The Man of My Dreams (30 page)

Pretty soon Henry and I were hanging out as many nights of the week as not. He often asked my advice, which surprised and flattered me. At the time, he and his twin sister were squabbling long-distance—her husband had borrowed money from Henry to start a restaurant in New Hampshire, and Henry was having an increasingly suspicious feeling about the whole venture—and so we talked about what, if anything, Henry should do. It took me a few months to realize how many other friends Henry confided in. True, I became the one he sought out most, but perhaps that was because no one else made themselves as available. Although I was unsure why he believed me to be capable of giving advice, I took his problems very seriously and would concentrate on them so hard, genuinely trying to find a solution, that I sometimes had headaches afterward. In addition to talking about his sister and brother-in-law, we talked a lot about his new boss at the consulting firm where he worked, who was, Henry thought, a particular asshole, and sometimes about Dana. Henry had the idea he’d screwed up his last several relationships, and he was determined to make this one work. It seemed so clear to me that he couldn’t that I didn’t even try to convince him. I figured he’d realize it himself soon enough.

One night in late September—I’d been in Chicago for three weeks by then—Henry and I drove to Milwaukee with his friend Bill to see the Brewers play the Cubs. Though I hardly understood the rules of baseball, Henry had bought my ticket and insisted I come along. At the ballpark, Bill announced that he was going to eat one hot dog for every run the Cubs scored. By his fifth hot dog, Bill was gripping his stomach unhappily, and by the seventh, he could barely watch the game. He was leaning forward, his head in his hands.

After the game, we drove home to Chicago, and Bill fell asleep in the backseat, and Henry and I were listening to a classic-rock station, and it was a warm night in early fall. We were talking about the situation with Henry’s sister and then about a new building going up near his apartment. We weren’t talking about Dana; those conversations had already become unbearable to me, embedded as they were with the potential to be either exciting or heartbreaking, and on this night it all just felt ordinary and calm. I stuck my hand out the window so the air pressed against my palm, and I felt in that moment that I could never love anyone more than I loved Henry.

I loved how he was both a good driver and a relaxed driver; how he’d gotten me a giant foam finger at the ballpark; how he’d cared that I’d come to the game, he’d
wanted
me to come; how in the first week after I’d moved to Chicago, he’d taught me to open a bottle of wine, to parallel-park, and to say “You’re a tricky bastard” in Spanish, and how these seemed like long-overdue skills that you’d need for a life of happy situations; how, after I said that in high school my sister trained me to sing the Rolling Stones song “Under My Thumb” by replacing all the
she
and
her
pronouns with
he
and
him,
he sang the song that way, too, unprompted, the next time we heard it on the radio; how he looked cute in his plaid shirt with the pearl snaps and he looked cute in a Brooks Brothers tie and he looked cute when he met me after playing basketball at the gym, still all sweaty, and how he had the good kind of fingers, fingers that are the same width at the top and bottom instead of tapering up; how he knew me really well, and how, once when we ate at an outdoor restaurant, he said, “You can take the far chair,” because one of the things he knew was that I didn’t like having my back to the street. Later, when I’d think of how I ought to cut Henry off, I’d think of teaching another person to know me like he did, and it seemed—with a hypothetical person, especially—like it would be a lot of work.

That night all I wanted in the world was to sit in the front seat next to Henry, driving home from a baseball game in Milwaukee. Back in the city, he dropped off Bill first, even though it was out of the way, because he always dropped off anyone besides me first. Outside my building, he put the car in park and we talked for ten more minutes, still about basically nothing, and I wanted to touch him so badly that I felt like I wasn’t a body, I was just an aching propulsive meteor, and then abruptly he said, “I’m beat. I gotta hit the sack.” He always was the one who made us part, who could; I just couldn’t. Once I was inside my building, it was terrible to still be a meteor. I was alone with all my pent-up energy.

I believed, except in the dreadful moments when I didn’t believe this at all, that Henry and Dana would break up and he and I would enter a relationship that would lead to marriage, except that I was afraid when he first kissed me, the fact of our being friends would make me more rather than less tense, and after we kissed tensely, he might, unaware that the situation would improve, never want to kiss me again. But the main thing was that I was sure about Henry, certain my real life had finally started, and all that had come before had been preamble.

