Matchmaking for Beginners

I close my eyes.

Patrick, as if speaking from a great distance: “Well, yeah. Myself, yes. No—well, not much furniture, of course, but I have the computers.” He laughs. “No, of course I need them! I’m not exactly going to leave them behind.”

I open one eye and see the computers across the room, blinking approvingly as I slide away, down into the darkness.

Later I feel something being placed over me, and I struggle to open my eyes. Patrick says, “Let me make sure your pupils aren’t dilated.” He lifts my lids, one at a time, and says, “Hmmm.”

“Patrick,” I say through a thickness in my mouth. “I don’t believe in magic anymore.”

“Bullshit,” he says.

“No, it’s not bullshit. And I have to go home.” I struggle to sit up. Roy has been sleeping in the crook of my arm, and he jumps off the couch. My head is throbbing like there are a million tiny hammers inside my brain. My eyes don’t seem to be operational in the usual way.

“Absolutely not,” says Patrick. “You need to stay here. You shouldn’t be alone with a possible head thing. Come on. You can sleep in my bed. I’ll get you settled.”

He gently helps me up and leads me to his room, which, even in my sleepy state, I can tell is so spare it’s almost monkish. Hardly any lights. And he draws back the covers, and then he puts his hands on my shoulders and sits me down on the side of the bed and takes off my shoes. Then he sits back on his heels. I feel his eyes on me.

“Hmmm. Your clothes still have turkey stains all over them. Shall I go upstairs and get your pajamas?”

I don’t answer. I just plop down on the bed on my back.

“Right. I know. You can wear one of my sweatshirts.”

“Too hot.”

“Okay, then a T-shirt.” There’s the sound of drawers opening and closing, and then he’s back—I smell his presence more than see him—and he puts something in my hands: a shirt, I realize. “Do you need help? Oh, dear. I hadn’t thought much about this part.”

“I can do it,” I mumble. And then sleep overtakes me again; I am thinking about the computers blinking—but they’re not here, are they? Not in here. Patrick says, “No, no, sit up. Here. Alllll right. I’ll do it for you. Lift your arms. I’m going to slide your sweater up over your head. There.”

The air is cold on my skin all of a sudden. Then he’s sliding a shirt down over my chest and arms. My bra, I think. No one likes to sleep in a bra. Men probably don’t know that. I feel like laughing about that, but I can’t.

And anyway now he’s eased me back down on the bed and is tugging at my pants, which are so tight that he has to yank them, but then they’re off, one leg and then the other is free, and I’m trying not to think of what underpants I have on, that he’s seeing, and then the covers are over me, and there was something else I wanted to say to him, but I can’t think just now of what it is, and anyway, I’m too tired to get the words out. I’ll think about Patrick seeing my underpants tomorrow. And oh yes, I want to ask him not to go. I want to tell him that Blix really wants him to stay. That there’s other art he could do. I want to try one more last, desperate, begging thing.

And I will, just as soon as I can hold my head up again.

Later—how much later?—I turn over, and the cat jumps down off me. I hear Patrick breathing deeply somewhere, and when I open my eyes, he is right there, next to me in the bed. I command myself: touch his arm, but I can’t tell if that really happens or if I am just thinking it, and then when I wake up, there is the smell of cinnamon, and Patrick is coming into the room saying, “How’s the head? Did you sleep okay?”

The first words out of my mouth are maybe not the best ones. “What time is it? What’s that smell?”

Patrick says, “Deep breaths. I made cinnamon buns.”

“Cinnamon buns. I thought I was dreaming. You made them?”

“I made them.” He’s smiling at me. “I also made you some tea, so if you want to get up and come in the kitchen . . . or do you want me to bring it to you here?”

“Wait. Did I sleep here?”

“You did sleep here. You bumped your head, remember? So I put you to bed here.”

“Of course I remember.” And then I remember the rest—how everything blew up, how I don’t believe in magic anymore, or matchmaking, or being extraordinary, and that makes me so sad, because I wanted to believe in Blix and all the things she said about me. I wanted to believe I was here for a reason, but I’m not. I feel tears just behind my eyes, and then they’re rolling down my face, and my nose is running, too, and this is going to be ugly.

