The Matchmakers of Minnow Bay (4 page)

This is all to say I was hungover that Friday when the mail came. It was signature requested. I signed the green slip in a fog and went back to bed. When I woke up again later, I opened the envelope with the same knife I'd used to butter a piece of toast—I can see the butter stains on the envelope now, brown with age—and peered inside, groaned, and went back to bed for a second time. I don't think I even ever took the paperwork out. My God. I am colossally stupid.

I pull it out now. The cover letter is on the stationary of the State of Nevada, Clark County. There is a little seal at the top and under that it reads:

RE: petition for annulment of Benjamin Hutchinson-Lily Stewart marriage

Supporting Evidence Needed

And then there is a simple request: that I provide a copy of my birth certificate, as well as the enclosed signature page attesting that I am in good mental health, not pregnant, and am not requiring further action or assistance from the county or the state on the manner of maintenance payments or fiscal settlements. And at the bottom it reads:

Failure to provide said documents in a timely manner constitutes dismissal of this matter and continuation of the marriage.

I set down my juice glass of wine heavily.

It would have taken fifteen minutes, maybe thirty, to track down these documents, notarize them, and mail them back. But I never did. I never replied at all. Never sent in these small, easy documents to finish the annulment. I saw the paperwork, thought,
Oh lord, not now,
and put the manila envelope into my “to do” drawer in the galley kitchen in my new little apartment, knowing I could handle it after the hangover passed, after I was a bridesmaid in my best friend's wedding the next day, after I spent thirty minutes holding her bouquet so her hands were free for my ex-boyfriend's ring. I would do it first thing Monday. Monday, June 7th.

Almost ten years ago.

Oh God.

I have been married for the last nine and a half years. To a man whose last name I only learned when I filled out the original annulment paperwork the day after we said “I do.”

A man I haven't spoken to since.

 

Two

 

First, I close the drawer. Maybe I could just leave the contents behind. Move away and forget the whole thing for another ten years. Or a lifetime.

Then I open it again. Study this guy's name. Benjamin Hutchinson. Ben Hutchinson. Ben Hutchinson. Almost without thinking, I open the Facebook app on my phone and type his name into the search field.

There are thirty results. Bens and Benjamins and Benjis and Benazirs. Some have no photo. Most do. On my tiny screen they all look strange to me. I start sorting through the results, ruling out high school boys, college kids, a couple old guys who are indiscriminate with their privacy settings and throw around lots of emoticons. Five of the Bens are hyper-private: artsy nature photos for their cover, impossibly zoomed-in pictures of their hands or eyes or in one case, mustache, as profile pics. I think back to that night in Vegas. It was so long ago. Even if I had a lineup of police mug shots, would I be able to find this guy's face? He definitely had dusty blond hair. Or light brown. Dark brown? No. His eyes were … eye-shaped. He was definitely a man.

So that narrows the field. He was a man, and he had hair, which was lightish, so he's probably Caucasian, or part-Caucasian. Maybe I could sketch him? I stand up and find a sketch pad on the little table I use for extra counter space and, while I'm at it, I pour myself another glass of wine. A big glass. A fortifying amount. Then I draw the edges of a face, with a strong jaw, high cheekbones, long lashes, lightish hair. The rest is a blank for a while. Finally, I remember his nose. Broken at the bridge, and set just a millimeter to the left of where it must have started out. And his smile that leaned in the other direction. God, no wonder I married this guy. Even eyeless, the man in my picture is hot.

I go back to Facebook, this time on my laptop, where I can get better intel, and start looking harder, sleuthing around to every single Ben-something Hutchinson in America and beyond. There are three guys he definitely
could
be. One is married—he's married!—in Utah. He could be a bigamist, thanks to me!

At least it's Utah, I tell myself as I drain the last of my wine. According to HBO, they should be used to this sort of thing.

But more investigation proves that Utah Ben Hutchinson is not my guy. My Ben Hutchinson was older than me by a few years. This one graduated from high school ten years ago. He's thirty at best, even if he was held back. I'm thirty-two.

