I laugh. “Get on up here, you big galoot. You can save the world from illness after breakfast,” I tell him, and he sighs.
Which means he’s not coming.
“Come on,” I say. “We’ll sit up on the roof, just the four of us.”
“Um, I’d have to take a shower first.”
“No, you don’t. We’ll be on the roof. The fresh air will blow the stink off you.”
“My hair isn’t good. I should at least wash that.”
“Put on your hat. You’re always wearing a hat.” I get out the cloth napkins and put them on the tray. I’m distracted suddenly by a dust mote that seems lit up in a sunbeam. My hairline is tingling just a little.
“And I should cut my toenails maybe.”
“Now you’re just toying with me.”
“Get up here!” yells Houndy from across the room. “We need more representation by testosterone. Don’t make me cope with these women by myself!”
Patrick says something about how he’s already eaten breakfast, and he really does have a lot of work to do. And also he’s waiting on a package. He’s lobbing excuses like they’re pebbles and he’s laughing while he does it, knowing that I understand that he can’t come. It’s not one of the days when Patrick can do stuff.
If I squint, I suddenly see little points of light everywhere. My head feels funny, like something is trying to signal me.
“I have to sit down,” I whisper to Lola, and she gives me an odd look. Houndy has taken the tray and gone on upstairs to the roof, and I hear the door slam behind him, feel how the whole building shakes, like it’s answering him.
“Are you dizzy?” she says.
“No . . .”
“Maybe you need some water instead of coffee. Here.” She turns to the sink and runs the tap.
“That’s . . . not . . .”
And then I know what it is.
Marnie. Patrick needs Marnie.
They are a match.
So much clicks into place—why it was essential for me to go to my niece’s Christmas party in Virginia even though my family drives me nuts, why I needed to meet Marnie, and why Noah hooked up with a woman that he isn’t going to keep loving . . . oh my God. As though we’ve all come together in some kind of elaborate dance. For Patrick and Marnie.
Patrick and Marnie. Old souls who need to find each other.
I love when it happens this way. Even now I feel my body, tired and creaky as it is, running with energy.
Lola is looking at me closely. “Oh boy,” she says. “I know what it means when you look like this. Something is happening.”
“Later I’ll tell you,” I say. “Right now I need to think.”
And she and I go up to the roof, and we look out over the city and soak up the early summer morning light while we eat. It is so beautiful here, and life is so full of possibilities, even though I’m not going to be here for much longer.
How can I bear to leave knowing there is so much undone? I have to trust the universe to make it all work out for them.
I watch the doorway, but Patrick does not come upstairs to the rooftop. He’s downstairs pounding away on his computer keyboard, trapped by his own demons. And Marnie—Marnie’s heart is being broken somewhere far away. I can feel it.
You are going to be okay, I beam to her. And then to them both: Be brave. Be brave.
There is so much fear to wade through before you get to love.
SIX
MARNIE
Natalie texts me two days into my honeymoon: Is honeymoon Noah behaving better than wedding Noah?
MUCH BETTER, I write back. #ALLGOOD. WHEW! THANK GOODNESS.
And then I look across the table at my handsome, tousled husband, who is sipping his Bloody Mary and gazing out through his Ray-Ban sunglasses at the turquoise sea just beyond the jungle. He looks like an ad for the tropics. We are having a perfectly normal late breakfast on the hotel restaurant’s deck after having perfectly normal honeymoon sex last night, and I’m glad to report that Noah looks tanned and well rested and not anxious at all. There is just one tiny little thing: underneath the table, his knee is bouncing up and down like it’s connected to an unseen metronome.
He feels me concentrating on him and looks at me. We both smile, and I turn back to my eggs quickly before I have to see his smile fading.
Jesus.
He is going to break up with me. He’s just waiting for the right moment.
Which is probably why I’ve had a headache practically the entire time we’ve been here. I feel that my smile must look like a rictus grin, something you’d see on a skeleton. No wonder the waiter put our food on the table and backed away fast.
“Noah,” I say, and then can’t quite recall what I meant to say after that.
“What?” he says.
Do you love me? And do you remember when you first started spending the night at my apartment how sometimes my old bed frame would crash onto the floor when we made love? We started having to drag the mattress to the living room before sex. You joked that moving the mattress was the most exciting foreplay you’d ever had, and I knew I wanted to keep you forever.
“Nothing, never mind.”
“Do you want to go on a hike this afternoon?” he says grimly.
So we do. We walk through the little town and out into the jungle. He walks along quietly, like a man walking to his doom, stopping every once in a while to look at birds through his pair of binoculars, or to solemnly hand me the bottled water he put in the backpack. When his long, lovely fingers brush mine, I have to squeeze my eyes tight so that I don’t cry.
I am stumbling along the path behind him, tears blinding me, when I hear a voice in my head saying, You’re going to be okay. Be brave.
That’s when I take a deep breath and I say to his back, “Noah. Tell me what’s the matter.”
And he turns and looks at me, and I see that my week-old marriage is about to die right there on a path in the Costa Rican jungle.
