The Magic of Found Objects

by Maddie Dawson

  Anyway, I came home from work unexpectedly one day (which a person should never, ever do, by the way), and there he was in our bed with some woman underneath him. Her legs were spread out on my bedspread, and before I started to scream, all I could think was that sex really looks and sounds quite ridiculous when you arrive upon it without warning. When it’s not you doing it.

  I hit him on the butt. I also threw my purse at her little pink polished toenails. I made screeching noises and pulled at my own hair. And then I delivered the ultimatum—that she was to get out of my apartment in two minutes or I was calling the cops.

  It took her nine whole minutes to leave. And when she did, Steve sailed out right along with her. He said something about a lawyer, and also that he wished me good luck. He looked only vaguely chagrined that he’d been caught so dramatically. He actually said maybe it had been for the best, that at last I knew the truth.

  The best? Who was he kidding, using the word best?

  And yet . . . and yet, when Steve Hanover proposed, he had gotten down on one knee next to the boathouse in Central Park. His eyes had been glistening with tears of joy. It felt like magic. A crowd gathered and people cheered for us. There was an actual diamond engagement ring involved. We held it up for the crowd to see.

  And when he left . . . well, I hate to admit this because I want to be a strong, independent, fearless woman, still fighting and rebelling and raising hell, but the truth is that Steve killed off something in me. I stopped feeling like there was somebody out there who was going to really understand me. Who would take care of my bruised little heart.

  I guess I just stopped trusting in love to be the thing that would save me.

  So now the contrast is not lost on me. Here I am, getting my second marriage proposal of my lifetime, and I’m sitting in a diner, under fluorescent lights that do not bring out my best features, especially at 1:05 a.m. And the gentleman proposing is now going on and on about how nobody we know who married for love is happy over that choice. He’s naming names, counting them on his fingers. This one is having an affair; this one wants separate bedrooms and separate vacations. These two don’t speak. And in fact, hadn’t I noticed that the whole scene at Tandy’s the past few years has just been filled with married people arguing?

  Judd is now leaning forward, and his eyes are lit up from within, burning into mine. “If you look around, we’re the only ones who still get along, and you know why? Because being madly in love is a temporary condition of insanity, that’s why. Wait until this weekend when we go see Russell and Sarah to meet the new baby. Those two are so in love that they’re practically ready to kill each other.”

  The twist tie ring sits between us on the table, getting wet from the condensation from the beer bottle. In another hour, it will revert back to just being a piece of wire.

  He stops talking for a moment. I look at his eyes, the swoop of dark hair he has falling across his forehead. He looks older than he did the last time I really took a good look at him. We’re both older. God, we’ve been friends for so long. He knows my family history: my witchy, hippie mom in Woodstock and my algebra-teaching stepmom who worries about everything—and my grumpy old dad. He’s the one who can make my dad smile. He’s hung out with me and Hendrix our whole lives, slept over at our house countless times. We were the Three Musketeers.

  Also, I know his parents—two sweet, baffled people from Hungary who married late and were nearly fifty when he, their only child, came barreling into their lives. They didn’t even know children had to have birthday parties! And they never once went to a football game of his. Thought they weren’t invited maybe.

  “I gotta ask you something,” I say. “Are you doing this because you’re giving up? Is it because you’re afraid you’re not going to meet anyone you really could love?”

  “What? No. No, Phronsie. I don’t want to meet anyone else. I don’t know anybody I’d rather be with than you. And I’m sick of dating. I want to be married. I want to have children. I want a regular life, like the other grown-ups. That’s it. My whole case. I want to marry you.”

  “I’m sick of dating, too,” I tell him. Forty-three men and not one of them looked like anybody I could ever love. “But,” I say, “there is this firefighter who wants to have coffee with me . . .”

  He puts both his hands down flat on the table and smiles. “Okay, so go ahead and date the firefighter. Date number forty-four. It’s fine. Go see if he’s your Prince Charming, but I bet you anything he isn’t. Anyway, even if he is, it would take you decades to fill him in on everything about you, stuff that I already know and accept. I accept you, Phronsie. Just let that sink in.”