One Saturday in winter when Dana had gone to Washington, D.C., to visit her parents, Henry and I went snowshoeing—this was his idea—and that night we made tacos and drank beer and sat in his apartment listening to Bruce Springsteen. At three in the morning, while I was slumped on the couch with my feet propped on the coffee table and he was sprawled on the floor, I said, “Henry, sometimes I feel like things are weird between us.” No one had ever explained to me that such conversations are futile, that you go ahead and kiss him because what’s a discussion compared to your warm and moving lips? The guy could still reject you, of course, but he’d be rejecting you because he didn’t want to kiss you back, which is a truer reason than anything that can be put into words.

Henry was quiet, and the moment was huge, it still contained two outcomes, and then he said, “I sometimes do, too,” and even though this was an affirmation of sorts, I could tell immediately that the rest of the conversation would make me sad. There would be bright bursts, but that would be the net of it: sadness. He was quiet for a long time again, then said, “I don’t think you understand how important you are to me,” and I thought he might cry.

“Henry, you’re important to me,” I said.

“But Dana’s great, too,” he said. “And she’s my girlfriend.”

“I just have to say this,” I said. “I’ve liked you since we were in college.”

Henry squinted. “You liked me back then?”

“Wasn’t it obvious?”

“Oh, I don’t know. There were times—” He shook his head and exhaled a long breath. “It’s all complicated.”

Looking back, I think,
No, not really.
I also think,
No, Dana was not in fact great.
But I was still inclined then to take Henry at his word.

Henry said, “When I lived in Seoul, I really wanted you to visit me. Do you remember that?”

I nodded.

“I think I kind of had a crush on you then. And when you e-mailed me saying you had a boyfriend, I felt jealous.” He smiled wryly, and my heart sparked—he’d had a crush on me!—and it is not an exaggeration to say I thought probably a hundred times afterward of my mistake in not having visited him then. It took me until I’d moved to New Mexico to understand that it never comes down to a single thing you did or didn’t do or say. You might convince yourself it did, but it didn’t.

“Can you imagine us together now?” I asked him.

“Of course.” There was another long, long silence, and he said, sounding pained, “I feel like I’m making a mess of things.”

“No,” I said. “I’m the one who’s creating awkwardness by bringing this up.”

“It’s going to be
really
awkward now.
So
awkward.” He grinned. We listened to the end of the song—it was “Mansion on the Hill”—and then he said, “It’s late. Why don’t you stay over and sleep in my bed, and I’ll sleep on the couch?”

When he’d escorted me to his room, we paused in the doorway and he set his hand on my shoulder and said, “This isn’t because I’m not attracted to you, because I totally am.” And that, of everything, probably hurt my feelings the most. It sounded so
There, there, little sister.
Now I see how he offered opportunities but how, in such opportunities, I had to be the initiator. It had to be my fault, or at least more mine than his. But I didn’t understand that as a condition, or I half understood—I understood subconsciously but I was too shy, and it also wasn’t how I wanted it to happen, while he was still involved with another girl. I smiled like a good sport and said, “Thanks for letting me stay here, Henry,” and we looked at each other a moment longer, and he said, “Sleep tight, Gavener.” His use of my last name hurt, too, at the time.

I suspect you can imagine the rest. It was so repetitive that even if you can imagine only a portion, you know the entire story. I thought that night was a breakthrough when it wasn’t a breakthrough at all, I thought a relationship was imminent, I thought the conversation was an outrageous anomaly, but it was a conversation we had over and over and over, and every time it seemed less like an acknowledgment of the mutual attraction between us and more like my reminder to him of my unrequited love, and of my unwavering availability should he ever find himself in the mood to indulge. What he reminded me of was how much he
valued
me, how well I understood him. Sometimes, if our discussion had taken a disagreeable turn, he’d ask, seeming hurt, “Do you not want to be friends with me if I’m not your boyfriend?” And I’d say, “Of course I want to be friends!” Hanging around while he noodled over his feelings, while he soaked in the tepid bath of his ambivalence, contorting my face into expressions of concern and sympathy and unjudgmental insight and unhurt receptivity—that I had no problem with. But what kind of pathetic person would I have revealed myself as if I didn’t want to be friends with him because he wouldn’t be my boyfriend?

