The Hypothetical Girl (12 page)

There, parked in front, was a tired old Saab with a dog in the back. Standing beside it was a disheveled man in sweatpants, with one leg rolled to the knee and the other rolled down.
It couldn’t be? Could it?
she thought. It was. Her date, the Ugly Man. “You’re late,” he said as she stepped out of her car, “but I will let it go this time.” He cracked a smile and Estelle could see he meant this as a sort of humor. She smiled weakly back. He introduced her to his dog, Belinda, who was a very old-looking dog, with a wounded-looking left leg. Together they walked into the bar. He ordered them each a beer. “You must try the stout,” he said. “It is very good.”

“I don’t like stout,” she said.

“You will like this one,” said Charlie.

It annoyed her, the idea that someone might think they knew her tastes better than she did. But when Estelle tasted the beer she had to admit she did like it. Surprisingly. She never liked such beers, but this one had a deeply nutty taste. It was like drinking liquid macadamia nuts with a hint of oak.

“Yummy,” she said, despite herself.

“Told ya,” said Charlie.

They sat and chatted for a while and decided to go for a drive to see the moon rise over a particular spot that he knew of, where a “lovely vista” could be seen.
He will probably try to kiss me there
, Estelle thought, annoyed by the cliché of it all.

While he drove, she found herself searching the man’s face to pinpoint exactly where his ugliness lay. She wanted to zero in on it, hone in like radar. If his ugliness was a code, she thought she should try to crack it, get to the bottom of it. It would be nice to define it more closely. But when she did look closer at him, she found she could not. He actually had a nice nose, rather pretty green eyes, a strong jaw, lovely skin, Charlie. It was the way it all fit together that was wrong. It just didn’t. He was sort of asymmetrical. She recalled once reading about a study of infants that demonstrated that they would go more readily to a stranger who had symmetrical features. Charlie was off-kilter. That was his ugliness, she decided. If she focused on one element at a time in his face, she found him quite tolerable, attractive even.

They drove toward the beautiful vista place slowly, and he pointed out places he knew in the town. “I used to work at that bank,” he said. “One summer I made ice cream cones at that stand.” He had grown up there and the whole world seemed a map of his life.

They heard a siren. Charlie pulled over to the side of the road and let an ambulance pass by. “Wonder where it’s going,” he muttered, and she realized that wherever it was he had probably had some important experience right there, as a child. It was a very smallish town. They didn’t have to wonder long. The ambulance pulled into the parking lot near the skate park; nearby a skateboarder lay in the middle of a ring of people looking on, as if his apparent injury were an exotic animal they might never get an opportunity to see again. A wildebeest, perhaps, or one of those all-white tigers. The EMTs popped out of the ambulance and pushed their way through the crowd. Estelle and Charlie, at an adjacent stop light, looked on at the spectacle as well. Just before the light changed, another boy on a skateboard stepped over to the cars in line at the light and announced, like it was his duty: “He was trying to flip over on the half-pipe,” he said, “do a one-sixty: I told him not to, but he wouldn’t listen.”

“A lot of people were opposed to that skate park,” the Ugly Man told her, after the light changed and they had driven away.

“Were you?” she asked, feeling shaken and horrified by the scene.

“Was I what?”

“Opposed to the skate park?”

“Oh, I don’t know,” he said.

Soon they were at the bluff where Charlie said the beautiful vista was to be seen. They pulled up to a spot
and parked, but it was cloudy, you couldn’t see much at all. Somewhere, behind the fogginess, Charlie promised, a lovely view was lurking. Estelle found it annoying, to drive a distance to see something obscured, even if it was beyond his control.

In addition, she had just discovered that she herself looked very plain in Charlie’s rearview mirror, which she had used to check her lipstick. She thought she could see crow’s-feet fanning out from her eyes, something she had never really noticed before as so unsightly. In the distance she could hear the ambulance siren singing mournfully as it ferried the skateboarder to medical treatment, probably in Elmira.

Charlie, the Ugly Man, did not try to kiss her. This was both a relief and annoying, which, Estelle realized, was the sort of reaction only a person with a Kryptonite heart could have.

