The Matchmakers of Minnow Bay (21 page)

Ben is standing on the other side, staring right at the place where the the door swung out. I jump back an inch.

“Oh my God, you scared me,” I say when I finally get my breath back. “What are you doing here?” He looks lost. Like he forgot where he lives.

“Where are you going at this time of night?” he asks, in lieu of an answer.

I was planning to go back to the river, to see Ben's lights again, play with the colors a little, and maybe take some photos for future sketching. Rather than tell him that, I just shake my head. “I don't know.”

“I don't know what I'm doing here either,” he says. “I was walking Steve at the house, and then I was putting him in the car and driving to town, and then I was here trying to figure why I wanted to see you so badly. I've been standing here, at this door, for ten minutes now.”

I shake my head again, trying to unhear what he just said. “It's because of the snow,” I say, at last. “It's so pretty tonight.” I force myself to step out of his gaze so that we are side by side, our backs to the front of the Inn.

We both stand there in the portico, stupidly staring at the flurries for a long moment. Then Ben turns away, back to me. “Do you remember what we did, after? In Vegas I mean?”

For a moment, I don't. I shake my head. “I don't think so.” But then I do remember. “Wait. Yes.”

“The pen.”

I nod. “Actually, I think it was an eyeliner.”

I remember the stupid all-night wedding chapel. I remember leaving the chapel a little drunker than we came in, and making a bunch of clumsy allusions to consummating the marriage, and then Ben suggesting that we go someplace. Where did we go? To the pool. The over-the-top Italianate pool set into the courtyard of his hotel.

The sun was coming up. I was starting to get tired. We curled up together on one large chaise, pulled off to the side a bit, maybe to give us a view of the sunrise, maybe to block off the view from the hotel. Ben saw my eyes getting heavy and said, “No, no, Lily. Don't go to sleep yet.”

“Ben,” I muttered. “It's so late.”

“Stay awake a little longer.”

“I can't. I am too full of wedding cake.”

“If you fall asleep now, our night together is over.”

This made me peel my eyes back open, and tilt my head up at Ben carefully. Think about what he'd said.

“Ben, I just assumed…” I began. “I mean … this is fun.” I pressed my lips to his for emphasis. “So fun. But it has to end sometime.” I made my voice as gentle as I could. “I'm flying home soon. Like, in a few hours.”

“No, I know that. But you know that thing, that weird phenomenon of really wild nights where you don't realize you're even drunk until you've fallen asleep? And then you wake up with a start and you're like,
Oh no, what have I done?
”

I nodded hesitantly, unsure about where he was going with this. Feeling suddenly very vulnerable, considering he'd already seen me naked. Twice.

“I don't want that for you,” he said then. “I don't want you to have that feeling about tonight.”

In the chaise, I rolled my lips together. I remember how much I wanted him to kiss me right then. I remember leaning into him in that half-drunken way, and him turning, suddenly, and jumping up out of my arms.

“Do you have any paper?” he had asked me out of nowhere.

“Paper?”

“Paper and a pen? You're an artist, right? So you travel around with a sketchpad?”

I couldn't help but smile at that a little. In fact, I usually did travel around with a sketchpad at that point in my life. But I showed him my tiny baby blue clutch and said, “Where would I put a sketchpad in here?”

He paused, then sat back down next to me, close again, and I wished he would just wrap his arms around me and let me sleep. “What about a pen, though?” he asked.

“Hmm,” I said on a yawn, and opened the clutch for him. Inside we found my credit card, my ID, eight dollars in cash, the silly coaster contract from the diner, and a kohl-colored eyeliner. “I must have lost my pen,” I announced.

“That thing,” he said, pulling out the eyeliner. “Is it expensive?”

“No,” I admitted. “It's from the drugstore. Three bucks, maybe?”

“Okay, so we just need something to write on.” His eyes moved around some more. The pool, which was officially locked at that hour, was so clean and austere. No fluttering receipt in a corner. No stained cocktail napkin under a chaise. “Here,” he said at last, and took off his sport coat, revealing his worn short-sleeved T-shirt. “Right here.”

