The Man of My Dreams (8 page)

“No.” Jenny seems very serious in this moment, almost sad. “It doesn’t sound strange at all.”

They turn in to the parking lot. Advertisements for a sale on two-liters of soda hang in the window, and behind the counter, Hannah can see two women in red smocks. The whole complex seems to buzz with electricity.

“I haven’t hooked up with that many guys,” Hannah says.

Jenny laughs softly. “You’re lucky,” she says.

3

______

April 1997

RIDING THE T
back to school after her appointment with Dr. Lewin, Hannah takes notes on their conversation.
Jared probably flattered,
she writes.
Why freakish gesture? Why not thoughtful?
She is using her Islamic Art notebook, and in the dorm, she’ll rip out the paper and stick the notes in the manila file she keeps in the top drawer of her desk. When enough pieces of paper have accumulated, Hannah will, she hopes, understand the secret of happiness. It is not clear how long this will take, but so far Hannah has been seeing Dr. Lewin for a year, every Friday afternoon since her freshman spring. Dr. Lewin charges Hannah ninety dollars an hour, a seemingly outrageous amount that actually reflects a sliding-fee scale. To cover this cost without asking either of her parents for money—that is, without telling her parents she is seeing a psychiatrist—Hannah has gotten a job shelving books in the veterinary library. “What are you worried it will make them think?” Dr. Lewin once asked, and Hannah said, “I just don’t want to talk about it with them. I don’t see the point.”

Dr. Lewin is in her late thirties, trim and fit; Hannah guesses she is a runner. She has dark curly hair that she keeps short, fair skin, and intense blue eyes. She favors white or striped button-down shirts and black pants. They meet in the finished basement of Dr. Lewin’s large gray stucco house in Brookline. According to the diplomas on the wall in Dr. Lewin’s office, she attended Wellesley College, graduating summa cum laude, and went on to medical school at Johns Hopkins University. Hannah has a hunch Dr. Lewin is Jewish, though
Lewin
does not sound to Hannah like a Jewish name. Dr. Lewin has two elementary-school-age sons who appear to be adopted, perhaps from Central or South America—in the framed photo on Dr. Lewin’s desk, they have caramel-colored skin. Hannah knows nothing of Dr. Lewin’s husband. At times she imagines him as a fellow psychiatrist, a man Dr. Lewin met at Hopkins who admired her intelligence and seriousness, but at other times (Hannah has a preference for this version) Hannah imagines him as a sexy carpenter, a smoldering guy with a tool belt who also, though in a different way, admires Dr. Lewin’s intelligence and seriousness.

The subject they talked about in today’s session was how Hannah gave a bottle of cough syrup to a guy in her sociology class named Jared. It’s a small class, only twelve students, and the professor is an earnest bearded guy who wears jeans. The students all sit around a large table, and Hannah and Jared usually sit next to each other and never talk, though a benign energy sometimes passes between them; she suspects he is noticing the same things she is, finding the same other students amusing or annoying. Jared dresses in a very particular style that is possibly punk or possibly gay: large red or navy or olive denim shorts that are much longer than normal shorts, hanging well past his knees; white tube socks that he pulls up over his thin ankles and calves; suede sneakers; and nylon warm-up jackets that zip in the front and have vertical white stripes on the arms. If you leave the classroom behind him, you can see a silver chain running between a back pocket and a front pocket, conspicuously connecting something Hannah isn’t sure of (a wallet?) to something else she isn’t sure of (keys? a pocket watch?). He has dyed black hair and she sees him around campus on a skateboard, with other guys who dress about like he does, and with a girl who has her right eyebrow pierced.

What made Hannah give Jared the cough syrup was, logically enough, that he was coughing a lot for several classes in a row. Sitting next to him one day, Hannah had a sudden memory of a bottle of cough syrup in a box in her dorm closet, left over from when she would take it to get to sleep. (She stopped last year around the time she became friends with Jenny, which is also the time she found a therapist.) The bottle still had a clear seal over the cap; the syrup was cherry flavored. When Hannah placed it in her backpack before the next class, she noticed that the expiration date on it had passed, but whatever, right? It wasn’t like it was milk. She gave it to him as they were leaving the classroom—when she said, a few steps behind him, “Jared?” it was the first time she had used his name—and he seemed first mildly confused and then, after she explained, mildly pleased. He thanked her and turned again and kept walking. They did not begin walking together, not even just out of the building. The next time the class met, which was today, he said nothing to her, in fact they never made eye contact, which Hannah thinks might be unprecedented for them. As the minutes of the class ticked away, Hannah felt a building, billowing regret, practically a nausea. Why is she so fucking weird? Why did she give this punky boy she’s never talked to expired cough syrup? Did she think she was flirting? Also, what if the expiration date on cough syrup actually does matter and there was gross cherry mold floating inside when he opened the bottle,
if
he opened the bottle, although he probably wouldn’t have and his cough is merely from using some kind of new club drug Hannah has never heard of.

