A Happy Catastrophe

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A Happy Catastrophe Page 17

by Dawson, Maddie


  He closes his eyes, tries to think of what he can possibly say—thank you?—and when he opens them again, Marnie has left the room.

  She says these things, but she doesn’t get it, says Anneliese.

  Later, he lies in bed next to her and hates himself.

  Maybe he should stand on the rooftop and call out to anyone who is interested—and apparently that is everyone he’s acquainted with—that he knows that he is being impossible, thank you very much, but that he has nothing more to give anybody, and also for their own safety, they should get the hell away from him. Leave him to it.

  And while he’s up there yelling on that rooftop, he wants to say that he is shuddering right along with them. He would like very much to stop being him and try on the identity of someone else for a while.

  Someone from his imaginary audience yells out, “Why the hell don’t you just quit doing the paintings then, if you hate yourself so much? What’s the point?”

  Right. He could stop painting if he wanted, couldn’t he? Even after all this time, he could call off the gallery show. He could say something’s come up. He could call off the magazine interview, as well as the whole so-called goddamned comeback. He’s not doing this for the money; he’s not even doing it for art. He has enough of a life without art. He could just keep on hanging out in his house, watching game shows, taking the dog to the park, cooking on the rooftop, making love to Marnie, the way he had been doing before all this.

  But—aha, here’s the real problem—what if he called off the gallery show, what if he stopped doing these painful paintings, and it turned out he was still his fucked-up self? What then? Who would he be then? Just a guy with a bunch of scars all over his body mourning a past that he can’t change; a sarcastic guy who comes across great in text messages but who’s locked up in some prison, with no hope of parole. A man who hurts the things he loves.

  He feels Marnie stirring next to him. So she’s not asleep either.

  “Patrick?” she whispers.

  “I’m awake,” he says after a moment.

  She reaches over for him and he takes her in his arms, at first reluctantly. But then he goes through the motions of kissing her, and when he squints his eyes very tightly, he finds his way somehow to making love. He can do this. Maybe. He has to just keep reaching out for her strength to carry him through. He has to guard himself against Anneliese, who rises up in his head, wanting to make him pay attention. He doesn’t have to pay attention to what Anneliese believes about him. He can climb back into his real, regular life. He smells Marnie’s hair and feels her arms around him, and for a moment he does not have to live in sorrow.

  But then the next morning, he goes into the studio and he hears the screams, sees the fear. He fills the canvas with everything he hears, but there’s more and more and more to be painted, and he knows—Anneliese tells him—that he has to work faster.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  MARNIE

  We are set to have a calm, boring, routine Thanksgiving, which goes against all my animal instincts as well as my most fervent wishes. Everything I stand for, really. Thanksgiving, you see, is my favorite holiday, and the ones I like best are filled with more guests than we can sanely accommodate, as well as a lot of gratitude, mismatched plates, turkey, stuffing, and waaay too many pies. I love when the required sweet potatoes are covered in brown sugar and marshmallows and when the green beans have hard fried onions that come from a can, and it’s fine with me if there are nineteen pies and all of them are pumpkin. I just like the whole idea of it.

  But this year, out of deference to the Patrick Situation, I’ve scaled back. The guy from Inside Outside came yesterday and did an interview with him, and horror of horrors, Patrick told me that the guy brought with him an unexpected film crew, which may have flipped Patrick out for all time: cameras and lights, all pointed at him and at his work, work that he apparently doesn’t want anyone to see. Because he’s—well, he’s Patrick. He’s nothing if not ambivalent. And he talked to the guy for hours and hours and now he’s positive he said way too much, and from the way the questions were going, he now thinks the reporter is going to make him out to be some tragic hero, fighting his way back from a devastating personal tragedy to an unlikely, desperate comeback.

  “I don’t want to have to be anybody’s hero,” he says. “I’m not a hero.”

