The Hypothetical Girl (18 page)

Clarissa considered this comment for a moment. She knew it was a joke, but she did feel a little like she was in trouble. “I’m stunned by it all,” she said. “It was just so fast.”

“That is just what Persephone said. Too damn fast there, Hades! And you even had Zeus and Juno looking on.”

“Thanks for this enlightening observation,” Clarissa said.

T
he next day she received an e-mail from Harry.

“So I will just cut to the chase here,” he wrote. “I want to see you again, when do I get to see you again?”

“What’s your schedule?” she wrote back.

“You are the one with a job and a life,” he said. “I’m just here all the time on my property.”

Clarissa did have a job and a life. She worked inputting information for a local physician and taught yoga on the weekends.

“Well, I’m free after five most days, and on Sundays, after my yoga class.”

A date was set. Clarissa would stop by and see Harry one afternoon after she was done teaching yoga.

During the week that followed, Clarissa felt that her life had shifted into a new and unusual gear. She felt as if she was inhabiting her body in a new way, more consciously, and she felt an awareness of every step, the way her hands did things like tuck back a stray hair. The automaticness of her seemed to be laid bare, and it was as if she was seeing that for the first time. Things she ate had richer and deeper flavors. Because of this she ate very little. Things she drank seemed extremely liquidy. The way they traveled down her throat reminded her of streams and rivers.

She found that she was ticking off the days in her head. The way she had felt before meeting Harry had been centered and calm; she had worked hard on that. She was a woman in the middle of her own imperfect but cozy universe, a life made of yoga stretches and yogurt smoothies, mornings with coffee on her back porch, taking in the day, evenings with certain television
shows she religiously watched. She particularly liked her Wednesday-night lineup.

Now her days were filled with waiting. It was as if the real man Harry had shunted away her own real life with the possibilities of some other one, though she was not sure what it would be. She was a little annoyed, actually, by how fast and completely that had happened. She missed her old self a bit, the comfortable, un-anxious one, who was not
waiting
for something unknown to arrive.

The day did arrive, however, the Harry day, but Clarissa was feeling a bit worn out from the waiting. She had found herself quite sleepless the night before. Would she walk around Harry’s property and eat his bean sprouts again? Would Zeus and Juno cuddle up so lovingly? Would they make love again?

She arrived at three o’clock in the afternoon but Harry was still in his pajamas. His hair was all messed up and she could see that he was not really ready for her to be there. He did say she could come right after yoga, didn’t he?

He came to the door and opened it, but the smile she was expecting was not there; rather, he seemed a little annoyed, as though he had forgotten the invitation. As she went inside he seemed to shake it off a bit. Zeus leaped on Juno with joy, and again the two playfully licked and sniffed and romped about the room.

“Well, I guess they are happy to see each other again,” Clarissa said.

“Have a seat, let me just jump in the shower, do you mind?”

“Not at all,” said Clarissa, settling in on the couch she had begun to think of as
the couch of many sweet kisses
. As she looked around she noticed a lot of boxes were out and the place was a general mess.

“That’s better,” Harry said, emerging all shiny and steamy from the bathroom. He had thrown on some shorts and a tee shirt and looked sort of delicious to Clarissa at that moment and she was looking forward to at least a hug.

“Today was the right day, wasn’t it?” she asked.

“Oh yes, today is the day, sorry! Want some coffee?”

“Sure,” she said. “So … lotta boxes around.”

“I’m in the middle of a big project,” Harry said, settling in next to her on the couch. “So, whassup, you?” he asked. He let his lips graze the side of her face. “Want to go for a ride on my motorcycle?”

In the backyard, under a big black tarp, he unveiled a Harley. “Let’s take her out! It is a perfect day for it.” He handed her a helmet.

He got on and kick-started the bike and she heard the roar of the engine, which reminded her of a dragon in a movie she had once seen as a child. “Hop on?” he asked.