  My head is spinning the slightest bit. Like the way I felt one time on the roller coaster right before I threw up. I think Judd was there for that time, too.

  “Also,” I say. “How to put this delicately? You like women who have . . . good looks. Push-up bras. Legs up to their armpits. And that’s fine. For you. But I don’t care about any of that. I can’t make myself go beyond, shall we say, a certain level of body maintenance. I will not, for instance, ever get a bikini wax. So if you’re expecting that, you are going to be—”

  He is waving his arms around in front of his face. “Stop, stop, with the bikini whatever. No! No to that! God!”

  “Well? It’s a reasonable question. I’ve seen who you date.”

  “I don’t care about any of that stuff. Seriously. You have to believe me. I want this. This. And I also happen to think we’ll be terrific parents. We’ll have kids and take them to the park, and ride bikes together. We’re going to rock this parenthood thing.”

  Yes. Parenthood. He loves children; he would read them stories and let them climb on his back. I’ve seen him with Hendrix’s kids. I’ve seen him making kids in the park laugh, even here in New York.

  “So . . . in this plan of yours . . . what about sex?” I say.

  He bugs out his eyes. “Did I not just tell you there would be children? Obviously there will be sex.”

  “Well, that’s the part—I mean, we never have. Aren’t you worried that maybe we don’t have any, um, chemistry?”

  “Nope. Sex is the easy part,” he says. “Of course we’ll have sex. It just won’t be the driving force. Our friendship is.”

  “No offense, but I kind of like the driving force aspect. Driving force actually makes me swoon, now that I think about it.”

  “Well,” he says. “I can manufacture driving force if that’s what you need. But we are not going to have romantic suspense and agony, if that’s all right with you. That I don’t want.”

  My mind scrolls back through all the dating disasters I’ve endured. Years of them. All the hours and hours of waiting for the guy to call, worrying that I wasn’t attractive enough or attentive enough or didn’t have enough sparkling conversation to get through an evening. The fake laughter I manufactured too many times to count. The flattery and flirtations I mastered. The times I’ve slept with a man because of what felt like a genuine mutual attraction . . . and then afterward endured days of torment, waiting for him to call. Followed, of course, by all the meditation and soul-searching and serious talks with my girlfriends when the jerk didn’t call.

  All of it has been so demoralizing, so soul-crushing. Maybe because it’s technically the middle of the night and I’m overtired, but I suddenly feel so furious at Mr. Cyber Security Previously Married No Kids for his cavalier attitude toward me. For the smirk on his face as he described how confusing it was to be a man trying to talk to women these days.

  In fact, I realize, I’m angry at the whole lot of them—the whole cadre of forty-three men I’ve gotten myself dressed up for. Angry about the manicures and pedicures and lipstick purchases, the hair appointments, the nice underwear, the hopes rising and falling, rising and falling. The notes I take afterward. The story I’m going to write.

  Furious about the number of times I’ve played “Love Has No Pride” by Bonnie Raitt and screamed along to the lyri
cs.

  The only good part, I realize, has been telling Judd about these dates afterward, listening to him laugh. Hearing him tell about the vacuous women he’s been seeing.

  He’s smiling at me. “I don’t think,” he says, “that I want to live in a world in which this isn’t the kind of love that really matters.”

  I get a little shiver at that. It’s really his best line.

  “Okay. I have some questions. If we got married,” I say, “would that mean you’d call in sick for me when I can’t go to work? Because when I call, I always think it sounds like I’m faking.”

  “What? Well, yes, of course.”

  “And you’d rub my feet sometimes?”

  “Okayyyy . . .”

  “With no complaining about it, right? And, how about Mr. Swanky? He likes to sleep on the bed, you know.”

  “Phronsie, I’m not going to kick the dog off the bed.”

