“Ha!”
He’s gazing at me like he’s seeing me for the first time. I sip the beer he’s handed me, and then I say I’m going to see if Jessica’s around, and then he says that we never actually made it to that burger bar the other night, and why don’t we grab a bite to eat now, and the truth is, I’m a little bit hungry, and I can’t think of a good reason why not, and so we walk there. I keep meaning to ask him when exactly he might move out of the house now that he knows it’s not going to be his. Because surely that’s his plan. But the conversation is instead going all over the place—Whipple and Africa and playing music and what living in Brooklyn is really like—and I never quite get around to it.
Okay, I know this is shallow of me, but all my nerve endings and I had kind of forgotten what it’s like to be with a man who is so handsome that everyone stops and looks at him. It’s so unfair. Did separating from me and going to Africa have to actually improve his looks? And while we’re at it, at what age will looks cease to matter to me?
But, well, here we are—me and my nerves and him—and we’re laughing and talking, and he’s holding court, telling his magnificent stories and being the life of the party. And every now and then his eyes meet mine and he smiles, and I dig down into whatever sanity and strength I possess, and I say to myself, Not this time.
And when we walk home, with him smiling and taking my arm and laughing about the people in the bar and being as charming and engaging as Noah can ever be, I hold myself very tightly together. I let my footfalls tap out the rhythm as I walk: Not. This. Time. Not. This. Time.
And later, lying there alone in the dark, I resolve that tomorrow I will tell him he has to leave.
The next morning I wake up to a knock at my bedroom door.
“Please. Go away,” I say from the mound of pillows and covers.
“That is not a nice way to talk to a man who is bringing you breakfast.”
“Um, thank you anyway, but I don’t eat breakfast.”
“What? It’s the most important meal of the day,” he says. “And also I made my specialty—German pancakes.”
He pushes the door open. “Come on, I know you, and I am not buying the fact that you don’t want at least two bites of a perfect German pancake! Look at it!”
Making German pancakes was his specialty back when we were together. They’re thick wondrous concoctions with powdered sugar. Irresistible. Now he’s bringing them on a tray with coffee on the side. Bacon. A folded napkin. He’s a rich guy, the son of a woman who makes Welsh rarebit, so he has always been all about the presentation.
His face is flushed from all the effort he’s gone to.
“I thought you might like a reminder of happier times. That’s all. It’s just breakfast. If you really want me to, I’ll go away.”
“It’s okay,” I say grouchily.
“Scoot over. I’m joining you.” He stands there while I contemplate whether to move or not. Then he says, “If you don’t mind.”
So I haul myself over to the other side of the bed, and he sits down and puts the tray down between us. I tuck my feet under and arrange the covers around me. This is not good.
“Um, why are you doing this?” I ask him. The pancakes really are perfect—round and golden brown, with melted butter oozing across the top. And the bacon is how I like it—snappable. My stomach does a traitorously appreciative growl.
“Because this is my way of saying I’m sorry. I’m asking for pancake absolution. Aaaaand . . . well, I also want to ask a favor.”
“What?”
He grins at me. “Such a tone of voice! It’s just that I kind of need to stay here, so just hear me out, if you please. I promise I will be a good roommate, and I’ll behave myself and not throw wild parties. I’ll make pancakes and I’ll clean up. And fix faucet leaks. You know. That sort of thing. I’ll even put the toilet seat down ninety-five percent of the time, which is something I have never been successful at before.”
“No, Noah. That’s an absurd idea. We can’t live in the same house. It won’t work. You need to go.”
“But I don’t have anywhere to go,” he says. His eyes are twinkling, like he knows how to make himself adorable. “Come on, Marnie. We’re cool.”
“Call your family. Go back to Virginia and live with them, like I had to do with my family. Do whatever your people do when they run out of money, if that’s ever happened to any of them. But staying here is not an option. You know it won’t work.”
“I can’t call them. I really screwed up in Africa, and they’re pissed.” He starts stroking my arm.
