The Man of My Dreams

by Curtis Sittenfeld

  “Oh, good idea,” Hannah says. “Fig, we can get you a Band-Aid or something.” Later, this comment in particular makes Hannah think how foolish she is. Part of it is that she takes situations at face value. Fig and Henry are sniping at each other, which she thinks means they’re angry. She really does kind of believe that if they all have a soda, they’ll calm down and the ride back to Boston will be more pleasant and Henry will drop off Fig in her dorm, and Hannah will step out of the front seat to hug Fig goodbye, and then Hannah will climb back into the car and she and Henry will go out for dinner and on to the part of their lives where they become a couple. Really, she has to be the most naïve twenty-year-old in the world.

  When he has turned off the ignition, Henry says to Fig, “I want to talk to you.”

  “I’ll pump,” Hannah says.

  They walk away, and Hannah inserts the nozzle into the gas tank. It is a pretty night, a cool spring breeze rising, the edges of the sky turning pale purple. Obviously, the professor is some kind of creep, but Fig seems more or less okay, so maybe it’s all right that it’s been such a good day; it’s sort of been a great day.

  But then they don’t return—wherever they went, they don’t come back. Paying for the gas inside, Hannah doesn’t see them among the aisles of chips and antifreeze. Just before Henry pulled into the lot, the idea Hannah had of their activities here were her standing by the sink in the women’s bathroom with Fig, dabbing a wet paper towel on her cousin’s face—sort of Florence Nightingale–ish—while Henry hovered outside. (Pumping air into the tires, maybe? Some background manly deed.) But there is no one in the women’s bathroom, no one going in and out of the men’s bathroom. Probably she knows then, but not yet consciously. She buys a bottled water and goes outside. In the parking lot, she calls, “Fig?” then feels ridiculous. She walks around the side of the small building, and it turns out they are not so hard to find: Fig’s back is against the back of the store, and Henry is kneeling before her, his arms around her waist, his face against her bare abdomen. She is rubbing his head. Though Fig’s sweater is pushed up, they are both completely clothed; thank God for this. It is devastating to see—in a way, the tenderness is worse than if they were having wild sex—but it isn’t shocking. In this moment, Hannah isn’t shocked, and later, after she has a boyfriend, she will understand how the situation called for it. Their recent breakup, Fig’s injury, the painfully lovely spring night—how could they possibly stay out of each other’s arms? Also, if you’re part of a couple, even an estranged couple, your reunion is incomplete and unofficial until you’ve embraced. Even when you’re just meeting in a restaurant for dinner—if you don’t hug or kiss, Hannah thinks, there must be something wrong in the relationship. All of which is to say, they’re playing their parts. They’re not trying to be mean to her. Or at least that’s not Henry’s motivation, and it’s possible to believe it’s not Fig’s, either, until she turns her head in Hannah’s direction and smiles a small, closed-mouth smile. Immediately, Hannah retreats.

  She leans against the outside of the car with her arms folded; she formulates a plan. She will kiss a boy. Or, ideally, several. She will kiss other boys and then someday—not tonight, obviously, and maybe not for a while—when Henry wants to kiss her, she’ll be ready. He has given her a reason to prepare. She doesn’t feel sad. She thinks of Jared from sociology, how distraught about the cough syrup stuff she was, and how there is very little she really knows about him. She doesn’t even know if he’s heterosexual. The truth is that she can’t imagine anything more than being nervous around him—at best, enjoyably nervous, at worst, just nervous. But she can’t picture kissing him. She’s pretty sure she’s not attracted to him. He’s like a game she’s been playing. He gives her something to think about, and something to talk about with Dr. Lewin besides her parents.

  With Henry, however, Hannah could sleep in a bed at night. She could eat cereal with him in the morning, or drink beer with him in a bar. Boring things, too—she could go with him to a department store to buy an umbrella, or wait in the car while he went into the post office. She could introduce him to her mother and sister. It’s not that she envisions glittering romance; it’s that there is no situation she cannot imagine experiencing with him, nothing she cannot imagine telling him. It seems like there would always be something to say, or if there wasn’t, that would be fine, too, and not uncomfortable.

