The Matchmakers of Minnow Bay (6 page)

I pick up the phone again, call Minnow Bay High, home of the Stormin' Sturgeons. I guess minnows aren't scary enough? “MBH,” says the admin who answers.

“Is Ben Hutchinson in today?” I ask. I'm not sure what a school is allowed to say about a student, but it's worth a try.

“Yep,” says the admin. “But he's got the kids in the lab right now. I think it's AP Comp Sci. I can get him if it's an emergency.”

“He teaches computer science?” I blurt. Well, I guess I was right about the money being gone. I wonder why he's not still in California, making more crappy time-wasting games, instead of toiling away on a teacher's salary in the back of beyond.

“Who's calling, please?” the admin finally thinks to ask.

“Oh, I'm sorry, this is an old friend of his.” Sort of true? “I just haven't spoken to Ben for a while and lost his cell number.” More true, if by lost I mean left it on a nightstand in the Venetian ten years ago.

“Ah. Okay. Well … I can take a message? I'm pretty sure he doesn't want me giving his number out. You know how he is.”

I think of Renee's marching orders to get an address. “Actually I was just looking for his home address. I'm running a little late on Christmas cards this year”—totally true—“… and I was kind of hoping to get to the post office this morning and realized I didn't have his address filled out yet…” And … that's a full-on lie.

“Um … would it be okay if he called you back?”

“That's so sweet,” I start slowly. “But I'm sure you've got lots to do. I'll just send him an e-mail. Thanks!” Another quick hangup. The poor people of Minnow Bay. When I find Ben Hutchinson, I'm going to tell him what nice people he has in his life and apologize for being rude to half of them.

Wait, no. I'm not going to tell Ben Hutchinson anything. My attorney-slash-best-friend, Renee, is going to send him a carefully worded letter, in care of the high school if need be. He'll be pissed that I screwed up, but then it will be fixed quickly enough and we'll both move on. I'm never going to see him again. Which is no big deal because I haven't given him a moment's thought for almost a decade. I click back over to the high school home page and start writing the school mailing address on one of the four million yellow legal pads that coat Renee's desk: 95 Lake Street. According to the map on their website, Lake Street intersects River Street a few blocks down. I can just imagine Hutch's little bar with it's snappy website, and Ben, walking over after work to see his dad—or grandfather, maybe?—to help him get it online. Ben probably lives in another little house on River a few more blocks down the way. Maybe one of those small-town old Victorians, big and rambling and storied? Maybe he has a staff party there every Christmas, makes mulled wine and everyone brings chips and salsa and they let off steam and talk smack about the principal and a few people always dance and at least one spur-of-the-moment coupling sneaks out five minutes apart pretending they left alone.

Maybe he has a spare room where I can crash until April.

“You are like no woman I've ever met before,” Ben told me back in Vegas all those years ago.

“Should I take that as a compliment?” We were sitting in two red velvet seats, side by side, in an empty Cirque du Soleil theater in the Venetian sharing a bottle of Champagne. It was, Ben had told me, the only place it gets dark in all of Las Vegas.

“You should,” he said. “You seem to be impervious to money and success. As far as I can tell my winnings tonight only made you nervous.”

“Hah!” I said. “God, thanks a lot for noticing.”

He shook his head. “A lot of people are not impervious. Ever since I moved to California, I've wondered if anyone really is.”

“Is Silicon Valley really as bad as all that?” I asked him.

“Maybe it is, or maybe it's me. I have bad taste in women.”

“Exhibit A,” I said, gesturing to myself. “You should watch out for the self-depreciating ones.”

He frowned at me. “In the past I've mistaken
pretending
not to care about money for actually not caring. And yet I do feel pretty sure that you are not pretending.”

“You can be sure of that. I just graduated from art school. That's basically like taking a vow of poverty.” A vow that, so far, I was taking very seriously.

“Are you a good artist?”

I thought about that question for a moment in the cool dark theater. “Yes. I think so. But I have a commercial failing.”

“What's that?”

“I paint the same thing again and again. I think it might get me into some trouble, from a sales perspective.”