  “But they have to have an angle, you know. You can’t be Just an Ordinary Guy Named Patrick Who Used to Do Sculpture But Now Is Painting, and doing some good work . . . so hey, folks, come have a look. That won’t bring anybody in.”

  “Which is exactly why I shouldn’t have agreed to do the show—or the article,” he says. “And why did they bring a film crew?”

  “But was it a film crew, or just a photographer with some lights?”

  “It was just a guy with one camera and one light,” pipes up Fritzie. “He took my picture, too.”

  “Oh my God,” says poor Patrick.

  “You could call the reporter,” I say for the millionth time. “He’s a human being; he’ll listen to you say what you’re worried about, and maybe he could leave that part out. If you think he’s going to misrepresent you, I think he’d be interested in getting the correct version.”

  “You don’t understand. He wants me to be the sad, heroic artist.”

  “See? That’s because that’s your brand, Patrick,” says Fritzie. “Call him and tell him you want to be Artist Who Paints Their Daughters They Didn’t Know They Had, and then you could paint me.”

  Patrick looks at her and shakes his head, speechless. “You, too? I can’t believe that even third graders are talking about brands these days. I think this may be the actual end of civilization. I don’t have a brand. I don’t even want a brand. I am an artist!” He realizes he is raising his voice. Roy runs from the room.

  Fritzie is not flappable. “Ariana,” she says quietly, “tells me everybody has a brand.”

  I just want Patrick to be calm again. So I tell him it will simply be Thanksgiving for the three of us. No strangers. No homeless people from the corner, no displaced employees from Best Buds. No Amazings. Ariana is going to have dinner with her family at her grandmother’s house anyway, and Lola and William Sullivan are taking a road trip to visit her son in Pennsylvania. Fritzie wanted to invite Laramie’s family, and I must admit I had thoughts about how we could help find them a place to live, but when I call Laramie’s mother, Gloria, to invite her, she says they’re heading up to Massachusetts to see a place Laramie’s grandmother knows where they can live.

  So . . . it’s us.

  “Thank you, thank you,” says Patrick.

  “However, this does go against everything that Thanksgiving stands for,” I tell him. “You do know that.”

  “I know.”

  “And it might give Fritzie the wrong message about family love and community.”

  “Marnie.”

  “What?”

  “Fritzie is pretty much steeped in family love and community here. Maybe this gives her a healthy message about boundaries and respecting when one member of the family is having a dark night of the soul.”

  “Are you having a dark night of the soul?”

  “I don’t know.”

  I stare at him, measuring the amount of light in his eyes. “What time of day would you say it is in your soul?”

  “Right now?”

  “Yes, right now.”

  “It’s four thirty p.m.”

  “Winter or summer?”

  “Late autumn, I’d say. After the time change.”

  “That sounds dark.”

  “It’s getting dark, but it’s not the dark night of the soul completely yet.”

  I study him carefully. “You’re going to be fine. I have faith in you. Blix has faith in you.”

  He grimaces when I mention Blix. “No. I’m not going to be fine! I haven’t shown my work in years, and I’ve never shown my paintings at all. I have no idea if they’re even any good, and a man
came and interviewed me and asked me all kinds of questions that I couldn’t answer.” He bangs his hand down on the counter, hard. “And it was a film crew. A film crew of one guy who was obnoxious and kept taking my picture. With lights.”

  I go over and kiss him. “So then it will just be us for Thanksgiving.”

  “Once again, I thank you for your understanding and appreciation. Although I might add that I don’t completely believe you.”

  So Fritzie and I go off to buy a turkey that’s not too, too gigantic (meaning it will fit in the oven), along with potatoes and green beans and the cans of fried onions, and I explain to her how you have to put canned fried onions and mushroom soup in the green beans just this one time of the year, which is a rule that she says she never heard about. Apparently it’s not being properly enforced in all the states. But I want her to know about this, because it hits me that I might only have one Thanksgiving with this little girl, and forever after I’d like to imagine her stopping on Thanksgiving Eve and remembering that people have to have fried onions with the green beans. That will be my legacy to her.

