The Matchmakers of Minnow Bay (9 page)

The last in this row of winter neighbors must be the house I'm looking for. It is imposing, dark, and hyper-masculine. Ugly, even. The side facing the road is peeling brown wood slats and garages, no windows, and it seems to be only one story, maybe one and a half. The road has risen a bit, so this house must be set into the hill, with some kind of spectacular lake face that only the people who really matter get to see. I suppose it makes sense, but still, pulling up to this home after seeing one beautiful well-loved property after another is a bit disorienting. There is no cute wooden sign, no landscape lighting, just a low red-fire number that catches my headlights at the last second. This is it. I turn in to the long, barely plowed and certainly unpaved driveway, and pray for traction.

I get up the driveway by staying in well-worn tracks, and park in front of the garage, but I do not get out. It's hard, from my car, to tell even where the front door is. To the left I finally discover an awning and a small shoveled pathway in the snow. I pull my bomber hat down low around my ears against the windy chill, and tromp through new fallen snow to a nondescript door, and think,
Does someone actually live here?
The closer I stand to the house the scarier it seems. The wood siding is rotting in a couple of places, patched up with aluminum in others. There are icicles everywhere, including in the doorframe. There is plywood nailed over the window of the door.

Should I knock? Or should I turn around and go home?

I knock.

“Sorry for the mess,” Ben Hutchinson says even as he opens the door and gestures inside. I step in right away—I'm so cold, I forget my manners—and take everything in. Ben, tall, blondish, striking in his now-untucked flannel and worn denim. As hyper-masculine as the house. But with a much nicer facade. And then the house. Egad, the house.

This is no million-dollar house with a beautiful lake face to offset the modest approach. The land might be worth something, but the house itself is a dump. As ugly as it looked from the outside, it is worse inside. Half of what I see is just walls stripped to the studs and then draped in plastic sheeting. The other half is a Formica and wood-paneled 1970s nightmare. Behind Ben I can see through the framing all the way to a back bedroom, and I can tell it's a bedroom only because it has a mattress on the floor.

“Let me take your coat,” he says. I hand it over a bit warily. Does this place have heat? Then I bend down to slip out of my boots, but Ben shakes his head. “You'll want to keep your shoes on.” Never has a sartorial advisement seemed so ominous.

The livable bits of the house seem to be concentrated toward the lake side, and that's the direction Ben leads me. There the walls have drywall at least, but no paint, no molding, no nothing. Measurements or diagrams are written on every wall in thick contractor's pencil. I also see a shopping list written on a wall near a table, unless “bagels, milk, cream cheese” is a secret builder's code. Near a counter that might once have been a breakfast bar, there's a doodle of a maze. Stuck to an exposed stud I see some Christmas cards, pushed in with thumbtacks. So that's the décor.

And then there is the furniture. Well, furniture is sort of an overstatement. In the main room of the house there's a card table, an old one with a drooping middle, with three folding chairs around it. There's a vile-looking black leather sofa that I pray I won't be expected to sit on, and propped up on a wooden fruit crate, a large flatscreen TV and various blinking video devices.

And that's it. Mattress, couch, card table, TV. My riches-to-rags hypothesis about Ben is confirmed. I find myself feeling strangely relieved.

I do smell something rich and warm cooking in the kitchen, and hear lovely music playing, something acoustic and rhythmic and maybe Brazilian, but beyond those touches of home, I would describe this place as uninhabitable.

“Make yourself at home,” he says warmly while I am taking all this in. I look down at the floor, wondering,
Should I sit?
I am standing on a piece of wet, filthy cardboard that seems to be serving as protection for subflooring.

“The secret is to not look too closely,” he says before I can ask. “You're right in the middle of a construction zone.”

“I see that,” I say, and I hope it doesn't come out snappily. It shouldn't. I mean, since when do I care one whit how someone lives? I had cinderblock bookshelves in my apartment. And I wasn't doing construction, so I had no excuse. “You're in the middle of a remodel?” I ask, to try to soften my tone.

“You could say that. I guess that implies that I'm actually working on remodeling.”