The next day Estelle woke up with a dream still freshly planted in her mind. It was about her sister, Sonia. They were girls again, and her sister was angry at her. “Estelle did it, Momma,” she sobbed, pointing at a broken doll. “She killed Lillith.”

Her dream mother glared at her, angrily. “You will have to give her one of your dolls, now, Estelle.”

She had woken up feeling queasy from this dream. But then she remembered. It was the day of her lunch date with the beautiful man. She was going to Corning,
to the glass museum café. And she was running late. She had overslept.

“Are you up?” texted her mother, whom she had told about the drink date but not the lunch date. “How was it?”

She was so groggy from sleep that at first she wasn’t sure exactly what her mother was talking about. She thought for a second that her mother might have found some way to get into her dreams and was asking about the dream about the doll.
How was the dream? How was the doll?
Then it hit her: Her mother was asking about Charlie. About the drink date the evening before.

“Fine,” she texted back. “I tried stout beer and liked it, but then we saw a kid get hurt bad at a skate park.”

“Well did he ask you out again? Did he seem to like you?”

“Mom,” she texted, “it is Saturday morning. I haven’t even had coffee yet.”

“That is immaterial,” her mother texted. “A complete non sequitur.”

She put down the phone and went into the bathroom. There stood a perfectly okay-looking version of herself; that woman in Charlie’s rearview mirror—the unkissed woman—was just some sort of strange anomaly. After all, those mirrors were so bad they came with those odd disclaimers about “objects in mirrors,” and all that. They were known to be flawed, it was official.
She put on a pretty, flowered pink-and-yellow top and drove to Corning. It was a beautiful morning, and feathery clouds seemed flung up in the sky gaily. She stopped for a coffee at the gas station convenience store. She liked hers with Irish cream “whitener” in it, which came from little flavored creamers in a bin next to the coffee pot. As she pulled off the top, her eyes grazed the adjacent newspaper stand. A headline pounced off the front page: “Skateboarder killed in freak accident at Horseheads Park.”

“He died? The kid last night? Actually died?”

“Yep,” said the convenience store manager, a guy with a nametag that said “Hi, I’m Alan.”

“He is dead all right.”

Her stomach caved. She bit her lip. It seemed so extreme just then—death by skateboard, almost impossible really, and to think she had been right there, probably right after it happened.

She felt a bit guilty. Should a person really go to have lunch with a handsome man right after seeing someone killed? Was this part of a pattern in her life of looking the other way rather than acknowledging terrible things? The Kryptonite-hearted girl thing? She paid at the register, took her coffee, got in her car and drove fast, leaving the headline behind her as quickly as possible. She left off the radio and CD player. She just wanted to get there.

When she pulled into the vast parking lot at Corning, at the glass museum, she saw a man standing next to a BMW convertible, just standing there, completely still. He waved her over.

“Estelle!” he said. “Right here.”

He was saving her a parking spot right next to him by literally standing in it. She pulled in and he stepped over and opened her car door. “Hello there!” he said.

Side by side they walked into the Corning Museum of Glass (he was a member, they didn’t even have to pay) and into the little café. “You should see the new exhibit. Depression glass, it’s beautiful,” he said.

“Oh, I love that, red and pink, right?”

“And blue, they made dark blue.”

She searched the handsome man’s face. She was trying hard to locate his beauty, to zero in on it the way she had the ugly man’s ugliness. She tried to look at each feature of him, one by one, without being too obvious. His eyes were ordinary brown eyes, nothing special about them. His nose was actually a little large. And he was balding. He was definitely balding. Once he took off his baseball cap (Red Sox—he was one of
those
, she thought, realizing she had detected that slight Bostonly accent on the phone the one time they spoke), she saw the absence of hair. Why did balding men always wear baseball caps? It merely drew attention to their baldness. Funny, she thought, the Ugly
Man had a full head of thick blond hair. This thing, beauty, it wasn’t about features. It was the way they were assembled! The Handsome Man was like a puzzle that had been put together right. Each plain feature complemented the rest. What a revelation it was, to finally actually comprehend beauty.

