The Man of My Dreams (9 page)

“Can I talk to you for a second?” Hannah gestures to the entry hall. “Out there?”

When they’ve retreated from the television, Henry stands before her with his arms crossed, though not unpleasantly. He’s about six feet tall, wearing a plain white T-shirt and blue athletic shorts and flip-flops. His hair is dark brown, almost black, and his eyes are also brown. He is so cute, so exactly the image of what you think a boyfriend should be when you are nine or ten years old—what you think your own boyfriend will be, your birthright—that he breaks Hannah’s heart a little. She hardly knows him (maybe he isn’t that great), but it’s still unfair that only some girls grow up to get boys like this.

Hannah takes a breath. “Fig needs us to go get her. She’s with her professor.”

“What are you talking about?”

She’d assumed he would know everything, and then be able to explain it to her. That he is reacting exactly the way Hannah herself did is unnerving and intriguing.

“She called me”—Hannah glances at her watch—“about an hour ago. She wants us to go pick her up. She’s in Hyannis.”

“Is she with Mark Harris?”

“Is that her professor?”

“Her professor—yeah, right.”

“He’s not?”

Henry regards Hannah for a few seconds. “Fig and I aren’t really together anymore,” he says. “I get the feeling she hasn’t told you that.”

So therefore what? Does Hannah go back to Tufts now? She’s not expected to rent a car and get Fig on her own, is she? It’s conceivable that this is the errand’s abrupt termination. Yet she also can feel that Henry is not completely averse. He’s not saying no; it’s more like he wants to be on the record as reluctant.

“I don’t think Fig is in
danger,
” Hannah says, and is half disgusted with herself for being so accommodating.
Here, my self-centered cousin, and here, her wishy-washy quasi-boyfriend, allow me to simultaneously push the situation toward the outcome you
both desire while alleviating any discomfort you might feel.
“But,” Hannah adds, “she didn’t sound quite like herself.”

“Hyannis is like seventy miles from here,” Henry says.

Hannah says nothing. She holds his gaze. Whatever convincing Henry is an exercise in, and however compromising to Hannah herself, she’s surprisingly good at it.

Finally, Henry sighs and looks away. “You have directions?”

Hannah nods.

“My keys are upstairs,” Henry says. “I’ll meet you out front.”

SHE WISHES SHE
had sunglasses, but otherwise it’s so nice to be headed down the highway on a perfect late-April afternoon, so nice just to be going somewhere. She hasn’t ridden in a car since she was home for spring break over a month ago. And she was prepared for Henry to listen to some terrible kind of male music—heavy metal or maybe pretentious white-men rappers—but the CD that’s playing is Bruce Springsteen. Quite possibly, this is the happiest Hannah has ever been in her entire life.

Henry does have sunglasses, with a faded purple strap, a sporty strap, around the back. He keeps an atlas in the car, already folded open to a two-page spread, also faded, of Massachusetts. “You’re navigating,” he said when they got in the car, and when Hannah saw how far away Hyannis was, a flash of excitement went off inside her.

They don’t talk at first, except Hannah saying, “Do you need to take Ninety-three to get on Three?” and Henry shaking his head. Almost half an hour has passed by the time he turns down the volume on the car stereo.

“So she just called you out of the blue and said ‘Come get me’?” he asks.

“More or less.”

“You’re a good cousin, Hannah.”

“Fig can be pretty persuasive.”

“That’s one way to put it,” Henry says. Hannah does not point out that he, too, is in the car.

They don’t speak—“I got laid off down at the lumberyard,” sings Bruce Springsteen—and then Hannah says, “I think I got frustrated with her more when we were younger. In the beginning of high school, especially, because that’s when Fig would get invited to parties by juniors and seniors. Or I’d hear people talking about something that had happened, like she’d been doing Jell-O shots in the parking lot at the basketball game, and I’d think, wait, my cousin Fig?
That
Fig?” The fact that Henry seems vaguely annoyed, and the fact that he’s Fig’s—even if he and Fig are broken up, he’s still Fig’s, and off-limits to Hannah—are both liberating, and Hannah feels uncharacteristically chatty. It’s not like she’s trying to appear attractive to him, or to impress him; she can just relax. “Of course, I’m not sure I even wanted to go to junior and senior parties,” she continues. “Probably I wanted to be invited more than I wanted to go. I’m kind of a dork, though.”

“Or maybe Jell-O shots aren’t your thing,” Henry says.

