The Man of My Dreams (26 page)

“I don’t have low self-esteem,” Hannah says.

“Right.”

“I don’t,” Hannah says.

“Listen carefully,” Fig says, “because I’m only doing this once. You have a lot of integrity. That’s one of your good qualities. And you’re not fake. Probably you’d enjoy yourself more if you
were
fake, but you’re not. You’re very reliable and trustworthy. You’re not that funny—no offense—but you do have a good sense of humor, and you appreciate other people’s funniness. You’re just overall a sturdy presence, and that’s something very few people are.”

“Please tell me,” Hannah says, “that you mean a steady presence.”

“That’s what I said.”

“You said sturdy, which is what a dining room table is.”

“Hannah, I’m heaping compliments on you. Quit pretending you don’t realize it. Oh, also, when you rescued me from my creepy professor on Cape Cod, that was one of the top three nicest things anyone ever did for me. I knew I should call you that day because you were the only person who would just get in the car without making me go through some massive explanation.”

“Yeah, but then I abandoned you when you went to see Philip Lake.”

“Who’s Philip Lake?” Fig says.

“Are you serious? He’s that man in L.A., the man of your dreams.”

“No, I knew the name was familiar.”

“Don’t you wonder what became of him?”

“Not particularly,” Fig says.

They both are quiet.

“As long as we’re soul-baring,” Hannah says, “I should also tell you that the Cape Cod rescue mission was the beginning of my obsession with Henry. I had a huge crush on him for years after that.”

Fig sits straight up in bed. Hannah assumes her cousin is angry—in spite of time and everything else, Fig is angry—but she sounds practically joyful when she says, “Of course! I can
completely
see you and Henry together. We should call him right now.”

Hannah pulls her back down toward the mattress. “Fig, I haven’t been in touch with Henry for years. I lost track of him when he was living in Seoul.” She pauses. “Do you even have his number?”

“I’m sure I can get it. I think he’s in Chicago now. This is so perfect. I was always way too insane for him, but you guys would definitely be compatible. I can’t believe I didn’t think of this before. Did I ever tell you he has a huge penis? He’ll rearrange your internal organs, but you’ll enjoy every minute of it.”

“You seem to be forgetting that I already have a boyfriend.”

“I thought we just decided you’re breaking up with Oliver.”

“
You
decided it. Anyway, why are you so sure Henry would want to date me?”

“This is exactly what I mean,” Fig says. “Enough with the defeatist crap. Why not assume from now on, until you have evidence to the contrary, that every man you meet finds you irresistible?”

Lying next to Fig—their heads are now on the same pillow—Hannah cannot help smiling. “So that’s your secret,” she says. “I always wondered.”

HANNAH DOESN’T LEAVE
her room again before going to bed, and she sleeps fitfully. Each time she wakes up, the idea of having to face her mother, Frank, or Aunt Polly after her outburst seems increasingly mortifying. Oliver she doesn’t worry about—she knows by now she’s incapable of offending him.

She rises at seven thirty, thinking she will eat a quick bowl of cereal before anyone else is up, and finds her mother already in the kitchen, standing at the sink in her pink quilted bathrobe and fiddling with one of the bouquets from the wedding. Immediately, it is clear that her mother is willing to pretend that Hannah did not mar the festivities last night with her personal vileness. “You cut the stems on the diagonal so they stay fresh,” her mother says and holds out a single flower toward Hannah, stem first. “Like so,” her mother says. “And you want to change the water in the vase if it starts getting cloudy.”

Hannah nods. Her mother has always been a font of tidbits useful for a life Hannah is pretty sure she’ll never have: Don’t use too harsh a cleaning agent on marble; when you’re stacking good china, put a flat paper towel on top of every plate.

“You just missed your sister going for a walk,” her mother says. “Would you think of saying to her that she should be careful exercising in this kind of temperature, especially while she’s pregnant?”

“You don’t want to tell her yourself?”

“I already have. I’m an old nag, aren’t I? But I worry.” Her mother opens the cabinet beneath the sink and tosses a handful of flower stems into the trash. “Hannah, I hope you know how appreciative I am to both you girls for coming home.”

“Mom, of course.”