The next Ben Hutchinson contender has a real photo up, and he's blessedly unattached, at least according to Facebook. He looks blondish, and he's not ugly, though he's no match for my sketch. He lives in Durham.
I would not marry this man, would I?
I ask myself as I look at his incendiary political posts all over his friends' pages. When I see that his favorite movie is
The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift,
I start aggressively looking for proof that it is not him. I know my Ben Hutchinson lived in California when we met. Has this guy ever lived in California? Not that there is any Facebook record of it. It's probably not him.

If it's him, I need to get this annulment fixed pronto. If it's not him, I scoldingly remind myself, I still need to get this annulment fixed pronto. I pour myself one more teeny tiny glass of wine.

The last Ben Hutchinson has to be him. This one is the most private of the bunch. There's only a picture of something red on his profile picture, and his cover is a panoramic picture of a blimp. I click on the profile pic and zoom out to try to achieve some kind of resolution. Okay. It's the Stanford Cardinal. It's a football helmet with the Stanford Cardinal symbol on it. I remember the guy from Vegas liked football. Blimps fly over football games. Stanford is in California. Is this my guy? This must be my guy!

Under “About,” it shows that he is engaged. Shit. Lives in Berkeley. Is an attorney. Double shit. My guy was definitely not a lawyer, at least not openly, but he had ten years to go to law school since I saw him last. Wouldn't a lawyer have noticed if some girl he married on a whim in Vegas never finished her annulment paperwork? Maybe that's why he became a lawyer. To be able to personally find me and nail my ass to a wall.

No, that's the wine talking. One would not need law school to nail my ass to the wall. I am insanely easy to find. I'm on Facebook both as myself and with an artist's profile. I have a respectable number of likes on my artist page, most of them probably art bloggers who blab about everything. All the Vegas guy would need is my name and some recollection of our conversation about the inexplicable popularity of Dale Chihuly and he'd find me.

But he hasn't found me. Does he know? I look at the one Facebook photo of this Ben Hutchinson that he has let slip through his privacy filters. It's a row of guys, arm in arm, in front of a stadium. More football. He's hefting a beer joyously, in a can, and giving the camera a thumbs up. Even with my art-school expertise with Photoshop I cannot seem to get a good look at his face. All I see is blondish hair, a good jawline, and a thumbs-up.

So this is my husband, I think, a little sadly. He's engaged. A lawyer. In Berkeley. I need to find him quickly, and explain what happened, and beg for his forgiveness, and hope he'll be relieved that it all happened before he tried to get a marriage certificate. I can hope it's nothing more to him than a little blip on his radar, a funny story. Tomorrow, when I wake up, first thing in the morning, I will send him a PM and explain the whole situation and offer him free art for life if he just helps me finish this annulment and doesn't press charges for wrongful being-married-to-him-ness. I'll do it tomorrow early, when I'm perfectly sober and alert, before I have time to screw things up worse: 6:00
A.M.
I set the alarm on my phone with the following memo: “wake up and smell your bad choices.”

I send a text to Renee reading:
fucked up badly. Call me tomorrow?

And another to my stepbrother:
any house guests this weekend? I could use a place to crash—strictly short term.

And one more to Renee:
no need to worry.

And one more to my brother:
and by short term I mean a couple months.

And finally one more to Renee:
you can worry a little but, really, I'm fine. But also, a little bit married. xo. This is Lily btw.

Then I haul myself to bed, phone on the kitchen floor, Attorney Ben Hutchinson of Berkeley, California, mostly forgotten, $15 red wine making up the majority of the contents of my veins.

*   *   *

That night I dream of Ben Hutchinson. The real one, not the Facebook version. The guy I met in Vegas. The one I married. I see him more clearly in my dream—even remember the shirt he was wearing—and see myself too. Short dark hair flipping up at the ends, thick mascara, all arms and legs and a revealing dress I bought at a teen mall store. The dream stays factual at first. I am in Las Vegas for Renee's bachelorette party. Renee looks like a giant Mr. Potato Head, but she is still Renee, thanks to dream logic. I'm her maid of honor and still feeling a bit on edge about helping my best friend plan her dream wedding to my ex-boyfriend. She wants a Vegas Girls' weekend, I plan a Vegas Girls' weekend. She wants a spa day, sushi dinner, and Neil Diamond tickets followed by swanky casinos, I deliver on those things. And really, all things considered, we have a very good time. But yes, it hurts to be in the front row of the audience for what was, I thought, going to be my show. My wedding. My bachelorette party. My husband.

