Matchmaking for Beginners

by Maddie Dawson

  I think my heart is breaking.

  Patrick says I should immediately call Charles Sanford, and I do, but he’s not picking up. Right. It’s the day before Thanksgiving. A lot of people are going over the river and through the woods today. They are not in their offices.

  “Should we call the cops, do you think?” Patrick says.

  “I feel too sad,” I tell him. “I don’t want the police going after Noah. For God’s sake, his great-aunt has died. And maybe this stuff had some sentimental value to him. Also, who’s to say Blix wouldn’t want him to have some stuff from here?”

  “Yeah,” says Patrick, but he doesn’t look convinced.

  “Do you want some coffee?” I ask him. “I fight every day with this damned coffee press, and I’m willing to go another round with it.”

  “Oh, I know how to work that thing,” he says. And then he very competently makes coffee. He’s wearing jeans and a blue sweater. His dark hair brushes his collar, and I love that, for a moment, at least, I have an excuse simply to watch him, since I’m pretending to care how to work this abominable coffee thing that hates me.

  Normally, Patrick doesn’t like it when I look at him. But now, as I see his miraculous, stitched-back-together hands and fingers, see the nimble way he has of moving about, I can’t help but think how stunning it is that he is here at all, that we’re together in this room, in Blix’s kitchen. Standing close together. I think of the spell book, Blix’s journal, and my breath goes up high in my chest. This feels so momentous.

  He straightens up, hands me a cup of coffee.

  “Would you like a little help with piecrust?” he says. “Because I am, as you well know, the Prince of Pastry.”

  “Prince of Pastry, Chief of Cheesecake . . . you could have many titles.”

  “At Thanksgiving, though, I try to stay with pies. It’s only fitting.”

  He rolls out some piecrust on the table, and I get busy chopping carrots and celery for the salad, and then, maybe because I’m feeling bold because there’s nothing left to lose here, or maybe because I know I’m going home in a month and he’s leaving for the depths of the Wyoming wilderness, I say very carefully, “I want to know what happened to you. I’ve now told you every embarrassing thing about me, and now I need to know about you. What happened. Please tell me.”

  “A lot of people don’t know that the true secret ingredient to piecrusts is that the baker cannot talk to others while making it.”

  “Don’t joke with me about this. I have to know. Is there somebody you love? Is that why you’re going to Wyoming, because one of the twenty-eight people there loves you and wants you back?”

  He lifts his chin up, looks for a moment like he’s not going to say anything, and then he sighs. Maybe my persistence has worn him down, but somehow I prefer to think that Blix is making him tell me—Blix operating from the other side.

  “She died,” he says finally. “The person I loved died.”

  The sentence hangs in the air. I swallow and say, “Please tell me.”

  There’s such a long silence that I think he has decided to completely ignore me. But then he sighs again, and when he starts, he speaks haltingly, lightly, like maybe it won’t land so hard that way.

  “Four years ago. A gas leak.” He stares out the window. “We were in the studio together. I was making a sculpture. She was finishing a painting. She went to make coffee, lit a match near the gas stove, and there was an explosion. Blue light, the whole room engulfed in that light. I looked up and she was on fire. She was in the flames, and there was no getting her out.”

  He stops, looks right at me. “I was across the room, but I remember running toward her, pulling her away . . . grabbing a blanket and rolling it over her.” He holds out his hands, spreads his fingers apart. I see the scars and the patches, the scaled-away parts, the ridges. “These, believe it or not, are medical miracles. For some reason Anneliese didn’t get the miracles. I did. Even though I didn’t want them.” He flattens the dough with the palm of his hand. “What I wanted was to have died right along with her.”

  I hold myself very steady. It’s like he’s a wild animal and I don’t want to frighten him away with too much sentiment, too much sympathy. I feel almost as though I am outside of myself. Maybe this is how Blix would have handled things.