Listening to all of this, Dr. Lewin remained, as always, unfazed: less concerned with discussing whether Jared now sees Hannah as strange than why Hannah herself thinks she wanted to give him the cough syrup, why Jared would have interpreted the syrup as anything other than a gesture of kindness, and what non-syrup-related reasons might have caused him not to make eye contact with Hannah during today’s class.

“You want me to name actual reasons?” Hannah asked.

Dr. Lewin nodded calmly. (
Oh, Dr. Lewin,
Hannah sometimes thinks,
let it be true that you’re as decent and well adjusted as you appear! Let the life you have put together be genuinely gratifying, make you exempt from all the nuisances and sorrows of everyone else
.)

“I don’t know—maybe if he was tired because he stayed up all night writing a paper,” Hannah said. “Or if he had a disagreement with his roommate.”

Both perfectly plausible, Dr. Lewin said. Also, she did not see a reason for Hannah to announce to Jared in class this coming Monday, in case he hadn’t noticed it, the fact of the cough syrup’s expiration. Dr. Lewin considered there to be no major health risk, and she is, after all, a doctor.

The way Hannah ended up seeing Dr. Lewin was by calling the Tufts student health services center and getting a referral. What prompted her to call the student health services center—who prompted her—was Elizabeth. They talk on the phone every few months, and once Elizabeth called on a Friday at seven
P.M.
and awakened Hannah. “You’re taking a nap?” Elizabeth asked, and Hannah said, “Sort of.” That Sunday, Elizabeth called again and said, “I want to tell you something, and you have to understand this isn’t a comment on your personality, which is spectacular. I think you’re depressed and you should find a therapist.” Hannah did not reply immediately, and Elizabeth said, “Are you offended?” “No,” Hannah said. She wasn’t. The possibility that she was depressed had occurred to her; what hadn’t occurred to her was to do anything about it. “Some therapists are real weenies,” Elizabeth said. “But the right one can make a difference.” Dr. Lewin was the first person Hannah called from the list she received, and she liked her right away. In fact, Dr. Lewin initially reminded Hannah of Elizabeth, but as time passed, Hannah saw that this was a false association, no doubt sprung from the circumstances of her seeking therapy, and the two women were not particularly similar at all.

By the time Hannah is back in her room, it is nearly six o’clock. She opens the top desk drawer, inserts the new piece of notebook paper into the manila file, slides the drawer shut, and sits there a minute at the desk, motionless. She is scheduled to work in the veterinary library tonight, a prospect that makes her think,
Thank God.
Friday-night intimidation, the impulse to hide in her room, doesn’t overtake her as easily if she knows there’s a place she’s supposed to be later on. She can sometimes swing by the cafeteria, not to eat a real meal, but she’ll pick up an apple or a granola bar. And then, in the library, sliding the books in their clear plastic sheaths onto the metal shelves, tidying the gray or pale blue periodicals, the table of contents on their covers listing the articles—“Equine Arthroscopic Surgery of the Musculoskeletal System”—in the quiet stacks, in the unstrenuously preoccupying and repetitive activity of those moments, Hannah is almost peaceful.

IT IS THREE
o’clock on Saturday when the phone rings. Hannah is reading about sixteenth-century Iznik tiles, has talked to no one since Friday night, and is expecting Jenny’s voice on the other end when she picks up the receiver. Now that it’s warm, she and Jenny have been getting frozen yogurt together on Saturday afternoons. Instead, it is Hannah’s cousin Fig who says, “So I’m calling to check on Granny.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Oh, God,” Fig says. “Oh, no. Oh, that’s horrible. Yes, of course.” In a whisper, Fig adds, “Play along.” Resuming her loud voice—her abnormally, theatrically loud voice, Hannah realizes—Fig adds, “Yeah, I guess I should. I don’t know, maybe if you can come get me. Really, you don’t mind?”

