The Man of My Dreams (31 page)

“That’s weird that you keep running into her,” I said. “Maybe she’s stalking you.”

“No, we met up on purpose,” he said. “I called her.” There was a silence, the silence of my receiving this information and Henry—what?—dignifying my receipt of it.

“How’d you get her number?” I asked, and I felt that familiar slide down the icy precipice: the slick burn of my hands, the endlessness of the drop.

“When we saw her before,” he said, which didn’t really answer my question, while telling me pretty much all I needed to know.

Even when he and Dana officially broke up, I thought it couldn’t be serious for him and Suzy. She was nineteen and probably loved giving blow jobs or something. The three of us had dinner once, and she wasn’t stupid—I wanted her to be, obviously—but she wasn’t particularly interesting. She wasn’t someone who asked other people questions, or maybe she just didn’t ask me. She was from Madison, majoring in sociology at DePaul, working twenty hours a week as a waitress. At one point Henry said, “I got the weirdest e-mail from Julie today,” and Suzy said, “Who’s Julie?” and I said, “Henry’s twin.” I didn’t say it pointedly, I was just answering the question. Suzy said, “You have a twin?” and again (Dr. Lewin, I hope it does not seem like I am being gratuitously crude), all I could think was
blow jobs.

I walked home after that dinner, and it was a rainy April evening, and I thought—I was by this point constantly trying to impose these types of limits—that I should never again hang out with Henry in Suzy’s company, and that from then on I should see him no more than twice a week and I shouldn’t talk to him if he called me at work. Or maybe I am mixing this up, and maybe this was the time I decided I
shouldn’t
talk to him at home and should
only
talk to him at work.

Either way, we met for lunch the next week, and I had the feeling I so often had with him, that between us no words or gestures were impossible. I wanted to reach across the table and cup his chin and feel all the bones of his face beneath the skin. He always seemed like mine. Or I wanted to say
I feel gutted like a fish,
without any more explanation. But I didn’t cup his chin, I didn’t say anything weird, and I didn’t ask him about Suzy, because that was another of my resolutions: to quit acting like talking about his girlfriends didn’t bother me.

We weren’t in touch for ten days. I intentionally didn’t call him, and I felt proud for holding out. And then on a Thursday morning when he called me at work, I thought,
Of course, of course, he always needs to check in,
and he said, “I have some news, and I hope you’ll be happy for me,” and then he said, “Suzy’s pregnant.” They had been dating then for less than four months.

I was sitting at my desk, and all the objects on it—the red mouse pad, the mug of pens, the line of plastic binders—seemed suddenly
obvious;
I noticed them in a way I never had before.

“I need your support,” he said, and I observed the fat spine of the Chicago phone book. “My family is flipping out.”

Finally, I asked, “How many weeks along is she?”

“Nine.”

“Are you not pro-choice?”

“Do you hear yourself, Hannah? I guess you can’t imagine this, but we want the baby. We feel like this happened for a reason.”

“You mean a reason other than Suzy not taking her birth control pills?”

“That’s completely sexist,” he said. “I’m more ready than she is. She’s the one who’s still in school. But we really are in love.” For a split second, I thought he was talking about us. “I wish you wouldn’t make this weird,” he said.

“I think you already have.”

He was silent.

“Are you guys getting married?” I asked.

“Not for now, but probably at some point.”

“What does her family think?”

“They’re cool with it. We were up there this past weekend. They’re wonderful people.”

I thought again of the afternoon we’d driven to Cape Cod, and of how Henry had changed since then—I think he’d become less honest with himself—but also how what had been true that day turned out to be true seven years later: that he liked to rescue girls who needed rescuing. He’d been wrong only in predicting his proclivity would change.

And surely Henry would have been disappointed had I not reacted negatively to the news. Wasn’t this the pattern we were supposed to follow, that he’d tell me, I’d freak out, I’d calm down, I’d then talk him through how to smooth things over with his family, we’d figure out a way for these developments to reinforce the idea that he was a good, thoughtful guy whose life was headed in the right direction? We’d say his decision was
honorable;
also, he’d mention in passing how gorgeous he found Suzy, so I knew they were having good sex and didn’t get the idea he was acting entirely out of duty.