  “For the longest time death was all I wished for. Instead, I got surgeries. Thirteen surgeries. And a settlement. I lost my love, my art, my ability to even look at my old sculptures without wanting to throw up, but apparently society gives you money for that kind of loss. I went from being your typical poor, starving, happy artist to being a rich guy with literally nothing in the world that I wanted.”

  Bedford comes over and puts his rubber ball on the floor next to Patrick, and Patrick strokes his head, scratches him behind the ears. He actually smiles down at him.

  “Where did Blix fit in? Did you know her at the time of the accident?”

  “Really, Marnie? Really, do we have to talk about this?” He looks back down at the dough. “Blix found me one day in Manhattan. It was after. Long after. I was rich, living in a luxury hotel, eating room service every night, drinking myself to death, or trying to. And my therapist said it was time I went and looked at art again, tried to make friends with it. ‘Art,’ she said, ‘wasn’t the thing that hurt you. And maybe it has the power to heal you. You should give it a chance.’ So I got to the Museum of Modern Art and I tried to make myself go inside. Walked five steps in, and then turned around and went back out. Then I talked to myself and went in again, and turned around and came back out. Five times, in and out again, in and out. And then a voice said to me, ‘Are you imitating a person who’s attached to an invisible rubber band? Is this an art installation you’re doing outside the museum? Because I’m sold, if that’s what this is.’ My immediate response was that I wanted to kill whoever had said that, but then I saw this old lady standing there wearing crazy clothes, with her hair sticking up and her eyes so kind and compassionate. ‘Hi, I’m Blix,’ she said. And you know how she is—how those eyes would reach over and look right into you! Oh my God! The first person who ever looked at me like that. ‘Or maybe,’ she said, ‘there’s something inside that you can’t bear to see.’ She’s there, just looking at me, human to human. It was like she didn’t even see all my scars. ‘Maybe there’s something inside that you can’t bear to see.’” He shakes his head, remembering.

  “Wow,” I say.

  “Yeah. So she takes me by the arm—my arm, which was still hurting, I’ll have you know, but Blix didn’t know from pain—and we go have a cup of coffee together. I’m too exhausted to resist her. I feel like I’m under hypnosis or something. She takes me to this dark restaurant, like she knew instinctively that’s what I needed, some shadows, and we sit in the back. And she says, ‘Tell me.’ So . . . I told her a bit of the story. And she wanted to hear all of it. I said no at first, but then the story starts pouring out of me. And it was the first time I’d told it. The fire, the operations, the therapist. She listened and then she said we should go into the museum together. And so we did.”

  “What happened?”

  “Before we even got to the art, a child started screaming at the sight of me, and old Blix—well, she was not having any of that. She held on to me, walked me through the museum. Steeled herself for whatever was going to happen. Gave me her strength. I could feel it flowing to me. After that, I started meeting her every week. We didn’t go to the art museum anymore, where people stared at me. She would come to my fancy hotel room with the maid service and the room service, and we’d just sit there and talk. About life, about art, about politics. And then one day she said to me, ‘Listen, I like the look of you, and this is no fucking way to live your life. This is false and harmful and dangerous to your health. You’re coming to live in my building with me. In Brooklyn. You’ll have people.’ And so I did.

  “I didn’t want any people, mind you, so I saw that as a big drawback, but I got Houndy and Je
ssica and Sammy in the bargain. And Lola. Five people, counting Blix. All I could handle. I took the job writing up symptoms. Because I wanted something to do. I thought this was the way to do it, stay so busy thinking about other things—people’s symptoms—that I wouldn’t think. And it works. I get to stay away from the outside world, from the children who cry when they see me. I don’t go out. I don’t have to. Why should I let in the awfulness out there, the people who stare at me and make me feel like a freak?”

  “Did . . . Blix think that was okay? You not going out?”

  “Well, yes and no. She gave me the space to live my life, and I loved her for it, and when she was sick, I didn’t say ‘Go to the hospital, get your tumor looked at, let them cut you up,’ because I knew that wasn’t what she wanted to do, and why should she? And she didn’t say to me, ‘Why aren’t you trying to find art again? Why aren’t you out there working on being a social guy?’ We didn’t do that to each other. I knew why she didn’t want to turn herself over to surgeons, and she knew why I needed to mend in the quiet.”

