Matchmaking for Beginners

by Maddie Dawson

  “Yeah,” she says, punching me in the arm. “We’re not perfect, by any means, but we’re your city. You might as well save yourself some trouble and accept it now.”

  But Patrick, I think. I can’t tell her that part, that there’s a hole in my heart.

  FORTY-FOUR

  MARNIE

  As soon as I unlock the front door and walk into the house, I nearly have four kinds of heart attacks. There’s Noah standing there in the entry hall, holding a cardboard box. I let out a blood-curdling scream, and he jumps in the air.

  “WHAT THE HELL ARE YOU DOING?” (That’s me.)

  “WHAT THE HELL ARE YOU DOING?” (Not his most original moment.)

  We stare at each other. Then he says, “I came to get the rest of my great-aunt’s possessions. Now if you’ll just move out of my way, I have to take these to Paco’s before the UPS guy comes.”

  “Wait. Wait just a minute here. What makes you think it’s okay for you to do this?”

  He sighs. “My mother wants Blix’s clothes.”

  “Why? Why? What is she going to do with all this stuff? You’re just doing this to get back at me, is all. I did not talk your aunt into leaving me this building, I did not interfere with her will in any way, shape, or form—and why do you have to be instrumental in contesting a will that you know from Blix’s lawyer is legitimate—”

  He sighs again. “Listen. My family is freaked out. Okay? They know that you asked her for a spell, and they think that was tampering with the will. Or something. I actually can’t bring myself to pay attention.”

  “So what, I asked her for a spell? I missed you. I wanted you back. What does that prove?”

  He looks confused for a moment. “Fuck. I don’t know. Maybe she felt sorry for you and mad at me, and so she changed her whole will.”

  “That was her choice, not mine.”

  “Well, my mother wants the building, and my father has called his attorneys, and now they want all the evidence they can find, and also the contents of the house.”

  “No,” I say. “No. The contents of the house go with the house. You are not removing another thing.”

  “Look,” he says. “This is weird, okay? I couldn’t give a crap about this house or the will or any of it. I don’t even care if my parents get it, or you get it, or it falls into the sea, frankly. But my mom is on her high horse. She—well, if we had all day, I could tell you the whole story, but it’s pointless and stupid, and—”

  “I happen to have all day.”

  He lets out one of his huge sighs again, and gives me one of his guilty-conscience looks, and we go into the kitchen. I get the feeling somehow that he wants to tell me the whole story, to get it off his chest.

  He grabs a beer from the fridge and admires the shininess of the turkey-fat–sparkling floor, and he actually laughs about that a little. Ha ha—wasn’t that something—you and your fiancé, and the way the turkey skidded across the room just at the moment Jeremy realized you’d been living with me!

  “Hilarious,” I say.

  I’m still so mad at him, but fascinated by him, too, in the way that I always have been and probably always will be—and we sit down at the scarred old table, and he drums his fingers on the table and then he begins, “So Blix was the one who was supposed to get my family’s mansion, the one that got passed down through the generations, oldest daughter to oldest daughter. But she got cut out of the will after what were probably high-level shenanigans, knowing my parents, and—well, whatever. My mom’s mom ended up with the house instead.”

  After that start, he has to get up and pace around, and the story is like something from some Southern Gothic network TV miniseries. It all started back with robber barons and war heroes and wills and pistols at dawn—but basically the part that meant something was that Blix got cheated out of the family mansion, and Noah knows that his mother has always been squirrelly (his word) about Blix, maybe because she feels guilty for what they did. She was always proclaiming how, in her own defense, she took much better care of the house than Blix would have—and how she was so much more connected to the community, and had so many charitable causes.

  But meanwhile Blix traveled around the world and then went off to Brooklyn, of course, and the family watched with consternation as she took up with all those alternative things: “magic and mayhem,” Wendy called it.