“What do you paint?”

“Sides of buildings.”

“You're a muralist?”

I laughed. “No, I paint pictures of the sides of buildings, onto canvas, or sometimes rice paper. I like the way sides of buildings look.”

Ben just looked at me hard for a second. “Oh yeah. You are going to be poor for the rest of your life.”

I laughed. “See? I'm pretty okay with it, though. I have amazing friends, even if they are being kind of inconsiderate right now. Decent family. Good teeth. The sort of stuff money can't buy.”

We were quiet for just a moment. Neither of us was drinking anymore. The Champagne was there more for permission than inebriation.

“Here, this is why we had to come in here.”

He pulled out his Blackberry—it was ten years ago, and tech guys had Blackberries—and added a little square attachment that plugged into the headphone jack. Then he fiddled with the device a bit, and points of light appeared all over the ceiling. First, I thought,
Disco?
Then I realized: Stars.

“Wow.”

“You're from Chicago, right?”

“Right.”

“This is what the night sky would look like from Chicago tonight, if you could see stars there, which you can't.”

“That's really cool.”

“I made it.”

“Really? What's it called? I want to buy it.”

“You can't. Not yet. I only finished coding it yesterday.”

“It will sell like hotcakes,” I tell him.

He shook his head a little sadly. “No, it won't. People use their Blackberries for work. They don't like to be distracted. They want to pay for hardware that makes them money, not makes them happy.”

I nodded knowingly. “I don't think they like to pay for art, either.”

“And yet you still make art.”

“And you still make stars.”

“Mostly I make operating systems that will be obsolete by the time I go to bed at night. It's a little soul-killing.”

“As long as you take a few moments for stars now and then, your soul will stay alive.”

Quiet fell over us. Ben changed the star setting to California, then Vegas, and the shift was almost imperceptible. He turned something on that makes lines appear in the constellations, then fidgeted again and large moving points of light appeared—the planets. We just looked up for a while. Both of us were draped over our seats, legs kicked against the row in front of us, heads gaping back. I remember now how I imagined I could feel the bubbles of the Champagne rising up from within me to my head and pop, pop, popping pleasantly in my brain. Maybe I was a little drunker than I realized.

“Grasping.” He said after a long period of quiet.

“What?”

“You're not. Grasping. That's what it is about you.”

“Oh. Thank you. I guess I never thought about it.”

“And you're beautiful.”

I have never been able to hear those words. “Not really—” I started, almost reflexively, maybe because I wanted him to elaborate.

“Oh yes,” he obliged. “Beautiful eyes. Beautiful hair. Beautiful lips. Beautiful, ah … stuff below your neck.” His eyes darted around my body then. And when I inhaled deeply, he stared a bit. My mouth went dry. My chest pressed upon my lungs. I knew that feeling. The feeling I would get just before I pounced. I've been known to pounce from time to time.

But this time I waited. He did nothing. We were frozen. I couldn't take it.

“I can't decide if you're actually a bit shy under that ridiculous suit, or if this is all part of your amazing game,” I told him.

“You should take off my suit and find out.”

I nodded. “That answers that.”

“Sorry to disappoint,” Ben said, not even slightly sorry. “But I'm not shy.” He turned his shoulders toward mine and looked at me hard. I remember how I could feel his eyes on my eyes, then on my mouth, then on my eyes again. “I'm a gentleman, but I'm not shy.” He was a gentleman, or had been thus far. Suddenly, the way he was looking at me was not at all well-mannered.

“I'm not always a lady,” I told him, and I reached out and pulled him by the lapels, so close I was almost talking into his mouth.

“Show me,” he said, and like it was nothing, he was hoisting me over the armrest and onto his lap.

God help me, I did.

*   *   *

I shake myself out of the memory and back into Renee's office. Whew. Ben Hutchinson. How did I ever forget
you
?

I think of the men since him. It's been ten years. There have been a lot of men. A couple of serious relationships, but mostly not. I don't like change. Things derail fast when guys ask me to make any change—to move in with them, to meet their families, to travel. And then there's Mitchell. Mitchell has never asked me to do any of those things. Sometimes I wonder if he ever will.

