The Hypothetical Girl (2 page)

It didn’t hurt that her father had arranged for numerous feature articles on her business, some on the front page of the
Cleveland Herald
. He was a man who usually exhibited flawless business ethics, even if his sexual ethics had been a bit lacking. He had caught some flack for this indiscretion. But the same people who accused him later forgave him the trespass, as he made up for it with his expression of paternal support. And who could really, seriously condemn that? It was also, all agreed, an extremely original business model. Chloe was attractive, if a bit plump, or “a wee bit zaftig,” as her father described it, and her gallery, ART PLAY, had become a very popular stopping place in town, for the frequent openings and art parties, readings, lectures, and slide shows she sponsored there. She had also begun a monthly free movie event, projected on the side of her 1899 white brick building. She set up seats in the parking lot and invited the public to see such eclectic fare as
The Maltese Falcon, Murder on the Orient Express
, and
Bambi
. The movie screenings were wildly popular in the neighborhood, which was a bit down on its heels and striving to be better, like a man who has just been let
out of prison and has his first good, real job. A man who dresses very nicely and is on his best behavior, aiming to please. That was the sort of neighborhood where Chloe had her business. And her business, especially the film screenings, made it feel better about itself.

Yes
, she thought each night as she checked the various online dating sites where she had posted, like a hunter checking traps.
I am a giver. I am fun. I am interesting and I have spectacular eyes. Someone will find me. Someone will love me
.

She really did have great eyes. They were green with a penchant to shift into blue-green at times, such as when she was preoccupied with something or wore a certain color sweater. Those eyes were the gift of her grandmother from Lodz.

It was on one of these occasions, checking her sites and postings, acting the huntress, when she found Ivan. He was thirty-six, medium height and build, and, as he put it, “handsome without being a Ken doll.” She liked that phrase. It bespoke a sense of humor like her own. Sort of the way she and her father bantered.

Ivan lived in a nearby town and ran a print shop. He made signs, wedding invitations, and anything else people might need printed up. He used desktop publishing. He liked what he did, he said, because it involved words. Ivan was a closet poet, he confessed in one texting session that had bled into the early morning hours. He texted one of Romeo’s soliloquies:

Chloe felt her chest tighten. He had not only read but memorized something from Shakespeare. She had memorized almost all of
Hamlet
.

“Would you like to meet for dinner?” he had finally asked, during another late-night texting session. “Saturday night? Ground Round?”

Yes, yes, yes!
she thought, but soberly typed out, “Sure.” She had read in a magazine that it wasn’t good to sound too eager. She would bring along some promotional pamphlets about ART PLAY for him to display in his print shop, aptly called the Print Shoppe. “Why the extra ‘p’ and ‘e’?” Chloe had asked Ivan, during one of their first online chats.

“It is a play for cuteness. Or quaintness. Or antiqueness. Some kind of ness,” he wrote back. It was such a winning answer, so honest and slyly self-deprecating. And clever. It was clever. She was falling in love with his online persona, she thought.
And autumn is here
, she thought, looking out the window at the browning grass, covered in twisty seeds dropped by her Japanese mimosa tree,
the true season for love
. She noted it again,
the way everything, everywhere was making a last bid for reproduction. Sending out one last batch of embryos into the world, like postcards to unknown lovers. Would a love seed take somewhere and implant, grow and thrive?

As their date approached, Chloe found herself growing fonder of Ivan.
I think it might even be something like love
, she wrote to her friend Cassandra, who had briefly been her roommate at Barnard until she dropped out to marry Hans, a sax player from Berlin. The two had had many adventures and traveled the world for an entire year; Chloe had received postcards from Melbourne, Addis Ababa, Cinque Terre, and Montreal. They had become her model for true love. They dispatched sentences like, “Marvelous bananas here in Islamorada!” and “Stupendous sunsets in Truth or Consequences!” She asked Ivan what he thought of travel. “Never thought much about it,” he replied, “though I do love Disney. Joking.”

She loved that: the word “joking.”