It isn’t that he’s gone crazy or is suffering from anxiety, or any of the things I have tried to tell myself. It’s worse than that. It really does turn out to be lawn mowers.
“Lawn mowers,” I say blankly.
Ahead of us on the path is a middle-aged couple in matching Bermuda shorts and powder-blue T-shirts. When she passed us, the woman told me that if you wear light blue, butterflies might land on you. She said this giggling, and the man had laughed, too, and then they’d set out on the path, arm in arm. I watch their retreating backs. She is oblivious to the fact that there is a butterfly riding on her back.
“Excuse me, sir,” I say in a low voice, only for Noah’s benefit, once they are out of earshot. “Sir, I know this may sound strange, but could I ask you your deepest feelings about the lawn mower in your garage? Are you in any way afraid of it, sir?”
“Shut up, Marnie,” Noah says.
“No, please, Noah. Tell me these fears you have, the ones you’ve just discovered in yourself on the day you got married to me.”
He scowls. “It’s the tyranny of lawn mowers, not the things themselves,” he says. “And it’s not just the lawn mowers. I don’t want any of it: the lawn, the household budgets, the electric bill, the daily conversation that goes: ‘How was your day, no, how was your day? Did you have a good day?’ I can’t do it.”
“The tyranny of lawn mowers and being asked, ‘How was your day,’” I say slowly. “You can’t do ‘How was your day.’” The sky is full of birds. Parrots are screaming around us.
You are going to be okay, Marnie.
He shrugs and looks off into the distance, ruggedly handsome and bored with me.
A memory swims up in my head of the time last year when he went with me to Florida to meet my parents. My mother, a firm believer in the Getting to a Man’s Heart through His Stomach theory of romance, insisted on cooking us dinner. We all sat there in my mom’s little suburban kitchen with the rooster wallpaper and the rooster salt-and-pepper shakers, and she made us her sign
ature dish, which my father nicknamed Millie’s Magnificent Masterpiece Meatloaf, so named because she melts whole chunks of two different kinds of cheese into the meat, and then she serves it, glistening with ketchup poured over the top. Ketchup! Only the finest for the MacGraws.
For as long as I can remember, Thursday has always been meatloaf night, and every single week my father would rub his hands together in great anticipation and exclaim as though it were Thanksgiving and Christmas and the Fourth of July all at once. And here they were, sharing this with my new boyfriend. And they were so happy about it! It broke my heart, all this optimism they had for us, when I could see, with paralyzing shame, that this handsome, bright-eyed boyfriend of mine, sitting there in their modest little three-bedroom ranch, was watching them with a little dazed half smile on his face. I knew that look: he was fashioning this whole incident into a comedy routine he’d entertain people with later. Like, really, dude, ketchup on the top? he’d say. Please tell me you’re not really going to use two kinds of cheese inside! It’s too, too extravagant for words!
He doesn’t get domestic life, the way you can be glad for such stupid, simple things. That you can bicker and fight your way through marriage, and then Thursday night meatloaf comes to save you.
I should have known then. I should have broken up with him right then.
I wish to hell I had.
“Okay, look, I’ve done something kind of awful,” he says finally. He puts his hand up to shade his eyes. “I didn’t tell you, but on a lark I applied for a fellowship to go to Africa with Whipple. I never thought I’d get it, and to tell you the truth, I forgot all about it. But then, lo and behold, it came through. I found out a week before the wedding.” He picks up a stick and pokes at the ground, drawing circles in the soft dirt. My ears are ringing from all the jungle noises around us.
“‘Lo and behold,’” I say, mocking him. “Lo and behold, you happened to apply for a fellowship. On a lark.”
He stabs the dirt with the end of the stick.
“What the fuck, Noah?”
“I know. I shouldn’t have done it.”
“No! If this is something you really wanted, then of course you should have done it. That’s when you’re supposed to talk about it. That’s when you say to your fiancée, the person you’re going to share your life with, ‘Hey, there’s something I might like to do. What do you think?’ You’re supposed to communicate with me.”
“We shouldn’t have gotten married.”
“Why does it mean we can’t be married? You think celibacy is a requirement for going to Africa?”
It hits me then, the true meaning of what he’s saying: that the fact that he would on impulse apply for a fellowship without even telling me means that I am completely peripheral to his life. That’s what this is. He was always so proud of the way we never fight. But maybe if you never fight, it only means you don’t care enough.
I try again. “What if—what if I come and join you? What if we both do this together? You’ll see,” I say. “I can be adventurous, too.” Oh God, I’m being so pathetic. A monkey swings down from a vine and I think he’s going to smack me, but he only wants my granola bar, so I let him take it.
Noah clears his throat and tells me he doesn’t want any of the life we’d planned: not the house in the suburbs, the three children, our teaching careers. None of it.
“I thought I could do it,” he says. “Really I did. I love you, but—”
“Just shut up, please. If there is any worse sentence than the one that starts, ‘I love you, but—’ then I don’t know what it is.”
“You’re right,” he says. “I’m sorry.”