“I’ve actually never tried one.” She wonders if this seems to him like a confession. If so—ha! Given that she still hasn’t even kissed anyone, Jell-O shots are the least of what she’s never tried. “But my main point about Fig is that you don’t expect her to meet you fifty-fifty,” Hannah says. “You sort of appreciate her good qualities and don’t take it too personally when she blows you off.”

“Which good qualities are you referring to?”

Hannah glances at him. “You’ve spent time with her,” Hannah says. “You know what she’s like.”

“True,” Henry says. “But I’m curious about what you mean specifically.”

“Why don’t you go first?”

“You want me to say what I like about Fig?”

“That’s what you’re asking me to do.”

“The two of you didn’t just break up,” he says. “But I’ll play.” He switches into the left lane, passes a Volvo, switches back. He is a good and also a confident driver. “First of all, she’s gorgeous.”

Blah, blah, blah,
Hannah thinks.

Henry looks over. “That’s not offensive, right? I’m allowed to say that a good-looking girl is good-looking?”

“Of course you’re allowed to,” Hannah says. The only thing that could be more boring than talking about Fig’s prettiness is talking about how Henry’s entitled to talk about it.

“It’s not only looks,” Henry says. “But I’d be lying if I claimed that’s not a factor. Also, she’s a wild card.”

This, Hannah suspects, is a euphemism for good in bed.

“She keeps you guessing,” Henry continues. “She has so much energy, and she’s up for anything. If it was three in the morning and you said, ‘I want to go skinny-dipping in the Charles right now,’ she’d be like, ‘Great!’ ”

Okay,
Hannah thinks.
I’ve gotten the idea.

Then Henry says, “All of which I guess makes it not that surprising that she sees me as a big fuddy-duddy.”

“Yeah, but Fig likes fuddy-duddies.”

“You think so?”

“She needs an audience. It’s like she’s defined in contrast to whoever’s around her.” Hannah has never discussed this, but she’s pretty sure she believes what she’s saying. “When we were in sixth grade, there was a girl named Amanda on our softball team who was always goofing off—she could play ‘Yankee Doodle’ on her armpit, or she’d be doing cartwheels while the coach was trying to explain stuff to us, but it was obvious he still liked her. When we drove in the van, Amanda sat in the front seat and chose the radio station. She’d say, ‘Drive straight, Coach Halvorsen,’ and then he’d swerve. It was like Amanda was out-Figging Fig. And Fig hated her.”

“Wait a second,” Henry says. “This girl played ‘Yankee Doodle’ on her
armpit
?”

“It was sort of her special trick.”

“Well, no wonder Fig was threatened.”

Hannah smiles. “I guess you’re right that it was unusual, but I never thought about it,” she says. “Amanda would pull up her shirt and flap her arm, like she was pretending to be a chicken, and her armpit would squeak.”

“Geez, and I thought I was cool because I could turn my eyelids inside out.”

“I remember that,” Hannah says. “That’s what the boys I rode the bus with would do, and all the girls would scream.”

“So what was your elementary-school talent? You can’t say you didn’t have one.”

The only thing Hannah can remember right now is not what you say to a cute guy. But again: He’s Fig’s. She isn’t trying to lure him. “In fourth grade,” she says, “in the middle of social studies, I once sneezed and farted at the same time.”

Henry laughs.

“I denied that it was me. I was sitting near the back of the room, and all the kids around me had heard and were like, ‘Who was that?’ and I said, ‘
Obviously
it wasn’t me, because I’m the one who sneezed.’ ”

“That was very clever of you.”

“They probably thought it was Sheila Waliwal, who was this scapegoat for everything gross or weird in our class. She was the first one to get her period, when we were in fifth grade, and all hell broke loose. Sheila was hiding in a stall while the rest of the girls were freaking out, running in and out of the bathroom. And Fig was at the helm—she was like the director and producer of Sheila’s period.”

“That actually sounds sort of sweet.”

“I guess all the girls did rise to the occasion. I think we were just so happy it wasn’t one of us who’d gotten it first, although looking back, for all I know, there were girls who had gotten theirs already but just didn’t tell everyone. But Sheila told Fig, which was the same as making a public announcement.”

“When my twin sister got her period,” Henry says, “my dad congratulated her at the dinner table. I almost couldn’t finish eating. We were thirteen, meaning I looked and acted about nine and Julie looked and acted about twenty-five.”

“I didn’t know you’re a twin,” Hannah says. “I always thought that would be fun.”