  And then what do you think happens? Blix would have known to warn me about this, I think. I hate to invoke the universe because people get sick of hearing that the universe is doing things—but really, we’ll call it the spirit of all that is good about love and life and community decides that our Thanksgiving must be fixed after all.

  As soon as we get home and are putting away the food, Laramie’s mom calls me and says that her mother has had some sort of setback and they need to go the following weekend instead—and if the offer is still open, she would love nothing better than to have a normal Thanksgiving, outside of the shelter, with us. She’ll bring Laramie, her three-year-old twins, Luna and Tina, and her baby, Marco. If that’s okay.

  So what could I say? I didn’t even hesitate. I said, “Yes, yes! Come on!”

  I go in to tell Patrick that, oops, there will be company after all, and he just groans. He doesn’t even go crazy. “It’s fine. I knew it would happen this way,” he says grimly. And then he says, “What if the guy makes it sound like I think I’m some kind of hero? I think I could take anything but that.”

  “Please. Call the reporter, and tell him what you’re worried about,” I say. After three times of saying this, I just shorten it to “CTR.”

  On Thanksgiving morning, when I’m clearing the breakfast dishes and have had to say, “CTR,” at least a couple of times, Fritzie gets up and takes her plate over to the sink.

  “Well, Patrick, I talked to the reporter, and I thought he was very nice,” she says.

  “What? You talked to the reporter?” he says. “How did I not know this?”

  She squirms. “I just asked him some questions, and he asked me a couple of things. He told me he has a little girl, too.”

  Patrick says, “I did not give permission for him to interview you.”

  “It wasn’t an interview,” she says.

  He stares at her for a long moment. “Oh my God. What is this story going to consist of?” he says.

  “CTR,” I say. “CTR, CTR, CTR!”

  “Why are you mad at me?” says Fritzie. “I didn’t say anything wrong to him! I was nice.”

  Patrick staggers over to the fruit bowl, gets himself an apple, and heads back to his studio, shaking his head and clutching his heart. I would worry, except I think the apple is a good sign.

  “What?” says Fritzie to me. “And don’t say CTR.”

  “He’s just being dramatic,” I tell her. “Here’s a little secret about people: sometimes when they seem like they’re nervous about one thing, it’s really all about something else instead.”

  “What’s he nervous about then?”

  “He’s nervous—well, he’s nervous, I think, because he’s finding himself so happy to have a little girl here who belongs to him, but—” I can’t believe I’m saying this.

  “Marnie.” She laughs and shakes her head, like she feels sorry for me, being so deluded. “Patrick is not used to me. I would not say he’s all that happy about me. Yet.”

  She’s right, of course. I shouldn’t have tried to run that line on her. “Well, honey, he’s scared because a long time ago he lost somebody he loved very much, and now he doesn’t want that ever to happen again. So he’s protecting his heart. But what he hasn’t learned yet—but what he will learn—is that you can’t live and protect your heart at the same time. You have to go full-out into love as hard as you can. Remember that for your future life. Give everything you have to love. It’s the only thing that counts.”

  “You’re good at the love stuff, aren’t you?” she says.

  I go over and kiss her for that. And then, because I’m good at the love stuff, we call her mom and do a FaceTime, and yes, it seems to me to be stilted and weird, but maybe it’s only because I don’t understand Tessa so well, and so when she talks to Fritzie and tells her about the buildings and the churches she’s seeing and doesn’t ask about the stuff Fritzie is doing—well, I take it personally. It pierces me just the slightest bit hearing her one question, which is always, “Are you being a good girl?” But, having said that, I think the occasional phone calls are important, and I wish they happened more often, but I’m good at the love stuff, so I make them happen.

  Even when they hurt.

