Matchmaking for Beginners
“This is like the most amazing thing anyone’s ever done for me.”
“Listen, I’m not prepared to make a big speech or anything,” he says. “I’m still a wreck. Still me. But I thought about what you said.”
“Oh my God, Patrick, you’re outside. For me.”
“Yeah, well, I want to go see how this dog of yours is doing. And I want—well, then I want to start the process where Roy and Bedford get to be friends.”
“You do? Aren’t you moving, like, in twenty minutes? Going to Wyoming?”
“And then maybe if you want we could have an exploratory preliminary talk about how ridiculous it would be if one of us is walking on the plains of Wyoming alone while the other one is in Florida. Flah-rida, as you say it. You know, as a long-term plan.” He stops walking and faces me and takes both of my hands in his leathery, stitched-together, wonderful hands, the medical miracle hands.
His eyes are luminous in the half darkness. “I probably can’t be fixed all the way, you know. There’s always going to be some . . . pain . . . and maybe some visits to that planet. The My Lover Died planet. I may have a permanent parking space there for my spaceship. But I . . . well, I need you. I don’t want to live without you.”
“Patrick . . .”
“Please. You don’t have to do this. You’re going to have to think very hard about what you want. I’m no bargain, believe me. Just tell me this. Is this—am I—I mean, could this ever be something you even want?”
I close my eyes. “So much.”
He pulls me to him and kisses me so softly. “Is that really true?” he whispers. “You want this?”
I nod. I’m about to burst into tears, so I can’t trust myself to speak.
“Okay,” he says, “so we’ll go visit Bedford. Then we have to go home and tell Roy the news. That he’s now a dog owner. He’s not going to be happy, believe me.”
We start walking again, and the sky gets dark, and yes, there may be sparkles everywhere I look, or maybe it’s just the streetlights coming on and shining on the snow. We can’t stop smiling. Smiling and walking and holding hands.
“You do know there are going to be piles of problems, right?” he says about half a block later. “This isn’t going to be like—”
“Patrick,” I say.
“What?”
“I may need you to be quiet just now so I can love on you better. I’m thinking how it’s going to be so amazing, unwrapping you.”
“Unwrapping me, did you say? You are?”
“Yes,” I say. “Yes! Yes! Yes! I’ve been thinking of nothing else.”
“If you’d been texting that, would there have been periods or commas between all those yeses?”
I stop walking then and put my arms around him, and he kisses me again and again. And it’s the best, really—kisses that have exclamation points between them. Like all the yeses from now on.
FORTY-SEVEN
MARNIE
On the day that the three months are up, Charles Sanford gives me the papers to sign, now fully accepting the terms of the will—and then he hands me the last letter from Blix, the letter he’d explained would be mine once I’d fulfilled the terms of the will.
“Just out of curiosity,” I ask him, “did she really write me two letters—one if I was staying and one if I was going?”
He laughs a little bit. “Well. No. Not really.”
“Oh, because she would have been too disappointed in me if I’d gone back to my regular life,” I say.
“That’s one way to look at it. But probably, it was more that she always was sure you wouldn’t.”
“But I almost did,” I say. “I even had a real estate agent showing the house! I had a plane ticket home.”
And he smiles. “Yes, but no offers ever materialized, did they? And you decided to stay. You see, Blix didn’t deal in almosts. She knew what she was doing.”
I go to the Starbucks where I had read her first letter, three months ago. And then I open up this letter, my heart beating fast.
Marnie, my love, welcome to your big, big life. Sweetheart, it worked out just as I knew it would. For the good of all.
As you look around you, I know you’re seeing all the nonstop, everyday, and everywhere miracles. They are everywhere.
And, sweetheart, keep loving him. He’s a good man—damaged and broken, but as someone wiser than me said, it’s in the broken places where the light gets in.
And as you and I both know, he is LUMINOUS. Filled with trapped light. It beams out of his eyes, doesn’t it, darling? I also want you to know that he has a Hawaiian shirt and he has straw hats—and when he puts those on and dances, you are not going to believe the transformation that takes place. I am there with you, loving every minute. So live your little hearts out. Love is everything there is. Never forget who you are.
Love,
Blix
I put down the letter and smile off into the distance.
So she did know. She fixed it so it would happen just this way.
I feel like if I turned around fast enough, if the principles of time and space could somehow allow it, I’d see her there, dancing in the street, twirling, with her hands in the air, just the way she danced at my wedding.
And I wonder if she knew even way back then that I was meant for Patrick. Someday I hope I can ask her.
Oh yeah. It’s now a year later, and here are some other things that have happened.
My parents were upset at first about me staying in Brooklyn, and could barely stand that I broke Jeremy’s heart two times. But they came around. Parents always do when they see you are truly happy. My mother said she just knew, with a mother’s intuition, that when I went to Brooklyn my whole life was going to change. And she’s resigned to the fact that I’ll turn into a Northerner and that my children, when Patrick and I get around to having them, will speak Northern instead of Southern.
Natalie has visited me and met Patrick. She said she needed to see my life here, to figure out what in the world Brooklyn offered. She left still perplexed, I’m afraid. She’ll always prefer big green lawns, swimming pools, and the quiet certainty of a suburban boulevard at midday. Me, I love how the city wakes up merely two hours after it went to sleep, and the way the 6:43 bus roars around the corner and hits the pothole—the same pothole—every single morning. And how the dance of the city means you never know who’s going to show up next on your street, in your life.
Jeremy—well now, Jeremy is really the casualty of the whole situation. No getting around that. What can I say? Such a nice guy, and I know he’s telling himself the story of how nice guys always finish last, never get the girl. He joked that maybe he and I will try again when I’m between husbands number two and number three. I told him that wasn’t funny at all, but actually I was happy to hear him say that. Maybe it means that his snarkiness is coming back.
William Sullivan is on number ninety-two of A Year of One Hundred Dates with Lola. He says he has the patience of a mule. And I happen to know that she’s been to the drugstore. For products that make things easier, you know. On their one-hundredth date, he tells me, not only is he going to propose, but they’re going to figure out whether to move to New Jersey or stay in Brooklyn. (Lola told me they’re staying, and she thinks Walter will be fine with that.)
Andrew and Jessica, now members of a family of four, bought a house in Ditmas Park (a much more residential section of Brooklyn). They’re planning a spring wedding. Best man: Sammy. The maid of honor will only be nine months old, so her mother plans to carry her up the aisle.
Sammy’s school bus brings him to me after school twice a week, and we sit in the kitchen while he works on the poem he’s going to read for the wedding toast. (It’s a pretty good bet we’ll be hearing about the further adventures of the egg and the toast.)
And some new tenants moved into Jessica’s apartment: Leila and Amanda, who will forever after be known as the lesbian moms, a title they love, by the way. Their baby is adorable. And their sperm donor, the one they were writing the note to when I first met them at Best Buds—well, I have to say he’s around a fair amount, too. I’ve been asked if I can think of a spell that might bring him his own woman and baby.