Matchmaking for Beginners
Page 26

He’s grown up to be a good-natured, good-looking man who takes care of his mom, and I’m suddenly so sorry I broke his heart, except that I think that we all do need to have our hearts broken at some point, and so maybe I actually did him a good service. It’s something we need to know about ourselves, how that heart breaks and grows back.
My own heart, given away to Noah, now stirs somewhere deep down, stretches, yawns, looks at its watch and rolls over, tries to go back to sleep. But it has one eye open, I notice.
In no time, over a glass of wine, we’ve covered our college years and our employment decisions (his good, mine questionable). And then, because this is what you do under these circumstances, we rehash our own breakup, casting it in a new, more philosophical, forgiving light.
After he razzes me for falling for Brad Whitaker, I say to him, “Did you ever think that maybe you could have tried harder to fight for me? Like, you at least could have said you cared about me. Maybe asked me not to date him.”
“Um, I was not equipped at seventeen to have that kind of conversation,” he says.
“Yeah, well, you treated me like I was just one of your buddies and I honestly had no idea you cared one way or the other.”
He smiles and his eyes hold mine a lot longer than necessary. “Didn’t you, really?” he says. “Yeah, I know I wasn’t any Prince Charming, more’s the pity. But on the other hand, I’m the one who gets to sit here with you tonight, while he’s some loser out in the world not spending time with you. So maybe the good guy triumphs in the end, you know?”
He is gazing at me so directly that I have to look away.
Then he says, “I’ve, um, heard through the grapevine that you’ve had something of a rough go. We don’t have to talk about it if you don’t want to, but . . .”
“Oh,” I say. “Well. Yeah. Pretty much your average stood-up-at-the-altar situation. Not really ideal.”
“Well, that certainly sucks.” He looks at me like he wants to hear what happened, and not just so he can gloat a little bit over my poor judgment.
So I go through the story—the long version, including the two years Noah and I were together, the engagement excitement, and then him showing up late to the wedding and our horrible talk in the meadow, blah blah blah, and then I tell him about the honeymoon and the screaming monkeys, because by now it’s becoming The Story I Tell about My Marriage, and it always gets a laugh as well as a sympathetic clucking, depending on how I tell it.
With him, I confess the part I hadn’t told anyone but Natalie—how I dismantled my wedding dress—because he is the only person who would understand something that bizarre and find it funny. Sure enough, he laughs in all the right places—and he does this thing that I now remember he used to do as a kid: he sort of wrinkles his nose and closes his eyes before he laughs. It’s just a little quirk, but seeing him still do it makes my heart glad.
And then things shift slightly. Jeremy is looking at me without having to look away. He says that this is a momentous day, because not only have we been present at the miracle of birth, but he’s also gotten to hear about a jerk who is perhaps even worse than the jerk I ditched him for senior year.
When he comes over to the couch where I’m sitting and puts his hand idly on my arm, I slide over closer, and it turns out that, thank God, he’s learned something about kissing in the intervening years because I realize that I haven’t been kissed in quite a while, and I need it badly.
It’s still a slightly cautious kiss around the edges, of course, because it’s Jeremy—and also because I have hurt him before, and so maybe he’s wisely holding something back, but I throw myself into it, kissing him as passionately as I can, holding nothing back, just to show him how it can be done, and then—my God, in no time at all, we’re breathless and shocked at the heat we’ve generated.
He looks at me in surprise, and I see his Adam’s apple bob up and down. He smells like aftershave, and my mind briefly wobbles, goes to the backseats of cars in high school, to the hot breath of boys and their heavy aroma of sex—was it Old Spice? Something else?
“So, listen,” he says roughly. “Will you . . . I mean I know it’s weird, with my mother upstairs sleeping, but we used to be good at sneaking around, and—”
“Yes,” I say. “I will.”
He pulls away, wide-eyed. “Yeah? Really?” He blinks, and I think maybe he’ll lose his nerve. But then he says, “Okay then! Okay. Let’s do it!” And he takes me upstairs to his boyhood room, and I swear, it’s like time has stood still up there, with his single bed still in there and his old posters of Harry Potter.
“Dude, your room!” I say. “My God, everything’s still the same except the Star Wars sheets. How in the world have you not changed anything?”
He looks around like he’s seeing it all for the first time, too, and runs his fingers through his hair. “I’m hopeless, I know. I guess I was thinking I’d move out sometime, so why get new stuff?” He looks very concerned. “It is weird in here, isn’t it? The question is, is it too weird for you? Deal-breakingly weird? Are we going to have to go to Kmart before we can make anything happen between us, do you think?”
“No,” I say. “No! But seriously? Harry Potter?”
“Everybody knows that Harry Potter is cool, and besides”—he wraps his arms around me and puts his face up against mine, whispering—“full disclosure: the Star Wars sheets are in the wash. They’ll be back on the bed next time you’re here.”
I’m laughing as I wrap my arms around his neck. “Well, I can certainly see that you don’t bring a lot of women home.”
He gets all serious. “No. Well . . . I guess I don’t. My mom being here and all.” He starts planting little kisses all along my jawline, down to my neck. With his right hand he unbuttons my blouse. “And can you please . . . could we both stop laughing so we can have sex? Am I going to have to go get a paper bag for you to breathe into, because hysterical laughter really ruins a seduction scene.”
“Oh, brother. Is this a seduction scene?”
“Well, I’m trying,” he says, and he reaches around to unfasten my bra, and I attempt to be serious, which makes me start laughing all over again. “Could you?” he says. “Stop?”
He walks me, backward, over to his bed, and we fall down on the mattress, with him on top of me, and he says, “I can’t believe how long I’ve waited for this,” and I say, “Me, too,” as you do. It’s just the slightest bit awkward, but I’m wondering if life would have been altogether different if we had done this long, long ago—that day way back when he didn’t buy condoms. If I could go back in time, I’d insist we try another drugstore.
This is what I’m thinking, lying there underneath him and looking into his eyes—and then, all of a sudden, I’m not thinking anymore at all. Sex has a way of taking over, all the body parts waking right up and taking their stations.
Afterward, I think how nice it is, lying there in his arms, as though no time at all has gone by. Press a button, and—bingo, you’re back to safety.
When I go home that evening, I realize that I, too, am sleeping in my girlhood room with the same posters and sheets. We’re not so different after all, he and I. The walking wounded, coming home to heal.
FIFTEEN
BLIX
So I don’t die.
I don’t die that night, and I don’t die the next week or the next after that. In fact, I have never had a larger appetite, or more of a piercing sense of what it means to be alive. All this feels like bonus time, like the days that get tacked on to a vacation trip because the airline cancels your flight.
There’s a kind of holiness to these days, this time, painful as it is.
Maybe I am meant to simply cruise along. Maybe there’s still something I am supposed to accomplish.
Or maybe when death came for me, Houndy jumped out in front and took his turn first. He’s a scoundrel, that one.
Ah, well, but if you believe, as I do, that there are no mistakes, then clearly I am supposed to be here.