The Hypothetical Girl (10 page)

W
hen you try harder to see the reality of him you see that this man has no job. He has no health insurance and he lives in a faraway place. You notice that he has had many previous wives and that he, too, has a big dog. His dog is young, however, and he tells you that his dog can run up to thirty miles per hour. Your dog cannot do
this. In fact, your dog probably can’t run five miles per hour. There is a good chance your dog won’t like the man’s dog. And that must be what the man means by reality. Reality is when the man who makes little lightning bolts hit you all over and has turned your body into a harmonica at night has a dog that is smarter, younger, and faster than yours, and they might not get along.

T
his is the part where an old girlfriend shows up at the man’s house. They must take a trip together to New York City, where she must do some work. This was planned, the man tells you, before you met. And you really don’t have a commitment yet, anyway. Besides, he points out, you are married. The man and his old girlfriend go away for a weekend. While you understand that this was a planned thing, it feels bad, bad, bad. You think this has had an effect on the lightning bolts; they are changing now when they hit you all over. They are starting to get mean, they hurt in certain spots. One is right under your rib cage, a place you identify as where your heart must sit. But this is ridiculous, you think. Your actual heart, the organ of it, cannot possibly care about the man going to New York with this woman.

T
he man returns. He immediately calls you and tells you he is sad about this, what happened with the old girlfriend. She has left a lot of things at his house and some of them are dresses she will sell. She will come
back for them soon. You tell a friend about this. The woman and her dresses. You tell her about the lightning bolts and how they have turned mean, and even painful.

“H
mmm,” says your friend.

“Hmmm what?” you ask.

“Hmmm. Dresses,” she replies. “Did you ask what sizes they are?”

Yes, your friend wants to know about the dresses, and how much they cost.

“They are butt ugly,” you tell your friend, explaining you snuck in and opened one of the bags and looked at them one morning when the man was shaving.

“Ugly to you might be pretty to me,” she says.

T
his is the part where the woman comes back for her dresses. She has to spend the night, apparently. But the man has told her the sleeping arrangements have changed. The woman says that is fine but you as a woman know this is bullshit. If you were this woman it would not be fine that the sleeping arrangements had changed. If you were her you would crawl right into bed with him after he was asleep. And, secretly, you imagine this is
just
what she did.

T
his is the part where you get upset. The woman with the dresses will come back again and again and again. The man says it is over between them, not to worry.
But you do. Your worry has become a drum that is much louder than the harmonica of you that plays when you are asleep. Sometimes it wakes you up and the humming—the beautiful humming—is completely drowned out by it. You have a fight with the man. You do not want the woman with the dresses to come back. “I will not be rude,” he says. “I am not that kind of a person.”

T
his is the part where the man tells you he loves you. It happens fast, a mumble really. Then louder. You want to savor it, because you think you also love this man, the whole gestalt of him, the familiar country that stretches from his face to his toes. But you realize it has flipped by before you can. It is a flip book of a sentence and before you can catch an image of this love, another image appears. The other image, interestingly, is of a dress. A butt-ugly dress.

T
his is the part where you make dinner with the man. You cook him enchiladas. You have sort of improvised the recipe based on one your mother used to use. Hers were good but yours are less good. You serve them and you can tell he doesn’t really like them. You have already told him you cannot cook, but now you have dished him up the actual evidence. You are a woman with too many cats, a child, and an old dog. You are a woman who makes bad enchiladas. You can see it in his eyes. The bad enchilada maker of you. And you are
beginning to suspect that the man is not feeling the humming at night anymore when he thinks of you. This makes you so sad.

T
his is the part where you write the man a letter. You write it by hand and it is very long. You drive to his house to read it to him. In it you talk about how much you hated it when he went away with the woman with the dresses. How much you like him and how confused you are by him. The man lies on his back with his eyes shut while you read him the letter. Afterward, he sighs. “What was the thesis sentence, and what was the conclusion?” he asks. “I am not sure I understand.” Then he turns and takes hold of your foot. “I love you,” he says. “I love your foot.”

