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.
Summer ends, and Brooklyn ushers in September. I am tired. The mad current of life goes on around me. A bright ribbon of humanity exists outside, coming back to life now that the summer’s heat has dissipated some; there is laughter and there are doors slamming, and sirens and cars backfiring, and conversations and arguments in the street and out the windows. Houndy’s chrysanthemums bloom in his rooftop pots, as though he’s saying hi. The nights grow chilly, and Sammy goes back to school and doesn’t come home now until after six o’clock every day because he’s in an after-school program. Patrick is still writing about diseases, but he comes up to see me sometimes when he knows no one else will be here.
In this bonus time I’ve been given, I trundle down the steps, bringing him cakes and pickles and delicate mushrooms, and once a Prosecco that I need him to taste—but no matter how often I throw open his curtains and rub his head, no matter how many times I hug him and bask in his presence, I’m not sure anything I’ve said has yet convinced Patrick that he deserves love.
Sometimes the universe has its own ideas, and I have to accept the fact that I may run out of time here on the planet, and I have to hope I can watch people from the unseen realm. I wonder if that’s true, if I’ll see them and hear them. If I’ll be able to communicate from beyond.
I take a deep, deep breath—breathing in the city around me, all its sounds and voices, and the car horns and the laughter and uncertainty of life on planet Earth. And then a voice says to me, There is nothing more important than this.
One morning I make my way out to the stoop. I have sciatica, I have a pain in my chest area, an arm that feels on fire, and my eyes are burning. I haven’t been able to sleep since four o’clock, that blackest of hours, so at first light I go outside where I can watch street life happening in front of me, and perhaps be healed by the jangle of personalities and car horns. I want to stop thinking of pain as a problem I have to solve.
I’m sitting there on my blue flowered pillow thinking about endings when I notice a man loping down the sidewalk. He is swinging a backpack behind him, and I watch him come toward me because it is more effort to turn away, frankly, and because I have a little tingly sense that something is about to happen. He looks elegant and disheveled at the same time, animal-like in the way he moves, his arms swinging and his long legs in their khaki shorts striding down the street, looking around him the way a tourist would. He comes closer and closer, until I finally have to put my hand over my mouth, seeing who it is.
“Noah?” I say, and I cannot even stand up, cannot hold on even another hour, because I am suddenly so tired, and here is Noah to catch me when I fall. Maybe he is the miracle I’ve been waiting for, the savior coming to console me, to pay his respects, to say good-bye. Wouldn’t it be amazing if, after all our family history, the universe has sent him, and he turns out to be the one who helps me?
He comes closer, peering at me from under a fringe of long hair, and I don’t see very well, but I feel his shock at the look of me. All that terror. “Aunt Blix, what happened to you?” he says. “Look at you! What—? Oh, are you ill?”
“Yes,” I say. “I’m actually about to drop dead. That’s why you’re here.”
“That’s why I’m here?” he says. He doesn’t hug me. He runs his hands through his mop of hair and looks around. “You’re dying?” he says. He licks his lips nervously. “Shouldn’t you be in the hospital? Who’s taking care of you?” He looks up and down the street, like he’s hoping a team of doctors and medical professionals with their stethoscopes will step out from behind the shrubbery and tell him everything is under control. I almost want to laugh.
“No, honey. There’s no need for hospitals. I’m dying,” I say. “Perfectly normal thing to do at the end of life. Come and sit with me. I’m so glad to see you.”
“Aunt Blix, I think we need to get you to a doctor.”
“The hell. No doctors, darling.”
“But doctors could help you!”
“I’ve been dying for some time now, and I have no intention of seeing doctors now. Sit here, please. Hold my hand.”
He looks so sad, so frightened. Like if he could, he’d rewind the tape, spool himself walking backward down the street, back down the subway steps, back into the subway car, perhaps all the way back to the airport and maybe even back to Africa, the plane flying in reverse. But he sits, perched on the steps, and I take his hand in mine, and he lets me hold it there. I flow an abundance of love and energy to him.
Ah, my grandnephew. How we loved each other when he was a little kid, but as can so easily happen with distance and time, things went bad between us later. I remember that he came to visit Houndy and me when he was about nineteen and full of himself. I was shocked at the change in him. He was so much his mother’s son at that point—arrogant and judgmental, challenging me about all my beliefs, laughing at us for being old hippies, as he called us.
Even worse, I felt the first inklings of a brittle vanity in him, as though appearances were all that mattered, in the same way Wendy was renovating our old mansion without curiosity for the past or any attention to the details that made the old house beautiful. Just pave over what you don’t appreciate. That’s what my family seems to say.
And mock in others whatever you yourself don’t understand.
But now maybe we have another chance. Clearly that’s what his presence here means.
“Well, then—what?” he says. “What can I do?”
“You can ease me over to the other side,” I say. “That’s what I’m hoping you’ll do.”
