Elin Hilderbrand - The Matchmaker

“No,” she said. “I did not! I swear I did not!”

He slammed her head again and this time the pain made Agnes’s knees buckle. CJ lifted her up by one arm; he was going to rip it out of its socket. Hair pulling, arm twisting, some not-so-nice stuff. She was going to faint. Is your fiancé a nice guy? There was a sticky trickle down the back of her neck, and Agnes vomited into the shells of the driveway.

“What the hell is going on here?” Another voice, growling and bearlike. And then a high-pitched cry that Agnes knew belonged to her mother.

Darling!

CJ let Agnes go and she collapsed in a heap. She touched her head. Blood. Her left arm was numb.

She heard a struggle, heavy breathing, fists against flesh. CJ was fighting with Clendenin. Clen, who had only one arm.

Dabney cried out, “Clen, stop, you’re going to get hurt.”

Hurt, Agnes thought. Hurthurthurthurthurt.

The blood running down her neck was half Clendenin’s blood.

Agnes opened her eyes in time to see Dabney climbing the porch stairs and Agnes thought, Call the police, Mom! Go inside and call the police! She couldn’t say the words. CJ was punching Clen the way she used to see him go after the bag at the gym. Relentlessly. And yet Clen was still on his feet, still swinging his right arm.

Agnes thought back to the moment when CJ Pippin was introduced to her, in the Waldorf ballroom, with a full orchestra playing in the background and canapés being served on silver trays. Their gala benefit had been the polar opposite of the cause they were raising money for. Agnes remembered being discomfited by this, even as she knew that throwing glamorous events was how one kept the doors open. CJ had asked Agnes to dance, and afterward he had brought her a glass of champagne. Then, during the Ask, he had raised his hand and donated a hundred thousand dollars. Agnes had gushed at his generosity. He had seemed like such a hero then.

“Leave him alone, you monster!” Dabney said. She was standing on the top step of the porch and she was holding a gun.

Gun? Agnes thought. My mother?

It was Clendenin’s BB gun, she realized then. But in the dark, the gun looked formidable, or at least it must have to CJ because he immediately backed off Clendenin and held his hands up in the air.

“You’re crazy,” CJ said to Dabney. “Crazy insane psycho nuts. You know that?”

“Yes,” Dabney said, walking toward CJ with the BB gun and pointing the muzzle straight into his face. “I’m well aware.”

Agnes closed her eyes. She was suddenly very, very tired. She thought, My mother is pointing a gun at CJ. She thought, My mother is crazy. But I love her. I love her so much.

He packed a bag, nothing unusual in that; his entire life with Dabney he had packed a bag each Monday and unpacked it on Friday, his entire life with Dabney had been two lives, his life here on Nantucket with her, and his life in Cambridge-or Washington, New York, London-without her.

Had that been the problem?

Which had been his “real” life? He had never had occasion to ask himself this question, although in the early days of their marriage, Dabney used to badger him. Did he love Harvard more than he loved her? Did he love economics more than he loved her?

You are my wife, he always answered. I love you in a way that one cannot love a university or a field of study.

She had asked-fifteen or twenty years ago-because she loved something else more than him, someone else, the boy who had left. She had never lied to him about that. The day Box proposed, she said, I will marry you but you must know that I will never recover from my feelings for Clendenin Hughes. He didn’t only break my heart, he stole it.

She had warned him.

Another man might have backed away. After all, who wanted to be number two? But the truth was, the specter of Clendenin Hughes had never bothered Box. Clendenin Hughes lived on the other side of the world. He would never return, but if he did, he would be faced with the ruins of what he’d left behind. He would certainly not be in any position to reclaim Dabney or Agnes.

That was what Box had thought.

Maybe if Box had been a more attentive husband, Dabney would have been able to withstand the temptation of Hughes’s return. Box was guilty of being busy and distant, of taking Dabney for granted, of leaving enough space in their marriage for Dabney to slip back and forth undetected. In better, closer marriages, he knew, there were no such spaces. Or maybe Dabney’s feelings for Hughes had grown stronger and deeper only because she had given him up. Box had never been good at understanding the complexities of other people, or even, sadly, of himself, but he did realize that unattainability was a powerful aphrodisiac, nearly impossible to battle against. It was, he thought with no small amount of irony, the simple law of supply and demand at work. We always want what we can’t have.

