I Knew You'd Be Lovely (13 page)

Next she went to the Verizon payment center at Second Avenue and Thirteenth Street, just around the corner from her apartment. She waited in a long line; it seemed it was a busy time of year for the phone-disconnecting business. In general, it was not a very happy place. As if it weren't bad enough that they disconnected your phone, they made you hang around with the kind of people who got their phones disconnected. She imagined a TV camera rolling into the room. People in rollers and sweatpants would still smile ghoulishly and wave. “Hi, Mom!”
Hi! I'm here getting my phone reconnected because I'm pretty much a failure, but Hi!

She wrote the phone company a bad check. Just a small fiction that, like most fiction, had a strong foundation in truth. The money had been in her checking account just that morning, before she had to bail her car out of jail. She felt terrible handing it over to the nice man behind the counter, all smiles, but what else was she supposed to do? She'd once had to write a bad check to the post office at Christmastime, when she was mailing her packages home. And they'd been very understanding when she sent them the money a month later, saying they wouldn't send the federal agents after all. It appeared that in her efforts to get some fuzzy mittens to her sister, Katie had committed a felony.

Walking away from the counter, she remembered that she still had a small amount of money left in her savings account. She'd always liked the idea of savings, even if she wasn't particularly keen on its practice. She liked
calling it saving, too, because it was like that: You think you're saving something, when actually, it saves you.

But she needed to transfer the money right away, before the phone company discovered her check was bad. It was after five o'clock, but there was still telebanking. Perhaps there was a use, after all, for the rampant inbreeding of technology and information, and all their mutant offspring.

She used the pay phone across the street from her apartment. It must have been the coldest day in the history of winter. Too bad she couldn't go inside and use her own phone, but she understood that sometimes it's hard to fix a thing by using the thing that needs fixing.

She put in a quarter and did a little jump-dance to try to get warm. For such-and-such corporate account, press 3; for such-and-such-and-such credit card, press 7. She plumbed the depths of her purse for more change and came up with a few nickels. Several yards away, the homeless man was sitting on a piece of cardboard, feeding pigeons out of a grimy paper bag. How could anyone be whistling on a day like this? One of the birds wandered over to Katie. She ignored it, but it wouldn't go away.

“I don't have anything for you,” she said. “I've got my own problems here.” The bird cooed softly in the snow at her feet.

She pressed more buttons and waited. Not only were they making her jump through countless audio hoops, but the worst part was, every time she got within sight of her goal she was mysteriously disconnected. It seemed that modern technology was not the perfect überland all the ads claimed it would be.

She was almost out of change when she was disconnected, again. She was incredulous. She was beside herself. But she wouldn't give up. She couldn't give up. She had to at least be able to do this one little thing.

She started over. Numbers, shivering, coins.

Click
.

She stared at the pigeon, wanted to wring its feathery little purple-gray neck. “I am not a Dodo bird!” she shouted. “Go away!”

The homeless man looked up when she yelled. He gazed at her, and for the first time, she noticed his sign.

YOU'RE JUST ABOUT TO GET TO THE GOOD PART
, it read.

Had she begun to hallucinate? Her vision was blurry; she blinked and stared. Then she walked over to him.

“Is that for me?” she said. “Did you write that for me?” The homeless man just smiled, a toothless, beatific smile, and rattled his paper cup. Katie dropped in her last quarter.

She walked all the way to the Bronx. The snow was stiff and crusty, but she was wearing sturdy boots, and was able to make steady progress. The air seemed to have gotten warmer, too. She was not a Dodo bird, complacent unto extinction. She was a mollusk, barnacled and determined. She would survive. She would survive and multiply, until one day entire wings of museums would be filled with her kind.
Mollusk makes a comeback
, she thought. Her cheeks were pink from the cold, which her mother always said brought out her good looks, and her lips were rosy with her new favorite lipstick. It was officially called “Brick,” but Katie had conceived of a better name: “I'm not really a waitress.”

She marched to the Unlimited Tow Company, and on the way, she made a plan. On the cross streets, she asked her feet questions: “What are you so afraid of? What is it you're running from?” And on the avenues, she made them reply: “We're afraid of failure, and afraid of success. We are afraid of being loved, and afraid of being alone. The world is full of pain, and this is scary. And the world is crazy-beautiful, and that's daunting, too. Worst of all, so little is under our control.” When she heard this last answer, she stopped and struck a deal. “All you have to do is try,” she said. “Okay?” Her feet resumed their motion. That was their way of nodding.

She would eventually get to the tow lot and pass through a chain-link fence into the sea of automobiles. Somewhere there would be a man in a heated trailer who would take her receipt and show her to her car. Somewhere there would be a good part, waiting to begin.

His birthday was only three days away, and Hannah had to find Tom the perfect gift: prescient, ingenious, unique, unforgettable. All month she'd been looking for clues from the universe. She scoured the Internet, studied mail-order catalogs, stole peeks inside other people's briefcases. Finally she found herself resorting to desperate measures, and was trying to read the minds of the men seated across from her on the commuter train. She stared at them under the bright lights and asked telepathically:
What do you want most in the whole world that costs under two hundred dollars and would fit in a box?

Her psychic acumen, however, was proving to be as dim as her prospects. To make matters worse, she'd been caught squinting purposefully at strangers, a posture she quickly tried to pass off as an attempt to read the contact-lens advertisements. By the time she got to work, she had the kind of headache that made her think she might in fact
need
contact lenses. She was also on the
verge of full-scale panic. Hannah knew that if she didn't find the gift that demonstrated she, better than anyone, understood the very contours of Tom's soul, she could lose him.