  I am having a traitorous thought. I am thinking that maybe it would have worked out better for him if, say, she had pushed him just a little, nudged him back into life. Not right away, of course—I’m sure it took everything to dislodge him from his grief and get him to move to Brooklyn. But at some point.

  As if he’s reading my thoughts, he says, “Things changed after a while, though. She would come down and put on music and say it was time that we danced together. Or she’d insist that I come upstairs to her dinner parties and mingle with nice people who weren’t going to stare. People she’d probably prepared in advance. She said once—she said it was time I realized that most people are way too self-absorbed to be looking at somebody like me and thinking pitying thoughts. She said—ha! I still can’t get over this—she said that it would be such a more wonderful world if people did care enough to stare. But they don’t, she said. They’re thinking of their own lives.”

  “That sounds about right.”

  “Then she started in with this campaign to make me believe in love again. She claimed to have magic, and she kept saying there was love coming for me.” He wiggles his floury fingers in the air and rolls his eyes. “She and Lola were these old ladies, always trying to drag the topic over to love. Like we were in a sitcom or a happily-ever-after Disney movie. Like Beauty and the Beast! One day we had an actual serious conversation about whether or not Belle—was that her name?—yeah, whether Belle really loved the beast from the beginning or if it was just pity.” He eases the piecrust into the pie pan, turning it just so, tilting his head while he works it perfectly. “Read the text, people! It’s fear and pity. Fear and pity—how’s that as a cocktail for a doomed relationship?”

  I can’t speak. I’ve put down the knife I’m scraping the carrots with, because my hands seem to be shaking.

  “Anyway,” he says. “Here are the facts I’ve accepted: Anneliese will always be dead. I always will have tried to get to her in time and failed. When it really counted, I was powerless to change the outcome.” He swallows and goes silent for a moment. Then he says, “You know, I used to dream that she made the coffee and the explosion didn’t happen. Then I’d dream that the explosion happened, but that she and I weren’t there; we came back to a studio that was gone but we were safe. Then other times, I’d dream that she lived through the burns and the pain and didn’t love me anymore. So that’s my life now. I endure. I’m not waiting to die anymore, but I’ll never be the way I was before.”

  My voice feels clotted over when I speak. “Do you ever go anywhere? At all?”

  He swings his eyes over to me, like he’s just remembered I’m there. “Ah, goodie, another caseworker! Yes. For your information, I do. I walk sometimes at night, or I go to the twenty-four-hour gym and work out with weights in the back room in the middle of the night where no one has to see me.”

  “What is this feeling about people having to see you? You’re you! You’re a person in the world, and okay, so you have scars. Does that mean people can’t look at you? Why can’t we just go somewhere you and me? In the daytime? We could take the dog for a walk maybe. We don’t have to care what people think.”

  “Haven’t you heard anything I’ve said? I don’t need anything that’s out there in the world. I don’t want to go fucking out. And you will find in your life that a man who lives alone with a cat doesn’t usually want to be walking a dog. What’s next is that I’m going to Wyoming, where my sister has a house in the middle of nowhere with a spare wing for me. She’s good at Scrabble and she reads books. And I get along with her fine.”

  “God, Patrick, I have to say that sounds like giving up.”

  “Yeah, well, I get to do that if I want to. I have the right to give up after what I went through.” He leans down and scratches Bedford’s ears. “Don’t I, boy? You want to give up, too? Is this the good boy who’d like to give up? Oh, yes you would! Oh, yes you would!”

  “But isn’t there some kind of art you want to do? Maybe, okay, not sculpture, but something else? Painting? Drawing? Photography? You’re a creative guy, and you’ve convinced yourself to just shut off that whole part of your personality.”

  “Wow, look at the time!” he says sarcastically.

  “I know. I shouldn’t be offering any advice to anybody. Look at what a mess I’ve made of things. Also, may I just say that I think you have potential as a dog person. Just saying.”