Renee wanted coffee. She wanted coffee in exchange for writing to Ben Hutchinson so I wouldn't have to face him directly. I grab up my handbag and log out of everything I'd logged into on her computer. She'll be back here in ten minutes, and I will be too. I'll just go grab us both coffees, and then we'll draft that letter, and send it to Minnow Bay High School, and I will go home to finish packing and moving my stuff into my brother's house in the far west suburbs and never give Ben Hutchinson another thought. Never see him again or know what he became or feel that insanely powerful desirability I saw in his eyes again. After all, I haven't even thought of it in ten years and certainly haven't missed it in my relationship with Mitchell.

Unbidden, Renee's words start buzzing around me.
Mitchell is the best thing to ever happen to you.

It's time for you to leave Chicago.

I fucking hate being your friend.

Everything about you is so messy.

I shake my head to stop the onslaught. She was overreacting. She's just sleep deprived. Really, this whole marriage nonsense is no big deal. Just a blip in the landscape of my life. Finding a new place to live on a shoestring—that's my real priority. Not this little paperwork snafu from a decade ago.

I close Renee's door behind me. Onward, not backward. That should be my new mantra.

*   *   *

But I am not quite ready to move onward. I rush back to Renee's desk, grab the address, and print out driving directions to Minnow Bay, Wisconsin.

 

Three

 

Minnow Bay, Wisconsin, in January is cold as hell. Wisconsin always is. The last time I was up here in the winter, it was because Mitchell was dragging me to Door County to taste wines. All due respect to Door County, but when I want to taste wines, I go to the wine shop across the street from my apartment where they sell wines from such exotic places as Napa and Bordeaux and the Willamette Valley. I do not go to a place where they have goats on the roof and paint their homes green and gold and boil whitefish in a pot with corn and call it dinner.

Still, Mitchell and I had a lovely time up on that trip, whenever we were indoors. Outdoors was beautiful and icy and a wasteland. I took pictures of it and painted from them when I got home, but beyond that, my recollection of winter in Wisconsin was of a hat, hood, and scarf, all wrapped and cinched up so I was viewing the world through a tiny, down-lined tunnel. A very cold tunnel.

Minnow Bay in January is colder still. There is a harsh blowing wind, probably coming off some lake somewhere. These North Woods people and their lakes. And there is snow up to my knees everywhere. The roads themselves are that brownish gray sludge of snows thawed and refrozen, but the rest of the world is white, white, white. White coating the trees. White on the roofs. White in the corners of every window, door, alcove, or nook. Icy, pure, colorless white.

My car is parked in a diagonal spot in a row of diagonal spots that line both sides of this street. The car is jam-packed, completely solid, with my belongings. Just the sight of them makes me long painfully for my old apartment. My furniture was picked up by Goodwill this morning—even they didn't seem too excited by some of it—and all but a few of my books went to the Friends of the Chicago Public Library. What is left is art supplies, canvases, and clothes. Apparently I wear a lot of leggings. I have half a suitcase of just leggings and yoga pants.

And, because I am a human, I kept a few sentimental things I've accumulated over the years. Photos and precious things, the necklace Mitchell bought me to celebrate my first show, and my mom's ring. Those things, and the art stuff, and the canvasses, and the clothes, and me; that is all in the world that fits into my beat-up, twelve-year-old hatchback. And that's fine. Bringing more than that to my brother's house would surely be an imposition. I don't want to impose. I don't even want to go. But if I must, I want to stay as invisible as possible while I'm there.

I turn my head back to my car now. It is quickly being covered in white itself. It is snowing big fluffy flakes right now, and it is positively beautiful, and probably snows like this every single day, if the crowds are any indication. No one here has stayed home by the fire to watch the flakes today. The streets and sidewalks are bustling with people. People going into the markets and the shops, and driving who knows where. People in bomber hats and brightly colored parkas and Sorel boots that lace up to their knees. People who are not afraid of a little cold.