There was another woman. Tom had done everything he could to assure Hannah the woman was just a pen pal, and described what they had as that clever little word, a
correspondence
. But it was easy for Hannah to tell that her nemesis was no mere pal of the pen. She was more like a
Playboy
centerfold with stationery.

Tom met the woman six months ago, at a summer writing seminar in Prague. Hannah's first warning sign came when she was relating the story to her best friend.

“He met her at some summer camp? What'd they do, sit around, toast marshmallows, and sing by the campfire?”

“It wasn't a summer camp. It was a writing workshop.”

“Oh,”
Nihan said, shaking out her cigarette match. “So they sat around, drank whiskey, and screwed.”

As it happened, when Tom returned to Boston in September, he
was
somewhat aglow, but Hannah assumed that had something to do with renewed confidence and nutritious Czech food. True, he proceeded to commit to his work with inordinate enthusiasm—retreating from Hannah a bit in the process—but this seemed the natural consequence of a summer of encouragement. In fact, she thought she'd read something about that in the brochure. The brochure that had featured all kinds of attractive young writers, huddled in clusters of smiling excitement.

Back in college, when Tom was first courting her, Hannah used to tease him about his wavy brown locks and gold-rimmed spectacles.

“You're too good-looking to be a poet.” Five years later she'd learned better than to encourage him along those lines. But she did encourage his writing. So although he seemed distant, Hannah stood by her belief in the need for solitude and selfishness—of the good kind—when it came to one's work. Nihan rolled her eyes.

“True intimacy embraces a certain distance,” Hannah said.

“Sure,” Nihan chuckled. “Whatever.”

But Hannah let Tom have his space and tried not to feel threatened. She reasoned that she would have every advantage over an opponent: She
knew
Tom, knew his weakness for World War II documentaries, knew his secret dream of becoming a competitive Scrabble champion, knew he often laughed in his sleep. She understood that he considered himself to be “Capricorn, nonpracticing,” and that he'd once set out to read the dictionary but had only gotten as far as
D
. When he was depressed he liked to go to the movies by himself, and when his back was giving him trouble, it sometimes helped if she walked on it for him. This nefarious newcomer would be no match for her—why, she
lived
with Tom (had the home-court advantage), and his would-be seductress didn't even live in the same state.

But as soon as the leaves began to turn, her letters started to arrive. No, they couldn't use e-mail like the rest of the world. Apparently the girl either had some quaint notion about the benefits of real paper and real penmanship or she was simply too dumb to know how to connect to a server. Before long, Hannah found herself resenting the postman and rethinking his holiday bonus of
baked goods. And she would cringe at the heavy, eggshell-colored envelopes addressed with slanted loops of red ink—the felt-tipped marker of Satan's minion, to be sure.

Hannah and Tom had a happy relationship built on five years of commitment and trust—qualities that were beginning to feel like small, cold pebbles compared with the heated rush of novelty. So when the New York postmark began showing up more and more frequently—sometimes twice in one week—Hannah started asking questions.

“What does she look like, anyway?” she said one Saturday in October as she placed a stack of mail on the kitchen table. Tom glanced up from the paper just as the kettle began to hiss.

“Who?” he said, predictably.

“Girl.” He and Hannah both knew who “girl” referred to; no use feigning ignorance. He turned a page and refolded the paper.

“Well, she's blond,” he said.

“Oh, she's
blond
, is she?” Hannah said, as if
blond
were the Czech word for “fellatio addict.” Hannah was strawberry blond herself, with a dusting of freckles across her nose. “That figures,” she muttered. “Go on,” she said. “Continue.”

“And she's, well, I'd say she's about your height.” Five feet six inches of Hannah was standing in front of his chair. Tom scanned from her ankles to her eyebrows. “Yeah. Your height,” he said. “If I had to guess.”

Evidently, she was going to have to help him along.

“And breasts?” she said, crossing her arms.

“Yes. She has breasts.”

“I knew it! So just what are these breasts of hers like?” Hannah's breasts were a little on the small side, although perfectly shaped, well-rounded with pretty pink nipples.

“I wouldn't know,” Tom said. “I slept through the class where everyone came topless.”

Hannah stepped up and straddled his chair. “Don't try to tell me you haven't imagined what they're like, mister,” she said. She wagged her finger at him, in order to be herself and make fun of herself at the same time. “Even
I've
imagined what they're like by now.” Tom snapped at her finger with his teeth. “I mean it,” she said. “Don't make me hurt you.”

“Please, hurt me!” he said. He pulled her into his lap. “Give the man a break,” he said. “He doesn't know what he's doing. He isn't all that sharp.” He kissed her temple. “Besides, you know he'd pull the moon for you.” He imagined Hannah knew full well he
would
, too. He also imagined Sydney's breasts were magnificent: smooth and luscious.

Although Tom was somewhat charmed by Hannah's unprecedented antics at first, before long he was curious to know what kind of justice could exist in a world that would allow him to be punished for sex he didn't even have. He was smart enough not to want points for resisting temptation, because he knew the need for resistance betrayed the presence of temptation, which for most women was as much a sin as mattress-gripping, pore-cleansing
sex that lifted the bedposts and rattled the fishbowl. But then again, Hannah wasn't like most women.

The two met their senior year in college while she was working at the student union. Tom loved to watch her, her hair twisted up, dewy and serious as she steamed milk for other undergrads' cappuccinos. It didn't take long for him to develop a serious caffeine habit. Soon they were an item.