He turned his arm over, palm up, exposing a flat, broad plane of forearm. On it, he used his finger to draw an imaginary box, three by five or so, and said, “Make me a sketch.”

I felt just a tiny bit of the tiredness slip away. “What do you want me to draw?”

“Anything. The side of a building. That's what you make, right?”

I nodded. “Sometimes the fronts of buildings too.”

“Okay. So you have a range.”

“Give me your arm,” I said. I took it firmly in my left hand, craning it a bit into a comfortable position for me. Then I slowly traced the outline of the canvas he had made for me, not with the eyeliner but with my own finger, thinking of the planes of his arm, the way the black would look on his skin, my workspace made of his body. The feel of his skin on my finger was warm and charged—it seemed to electrify and settle me at once, like the moment after a good bolt of lightening.

“You can see it. It's already there, right?” I asked him after a few moments.

“What is?”

With the eyeliner I traced a curve of a vein, an outline of a muscle, until there was no way to miss what I had seen. “Here is the place where you fell asleep after … we…” I let my voice trail away. Rather than look back up at him, I drew the legs on the too-stark hotel-room platform bed, the sheet that had been tangled around me that I'd pulled away in my attempt to get a better view. He had fallen asleep almost midsentence on that bed, and I had thought, then, that perhaps our night was already over. And so I had, in that moment, with the sheet wrapped around my middle, climbed back far enough to the bottom of the bed to get a good view of him sleeping, to write the memory on the backs of my eyes, because that was what I always did when I saw something beautiful.

“And here is where I fell asleep,” I said, drawing my outline toward the crook of his elbow, as far from his sleeping form as I could go. “Curled up, over here, just out of reach.”

“You fell asleep too?” Ben asked me then. Now, all these years later, I remember how he had curled his hand over my drawing hand, leaving me nowhere to look but in his face. “After I did? In my room?”

“I did. So, you see, I already had my chance to be filled with regret. If I was going to be filled with regret.”

“And you married me anyway,” he said then, in that chaise by the pool in Las Vegas, as he pulled me in closer.

“And I married you anyway,” I say now, aloud.

The Ben Hutchinson of now, of Minnow Bay, Wisconsin, of ten years later, says, “You remember.”

The snow keeps falling. The pool in the desert could not be farther away.

“I'm leaving in the morning,” I tell him.

“You're here now.”

“Steve's in the car,” I say, incredibly off balance.

“Do you want me to go?” he asks back.

“I think that…” I begin, wanting to say something about Mitchell and my life in Chicago, but he is already turning away from me. Somehow in all that snowy silence, we have gotten very, very close together, and now, when I am only just noticing it, he is pulling away. “Ben, wait,” I say, and take his arm. Where is his coat? Why is he in nothing but a fleece hoodie?

He turns back and, as he does, he gently takes my hand off his arm and puts it on his chest. Then he looks down at me, and I look up at him. My chin tilts up to follow my eyes.

And, thank goodness, he understands why. He leans down and in, closer and closer, and then at last his lips are finally touching mine.

 

Twelve

 

The next day it is still snowing. I lay as low as I can in the morning, refusing to let myself wade into the paired black holes of confusion and want that lie at either side of my consciousness. At breakfast, I don't even ask Colleen about Duluth—it is obviously way too treacherous on the roads—and, mercifully, she doesn't ask about Ben. We make plans to meet up for dinner at the bistro, and then go our separate ways. I don't know if she is on to me, and I don't care to find out. The newfallen snow acts like a protective layer over my memory of the night before, sealing it off from the real world.

Simone and I work side by side in the studio that afternoon. Aside from sighing a lot, she makes a decent enough studio partner. Then, after dark, she looks at her brass pocket watch—no idea where she found a pocket watch or why she is wearing it when she has no pockets—and announces that it's time for dinner. I'm about to remark that, though I may seem old to her, I still don't eat dinner at 5:00, when I realize it's 7:30. The day is gone, I am still in Minnow Bay, and have made absolutely no effort to leave. But I have made my first start at new work in weeks. And it is not of the view out my old apartment window.