“Oh, dear,” he says. “Here, come in the kitchen and have some tea and cinnamon buns. Let’s get you moving again.”

I obediently swing my legs over the side of the bed and look down at myself. Bare legs and a T-shirt I’ve never seen before. Oh God. I look back up at him.

“Yes. You’re wearing my T-shirt. I couldn’t let you sleep upstairs with a head injury. And your clothes had a lot of turkey fat on them.”

Ah yes. Then I sort of remember. Underpants. Being put to bed. Patrick there in the middle of the night, snoring softly next to me. It’s all coming back to me. Oh God God God God. I look around for my clothes, which he hands me, folded neatly in a little pile.

“Well. Thank you,” I say primly. I don’t want to look at him, and I wish to hell he’d stop looking at me. Maybe if I don’t look at him for long enough, he’ll get the idea and head somewhere else. Go scare somebody about cancer or something.

“Well,” he says. “Well. You’re welcome.” He stands there for what seems like another whole eternity, and then he says, “So, uh, I’ll get out of your way and let you get dressed.”

“Okay.”

“When you get dressed, come into the kitchen, because I have something of a surprise for you. Well, let’s not call it a surprise, shall we, because that word got ruined yesterday by Jeremy. Let’s call it a plan.”

Oh, yes, Jeremy. Ugh.

When he leaves, I blow my nose on tissues he has by the bed, and then I get up and struggle into my clothes. There are no mirrors in his apartment—it occurs to me that he probably doesn’t like to look at himself, which is another thing that threatens to make me cry again—but I comb my hair as best I can. There may be some dried blood here and there. I wish I had a toothbrush.

Where are my shoes?

Oh my God, I think a real estate agent is coming! And the place is probably a wreck! Please tell me there’s not a turkey carcass in the living room anymore.

Patrick slept beside me last night. He took care of me!

Wait . . . so Noah had moved out and yet he came to Thanksgiving, and why was he there, again?

And Jeremy. I have broken Jeremy.

So this is going to be the way life is for a while—thoughts showing up in my brain without notice, each one feeling like an emergency that needed to bump the previous thought out of the way.

I go into the kitchen, blinking from the fluorescent light.

“Hmm,” he says. “You may want to work with that jaunty bandage before the real estate agent comes. You look a little like a pirate.”

There’s a bump from upstairs.

“Noah,” I say. “Did I tell you he was taking things off the wall yesterday in the middle of everything? Blix’s stuff. I’ll bet he’s back. Doing it again.”

“Well, that,” Patrick says. “That’s what I wanted to talk to you about last night, but then my sister called. I have to show you something. Can you follow me?”

He steers me over to the back door and unlocks all the bolts and—out on his little stunted terrace—there is a whole stack of cardboard boxes. Three, maybe. Large ones.

I look at him blankly. He smiles.

“Frankly, this is the most unethical thing I have ever done in my life, but I kind of don’t feel bad about it.”

“But what is it?”

“The stuff Noah’s been packing,” he says. “Blix’s stuff. It’s all here.”

“But how did you get it?” This is hurting my head even more.

“This is my brand of magic.” His eyes are twinkling. I’ve never seen him look so happy.

“You magically got the boxes to get on your terrace?”

“Well. I magically overheard Noah asking Paco if the UPS driver stops at his bodega, and if he’d take these boxes, since Noah didn’t feel like schlepping them to a post office, God forbid, or to a mailing center. And Paco said sure, no problem. And then I—”

“You didn’t!”

“I did. I made an arrangement with Paco. He brought the boxes over here—Noah had brought some over to him on Wednesday afternoon, which means they must contain Blix’s journal and your letter.”

“Oh, Patrick!”

“So we can go through them and take out what we need—or rather what Blix needs us to have. And decide if we want to mail the rest.”

“Can I kiss you?”

“No.”

He says it so quickly that I laugh. First laugh since the fall.

“Come on. Technically we’ve slept together, so I think I could give you one kiss on the cheek.”