So I haul myself over to the other side of the bed, and he sits down and puts the tray down between us. I tuck my feet under and arrange the covers around me. This is not good.
“Um, why are you doing this?” I ask him. The pancakes really are perfect—round and golden brown, with melted butter oozing across the top. And the bacon is how I like it—snappable. My stomach does a traitorously appreciative growl.
“Because this is my way of saying I’m sorry. I’m asking for pancake absolution. Aaaaand . . . well, I also want to ask a favor.”
“What?”
He grins at me. “Such a tone of voice! It’s just that I kind of need to stay here, so just hear me out, if you please. I promise I will be a good roommate, and I’ll behave myself and not throw wild parties. I’ll make pancakes and I’ll clean up. And fix faucet leaks. You know. That sort of thing. I’ll even put the toilet seat down ninety-five percent of the time, which is something I have never been successful at before.”
“No, Noah. That’s an absurd idea. We can’t live in the same house. It won’t work. You need to go.”
“But I don’t have anywhere to go,” he says. His eyes are twinkling, like he knows how to make himself adorable. “Come on, Marnie. We’re cool.”
“Call your family. Go back to Virginia and live with them, like I had to do with my family. Do whatever your people do when they run out of money, if that’s ever happened to any of them. But staying here is not an option. You know it won’t work.”
“I can’t call them. I really screwed up in Africa, and they’re pissed.” He starts stroking my arm.
I pull it away. “So teach. You have a teaching certificate.”
“I’m not licensed here. And I’m burned out. I don’t want to teach. Please, Marnie. I started some classes in September, and I intend to stay here while I finish them.”
I don’t say anything.
“Okay, hear me out. Look at it this way. This is a massive social experiment, okay? No, no. Don’t roll your eyes. Listen! We were good friends before we were lovers, and we were lovers for a while before we moved in together and decided to get married. And then I screwed up royally, bigger than I’ve ever screwed up in my whole life. And clearly, because of that screwup, we’re never going to be together together again. You’ve got somebody else now, and I respect that. So what if we just have this time in Brooklyn, in my great-aunt’s house? Just this little slice of time while you wait to inherit this place for real. We’ll be nice to each other. We’ll be friends again, repair all the holes in our relationship. And then—well, when we’re old and gray and decrepit and married a hundred years to other people, maybe we’ll look back and say, ‘Wow, that was such a cool thing we did, living together nicely even though we were divorced and had all that baggage.’ It can be like a spiritual practice—both of us here, in Blix’s house. I think she’d think this was really cool of us to do. Closure.”
“I don’t know, I don’t know.” I can’t look him in the eye. I go to the bathroom and pee, and then I stare at my reflection in the cracked, mottled, wavy bathroom mirror.
He calls through the door: “Did I mention that I’ll make pancakes? And I’m also throwing in the fact that I’ll kill all the spiders.”
“There are no spiders!” I call to him, but I have lost. I know I will say yes. I just wish I knew for sure why I’m saying yes. Is it to please him? Or to keep from being alone? Or is he right, that we really could bring some closure to our relationship?
And then I know for sure what it is.
I am not really done with him.
The place where he lives in my heart—well, he’s still in there. Still rattling around. And it was okay as long as I wasn’t seeing him. I had paved over so many emotions. And now I really, really do need to get over him.
So maybe this will do it.
After too much time has passed, I go back into the bedroom. “All right. You can stay. But, Noah, I hate this. Really. Whether you think it’s a good thing or not, I am seeing someone else. Somebody nice who’s waiting for me—”
“I know, I know,” he says. “Believe me, I respect that. I do.”
“Noah. Don’t.”
“No funny business, no regrets. Just us.”
“Okay,” I say, and he does a fist pump in the air and then he comes over and kisses me, a chaste kiss on the cheek. But there’s a history behind that kiss, and we both know we could tumble right into our old story. He gives me a knowing glance and then picks up the tray with the dishes, and he takes his arrogance and his kisses and his magnetism and leaves, trailing a little whiff of possibility. I hear him walk up the stairs to the kitchen, hear him put the dishes in the sink, and only then do I exhale, and then collapse on the bed and find myself in tears.
I’m not sure what I’m crying for, to tell you the truth. Maybe I’m crying because there’s something in me that can’t seem to quit him, or maybe at last I’m crying for Blix who, despite how everybody talks about her in the present tense, really is dead. And I’m crying because the legacy she left me—this house, all these characters, this life—is something I would never have chosen and don’t intend to keep.
That’s it. I’m crying for Blix’s mistake. She was so wrong about me.
TWENTY-SEVEN
MARNIE
Later that day, when Noah has gone out, Lola brings over brownies, cookies, two pumpkins, and a pair of hand-knit socks with hearts on them. “The socks are because it’s going to get cold here, and the pumpkins are because I thought we should decorate them,” she says. “The brownies and cookies are self-explanatory.” She smiles at me, and I see that she has smiling gray eyes that crinkle up nicely, like they are nested in a crisscross of lines. Grandmotherly, sweet pink skin topped by a haze of gray cottony hair. “Blix and I always did pumpkins together,” she is saying. “Kids will come for Halloween, you know. And by kids, I mean hipsters and their kids. Very entertaining.”
I blink. Halloween is still weeks away! Why are we doing these now?
Lola smiles and heads past me, upstairs toward the kitchen. “So how are you settling in?” she calls over her shoulder. “It’s a fine place to live, isn’t it? So Blix!” She looks around, smiling brightly, like this house is an old friend she’s needed to see.
“I’m so glad you’re here,” I say when we’re both in the kitchen, and Lola is taking off her gray cape that matches her eyes, and draping it over one of the kitchen chairs. The way she looks around the kitchen makes it obvious that it belongs much more to her than to me.
“Ah!” she says and holds her arms straight out, as if she could hug the whole room. “Wow, so she’s still here, isn’t she? I feel her everywhere around!”
“I’ll put some tea on,” I say.
“And then let’s get to work on these pumpkins. Want to?”
She’s the one who goes and gets the kettle out of the cabinet and fills it with water and sets it down on the back burner. “So tell me about Monday. I guess you got the news?”
“The news? Oh, you mean the three-months thing.”
She looks at me closely. “Yes, of course that. Were you surprised? Believe me, this three-months thing was not my idea. I told Blix that was crazy. I told her that you already have your own life somewhere else. And I said that when you give somebody a house, you either just give it to them or you don’t. You don’t try to give them a whole life in the bargain. But there wasn’t any reasoning with her. I guess you know that by now.” She opens a drawer and gets out what look to be some alarmingly sharp carving knives and brings them over to the table.