“Fig?”

“The house where I’m staying is in Hyannis. You basically have to follow Three South and then you pick up Six, and then once you get into town, you take Barnstable Road—are you writing this down?”

Hannah is silent before asking, “Is that a pretend question or are you actually talking to me?”

Again in a whisper, practically hissing, Fig says, “I’m with this professor, but he’s being really lame and I want to leave. I need you to find Henry and get him to drive here. He’s not answering his phone, but if you go over to SAE, he’s probably outside playing Frisbee, or just ask someone where he is. Oh,” she adds, now loudly and forlornly, “I can’t believe it, either. It happens fast sometimes.”

“You’re acting bizarre,” Hannah says. “Is something dangerous going on?”

“I’m pretending Granny just died,” Fig whispers. “Can you leave right now?”

“You mean Granny who’s been dead for four years?”

“Hannah, what did I just tell you? Play along. Were you writing down the directions before?” Fig gives them again, and this time Hannah does write them down, though Fig is going fast in her strange voice. “You’ve been to the Cape, right?” Fig asks.

“Cape Cod?”

“No, the Cape of Good Hope. For Christ’s sake, Hannah, what do you think?”

“Sorry,” Hannah says. “I’ve never been. Does Henry know how to get there?”

“Oh, please don’t be upset,” Fig says. “Hannah, it was her time.”

“You’re kind of creeping me out.”

Whispering again, Fig says, “I’ll explain it in the car.” Then, louder, “Drive safely, okay? Bye, Han.”

“Give me the number there,” Hannah says, but Fig has already hung up the phone.

IN THE MIDDLE
of switching T lines to get from Davis Square to the BU West stop, it occurs to Hannah that perhaps she should have taken a cab. Is time of the essence?
Is
Fig in danger? Sigma Alpha Epsilon turns out to be a redbrick townhouse with a semicircular front stoop and, over the stoop, a roof, also semicircular, supported by skinny Ionic columns; two guys, one shirtless, sit on the roof on lawn chairs, the chairs taking up almost all the space behind a black wrought-iron railing. Holding her hand above her eyes, Hannah squints up at them. “Excuse me,” she says. “I’m looking for Henry.” She realizes she has no idea what Henry’s last name is. She has met him just once, a few months ago, when she was visiting Fig’s dorm room. He is a senior, two years older than Fig and Hannah. He was handsome, which was not surprising, and nice, which was; unlike any of Fig’s previous boyfriends, he asked Hannah questions about herself.

“You gotta tell us what Henry did before we tell you where he is,” one of the guys says. “That’s the rule.”

Hannah hesitates, then says, “I’m his girlfriend’s cousin—Fig’s cousin.”

“You’re
Fig’s
cousin,” the shirtless guy repeats, and both of them laugh. Hannah is tempted to say,
It’s an emergency,
but she doesn’t know if it really is, and also it feels awkward to change the tenor of the exchange so drastically. The guys are friendly, and it’s her own fault for not conveying urgency sooner.

Trying to sound cheerful, she says, “I’m so sorry, but I’m sort of in a hurry. I heard he might be playing Frisbee?”

The shirtless guy stands, leans over the railing, and points inside the house. “He’s watching the game.”

“Thanks.” Hannah quickly climbs the steps. The door is painted red, propped open with a tan plastic wastebasket, and as she pushes the heavy wood, she hears one of them say, “Bye, Fig’s cousin.” She is glad, because it must mean she didn’t seem completely humorless.

It is darker inside than out, and the television is enormous. She stands in the threshold of the living room—one guy looks over at her, then looks away—and observes the backs of perhaps seven guys’ heads. The guys are arranged on various chairs and sofas. She’s pretty sure the one who’s Henry is a few feet in front of her, and she walks around the side of the sofa. “Henry?” she says—it’s definitely him—and when he turns, she sets her hand against her collarbone. “It’s Hannah,” she says. “I don’t know if you remember me—we met before—with Fig—?”

Whatever she imagined he’d do—jump to attention, maybe—he doesn’t. “Hi,” he says, and he looks quizzical.