Box packed a bag, two bags, three bags. He was taking everything of consequence, even things he had duplicates of in Cambridge. Childishly, perhaps, he wanted Dabney to walk into this room tonight and feel his absence.

I’m in love with Clendenin. I’ve been in love with him my whole life. I’m so sorry.

Sorry, Box thought. Sorry?

He could reason all he wanted, but the truth was, he was in crisis, his bank had defaulted, his personal economy had crumbled. He would leave this house. He would leave the finest woman he had ever known, indeed, the finest human being he had ever known-and yes, he still believed that. He was John Boxmiller Beech, the Harvard professor, the textbook author, the economic consultant to the President of the United States, but none of that mattered without Dabney.

Clendenin

He went down to the police station with CJ and the arresting officer while Dabney took Agnes to the emergency room. It ended up being a very long night. CJ was charged with aggravated assault, and Agnes received thirty-five stitches in her scalp and was held at the hospital overnight for observation.

When Clen and Dabney finally met back at Clen’s cottage around quarter of four in the morning, Clen poured a shot of Gentleman Jack for himself and a glass of wine for Dabney and they sat at his big oak table in the dark. Clen threw back his shot; he wasn’t feeling that great himself. CJ had bloodied his lip, bruised his cheek, and given him a nasty black eye. On her way home from the hospital, Dabney had stopped at the grocery store for a bag of frozen peas and a porterhouse steak.

“For your face,” she said.

He said, “And maybe tomorrow night, it will be dinner.”

Dabney sipped her wine. “The beautiful young woman you’ve been seeing? It’s Agnes?”

Clen poured himself another shot, but let it sit in front of him. He slowly spun the glass.

Yes,” he said. “She came out to the house looking for you, and she found me.”

Dabney’s eyes were shining with tears. Happy ones, he hoped, although he wasn’t sure. “And how has it been…between you and her?”

Clen knew that his answer was important; this had been an emotional steamroller of a night. There was no road to take but the true, straight one.

“Things between us have been lovely,” he said. He threw back the shot. “You have raised an intelligent, thoughtful, kind human being. She is your daughter, Dabney. I have absolutely no claim to her.”

“Box is an excellent father,” Dabney said. “I couldn’t have asked for better. But there are things about Agnes that are purely you.”

“I’ve seen those things,” Clen said. “Even in the short time I’ve known her.”

“Well, now that you’ve found her, don’t let her go.”

There were no words he could offer in response to that, so Clen took Dabney’s hand and led her to bed.

When Agnes woke up in the hospital, Dabney was sitting in a chair by the bed. She was wearing her headband and pearls, but she looked exhausted.

Agnes said, “Have you been here all night?”

Dabney said, “No, I went back to Clendenin’s for a little while, took a shower and a nap, but I wanted to be here when you woke up.”

Agnes noted the phrase went back to Clendenin’s but she didn’t know what to do with it.

She said, “Where’s Daddy?”

Dabney said, “He’s in Cambridge. He caught the late ferry last night. He…had to go back.”

“Does he know what happened?”

“I called and left him a message,” Dabney said. “I’m sure he’ll call you, or come see you. He loves you very, very much.”

“I know,” Agnes said. She leaned back into her pillows. Her head hurt and she was thirsty. “You were right, Mommy. CJ wasn’t my perfect match.”

Dabney squeezed her hand. “There is going to be a perfect match for you somewhere down the road, darling,” she said. “That I can promise.”

CJ’s arrest got two inches in the sports section of the New York Post, and a call came to Agnes’s cell phone from a producer at ESPN who wanted to do a segment about “Charlie Pippin’s Fall from Grace.” Annabelle Pippin had already agreed to talk, the producer said.

Agnes did not return the call. Let Annabelle talk to the media about Charlie Pippin’s fall from grace. Agnes wanted to forget the man had ever existed.

He had been charged with aggravated assault, but he would plead down. There would be jail time, twelve to eighteen months; there would be anger-management classes and hours of community service. He had been fired from his firm. Bantam Killjoy was now being represented by Tom Condon.

It was his own fault. Agnes had broken the engagement and his heart, but there were other ways of dealing with this than bashing Agnes’s head in. CJ needed help. He would do it again to the next woman if he didn’t get help.