A
bout all the rest, he just says something he often says: “It is what it is.” And “I take one day at a time.” You realize that you have heard those sentences before in an AA meeting you once went to with your sister. The beautiful man who loves you spouts many clichés like this. You wish he would be a bit more original.

T
his is the part where the lightning bolts turn into small dark hammers that pound on you. When you sleep, they come out of a red box and hammer away at you. They will not go back into their box, even though you have told them to. “Go away, you shitty little hammers,”
you say. One of the hammers turns to you and grows a mouth. “Make me,” it says. You realize that you have no idea how to make the hammer go back into its red box. No idea at all. So you just sit there while they hammer at you, and you put your elbow up, over your face, to protect your eyes. It would be awful to lose an eye to a stupid little dream hammer.

T
his is the part where the man goes away for a long time and forgets to text. You are not even sure where he went. You text him: “I love you.” Three days later you get a text back: “Luv u 2,” he texts. All is well, you think, at least on paper. Or on screen.

T
his is the part where the woman comes back for the rest of her dresses. You are not happy about this, but what can you do? She will stay two days. Meanwhile, the lightning bolts and the humming have stopped. The hammers have gone away. Inside you now is a dead zone. A horse latitudes. You go to sleep and look at it, a big tepid lake that extends out from the side of your head, opens and opens. But it is not a friendly, swimming kind of lake. More of a large cesspool, actually. And nobody is taking any steps to clean it up.

Y
ou want to tell the man, Y
ou are killing the humming. You are eradicating lightning, man! Be careful, you have created a lake of sorrow
. But this would sound odd, you realize,
and might be one more thing that he could add to the long and ever-growing list of your flaws. Bad enchiladas, old dog, five cats, child. So you don’t say a word. Whenever you see him he says,
I love you, I love you. You are so cute. I love your little toes. I love your face. I love your words. I love your brain
. And you want to drink in those words, you do, you want to pack up and move inside the house of them and live there, right there in their dictionary, to hell with your cats and dog and child; here is love, love! But the butt-ugly dresses are stopping you.

Y
ou want to believe in a future with the man. But the future is cloudy, like the lake that extends from your head now when you sleep is cloudy. You want to believe that love is strong. You want to believe. This is the part where you say you want to fix it, this thing of you. “Fix what?” he asks. “Nothing is broken.” You realize that you and the man are having completely different experiences. You and he are not in the same love affair but in two separate ones. It is a mere coincidence that they happen to be with each other.

T
his is the part where you go back online to the romance website and see that the man has been very active there, in the time since you have met. This is the part where the place under your ribs sighs. This is the part where you cry. This is the part where you try to teach your mouth how to say it. How to say goodbye to
a man who is a country where you wanted to emigrate. A man whose face was so familiar.

T
his is the part where you realize: It is what it is.

This is the part where you realize you will, in fact, take. One. Day. At. A. Time.

B
ut then things change, yes! There is a sea change. The man says he has thought about it and he wants you no matter what. He is willing to take on the cats and dog and child. In fact, he wants to, he wants to be a family, by golly, and you are the one he wants to be a family with. You and yours. And you bring your dog over and, lo and behold, the dogs get along! And it doesn’t matter that his dog is sleek and fast and yours is old and lumpy. There is a place on the rug where your dog settles right in and, with a little groan, falls asleep. He is happy at the man’s house! He drinks from the man’s dog’s water dish. Slurp slurp slurp. And the man’s dog doesn’t even growl.

This is the part where he tells you he has made a commitment, sort of, he has gone off the website and told the woman with the dresses not to come back. She has had to come and get all the dresses. And then, it happens; he gives you a key to his house.

This is the part where you tell the man you are his. You will divorce that faraway husband. You will take a cooking class. Your old dog will settle in and live and
die in the man’s life and house. As for your child, she will be grown up soon. This is something that pinches your heart.

As for the five cats … well. What can you say? They will eventually die or run away or settle in somehow and sleep on pillows and in corner baskets and do cat things in his life, too. The cats are the price of being with you. The test.