  “No. It’s cats for me. They need so little. I’m only trying to humor this mutt, with his neediness. Dogs are shameless self-promoters.”

  He stretches. His shirt rides up, exposing his belly—which I can’t resist looking at. It’s all smooth, regular, unburned skin. His burns are all located on the parts of him that show.

  “What I feel worst about just now is that Noah’s parents are going to have Blix’s journal,” he says, “and then they’re going to try to take her house, and that’s just what she didn’t want to happen. Just another example of powerlessness in the face of fate.”

  “You know something? I don’t care if they take her house. You’re leaving, and I’m leaving.”

  “You don’t mean that,” he tells me quietly. “They can’t have Blix’s house, because even if we’re not here, it has to house her spirit. It’s not meant for them.”

  “No. I think her spirit is somewhere else altogether. I think it’s in the relationships she had with the people. If I have to give up on this house, then I will. I’m not going to do a whole court battle for a building I can’t even take care of.”

  He looks stunned. And then I make things so much worse, because I can’t help myself—I go over to him and stand on tiptoe and kiss him on the cheek, right below his eye, where there’s the smoothest, pinkest skin. I just want to touch him.

  It feels like silk. But he jerks away from my touch. He says, “No! Do not do that!”

  “Does it hurt?”

  “I can’t stand being pitied.”

  “But I don’t pity you. Why do you have to read affection as pity? Maybe that’s what Blix was trying to tell you.” I feel myself start to cry, which is even worse than trying to touch him.

  Everything’s weird after that. I’ve made the worst mess of things. He’s rattled and angry. And I’m apologetic, but nothing helps. Nothing feels right.

  After he’s gone, I go in the living room, and stop beside the sculpture on the mantel. At least this is something Noah didn’t take, maybe because it’s so big. I touch its strong, deep lines, feel the taut seams underneath the welding, underneath the smoothness. Patrick made this back when he was healthy and whole. But he says he will never be that way again.

  I close my eyes. Do I pity him? Am I drawn to him because of how fragile he seems?

  Is it that I feel sorry for him because he’s burned and damaged?

  You are okay, says a voice.

  You are so meant to be where you are.

  And you can love him. He is meant to be loved.


  THIRTY-NINE

  MARNIE

  Thanksgiving dawns rainy, windy, and cold. The first really cold day of the season. The wooden floors chill my feet when I get out of bed. It’s five fifteen, time to start the turkey.

  It hits me that I seem to have accidentally invited thirteen people for dinner (fourteen if you count Patrick, but he won’t come), and I have no idea what any of them are bringing to share. They all said they’d bring something, and until this moment that seemed good enough for me. Back when I planned this whole thing, I figured whatever arrives is going to be just the thing we need.

  But now—what if we end up only with the turkey, my green bean casserole that probably no one is going to like, my pile of mashed potatoes, and a pie that Patrick made? This will be the first Thanksgiving that people will have to call out for pizza.

  I’m pretty sure I could qualify for my adulting license on the basis of this day alone, especially if it turns out there’s enough food. I turn on some kick-ass rock music and crank it up loud while I work in the kitchen. I put on an old apron that I find in the cupboard and twirl around before I confront the massive, eighteen-pound turkey looming in the fridge. The happy homemaker, that’s me.

  “Tom,” I say to him. “You’re my first. Just so you know. So I’d appreciate it if you could do the right thing here, feastwise. I mean, I’m sorry and all about what you must have gone through. But I want you to know I’m deeply appreciative. Giving thanks for your life.”

  I have to borrow chairs, forks, knives, spoons, tablecloths, plates, and platters. Jessica says she has some, and so does Lola, and if those aren’t enough—well, then some people might have to sit on the floor to eat, or else we’ll eat in shifts, Jessica says.

  Eat in shifts! I think of my mother with her white damask tablecloth and her candlesticks and the sterling silver turkey platter and dessert forks. She would die at the idea of people sitting on the floor or eating in shifts.