Clarissa swung her leg over the bike and then wrapped her arms around him. They pealed out of the yard onto
the road and then began a long and dizzying ride up the side of a mountain. They swerved and negotiated curves and then hit a straightaway, where Clarissa thought Harry might have been driving way too fast, but she couldn’t tell, really, as she had actually never been on a motorcycle before. Then Harry stopped and they got off the bike. “Follow me,” he said, walking up a trail by the roadside. They walked up the trail to another trail until they reached a flat rock summit where there were two chairs.

They sat in the chairs and looked down on a huge view. Clarissa could see mountains, and lakes, and other mountains beyond the lakes. A whole world unfurled there, like a glorious rug. “Wow,” she said.

“Yes, it is all mine, this mountain and that one and the one over there.”

Then Harry told Clarissa all about how the mountains changed colors with the time of day, from a smoky mauve to a deep green to a charcoal. And how on certain summer days it all seemed cloaked in mist, like it was wrapped in a shawl. He told her about how he had seen a pileated woodpecker once there, so big it was like a peacock, or even a small mammal. “Have you ever seen one? A pileated woodpecker?”

“Can’t say I have,” said Clarissa. She felt complete awe at the 360-degree view from the top of Harry’s tallest mountain.

After that they sat there saying nothing at all until Harry, this realer-than-real man, took her hand and
pulled her toward him and they kissed. Then they just sat in the warm sun and a cooling breeze, which seemed to join forces to create the perfect temperature. After a while they hiked back down to the motorcycle and Harry took Clarissa to a bar along the highway where he said they made the best burgers in the world. And Clarissa had to agree, after just one bite, it
was
the best burger in the world. “Or at least it’s in the top five hundred.”

“You are funny,” he said to her. “And so beautiful.”

When they got back to his house the dogs were sleeping again, peacefully, and they tiptoed upstairs to his room so as not to disturb them the way some people do with their sleeping toddlers. After kissing for a few minutes they stripped off their clothes and made love again. By this time it was late and Clarissa had to get home, as she had an early-morning meeting at work.

“S
o …?” It was Molly, texting her.

“So awesome, so otherworldly. So unreal really.”

“A real man who is unreal,” Molly wrote, “that is just funny.”

“Except it is amazing,” Clarissa wrote. “It is like I am an actor in someone else’s life.”

“Except it’s yours.”

“Right, it’s mine.”

“And the dogs even get along.”

“It’s like they’re in love,” Clarissa wrote.

“You have that in common,” Molly pointed out.

“We are both dog people,” Clarissa wrote.

“L
ove” is not a word that women of a certain age banter around easily. It is like the word itself has had some sort of curse placed on it ten relationships back. Utter it at your own risk. After Clarissa texted this text she felt superstitious, like something bad might come of it. She felt like the character Wang Lung the farmer in the book
The Good Earth
, which she had read in high school. When he saw that his son was beautiful and perfect and healthy he covered him in a blanket and ran through his town saying “Too bad we have a daughter, and she is pock-marked and sick,” or something like that. In other words, you do not want the gods to see you too happy. She felt that way about even writing the word “love,” even in the context of her dog. Like God might see it and take it all back.

“Watch out there, woman,” Molly texted. “You are getting in pretty deep.”

“I am,” she wrote back.

A
day went by and Clarissa was still feeling a humming in her bones from the encounters with Harry. She kept playing over the moments of him in her head. The cheek kiss on the couch, the silence on the mountaintop, the
too-fast Harley ride to the mountain, and the bar with the hamburgers. She felt as if she had a video loop of it running all the time. And she was eager to know what would happen next with this real man, Harry.

Two days went by and she heard nothing from Harry. She kept thinking about him, though. His smell (which she had decided was something between clove and Drakkar Noir); his blue blue earth eyes, his cuddliness, his ability to take her completely by surprise with an amazing compliment. She checked her phone several times an hour for a text. She went online to see if she had an e-mail every twenty minutes or so. Since she had a job that involved sitting at a computer, this was really not that difficult. She actually kept two windows open on her screen. One was her work and the other her e-mail, just in case a message popped up. But nothing came along.