“And stop saying you’re sorry! God! Don’t say you love me, and don’t say you’re sorry. You fucking betrayed me, and you know it! How long have you known this? How long, Noah? You knew all along through all the wedding planning that you didn’t want to do this, and yet you just stood by and let the whole wedding thing happen! You let me invite all those people and you kept us all waiting even though you’d known for weeks you couldn’t do this! What is wrong with you?”
“I wanted—”
“Don’t you dare talk to me about anything you wanted! You lied to me, and embarrassed me, and now you’re leaving me to go off on some fantasy trip that just came up! And when I say I love you and I’ll support you, you turn me away! Like I’m just some object you’re tossing out of the window! Some useless extra baggage!”
“You’re not just some—”
“I said, shut up! You don’t have the right to talk to me about what I am or what I’m not. Listen, you idiot, I’m willing to give my whole heart and soul to you, and work together on our dreams! We have to sacrifice! Nobody’s happy all the time! Look at my parents. They have a very successful, long marriage, but do you think they were happy every single day? No one is happy every single day. And work is called work because that’s what it is. That’s what you do!”
“No,” he says, and his eyes are shiny with sadness. “No, your parents definitely aren’t happy, and neither are mine. And that’s just the point. I’m not going to do that.”
“Fuck you,” I say.
He gives me a sad, knowing smile, and then he lifts his hand in farewell and walks away. Our surroundings have gone berserk, the heavy wet air filled with screeching and hollering, animals taking sides, flinging leaves and nuts at each other, raucously arguing, probably over the meaning of work versus love. I abruptly turn off the trail and go a different way down the mountain, and I walk furiously with my head down, not caring if I ever see the hotel again, or him, or the airplane that’s going to take me back to California.
I want to throw myself off the cliff into the ocean.
Oh, stop already. You’re going to be okay, a voice says.
I say back to it, I am never again going to be okay.
But it laughs and says again, No, you’re absolutely going to be okay. You have a big life coming. A big, gigantic heart song of a life.
And I say back to it: What the hell does that even mean?
He moves out as soon as we get back to our apartment in Burlingame, the place we have shared for six months. He feels it’s best that he stays with a friend because—get this—he feels too guilty to look at me across the room. He needs to punish himself for hurting me this way. I hate the way he’s almost getting off on all this suffering—how it makes him seem so heroic in his own head, the villain with the hangdog look, the guy who bows down and closes his eyes out of such sweet sorrow with his own bad self.
Before he leaves me for good, backpack and suitcases overflowing, he tells me about all the decisions he’s made without me. The one about how he and Whipple are flying to Africa in another month. Then the one about how he’s not going back to teaching. Ever.
He looks at me with his new tragic expression and says he’ll be in touch if I want him to be, which makes me laugh a high-pitched, maniacal laugh and fling the butter dish across the room. I think of how proud Natalie will be when she hears that I’m not putting up with being treated this way, that I am actually throwing crockery.
And then I start to cry, because I know that I am supremely unlovable in a very deep, unfixable way.
With great sadness, he picks up the pieces of the butter dish, sweeps up the shards, drops it all in the trash can. He tells me he’s paid his portion of the rent for the next three months so I can keep the apartment without having to take in a roommate. He even leaves me the recipe for his secret six-layer dip—the one with four kinds of melted cheese, red onion, and avocado, the dip that he never, ever would tell me how to prepare. I rip it up in front of him while making hyena noises. He flinches, and I get louder.
So this, this is what I’ve come to: being thrilled I can screech loudly enough to possibly scare him out of his mind.
SEVEN
MARNIE
Three weeks later, I come home from work to find a letter from an online divorce site. I drink two glasses of wine, turn our engagement p
icture toward the wall, and then I sign the papers that say I promise not to love him anymore.
Soon after comes a copy of the decree.
And just like that, I’m divorced.
I say things to myself that get me through each day: I loved him for two years; we got married in an ill-advised ceremony; we broke up; I am still sad. I will fold my laundry and get around to sending back the wedding gifts. I will buy coffee and cream and eat oatmeal and cranberries for breakfast.
I say: This is the poster on the wall. This is my kitchen table. This is my car key. I like coffee. It is Thursday.
Then I do what MacGraws do in times of great personal upheaval and grief: I go into full denial mode. I tell my emotions that they are now on stage-four lockdown, forbidden to show up in public.
I am, in fact, a denial warrior-queen, bouncing into the nursery school where I work every day, playing the part of the happy little fulfilled bride with a big smile on her face. I don’t tell anyone what has happened. I go in early and stay late. I smile so hard my face hurts sometimes. I think up approximately seven art projects for the children per day, projects that necessitate cutting up hundreds of little construction-paper shapes. As an added flourish, I make little books—one for each child, with stories in them of laughing cats and turtles that talk.
I could tell my boss, Sylvie, what happened, I suppose. Sylvie would be outraged for me, and she’d take me home with her, and she’d tell her husband, and they would comfort me, and I could sleep in their guest room until I’m healed up. Sylvie is the most motherly person I know. I could fall apart around her, and she would know how to put me back together again.
But I don’t tell her the first day, and that makes it harder to mention on the second day, and then impossible after that. Maybe if I don’t talk about it out loud, it will cease to be true.
Matchmaking for Beginners Page 6
