The Hypothetical Girl (19 page)

“I liked that beard,” Clarissa texted.

A
year and two months later she caught a glimpse of what looked like them: Harry and Juno. She was at a street festival in a neighboring town, with a strawberry theme. It
was
Harry and Juno! She was sure of it. Maybe his strawberries were in some sort of strawberry competition. Maybe he was there to collect a strawberry prize. She had Zeus on a leash and she quickly rounded a corner to see where he was going. It was
his truck
; they were headed for his truck.

“Harry!” she called out. Her voice rang out a little too loud and people were looking. The man turned. It
was
Harry. She rushed over toward where he was standing,
across a street and a large parking lot, about to get in his truck. But Zeus, excited, pulled away faster, and his leash slipped out of her hands as he rushed forward into the traffic, toward Juno. Cars were honking and there was a near miss and she felt her stomach avalanche as he leapt forward, just missing a collision with a Miata by a hair. Then, to her complete surprise, once across the street and parking lot, Zeus lunged at Juno, growling, with his teeth bared. Juno leapt into the truck and Harry got in, too. They were leaving.

He turned once and looked back at her, with a desperate sort of expression, like a deer in the headlights of her, like he just wanted to get away. Then she heard the click of the truck door. It seemed louder than a door click should have been. In fact, he was much too far away for her to even hear such a sound. It was amplified, like everything around him had always been, realer than real. Harry started up his engine and he drove away, slowly, until his truck was just a blue smudge down the road.

T
hink of this story as a quiz. The sort you complete at 3:00 a.m., when you are alone and online and have had one too many mango daiquiris with a friend named Amanda who told you at around 2:15 that despite the fact that you have traveled together to Thailand, Paris, and Israel over the years and it was she who was at your side when you had your abortion, she actually hates you. Yes, she
hates
you! She said it emphatically, sobbing a bit around the edges of her drink, which she was literally leaning on, leaning with all her weight so as to make an indentation in her bottom lip when she sat up to speak again.

“I do, I hate you, Ona!”

“Amanda, you are drunk,” you replied. “This is the daiquiri talking.”

“Then the daiquiri is a truth serum, because I hate you, Ona.” She signaled to the bartender that she wanted another.

“Is that really a good idea?” you asked in a sotto voce meant to signal,
I really care about you
.

“Shut up, Ona. I hate you and I don’t want advice from you. I don’t want to even hear your stupid voice. You can go now. I hate you.”

This, Amanda told you, is because you dated her boyfriend from college three years ago. The one who had been the love of her life, she confessed (three daiquiris and a Jell-O shot in), and you, if you were a decent friend, would have known that and would have never, ever dated Jim. But you did and that sealed the ultimate fate of the friendship. She sipped her fifth daiquiri and you collected your backpack. She turned away her face when you said goodbye, and slammed a palm on the bar. One last angry gesture.

Slam.

Door on friendship.

Shut.

Now you find yourself, in the wee hours of the morning, alone in your teensy apartment on West 10th Street (with one window that will not, absolutely not, shut all the way, hence the whistling wind sound all the time), trolling the Internet aimlessly, feeling friendless—as well as boyfriendless. Because you were dumped not only by Jim (the love of your so-called best friend’s life), but also, in the three years since, by Richard, Marty, James, and Tate, the last of whom might have been the
love of
your
life. The gestalt of this situation leads you right to the staircase, which leads down to the pit of despair, into which, by clicking and answering the quiz that pops up on the screen from an online dating site, you will now descend definitively.

But wait—this story will give you a choice
. You can either go on to the next section (section A, the quiz section) or skip it (and proceed to section B) or skip both of those (by choosing section C).

Each section offers up a different scenario, a very different ending.
Which is how life is, right?
You make choices, like you did by dating your best friend’s college beau, and you must take the consequences. Your life, in fact, is one big quiz show. Box or curtain? Door or package? Take the money or risk all to see what is behind door number 4?

But know this: As in the quiz, the choices in this story step up in risk
. If you are a risk avoider, someone who can’t handle anything unpleasant, it is highly suggested you do
not
choose the third option (section C).

(The author knows from her study of the research on risk taking that approximately 35 percent of readers will, at this very moment, skip forward to section C.) (Which is exactly what is wrong with literature today, the ADD reader, who just wants to cut to the chase, what they deem is the “good part.” But that is a problem for another day.)

Well, loyalty is always good. You would go with loyalty, you think. But then what is life without affection? Richard taught you that. He was loyal as the day is long, but there was no warmth there. No afternoon smooch on the forehead. No little hug at dawn, no sidelong longing glance in the supermarket aisle. So one must give pause to the idea of loyalty.

And then there is the thorny issue of sex. As you learned from Jim, hot sex can lead to a sense of great affection, and affection can lead to loyalty. But not always, which is what you really learned from Tate. Some people can be sexually stupendous, affectionate as all get out, and then flip on you, just stab you in the back. This is because they lack loyalty. So for you, tonight, this night of daiquiris and breaking off of friendships, loyalty trumps all. Hence,
a) loyalty
gets your vote.

You definitely fed Jim. You made corn bread and those little Thai egg-rolly thingies—spring rolls, that’s it. Plus you made chili and enchiladas and rice and beans and mango smoothies. You made Alfredo sauce so smooth and creamy it was like eating silk. You made those crunchy potato latkes with rosemary because you wanted him to enjoy some aspect of your culture and you were sensing a hint, just a smidgen, of anti-Semitism there. But then, two days later, when you were watching
Schindler’s List
, he said, “Why can’t the Jews get past the Holocaust? Isn’t it about time?”