“You and Fig are almost like twins. You’re just a couple months apart, right?”

“She’s three months older,” Hannah says. “But it’s not the same. We grew up in different houses, with different parents. Besides, the cool part of being a twin—”

“Are you going to say the ESP? Because Julie and I can’t do that at all.”

“Actually, I was going to say the slumber parties. I used to think if I had a boy twin, he’d invite his friends over and I could eavesdrop and find out who they had crushes on.”

“More like when Julie had slumber parties, I’d be banished from the house. One time that I was supposed to stay over at my friend’s, he got sick at the last minute and I couldn’t go. My mom just wigged out, like, ‘Don’t make Julie’s friends uncomfortable. Don’t play any tricks on them.’ Not that I was planning to—I was probably more uncomfortable than they were. But my mom made me sleep in her and my dad’s room, in a sleeping bag on the floor by their bed. All night long, every few hours, she’d sit straight up and say, ‘Henry, are you still there?’ ”

“Where did you grow up?” Hannah asks.

“New Hampshire. Live free or die.”

“I grew up outside Philly. Well, duh—the same as Fig. I have no idea of the state motto, though.”

Without hesitating, Henry says, “ ‘Virtue, liberty, and independence.’ ”

“Really?”

“Massachusetts: ‘By the sword we seek peace, but peace only under liberty.’ That’s a tricky one.”

“Are you making these up?”

“We had to memorize them in social studies,” Henry says. “That’s what some of us did while others were busy farting.”

Hannah hits his arm with the back of her hand. It’s light, more of a tap, but right away she has the highly unpleasant memory of her father’s warning never to touch the driver. “Sorry,” she says.

“For what?” Henry asks.

Still thinking of her father, Hannah wonders, are there situations, long-term situations, where conflict does not wait around every bend, where time does not unspool only in anticipation of your errors? It’s like imagining an enchanted mountain village in Switzerland. Aloud, she says, “I’m sorry for doubting you. What about Alaska—do you know that one?”

“ ‘North to the future.’ ”

“Missouri?”

“ ‘The welfare of the people shall be the supreme law.’ Some of these are translated from Latin.”

“Maryland?”

“ ‘Manly deeds, womanly words.’ ”

“That is
not
the state motto of Maryland,” Hannah says.

“What is it, then?”

“What would ‘Manly deeds, womanly words’ even mean? What’s a manly deed or a womanly word?”

“I think a manly deed is something like splitting wood. And a womanly word is…
mascara,
maybe?
Doily?
By the way, am I right in assuming I just stay on Three until the Sagamore Bridge?”

Hannah picks up the atlas by her feet. “It looks like after that, Three turns into Six, which is the same as the Mid-Cape Highway. You have about ten miles.” They both are quiet, and then she asks, “So why are you a fuddy-duddy?”

“I mostly meant compared to Fig. I’m just not that into partying. When you’re single, you go out a lot, but being in a relationship—sometimes I just wanted to stay in and chill out. But your cousin likes to have fun. She likes her rum and Cokes, right?”

“Her partying isn’t why you broke up, is it?”

“We’re overall headed in different directions. I’m graduating in a couple weeks, and I’ll be working as a consultant, which means crazy hours. And the fact that Fig still has two more years of school—it’s cleaner this way than constantly wondering what she’s up to.” So Fig cheated on him. That must be what he means. “But it’s like you said,” he continues. “Accept Fig for her good qualities, and don’t expect too much of her.”

Did Hannah say that? She can barely remember now.

“Mark Harris isn’t a real professor, by the way,” Henry adds. “He’s some jackass T.A. grad student studying, like, Chaucer—he’s Mr.
Sensitive.
And he’s been after Fig since the fall.”

“Is he her T.A.?”

“Not this semester. But the guy’s just a total sleazeball. I seriously wouldn’t be surprised if he wears a velvet cape.” Hannah laughs, but Henry doesn’t. He says, “What kind of T.A. has a house on Cape Cod? It has to be his parents’, doesn’t it?” He shakes his head. “I’ve gotta say that a part of me really wants to turn the car around.”

At first Hannah says nothing. There was the suddenness of Fig’s call, and immediately, the situation had its own momentum. But really, who knows what’s going on? She thinks of when she and Fig were little, how Fig would come over to play and they’d be drawing or baking cookies and then, without warning, Fig would want to leave when Hannah had thought they were having a perfectly good time. It even happened in the middle of the night, and Hannah’s father, who considered Fig a brat, eventually barred her from staying over.