The Man of My Dreams (13 page)

Then Stefan and Ted return, and what they proceed to do is get hugely, sloppily drunk—all of them and, in fact, Hannah especially. Rick brings a Trivial Pursuit set out of the bedroom, and they play for a while, but they’re doing shots, and within an hour no one is getting any answers right. They abandon the game, and someone turns on the TV. Another forty-five minutes pass, and when Hannah rises from the sofa to use the bathroom, she finds she must grab Sarie’s shoulder to steady herself. In the mirror above the bathroom sink, she peers at her flushed cheeks and, inexplicably, beams. The hand towels are red—the fact that Rick even owns hand towels makes her like him more—and she dries her fingers one by one, pretending she’s a hand model.

When she gets back to the living room, Sarie and Ted have switched places, and the next hour is filled with intricate maneuvering and Hannah’s hyperconsciousness of, and only of, any moments when she and Ted have physical contact. These moments occur increasingly frequently until they have resulted in his arm resting across her shoulders, just lightly but definitely there.

At this juncture—more and more signs indicate something will happen—Hannah returns to the bathroom, pulls a toothbrush from a cup on the sink, and brushes her teeth. In her current state, this act of borrowing feels jaunty and rather adorable.

At some point, Rick’s girlfriend gets home, carrying several shopping bags and seeming miffed, and she and Rick go down the hall and proceed to bicker loudly. It’s the kind of thing that, sober, Hannah would find shamefully enthralling, but right now she is far too distracted to appreciate the drama. She closes her eyes—everything is reeling—and when she opens them, she sees Ted go into the kitchen. She can’t help herself; she follows him. She has nothing to say, she has no excuse to be in there. She just wants to stay near him.

The volume of the TV has been growing progressively louder over the course of the afternoon and evening—it is past seven o’clock—and now it’s blaring, lending the gathering a feel of chaos far greater than it really possesses. “Are you having fun?” Ted calls to her when she’s entered the kitchen. He is standing by the sink, filling a glass with ice. “I’m glad you came,” he adds.

And even as he says this, she and Ted are both smirking, he is setting down the ice tray, they’re tilting toward each other and leaning in until they’re touching. His lips graze her jaw, that is the first instance of contact. Then comes a tiny, exquisite moment of facial negotiating—so this is kissing—and then they are making out in earnest. She never imagined that her first kiss would take place in the kitchen of a person she barely knows, with a guy who’s almost thirty, while she’s wearing glasses; she didn’t even know you
could
kiss while wearing glasses. Also, there’s a decent chance everyone in the living room can see them. But she’s so drunk that who cares about any of it!

He grasps her face with both hands, his fingers gripping the back of her neck where her hairline ends, his thumbs pressed up beside her earlobes. He steps forward—into her—so their bodies meet at all points. This is not a tentative, goofy kiss; it’s a pre-sex kiss. How does she recognize it? She just does. Sure enough, he pulls away but runs his palm over her hair and says, “You want to get out of here?”

She nods.

In the living room, they bid farewell to the others. Ted makes some excuse that she barely listens to while she goes around hugging everyone except Sarie, who apparently has passed out in the bathtub. Then they stumble down the steps and out into the humid evening. They debate where to go, her apartment or his, and decide on hers because her roommates, Jenny and Kim, have already left town for the weekend. The absence of Hannah’s inhibition is so pronounced it feels as if she and Ted have escaped from the company of some judgmental third party—a pursed-lipped great-aunt, perhaps.

The T is packed—she’s not sure why, at this in-between hour—and riding to her stop, she and Ted are standing very close and, on top of that, keep heaving into each other. Even Hannah can’t tell how much of this is the jerking of the T and how much is willful on her part or Ted’s. When they step out of the station at Porter Square, the sun is setting and she realizes that she’s starting to sober up. It’s okay, though. Surely the widest gulf is between not touching and touching, not between touching and whatever comes afterward. They head up the sidewalk and around the corner to the apartment she and Jenny and Kim are subletting. She opens the first door, then turns the lock on the second one with her key. Climbing the stairs to the second floor, she feels like all the blood in her body is surging, propelling her forward.