  “She would never admit this, but I think she was kind of worried that Blix was going to do voodoo on her or something. Get the house back, or expose her. And so now that Blix has died—and this is strictly my theory—my mom is desperate to get Blix’s papers and find out what she was up to all those years. And if she has to, she’ll prove that Blix was never in her right mind, and therefore, for that to happen, you should be cut out of the will.”

  “Speechless,” I say. “I am utterly speechless.”

  “Yeah. It’s ugly. This is why I never wanted to have much to do with my parents. My dad wanted me to go into business, learn all the ropes of his firm—but nope. I picked teaching school. And going to Africa. And now I just want to do more of that. I’m scheduled to leave the country next week. Going to Bali this time.”

  “To Bali? Aren’t you in school?”

  He grins. “Actually . . . ah . . . that would be a no.”

  “But you said that was why you wanted to stay here—” I see his face. “No? You were never taking classes?”

  “No. I told you that so I could stay. I didn’t have anything else going, and besides, I kind of was intrigued by you. You know. You’re hot. Aaaand . . . well, my mom wanted me to keep an eye on what was going on here.”

  “Wow.” I sit back in my chair. “Okay, so let me get this straight. So basically you’re dismantling this house to help your mom get it away from me, then? You have no stake in it.”

  “Pretty much.” He ducks his head. “Sorry.”

  “Well, then why don’t you stop? Why don’t you right now just this minute stop it?”

  “I would. I really would. But you don’t know my mom. She’s relentless. She talks to me every day, getting more and more worked up.” He gives me a guilty little smile. “Also, I’ve already sent her a whole bunch of boxes of Blix’s stuff. Including—and I’m sorry about this, Marnie, I really am—I sent her that letter Blix wrote to you. And her book of spells.”

  I think for a moment of telling him the truth, that those things are never, ever going to make it to Virginia. But I decide not to.

  Noah is, among other things, an ex-husband. An opportunist. A havoc wreaker. A double agent. The best lover I’ve ever had. And I am so ready to be rid of him forever.

  I decide right that minute that if he heads out to Bali, Wendy Spinnaker can always just wonder what exactly her aunt’s wacky career in magic consisted of, and why nothing ever turned up in those boxes. She can text him over and over again while he’s lying on the beach somewhere, and he can turn over on his towel, adjust his sunglasses, take another sip of his mai tai or whatever, and gaze out at the azure sky.

  But he’ll never be able to tell her for sure what happened, because he’ll never know.

  FORTY-FIVE

  MARNIE

  Blix’s nefarious magic career is still on my back patio. Just so you know.

  Shall I put on the tinfoil hat and come down and tackle it?

  Ahem. I believe, if you will check your popular culture references, tinfoil hats only protect you from electromagnetic waves and therefore cannot have any effect on magic spells.

  Oh.

  Still, if you have one, bring it. It might look cute.

  Should I bring dinner? I bet Roy would like a chicken.

  I’m making popovers. I’ve decided to be the Reigning Prince of Popovers.

  A tinfoil crown is definitely in order then.

  Oh, we are so clever, aren’t we? Tinfoil hats and well-punctuated text messages—that’s us. So funny and chaste and clever and innocent. And it is December second, and he is leaving on December fifteenth, and that will
be that.

  I sit at my table with aluminum foil and a pair of scissors and a cardboard cutout of a crown. What am I doing? Why, making him a crown, of course. To make him smile. To keep up the joke, to make one of our last evenings together fun and companionable.

  So he’ll think as he’s driving cross-country: Yes, we had such fun, she and I.

  Fun, fun, fun.

  I slam the scissors down on the table and stand up. Oh my God. I want him. I want to unwrap him, press my head against his chest. I want his mouth grazing my nipple. I want to be in his bed with him again, but I want to be on top of him. I want him to kiss me and not look at me like I’m some kind of monster that he can’t give in to.

  I want Patrick. I want him, I want him, I want him, I want him.

  I look around the kitchen. The sky is darkening outside already, the lights of the skyline shining against the thick gray clouds of night. I walk around the room, my arms folded tight across my chest, my heart beating so fast.