A few times Henry said, “I love our friendship.” Or “I love hanging out with you.” Or the closest he got: “I love you in my life.”

And then there were the evenings I sat on the couch and he lay with his head in my lap while we watched television, and I might set my hand on his shoulder but only in such a way as to treat it like a resting place; I did not run my fingers through his hair. When he lay like that, I was the happiest I had ever been. I was so happy I was afraid to breathe. We never talked about it, and any conversation we had before, during, or after was entirely casual. And we never spoke of it when he stopped doing it, which he did—I don’t know for sure that they were related, but it seems plausible—soon after a wedding he and Dana attended together. After he stopped, when we sat on the couch, the absence of his head on my lap was bigger than the television program, or my apartment, or the city of Chicago.

And where exactly was Dana in all of this? She was working at the law firm downtown, then rowing on the Erg at her gym on Clark Street, then, on Fridays and Saturdays, drinking gin and tonics at gatherings Henry did not invite me to, at swanky bars where I’d never been. Once when I used the bathroom in Henry’s apartment, I saw a tampon wrapper in the wastebasket and wanted to weep. A few times he said, “I think Dana’s threatened by you. She’s threatened because she doesn’t know what to make of you.” And didn’t I love the idea that broad-shouldered, gin-drinking Dana could be threatened by me, didn’t I, in certain ways, love my own sadness? On weekends, when I walked to the supermarket and the movie rental store at seven-thirty
P.M.
in corduroy pants and a sweatshirt while around me couples in black clothes held hands and hailed taxis, wasn’t I stirred by the poignancy of my loneliness, by how
deserving
I was of Henry’s love, by how much more exquisite it would be, coming after my suffering?

On the one hand, I feel that I was the biggest fool ever: If a man wants to be romantically involved with you, he tries to kiss you. That’s the entire story, and if he doesn’t kiss you, there is never a reason to wait for him. Yes, in the history of crushes, one person has come around for another—during this time, I collected such stories—but it happens rarely. Again, though, no one had told me. And it wasn’t that I didn’t know spending so much time with Henry was unwise. It was that I didn’t really care. I didn’t
want
to keep my distance from him, to pick up the pieces and meet some pleasant fellow on the El one day, a guy who’d appreciate me as I deserved to be appreciated. I wanted Henry.

Our wedding, I believed, would not be a victory in and of itself but would be merely a by-product of the fact that we enjoyed each other’s company so much, and that it seemed impossible to imagine a time when we wouldn’t. My certainty was like a physical object—a telephone, a running shoe, nothing precious or sparkly—and I did not need to be in the same room with it to know it existed. For his twenty-ninth birthday, I bought him a set of twelve orange dinner plates costing over two hundred dollars, and though the purchase felt extravagant, I understood—not in a cute way, not as an inside joke with myself, but matter-of-factly—that the plates would ultimately be both of ours.

Henry and Dana were still going out in February when he met Suzy, a meeting at which, I, too, was present. (I have heard that many of those at Harvard University’s 1947 graduation did not realize, in listening to Secretary of State George C. Marshall’s commencement address, that they were hearing the announcement of the Marshall Plan.) Henry and I got pizza one evening on Damen Avenue, and Suzy was at the table behind us, smoking by herself, while Henry and I waited for our slices. She looked so, for lack of a better word, undergraduate-ish that it didn’t occur to me to feel nervous. She wore a jean jacket, she kept most of her long hair loose but had a few tiny braids in front, and she had silver rings on almost all her fingers. She was small and pretty, and I don’t remember that she actually did smell like patchouli, but she seemed like she could have. If you’d asked me that night how we got into a conversation with her, I probably wouldn’t have known immediately, but later, I forced myself to remember, and it seemed not coincidental that it was when I went up to the front counter to get a cup of water that she and Henry started talking. Probably he was the one who started talking to her. When I returned, they were discussing gun control. And the next week when I called his office midmorning he announced he was hungover. He’d seen Suzy at a bar, he told me, but I still didn’t understand, and I was surprised when he said that they’d stayed until closing time.