“Well, I know you’re busy. You two work long hours.” Perhaps because their mother has not had much of a career, she is, in Hannah’s opinion, overly respectful of her daughters’ jobs. For Christmas she even gave them monogrammed leather briefcases.
I’m mostly just sitting at a desk,
Hannah wants to say, but she suspects her mother takes pleasure in the idea of Hannah and Allison as on the go, conducting important business.

Her mother dries her hands on a dish towel. “You and Oliver fly out around three, right?”

Hannah nods again.

Her mother hesitates—possibly she’s blushing—and then she says, “You know, honey, I’ve met Fig’s friend, and she seems quite nice.”

“You’ve met Fig’s girlfriend?”

The blush deepens. “I didn’t realize at the time that they were an item, so to speak. But Frank and I ran into the two of them at Striped Bass, oh, probably in November. We all had a drink.” Her mother as stealth gay sympathizer? Hannah can’t wait to tell Allison. “She seemed like an appealing young lady,” her mother says. The toaster pops up then, with a little ding. “How about an English muffin?”

Hannah says okay before realizing her mother intends to give her this English muffin, the one that’s ready now. “I can fix my own,” Hannah says.

“Oh, honey, don’t be silly. It will take me one second to make another. Sit down and eat this while it’s warm.”

Hannah obeys because it seems easier, it seems like what her mother wants. Passing Hannah the plate, her mother says, “I think the important thing is to find someone you feel comfortable around.” Then—her mother has always been both tentative and not subtle—she adds, “Oliver is a little eccentric, isn’t he?” She’s lowered her voice; presumably, Oliver is asleep in the den.

“In what way?” Hannah says.

“Well, I’m sure he’s had a lot of interesting experiences. I take it he’s traveled the globe. We all grow up differently, don’t we?” This is definitely her mother’s version of a condemnation. The question is, did Oliver do something explicitly inappropriate in front of her, something besides the snowball, or was it a general vibe her mother got? “And he’s very handsome,” her mother continues, “but you know, your father was handsome, too, when he was a young man.”

Hannah is more intrigued than insulted. Because her mother is truly without malice, she’d make such remarks only due to a nervousness on Hannah’s behalf, a concern for her future.

“Is that why you fell for Dad, because of his looks?” Hannah asks, and unexpectedly, her mother laughs.

“That was probably part of it. God help me if that was all of it. I was twenty-two on our wedding day, which seems extraordinary to me now. I moved right from my parents’ house into a house with your father. But Hannah, I would never consider my marriage to your father a mistake. I used to beat myself up, thinking what a bad role model I must have been for you and Allison, but eventually, I realized, well, I’d never have had you girls if I hadn’t been married to your father. Sometimes it’s hard to say what’s a bad decision and what’s not.” There is a silence, and then her mother adds, “It’s nice you went to see him yesterday. I know it made him happy.”

“Who told you?”

“He mentioned it when he called to wish me luck.”

“That was uncharacteristically gracious of him.”

Her mother smiles. “Let’s hope it’s never too late for any of us.”

Hannah bites into the English muffin, which is excellent: It is perfectly browned, and her mother buttered it about three times more thickly than Hannah would have, meaning it tastes three times better. “Mom,” Hannah says.

Her mother looks over.

“I really like Frank,” Hannah says. “I’m glad you married him.”

SHE WAS NOT
planning to, but as she passes by the closed door to the den on her way back upstairs, she impulsively stops and turns the knob. Inside the den, the curtains are pulled and the room is dim; Oliver is a vertical lump beneath the covers. She also is acting on impulse when she joins him. He lies on his back, and she curls up against him, her face in the hollow between his shoulder and neck, one of her arms against the left side of his rib cage and one across his chest. He does not seem to wake completely as he shifts to accommodate her, encircling her waist with his arm. She glances up at his face, relaxed in sleep. He is breathing audibly without quite snoring.

There is a way he smells in the morning, beneath the ever-present smell of cigarettes; he smells, she thinks, like a baby’s spit-up. If she ever expressed this, he’d make fun of her. It’s a scent that’s of the body yet completely clean, coming from some blend of his hair and mouth and skin, and it’s her favorite thing about him. Inhaling it in this moment, she feels an urge to somehow store it, to save it up for remembering, and this is how she knows she’s going to end things with him after all. Of course she is. Isn’t she the only one who’s ever thought that to do otherwise would be a good idea?