  “And . . . and . . . we’ll cook together and go grocery shopping and plan meals and throw parties for our friends sometimes? And we’ll sleep in the same bed, and you’ll hold me while I fall asleep?”

  He’s smiling. He really does have a lovely smile. “Yes, all that. And I’ll take care of the children with you, and we’ll go on family vacations together. All of it. Marriage. Parenthood. All the good stuff.”

  “What about my novel?”

  “What about it?”

  “Will you not give me a hard time when I need to write it, even if it’s in the middle of the night or when you want to do something else, but I need to write?”

  He stares at me. “I don’t care if you write a novel. Write it whenever you like.”

  “And no cheating?”

  “No cheating.”

  “Ever, ever, ever?”

  “What’s with you? I said no cheating.”

  “One more thing. Will we fall in love, do you think?”

  He runs his hands across his hair, hard. “Phronsie, you may be missing the point. What we already have is love. There’s no falling to be done. We’re upright. This is what upright love looks like. Rubbing feet and going grocery shopping together—this is winning at love, as far as I’m concerned.”

  I drink the last of my beer and look at him. He raises his eyebrows questioningly, and I nod, so he puts the twist tie ring on my finger.

  “Wait. This is not official. I might need to talk to Sarah and Talia about this,” I say. “Just to run it by them.”

  He laughs. “No, I understand. We can’t make a move without Sarah and Talia.”

  Sarah and Talia are my best friends; they were the first people I clicked with when I moved to New York. We were all Sex and the City together right after I graduated from NYU. I got to be Carrie Bradshaw because I was a writer and my hair looked like hers. We all went on dates and we drank a lot of wine, and we had fun, glamorous jobs, and we were dramatic and gloriously young with lots of good hair products and no bags under our eyes—and one by one, we met guys who became our husbands: Russell with Sarah, Talia with Dennis, me with Steve. Only their guys stuck around, and now they are having babies. Sarah and Russell just had one last week. They named the kid Willoughby after a street Russell lived on in Brooklyn.

  When we get back to our building, I look at Judd there beside me in the brightly lit lobby, at his large moist hands, his bright eyes, the little hairs under his nose that would like to turn into a mustache except he shaved them probably sixteen hours ago. The little crinkles around his eyes are now permanent, not just when he laughs. I see the same crinkles when I look at myself in the mirror; when I don’t get at least eight hours of sleep, I look like my face is collapsing in on itself. I’m a little bit stunned at how old—or rather mature—we’ve suddenly gotten overnight.

  We take the stairs up to my floor in silence—Judd always thinks people have to take the stairs instead of the elevator so we’ll still have muscles and bones that work when we’re eighty—and when we get there, we stand in the stairwell awkwardly.

  Oh God. Is he going to make a move on me? Am I ready for this?

  Then he puts his arms around me like we’ve done casually a bunch of times before. But this time he looks at me and smiles and then puts his mouth down on mine, hard.

  We don’t fit together, somehow. His nose hits my nose too hard, which makes my eyes water. This kiss is somehow too wet and also it doesn’t connect. Between my eyes watering and all the saliva that suddenly has sprung up between us, all I can think of is drowning. And would I be terribly awful if I mention that his nose hairs are tickling me? We move around a bit and try to make it work, but then he pulls away and laughs. He shrugs.

  “Not the end of the world. We’ll work on it,” he says cheerfully and gives me a high five. “Also, can I borrow my ring back? My bread is going to get stale without it.”

  CHAPTER TWO

  I wake up the next day realizing I’m as close to a panic attack as I’ve been since Steve Hanover walked out on me. Mr. Swanky stares at me with his head tilted to the side, as I down two pharmaceutically required cups of coffee and start pacing around the apartment.

  “Am I really considering marrying Judd?” I ask him. “Because that’s insane, right?”

  He lies down with his head on his paws. I can tell he’s thinking it over.

  “Well, you’re right. I can’t be serious. There are absolutely forty-nine obvious reasons not to marry him that I didn’t even begin to think of last night.”

