Matchmaking for Beginners
Page 55

“You’ve gone to some trouble,” I say. “Thank you.”
“Well, it’s the least I can do for a fellow trooper.” He smiles and lifts his glass in a toast. “To Blix, away from us for two long months now.”
I look closely at him, but he’s holding his emotions in check. Probably for my sake.
“To Blix! Who is still watching over us,” I say.
“And also I have some news for you. I’m moving. I wanted to tell you in person.”
“You’re moving!” I put my fork down.
“You sound shocked.”
“Well, I guess I am shocked. I never meant to disrupt your life! And also—I haven’t even talked to a real estate agent yet, so who knows if this place is even going to sell? And when I go back, I was thinking I could rent out Blix’s place, and you and Jessica could stay on. Also, even if it did sell, you could probably negotiate staying—”
“No,” he says. “Thank you but no.”
“May I ask—without you getting mad at me—what you’re going to do?”
“Yes. I’m going to my sister’s in Wyoming.”
“Wyoming?!”
“Wyoming. The wilderness. My sister lives in a town with a population of twenty-eight. That’s what it says on the sign year after year. So obviously when somebody dies, somebody else in town has to step up and reproduce. It’s the law of the land.”
“Can you really be happy there? I mean, with no people around?”
He laughs. “Have you noticed that I don’t have a lot of people around already? Frankly, I’m worried that twenty-eight people are going to be too much for me. I’m counting on my sister to fend off the hordes.”
“Patrick.”
“Marnie.”
“Can you tell me . . . what happened to you? How . . . ?”
He looks surprised. He refills our glasses, which is really just to give him an excuse not to look at me, I think, because we both have plenty left. And then he says, slowly, “Ah, actually, no. I can’t.”
“Patrick, I—”
“No. I don’t want to talk about it. Let’s talk about you. We covered my life at your last visit.” He looks up and smiles. His eyes are hard to read, maybe because of the scars that pull that right eye so taut, but I can see that he’s making an effort to look happy. God knows he probably wishes he could shift this back to a nice, light, polite conversation. “So here’s what I know about you. Let’s see. You were married to Noah for about two weeks, you met Blix at his family’s party, she went bonkers over you and decided to leave you her house. You, however, don’t really want her house. And so you’re moving back to Florida, but you feel guilty. Unnecessarily guilty, I should add.”
“Yes. Those are my facts.”
“And, if I may ask, what are you doing in Florida that is so much more compelling than Brooklyn, New York? Which you seem to have taken to, I might add.”
“Well.” I feel my mouth getting dry. “It’s kind of hard to explain. But at the time I inherited this house, I had actually only just settled in Florida, and I had—well, if you want to know the real truth, I have this sort of fiancé there.”
“What?” He raises his eyebrows, as best he can. He’s trying not to laugh. “What, may I ask, is a sort of fiancé? Excuse me, but given the evidence around here, I’ve been under the, um, impression that you and Noah were back together and rekindling your . . .”
“No. We’re not. I mean, not really.”
“You are certainly an interesting one, aren’t you?” he says. He raises his glass and clinks it against mine. “To an interesting life!” I know then, by the look on his face, that he knows we sleep together. My bedroom is just above his main room. The sound travels downward, I’m sure. I feel my face grow warm.
“It’s not—” I say, and at the same time, he says, “No, really. You don’t have to explain anything to me. I know that life is complicated, believe me. These things—really, don’t be embarrassed.”
We go back to eating. I pick up my fork and spear a piece of chicken. My silverware clinks together. The Bach fugue has stopped for a moment, and in the huge silence that yawns before us, there is only the sound of me trying to rip some meat apart. I feel him looking at me.
At last I put down both the knife and the fork and square my shoulders.
“Okay, yes. God, this is awful to have to say out loud, but you’re right. Everything you’re thinking is right! I am cheating on someone, and he’s probably the nicest guy in the whole world, and I never thought I would do anything like that! I’m actually horrible and insensitive and incompetent at life, and oh my God, I’m having sex with my ex, who I don’t even love. And I don’t even mean to be doing it! It’s all a big mistake. And I don’t even know if that makes it worse or better, having sex with somebody by default.”
I am slightly aware that he says under his breath, “Really, I wasn’t . . . you don’t have to . . .”
But I am in this now, so I plow on, MacGraw-style.
“And my fiancé—he’s so trusting and nice, and yet—and yet, Patrick, can I tell you something I’ve never told anyone? He is so god-awful boring that sometimes it takes all of my willpower not to throw my phone into the nearest gutter just so I don’t have to hear him talking to me anymore. There.”
I stop, because Patrick is looking at me, and it looks, shockingly, like he’s suppressing a smile.
“Do you even know what I’m talking about? That level of boringness? He can go on and on about the way the cleaning service shampooed his office rug and how long it took them and how many guys they sent to do it and what the first guy said and then what the second guy said. And he can also talk until the sun comes up about highway routes! Highway routes, Patrick! And I’m supposed to love him, and I probably do, but he loves me so much more than I love him, and what’s so really terrible is that I broke his heart back in high school so I can’t do it again, even if it turns out that I can’t love him. Do you see? There’s a special kind of hell for people who break nice people’s hearts twice, don’t you think? And I know I don’t deserve him, and that just makes it worse somehow! Oh God, please stop looking at me! I don’t even know why I’m telling you this! I am not a good person, Patrick. I came here to Brooklyn scared out of my mind, but now I see that way deep down I was just hiding from my real life and hoping Brooklyn would show me an answer, and instead I’m stupider than ever—sleeping with my ex, who doesn’t love me and never loved me! Like that’s going to lead to anything good! Some experiment, he called it, in behavior for exes. We’re going to have closure.”
My voice breaks, and I make myself stop talking. I carefully set my napkin down on the table in the heavy silence that follows and put my head in my hands. What will he do when I start to sob? I can feel the tears, all right there—a big cry is organizing itself and is going to break all over both of us soon.
“Well,” he says at last. “Well. My goodness. I’m wondering if this night doesn’t call for whiskey instead of wine. This may be a Chivas Regal situation.” He gets up and goes over to the cabinet and brings down a bottle and two glasses. On his way back to the table, he grabs a box of tissues and puts it in front of me.
He hands me a glass of whiskey, and I stare at it because I don’t drink whiskey. But I take a sip anyway, and God, it’s the most terrible taste in the world, burning all the way down, but also warming me up, inch by inch. Who can drink this stuff? I take another sip and set my glass down. He’s downed all of his.
“You know what? I thought—when I came here—I thought Blix left me the house because maybe she wanted me to be with Noah. That she set this all up. That’s how crazy I am. Right after he left me, when I was desperately unhappy, I asked her once for a spell to get him back, and I thought maybe that was why she gave me the house, and why he was here. The spell.”
He clears his throat. “I have to say that I don’t think she wanted you to be with Noah.”