“Well, good luck,” I said, and he said, “It’s not like we’ll never see each other again.”

I began to cry as soon as I’d hung up. I was sitting at my desk, and the door to my office was open, but I didn’t care. I was crying partly because Suzy got him and I didn’t, but more than for the loss of Henry, I was crying for my own wrongness, a wrongness of which there now was incontrovertible proof. My intuition, my gut instinct—whatever you want to call it, it had been wrong. Henry and I weren’t each other’s fates. We weren’t going to spend the rest of our lives eating dinner off orange plates, I wasn’t ever going to actually rub his head while he rested it in my lap, we’d never travel together to a foreign country. None of it. It was over. Or maybe it wouldn’t work out with him and Suzy and he’d want me later, in a few years, or he’d want me much later, he’d come find me when I was sixty-eight and he was seventy, but by then, who cared? I wanted him while we were still the people we were now. Besides, he’d violated the terms of what I’d seen as our unspoken agreement.

I decided to move to Albuquerque because I didn’t know anyone there, because it was far from Chicago and Boston and Philadelphia, and if the terrain was different, dry and mountainous and spiked by strange plants, I imagined maybe I could be different, too. Escape, like unrequited love, is an old story. Less than a month after Henry had told me Suzy was pregnant, I was ensconced in the second bedroom in Lisa’s house here on Coal Street. I spent the summer working as a hostess at a French restaurant, and in August I was hired for my current position as an assistant teacher at Praither Exceptional School. I knew little about special ed when I started—my only real exposure to anyone with developmental issues had been my cousin Rory—but I felt ready for change. My salary now is not high, but luckily, neither is the cost of living in New Mexico. I am especially pleased to report that as of February, I have paid off my student loans.

Last week we took the boys out for recess—the other teachers in my classroom are named Beverly and Anita, and the head teacher is Graciela, though she stayed inside to prepare ingredients for the English-muffin pizzas we were teaching the boys to make that afternoon—and a few of the students were shooting baskets while the others climbed on the jungle gym. I was standing by the slide as a boy named Ivan described to me his wish to buy a tractor, when I heard a wail. It was Jason—he’s the temperamental one who carries the cat brush and other items in his pockets—and I turned and saw that he was sitting on the platform that connects the two sections of the jungle gym and that his fingers were stuck in one of the platform’s drainage holes. I should point out here that the jungle gym is designed for children smaller and younger than my students. I climbed onto the platform and knelt next to Jason, thinking that if he held still, I’d be able to pull his fingers out. He was shrieking and weeping, and, as gently as possible, I tugged at his hand, but his fingers—it was his middle and ring fingers—stayed where they were. Anita and Beverly came over, and the rest of the boys were watching us by then.

“Can one of you go get some Vaseline?” I asked the teachers. “Or maybe soap and water?”

“We’ll take the kids inside,” Anita said.

After the playground emptied out except for us, Jason was still howling. “Jason, what’s on your shirt?” I said. “That’s a fish, right? A fish from Texas?” He was wearing a turquoise T-shirt that said
SOUTH PADRE ISLAND
.
“What kind of fish is that?” I asked.

His wailing slowed and dropped in volume.

“I wonder if it likes to eat candy,” I said. “Do fish eat candy? Not in real life, but maybe if it’s a movie fish or a pretend fish.” The candy reference was cheap on my part—to help students work on math (I assume you know it is far from true that all autistic people are mathematical geniuses) as well as to practice making purchases, the classrooms hold sales on alternating days. Our classroom, Classroom D4, sells popcorn for thirty cents a bag; it is Classroom D7, the oldest kids, who sell candy, and many of our boys, including Jason, are fixated on it.

Jason had stopped crying. I pulled a tissue from my pocket and held it out to him. “Blow,” I said, and he scowled and turned his head in the other direction.

“What about a lollipop?” I said. “Would a fish ever eat a lollipop?”

His head swiveled back around. In my peripheral vision, I could see Graciela and the school nurse emerge from the building and walk toward us. Jason was staring at me. “Are you fourteen?” he asked.

I shook my head. “You’re fourteen,” I said. “Right? You’re fourteen years old. But I’m a grown-up. I’m twenty-eight.”

He regarded me impassively.

