The Man of My Dreams (17 page)

She shifts as if to lie on her stomach, and he rolls off her.

IN THE MORNING,
there is the requisite debriefing, the repeated reenactment of the bear’s trajectory through their campsite. They pack up for the last time and paddle out. In the afternoon, they will meet the captain on the same beach where he first delivered them.

After lunch, the sky drops and darkens. “Hannah,” Allison says, and abruptly, Hannah is waiting tensely, every strand of hair on her head electrified. “I know things went wrong in a big way on this trip, right off the bat,” Allison says. “I wish I could fix them, or maybe we never should have all come here. But you have to accept that I’m marrying Sam. He’s honestly a good person, and he likes you. And if you refuse to make an effort, things will be unpleasant for everyone.”

“I’m not disagreeing with you,” Hannah says. “But can you just explain
why
you’re marrying him? I swear I’m not being a bitch. I’m genuinely curious. I want to understand what qualities he has that you like so much.”

“I’m marrying him because he makes me happy,” Allison says, and all at once it begins to rain. Real rain, not drizzle. Hannah can’t entirely turn around—she can turn her head so she’s facing the side and Allison is in her peripheral vision, but that’s it. “I feel better when I’m with him than I feel when I’m alone,” Allison adds, and because of the increasing volume of the rain, she is almost yelling. Far away—how far it’s hard to say, being on the water like this—a flash of lightning splits the sky. Hannah is not sure if Allison notices. “I know it’s wimpy,” Allison says, “but Sam takes care of me. It’s not that I don’t see any of his flaws, because I do. But I love him anyway.”

It is pouring; raindrops bounce off Hannah’s jacket and soak her face and hair. “My glasses are steaming up,” she says. “I can barely see.”

“Take them off. If you already can’t see, it won’t be any worse.”

When Hannah removes them she doesn’t know what to do with them. If she puts them in one of the pockets of her raincoat, she’s afraid they’ll get crushed when they’re landing the kayaks, so finally, she slips them inside the neck of her shirt. In the rain, everything in front of her is gray and indistinct.

“See the guys?” Allison says. “They’re heading toward that beach on the right. Just keep paddling, and I’ll steer us.”

Hannah’s teeth are chattering, and her hands are cold and slick with water. The rain is almost solid, like sleet. She turns partway around. She says, “I don’t really think Sam’s a dick. I hope you know that.” (As if calling him a dick is the worst thing Hannah said. What she really should apologize for is
I guess I just don’t see him as very special.
But the sincerity of that comment makes it unerasable; it is better just to move on.) “And I know that I am like Dad in some ways. But I feel sort of like, of course I am. It’s in my genes. Isn’t it weirder that you’re not like him than that I am?”

“You give too much attention to things that make you unhappy,” Allison says.

No doubt she is right. And yet attending to things that make Hannah unhappy—it’s such a natural reflex. It feels so intrinsic, it feels in some ways like who she is. The unflattering observations she makes about other people, the comments that get her in trouble, aren’t these truer than small talk and thank-you notes? Worse, but truer. And underneath all the decorum, isn’t most everyone judgmental and disappointed? Or is it only certain people, and can she choose not to be one of them—can she choose this without also, like her mother, just giving in?

They paddle through the rain, and when at last they reach the island, the brothers, who have landed already, come into the water to help. “I put up a tarp,” Sam says. After they’ve secured the second kayak, Elliot unrolls another tarp on the ground. They lie on it, all four of them flat on their backs.

“Does anyone else have raisin fingers?” Allison asks.

“I have raisin you-don’t-even-want-to-know,” Sam says.

Prostrate on the tarp, sore and chilled and not making eye contact with anyone, Hannah smiles. She is, after all, no longer waiting for the bear, and they are leaving tomorrow. She pushes a clump of wet hair off her forehead and abruptly sits up. “I don’t know where my glasses are,” she says.

“When did you last see them?” Sam asks, and Allison explains to him that Hannah took them off when it started raining.

“Fuck,” Hannah says. She stands and pats her chest and stomach. “They must have fallen out as we were pulling in the kayak.”