  When Fig and Henry return to the car, they carry with them an exclusionary glow that Henry tries to dispel and Fig seems just fine with (once when they were fifteen, Fig got Hannah to walk four or five miles with her to some guy’s house, then vanished with the guy into the attic, while Hannah sat in the kitchen waiting; embarrassingly, when the guy’s mom got home, Hannah was eating a pear from the bowl on the table). Hannah does not protest when Fig slips into the front seat. Henry asks Hannah clumsily solicitous questions, as if they haven’t been in the car together for two hours: When do her classes end? What are her plans for the summer?

  A few days later, he e-mails her. Hey there Hannah, the e-mail says. Hope things are good with you. I found your address on the Tufts website. (That’s her favorite part, the idea of him typing in her name.) Saturday was pretty crazy, huh? Fig and I have been hanging out, and she’s doing okay. Thought you’d want to know. Take care, Henry. P.S. I’m sure I seem like a big hypocrite to you. I can just imagine if we had a conversation about it you would call me on my self-delusions.

  Hannah prints out the e-mail, and even after she has memorized all the words—the last sentence is her second-favorite part—she still sometimes looks at the hard copy. Because Hannah is not upset that Fig and Henry have gotten back together, Dr. Lewin does not seem to grasp (it is highly unusual for Dr. Lewin not to grasp something) that Hannah doesn’t see Henry as emblematic of the type of guy she could like or be involved with; it is Henry himself, Henry specifically, with whom Hannah wants to be involved.

  But again: not yet. Later, when she is more ready. This is why, driving back from the Cape, she almost doesn’t mind when she is the one who gets dropped off by the two of them, she is the one hugged goodbye. As Fig climbs back into the car, Hannah leans over and waves at Henry, who remains in the driver’s seat. “Bye, Henry,” she says. “Nice to see you again.” Is it possible he’ll understand that she’s using this pleasantly bland voice only as concealment?

  He hesitates and then says, “You, too, Hannah.”

  It is entirely dark out as she watches the car pull away. For the first time in years, Hannah does not feel jealous of Fig, and the split lip is only part of it. It just seems like Fig is walking down a wrong road. To treat Henry the way she has—he won’t allow it indefinitely, or karma won’t, Hannah is certain. Before the car’s taillights disappear from view, Hannah concentrates very hard, as if doing so means Fig really will receive the message, as if Hannah is capable of charging Fig with this responsibility. She thinks, Take good care of the love of my life.

  4

  July 1998

  WHEN HANNAH IS home in May, before the start of her summer internship, she meets her father for lunch near his office. (Lunch is better than dinner because he is less menacing in daylight.) They go to a restaurant where they sit at a table on the sidewalk. She orders spinach ravioli, which comes in a cream sauce rather than a tomato sauce; the menu probably specified this, and she just wasn’t paying attention. She takes a few bites, but it is one in the afternoon on a sunny day, and the idea of eating the whole hot, creamy bowl turns her stomach. Her father has finished his own meal, a Caesar salad with grilled chicken, when he says, “Yours isn’t any good?”

  “It’s all right,” Hannah says. “Do you want some? I’m not that hungry.”

  “If it’s bad, send it back.”

  “It’s not that it’s bad. I’m just not in a very pasta-ish mood.”

  She knows as soon as she’s said it. One of the signs with her father, the surest sign, is his nostrils. They flare now, like a bull’s. “I don’t know that
I’ve ever heard of a pasta-ish mood,” he says. “But I’ll tell you what I do know. I know that ravioli cost sixteen dollars, and I know I’m going to watch you eat every bite.”

  She can feel in herself, in equal measures, the impulse to burst into laughter and the impulse to burst into tears. “I’m twenty-one years old,” she says. “You can’t make me finish my food.”

  “Well, Hannah”—he’s talking in his fake-casual voice, his tone of big-enough-to-humor-you, which actually means he won’t be humoring you for long—“here’s the problem. When I see you being cavalier with money, I have to ask myself, is it really wise for me to pay your rent this summer so you can flit about at an ad agency? Maybe I’m not doing you any favors by spoiling you.” This, also, is one of her father’s trademarks—the escalation. Every fight is about not just itself but all of your massive personal inadequacies, your fundamental disrespect for him.

