“Oh, I know how to work that thing,” he says. And then he very competently makes coffee. He’s wearing jeans and a blue sweater. His dark hair brushes his collar, and I love that, for a moment, at least, I have an excuse simply to watch him, since I’m pretending to care how to work this abominable coffee thing that hates me.
Normally, Patrick doesn’t like it when I look at him. But now, as I see his miraculous, stitched-back-together hands and fingers, see the nimble way he has of moving about, I can’t help but think how stunning it is that he is here at all, that we’re together in this room, in Blix’s kitchen. Standing close together. I think of the spell book, Blix’s journal, and my breath goes up high in my chest. This feels so momentous.
He straightens up, hands me a cup of coffee.
“Would you like a little help with piecrust?” he says. “Because I am, as you well know, the Prince of Pastry.”
“Prince of Pastry, Chief of Cheesecake . . . you could have many titles.”
“At Thanksgiving, though, I try to stay with pies. It’s only fitting.”
He rolls out some piecrust on the table, and I get busy chopping carrots and celery for the salad, and then, maybe because I’m feeling bold because there’s nothing left to lose here, or maybe because I know I’m going home in a month and he’s leaving for the depths of the Wyoming wilderness, I say very carefully, “I want to know what happened to you. I’ve now told you every embarrassing thing about me, and now I need to know about you. What happened. Please tell me.”
“A lot of people don’t know that the true secret ingredient to piecrusts is that the baker cannot talk to others while making it.”
“Don’t joke with me about this. I have to know. Is there somebody you love? Is that why you’re going to Wyoming, because one of the twenty-eight people there loves you and wants you back?”
He lifts his chin up, looks for a moment like he’s not going to say anything, and then he sighs. Maybe my persistence has worn him down, but somehow I prefer to think that Blix is making him tell me—Blix operating from the other side.
“She died,” he says finally. “The person I loved died.”
The sentence hangs in the air. I swallow and say, “Please tell me.”
There’s such a long silence that I think he has decided to completely ignore me. But then he sighs again, and when he starts, he speaks haltingly, lightly, like maybe it won’t land so hard that way.
“Four years ago. A gas leak.” He stares out the window. “We were in the studio together. I was making a sculpture. She was finishing a painting. She went to make coffee, lit a match near the gas stove, and there was an explosion. Blue light, the whole room engulfed in that light. I looked up and she was on fire. She was in the flames, and there was no getting her out.”
He stops, looks right at me. “I was across the room, but I remember running toward her, pulling her away . . . grabbing a blanket and rolling it over her.” He holds out his hands, spreads his fingers apart. I see the scars and the patches, the scaled-away parts, the ridges. “These, believe it or not, are medical miracles. For some reason Anneliese didn’t get the miracles. I did. Even though I didn’t want them.” He flattens the dough with the palm of his hand. “What I wanted was to have died right along with her.”
I hold myself very steady. It’s like he’s a wild animal and I don’t want to frighten him away with too much sentiment, too much sympathy. I feel almost as though I am outside of myself. Maybe this is how Blix would have handled things.
“For the longest time death was all I wished for. Instead, I got surgeries. Thirteen surgeries. And a settlement. I lost my love, my art, my ability to even look at my old sculptures without wanting to throw up, but apparently society gives you money for that kind of loss. I went from being your typical poor, starving, happy artist to being a rich guy with literally nothing in the world that I wanted.”
Bedford comes over and puts his rubber ball on the floor next to Patrick, and Patrick strokes his head, scratches him behind the ears. He actually smiles down at him.
“Where did Blix fit in? Did you know her at the time of the accident?”
“Really, Marnie? Really, do we have to talk about this?” He looks back down at the dough. “Blix found me one day in Manhattan. It was after. Long after. I was rich, living in a luxury hotel, eating room service every night, drinking myself to death, or trying to. And my therapist said it was time I went and looked at art again, tried to make friends with it. ‘Art,’ she said, ‘wasn’t the thing that hurt you. And maybe it has the power to heal you. You should give it a chance.’ So I got to the Museum of Modern Art and I tried to make myself go inside. Walked five steps in, and then turned around and went back out. Then I talked to myself and went in again, and turned around and came back out. Five times, in and out again, in and out. And then a voice said to me, ‘Are you imitating a person who’s attached to an invisible rubber band? Is this an art installation you’re doing outside the museum? Because I’m sold, if that’s what this is.’ My immediate response was that I wanted to kill whoever had said that, but then I saw this old lady standing there wearing crazy clothes, with her hair sticking up and her eyes so kind and compassionate. ‘Hi, I’m Blix,’ she said. And you know how she is—how those eyes would reach over and look right into you! Oh my God! The first person who ever looked at me like that. ‘Or maybe,’ she said, ‘there’s something inside that you can’t bear to see.’ She’s there, just looking at me, human to human. It was like she didn’t even see all my scars. ‘Maybe there’s something inside that you can’t bear to see.’” He shakes his head, remembering.
“Wow,” I say.
“Yeah. So she takes me by the arm—my arm, which was still hurting, I’ll have you know, but Blix didn’t know from pain—and we go have a cup of coffee together. I’m too exhausted to resist her. I feel like I’m under hypnosis or something. She takes me to this dark restaurant, like she knew instinctively that’s what I needed, some shadows, and we sit in the back. And she says, ‘Tell me.’ So . . . I told her a bit of the story. And she wanted to hear all of it. I said no at first, but then the story starts pouring out of me. And it was the first time I’d told it. The fire, the operations, the therapist. She listened and then she said we should go into the museum together. And so we did.”
“What happened?”
“Before we even got to the art, a child started screaming at the sight of me, and old Blix—well, she was not having any of that. She held on to me, walked me through the museum. Steeled herself for whatever was going to happen. Gave me her strength. I could feel it flowing to me. After that, I started meeting her every week. We didn’t go to the art museum anymore, where people stared at me. She would come to my fancy hotel room with the maid service and the room service, and we’d just sit there and talk. About life, about art, about politics. And then one day she said to me, ‘Listen, I like the look of you, and this is no fucking way to live your life. This is false and harmful and dangerous to your health. You’re coming to live in my building with me. In Brooklyn. You’ll have people.’ And so I did.
“I didn’t want any people, mind you, so I saw that as a big drawback, but I got Houndy and Jessica and Sammy in the bargain. And Lola. Five people, counting Blix. All I could handle. I took the job writing up symptoms. Because I wanted something to do. I thought this was the way to do it, stay so busy thinking about other things—people’s symptoms—that I wouldn’t think. And it works. I get to stay away from the outside world, from the children who cry when they see me. I don’t go out. I don’t have to. Why should I let in the awfulness out there, the people who stare at me and make me feel like a freak?”