A Happy Catastrophe

“Ha! Moody doesn’t even begin to describe him lately. He’s a wreck.”

“Your father is a couch potato wreck. What the hell is it with men lately? Everywhere you look, they are not panning out. Disappointing everyone around them.”

So then we stay up until three in the morning, talking. She’s lively and funny and self-deprecating—unlike the mom I mostly remember her to be, who might have been the tiniest bit exacting when it came to rules and decorum and deportment. “Look! Just look at these bags under my eyes!” she says. “Now I don’t mean to be shallow, and I know that how awful my skin looks is not the point of life, but I look at these every day in the mirror and I think I look just like your nana.”

She said my father doesn’t laugh at her jokes anymore, and he wants everything to stay put, exactly as it is. Could we just not rock the boat—that’s his favorite expression for everything. When she told him she might want to go back to school, he said absolutely not, waste of money and time at her age, there was no need for any of that—and so even though nothing is really wrong, she says, and yes, she knows, other people have it so much worse, she just wants to live again. Look forward to something big! Gigantic!

“You know what I really want? I want to fall in love,” she says wistfully, around about two in the morning. Her voice is soft and fragile, like a young girl’s. “One more time for falling in love. Maybe that’s why I’m here.”

“Hmm,” I say. I would so much prefer that she not fall in love with someone else besides my father.

“Is that so wrong?” she says, and we both laugh because it reminds us of an old comedy routine that neither of us can quite remember. “I’ve become the worst kind of cliché. Go ahead. I know you’re thinking that. I buy every single moisturizer I see on the shopping network—wait until you see what’s in my suitcase—and all I want is for somebody to look at me with a sly grin, and somebody who wants to listen to me, and not sit there disinterested in everything, telling me I’m too old for this and too old for that, and where’s the meat loaf, and why can’t we put a television set in the bedroom. If we put a television in the bedroom, Marnie, I swear that man would never get out of the room! Next it would be bedpans!”

“Well,” I say. “If he wants to put a television set in the bedroom, he clearly needs some rehabilitation.”

I’m being funny, but she looks at me and smiles. “Exactly! You see? Now you’ve never had a man suggest a television set, have you? I don’t notice one in here.” Then she wrinkles up her nose and says, “Of course there’s no man in here either. So tell me. What’s going on with Patrick, do you think? He seemed fine when I talked to him a few weeks ago.”

And that’s all it takes, I’m ashamed to say. I tell her about the art show and how sad he is, and how I want a baby and he isn’t sure he can handle it, and how much it has stressed him out having Fritzie around. My eyes fill up with tears, and then her eyes fill up with tears, too, and maybe that’s just because it’s the middle of the night, the hour when people could weep over the last sad, neglected egg in the egg carton, but maybe we’ve hit upon the rock-bottom hardness of living a long life—which is that things go wrong, and you constantly have to be recasting your experiences so you can see your way forward out of despair. I try to remember what Blix would say about all this. Certainly her life didn’t always go the way she planned.

She would say that Patrick is mine for life, and that I am meant to believe in him, and he believes in me—and that all these trappings of unhappiness right now are temporary distractions from the real rock-solidity of our love for each other.

“He’s just going through a bit of a rough patch,” I say to my mother. “He’s committing himself to doing art for the first time since the fire, and I think the memories are swamping him.”

Then I tell her, just in case she doesn’t remember this about Patrick, that he rushed into the fire to save his girlfriend, and that when Blix was dying, he took care of her completely, all on his own, and then he rescued Bedford when he got hit by a car. In every case, he’s stepped up and been the person who could be counted on.

It’s me who is the problem, I tell her. “Here he is, holding me up time and time again, and he makes me laugh and he’s so sweet and passionate and he tells me how much I’ve changed his life, but now I want more. I’m not contented with what we have. I want everything! More life around me, more people, and he says he needs to crawl away and be by himself. He’s closing up. He said he’s come as far as he can come, and he can’t do any more.”

“I know,” she says. She reaches over and squeezes my hand and then she winks at me. “He’s a great guy, but maybe he’s not the only great guy for you. You know? Things change.”

I pull back. “No. I love him. I’m not giving up on this.”

“Sometimes you have to give up in order to save yourself,” she says. “In fact, you shouldn’t even think of it as ‘giving up.’ Call it relinquishing. Maybe your father is the man I was meant for in my twenties and during all the decades of raising you kids. And we had a wonderful time of it, he and I, but that doesn’t mean he has to be the one for my old age, does it? Maybe after forty years we can fold this marriage up and put it in a drawer somewhere with the old silver service, and both of us can do more of what we want. I can fall in love and go to plays and join the space program if I want to, and he can sit on the couch and watch the golf channel. We’ll get together with the kids and grandkids on holidays.”

“With your new partners? That sounds horrifying.”

“Yes,” she says, laughing. “I’ll bring all the men I’m currently dating at the time. Your father can give them a thumbs-up or thumbs-down. I’ll take his views under consideration.”

I bury my head in the pillow. “No, no, no.”

“I’m shocked I have to explain this to you,” she says. “I pretty much thought this would be your advice to me.”

But here’s what she doesn’t get: he’s my dad, and I know he loves her more than anything. And some things—and I count Patrick among these things—just might be worth fighting for.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

PATRICK

Patrick wakes up to find Fritzie sitting cross-legged on the side of the futon in his studio, staring at him. It’s still mostly dark, with only a tiny knife-edge of gray light sticking under the shades. It was her breathing that woke him up.

“Why are you in here?” she says when he opens one eye.

“More importantly, why are you in here?” he says.

“I’m here because I was looking for you, and you weren’t in your room with Marnie. Her mom is in there.”

“Well, that’s why I’m here. There’s not room for three in a bed, is there?”

“Nope. Not unless you’re going to squinch up.”

“What time is it?”

“It’s six thirty.”

“Six thirty! Holy mother of mercy! What are you doing up?”

“I had to find you.”