The Matchmakers of Minnow Bay

 

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To Allan Harms,
1945–2014

 

PART I

Time Transfixed

 

TEN YEARS EARLIER

“I think I've looked at this one too much,” my best friend Renee says to me as we come around the corner and find what I suspect is Magritte's most annoying piece. It's got the same strong lines and supreme confidence of his most famous work,
The Son of Man
, the fancy guy with the bowler hat with a green apple floating in front of his face. But the subject matter of
Time Transfixed
is very different—a flat fireplace in a streamlined drawing room, with the perspective angled from lower-left corner to upper right, so you know the room is a room, not a box. And of course, the ultra-black locomotive made out of a steam pipe thrusting out of the fireplace. Like it's … you know.

“Yeah, me too,” I agree. “Or maybe the idea of
Time Transfixed
is just not sitting well with me right now,” I say. It is the day before art school graduation. Four years living with my best friend and making art and looking at art and eating, sleeping, drinking up art, and tomorrow it is all over.

Time is most certainly not feeling very transfixed.

“Magritte preferred a different translation for the French,” she tells me. “Something about stabbing time with a knife. It's a lot more aggressive, more active that way.”

“I wish I could stab time with a knife.”

“No, you don't.”

“Easy for you to say. You're going off to law school after graduation. Law school, Renee. You're going to be a lawyer, and make tons of money, and wear suits.” I pause at that. “Have you really thought this through?”

She laughs warmly at me. “Of course I have! It's going to be great. I love arguing. And you don't
have
to wear suits unless you're in court.”

“Do you even own a suit?” I ask her.

She laughs. “Just the one I bought for the interview. And it was separates so I don't think it counts. Don't worry, Lily. I'm still me even if I'm going to be a lawyer. Law school won't change the fact that I don't wear pantyhose.”

“When will you sculpt?”

Renee shrugs. “There will be time. Or I can always set it aside for a little while, come back when I'm more inspired. It hasn't really been as fun for me since … well, since I started planning my future.”

I look at her sideways, thinking,
That is what you get for always worrying about your future.

“I don't think you'll survive without your art.”

Renee tilts her head at me, looking away from the Magritte for the first time. “Or maybe that's more you than me. You need to be covered in paint every hour of every day. You are the one who's talented. You're the one with the passion.”

“You're talented! You have passion!”

“Remember what they said to us at orientation freshman year?”

“No,” I say honestly. “Something about reporting date rape?”

“Besides that. They said, if you can do something besides art, you should.”

I open my arms in question. “Well, that's everyone, though. I can do lots of other things. I can sort of play the piano. I make a good espresso. And a good martini.”

“They meant do any other
job
. They meant if your soul wouldn't die from not making art, don't make art.”

“I think that's a lousy litmus test,” I say. “Soul death is kind of an extreme bar to set.”

“And yet for you, I think you meet it. You are destined to do this.” She gestures at the museum, as though I am supposed to end up in a place like this. When, much more likely, I'd be lucky to get paid to paint the side of a barn.

“So I'm destined to be poor and tortured for at least the next fifty years, and you, my best friend in the whole world, are destined to sue people for a living?”

Renee smiles mildly. “Well, that's what I'm hoping.”

I gesture to the Magritte. “I am the fireplace. All out of whack and stagnant. And you are the locomotive, doing useful things and plowing ahead.”

“Actually, I think the locomotive is supposed to be his penis.”

I snort. “You think everything in art is genitals.”

Renee shrugs. “It isn't?”

We laugh. But my laugh is melancholy. Four years in art school together. Four years living together as best friends, telling each other everything, seeing each other at our absolute worst and absolute best. How can it be over already? How come time isn't just a little more transfixed?

“There's room for you to stay in my apartment any time you visit,” I tell her. “It's such a sweet place; you're going to be so jealous.”

“I'm just jealous that you don't have to live in South Bend, Indiana, for the next two years. Promise you'll visit every weekend you don't have to work.” Renee grabs my hand. “I can't believe we won't be living together anymore. I don't even know how that's supposed to work. About seventy-five percent of my clothes are actually your clothes. I'm going to have to go shopping. Promise when you come you'll bring your Seven jeans for me to wear?”