“Twenty-eight is twice as old as fourteen,” I said. Jason still didn’t respond, and I asked, “Why are you staring at me like that?”

“I’m looking for social cues,” he said.

I had to bite my lip. “That’s great!” I said. “Jason, that’s wonderful. That’s just exactly what you should be doing. You know what, though? When you’re looking for social cues, you usually don’t tell the other person. You don’t need to.”

He was quiet. Sensing that I’d discouraged him, I added, “But I’ll tell you a secret. I’m looking for social cues, too. It’s not easy, is it?”

Graciela and the nurse had reached the jungle gym. They’d brought Vaseline and soap, and Beverly soon followed with dental floss and ice chips. Nothing worked. Graciela and the nurse stood under the platform pressing ice against Jason’s fingers, slathering them with Vaseline, turning and prodding them, and they stayed stuck. The nurse called the paramedics. I kept talking to Jason as they hunched under the platform—I could tell when they were really pushing at his fingers because he’d yelp and then, as if preparing to ride the wave of a new set of tears, glance at me. I’d shake my head. “You’re fine,” I’d say. Or, “They want to help you feel better.”

The paramedics showed up twenty minutes later. The police came, too—they have to by law—and it turned out to be my roommate, Lisa, and her partner, which has happened before. “What have we here?” she said. She offered to let Jason put on her hat, but he didn’t want to. I could feel his capacity for hysteria growing again with the arrival of the new cars and people, and he teared up a little but stayed composed. Even when the paramedics jammed his fingers out—I suspect all they did was use more force than Graciela or the nurse could bring themselves to—Jason stayed composed. When his fingers finally were free and he could stand, I hugged him. We try as much as possible to treat the boys as we’d treat other fourteen-year-olds, to impose the same boundaries of physical contact—Mickey in particular has difficulty with this and will wedge his head beneath my armpit and croon, “I love you, Ms. Gaahv”—but in this instance, I could not help myself. I sensed that Graciela simultaneously disapproved and understood.

I was wearing a gray button-down shirt, and as Jason headed inside with the nurse, I noticed that Vaseline was smeared on it in several places, and I felt in that moment—you can see the Sandia Mountains from the school playground—that I was meant to live in the desert of New Mexico, meant to be a teacher with Vaseline on my blouse. I do not want to idealize the boys or pretend they’re angels; on a regular basis, Pedro picks his nose until it bleeds, and all of them stick their hands in their pants and fiddle with their penises so often that we have pasted paper hands on their desks where they’re meant to place their palms. “Public hands!” we remind them. “Public hands!” And yet I feel somehow that my students contain the world. This is difficult for me to express. Like all of us, they are greedy and cranky and sometimes disgusting. But they are never cagey; they are entirely sincere.

My students’ lives will be hard in ways they don’t understand, and I wish I could protect them—I can’t—but at least as long as I’m trying to show them how to protect themselves, I don’t think that I am wasting my time. Perhaps this is how you know you’re doing the thing you’re intended to: No matter how slow or slight your progress, you never feel that it’s a waste of time.

I am glad, honestly, that I didn’t get what I thought I wanted back in Chicago. If I’d gotten what I wanted, I’d never have learned to physically restrain a teenager trying to attack me, I’d never have pinned a dashiki to a bulletin board while decorating for Kwanzaa, I’d never have stood before a classroom of boys, making a presentation on puberty and hygiene. And sincerely I feel that I am
lucky
to have stood there simulating the application of deodorant. What would Henry and I have been like if we’d married? I picture us spending Saturday afternoons at upscale houseware stores, purchasing throw pillows or porcelain platters meant for serving deviled eggs.

Sometimes in the afternoon, after I’ve used the bathroom and am approaching the sink to wash my hands, my reflection in the mirror is that of a person whom I know that I know but cannot immediately place. This, too, is because of the boys: because of how they require all my attention, how they consume me and make me forget myself. Or if, while washing my hands, I notice that a piece of food is stuck in my teeth and I can infer that it’s been there for several hours and during those hours I’ve talked to other teachers, including male teachers, I would not say I don’t care at all, but I don’t care very much. In my life before, both in Chicago and in Boston, how embarrassed I’d have felt to know I’d been talking to people with food in my teeth. But that never would have happened, because I cared enormously about such things.