I stop, because Patrick is looking at me, and it looks, shockingly, like he’s suppressing a smile.
“Do you even know what I’m talking about? That level of boringness? He can go on and on about the way the cleaning service shampooed his office rug and how long it took them and how many guys they sent to do it and what the first guy said and then what the second guy said. And he can also talk until the sun comes up about highway routes! Highway routes, Patrick! And I’m supposed to love him, and I probably do, but he loves me so much more than I love him, and what’s so really terrible is that I broke his heart back in high school so I can’t do it again, even if it turns out that I can’t love him. Do you see? There’s a special kind of hell for people who break nice people’s hearts twice, don’t you think? And I know I don’t deserve him, and that just makes it worse somehow! Oh God, please stop looking at me! I don’t even know why I’m telling you this! I am not a good person, Patrick. I came here to Brooklyn scared out of my mind, but now I see that way deep down I was just hiding from my real life and hoping Brooklyn would show me an answer, and instead I’m stupider than ever—sleeping with my ex, who doesn’t love me and never loved me! Like that’s going to lead to anything good! Some experiment, he called it, in behavior for exes. We’re going to have closure.”
My voice breaks, and I make myself stop talking. I carefully set my napkin down on the table in the heavy silence that follows and put my head in my hands. What will he do when I start to sob? I can feel the tears, all right there—a big cry is organizing itself and is going to break all over both of us soon.
“Well,” he says at last. “Well. My goodness. I’m wondering if this night doesn’t call for whiskey instead of wine. This may be a Chivas Regal situation.” He gets up and goes over to the cabinet and brings down a bottle and two glasses. On his way back to the table, he grabs a box of tissues and puts it in front of me.
He hands me a glass of whiskey, and I stare at it because I don’t drink whiskey. But I take a sip anyway, and God, it’s the most terrible taste in the world, burning all the way down, but also warming me up, inch by inch. Who can drink this stuff? I take another sip and set my glass down. He’s downed all of his.
“You know what? I thought—when I came here—I thought Blix left me the house because maybe she wanted me to be with Noah. That she set this all up. That’s how crazy I am. Right after he left me, when I was desperately unhappy, I asked her once for a spell to get him back, and I thought maybe that was why she gave me the house, and why he was here. The spell.”
He clears his throat. “I have to say that I don’t think she wanted you to be with Noah.”
“I’m getting that idea. But why not? Why did she not really like him? You know the whole story, don’t you?”
He hesitates, pours himself another glass. “Really? Are we going to do this?” Then he sees my face. “We are. Okay, she saw him as something of an opportunist, I think. Somebody who would take advantage. He wasn’t . . . so wonderful when she was at the end of her life and needed him to step up.”
“Please tell me what happened. I need to know everything. He told me he was the one who took care of her.”
“Are you sure you want to hear this?”
“I think I need to know, don’t you?”
“All right.” He stretches out his legs and cracks his knuckles. “Well, he showed up one day when it was right near the end for her. We were all taking care of her—all her people, you know. Coming and keeping her company, fixing meals, straightening, that sort of thing. Mostly sitting and talking to her. And he comes along one day with no idea what’s going on, doesn’t even know that she’s sick, much less dying. And he was shocked, of course. We all tried to help him with that, because it can be upsetting to see a loved one dying, but we started getting uncomfortable because of the way he just kept badgering her to go to the hospital. He thought she should have had surgery for the tumor. Get some chemotherapy, whatever. We kept trying to talk to him, to explain to him that the time for all that had passed, and that we were there helping her make her transition, but he wasn’t having it. He kept insisting that professionals needed to be called, that only they know how to take care of people who are dying.”
“Oh, Patrick! How did she stand it? What did she do?”
“See, that’s just it. The essence of Blix is to try to solve things. To love what’s there. She was sad, but I think at the end she thought that she could use love to help him. She wanted to fill him up with love. The way she did. You know how she was.”
There’s a silence. Roy climbs up on my lap and I pet him. Patrick is looking at us with a serious look on his face.
“On the last day, he was panicking at the idea of having her die in front of him, and I get that. It’s scary, watching somebody die. But she had planned it all out, and she wanted to die at home in a peaceful state, and he was determined to have medical authorities. So Lola took him next door and fed him something, just to keep him away. And . . . well, I sat with Blix while her breaths just kept getting farther and farther apart, and I held her hand. I told her I’d stay with her for as long as she needed, and for her to take her time, to go only when she was ready. And—well, that’s it.”
“Oh, Patrick.”
I want so badly to get up and go over to him and hug him—the air is practically demanding that we hug—but I know better. The air may want us to hug, but he’s not inviting that kind of attention. Instead, he gets up and walks to the sink with our plates.
I lean down and give Roy my last little piece of chicken, and he takes it and jumps down from my lap and eats it next to my foot.
“Hey, congratulations. You’re now Roy’s best friend,” Patrick says. He picks up the cat, and Roy rubs his head along Patrick’s chin, along the place where the skin is pulled tight.
Maybe it’s because I’m possibly drunk, or maybe it’s because Blix is right now in the room with us, but I suddenly get an amazing idea. It feels like the very best idea anybody in the history of the world ever had, and I stand up to deliver the news of it, so it will have the fullest possible impact.
“What if—what if I threw a big dinner party? Or—I know—Thanksgiving! I’ll put on a Thanksgiving dinner upstairs and invite everybody who loved her, and we’ll all celebrate her life. It can be my good-bye to her. And my thank-you. Both at the same time.”
Patrick is smiling. “Look at you,” he says. “Glowing like this. This is a big plan.”
“Will you come?”
“Well—no. But I think it’s a good idea for you.”
“Patrick!”
He leans across the table and speaks in a husky voice. “Look at me, Marnie. Look at my face. You and Blix . . . you are the only people I’ve let into my life. Don’t you know that by now? The only people who see me on purpose. I’ll send up some cookies, some pumpkin pies, and I’ll cheer for you from down here. But I can’t go up there. The hideous factor kicks in.”
“But you are the furthest thing there is from hideous,” I say. “You’re luminous.”
“My tolerance for absorbing sympathetic remarks has reached the breaking point,” he says. “So I think it’s time to call this evening quits.”
I say, “Patrick,” and then I look at him and set my mouth a certain way, and then I give him my most exasperated expression and roll my eyes, and then I say, “Patrick, you and I both know—”
And then I just leave because there’s no point. Patrick’s heart is closed for business. He’s told me every way he knows how.
THIRTY-THREE
MARNIE
“I’m afraid you’re not going to like late November up here,” Sammy tells me. He’s waiting in my kitchen for his dad to come pick him up for their weekend together. “I don’t know if you realize it, but November is when everybody’s teeth start to hurt.”