I smile with what I hope is compassion. “I assume it would be hard to work on much in the middle of winter.”

“Harder still when I don't know what I'm doing. I bit off more than I could chew when I moved into this house. I saw all this potential and forgot that I would be the one tasked with bringing that potential to life.”

“I get that,” I say, thinking again of my fantasy life, where I get control of my finances, command respect from my friends, get some vague semblance of commitment from my boyfriend, and am left in peace to make my art without getting evicted.

“Anyway, I think by spring I'll have a better handle on what to do next.”

“That's a long time to live without walls.”

He smiles. “I live alone. What do I need with walls?”

As if intending to make a liar of him, a knee-high brown-and-white mutt wanders into the living room. The dog is fluffy and rotund, maybe part basset? Definitely part spaniel. He makes for that horrible leather sofa and hops up. I think again of the yellow Lab I saw this morning, purebred and dignified. The rugged log-hewn lodge I passed on the way here. Those are part of the North Woods life I could have imagined Ben Hutchinson would have. Not this.

“I see you're not entirely alone,” I say with a smile. “Who's this?”

“Oh, this gentleman is Steve. Steve the dog. He doesn't need walls either. He needs little more than space to bound in and a wrecked leather sofa. And the occasional slice of roast beef.”

“Nice to meet you, Steve,” I say. Steve inclines his head. He's ridiculously cute for someone quite as wild looking as he is. He almost makes me want to approach the sofa.

“Here,” says Ben, and goes into his jeans pocket and pulls out a hard little dog biscuit. “He'll love you forever.”

I take the biscuit and slowly approach the pup, sidestepping a wrench, a stack of two-by-fours, a case of beer in cans. Ben trails behind me and I hope he is not seeing his house through my eyes. My heart goes out to this man I know so little about. In glitzy Las Vegas the stars were all out for him. Here in the North Woods, it seems his star has fallen.

When I get near the sofa, fluffy, gentle-looking Steve knows something is up. His tail starts to thump on the couch and then he can't lie down anymore and sort of pops up on all fours, like a trundle bed. I give him a little smooching sound, kiss kiss, and he flies down off the couch and to my heel. “Steve,” I say, “sit,” and he does. “Lie down,” I add, with an open hand pressing toward the floor in that universal dog language, and he does that too. I lean over and give him the treat and a good petting and he gobbles it up and then looks up at me for instructions and I say, “Good dog,” and he releases and goes back to the sofa, chomping all the way.

“Now, that's a gentleman,” I say to Ben. He is watching me, his head inclined in much the same expression Steve the dog gave me a moment earlier. As if to say, “Hey, who's this, and what's she all about?” I wish I had some sort of milkbone for Ben too, to break this ice.

Ben straightens up. “I hope you're not making a contrast between me and my roommate?”

I blush. “Well, no. I guess I remember you being pretty polite too.” I think of his hand on my face, so gentle. How he asked again and again, “May I kiss you here?” and waited to hear an answer as he moved from neck to collarbone to the crease between my breast and my ribs.

“Oh, good. I'll have to take your word for it, though. My recollection of that particular night is a little shaky.”

“Ah, of course. That makes sense.” Because I must have been one of many. Getting married on a whim was probably, hopefully, unique to me. But meeting and sleeping with strange women in Vegas may have just been Ben's average Saturday.

“I mean, I do remember you, and getting married. But … why?”

He is looking at me hard and I try to see myself from his point of view. I haven't changed much since then, added maybe five pounds and grown my hair a bit. Even then I didn't think I was his type. I'm not really anyone's type, small, compact, plain-featured. Still. He hit on me, back then.

Lightly, I say, “I was probably wearing a lot more makeup that night.”

“That's not what I…” his voice trails off. I think that's exactly what he meant. There is a moment of long silence. Uncomfortable silence. Awkwardly, I lift my gaze to the corner of the room, where I see that there is a jigsawed hole in the ceiling with a coax cable dangling out of it.