  I want him.

  When I squint, I see them. The sparkles.

  Oh my goodness, I see the sparkles again. They’re back.

  If I had the spell book from his patio, maybe I could figure out if there’s a little bit of magic that might work on him. On us, before the time runs out.

  Then I remember something. The first night I met her, she gave me a scarf when I was leaving. And it’s hanging in the closet. I saw it the other day when I was looking at everything. Somehow it’s always seemed too fancy for me.

  Like it would have been cheating to wear Blix’s essence around my neck that way. But now tonight, we need the big guns.

  It goes all wrong from the moment I get there. I’m too shy or too forward or too tense. I forget to bring the chicken, and when I offer to go get one at Paco’s, Patrick says not to bother. And I’m wearing a dress, which I see is ridiculous, because you can’t unpack boxes in a dress—you can’t search through magical artifacts when you’re dressed like you wanted to be out at dinner or at a movie instead.

  And why did you do it? Because you wanted to look beautiful.

  I’m wearing the best thing in my closet, the black-striped dress with the leggings. The dress that shows a bit of cleavage. Patrick might appreciate the cleavage, and he could peel off the leggings—that’s what I was thinking, Your Honor. I plead guilty to lustful thoughts while getting dressed.

  But now I am here, and there is no chicken, and the popovers are just popovers—flour and milk and eggs and air. And he is in a mood—too jokey, too something. Brittle, somehow. Guarded.

  I tell him about Noah and the story of Blix being in line to inherit the family mansion but then having it stolen from her, and I make it all dramatic—too dramatic—and he asks questions I can’t answer. And I’m acting all flustered and he looks at me funny, and it’s probably written all over my face: Dude, I want you.

  But we can’t. He won’t.

  We sit on the floor and go through the boxes, and there’s really nothing to it. The book of spells is at the bottom of a box that contains Blix’s muumuus and caftans, the dress she wore to my wedding, some fabulous scarves and coats. I take out the book and open it, and I say, “Look at all this magic! It makes me feel like she’s right here when I see it.”

  He suddenly gets up and goes over to the sink and starts washing dishes.

  “What’s wrong?” I say.

  “Nothing.”

  “Is it the Blix stuff?”

  He hesitates, bites his lip. Puts a cup in the dish drainer. “It’s the anniversary of the fire.”

  “Oh. Oh, I’m so sorry.”

  “Yeah, I’m not fit for company. I’m sorry. I should be by myself.”

  I go over to the sink and I reach over and touch him, and to my surprise, he doesn’t pull away. I touch his arm and then his hand, where the scars are. I take his hand out of the soapy water. Slowly I run my finger along a ridge of scar tissue. He lets me.

  “It wasn’t your fault, you know,” I say. “You couldn’t have changed it.”

  When he speaks, his voice is ragged, and he pulls his arm away from me. “Yeah, well. If it hadn’t been for those ten seconds . . . do you see that if somehow those ten seconds didn’t happen, everything would have been different? Ten seconds, and the world doesn’t have any oxygen left for me. It’s like the color blue is missing or something, everything good drained away. I can’t—I don’t feel anything.”

  “Oh, Patrick.”

  “My life—you really don’t know me. You don’t see that my life is a before and after, and that I have to live in the shadows.”

  “Wait a minute,” I say. “I know what’s going on here.”

  “And what is that?” He closes his eyes. “Not enough magic?”

  “No. You are feeling again. You’re seeing there’s a bridge to healing, and you’re not sure you want to cross it. You might get hurt again. You can stay on the planet of My Lover Died in the Fire as long as you want, but eventually I think you’re going to want some company there. Because you survived the fire. And you can heal from this. I think—and I could be wrong about this, so don’t get mad—but I think you really can do art again.”

  He’s staring at me. Now I have done it. I’ve gone too far. “Did you really say that? That I’m on the planet of My Lover Died in the Fire?”

  “I believe I did.”

