Matchmaking for Beginners(75)

Sure enough, there’s a book called The Encyclopedia of Spells sitting right out there for anybody to see, a book I’d somehow never noticed. The binding of the book has a picture of a vine with red flowers. Frankly, it doesn’t look all that legitimate. I think a real book of witches’ spells would look secretive, with hieroglyphics. You wouldn’t be able to read the title from across the room.

Just then the doorbell rings, and he jumps up and grabs his backpack. “Don’t tell my dad,” he says. “And think about it. Read the book! Pleasepleasepleaseplease!”

After he leaves, I finish drinking my tea. Periodically I glance over at the book and think about getting it off the shelf and looking at it, just to see . . . you know . . .

But something holds me back. I go outside, sweep the stoop, then go get some chicken salad at Paco’s bodega for dinner, and find myself watching a lively neighborhood conversation there between the regulars about which kind of people read the New York Daily News and which ones read the New York Post, and whether you can tell the difference merely by looking at people. Paco, in the minority, maintains that you can’t, and looks to me to back up his position.

I shrug and he laughs at his mistake. “How you going to know? You’re an incomer!” he says. “Now, Blix—she would have talked all day about this.”

Everybody gets quiet. It’s as though they’re observing a moment of silence for Blix.

“She was la maga. Our magician,” Paco says softly. And he wipes his eyes.





THIRTY





MARNIE


I am not a maga, so I don’t pretend to know how these things happen. But two nights later I’m walking home from Best Buds and I look up and see Noah approaching the house from the opposite direction—sauntering, really, that sexy walk I remember—and the air fills with little crackles of something, and when we reach the front door, my heart is pounding like it’s going to shake apart. He takes my hand, and we practically fall inside, mashed against the wall with our bodies pressed against each other and his mouth hard on mine.

All I can think is: Oh my God.

The door slams; he’s closed it with his foot, and the noise of that makes us open our eyes.

His hands are in my hair, removing a clip I’d used to pin it up. He says into my neck, “You’ve got me crazy! Being near you but having you no longer in love with me is killing me.”

My phone rings right then, and I work it out of my jeans pocket and look at it. Natalie.

“Listen, I’ve got to take this,” I say, and he releases me with a groan and we go inside the apartment, and he heads upstairs to the kitchen.

“How are you?” I sit down on the floor and listen as she launches into a litany of complaints. Brian is working too hard; she’s lonely at home with the baby. She needs me there. Nobody keeps her company in the daytime. And she’s sorry but she feels betrayed by my decision to stay in Brooklyn, even for three months. It’s as though we’d reunited and worked out a wonderful plan for our lives, and then I went and changed everything. Backed out. And now she’s just heard from Jeremy that I even have a job here—and what is that about?

Listen, I want to say to her. I am . . . I am . . . falling again.

Noah comes back downstairs, with a plate of grapes and some cheese. He sits down next to me and starts peeling grapes and dangling them in front of my mouth very suggestively, which makes me laugh.

“This isn’t funny,” says Natalie. “You didn’t even tell me about the job! How come I have to hear it from him?”

Noah starts unbuckling my sandals and easing one off my foot. I’m having a little trouble breathing.

“I have to go,” I say to her. “I’ll call you back.”

And then—well, it’s as though we’ve gone mad, ripping off each other’s clothes and then making love right there on the rug in Blix’s living room, and it’s like no time has passed at all; he’s what I’ve been missing, his mouth and hands and his breath against my cheek, and I have about a million feelings because he’s so familiar and exciting, sexy and infuriating—but then, it’s over. And the second we’re finished, as he’s rolling off me, it slams into me that I’m the worst person ever. Jeremy’s face rises up before me, his eyes wide and hurt, and I hate that I have betrayed him.

But you know something? Even as I’m sitting up, grabbing my clothes in the cold air, feeling both guilty about Jeremy and disappointed in myself, there’s a big part of me that wants to block out all thoughts and live in this blinding light of a moment.

And so I do. I just do. Maybe making love with Noah is something that is bad but necessary. Maybe I’ll understand later what I’m doing. Maybe I can’t think about it now.

Noah stays in my room that night and the night after that and the night after that, and the moon outside the window shines on us, and cold air seeps through the cracks where the window sash doesn’t quite meet the frame, and branches scritch against the building like in a horror movie. These are the first really cold nights, and he puts his arms around me and we lie there each night after making love before sleep overtakes us, and I listen to him breathing and look at the little chip of the moon from my pillow.

There’s something that felt so inevitable about all of this, like he’s an old habit that won’t go away. I don’t ask myself if it’s love, or if I can trust him, or if this is the right thing to do, whole-life-wise. Because it’s not. God knows it’s not even close to being the right thing.