Finally, I speak. “I guess the way I remember it, it was kind of a dare. We had just … you know. And we probably should have gone our separate ways. But it was really, really late, and you said something about an all-night breakfast place and I was so hungry, and then it was right next to that chapel, and we watched people come and go and it looked so fun … like a stunt, a lark, you know. You said it would be the perfect revenge on Renee—the friend getting married—to beat her down the aisle. And I was feeling a little vengeful.”

“That's right,” he says slowly. “It was my idea.”

I nod. “I was going to say that, but I was trying to be tactful.”

He sighs. He is not happy. I feel terrible. “I need to work on tact, clearly,” he says. “I'm sorry. I'm just … I've been taken by surprise. It's not often that I revisit that part of my life.”

I nod, thinking again of his Wikipedia entry, wondering how he went from self-made millionnaire playboy in the Valley to high school teacher and crappy cabin owner in the darkest tundra.

“I'm sorry to bring it all back up,” I say.

He pauses a moment and then says, “There's something you should know, Lily. Things are different now. I'm not that same person you met back then.”

“I understand.” One only has to look at this house to understand.

“I don't do that stuff anymore. Things on a whim. Stupid things. I don't sleep with strangers or stay out all night drinking or blow a grand on a meal.”

“Of course not,” I say. “It was ten years ago.”

“Ten years of marriage,” he says. He isn't looking at me.

“I'm sorry, again. For screwing up the paperwork.”

He gives sort of a bitter laugh. “Are you, really?”

Lost, I look at his face. It's set in this weird, hard way, a way that almost scares me. “Yes, I am sorry.”

He says nothing. My mind goes blank. I am so uncomfortable. The room is cold. My host is cold. I want to be anywhere but here. I want to get this over with and go home to Chicago. I want to go back in time before I knew about this marriage, far enough that I pay my rent on time and never have to open that kitchen drawer.

“I brought a salad,” I blurt, after the silence becomes more than I can stand.

“A salad?”

“To eat, with dinner?” He invited me over to dinner, didn't he? I call back the memory of Ben's classroom, the conversation we had there. He was so much warmer there. Like a different person.

Just then his phone rings. It's sitting on a sealed cardboard box next to the sofa that seems to be in service as a coffee table. It has a few water stains on it, from sweaty beer cans, I imagine.

“I have to take this.”

Though Ben Hutchinson has no way of knowing this, since we met in a time before smartphones, nothing makes my skin crawl like choosing a phone call over an in-person human being. He falls several rungs in my estimation just by scooping up his cell and answering it while still facing me. Then he just walks away from me, muttering into the phone a little, but mostly listening.

My eyes follow him as he walks through the framing sideways, getting farther and farther away from me. Finally he winds into a real hallway and disappears into a room with an actual door. It must be a bathroom. He is gone for a long time.

While I wait, I do not sit, or take the grocery bag of salad fixings into the kitchen, or even set down my purse. I just stand there, impatient, and ignored, and getting a little angry. I find I don't really like this version of Ben Hutchinson that much. Didn't like him even before he took that phone call and vanished. He runs very hot and cold. Makes me feel quite unsteady on my feet. When I remember that night in Vegas, I remember someone warm, funny, and attentive. Someone who could have had anyone, but chose me.

But maybe that was not really how it was. Maybe my memories of Ben Hutchinson have been whitewashed by time. Maybe coming up here, abandoning my real life, real boyfriend, real friends, to track down a fantasy of the past, was a mistake.

The door opens.

Ben rejoins me in the room wordlessly. Sets the phone down on the cardboard box again. I look into his eyes. They are cold. I can't imagine I ever had sex with someone who could look so cold. But I did.

Time for me to apologize and get out.

“Listen, I am really sorry about this,” I say quickly, and now there is more truth to those words. Now I
am
sorry to be here. “I was pretty disorganized when I got home from Vegas.” That is a misleading statement, designed to make it sound like I have my shit together now, which I don't, but I don't particularly feel like laying my weakness bare before this guy anymore. “And I misplaced that notice, stuffed it in a drawer, probably in a frenzy to tidy up before someone came to my apartment.”