It is at the blackjack table in the Venetian, both in the dream and in real life, that I meet Ben Hutchinson. He is wearing a Shins T-shirt under a well-cut suit jacket and winning hand after hand after hand. I watch him for a few rounds from across the table—I am not playing but just watching Renee lose a lot of her own money while enjoying the free drinks—and then I stage whisper to one of Renee's friends—I can't even remember who—something rude about him. Real me has stifled the memory of what I said that night—it's too mean to admit, even to myself—but dream me knows my exact words: “Hey, look at the dot-com douchebag killing it over there. I wonder if he's one of those computer geniuses who can count cards.”

I say it really loud. Everyone hears. The dealer hears. I shit you not, it takes less than a minute for two floor security guys to come over and ask to buy Ben Hutchinson a drink. At the bar way over there. And they are not really asking.

I feel terrible. I look up at him and give him the biggest wordless
I'm sorry
a girl can give when she's had three shots of Cuervo and is on hour eighteen of orchestrating the best weekend of someone else's life.

In response, he smiles just a little, that crooked smile, shakes his head, and nods to his spot at the table, where rests a fortune in chips. “Keep my streak going,” he calls to me and then is led away.

My stomach jumps into my neck. The pile of chips is enormous. This guy just left a few hundred—no, thousand—dollars in a pile to be watched over by a complete stranger who just called him a mean name and then got him accosted by casino security. And he wants me to gamble with it?

I think that's what he said. And so does the dealer. She has already dealt me my first card. I sit down anxiously and take a look.

The table is, thank God, just $20 bets. A fortune to me, chump change for this guy. I slowly, as slowly as humanly possible, start losing his money. Every time the bet comes to me I wait as long as I can possibly stand to make a decision, just to try to slow the hemorrhage. Everyone at the table looks annoyed at me. I keep asking stupid questions and trying to distract the person to my left into slowing down too. To this day I'm not entirely clear how the rules of blackjack work. But I just keep plugging away.

Then, about a hundred bucks down, with me sweating bullets about if he'll make me pay him back, and how will I ever come up with a hundred bucks after spending everything I had to throw this party in the first place, I hit blackjack. I don't even notice until the dealer tells me. The whole table cheers for me and the dealer pushes over a huge stack of chips with her fancy chip shover. And Renee glares at me. And then I feel a tap on my shoulder and it's a waitress with a drink for me “from the guy over there.” The guy over there is Ben Hutchinson, and he is sitting on a bar stool with his two new best friends in the world who are now slapping him on the back and laughing uproariously at his jokes. When he finally does look over at me, he mouths, “Lucky girl!”

And I do feel very, very lucky. Ben Hutchinson, I learn soon, is indeed a dot-commer, though he doesn't seem as douchey as I thought at first glance. He first tells me he's a programmer, but in time I peel it out of him that he
was
a programmer, and now he's a developer—and then a drink later it turns out he
runs
a development company, and I start to get it that the boy is pretty successful and maybe a little smart too. He cashes out his chips—more fun to make it than to lose it, he tells me as though he knows from some experience, and starts calling the fistful of bills they give him “our winnings” and says ridiculous things with a twinkle in his eye that I find irresistible. Things like “What should we spend our winnings on? Shoes? Jewelry? A nice suite upstairs?”

Believe me when I tell you the boy has game. I tell him laughingly that I'm not that kind of girl, and he sobers his expression a bit, looks me right in the eye, and slowly, softly, cups my face in one large warm hand. “The best ones never are,” he says. I swear I hear the sound of my panties hitting the floor.

I am just getting to the part where a Vegas wedding comes up in our conversation when I wake with a start. There's some sort of commotion in my kitchen. It almost sounds like a pigeon got in. That happened a couple years ago—it flew in through the chimney and scarred me for life. Now whenever I hear a sound in my apartment, my first thought isn't rape or murder, it's rabies.