Inside, he says, “Are you gonna give me the grand tour?”

Besides the unremarkable kitchen and unremarkable living room, there are only the bedrooms. She and Jenny share a room with twin beds; Kim pays more and has a double bed in her own room. Hannah sees that she left her bed unmade this morning, and she and Ted are standing beside her tangled beige sheets when he kisses her again. This goes on for several minutes and at some point he removes her glasses. They don’t talk at all, and it’s so quiet in the apartment, especially after the raucousness of Rick’s, that Hannah is conscious of the noises they’re making, that slight slurping. She wishes she’d thought to put on a CD. But soon—somehow—they are lying down and she stops thinking about it. She’s on her back, her feet dangling off the end of the bed, and he is leaning over her, and then they’ve scooted up toward the pillow. He unbuttons her blouse, then reaches around and unfastens her bra. “Will you turn out the light?” Hannah says, but he doesn’t respond. “Can you turn out the light?” she says more loudly. “The switch is by the door.”

“But I want to be able to see you,” he says.

There’s not a chance. She says, “No, really,” and nudges him from the side. He’s kissing her neck, and he pauses and looks at her before rising to flick the switch. “By the way,” he says when he’s standing, “do you have something for, ah, protection?” He lies down again, more next to her than on top of her.

“Actually, I thought the man always took care of that.” Hannah giggles and immediately is mortified, although Ted doesn’t seem like the kind of guy who would realize that what she just said, or the way she giggled, was mortifying.

“Maybe I do have one,” he says. “Hold on.” He rolls onto his side and reaches into his back pocket.

A window of time opens up and just as quickly starts to close again. If she is going to say anything, she has to say it now. “Incidentally,” she begins, and already her voice is the one she uses when she’s presenting meeting reports to Lois, “I should probably tell you. This isn’t a big deal, but I’ve never had sex before.”

There is such a long pause that Hannah starts to think Ted didn’t hear her, and she decides maybe it’s not such a great idea to tell him after all.

“You mean,” he says, and before he’s said anything else, she can tell he heard her perfectly, “you’re, you’re a virgin? That’s what you’re saying?”

“Well, I hate that word. I don’t even like when people say virgin daiquiri or virgin wool. But yes, that’s correct.”

“Are you religious?”

“No,” Hannah says.

“And you’re, what, a sophomore or a junior?”

“I’ll be a senior.”

“Did you—not to get personal, but was there a guy who treated you bad?”

“What, like molested me?” Hannah says. Her voice was getting a little quivery before, but now it comes back strong. “That’s what you mean, right?”

He says nothing.

“No,” she says. She’s not going to explain anymore. Everything is finished. This moment has passed.

“I can’t say I’m not flattered,” Ted says, “but I think you should do this with someone you love.”

“Well, aren’t you old-fashioned?”

“Hannah, you’re cool.” Ted’s voice is so earnest; it’s warbling even more than usual. “I like you. It’s just, under the circumstances—”

“Why don’t you leave?” she says.

“Come on. We can still have fun.”

“Really?” she says. “Can we?” Then—she doesn’t want to be this kind of person, doesn’t want to give in to her own nastiness—she says, “You should have done your homework. It’s Sarie who’s the slutty intern.”

He looks directly at her for the first time in several minutes. Even in the dark, the eye contact is excruciating. She looks away. His body rising from the bed a few seconds later is peripheral, more like a shadow than an actual person.

He is standing, tucking in his shirt, putting his shoes on. “I’ll see you around,” he says. “Thanks, Hannah.” Mentally, she adds
for nothing.
To be fair, his voice isn’t sarcastic. It’s just distant. He leaves the bedroom, and then the front door opens and clicks shut. The first thing that occurs to Hannah is that today is Friday, and she’ll at least have the weekend before returning to the office.

She lies there exactly as he left her, her blouse half off, her bra unfastened, her legs parted. An indeterminable amount of time elapses, and then she hears the burst of firecrackers—they are very nearby, possibly in the courtyard below her window—and a whiteness flickers in the room like during a lightning storm. Who are the boneheads who always insist on setting off firecrackers on the third of July?