By day three she was getting antsy. Was he busy with that box project? She realized she had no idea what sort of box project it was, or even what he actually did with his days, beyond tending to his bean sprouts and strawberry plants and riding his Harley to the top of his mountain. She actually could not imagine a typical day in his life. The more she thought about it, the more she realized she actually knew nothing about him at all. About all the normal things you know about people, their work, and families and friends, she knew squat. She didn’t even know his last name.

Day four arrived and Clarissa was getting frustrated. She had begun checking for texts and e-mails every few minutes. Finally she decided it was enough, and she texted him.

“Knock knock,” she wrote.

Nothing.

“I
just don’t get it,” she wrote to Molly. “What did I do wrong?”

“Babe, you might not have done anything wrong.”

“But I just don’t get it,” Clarissa wrote again.

“You already said that.”

“I know, I just don’t get it.”

“STOP!” wrote Molly. “You need to do something else, rent a movie.”

C
larissa did just that. In fact, she rented three movies, and then she went to one in a movie theater and she talked on the phone to her sister, Eleanor. She told Eleanor all about the real man Harry and then asked, “What do you make of it?”

“Do you really want to know?” Eleanor asked.

“Yes!”

“Okay, you asked for it. I think that it was an incredibly foolish and dangerous thing to get involved in the first place. You went to the house of a complete stranger. You are lucky all he did was check out. Christ, Clarissa, he could have been a serial killer.”

“But he’s not.”

“Lucky for you,” she said.

A
fter a week, Clarissa realized she was returning slowly to her “before Harry life,” watching her old shows, starting out her day with her yoga stretches, doing her old favorite things. Making her protein shakes, looking out at the trees at the beginning of each day—but the enjoyment of it all was somehow diminished. Harry had shown her a different something, whatever it was. When she was with him she had felt the world was in bas-relief. Now all the textures seemed dull and flat.

She dialed his number but nobody answered. Against her own good judgment, she called again. She left a message: “Dude, I’m worried about you.”

Finally she did something she knew could lead to great weirdness and possibly heartbreak. She decided to visit him, uninvited, or at least just drive by his place, the little house by the infinity-shaped pond and the property above, the mountaintop with the chairs. It was a rainy day, and the water sloshing over her windshield made everything blurry, like looking out at the world when you have been crying.

When she got to his house, she saw his truck was gone. There was no sign of him anywhere. She drove farther up to the mountain property but his truck wasn’t there, either. Then she drove back to the little
house and parked. She sat there a long, long time before getting out in the rain.

Immediately she noticed an odd nothingness in the damp air. It was the wind-chiming music that had rung from the back porch. The wind chimes were gone. The motorcycle under the tarp was gone. The greenhouse was there, still full of plants and steamy inside, but the door was wide open. She knocked on the door of the house.

Nothing.

On tiptoe she peered into a window. The whole house was empty! Everything was gone. The couch of many kisses. The stained-glass windows. The many odd sculptures in the trees that could grow and change. All of it, gone.

Juno, gone.

In her car Zeus barked and barked, as if he was terribly upset about it, too. Suddenly she realized with astonishment that one actually
could
tell if one’s dog was lonely, something Harry had said to her about Juno when they first met.

Clarissa sat for a long time on Harry’s porch, holding her stomach, which had a hollow and aching feeling in it, before it occurred to her. The property deal he was doing in town when she met him at the park, it must have been this. His home, his mountain range, his streams and valleys, that he had sold. The boxes must have been for moving.

The real man Harry, along with his entire life, had vanished.

S
he texted Molly on her iPhone: “OMG, real man Harry is gone! I mean it, everything he owns, his dog, his truck, his motorcycle, his COUCH even, they are just gone!” she wrote. “I am here at his house. It is so weird.”

“Wow wow wow,” wrote Molly back. “The couch even. Just like an online man!”

“I mean there is not one scrap of his stuff here, except the greenhouse,” she wrote.

“That is nuts,” Molly texted. “But then he did have that weird Rasputinish beard.”