She ducks under the tarp, back into the rain, and jogs toward the water. Where the waves hit the shore, she peers down. She kicks at the black sand and the small rocks with the toes of her rubber boots, but this makes the water murkier. She goes in deeper, stopping when the waves are just below her knee, threatening to wash over the tops of her boots.

“Hannah. Hey, Hannah.” Allison has ventured out from under the tarp. “I’ll help you look,” she says.

They search, shoulders and heads tipped, squinting into the water. They follow separate paths, passing sometimes as they comb over nearby sections, and don’t speak. The rain is a huge and violent whisper.

Perhaps ten minutes pass, and Hannah knows she will not find them. But they keep looking, or at least they keep trudging through the water. She glances sometimes at Allison, a blurry figure in a green raincoat, her light curly hair straight and dark, plastered to her head. Hannah will have to be the one to give up searching; Allison won’t, by herself. “They must have washed away,” Hannah says. “It’s all right. I’ll get new ones.”

“I feel terrible,” Allison says.

“It was dumb of me not to put them in a pocket.”

“Maybe we could get you glasses in Anchorage.”

“No, I’ll be fine. Really.” And she will. Airports, optometrists—these Hannah can handle, even without all her faculties she can handle them.

Allison squeezes Hannah’s forearm. “You can be my maid of honor,” she says. “I totally want you to. I was being ridiculous before.”

Back under the tarp, they decide to make hot chocolate, and Sam is the one who finds Hannah’s cup for her, then washes out the oatmeal remnants from breakfast—he insists—and pours in the cocoa powder and the boiling water from the pan. “I’m nearsighted,” Hannah says. “It’s only faraway stuff I can’t see.” But he wants to wash her cup again after she’s used it, and she acquiesces with minimal protest. As she passes the cup to Sam, their fingertips touch.
I give you my sister,
Hannah thinks,
because I have no choice. But you will never catch up to us; I will always have known her longer.

If he understands, he does not acknowledge it.

Back in Ander, they return their kayaks and life jackets and spray skirts and rubber boots, they take pictures of one another standing on the dock against the backdrop of the mountains, and that night they stay at a bed-and-breakfast—Davida’s B&B—which is inside the old army bunker. It’s an apartment that smells of cigarette smoke, and Davida herself, a warm woman in her fifties wearing acid-washed jeans, a pilly lavender sweater, and a blue windbreaker, escorts them up in the elevator to their apartment and proceeds to energetically spray air freshener until Hannah can taste it in her mouth, a sour mist. When Davida’s gone, Elliot says, “Who’d have guessed one of the Bs stands for Bunker?” and Hannah laughs extra. Since Elliot’s quasi-come-on last night, she felt first generously pitying toward him, then she felt like maybe there was sexual tension between them, and now she feels like probably he’s not interested in her at all but she definitely has a crush on him. For the last three hours, the crush has been thriving.

In the morning, they board the train back to Anchorage and take a taxi to the airport, where they will all leave on night flights. Hannah will arrive in Boston at six thirty in the morning. In the airport bathroom, Allison gets her period and doesn’t have a tampon and Hannah must buy one, sticking dimes into the machine on the wall, then passing it under the door of the stall. “Aren’t you glad this didn’t happen in the backcountry?” Allison says. “A bear would have sniffed me out in no time.”

Then Hannah
is
back at Tufts, the school year has started. She’s safe and alone again, as she is always safe and alone. The following May, Allison and Sam will marry in a simple ceremony at the Palace of the Legion of Honor in San Francisco, and though in the weeks before she flies out, Hannah will not be able to help wondering what her interactions with Elliot will be like, he’ll mostly ignore her. He’ll bring as his wedding date a very thin, very blond woman who is not only far prettier than Hannah but far prettier than even Allison. The woman will, apparently, be an ER doctor.

For a long time—more frequently than she’ll wish she hadn’t told Allison Sam wasn’t special, way more frequently than she’ll regret not having fooled around with Elliot—Hannah will think of her glasses on the floor of the North Pacific. It is dark and calm down there; fish slip past; her glasses rest untouched, the clear plastic lenses and titanium frames. In the stillness without her, the glasses see and see.

