The Man of My Dreams (12 page)

Sarie is short and curvy, and as she disappears from view, Hannah observes how nicely shaped Sarie’s calves are. Sarie has what Hannah has come to believe is the type of body most preferred by most guys: not too tall, small but still voluptuous, topped off by a pleasingly bland face, and blond hair that’s fakish but not definitively fake. Sarie wears skirts every day, while Hannah always wears pants. Also, Sarie wears thongs. Every time they’re in the bathroom together, Sarie expounds on their virtues (they’re so comfortable, they prevent panty lines) and says that if only Hannah would try a thong, she’d never go back.

At moments—on the two evenings Sarie has actually persuaded Hannah to go to a bar with her and Hannah has sat there feeling huge and dull while, across the table, the men wind toward Sarie like she’s some source of energy or light—Hannah has felt impressed by her. But then Hannah has thought of the afternoon Sarie said, “Wait, is Shanghai a city or a country?” The worst part was that, possibly reacting to Hannah’s shocked expression, Sarie then laughed self-consciously and said, “That was a really stupid question, right? Don’t tell anyone I said that.”

By quarter to twelve, the music coming from down the hall is so distracting that Hannah clicks off the meeting report she’s been working on and pulls out a piece of company stationery.
Do laundry,
she writes at the top. Then
B-day present for Mom.
Then she can’t think of anything else. She glances out at the hallway. Ted Daley, who was just promoted from cubicle to windowless office, is passing by. Their eyes meet, and he gives a little wave. “Turn that frown upside down,” he says, and involuntarily Hannah actually does smile. “Nice glasses,” Ted says. “Are they new?”

“I think all this staring at the computer has affected my vision,” Hannah says. “They’re kind of nerdy.”

“No, they look really good. That’s a bummer they’re making you guys come in today, huh? Not being paid should have a few privileges.”

“I don’t mind.” Originally, Hannah was supposed to work here five days a week, but she’s ended up doing just three so she can babysit on the other days for a professor’s children. Hannah tried to tell Lois, the intern supervisor, just enough about her new financial situation to make the scheduling change not seem flaky. As it’s turned out, there’s really not enough work to fill even three days. What there is consists primarily of sending faxes, making copies, and sitting in on meetings where senior-level employees take an hour to convey what seems to Hannah roughly three minutes’ worth of information. Her main goal at this point is just to get a good recommendation she can use to apply for jobs, not in advertising, when she graduates.

“I wouldn’t be here myself,” Ted says, “but I’m going to Baja in October, and there’s no way I’m wasting my vacation days.” He raises his arms as if keeping invisible walls from closing in on him and then wiggles his hips, or what he has of them. “ ‘All I need are some tasty waves, a cool buzz, and I’m fine.’ ”

“Huh?”

“Fast Times at Ridgemont High,”
Ted says. “The movie? Mid-eighties? Never mind—you were probably in kindergarten. I’m hoping to do some surfing in Baja.”

“Oh,” Hannah says. “Cool.”

There is a lull during which Ted looks down at his watch and Hannah looks up at Ted’s hearing aid.
When someone with a hearing aid goes in the water,
she wonders,
does he take it out first, or are hearing aids waterproof?
Ted is only twenty-eight or twenty-nine—he’s an assistant account executive—and when she arrived, she had a slight crush on him, if this is possible,
because
of his hearing aid. It made him seem sensitive, as if he had known difficulty but not difficulty so great that he’d be strange or bitter. His voice warbled endearingly, and besides that, he was tall and had green eyes. The crush passed, though, after less than a month. At a recent office happy hour she attended for sixteen minutes, she heard him having an animated conversation about what a bitch Lois is, which seemed first of all untrue to Hannah—Lois is perfectly nice—and also seemed both unwise and unbearably common. Hearing aid or not, Ted is no one special.

“We’re ordering pizza for lunch,” Ted is saying. “You want to go in on it?”

“Sure,” Hannah says. “How much should I give?”

Ted enters the cubicle to collect the money, and Hannah instinctively flips over her list of errands, although it seems like Ted’s not getting much work done right now, either. “Writing love letters?” he asks as she reaches for her purse on the floor beneath her desk.

“Yeah, to you,” Hannah says.

“Huh?”

When she realizes he didn’t hear her, she considers not repeating the joke, but then she thinks,
Oh, who cares?
“I was writing love letters to you,” she says more loudly.