And how heartbreaking, because if it were all just a few degrees different, she is pretty sure they could be quite happy together. She really does like him, she likes lying next to him, she wants to be around him; when you get down to it, can you say that about many people? But also, what a relief: When he awakens, she knows, he’ll be talkative—he is in the morning even when hungover—and after a few minutes he’ll pull her hand toward his erection.
Look what you’ve done,
he’ll say.
You’re a vixen.
Not that long ago, in spite of everything she knew, his constant horniness was sort of flattering, but at this point it makes her feel depleted. Staving him off or giving in—both options are equally unpleasant.

And so who knows what will happen next, how exactly it will unravel? For now, she thinks, this is the trick: to pay such close attention to him that she is able to stay until the last possible second before he opens his eyes.

8

______

August 2003

WHEN HANNAH TELLS
Allison they need to go by her doctor’s office in Brookline before getting on the highway, what Allison says—this is highly un-Allison-like—is “Are you fucking kidding me?”

It is just after eleven
A.M.
, a sunny morning on the last day of August, and they both are sweating. Hannah’s apartment is empty, all the furniture and boxes loaded onto the truck; last night she and Allison slept in separate sleeping bags on the same air mattress. Between trips out to the truck this morning, Hannah ate handfuls of stale animal crackers from a carton she’d unearthed in a cupboard, but Allison declined them.

“Brookline really isn’t that far away,” Hannah says. “It’s sort of parallel to Cambridge.”

Allison looks at Hannah.
“Parallel?”
she repeats.

Because Allison has agreed to drive the moving truck out of the city, Hannah is not in a position to be anything but diplomatic. In eight years of living in Boston, Hannah has driven here exactly once—that time her freshman year when she and Jenny came back from the engineering school in the middle of the night—and she has no wish to do it again, regardless of the fact that the truck is the smallest size available. When Hannah first broached the topic, Allison hesitated a little because of her daughter, Isabel, who is only a few months old, but Allison appeared not to see the driving part of Hannah’s request as a big deal. In San Francisco, Allison and Sam share a standard Saab, and they blithely back into parking spaces midway up hills.

Hannah inserts three more animal crackers into her mouth and then, while chewing, says, “Should we go?”

She’s not certain how to find Dr. Lewin’s—she has always come by T—and is relieved they don’t get lost. They are a few blocks from Dr. Lewin’s office, which is in the basement of her house, when Hannah realizes her mistake. When she told Allison she’d forgotten her sweater after a doctor’s appointment, Allison presumably thought she meant a doctor-doctor, which of course is what Hannah intended for Allison to think. To pull up in front of Dr. Lewin’s gray stucco house will require explanation, and Hannah doesn’t feel like announcing, at the start of a two-day drive from Boston to Chicago, with Allison in a ragingly bad mood, that she sees a shrink. Allison is a social worker and thus officially supports the pursuit of mental health, but Hannah suspects Allison would think it was kind of weird, borderline unsavory, for her own sister to go to a psychiatrist. Hannah would not be surprised if Allison is the kind of person who thinks only crazy people go to psychiatrists.

“Sorry,” Hannah says, “but I’ve gotten really mixed up. I know how to get us onto Ninety from here, but I don’t know how to get to”—she pauses—“the hospital. I think I’ll just have them send me the sweater.”

“Can’t you look at the map? We might as well figure it out if we’ve gotten this far.”

“No, you were right that this was a bad idea. If you turn on Beacon, we can go around the block.”

“Your doctor doesn’t have anything better to do than mail you sweaters?”

“Allison, I thought you wanted to get on the road.”

Allison does not respond, and Hannah thinks,
This is for your sake as much as mine.
“Sorry,” she says. “I thought I knew the way.”

Allison makes the turn that will lead them back to Ninety, but instead of acknowledging Hannah’s apology, she leans forward and tunes the radio until she finds the public station. Then she turns it up, which is pure Allison: aggression by NPR. Hannah eats several more animal crackers and looks out the window.