,” she says, and I can hear how weird this must sound. Patrick not participating in life at all. Like the old Patrick.

  “A guy is coming soon to interview him about his ‘comeback,’ and I think he’s trying to get a lot of work done ahead of that. He’s nervous about not having enough.” I make air quotes when I say the word comeback. Patrick doesn’t like to think of it that way.

  Even as I’m saying this—and Lola’s eyes are searching my face—I can feel myself realize that that’s not what’s really happening.

  What is happening is that Patrick is withdrawing, edging further and further away. He pretty much stays in the apartment across the hall most evenings now. I invite him to join all of us for dinner, but lately he mostly brushes me away. He has a litany of reasons he throws out:

  He’s working hard, he says.

  He needs to concentrate.

  Once he gets going on a painting, he has trouble stopping. And some days he has trouble starting.

  Also: he’s thinking of what he will say in the interview with Inside Outside. He could easily say the wrong thing, he says.

  Also: he probably shouldn’t have agreed to the writeup in the magazine.

  Also: maybe he shouldn’t have agreed to do a show at all. Who does he think he is anyway, staging a comeback? Coming back from what, exactly? People will think it sounds pretentious.

  But I don’t say any of that to Lola. After she and William Sullivan leave and the teenagers have gone downstairs, though, I go across the hall to his studio. “Patrick?” I call softly.

  He’s not in the main room. I stop at the easel next to the window. Usually he doesn’t want me to see what he’s working on. He says he doesn’t believe in showing things in the middle of working on them. The pictures change—the light, the mood, even the message each painting has. It’s all so subjective, he says, that it can be altered simply from being looked at by someone else.

  But there it is. I don’t understand all I should about abstract expressionism, but I feel a shiver looking at this paint
ing. It’s all browny-green algae-colored piles of paint. A minimal smear of discordant color tones—at the side. Is that an eye? It looks like an eye. I move closer and tighten my arms around myself.

  “Patrick?” I say softly. I hear a stirring from the other room, and Roy comes out and trots over to me, meowing. He winds himself around my legs, and I lean over and pet him.

  When I get to the back room, Patrick is sitting on the floor. There’s a large canvas propped against the wall facing him, and he is staring at it, with his head propped on his hands.

  His eyes slowly turn to me, and he gets up, startled. He had been so deep in thought that he hadn’t heard me.

  I feel my heart clutch in alarm. “Patrick,” I say again. “Honey . . .”

  Because what I’ve just realized is that Patrick’s face is so sad and drawn that he hardly looks like himself anymore. How had I not noticed this before?

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  PATRICK

  He hears Marnie calling him, and he makes the decision to pull himself together. He scrambles to his feet and composes his face into a smile, puts on an imitation of a man who’s doing fine. He feels like his mouth is filled with dust.

  “Hi,” he says. “I was just coming back over. Is everybody gone?” His voice sounds thick and clotted, even to his own ears. He’s shaky, standing up so fast.

  “What’s the matter?” she says in alarm and crosses over to him. Oh God. Her face searching his. It’s all he can do not to tell her. Because he knows she’s seeing it all anyway: how the paintings are ripping him up, how cracked he is. Maybe he’s in some kind of stupid existential crisis; isn’t that what people call it? He could say, “Hi, Marnie. I can hear your voice and see your face, but all around you is dust and death. I can’t participate in the love story you’re envisioning.”

  But what good would it do to tell her? What can she do? Instead he says in a soft voice, “It’s nothing. Really. I’m just tired. Has everybody left yet?”

  “They just left,” she says. “Didn’t you want to come over and eat with us?”

  Words show up from somewhere. “I can’t stop when I’ve got something going. I needed to get this painting under control.” He can feel the edge of irritation in his voice and tries to tamp it down, but he can see from her face that he didn’t manage it all that well. He turns away and goes over to the counter, puts a coffee cup down in the sink and runs the water in it. Feels the water running on his hands. Remembers falling down the day of the fire, trying to get to the water.

  “And is it?” she says. “Are you unhappy with it or something? What’s wrong?”

  “I’m just exhausted,” he says. And then he turns toward her. “Come on,” he says and takes her hand. See how I’m trying? Don’t I get some points for that, at least? “Let’s get out of here. Is there any of that delicious-smelling food left? Hey, did I hear Lola and William out there, too?”

  “Yeah,” she says. “They were here. Lola wanted to know if you were okay.”

  “I got caught up with work.”

  She’s looking at him way too closely.

  They move through the studio. He throws a drop cloth over the painting in the front room, hoping she hadn’t seen it.

  But of course she had. He can tell by the way she recoils a little bit, just passing it. It’s what alarmed her in the first place, most likely. “Is that the new one?” she says.

  “Yeah. One of them.”

  “Patrick, it’s so sad. It actually made me shiver.”

  “Well, that’s what art is supposed to do,” he says. “It’s not all little flowers and puppies, you know. It’s art.”

  She doesn’t answer. He knows he’s been too mean now. Crossed a line into being actually insulting. So he kisses her on the cheek and says he’s sorry. Tells her that something smells really good.

  “I think you must be starved,” she says. She’s made red curry, she says. She bets that his blood sugar has dropped. How many hours since he’s eaten? It’s easy to feel overwhelmed and not even know why. Isn’t there a term now for that—hangry? He must be hangry.

