“I haven’t ever led you astray, have I? We’ll be together through this. It’ll be wonderful. Trust me.”
He picks up my hand and kisses it. Kisses every knuckle while he looks into my eyes. My heart is like a trapped little bird in my chest; it thinks—it hopes—that there could be a shift, just like earlier. That the universe can show up at the right time and bring light to a situation, to an impasse. I can’t be the one to convince him, but something else can.
And then, wouldn’t you know, the molecules do shift, and suddenly Graham and Winnie are standing there, looming like happy idiotic bobbleheads right at our table. They are leaving, and they are just so happy and they want to thank us for making sure they got introduced—and oh, they couldn’t help but sense that something special was happening at our table, too! What is it? Can we talk about it?
“Not sure we should discuss it just yet,” says Patrick in a low voice, “but we may be considering running for president. Or buying the Knicks basketball team. One or the other.”
Winnie’s mouth makes an O, and Graham laughs and pulls her to him. “In other words, Win, it’s none of our business.”
Win. He calls her Win already. You see? They’ll be engaged by tomorrow night, the wedding will take place next Tuesday, and by a week from Saturday they’ll own a house and she’ll be pregnant. With twins.
I beam them over some scraps of love that seem to be floating around the table, and she leans over and gives me a quick hug and whispers, “Thank you, I’ll never forget this,” and I tell her I have a flower shop, Best Buds, and if she ever wants to, she should come and tell me what happened—and after they leave, Patrick and I ask Andre to pack up our food, which we now know we cannot eat.
It’s a hot, humid night outside, almost like a jungle, and we decide, without even talking about it, to walk all the way home to Park Slope. It’s as though we know that all these intense feelings can’t fit inside our house. We need to work some of them off before we get there.
He holds my hand, but his back is stiff and his eyes look straight ahead, and I’m not at all sure if he’s holding my hand like he’s going to change his mind and be the father of my child, or if he’s holding my hand like he’s comforting me before announcing once and for all his final answer that he can’t give me what I want.
I know deep down inside me that I am going to need to be able to live with whichever this is going to be, which is something that I really, really hate about life. The way you know exactly what would make you happy and what you need, but you still might not get it. This just doesn’t work for me at all. That’s where Blix was such an expert: she said you just have to keep going toward what you want and being open to surprise—because maybe, just maybe you’re really not the expert, and there might be something better you haven’t thought of.
Still, I would just like to put the universe on notice that I might not be able to give up the idea of having a baby and remain a mostly pleasant person.
When we get home, he goes upstairs and runs a bath, and while I’m brushing my teeth, he comes in, strips down, and gets in the tub.
“Wait,” I say. “I want to get in, too.”
“You should.” He pours in some divine-smelling bubble bath. Lavender, I think.
I set up little tea lights all around the edge of the tub, turn off the overhead light, and then climb in next to him—it’s a huge claw-foot tub from probably 1900, so we both fit—and I lie back against his strong chest, my hair drifting in the water, fanning out around my shoulders. This is what I like about Patrick—the way that when things are tough between us, he doesn’t look for reasons to keep things bad. He wants to find the place where we can be okay again. His heart is beating underneath me, and even just the sound of it is so lovely and reassuring.
We don’t talk, but after a bit he soaps my body and his touch is silky and sure. He bends his head down and kisses my shoulder and I laugh because he’s taken in a mouthful of bubbles. I twist around and fashion them into a beard for him and then kiss him on the mouth, which fills my own mouth with bubbles, too.
Afterward, we stumble our way to bed, sleepy and calm at last, and he pulls me to him, and we make love very carefully—like we’re making up for something hard that we might not be able to recover from. He is so loving and sweet, so warm and familiar.
At the crucial point, he reaches over to get a condom, as usual. I admit that I had entertained a tiny bit of hope that maybe he would skip it, but nope. I close my eyes and try not to be disappointed. It’s okay.
It’s not until we’re all done and he’s getting himself all put back together, that he turns to me with a shocked look on his face. “It broke,” he says. His eyes are wide.
“What broke?”
“The condom. It’s completely ripped.”
I get up on one elbow. “Are you kidding me? It broke?”
“Oh my God. Did you do this? Is this some of the Marnie magic at work here?”
“You think I have powers over latex?”
“Marnie,” he says. “I think you have powers over everything. I haven’t yet seen the thing that you don’t seem to know how to control.”
He flops down on the pillow. And I’m relieved to see that he’s laughing, even though it’s not altogether a happy laugh. “You are a minx of the highest order,” he says. “And oh my God, if we end up with a baby because of this . . .”
I sock him in the arm. “If we get a baby from this, it’ll just mean that there was a baby out there who was waiting for us to agree to be its parents, and it saw a way to make that happen, and it will be this wonderful, magical baby that was supposed to come to us.”
“Marnie.”
“What?”
“Could you just . . . not? Please.”
Long after he’s asleep, I lie perfectly still for a long time, and I have to admit it: I am watching the full moon through the wavy glass in the window, and I am visualizing all the little sperms energetically swimming toward my hopeful, patient little ovum, who is no doubt jumping up and down and cheering them on. “You did it!” she’s yelling. “You broke through! Hurry! We’ve got so much work to do! I’m going to get right to it, drawing up the blueprints for some arms and legs and a heartbeat. But first—implantation, here we come!”
The universe has so many tricks up its sleeve.
And now—well, I just hold up my hand toward the ceiling, where there might be the slightest little bit of mist forming up in the highest corner. Is it Blix, smiling down on us? Blix, who knew from the beginning that we were supposed to be together.
She had a mantra she lent me. I pinch my fingers and say it over and over again:
Whatever happens, love that.
CHAPTER TWO
PATRICK
It’s nine o’clock in the morning, and Patrick, who has been awake since four thirty, is in the living room, busily hyperventilating. The front door just closed behind Marnie, who was tripping off to the flower shop practically singing, swishing her long skirt, leaning down to kiss his coffee-soaked lips, ruffling his hair, kissing his nose and the tops of his ears. The whole happy dance bit.
He should perhaps go look for a paper bag to breathe into before he falls over on the floor.