He leans forward and whispers, “Nice work. They look like they’re hitting it off. Mission accomplished.”
“Sssh. Don’t look. It’s too early to evaluate.”
“Not in this case. He’s complimenting her on her shoes. He’s a goner.”
“Patrick. We don’t speak of people in love as goners.”
He smiles at me and reaches for my hand. “Nonsense. We’re all goners here. Happy little goners.”
Andre, our favorite waiter, comes over. Patrick says he’ll have the lemon aioli squid and I say I will, too, and then we’re quiet, and he’s staring at me expectantly, so I drink about four gulps of wine because I know it’s time to say the thing. Patrick is smiling, with his head tilted to the side, waiting. And my heart is beating ridiculously loud. They can hear it across the room, I’m sure.
“Okay, MacGraw, out with it,” he says. “I can’t stand the suspense.”
“I can’t. We need to make polite conversation for a while first. What did you do today?” I fold my hands in my lap.
He exhales. “Okay. What did I do today? Well, let’s see. I went to my studio and I stared at the empty canvas I’ve been staring at all week. And then, let’s see, your mother called.”
“My mother?” This makes me happy. My mother and Patrick both love to bake, and they’re always exchanging recipes.
But then I see that he’s frowning. “Yeah,” he says. “Not to be alarming or anything, but she said kind of a weird thing. She wanted to talk to you about it, I think, but I guess when she called your number, you couldn’t pick up . . .”
“No. I couldn’t because—get this, Patrick—there was an old man in the store who hadn’t talked to his daughter in five years, and he heard that she had a baby last week, and he wanted to send her flowers and also tell her that he is so sorry for all the times in her life when he wasn’t there for her. We all worked for an hour on the note. Everybody in the whole place was in tears by the time we got it written.”
“Nothing like a day when the whole shop bursts into tears.”
“Oh, stop. You know. It’s the best possible kind of tears. Everybody was hugging the old guy and giving him tips on what he could say. It was like pure joy, the whole community helping him.” I take a sip of wine. “So, what’s going on with my mother? Did I do a terrible thing not picking up?”
“No, I think it’s probably fine. She says your dad won’t get off the couch. She wants to travel and go places, and he says he’s too tired for all that. She sounded a little sad, is all.”
I am sure this is no big deal. My parents have been married for forty years, ever since they were teenagers, and they live in the suburbs of Florida (they happen to be actual Florida natives and not transplants), and he likes to play golf and she swims at the Y and they finish each other’s sentences, and bicker in the irritating way of people who have long ago turned their differences into what they consider a kind of amusing road show, for the benefit of an audience, usually my older sister Natalie and me. My parents are fine. Their marriage is an example to all their friends. They’re an institution.
“Tell me what else you did today. Did you take Bedford for a walk?”
“Oh God. It was awful.” He laughs. “We went to the park, and Bedford dragged me over to the playground, where he took a kid’s sneaker and ran off with it. So when I brought it back, the kid started screaming bloody murder at the sight of my scary face. And then the mom got all upset, and she yelled at the kid, which was terrible because he has the perfect right to be freaked out by my frightfulness. And then Bedford took the opportunity to grab the baby’s shoe out of the diaper bag, and he runs off with it, and she and I both start running after him, but then the kid starts crying to be picked up, and I don’t even know how it happened, but suddenly the mom just handed over her baby to me and picked up the older kid and went to get the shoe back!” He shakes his head. “Can you imagine? She just gives me her baby, and you know me—I don’t do babies, and I didn’t know how to hold the baby right, and so it stared right at my face in shock for about ten seconds and then it just let out this bloodcurdling scream and started wailing like the end of the world, and then the mom came running back without the baby’s shoe that Bedford took, probably realizing what a crazy thing it was to just hand a weird man her most prized possession—so I had to go find the baby shoe, and bring it back, which made everybody start crying again at the sight of me, and my new position is that dogs and babies are the worst.”
My heart sinks. I put down my wineglass.
“Um, so . . . what just happened?” he says. “What did I say? Tell me.”
There’s no choice. I have to come out with it, even though my voice is suddenly clogged in my throat, and my heart is hammering away something awful. “Patrick,” I say, “I-I want a baby. I need to have a baby.”
He stares at me. “Wait. So this is what you were going to ask me?”
“Yes. Listen to me. I need us to have a baby, Patrick. And you would be such an amazing father, and our lives would be so full and wonderful, and I can’t imagine not having a baby with you, and I’m thirty-three, and I want this so much, so very much.”
I’m ignoring the fact that his eyes have gone opaque and that he has put his napkin down.
He laughs, one of those hollow laughs that makes me want to hide my head. “What is this ludicrous idea you have that I would be an amazing father? You should ask the woman in the park today how amazing I am with children. Marnie, honey, I am useless when it comes to kids. Beyond useless.”
“You know that’s not true,” I say. “That one baby was not a referendum on you.”
“No. It is true,” he says. “It is definitely true. You love me, and so you choose to overlook a million things about me that are ruined. But look at me, Marnie. Honestly. Look at my face and my arms and try to tell me I’m a person who should be a father. I’m not father material. And the thing is, you really do know this. Which is why you’re so nervous.”
“I know the opposite.” I reach over and take his hand, which makes him flinch just the slightest bit. His hands are scarred and they hurt him, because when the fire came, he ran toward it, holding his hands out, trying to save his girlfriend. He is the best person in the world. “Patrick, please. This is so important to me. It’s everything. All the magic, all the possibilities of life—it’s all right here for us. I need a child. I need us to be parents of a child. I want to do this with you. You’ll be a wonderful father. You have so much to give. You’ll see. It’s life. It’s us—it’s you, coming back to life. Affirming what’s good—”
He interrupts me. “But I’m happy, Marnie,” he says quietly. “I like our lives just the way they are. I don’t need another affirmation of what’s good. I have what’s good.”
I lean forward, as if I can persuade him by getting closer. “But this will bring us so much more happiness! Think of it. We can take this next big step. I know we can do it. I just know we can.”
He’s silent for a long time. “I-I don’t know what else I can say to you. I can’t do it.”