I pull it away. “So teach. You have a teaching certificate.”
“I’m not licensed here. And I’m burned out. I don’t want to teach. Please, Marnie. I started some classes in September, and I intend to stay here while I finish them.”
I don’t say anything.
“Okay, hear me out. Look at it this way. This is a massive social experiment, okay? No, no. Don’t roll your eyes. Listen! We were good friends before we were lovers, and we were lovers for a while before we moved in together and decided to get married. And then I screwed up royally, bigger than I’ve ever screwed up in my whole life. And clearly, because of that screwup, we’re never going to be together together again. You’ve got somebody else now, and I respect that. So what if we just have this time in Brooklyn, in my great-aunt’s house? Just this little slice of time while you wait to inherit this place for real. We’ll be nice to each other. We’ll be friends again, repair all the holes in our relationship. And then—well, when we’re old and gray and decrepit and married a hundred years to other people, maybe we’ll look back and say, ‘Wow, that was such a cool thing we did, living together nicely even though we were divorced and had all that baggage.’ It can be like a spiritual practice—both of us here, in Blix’s house. I think she’d think this was really cool of us to do. Closure.”
“I don’t know, I don’t know.” I can’t look him in the eye. I go to the bathroom and pee, and then I stare at my reflection in the cracked, mottled, wavy bathroom mirror.
He calls through the door: “Did I mention that I’ll make pancakes? And I’m also throwing in the fact that I’ll kill all the spiders.”
“There are no spiders!” I call to him, but I have lost. I know I will say yes. I just wish I knew for sure why I’m saying yes. Is it to please him? Or to keep from being alone? Or is he right, that we really could bring some closure to our relationship?
And then I know for sure what it is.
I am not really done with him.
The place where he lives in my heart—well, he’s still in there. Still rattling around. And it was okay as long as I wasn’t seeing him. I had paved over so many emotions. And now I really, really do need to get over him.
So maybe this will do it.
After too much time has passed, I go back into the bedroom. “All right. You can stay. But, Noah, I hate this. Really. Whether you think it’s a good thing or not, I am seeing someone else. Somebody nice who’s waiting for me—”
“I know, I know,” he says. “Believe me, I respect that. I do.”
“Noah. Don’t.”
“No funny business, no regrets. Just us.”
“Okay,” I say, and he does a fist pump in the air and then he comes over and kisses me, a chaste kiss on the cheek. But there’s a history behind that kiss, and we both know we could tumble right into our old story. He gives me a knowing glance and then picks up the tray with the dishes, and he takes his arrogance and his kisses and his magnetism and leaves, trailing a little whiff of possibility. I hear him walk up the stairs to the kitchen, hear him put the dishes in the sink, and only then do I exhale, and then collapse on the bed and find myself in tears.
I’m not sure what I’m crying for, to tell you the truth. Maybe I’m crying because there’s something in me that can’t seem to quit him, or maybe at last I’m crying for Blix who, despite how everybody talks about her in the present tense, really is dead. And I’m
crying because the legacy she left me—this house, all these characters, this life—is something I would never have chosen and don’t intend to keep.
That’s it. I’m crying for Blix’s mistake. She was so wrong about me.
TWENTY-SEVEN
MARNIE
Later that day, when Noah has gone out, Lola brings over brownies, cookies, two pumpkins, and a pair of hand-knit socks with hearts on them. “The socks are because it’s going to get cold here, and the pumpkins are because I thought we should decorate them,” she says. “The brownies and cookies are self-explanatory.” She smiles at me, and I see that she has smiling gray eyes that crinkle up nicely, like they are nested in a crisscross of lines. Grandmotherly, sweet pink skin topped by a haze of gray cottony hair. “Blix and I always did pumpkins together,” she is saying. “Kids will come for Halloween, you know. And by kids, I mean hipsters and their kids. Very entertaining.”
I blink. Halloween is still weeks away! Why are we doing these now?
