The Hypothetical Girl (17 page)

“Just down the street,” said Clarissa. “How about you?”

“Oh I live a bit a ways, actually,” he said. “In a beautiful place in the mountains. By the way, I’m Harry.”

“Clarissa.”

“Good to meetcha,” he said. “I come here on Tuesdays, in the mornings, and walk my dog here. I have a business deal in the neighborhood.”

“I see,” said Clarissa, thinking how odd it was he should tell her his dog walking schedule, unless, of course, he meant to provide her an easy way to see him again. “We come here all the time, this is our main park,” she said, giving him a way back.

“Cool,” said the man named Harry.

“I
met a man,” Clarissa told her friend Molly, later in the day, in an instant message on Facebook.

“E-clectic, Catch, or PCF?” her friend asked. Lots of people met on Pretty Cool Fish, but it was also well-known as a place for the desperate. It was free to join
and a sort of last resort for women of a certain age, like around forty-two, which happened to be the age of both Molly and Clarissa. If a woman met a person on PCF she often wanted to hide that fact, and would say it happened on Catch or E-clectic.

“I met him at the park, walking Zeus,” Clarissa said.

“Oh wow,” Molly wrote back. “A real-world man. You don’t hear much about that anymore.”

“No,” Clarissa agreed. “You don’t.”

They stopped typing for a moment, each one thinking about what the implications of real-world men might be.

“Flesh and bone could have some pluses,” Molly said, “like none of that awful confusion in e-mails, not getting the tone right.”

“True, and no chance he would just vanish one day from your inbox. Like if he met someone else and just poof!”

“Been there, done that,” Molly said, “bought the tee shirt. And don’t you love how sometimes they just write you and say ‘done’?”

“Or vanish and then come back six months later like it is no big deal they just blew you off.”

“The rudeness factor, it’s just expected!”

N
ext Tuesday: park, dog run, same time, he was there. “Hey, Clarissa,” the man waved, from across the dog run, where Juno was sniffing the butt of a chubby Dalmatian.

“Hey there,” she said, feeling a little soft-shoe routine of anticipation tap up in her chest.

Harry, the real man, walked over, and she had a chance to get a sense of the whole person of him. He was medium height and build and had a goatee. He looked to be fortysomething, or maybe a bit older.

“So how’s Juno?” she asked.

“Oh, she is fine, but a little lonely these days, I think. How is Zeus?”

His dog, Juno, was lonely? How could one tell when one’s dog was lonely, anyway? What did the real man Harry mean by that? Was this a thinly veiled way of talking about himself? Was she supposed to say that Zeus was lonely, too?

“He’s great. Chased a squirrel up a tree and is feeling very proud of himself for it, I think.”

The real man Harry cut to the chase: “I live about twenty miles away, in the woods; it’s a great place for dogs to run and play free,” he said. “You and Zeus should come out sometime, it would be fun.”

What?
This was incredibly sudden and direct. At that moment she was somewhat embarrassed to notice that Zeus was sniffing Juno’s behind rather blatantly. Was Harry the real man asking her out after two chance encounters in the park? After months of trolling for men online it seemed ironic, to say the least, that a real man should trip into her life so easily.

“Sounds cool,” she said, not wanting to seem too eager or desperate, but there was also the danger factor to consider. Real man Harry might be a serial killer, luring her to his den of torture and real peril. She had heard that serial killers sometimes used cute pets as bait. But Juno was really not that cute and real man Harry seemed very sincere. She took the note on which he scribbled his number and e-mail and address. “It’s easy to find,” he said. “We are always around, except on Tuesday mornings, when I have a little business in town.”

“What sort of business?” Clarissa asked, curiously.

“Real estate. I am selling off some property,” he said.

“I see,” Clarissa said.

L
ater, on Facebook chat, she told Molly all about it. “A beard, what kind of beard? Molly said. “Please say it isn’t a ZZ Top kind of thing!”

Clarissa wrote back: “Oh, no, something small and neat.”

“Oh, please say a soul patch, those are so cute.”

“Nope. A beard. Like a goatee thing.”

“Oh, a goatee, like Rasputin.”

“Well, yes,” Clarissa wrote back. “I guess it is a little Rasputinish.”