Before the summer started, she’d had a feeling that it would be different, that her life was beginning to change. She was staying in Boston instead of going home, subletting this place with Jenny and Kim, and she had the internship. She had been hopeful. She thinks of that day in May, after lunch with her father. The restaurant was on Spruce Street, and when she got up from the table, she walked north on Twentieth—she was shaking—and took a right into Rittenhouse Square. The park was crowded with office workers eating outside, homeless men sitting on the benches surrounded by their bags of possessions, little kids running among the sculptures. On the far side of the park, she came out on Walnut, stopping to buy bottled water from a vendor. The temperature was eighty-five degrees, the first truly hot day of the year.

She’d parked her mother’s car at Seventeenth and Walnut, and as she headed toward it, she passed a new clothing store that seemed to be holding some sort of grand-opening festivities. The employees were wearing jeans and brightly colored T-shirts, and they’d set up speakers outside the entrance that were playing the song that would become the catchy, inescapable hit of the summer; it was the first time Hannah had ever heard it. Just past Eighteenth Street, between a gourmet-food emporium and a fancy boutique with satin dresses in the window, Hannah fell into step behind three people who at first she thought were traveling separately but who, after a moment, she realized were together: a girl around Hannah’s age, a man a few years older, a woman who looked like one of their mothers. Hannah watched their profiles when they spoke to one another. The couple—and they must have been a couple, Hannah thought when the man linked his arm through the girl’s in a way too tender to make them siblings—were both quite good-looking, the man with broad shoulders and a strong nose. The girl wore a green sundress, and she had long white-blond hair; the lightness of it made her seem somehow vulnerable. She held her chin in the air, in almost a parody of fine breeding. The older woman was bulky and slower-moving, wearing a handkerchief wrapped around her head. Hannah wondered where they were going. The man said something to the girl, and the girl shook her head. Hannah could not hear their conversation, and she began to walk more quickly. But they didn’t speak again for nearly a block.

Then, abruptly, the woman turned to the girl and said, “Are you happy?” She had an accent of some sort, so the emphasis came out on both syllables: Are you
happy
? She was Eastern European, Hannah decided, maybe Hungarian.

The girl didn’t respond, and it was ridiculous, but Hannah felt as if the question had been directed at her. How could the girl not answer? Had her entire life been like this, one long inquiry into whether things were going the way she wanted?

Across the street, a police car had on its flashing lights, and Hannah glanced at the swirl of blue, then looked at the police officer himself. He was writing a ticket to a man who sat in the driver’s seat of a minivan, waving his hands emphatically. They both seemed far away. The music from the store was still audible above the traffic, and, as she always did when she heard music while outside in an urban area, Hannah felt like she was in a movie. She had taken a drastic and possibly foolish step with her father. But she did not regret it. In a strange way, the ugliness with him contained its opposite, and everywhere around her lay the possibility that things would improve in the months to come. She drew closer to the Hungarian woman, so close she could have rested her palm on the woman’s back. “Are you
happy
?” the woman asked again, this time more insistently, and at that moment, heading up Walnut Street, Hannah was on the verge of saying yes.

5

______

August 1998

IN ROOM
128 of the Anchorage Holiday Inn, Hannah’s sister, Allison, has just finished brushing her teeth, and Hannah is washing her face. When Hannah sets her towel on the edge of the sink, Allison says, “Hannah, I’m engaged! Sam and I are getting married.”

“Sam?” Hannah says his name as if she isn’t certain who he is, though Sam is, right now, on the other side of the door, in this very hotel room. But she’s been caught off guard. She and Allison were talking about nothing, about brands of sunscreen. “Since when?” Hannah asks.

“He proposed last week. Look.” Allison holds out her left hand, on which she’s wearing a silver band of curling waves. Hannah noticed the ring already, though it did not occur to her that it could represent an engagement. “I almost let it slip over the phone, but I thought it would be more fun to tell you in person,” Allison says.

“Does Mom know?”

“She and Dad both do. Are you not happy for me or something? You might want to say congratulations.” Allison laughs a little helplessly. “I thought you liked Sam.”