  “Well, thank you very much for that image, but I’m not going to do art again. I’m going to planet Leave Me the Fuck Alone, Wyoming, and I’m going to walk along the plains by myself and watch television with my sister.”

  “Um, giving up.”

  “Call it whatever you like.”

  “I do call it giving up, because, Patrick, I have this unshakable idea about you, which is based on knowing that when the worst thing that ever happened to you happened, you didn’t run away from it. You ran toward that fire. And that man isn’t going to get away with walking alone on the plains and watching television with his sister. You’re healing right now. Don’t you see that? This is probably like when those horrible burn wounds were healing, and they hurt like hell. This is what your spirit is doing right now, too. But then maybe things will get better, one angstrom unit at a time. You can get your life back.”

  He turns off the water. “Shut the fuck up,” he says. But he is smiling in a weird way.

  “I honestly think you do not want to give up.”

  He closes his eyes then, like everything just hurts too much. I go over and take Blix’s journal and books and my letter out of the boxes, and then I seal them back up with the packing tape. And then I do the bravest/stupidest thing I’ve ever done, which is tell Patrick that I love him, and that no matter what he thinks, it’s not pity and it’s not any of those other lesser values. It’s love, love, love.

  I even say it loudly: “Love, love, love.”

  And he does not respond, because he is lost beyond my reach. He has traveled as far as he can go, and he didn’t get to where I’m standing.

  I’ve watched enough dramatic movies to know that there’s nothing to be done. Taking off my clothes wouldn’t help, begging won’t help, even throwing plates or singing or starting to make out with him. Nothing I can think of will help. Not magic, not making him laugh, not feeding him a popover one morsel at a time.

  So, while I still have one shred of pride left, I go home.

  Because the wisdom that William Sullivan doesn’t know is the thing I remember best: When all is lost, the Law of Giving Up will save you every time. But it only works if you’re really, really giving up.

  And I am.

  Anne Tyrone calls me later that night and says she has somebody who wants to come look at the building tomorrow, and I say bring it on.

  I have officially given up, and now Blix’s place will sell, and I will leave.

  FORTY-SIX

  MARNIE

  Brooklyn, in a show-offy mood, has its first snowfall on the fifteenth. It starts snowing before the sun comes up, and by the time I
get up, the world has turned white outside. Five inches have already fallen, and the schools are closed, much to Sammy’s delight. The mayor thinks that people should stay home if they possibly can, because this isn’t going to stop anytime soon.

  “The mayor never says that!” Sammy tells me. “Well, maybe two times in my lifetime is all. Or three times. Maybe five. Or one. But it is a big deal. Trust me on that.” He is following me around the kitchen while his parents sleep. “I mean, we have snow days. Sometimes. Not often, but we have them. But a snow day when my mom and dad don’t have to work—that never happens. Hardly ever.”

  “Sammy, do you think you’d like some oatmeal, or would you like pancakes?”

  “Oooh, pancakes,” he says. “Can we really have pancakes? I never get pancakes on a weekday. That’s because there’s never enough time. I should call my mom to come over. She loves pancakes. I wonder why my parents are sleeping so late.”

  “It’s not late. It’s only eight o’clock,” I say.

  “Maybe I’ll go tell them we’re having a great breakfast over here.”

  “No, let’s let them sleep,” I say.

  “But why are they so tired?”

  “I don’t know. But I have a firm belief in letting tired parents sleep. My own parents used to take naps sometimes. In the middle of the day. My sister and I had to leave them alone.”

  “Well, you know what that probably was, don’t you?” he says.

  “Do you like butter and syrup or butter and powdered sugar?” I say.

  “They were doing their taxes, I bet,” he says. “My parents told me that they need a lot of peace and quiet to do their taxes. So when they would take naps in the middle of the day, that’s what they were doing.” Then his face breaks out in a big grin. “Can I tell you something? Promise you won’t tell anybody?”

  “Okay,” I say.

  “Two things, really. The first is that I know about sex,” he whispers. “My mom told me all about it.”