“Watch out for those Rasputin-bearded men!” Molly wrote.

“OK then, I will, c-ya,” Clarissa wrote. She got annoyed with Molly sometimes, how she always riffed on everything in a negative way. She had been feeling fairly nice about Harry the real man and did not like this suggestion—or her own nagging suspicion—that he might be a weirdo.

Two days later she wrote an e-mail to Harry, but then she erased it. It was weird to e-mail a man you really didn’t know. But then, she did that all the time with men she met on Catch and PCF. That was funny. To e-mail a real-world man was odd, but a man in the ether, acceptable.

Note to self
, Clarissa thought:
Temper fears of real-world men. Do not be prejudiced against them for having three dimensions
.

The next Tuesday when she was walking Zeus, Harry was there again. He walked right over. “Today is my last day here with Juno,” he said. “I sold my property this morning!”

“Mazel tov!” she said. “I think—that’s a good thing, right?”

“It is!” he said. “But it’s a bad thing, because now Juno and I will no longer have opportunities to run into you and Zeus.”

“Awwww,” said Clarissa. “That’s sweet.” She blushed.

“You probably never wrote or called because it seemed too weird, calling out to a stranger, basically.”

“Yeah, it did,” she said, blushing again.

“You are blushing,” said Harry.

“I am?” Clarissa asked.

“Either that or you have developed a very bad and sudden sunburn.”

“You’re funny,” Clarissa said.

“I am,” said Harry, as if realizing for the first time that he might be.

They laughed. After chatting a few more minutes Clarissa gave Harry her e-mail. Later that afternoon he wrote her.

“This is a picture of my land,” he wrote. “On top of Sayer’s Point, and has four peaks and two streams, as well as a small pond. I also have a smaller house where I live down the road. There are lots of fun things to do there.”

“Wowwee,” Clarissa typed back.

“So would you like to visit sometime?”

“Sure.”

“How about Saturday?”

The real-world man was relentless. The date was set. Still, Clarissa had a funny feeling about it. Real world Harry seemed almost too real, too eager. When he had brushed against her hand when they were parting, it left her feeling lightly zapped, like she had accidently touched a wrong part of the toaster.

That Saturday, driving to Harry’s house in the mountains with her dog, Zeus, in the back of her car, Clarissa felt very alert and unsure. Was this a good idea even, driving to meet a man at his house, a man she barely
knew? Yet she also felt great anticipation, and that anticipation had opened the gates of her senses; she was noticing more things around her than usual. The way the houses were perched on hills, as if they were sitting there looking back at her through eyes that were windows; trees, shadows, the way shadows of trees played upon the road. She opened the car window and the smell of cut hay and forest came rushing in. It was like Harry the real man had made the world more interesting and sweet somehow, added some texture to it just by being in it.

Everywhere she saw dogs. Straining on their leashes as they were walked, running up and down properties behind fences, sleeping on porches, like children on the laps of their parents. When she got to Harry’s house she pulled into the yard. Juno came bounding out, followed by Harry. He was wearing a blue shirt that accentuated his blue earth-from-the-moon eyes.

“You’re here!” Harry said.

“I’m here!” said Clarissa.

“Come on in. Want some coffee?”

“Sure.”

She walked into his house behind him, thinking to herself:
I am in the house of a man named Harry, a man I do not know
.

On the walls were pictures of Harry and Juno, in various poses, everywhere. On mountaintops, on beaches, on a long beautiful dirt road. A few were placed in a semicircle atop a piano. It was clear this man was very
into his dog. As was she. She noted they shared an important thing, this human-canine bond.

“Do you play?” she asked.

“Not really. Do you?”

“A little,” said Clarissa. “I took lessons as a child.”

“Someday you can play for me,” Harry said.

The word “someday” never seemed so loaded, so puffed up with hope. To have a someday with a someone, that was a thing she had not considered likely for some time.

Juno and Zeus were sniffing each other up and a frenzy of intimate licking had started between them. It seemed raucous and a bit embarrassing, and that, along with the sudden presumption of a future sometime that involved her playing the piano for him, took Clarissa by surprise. Then Zeus did something she would have rather he hadn’t: He jumped up on Harry and began vigorously humping his leg. Harry laughed.

“He does that sometimes with people he likes. I always say don’t worry, he can’t get you pregnant.”