6

______

September 1998

HANNAH MEETS THE
guy in the financial aid office when she’s waiting to see the director. This is her third visit to the office since returning from Alaska; the financial aid system is starting to feel like an additional class for which she gets no credit. On a piece of paper, she makes the same calculations she has made more than once, as if this time they will yield a different answer: If the tuition for the year is $23,709, and if her mother increases the amount she pays per semester from $4,000 to $6,000 (“You really don’t have to,” Hannah said, and her mother said, “Oh, Hannah, I’m just sorry it can’t be more”), and then if Hannah gets $4,300 as a student loan, and if she works thirty hours a week at the veterinary library instead of twenty—in the middle of her calculations, she senses that the guy behind the desk is watching her. She looks up.

“While you’re waiting, maybe I can answer your question,” the guy says. She’s pretty sure he’s an undergrad. He’s only an inch or two taller than Hannah, with brown hair and glasses, and he isn’t particularly cute.

Hannah shakes her head. “It’s kind of complicated.”

“Try me. I’ve worked here a few years.”

“I’m an exceptional case,” Hannah says, which is verbatim what the director of financial aid told her—the exceptional part is that Hannah didn’t know until late last May, after the end of the school year, that she’d need aid—but the guy smiles.

He says, “Oh, I could tell that already.”

He’s either flirting with her or making fun of her; whichever it is, it’s annoying. She looks down again and resumes writing.

Less than a minute has passed when the guy says, “I went to that exhibit at the M.F.A.”

The book she’s holding on her lap beneath the piece of paper is a biography of Pierre Bonnard. Hannah is considering writing her thesis on him.

“He does all the paintings of his wife in the bath, right?” the guy says.

Hannah nods. She’s a little impressed. “Did you see the last one?” she asks. “His wife died while he was in the middle of painting it, but it turned out to be the best one by far. The interplay of warm and cool colors is really incredible, the tiles on the floor and the wall. It’s, like, luminous.” Right away, she feels embarrassed. That
luminous
—it sounded very art-history-major-ish.

But the guy is nodding. He seems interested. He says, “When I was at the exhibit—” and this is when the director of financial aid opens his office door and sticks his head out. “Hannah Gavener?” he says, and she stands and enters the office behind him.

DURING THE LAST
three years, the places Fig has stood Hannah up are two Starbucks (the one at Kenmore Square and the one at the corner of Newbury Street and Clarendon); the Clinique counter on the second floor of Filene’s; and now, on a Sunday morning, at Fig’s own off-campus apartment. They are supposed to go out for brunch, and standing in the dingy lobby of Fig’s building, Hannah presses the intercom button three times in a row. After the third time, a sleepy, unfriendly female voice—one of Fig’s three roommates, presumably—says, “Who is it?”

“It’s Hannah, and I’m looking—” Hannah begins, but the voice cuts her off.

“Fig’s not here. She never came home last night.” In the ensuing disconnection, there is something final; to buzz again, Hannah can tell already, would serve no purpose.

Back in her dorm, Hannah sends Fig a sarcastic e-mail (
Don’t worry about not being there, because I really enjoyed the early morning T ride…
), but after several days pass with no reply, Hannah begins to worry that maybe something bad has happened.

On Wednesday afternoon, Hannah calls. “Oh my God, I’ve been dying to talk to you,” Fig says. “Can we get together immediately? Are you free for dinner tonight? Or, wait, not tonight, because I said I’d go out for drinks with this law student. A law student is the only thing worse than a lawyer, right?”

“What happened to you last weekend?”

“Don’t ask. Do you remember my freshman roommate Betsy?”

Hannah remembers her well. The first time Hannah ever visited Fig at BU, Betsy said, “Did you jog over here?” and Hannah said, “I took the T. Why?” and Betsy said, “Because you’re so sweaty.”

“Betsy was having this big party Saturday and basically wigging out,” Fig says. “She begged me to help her get ready when, believe me, the last thing I wanted was to get sucked into the vortex of her insanity. But we ran all over the place, getting food, cleaning up, and then the party just went on forever. People seriously didn’t leave until like six in the morning. You should have come.”

“That would have been difficult, given that I didn’t know about it.”

“Betsy’s new boyfriend has braces. Can you imagine a guy with braces going down on you?”

“If you were hungover, Fig, all you had to do was call me.”