“Of course. Me, tequila, Seven jeans. I won't even call first.”

“Perfect. See, things don't have to change that much. It's only a few hours in the car. Plus, I'll have all those law school hotties rounded up for you to date.”

“You are
the
best friend, Renee. Let's trade keys tomorrow before the ceremony starts.”

“If you haven't locked yourself out before then,” Renee says, speaking of my truly extraordinary ability to trap myself out of cars, dorms, studios, and apartments.

I ignore her. “And then when law school is over you can move in with me.”

“I might meet someone, you know,” she says vaguely. “Fall in love. Move to the suburbs.”

“Don't even joke!”

A shadow crosses Renee's face. I work very hard not to see it. It feels like the shadow of the locomotive. “Anyway,” she says eventually, “you think you'll still be in that apartment in two years?”

“Renee, I am going to die in that apartment. In eighty years they will find me in there surrounded by bad paintings, half-eaten by cats. And you know what? I'm pretty okay with that.”

“Well,” she says, turning on her heels and making for the Miró. “As long as you have a plan.”

 

One

TEN YEARS LATER

“Getting evicted is the best thing that could have happened to me.”

I am trying to be convincing. I am keeping the tears at bay like a champ. Now I force a closed-mouth smile for punctuation.

“Well, that's insane,” says my oldest, best friend. We are sitting at the coffee shop sixteen stories below her office. She looks good, for her, for right now, the place in her life that she's in, which is one that is not overmuch concerned with how she looks. Still, good. I am sure I do not, with my paint-stained yoga pants and puffy eyes. I'm a crier, a private crier, and I have been exercising that muscle quite a lot since I came home early on New Year's Eve and found yellow seal tape around the edges of my apartment door.

In public, and we are in public right now, I try to be tough. I admire tough women, like Renee. Her toughness can be mistaken by some for rudeness. It is toughness. In another life, in another universe, she could have been a dynamite soccer coach. Or a bouncer.

Renee says, toughly, “The best thing that could happen to you is that you move according to your own timeline and your own terms, without a bad credit reference and a looming deadline.”

Today, as raw as I am, the toughness feels rude.

“Yeah. You're right,” I say. “But this is the
next
best thing. It's a sign from the universe saying, ‘Get on with your life, Lily.'”

“It's a sign saying, ‘Pay your bills on time,' more likely,” she says with a sigh. “Where will you go?”

I look at her long and hard. She is wearing a navy pantsuit. The suit is pressed and clean and fits funny. There is a lime green scarf involved, running under the collar of the jacket, maybe intended to soften the look. It does not look like something my oldest, best friend would wear if a gun were pressed to her temple, but I think that about her outfit every time I see her lately. I think,
Who is this person?

And now I wonder again, is there any chance in hell she will go along with this plan of mine? Her grand and stately home in the near west suburbs has room for me. It has room for a flock of me's. There are four bedrooms up and one master down and a huge finished basement, which she and I refer to as the pleasure dome, that is divided three ways: a mom cave (for scrapbooking. Scrapbooking! My oldest, best friend, scrapbooking!), a man cave, and a children's playroom. That playroom alone is twice as big as my old apartment and has three times nicer things in it, if you are the sort of person who believes that handmade, hand-dyed all-natural wooden educational toys are nicer appointments than a beat-up IKEA platform bed and upcycled shelving. I am that sort of person. I would rather sleep on a yoga mat on her playroom floor, cooking all my meals on her charming switch-operated pellet stove and eating off of compostable children's tea sets, than spend another night in my old apartment where my life and choices have grown stagnant and dusty.

That is not true at all.

I want to stay where I am. I've been in that apartment for ten years now. Since the summer after I graduated from Northwestern. It's an ancient two flat with good bones and good light. It is small and noisy, but so am I. There was never any reason to move.

Now there is a very good reason. Three months ago my landlord told me to find a new place because she was going to sell to developers. I did not find a new place, or look. I still had ten months on my lease. Then I missed a rent payment, in December, when Christmas gifts always get me a hair behind. Just a hair. I paid her later, midmonth. Late-month, really. Not the same as not paying at all, I don't think. But she says it is. She wants me out by next week.