  “You’re the one who encouraged me to take an unpaid internship,” Hannah says. “You said it would look better on my résumé than nannying.”

  They regard each other across the table. A waitress in black pants, a white button-down shirt, and a black apron tied around her waist passes by, carrying a tray. Wordlessly, Hannah’s father points to the bowl of ravioli.

  Beneath the table, Hannah is bundling her napkin, and she is telling herself not to forget her purse when she stands to leave. She swallows. “I’m not eating it,” she says. “And you don’t need to pay my rent this summer. That probably wasn’t a very good idea to begin with. You don’t need to pay my tuition this year, either.”

  The expression on her father’s face is both shocked and delighted, as if she’s told him an off-color but very funny joke. “Hell,” he says. “Here I was hoping to save sixteen bucks, and instead I’ve saved thirty thousand. I’m just curious about where you plan to find that kind of money. You think your mother can cough it up?”

  Since the divorce, her mother’s finances have been murky to Hannah. Years ago, her mother took a job four days a week at a store selling fancy kinds of linen and soap, but she seems to spend a good bit of her presumably modest salary on the merchandise there: The bathrooms in her condo are outfitted with the store’s scalloped hand towels, its miniature bottles of English lotion. There has been alimony, obviously, and an inheritance when Hannah’s maternal grandparents both died a few years back, but the sense Hannah has is more of surface genteelness than of any real security. However, she also has the sense that this surface genteelness plays a crucial role in maintaining her mother’s spirits, that possibly it’s a wise investment.

  Regardless: Hannah stands. She hooks her purse over her shoulder. “I guess I’ll have to figure out a way,” she says. “I don’t want anything more to do with you.”

  BY TEN THIRTY, there’s still barely anyone in the office—it’s the Friday before the Fourth of July—and someone from down the hall turns on the radio, tuned to a seventies station, as Hannah realizes after the fifth or sixth song. Around eleven, Sarie, who’s the other intern and who’s going into her senior year at Northeastern, arrives, appearing in the space where a doorway would be if the intern cubicle had a door.

  “So he’s completely late coming to get me,” Sarie says. “As soon as I get in the car, he’s like, ‘I’m not that hungry. Want to just get coffee?’ I’m like, no way, I don’t want to just get coffee. Here I’d—” She mouths the words gotten my legs waxed. Resuming her normal voice, she says, “I mean, I’d gone to some trouble. But I say sure. And we go to this freaking diner, not even Starbucks. I’m thinking there must be rats in the kitchen. We stay less than an hour, and then he drives me back. We’re outside and he asks—this’ll blow your mind, Han—he asks if he can come up.” Sarie shakes her head.

  “I don’t get it,” Hannah says. “Why is that so weird?”

  “He asks if he can come up for coffee. We’d just had coffee. How retarded is that? I didn’t even answer him. I slammed the door in his face.”

  “Oh,” Hannah says. “Well, that’s too bad.”

  “No shit it’s too bad,” Sarie says. “If he would have taken me out for dinner, it would be a different story. But after that, forget it.” She scowls and mutters, “Guys.”

  “It’s not all guys,” Hannah says immediately. “It’s one. Patrick, right?”

  Sarie nods.

  “No offense, but he sounded kind of like a dud from the beginning.”

  “Yeah, you did think that, huh? I gotta listen to you more often, Han. They’re all pigs.”

  “They’re not all pigs!” Hannah practically yells.

  “I’m just yanking your chain.” Sarie grins. “I need to run to the ladies’ room.” As she turns, Hannah notices the length of Sarie’s skirt, which is not very long at all: three inches below her ass, maximum; maroon; and made of a clingy material Hannah cannot identify because she owns no similar clothing. Before this summer, Hannah had not known people were allowed to come to the office wearing the sort of clothes Sarie wears. But apparently, there are many things you’re allowed to do out in the wide world.