  Gloria shows up about noon with her entourage. Laramie is very sweet and shy, and the twins love bouncing on the bed in Fritzie’s room, and I fall into crazy, mad love with Marco, a gurgling, drooling happy six-month-old, who holds out his arms to me the minute we’re introduced, as though he’s been looking for me all his life. He lets me carry him around on my hip for the rest of the day, giving me his toothless, love-struck grins and at times planting wet, openmouthed kisses on my cheeks.

  Honestly, it’s embarrassing, the way Marco and I feel about each other. I think I am smitten. Maybe he and I are destined to be soulmates, and when he is forty-five and having a midlife crisis, and I am well into my wise old seventies, we’ll travel to Europe together and I’ll tell him everything I know about life and wine.

  Or maybe he’s just come to me so that my ovaries can get to thinking about how fun it would be to have a baby boy of our own, and that this inspires them to dust off their best egg and spiff up the fallopian tubes, fluff up the uterus. Or whatever needs to be done.

  Patrick comes out of his lair and does the hostly jobs of filling drink orders and carving the turkey. He is only slightly robotic. Fritzie gets all silly and tries to drag him into the living room to dance with her, which he finally does. He even smiles at Marco and the jumping-bean twins—and then Luna, who can’t seem to take her eyes off him, bursts into hysterical tears.

  “His face is . . . hurting him!” she says. “It hurt him!”

  Why is that what kids always think, I wonder. We all keep saying how it doesn’t hurt, he’s fine, he’s not in pain—and finally Patrick, who is looking grimmer and grimmer like he might actually be in pain, motions to us to be quiet and he kneels down next to her on the kitchen floor. She hides behind her hands.

  “Here,” he says to her softly. “See? You want to touch my skin? It doesn’t hurt me. It’s just wrinkled up and pulled funny. But it’s just skin, like your skin.”

  He touches her face very softly, and I hear him whisper, “Now you touch mine.” But she shakes her head and won’t look at him.

  “Really, Patrick,” says Gloria, “you don’t have to do this.” She goes over and sits down next to them and pulls Luna onto her lap. “Sweetie, it’s okay. Look, it’s just Patrick. See?” Gloria says, “May I?” and she touches Patrick’s face. So then Luna peeks out from between her fingers.

  “Oh, for goodness sakes,” says Fritzie. “Come on, everybody. We’re all touching Patrick’s face! Everybody touch everybody’s face!”

  She runs over and climbs on him and runs both her hands over his face, and then Luna does the same thing, laughing, and so does Tina. I hold my breath. “Come on, Laramie,�
� Fritzie says, and pretty soon all the kids are touching him and ruffling up his hair. And even though I’m nervous for him, he’s smiling at them and touching their faces, and then they’re rolling around on the floor, and the twins are giggling and Gloria is tickling them very gently.

  “Thank you,” says Gloria. “Tell Patrick thank you.”

  I have such a lump in my throat, because I always hope that stuff like this is going to be what heals my sweet, wounded Patrick, and I am like a little child anticipating Christmas watching him take it in. And when I can see that he’s not fixed from this at all, that he’s probably even annoyed some, I have to turn the music up even louder and dance around the kitchen with Marco on my hip, while I wait for the next possible healing thing to come along. When the bell rings, meaning that the rolls are browned and it’s time to take the platters into the dining room, I go in and juggle the baby and the pans, and I call everyone to eat.

  “Dance line!” yells Fritzie, and she, Laramie, and the twins all join in an impromptu conga line to the dining room—but of course because it’s being led by Fritzie, it first goes to both the bedrooms and through the bathroom and the kitchen and is about to head out to the apartment/studio when I stop her, and at last I can persuade everybody to sit down and not stare at Patrick, so we can eat.

  It’s chaotic and noisy—finding enough cushions to be booster seats for the littlest ones, and then all the passing of the potatoes and the cutting up of the turkey portions and the questions of white meat or dark meat, and the explanations for why there are marshmallow things on the sweet potatoes and fried onions on the beans. Nobody under the age of ten is even going to consider eating these things.

 

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