He smiles. “All the girls are.”

“The competition.” Hannah waves a hand in the air. “Forget about them.”

“Is that right?” Ted says, and he’s still grinning, but his expression has become a mix of curiosity and surprise. He is, Hannah realizes, appraising her, and abruptly, she can’t think of anything to say.

She glances down, then looks back up at him. “So is ten dollars okay?”

“That depends if you want to treat half the office.”

Hannah always offers to pay more than she knows she should, mainly out of a fear of appearing stingy. Most other people don’t object.

“Five bucks should cover it,” Ted says. “You’ll be eating, what, two slices?” Then he adds, “You keep writing me poetry until then,” and Hannah realizes that the mood before—the weird light energy passing between them—has been replaced with awkwardness only for her, not for him.

WHEN THE PIZZAS
arrive, nine or ten people crowd into the kitchen. It turns out that only younger members of the staff are in today. Someone has ordered beer, and a bottle is passed to Hannah. “I didn’t pay for any,” she murmurs, but no one is listening, and then Lois, who is five months pregnant, hands Hannah the bottle opener. “None for me,” Lois says, patting her stomach. She is eating a slice of mushroom pizza.

“So what are your plans for the Fourth?” Hannah asks.

Lois has just taken a bite, and she waves her hand in front of her mouth.

“Oh, sorry,” Hannah says.

Lois swallows. “No major plans. Jim and I are having dinner with a few other couples.”

“Like a potluck?” Hannah asks brightly. Inside her head, she sneers at herself. Usually, she eats lunch alone, heading to a food court in the Prudential Building for Cobb salad in a clear plastic box and a waxy cup of Sprite.

“I suppose it’s a potluck,” Lois says. “But fancy, you know? I’m making dessert.”

“Oh, really? What are you making?”

“I made it last night. It’s a chocolate torte Jim’s mother gave me the recipe for.”

“That sounds tasty,” Hannah says. She has polished off her first slice of pizza. About thirty seconds pass, during which neither she nor Lois speaks, and Hannah begins chugging her beer. It’s dark and heavy, like bitter soup.

“Hi, girls,” Sarie says, approaching them. “How deserted is the office today?”

“You’re telling me,” Lois says.

“Han, you want to come over and get dressed at my place tomorrow?”

“That’s okay,” Hannah says. “I won’t be getting too decked out.”

“You two are hanging out for the Fourth?” Lois asks.

“Indeed we are,” Sarie says. “My brother-in-law’s apartment has a roof deck with an awesome view of the fireworks.”

Hannah tries not to cringe. But she hates herself for cringing—why does it matter what Lois thinks anyway?—and she just wishes to be away from both women. “I’ll be back in a second,” she says, and squeezes out of the kitchen.

In the hall are a cluster of men Hannah hardly knows: Ted, an AV guy named Rick, a copywriter named Stefan, and a guy whose name she can’t remember. When Ted sees her, he lifts the beer out of her hand and squints at it. “Looks like you need a replacement,” he says.

“I think one is plenty for the middle of the day,” Hannah says, but Ted has already gone into the kitchen.

“Any day when Nailand is out is definitely not a workday,” says Stefan.

“Didn’t Nailand come to the office the day his wife was in labor?” Rick says, and everyone laughs.

“Actually, that’s impossible, since the Nailands adopted their child,” Hannah says.

Ted is back by now, and at this comment, he leans over, puts an arm around her, and brings his mouth up to her ear as if to whisper. “Drink your beer,” he says in a normal voice, and the guys all crack up again.

For lack of anything better to do, Hannah does drink the beer. The men start talking about weekend plans, where people are traveling.

“I talked my girlfriend out of Nantucket, thank God,” Rick says. “I fuckin’ hate that scene.” Rick is the person at the agency whom Ted seems closest to, and also—this is the primary way Hannah thinks of him—someone Sarie had a fling with right when she started interning, unbeknownst to his Nantucket-loving girlfriend.

“So who’s playing the crappy music so loud today?” asks Stefan.

“Watch it, dude,” says Ted.

“Does that mean it’s you?” Stefan asks.

“Actually, no,” Ted says. “But I’m not embarrassed to say that the seventies were a beautiful time musically. Show me the man who doesn’t love ‘I Will Survive.’ ”

“You’re kidding, right?” Hannah says. “You know that’s, like, a feminist anthem, don’t you?”