  Sarie is short and curvy, and as she disappears from view, Hannah observes how nicely shaped Sarie’s calves are. Sarie has what Hannah has come to believe is the type of body most preferred by most guys: not too tall, small but still voluptuous, topped off by a pleasingly bland face, and blond hair that’s fakish but not definitively fake. Sarie wears skirts every day, while Hannah always wears pants. Also, Sarie wears thongs. Every time they’re in the bathroom together, Sarie expounds on their virtues (they’re so comfortable, they prevent panty lines) and says that if only Hannah would try a thong, she’d never go back.

  At moments—on the two evenings Sarie has actually persuaded Hannah to go to a bar with her and Hannah has sat there feeling huge and dull while, across the table, the men wind toward Sarie like she’s some source of energy or light—Hannah has felt impressed by her. But then Hannah has thought of the afternoon Sarie said, “Wait, is Shanghai a city or a country?” The worst part was that, possibly reacting to Hannah’s shocked expression, Sarie then laughed self-consciously and said, “That was a really stupid question, right? Don’t tell anyone I said that.”

  By quarter to twelve, the music coming from down the hall is so distracting that Hannah clicks off the meeting report she’s been working on and pulls out a piece of company stationery. Do laundry, she writes at the top. Then B-day present for Mom. Then she can’t think of anything else. She glances out at the hallway. Ted Daley, who was just promoted from cubicle to windowless office, is passing by. Their eyes meet, and he gives a little wave. “Turn that frown upside down,” he says, and involuntarily Hannah actually does smile. “Nice glasses,” Ted says. “Are they new?”

  “I think all this staring at the computer has affected my vision,” Hannah says. “They’re kind of nerdy.”

  “No, they look really good. That’s a bummer they’re making you guys come in today, huh? Not being paid should have a few privileges.”

  “I don’t mind.” Originally, Hannah was supposed to work here five days a week, but she’s ended up doing just three so she can babysit on the other days for a professor’s children. Hannah tried to tell Lois, the intern supervisor, just enough about her new financial situation to make the scheduling change not seem flaky. As it’s turned out, there’s really not enough work to fill even three days. What there is consists primarily of sending faxes, making copies, and sitting in on meetings where senior-level employees take an hour to convey what seems to Hannah roughly three minutes’ worth of information. Her main goal at this point is just to get a good recommendation she can use to apply for jobs, not in advertising, when she graduates.

  “I wouldn’t be here myself,” Ted says, “but I’m going to Baja in October, and there’s no way I’m wasting my vacation days.” He raises his arms as if keeping invisible walls from closing in on him and then wiggles his hips, or what he has of them. “ ‘All I need are some tasty waves, a cool buzz, and I’m fine.
’ ”

  “Huh?”

  “Fast Times at Ridgemont High,” Ted says. “The movie? Mid-eighties? Never mind—you were probably in kindergarten. I’m hoping to do some surfing in Baja.”

  “Oh,” Hannah says. “Cool.”

  There is a lull during which Ted looks down at his watch and Hannah looks up at Ted’s hearing aid. When someone with a hearing aid goes in the water, she wonders, does he take it out first, or are hearing aids waterproof? Ted is only twenty-eight or twenty-nine—he’s an assistant account executive—and when she arrived, she had a slight crush on him, if this is possible, because of his hearing aid. It made him seem sensitive, as if he had known difficulty but not difficulty so great that he’d be strange or bitter. His voice warbled endearingly, and besides that, he was tall and had green eyes. The crush passed, though, after less than a month. At a recent office happy hour she attended for sixteen minutes, she heard him having an animated conversation about what a bitch Lois is, which seemed first of all untrue to Hannah—Lois is perfectly nice—and also seemed both unwise and unbearably common. Hearing aid or not, Ted is no one special.

  “We’re ordering pizza for lunch,” Ted is saying. “You want to go in on it?”

  “Sure,” Hannah says. “How much should I give?”

  Ted enters the cubicle to collect the money, and Hannah instinctively flips over her list of errands, although it seems like Ted’s not getting much work done right now, either. “Writing love letters?” he asks as she reaches for her purse on the floor beneath her desk.

  “Yeah, to you,” Hannah says.

  “Huh?”

  When she realizes he didn’t hear her, she considers not repeating the joke, but then she thinks, Oh, who cares? “I was writing love letters to you,” she says more loudly.