As the day drew near, the fall seemed to fragment into pieces. There was a flurry of leaves, flowers letting loose final frantic handfuls of seeds. Leaf dust coating the sidewalks, getting up into your eyes even. The cottonwoods released great gobs of white fluff, like warm snow.

Chloe imagined that at night, when she was sleeping, the animals would come out of their holes and burrows
and enact elaborate courtship rituals, swing wildly into one another’s paws from the treetops, waltzing in the parking lots.

Soon I will meet Ivan, and we will eat dinner together at Ground Round. We will speak in ironic, sardonic phrases. And maybe, when he walks me to my car, we will kiss
.

She thought the animals would desist their dancing and courtship to look on at the human version, the way she often watched them, the squirrels hopping off the tree branches or mad dashing toward one another across a telephone wire. The deer peeking from the brush behind her house, shyly. Finally, it would happen; the animals would be watching
her
.

She’d had exactly seven boyfriends in her life, and four had been in college. The other three had been introductions made by her brothers (all of whom were happily married with children), to their friends. Men with names like Eugenio (a construction worker), Milan (owned a pizza joint in her neighborhood), and Miguel (a mysterious source of money—Chloe suspected he grew hydroponic marijuana in the basement of his gaudy McMansion in the outskirts of Cleveland). Nothing wrong with these men, no, not at all, perfectly cordial, dressed well, good-looking and all that, but there was no sense of wonder there for her, no light electric shock traveling down her spine when their numbers showed up on her cell phone, no light-headed feeling when they came to
her door. Ivan, on the other hand, had inspired all of the above, and they hadn’t even met.

Chloe had one of her rare coffee dates with her father, and when he asked his usual question—“Seeing anyone special, or not so special, or even completely boring?”—she decided to tell him about Ivan. Their date was two days away.

“Well, sort of, I think I am in love,” she said, “a bit,” enjoying the effect it had on her dad. He sat upright and looked intensely interested. Love, he thought, was a sensation he had never felt. He had experienced lust, attraction, and desire numerous times, but love was a foreign country. Like Poland, it seemed distant and full of danger. So far away from anywhere he had ever been. “In love!” he said. “Like on television.”

“Yes,” said Chloe, “just like that.”

“Well … tell me all about it,” Sol said.

“He runs a print shop,” she said. “He likes sushi. He hikes. And he’s funny. What more could I ask for?”

“Hmm …” said Sol, touching his temple with his index finger. “Now that I think about it, eats sushi, hikes, is employed, that about covers it. I think you should marry him.”

“I plan to,” said Chloe, smiling back at him, with her Lodz grandmother’s eyes, shifting between green and blue. They ordered chocolate cake, for dessert. A rare indulgence that felt like a sort of sugar bargain struck
between them. A deal made. A closing argument in the country of desserts. Chloe and Ivan. Yes.

Her three brothers and their wives teased her mercilessly when she came home for a dinner one night with their combined families. “Chloe and Ivan sittin’ in a tree. K-I-S-S-I-N-G. First comes love, then comes marriage, then comes Chloe with a baby carriage!” They pronounced his name ee-Van, the “van” rhyming with “lawn,” the Hispanic version. Her father had pronounced it with a distinctly Yiddish flair. She had no idea how to actually pronounce it, as she had only seen it written. Ivan could be anyone. He could be anything. An exotic and burly Russian. He could have a ballet dancer’s physique. All she knew was he was anglo and had a nice smile. That was from one fuzzy picture he had posted online. It could be a very, very old photograph. It was definitely out of focus. Odd, she thought, for a man who ran a print shop and must have a very good eye for visual clarity.

Two days later, Chloe sifted through her closet for something to wear. Something casual but not unattractive. No, gorgeous without seeming intentionally so. Something utterly lovely but haphazard-ish. Could such an outfit exist? It was like looking for a rare bird in a familiar forest. You know she might be there, somewhere, lurking, and once you found her you would say, of course,
Little special breed of starling, I knew you were there all along!
But until you spot her she is altogether
missing. Maybe even extinct, a dodo bird. Buried and fossilized beneath the dirty laundry.