  He says he loves red curry, and he grabs a beer from the refrigerator and sits down at the table. He’s better now. He can do this. He can eat and drink and smile. Just like a real person, one who is not seeing the world through cobwebs. One foot in front of the other. One sentence following the sentence before. An occasional smile, a tilt of the head.

  “So, how are you?” he says, and the specter of Anneliese withdraws, almost completely vanished now. “How are things at Best Buds?”

  “They’re good,” she says. She tells him about seeing the couple, Winnie and Graham, that she’d brought together the night she had the big question for him.

  He grimaces a little, remembering. He will probably always think of that night as the start of a cascading series of out-of-control life events. Her wanting a baby, the condom breaking, the further question of when and if they’re going to try to have a baby never quite getting answered. And then Fritzie showing up. Then there’s the art show he mistakenly agreed to.

  “Ah, yes,” he manages to say. He tries for a smile. “So I take it they’re still together then? That must make you happy.”

  “Yes, and they’re having a baby.”

  “Oh, how lovely for them. I’ll bet they want to raise a statue in your honor.”

  She is looking down at her hands. Oh God. He has been too sarcastic now, and he’s hurt her feelings. What’s even worse is that the topic has somehow veered over to babies again. Alarm bells sound in his brain. It’s so hard to avoid all the conversational land mines when you don’t see each other very much. You’d think it would be the opposite, that you could keep the subjects neutral for a few minutes of talk—but no. It’s as though all the important, hard stuff naturally lies in wait, jumping out into even routine conversations, like a wild animal leaping out of a tree onto your unsuspecting head.

  “Do you think much about our trying again soon?” she says.

  Aaaaaaaand . . . we’re off, he thinks. He drums his fingers on the table.

  “You know, maybe you’ve noticed that I’m a bit stressed out just now,” he says.

  “Yeah, well, I’ve heard good things about sex and stress,” she says.

  He squints and decides to go for a joke. “You know, somehow I feel almost like we already have a kid.”

  “A kid, not a baby.”

  He feels a bitter laugh coming from somewhere deep. “Also, have you noticed that our house is pretty much filled to the rafters with humans now? How many people were actually here eating dinner tonight? It sounded like it was at least a battalion.”

  “I don’t think we actually have rafters. Or a battalion.”

  “Are you kidding me? We have battalions of people living on our rafters, swinging from the rafters.” He leans his head back and swigs his beer in an attempt to show how careless and carefree he is. But still she is staring at him solemnly. She does not read his funny mood at all. Where is her sense of humor?

  He tries again. “You do know that I had no idea when I threw in my lot with you that you were going to bring in so many people. It’s wall-to-wall people around here lately.”

  “How is this me?” she says.

  “People follow you. This place is like a boardinghouse. In fact, it is an actual boardinghouse, now that I think of it. People come traipsing into my studio, making comments about my work. Why, even Ariana came in to borrow a pair of scissors the other day—”

  “What? She did? I’ve told her not to bother you.”

  “Everyone bothers me!” he says, trying to strike a friendly, exasperated tone. Amused, even. Not as irritated as he’d felt when he’d looked up to see Ariana standing at the door. “While she was there, she said my work looked so sad, and she wondered if I had given any thought to my brand. My brand! Can you believe this? Since I was going to be interviewed, she thought I might want to decide what my platform could be. She said it looked like I was going for Sa
d Artist Guy. Which might not be the very best look for me, she thought.”

  He means to sound funny/exasperated, funny/ironic. Funny/something. Come on: children, even teenagers, talking about marketing is hilarious. But he obviously isn’t getting that across because Marnie looks stricken. Why isn’t she getting this?

  Her eyes fill with tears, and he knows he should want to reach over and pull her to him, to comfort her, to say he understands. But what he actually wants is to go back to his studio, stop the burden of this conversation that is leading nowhere good. He shouldn’t be with humans right now. Even Marnie, with all her faith and hope. He is creating, and the art he’s doing is weird and hard and upsetting, and ohhhh yeessssss, he saw the look on her face when she looked at his painting. He saw how it landed inside her. Is he supposed to apologize for that, too? For what his art is trying to express? Does that not fit in with her all-happiness-all-the-time world view?

  “Do you still love me?” she says. Quietly.

  Oh God. Not this! “Do I—what?” he says. “Of course I love you. Why would you think I don’t love you?”

  Let her go, says Anneliese. She shouldn’t be doing this to you.

  “Because you don’t look at me when you talk to me. Because you don’t even really talk to me at all. Because I don’t see you anymore. The last time we spent any time together was the day we went to Fritzie’s school—”

  “Look,” he says and lets out a loud sigh. “You know that I’m busy—”

  “Don’t,” she says. “I know what it feels like when people love you even when they’re busy. Don’t tell me how busy you are, Patrick, because I know you. And what I know is that you are in some kind of crisis.”

  He folds his arms in front of his chest. “I’m doing a very hard thing. It’s the creative process.”

  “I know that, and I want to help you,” she says. “Your paintings are devastatingly sad, and that’s all right, Patrick, because that’s what’s in your soul right now, and that’s what needs to come out. But in the meantime, you seem very far away from me, and every day you’re spinning away more and more.” She holds up her hand in the stop position, to keep him from interrupting, which he was about to do. “But whatever is hurting inside you,” she says calmly, and she looks at him so directly with her blue, blue eyes filled with feeling, “I want you to know that I see you and I love you, and I’m willing to wait while you go through it, for as long as it takes. I believe in you, even if you don’t right now.”