Lola smiles and heads past me, upstairs toward the kitchen. “So how are you settling in?” she calls over her shoulder. “It’s a fine place to live, isn’t it? So Blix!” She looks around, smiling brightly, like this house is an old friend she’s needed to see.
“I’m so glad you’re here,” I say when we’re both in the kitchen, and Lola is taking off her gray cape that matches her eyes, and draping it over one of the kitchen chairs. The way she looks around the kitchen makes it obvious that it belongs much more to her than to me.
“Ah!” she says and holds her arms straight out, as if she could hug the whole room. “Wow, so she’s still here, isn’t she? I feel her everywhere around!”
“I’ll put some tea on,” I say.
“And then let’s get to work on these pumpkins. Want to?”
She’s the one who goes and gets the kettle out of the cabinet and fills it with water and sets it down on the back burner. “So tell me about Monday. I guess you got the news?”
“The news? Oh, you mean the three-months thing.”
She looks at me closely. “Yes, of course that. Were you surprised? Believe me, this three-months thing was not my idea. I told Blix that was crazy. I told her that you already have your own life somewhere else. And I said that when you give somebody a house, you either just give it to them or you don’t. You don’t try to give them a whole life in the bargain. But there wasn’t any reasoning with her. I guess you know that by now.” She opens a drawer and gets out what look to be some alarmingly sharp carving knives and brings them over to the table.
“Lola,” I say quietly. “You get that I didn’t really know Blix, right? I’ve had maybe three conversations with her in my whole life. And then she goes and does this. I don’t know what to think. Noah was positive the place should go to him and his family, and I can’t say I disagree with him.”
Her face darkens, and she picks up a knife and waves it around in the air. “No! Blix would not want to hear anything about that! She calls Noah an unevolved scoundrel—and trust me on this, she did not want him to end up with this place—and I’ve gotta tell you, somewhere, in whatever realm she’s in, she knows you’re letting him stay here now, and she’ll probably be all up in things trying to get you to change your mind. If there’s any way she can reach you from the afterlife, that is, and I wouldn’t put it past her.”
“Wait,” I say. “Is it because he wanted a divorce? Because—”
“No. It was all long-ago stuff—her entire family has always been so condescending, ever since her father died. He was her champion,” she says. “Blix was pure love, and they couldn’t see that. They treated her with such disrespect, and finally she got fed up with it. No way was she going to leave them her house!”
She hands me a knife. “Are you good at this? I’ve never done it without Blix, so I’m just faking it. But the main thing is, Blix says she knows you. She’s unexplainable, always doing the thing you’d least expect. I say to her, ‘Blix, nobody’s going to benefit when you go around trying to remake somebody’s whole life for them without their permission,’ and then she says, ‘I have my reasons for what I do.’ I feel like my whole thirty-something years with her has been and still is one big argument. In between the fun, of course.”
“Do you know you always talk about Blix in the present tense?”
“That’s because she’s right here with us. I know you feel it, too.”
I slice into one of the pumpkins, take off the stem, and lay it on the table. I haven’t done this since I was a kid, but I used to love cutting designs into the pumpkins. My mother was always telling me to cut out triangle eyes and mouths, but I liked doing spirals and curlicues.
“Know what I’m going to miss?” Lola says after a while. “It sounds crazy, but it’s the dinner parties. Blix and Houndy gave the best—”
“Houndy, the lobsterman? What happened to him?”
“He was her true love. They were together for over twenty years, but then in the summer, she was giving a party to say good-bye to everybody because she knew she was going to die soon, and Houndy died right at the party. Dropped dead just like that.” She takes off her glasses and wipes at her eyes with a napkin.
“Oh!”