“Wait. Does my mom know how sick you are?”
“No. Nobody in the family knows. That’s the way I wanted it. But now you’re going to be here, and I hope you’re going to stay with me while it happens. And it’s going to be the kindest thing you could ever do for me.”
“I can’t. I don’t—”
“Shush. Yes, you can. Everything is going to be fine,” I tell him. “Whether you know it or not, you were sent here, and now that you’re here, you can stay with me while I go. It might take a few days, but it’s coming soon. And, sweetheart, this is going to be good for you. Something elemental about life that you need to know.”
His beautiful face looks so uncertain. I almost want to reach over and pinch his cheeks between my fingers like I did when he was small. “But—when?” he says. “I mean, what’s going to happen?”
“Well, that’s what we don’t know. I thought it would be by now. But it hasn’t. I think I must have been waiting for you. The universe has sent you.”
His shoulders slump. I close my eyes and surround him in wh
ite light so that I can forgive him for being his mother’s son. He’s a child, a novice, what J.K. Rowling would label a muggle. Unsuitable for the task at hand, but maybe he’ll get there.
“Here. Let’s begin with this. Walk me inside the house,” I say.
“Okay,” he says and manages to support my arm as we slowly walk up the stairs. It’s funny how I’d come down these steps all alone—slowly, but still—but now I have to lean on him to get back up. I stop when I need to, which is about a million times, because this may be my last look at this beautiful scene, at my life here that I have loved with all my heart.
“Do you—do you think you’re going to suffer?” he says.
“Oh, my darling, I have decided not to suffer,” I tell him. “Suffering is optional.”
We get to the top of the steps, and he opens the big wooden door. I see our reflection briefly in the pane of glass as it catches us in the sunlight when it swings open. The smells of breakfast, of the parquet floors, the curtains blowing. The wind chimes tinkle above us, a comfort.
“It’s really going to be all right,” I tell him. “I’m not scared, and I don’t want you to be scared either.”
SIXTEEN
MARNIE
Summer has turned to September, which in Jacksonville means it’s Summer 2.0. The days are still bright and hot, the nights are filled with the electric sounds of buzzing insects and flashes of heat lightning, the air is still as humid as the inside of a dog’s mouth, and—yes, I’m still living with my parents and hanging out with Natalie and Brian and the baby.
And now there’s Jeremy.
We go running on the beach; we play cards with my parents; we cruise around in his car like we did in high school. It’s like when we were teenagers, except for the stunning fact that we’re adults so we also have sex now.
There is something so sweet and uncomplicated about these days—being with a guy who speaks your same language, who knows all the old jokes, who loved you even when you had braces and hair tinted green from chlorine.
We know the smell of each other’s houses. Which cabinet holds the drinking glasses and which drawer has the flatware. He already likes my family. I already like his mom.
Sometimes these days it’s already noon before I think of Noah.
Another good thing is that Jeremy has asked me to work with him in his office, which has happily put aside forever the talk of me having to be a dining room manager at the Crab & Clam House. So now three days a week—the days I’m not helping Natalie with the baby—I put on a skirt and blouse and little heels and go play receptionist, sitting there in his tastefully appointed office talking on the telephone and ushering in his patients.
His patients tell me they all love him because apparently he’s simply magic with his hands, as one woman put it. He makes back pain and knee pain vanish.
I felt a little pang of jealousy when she said that, which for me is a sure sign that I’m falling for him. After all, he’s in that exam room looking at women’s bodies, and not only that, thinking about how their muscles and tendons could be made to feel better. And I get to be the one he sleeps with!
I feel a little bit of a thrill when I see him do all the things he used to do—the way he flips his hair out of his eyes, that nose-wrinkling thing, and how sometimes he rubs his hands together when he’s anticipating something wonderful. He has never really appreciated deep, long kisses—but he’s the master of divine mini-kisses, all along my jawline, a whole trail of kisses.
What can I say? I know it’s way too soon to make any huge pronouncements—I’m not crazy or anything—but, as Natalie keeps pointing out to me, he and I seem more and more like a couple every single day.
And she ought to know. We visit her and Brian in the evenings after work, and we’ve become a lovely foursome: two ordinary, happy couples in the family room, with the guys making sports conversation and Natalie and I sitting with them, cuddling the baby. The four of us pass the baby around like she’s a big platter of happiness we all share.
I tell you, it’s as though I’ve walked through a door called Normalcy, the door I was always trying to find.
Most nights when we leave Natalie and Brian’s, we go back to his house, and we talk to his mom for a little while, and then, because he’s the best son in the world, he helps her get settled upstairs in bed with her cigarettes, her heating pad and her paperback book and her glass of club soda with lime and her sleeping pill. I wait for him downstairs because Mrs. Sanders is kind of shy, and since her husband died, she likes things done a certain way.