It is a painting of something I've actually never seen. A sketch made by an artist long gone, of a field of yellow wildflowers in front of a barn. The flowers hold no interest for me, but the barn, the field, the invisible line between ground and petals and sky;
that
has captivated my imagination. The sketch must have been made in late summer, but the big fluffy clouds depicted in the sketch are the white of bleached cotton, midsummer clouds, out of place, clumsy. I have no use for them, and puff them away. In their place is the hottest sky I can imagine, the kind that will burn up the flowers, dry up the prairie beneath, harden the soil, and fill the air with dust.

I labor at some length over that certain scorching blue that I can only vaguely remember here, in the face of the cold bitter winter. It is blue over blue over blue, but not bright, just intense. It gives you the impression that to look at it is to stare at the sun. It is angry, and bored, and rude. It is the thirteen-year-old-boy version of blue. I get the right base at last when I mix cadmium yellow light, an obnoxious neon, with enough red that I have the burnt umber that will engage my existing blue without dulling it down.

The process of making this particular color will be unrepeatable, but I won't need to repeat it because, though I've never given it much thought before, I now realize that my particular August blue sky is not a horizon-to-horizon solid, but rather a spot, the spot directly opposite the sun, the place where the color is stacked most deeply to your eye. From there, things go just slightly grayer, and then, finally, at the instant the sky meets the field, there is nothing but the smoky blur of heat overflowing out of the ground. But that's all work for another day.

“You didn't get much done,” says Simone when she looks at my four-inch square of hot blue sky.

“Didn't I?” I reply. I am trying to be the wise mentor. The Mr. Miyagi of painting.

“No,” she says without pause. “You didn't. Have fun tonight.”

“I'm not leaving yet. I have a ton of cleanup to do.”

“Nuh-uh. Jenny pays me to clean up for artists in residence, do other odd jobs around the gallery. It's how I can afford my brushes.”

“You work a lot of jobs,” I say. “The coffee shop. The gallery. And you have school too. Doesn't leave much time for milking cows.”

“I do it in the morning,” she says, entirely missing my point.

“Sounds like hard work.”

“I'm not afraid of hard work,” she says quickly. “Listen.” She wipes her hands on her pants. “If you let me work with you, I'll be the best mentee you ever had. I'll try anything, study whatever. I'll mix paint for you, clean up, get here early to heat up the studio, whatever you need. You'll actually have more time to work, not less.” She looks at me with her heart in her eyes. “Please,” she says.

“Simone,” I start. I cannot look back at her, with all her hopes bound up in me this way. “I think we've gotten our wires crossed. I'm going back to Chicago tomorrow as soon as I get my tire fixed. I'm not going to be able to mentor you. Now, if you do move to the city for art school, you should look me up—”

“What? You're just going to leave me like that?”

“Simone, you don't even like me. I'm screwing up your long game with Ben Hutchinson.”

Despite herself, she smiles. “Well, that's true.”

“Not that you should have a long game with him. He's way too old for you.”

“He's not too old for
you.
”

“I'm really not sure what you're cheering for here.”

“I just want him to be happy.”

“He'll be just fine.”

“Are you sure?”

This stops me. Is there any reason, whatsoever, to think that Ben Hutchinson will be affected in any kind of long-term way by my arriving here, divorcing him, and then making out with him in a snowstorm?

No more reason than to think he'd be affected by getting married in Vegas on a dare.

“I'm sure,” I tell her. “You sure you're okay with the cleanup?”

“Yep. See you later. Or not, I guess.” She shoos me off and heaves up a Rubbermaid bin full of brushes that need cleaning, following me out and locking the door behind her. “Say hi to Ben for me.”

“What?” I ask her, but she's already halfway to the gallery.

*   *   *

Maybe because I haven't had much to eat all day and my thoughts are consumed with French food, it is not until I get to the bistro's front door that the penny drops.
“Say hi to Ben for me.”
This is a setup. Colleen inviting me out to dinner so casually, saying she'd meet me at the restaurant? As soon as I walk into the bistro, it will be Ben Hutchinson and a good bottle of wine in an otherwise empty restaurant, with candles burning low and romantic music playing. Maybe some Hutchinson brother can play the violin, I think drolly.