Just then Isaac, the Handsome Man, reached across the table confidently and took Estelle’s hand, which was holding a steaming cup of tea. “I have been waiting so anxiously to meet you. All week,” he said, “I waited. And you are just as beautiful as I imagined.”

“Wow,” she said, feeling at that moment like the version of herself in the mirror at God Bless America Meats, not the airport mirror version and certainly not the Oakdale Mall version, not the car rearview mirror and not the girl she had once been. A woman who could be a new person, not the one who had left behind a sister to a terrible fate. “So sweet. Thank you.”

Somewhere, right at that moment, while Estelle parsed the beauty in the handsome man and the handsome man parsed the beauty in Estelle, she thought the Ugly Man, Charlie, might be walking his dog, Belinda. Somewhere else, the family of the skateboarder was beginning the arduous process of planning their boy’s funeral. Open or closed casket? White roses? Nosegay or small spray inside the casket? And her sister, Sonia, was reaching a trembling hand into her mother’s medicine cabinet toward the package of fentanyl patches.
She would extract one and place it under her tongue, a temporary answer to her thirty-year-old pain. And somewhere far, far away, a meteor made of the hardest material in the universe was wending its way through space, plummeting through the cold dark of nothingness, toward Earth. A hardness that would even make the hard and lonely place inside Estelle seem soft, light, and malleable.

T
here was an everything and then there was a something.

This something that had invaded Larry’s heart appeared to have brought a suitcase. It had unpacked and left its socks and underwear and hairbrush out. It clearly intended to stay. It didn’t care about all the things that he had previously done or cared about. It was a selfish something and wanted every acre, hectare, and mile of him.

The something chased the everything away.

Some days, Larry liked the something, let it tell him stories and play out elaborate filmstrips in his mind of lovely situations. Other days it was mean to him and taunted him with feelings of rejection and loss. He was completely owned by it; it had him.

And that was a feeling he did not like. No, not at all.

“Blame it on the Internet,” said his therapist, Jonathan. “You should avoid going on at all costs.” Larry had
admitted to himself that he was addicted to the Internet and meeting people on it, which was why he had sought psychological counseling. In addition, once a week he went to a support group Jonathan had told him of. The support group met in a rather dingy room in a Methodist church. People sat in uncomfortable chairs around two long tables that had been pushed together to make a larger table, and they went around the room saying the first half of the Serenity Prayer, and then each one responded with a brief anecdote about how something in their lives felt out of control and how they were working on it. All the people in the support group were owned by the something. They felt helpless and wanted someone there or everyone there to jump right in and tell them what to do or just say “I get that,” or “You are not alone.” He liked the support group because everyone in it had met the something and seen how it could be so disrespectful of them. They would sit in a circle and talk, talk, talk, talk, talk about the something, with brief breaks for coffee and cigarettes. You would have thought these people were strung out on heroin. But they were not. It was the something. It was like a drug but it was not a drug.

In Larry’s case the something had a specific name: Louise. She had found him there in the ether of the magical darkness of online love, and the beginning was so innocent. “Like your smile,” Louise wrote.

Such an innocuous little compliment. Such a tiny sentence even. Three words long. It was barely a sentence. It had a verb, “like,” and a noun, “smile,” and then there was that complicated and oh-so-very-stabbingly personal pronoun, “your.” How many times had that sentence been reviewed? It was uncountable. The sentence was turned inside out and then back outside in, and flipped over to see if there was any mud on its feet. It had had its hair combed and its pockets searched for loose change. It had had its passport stamped for future travel purposes and it had even possibly been proposed to, that little sentence. It was more than any sentence could bear, and finally it had broken into pieces, under all that pressure.

“Leave me alone,” the sentence finally said to Larry. And he had tried. He really had. He even threw it into his computer trash with the spam. But then he got it out again and kept it in a special folder, labeled “Louise”—which was a very dangerous and haunting place indeed.

Who would have guessed that such a small, small sentence would grow into this something? It was like the seed Jack planted that turned into the beanstalk. Jack had to climb up it, remember? There was no backing down once that thing sprouted.