Once we are sure she’s asleep, we tiptoe up to his room and get into bed. (Yes, there are Star Wars sheets.) It’s a little bit like being a kid again, because we have to whisper since his mom’s room is right next to his. Jeremy says she is probably quite aware that we’re having sex in his room, but he says there’s no need to “rub her nose in it” as he put it, since she doesn’t approve of sex before marriage. He’s always having to remind me not to make any sex noises at all, clamping his hand against my mouth, and many nights, to tell you the truth, it seems more trouble than it’s worth so we simply lie there chastely holding hands while we read our books before we turn in. In the mornings, I have to make sure to leave before she gets up.
But it’s worth it. He and I haven’t hit our sexual stride yet, but we will. He gives wonderful back rubs, and between those and all the soft little kisses, I’m quite turned on by him. And every couple has something to work on.
“It’ll be so much better when I get my own place,” he says. “I just have to approach my mother with that idea very delicately, but I’ll do it. And maybe sometime we could get a hotel room if you want.”
Late at night, sometimes I lie awake and watch his calm, unlined face as he sleeps. He might have been my snarky best friend back when we were teenagers, but now we’ve both been a bit humbled by life (“HBL” he calls it) and so here we are, milder and gentler versions of our old selves, waiting to see what life will serve up to us.
I’m aware that he’s the counterpoint to Noah, that he’ll never wake me up in the middle of the night to go stand in line for a Lady Gaga concert. That he doesn’t even know his car is hopelessly uncool, or that his hairstyle wouldn’t meet California standards. He’ll never get drunk at a restaurant and start doing the samba around the tables until we get kicked out, as Noah did when we first met. He’ll never throw out a case of seltzer water because the one I bought wasn’t a brand name, which is also a Noah move.
But he wants kids. He loves his mother. He loves me. And he appreciates my mother’s meatloaf.
And I am watching myself fall in love with him.
One day I’m at work at his office—and I’ve straightened the magazines and cleaned the little glass window between my cubicle and the waiting room—when he comes sauntering in from the back. It’s lunchtime, so there aren’t any patients.
“So,” he says, leaning against the doorjamb with his arms folded. He has on his nice, crisp, professional white coat with his name embroidered in maroon script, and he’s smiling at me. “So,” he says again, in this pseudocasual tone he uses when things are more important than he wants them to be, “when do you think you’re going to be over this other guy?”
I give a little uncomfortable laugh. “Noah?”
He wrinkles his nose. “Please. Don’t say his name in the office. This is sacred space.” He looks around, and I see that his eyes are more serious than I’ve seen them since the day of the condom incident in twelfth grade. “Just level with me here. Before I invest any more of myself in this relationship, you’ve gotta tell me if you’re ever going to be really done with him.”
“I think—well, I think that in all the ways that count, that I’m already done with him,” I say carefully.
I am pretty sure I am telling the truth.
“No,” he says, “it doesn’t work that way. You were married to the guy! He did a horrible thing to you. It’s only been a few months, and people don’
t bounce back that fast.”
“But I have bounced back. I work extra fast.” And then I tell him about Blix, who said some words that steered me toward happiness—a spell that suddenly seems to have come true in a way that none of us were expecting. And here I am. I have arrived at the door of happiness, I say, thanks to some words to the universe that someone chanted for me. For a moment, it occurs to me that I should call her and let her know how it all worked out. But then that thought dissipates; Blix might not see this as the big life she’d promised I’d get. Why disappoint her?
I look back at Jeremy, who is shaking his head comically, like he has water in his ears or something. “Oh God! Please don’t tell me I’m basing my whole future happiness on some fortune-teller’s notion of the universe!”
So I laugh and kiss him right there in his office, right on his smooth, clean-shaven cheek, but then the phone rings, and I have to go back to my desk to answer it. He stands there watching me while I switch around some appointments. I watch him out of the corner of my eye, and I suddenly feel all the doubt dragging on him, and I know that to him I’m the Louisville Slugger and he’s the ball. And, well, it pierces my heart, is all, that he doubts me.
I take it up with Natalie, my personal enabler and therapist, the next day. What I want to know is this, I tell her: Can a person (say, me) actually be ready to move on from a devastating heartbreak so soon? Or am I just kidding myself?
“Well,” she says. She is busy changing Amelia’s diaper, so she’s facing away from me. “Well, of course you can. Anything can happen where love is concerned. How do you feel?”
“I feel . . . I feel like I’m in the right place. Where I’m supposed to be.”
She turns and gives me a big smile. “Oh, I’m so glad to hear you say that, because that’s what I think, too. You and Jeremy have such great chemistry! Brian and I were talking about it last night, as a matter of fact.”
“Really?”
“Yeah, you’re so easy together. And he’s funny and he’s cute, and you seem really, really healthy and happy. Best I’ve seen you in years.”
Matchmaking for Beginners Page 13