“Its okay,” said Harry, “I completely understand the inclination.”

Harry gave Clarissa the coffee and asked what she took in it.

“Black is fine,” Clarissa said.

Then they walked out onto his back porch. Harry had a wide backyard with trees and plantings arching all around. There were many wind chimes hanging from the trees, and they orchestrated a gonging melody in the
breeze. In the center of the yard was a pond in the shape of an infinity sign.

“Nice pond,” she said.

“Yeah, I dug it out and built up the sides. It has koi in it.”

She smiled. “Well, you are clearly a pond visionary.”

He laughed. “I am very creative,” he said.

They took a walk around the yard and he showed her sculptures he had made and placed around: a little metal frog under a bush, a ceramic owl on a tree branch, and numerous abstract metal things that crouched around, with moss and wood embedded in them.

“Big art,” she said.

“Yes, it is art and it’s alive, too, it is art that always grows and changes.”

Harry asked if she was hungry. “I could make you a sandwich with bean sprouts I grow in my greenhouse,” he offered.

“Ahh,” she said, “a bean sprout visionary as well.”

“I grow the best bean sprouts around,” he said.

She wasn’t hungry but she did want to see the greenhouse, so he took her around the side of the house where it sprang from a tumble of boulders, a bright-green box of life. Inside was a jungle of plants and vegetable plantings. Ripe heart-shaped strawberries. He plucked one and handed it to her. She put it in her mouth. It was sweet and juicy and the seeds seemed seedier than other strawberries.

“A strawberry visionary, too,” she joked.

“My strawberries actually are a bit famous.”

“I can see why!” she said.

“What do you want to do now?” Harry asked. He smiled and a circuitry of crow’s-feet appeared around his eyes. He was not a young man, this Harry. Older than she originally thought. But he was not an old man, either. He was somewhere exactly between young and old. They were sitting on the porch again, with the wind chimes chiming and the sun glancing down on them.

“I just want to tell you that when I saw you the first day, walking Zeus, I said to myself, I want to meet this beautiful woman. You have such a beautiful face.”

“Thanks,” she said.

“You are blushing again.”

“Yeah, I do that when I’m complimented by handsome strangers, or when I’m out in the sun too long,” Clarissa said.

A
few minutes later it was decided they would eat some bean sprout and cheese sandwiches. When they went inside they found Zeus and Juno curled up in a corner by Harry’s wood stove, as if they had known each other for years.

“So cute,” Clarissa said.

“So intimate, so soon,” Harry said. They ate their sandwiches and then sat on his couch and kissed for a
long time. While it started out tentative, it became passionate very fast.

“Mmmmm,” said Harry.

An hour later Clarissa found herself in Harry’s bedroom, which was beautiful and painted the most amazing gold with yellow overtones.

“I like to do textured painting,” he said. “Can you tell what colors are on these walls?”

“Yellow and gold?”

“And purple and brown and a little red,” he said.

Harry is adorable and he understands colors in a way I haven’t ever considered before
, Clarissa thought. When they made love, Harry said things like “Delicious you” and “That is nice” and “Yummy.”

T
he next day, Clarissa could not stop thinking about Harry—not just what had happened, so fast and so sweet, but how real it all seemed. How could it be that she had just met this real man and suddenly been right with him, drunk coffee, eaten a strawberry, had a bean sprout sandwich, and then had sex? Was this what other people did sometimes? She decided to call her friend Molly.

“So,” said Molly, “do tell.”

“It is all so crazy.”

“Go on, I like crazy. I can live through you vicariously. My life is nothing but e-mails.”

“I went to his house, which he built himself, by the way, and saw the pond which he also built and ate the
strawberries and bean sprouts which he grew and then we had sex.”

“Oh no, you ate homegrown bean sprouts?” said Molly. “You bad, bad girl.”

“And, I repeat, had sex.”

“It is just like Persephone, in the underworld,” Molly said.

“What do you mean?” Clarissa asked.

“Well, she was taken down to the underworld by Hades and ate some pomegranate seeds … and then she was, like, his prisoner for half of every year. You went to this Rasputin-bearded man’s house and you ate his bean sprouts
and
his strawberries. Girl, I’d say you are in trouble.”