H
e nods his head, the man. He sees it. The cat price tag. The old dog you love. Your child who is almost grown. And he will take it on, he thinks. He can do it. This, he sees, is the price tag, the actual price of love.

Y
our body has begun to hum again at night when you sleep, but it is a less pronounced humming, a muted harmonica, background for a film perhaps, or a faraway harmonica that seeps in on occasion.
It is what it is
, you think. Because you love this man, you love him really. And that sort of thing is rare rare rare, at this age. It is a dodo bird. A white Siberian tiger. You are lucky to have found it at all. It is ridiculous, really. You will take it.

“
I
am,” Charlie said, “an ugly man. I hope that’s not a problem for you.”

It was not only a problem, but a conundrum. If Estelle answered the question honestly, she realized she might as well say: “I am, actually, a shallow woman. I do care that you are ugly. I hope that is not a problem for you.”

Or, she could answer: “I hardly care at all about that.”

But that would constitute a lie, no way to start a relationship. And starting a relationship was what Estelle was all about. She was thirty-eight years old, no spring chicken, as her mother liked to remind her. She had paid a forty-dollar fee to join an online community called Loveforreals.com, to find a mate, before “all her eggs went bad”—again, her mother’s phrase. Her mother did not mince words.

In the universe of Loveforreals.com she had a new identity. She was not Estelle with dangerously old eggs,
but Lovegrrl15. She liked the “grrr” in the middle, which bespoke both appetite and a certain feminist ethos she found very cleverly denoted.

She couldn’t afford to be choosy at thirty-eight; she couldn’t afford not to take every person quite seriously. Her mother was right. And ugly? What was ugly anyway? A word, it was just a word. It began at the back of your mouth and moved forward to your tongue. At the end of saying it you were practically smiling. (If you doubt this, try it.) She typed back: “Oh, don’t be silly. You look fine in your profile picture. I am sure you are not ugly at all.”

In fact, the man named Charlie had a very fuzzy, softly focused profile picture. He could look like anything at all. He could have a terribly misshapen head. He could be a hermaphrodite, a half-man, half-woman person. He could be one of those half-chicken people they have at the county fair. He could be a Mexican hairboy grown up. Estelle had read about the Mexican hairboy long ago in
Ripley’s Believe It or Not
. This boy was covered—all over his body—with soft brown hair. It was as if he had been carpeted. But someone, somewhere, would love this carpeted man. They might be very happy.

Since this exchange, the word “ugly” had begun to grate on her. She had recently moved from a bucolic town in Connecticut to a very plain and sad little town in central New York named Horseheads. A place that certainly could be called “ugly,” with its tired strip malls
and neighborhoods that looked all worn out, like they wanted to just board up already and call it quits. Yet there was beauty there, too, as she constantly reminded herself. There was a lovely full-blown peony bush at the end of her street, Marcus Avenue, that looked like someone had detonated a purple tube of paint. And there was a marvelous weeping willow, right by the entrance to the park, a place where the local boys tore up the asphalt on their skateboards. Whizzing by, flipping in the air and looping on a concrete half-pipe that was the gift of some local good-deed doer, they reminded Estelle of electrons spinning around their atomic nuclei that she had seen in a textbook long ago, criss-crossing and loop-de-looping. They were fun to watch, skidding and clicking up and down, protected somehow by the shadows of those long wispy arms of willow. But she had a nervous feeling about them, too. Sooner or later something bad could happen there, willow or no.

Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, she repeated to herself, and asked Charlie, aka Mr. Ugly (she had begun to refer to him as such in her journal), to meet her for a drink. This was a very daring thing to do, but desperate times call for desperate acts, another quip she got from dear old Mom, who lived in Poughkeepsie, another not-so-beautiful place where there were little instances and inklings of beauty. There had been a beauty spotting just last Thursday, her mother said, when all the Red Hat ladies came out for a photo shoot in front of Mrs.
Goldenburg’s rose garden. “Red hats, red roses, you should have been there,” said her mother.