  As soon as it is even a remotely decent hour, I call Talia. She’s married to Dennis, a surgical resident who works about nine thousand hours a month, so she’ll be able to come up with at least a few reasons why marriage might not be the best thing ever.

  “Not to alarm you or anything, but I’m afraid I’m having a possible psychological emergency,” I say to her as soon as she answers. “Can you meet me at Franco’s?”

  “Oh my God,” she says. “Do not tell me you’re moving out of the city.”

  “No, no.”

  “And it can’t be that you have an incurable disease either. Please. Although if you do have an incurable disease, forget I said that insensitive thing.”

  “No. It’s good news. I think. It might be. I mean, you’ll tell me if it is. It’s about marriage.”

  “Okay. Don’t give me any more details until I see you. If this is about one of your forty-three dates suddenly proposing marriage, I’m going to need some liquid fortification.”

  I see her immediately upon arrival at Franco’s. She’s dressed in an electric-blue tunic and leggings, with her red hair up in a bun, waving her arms in the air and calling, “Yoo-hoo!” She’s managed to get our favorite table over by the window.

  The waiter comes over to take our order—mimosas and cranberry scones, our usual—and as soon as he’s gone, I put my napkin in my lap and say, as casually as I can, “So . . . it’s Judd. He proposed to me last night.”

  “Holy shit!” she says. “I’m going to need about four of these drinks!” She studies my face. “Hmm. Let me think. Not saying he’s the candidate I would have expected, but still . . . a good guy. I like him. Dennis likes him. As much as Dennis likes anybody who’s not working at the hospital. So what brought this on, if I may ask?”

  I give her the rundown of Judd’s proposal: friendship over romance, no jealousy or drama, partners forever, babies, security, on and on. “It actually made a little bit of sense at the time, but then I couldn’t sleep all night, and now I’ve had two cups of coffee, and I’m hyperventilating, and I just feel . . . crazy. I asked him what about being in love, and he said that hadn’t worked out so well for me in the past, and that life shouldn’t look like a romantic comedy, and if this companionship we have isn’t love, then he doesn’t want to live in the world anymore. Or something. I don’t know what to do.” I’m so tired I just want to put my head down on the table and rest awhile. “So, that’s crazy, isn’t it? Nobody should get married for those reasons. Right? This is nuts.”

  Talia is trying to hide
a smile.

  “Well, for starters, he has a little bit of a point,” she says. “Call it what you will—love or friendship is all semantics—but I think it’s possible that this has been the path you two have been on for years. It’s just taken some wide detours. Like the Steve Hanover detour, for instance.” She leans closer. “Have you slept with him?”

  “No! Judd’s not—he’s never acted like we were anything but pals.”

  “So you’re saying you’ve never had sex with him. Never?”

  “Never.”

  “Not even for boredom? Or availability? In all these years? Why not?”

  “We haven’t had sex because we . . . just haven’t. It’s not that kind of relationship.”

  She frowns. “Well, you’re definitely going to want to make sure that part works before you sign on. He’s not against it, is he? Oh my God, is he one of those guys who dates supermodels but actually he’s really gay?”

  “No. I know this dude. It’s always been women for him.”

  “Okay, then. Well, you’ll have sex with him, and then you’ll know if you should marry him.”

  “It’s probably going to be embarrassing. You know. Because we know each other so well . . . but haven’t been attracted in that way. Last night he kissed me and all I could think of was that his nose hairs were tickling me. Is that a bad sign?”

  “You just have to do a little mental adjustment. Move him out of the friend zone and into the hot boyfriend zone. It takes some imagination. Luckily, he’s really handsome. And built. So it shouldn’t be hard.”

  “Yeah. He is.” I look down at my hands.

  Talia sees my face and reaches over and touches my arm. “Honey. It’s fine, trust me. Some love stories don’t follow the usual trajectory. Also, for some people, sex isn’t the main thing. Just jump his bones, and you’ll see what’s what.”