Finally she located it, a thrift store find, a gauzy white and rose floral blouse, a teensy bit see-through. Suggestive yet traditional, sexy yet austere, with its formal collar and slight ruffle up the front. Was it prissy? With her Levi’s that were nicely worn in and fit just right over her slightly generous rear (what her dad called her
tuchus deluxe
) (“DAD!” she would smile and say. “It is highly inappropriate to address your daughter thusly.”) (“Yes, sorry about that,” he’d say.) (Could there be such a thing as flirtation between a father and daughter, an utterly asexual banter of fun?).

As she got in her car and drove to the restaurant, Chloe’s heart pounded. She pulled in to a parking space and walked inside, looking for a man who seemed like he could be named Ivan. A man who had dark hair and an ironic smile. Nobody approached her. Everyone seemed as if they were already paired up and had been assigned seating. People were in family units, with baby car seat carriers in tow and daughters in matching dresses. No single man in the lot. No Ivan-ish creature lurking in the shadows.

She sat down at the bar, with her back to the door, and ordered a lemonade. Good to order a nonalcoholic beverage and then take her cue from Ivan about what to order next. You never know what people are like. He could be anti-alcohol. Or a recovering alcoholic. Or simply someone who mildly disapproves of alcohol. Chloe
thought this would not be a good thing, particularly, and would bespeak a certain stiffness of character. Oh, she was thinking way, way too much.

She kept glancing behind her to see if anyone had come in, an Ivan-ish someone. Perhaps with a mustache, though she hoped he had not grown one, as she hated them. More families with children. More people in pairs, people holding hands, people dressed similarly, as if they had been living together such a long time they had melded closets. Morphed tastes. These were the people she was trying to become, she thought. These were the chosen ones. The coupled. The people who had found love. But they looked pretty unhappy, or bored, or somehow unpleasant to her.

Maybe this was a mistake, this online love search. She felt her skin prickle. He was fifteen minutes late. Chloe glanced behind her and saw a man walk in. He had a cane and some sort of unpleasant hat on, not a bowler exactly, but something like one. He was twenty pounds overweight and wore thick Coke-bottle glasses. He had on (oh was it really?) a gold chain necklace and his shirt was unbuttoned way too far. He surveyed the room, whisking right past her.

What Ivan saw was a plumpish woman at a bar, wearing an unbecoming shirt that was unpleasantly risqué, see-through even. How brash, how forward, how even a little desperate, he thought. She was drinking, too, probably an alcoholic drink. Or maybe she was
drinking water. No, it looked like a drink.
She was probably a drunk
.

The woman at the bar headed for the back door to make a hasty escape just as he pivoted on his heels to flee in the other direction. Somehow, the two managed to walk right into each other in the parking lot. Each one was looking behind them, nervously, when they collided. “Oh, excuse me, sir,” Chloe said, her heart pounding. “I didn’t mean to bump into you.” His left eye was milky. An eye that had gone wrong somehow, or had contracted some rare left-eye disease.

“No problem,” muttered the man. “It was my fault. Really! I wasn’t paying attention.” He glanced at her slightly wide rear, the fronds of disheveled curly black hair circling her face. They both trotted quickly to their vehicles, which were parked, unpleasantly, next to each other.

Then, as Ivan got into his truck, he caught a glimpse of her blue-green eyes.
Enchanting somehow
, he thought,
but too late. I have made my exit
, he thought. She caught a glimpse of him looking at her and something flashed in her heart.
There goes my beloved
, she thought sarcastically,
my husband who never was
.

They each peeled out of the parking lot a little too fast, Ivan making an unpleasant squeal with the tires of his circa 1998 Ford Explorer. Chloe letting her foot hit the gas on the BMW convertible her father had given her with a pop, so it seemed to leap into the oncoming
traffic like an anxious deer, or a rabbit that had been dancing too long and had forgotten how to move at a normal pace.

At a traffic light they somehow ended up side by side.
Oh no
, she thought, he was rolling down his window. He was signaling to her to roll down her window. She did so, reluctantly.