At this, the men positively roar with laughter, although Hannah wasn’t trying to be funny.

Ted sets his beer on the floor, walks a few steps away, turns around, and takes a breath: “ ‘First I was afraid, I was petrified / Kept thinking I could never live without you by my side…’ ”

“Goodness,” Hannah says. She reenters the kitchen, picks up another beer, and says to Sarie and Lois, “You guys should come see this.”

Out in the hall, Ted is prancing around singing the chorus, and the women join in, except Hannah. She’s buzzed already, she’s even kind of smiley, but she’s not drunk. She does feel pretty good, though. She rarely drinks, and then when she does, she wishes she could be tipsy all the time.

Ted’s performance prompts the others to start singing songs they know all the words to: “Stayin’ Alive,” then “Uptown Girl.” In the excitement, Lois kicks over Ted’s half-full beer, but no one besides Hannah seems to notice as the liquid gets absorbed into the carpet. The atmosphere feels cheesily surreal: a scene from a sitcom about office life instead of a real office where, supposedly, people accomplish things during the day.

Then Ted grabs Hannah’s shoulders from behind, whirls her around, and pulls out her arms. She laughs. But when he releases her, she stumbles backward and says, “I’ve got to get back to work.”

“Work, huh?” Ted says. “Fat chance.” Back in the intern cubicle, the walls look like they’re shifting. She sits at her desk and grasps the mouse to the right of her computer monitor, checking her e-mail. No new messages, she sees, and shuts the account again quickly, before she mass-mails some incriminating message to the entire office—
I have never in my life seen so much mediocrity amassed under one roof,
or perhaps
Working with all of you is like dying a very slow death
—or, even worse, before she dashes off a declaration of love to Henry. Since the drive to Cape Cod over a year ago, they have exchanged sporadic and not particularly flirtatious e-mails (he once wrote to tell her there was an article in that day’s
Globe
about state mottoes), but the e-mails are increasing in number now that Henry lives in Korea. He was transferred in March to the Seoul office of the same consultancy he worked for in Boston.

Less than twenty minutes have passed before Ted appears again. “Hey there,” he says, and she says “Hey” back. She feels extremely shy. It’s not that she doesn’t like the people here, she thinks. How could she not like them as individuals, standing before her with their own private tics and appetites, their intermittent gestures of friendliness? No, like this, like Ted is now, they’re fine. She’d have to be cruel not to think they were fine. She just hadn’t expected that offices—adulthood—would seem so ordinary.

“So the day is pretty much shot,” Ted says. “We’re heading over to Rick’s if you want to come.”

“Where does Rick live?” Hannah asks, which feels like a pleasant way to turn down the invitation without turning it down.

“In the North End. And you’re in Somerville, right? You can catch the T again at Haymarket to get home.”

Hannah is astonished that he knows where she’s living this summer. “Just give me a minute,” she says.

It is three thirty by the time they’re all out on the street: Hannah, Ted, Rick, Stefan, and Sarie. The T is weirdly crowded for midday, and they joke that the rest of Boston has been playing hooky while they’ve worked. They are talking loudly, but everyone else seems to be talking loudly, too. An electricity is in the air, the anticipation of the holiday weekend.

Rick’s girlfriend isn’t home when they get there. The apartment has a black leather sofa and upside-down milk crates for tables.
What an awful combination,
Hannah thinks. Then, based on the sofa, she finds herself wondering how much Rick makes.

Stefan and Ted are discussing what to get from the liquor store down the street, and Rick gives them directions. When they’ve left, he goes into the bedroom to change, and Hannah and Sarie sit on the sofa. “Did I tell you about the Puerto Rican dude who called today?” Sarie says.

“I think I heard you on the phone,” Hannah says.

“It was so annoying. He was looking for some girl named Margaret, and I kept being like, ‘There’s no intern here by that name.’ And he’d be like, ‘Please to give me Miss Margaret?’ ”

Hannah reaches forward and picks up an issue of
Sports Illustrated
from the milk crate in front of her. She starts paging through it, looking at the ads.

Sarie keeps talking. As the story progresses, the caller changes from Puerto Rican to Mexican. After four minutes, Hannah glances at her watch and wonders if they all would think she was really strange for the rest of the summer if she got up right now and left.