It was right about then that the tick in your heart, the uptick, that thing you had for him, with his mega paintings and darling
sol y agua
tattoo, his motorcycles, his bad-boy act, died for you. Poof. You shut your heart, and your kitchen, down.

So much for feeding love.

Now, you certainly understood the mind of Richard. You talked and talked until you were blue in the face. You discussed matters of importance. Issues of the day. You went to hear lectures by famous poets and politicians, like Netanyahu, even though you deeply disliked the man, because it is important to know what people think. Even the people you disagree with, right?
And Richard went, too, and then you argued, intellectually argued, over his ideas.

Once you argued so hard and so long it became dawn and you were still arguing (something about Kant) and you were in a coffee shop on 14th Street that never closed and the waitresses kept looking at you, like
begging you please
to pay up and leave, but you didn’t, you stayed and talked some more and other people joined in at breakfast and they argued, too.

How funny was it when you all forgot what it was exactly you were arguing about, and who was on which side? It had all become a blur, a blur during which you noticed Richard had moved over to the other side of the booth and was sitting next to Liselle, glaring, in fact, at her cleavage. Liselle, who never had anything to say about anything! Liselle, who had just sat there with her steamy coffee, listening, with her cleavage.

Which leads you to
c) his penis
.

Now, Tate had a beautiful one. It was long and wide and had a sort of curve in it, like a relaxed banana. And, for the record, it matters. It may be terribly un-PC to say so, but everyone knows it. Everyone. You adored it and even worshipped it a bit, and he liked all that adoration and liking. He was proud of it. He even sent you a photograph of it once, taken with his cell phone. Which you actually kept. Kept!

But it turned out that one penis admirer was not enough for Tate. He was collecting admirers. You think
now, looking back, he might have even had a Tate Penis Fan Club going. In the end, you realized you were just one of the card-carrying, or rather, cell-phone-photo-carrying, members.

So much for option
c
. The best way to a man’s heart is not his penis.

So which choice, then? You pick
a
, because at least with Jim you had a nice time, eating and such. He might not really have been an anti-Semite. You might have overreacted. But then, dating Jim led to the loss of Amanda. Definitely problematic. Nevertheless,
a) his stomach
wins the day.

Okay, this is a hard one. You love to ski. In fact, some of the nicest moments of your life were on ski slopes with the sound of the trees whispering, the distant
shush
sound of someone skiing down a nearby slope, and you, there in a wooded place, about to possess a sense of speed and even a personal ownership of gravity. Riding a chairlift with someone you will share this experience with, share while being yourself, choosing your own path down a mountain, is one of life’s most romantic moments.

Especially when Marty popped out that little bottle of Drambuie and uncorked it and offered you his deerskin wine flask. Now, Marty was a mountain man with big hands and a knife in a leather belt loop holder at all times, ready and waiting for those manly knife duties such real men encounter. He was also a gentleman. You had so much fun at his A-frame cabin right on the slopes of Taos—well, not the actual ski area slopes, but the opposite side of the canyon, in a place where you could actually ski down to the first chair. That cabin had no heat, just a wood stove. It had no rooms; it wasn’t even really finished being built—but the time you spent there was so wonderful, eating venison from the deer he shot, cooked on sticks (from trees he cut down) over the fire. Drinking more from his deerskin flask, listening to him play his mandolin. He suggested you might want to try eating some bear he had in his freezer at home. He was a bear-eating sort of man and he made you feel very cave-girlish. A
me man you woman
sort of thing.

Chairlift. Definitely kissing on a chairlift.

Everyone knows that swimming and sex don’t really go together; it is sort of impossible to get the right position. It only works in movies, you are convinced of it. And holding hands on a walk—well, that is just something from Hallmark.

Now, tabulate your answers. Give yourself ten points for every
a
response, five points for every
b
, and one point for every
c
. You have earned the maximum, fifteen
points! Which means that according to those polled by Loveforever.com, you are excellent relationship material.

Oh yes, there is every hope for you. You, my dear, will find love; the Love Quiz deems it so. On this note, you head to the medicine cabinet, take two Excedrin PMs, and go to bed. Life will turn around. Amanda will be in a much better mood when she sobers up tomorrow. It will all be okay.

B. Who You Are by Candlelight

Wait, this is ridiculous. An online “Love Quiz”? You are way, way above such drivel. You are too sophisticated. Too smart. Too educated. You have a master’s degree in anthropology. Heck, you understand and know all about the research of Professor Louis Binford on the migration and trade patterns of the late Mayan, Aztec, and Olmec empires, which it is likely only one-millionth of mankind has ever even heard about.

You have better things to do with your life. You will do something better right now. Who cares if it is 3:00 a.m.? All that drama with Amanda has made you hungry. You will go to an all-night diner—not the one where you once spent hours arguing with Richard only to have him go home with a much quieter, less argumentative woman. Not the diner where your mother told you she was divorcing your father. Definitely not the diner where you broke your molar on a walnut shell
in the salad during a job interview. You will go to the diner you love more than any other diner in the world, the Empire Diner, on the west side, where your friend Lizzie tends bar and takes orders for munchies at this time of night. You will go there because she is beautiful and sweet and always has an assortment of handsome men mooning over her, yet she still comes over to talk to you. Plus, she knows Amanda and might have some words of wisdom for you on this sad, sad night. She might offer consolation. She might, also, give you a free drink. A coffee and amaretto would be lovely right about now.

You walk in and there she is, Lizzie, in a halo of bright admirers. One has a tattoo on his neck of the Virgin Mary. One has a patch on his eye. A pirate! One has looked over at you—and did he? Yes he did. He just winked. He is blond and tall and has the nicest soul patch. You sit down and, before you know it, Lizzie has brought you a coffee and amaretto. The girl has read your mind.