“Yeah, it was quite a shock to her. To all of us. I think he just couldn’t face the idea of life without her, so he went first. They were something together. Only people I ever knew whose priority was just to be happy, no matter what. Most people don’t have the knack for that day in and day out, you know. But they did. They danced. They gave dinner parties. Oh my goodness, those parties! Blix was a marvelous cook, but she was even better at knowing who needed to be there to share it with her. She’d just meet people on the street and become fast friends. They had musicians and poets and homeless people and shopkeepers. People would come again and again.” Her eyes are shining with tears. She gets up to pour the tea into the cups and brings them over to the table.
“And they’d do just about anything,” she says. “That was the thing that struck me the most. Never thought of how old they were, or if they were sick. They had all the usual aches and pains, and Blix, as it turned out, had that tumor. And yet she’s out there in the ocean, skinny-dipping, even in her eighties! Traveling all over. Then there was the year she taught herself the harmonica and she’d go to bars and play it. To bars! Right there with the young people, the hipsters, like she was one of them. And it wasn’t like she was just pulling some cute old-lady routine. She fixed them up with their partners and gave them advice and dragged them home with her. Bought them presents. And Houndy—oh, that Houndy—he gave out lobsters like they were nothing more than old rocks he’d happened to find on the beach.”
“I’d love to be like that.”
She puts her hands in her lap and looks wistfully at me. “You know, when you watch people like that live, you start to realize that the rest of us are just counting off the days until we die. They were the experts at life.”
I slice a paisley shape into the center of my pumpkin. “She rescued me at Noah’s parents’ house at Christmas. I made kind of an idiot of myself, and she just swooped in and made everything all right for me. Got me laughing. Telling me outrageous stories, making me laugh.”
Lola’s face scrunches up while she works on the eyes for her pumpkin. She does standard-issue jack-o’-lantern triangle eyes. “Oh, yes! I heard all about that. She was so excited when she came back. She was just stunned to find you. She told me how you reminded her so much of herself at your age.” She tilts her head at me like she’s trying to see if I’m anything like Blix, which I know I’m not. “I think she came home full of ideas about you.”
“But look at me, Lola! You can see that I am nothing like her! Nothing! She got it all wrong about me. I’m the least . . . able person that I know. I’m not even brave. Not the tiniest bit brave.” I fling my arm out and knock over my cup of tea, and have to run to the sink for a sponge to wipe it all up.
Lola moves the newspapers aside and says, �
�None of that matters to Blix. I’m her best friend, but she’s miles ahead of me. For God’s sake, I was a secretary for the board of education for forty-two years, a place Blix wouldn’t have put up with for one red-hot minute. And”—she lowers her voice and leans toward me—“you know how many men I’ve slept with in my life? Exactly one! The man I was married to for forty-seven years—a trustee for the railroad. I didn’t dance in the streets. I didn’t go skinny-dipping, and if I had, believe me, the cops would have showed up and hauled me away. We just have to trust what Blix sees in us, maybe.” Then her expression changes. “Also, aren’t you a matchmaker? She told me you’re a matchmaker.”
“I don’t know. Am I? I mean, sometimes I do sort of see when people should be together. But it’s not—I don’t really know how to make it happen, you know. I just know that it should happen.”
Lola is smiling. “I think one of the things you might want to be prepared for is that you’re not going to get to stay ordinary. She said you have a big life ahead of you.”
I grimace. “Yeah, she told me that, too. But I’m afraid there are things she didn’t know about me. I mean, I’m appreciative and all about getting the house, but I can’t stay here,” I say to her. “I’ve gotten involved with my old high school boyfriend. I’m actually scheduled to get married when I go back home. He’s a physical therapist with a practice in Florida, and we’ve got this whole life that we’re planning on. Blix didn’t know that was happening, you see . . .”
Lola is still smiling her unwavering smile and nodding up and down like nothing I’m saying makes one bit of difference.
“By the way,” she says, as if she’s just been told to say this. “Have you met Patrick? You kind of need to go see Patrick.”
I would like to meet Patrick, but Patrick famously does not come outside. So the next day I bake some cookies and go downstairs and knock on his door.
Forever passes and there is only silence from inside. Finally I type to him:
Matchmaking for Beginners Page 20
