The Man of My Dreams (18 page)

“I know. I’m the most horrible person in the world. But I was just about to call you right now. And I’ll make it up to you—I’ll
make
brunch for you.”

“You don’t know how to cook,” Hannah says. The staples of Fig’s diet are cocktail onions from the jar, a blend of cottage cheese and ketchup, and, occasionally, chocolate bars. At restaurants, she orders food but she rarely takes more than a few bites, and Hannah and Allison have speculated for years about whether she’s anorexic.

“Don’t be cranky,” Fig says. “Come over this weekend and I’ll whip up some French toast.”

“You’ve never made French toast in your life.”

“That may be,” Fig says, and it strikes Hannah that there is something undeniably comforting in knowing her cousin so well that even when she wants to be wrong about Fig, she isn’t. “But I’ve seen my mom do it about a thousand times,” Fig is saying. “It’s eggs and bread.”

“I’m not coming back over there,” Hannah says.

“Ooh, playing hard to get. I like it, Hannah, I like it. It’s a bold direction for you to go in. No sweat, though, I’ll come to you. Should we say noon on Sunday?”

“I’m busy this weekend,” Hannah says.

“It’ll be grand. We’ll giggle and tell secrets.”

“I said I’m busy.”

“Then we’re set,” Fig says. “Can’t wait to see you.”

THE GUY IS
working behind the desk again when Hannah returns to the financial aid office to drop off a form. When he sees her, he says, “Hannah, right?”

“Hi,” she says.

“I’m Mike,” he says. “FYI. How’ve you been?”

There are two other people waiting—an athletic-looking guy reading
The Economist
and a middle-aged woman just sitting there—and it seems slightly weird to carry on a chatty conversation in front of them.

“I’ve been fine,” Hannah says.

“Big plans for the weekend?”

“Not really. Can I give you this?” She passes him the form, a single sheet of paper.

But after she has left—she’s gotten about twenty feet down the hall—he follows her. He says, “Hey, Hannah,” and when she stops, he says, “I was wondering if you like jazz. I heard about this place called Aujourd’hui that has jazz on the weekend.”

If you’re doing what it seems like you’re doing,
Hannah thinks uncomfortably,
I just can’t help you.

“I don’t know if you’re free this Friday,” Mike adds.

Though she tries, she can’t come up with a reason to say no. She says, “I guess I am.”

ON FRIDAY, THEY
meet outside her dorm and walk through the warm fall night to the restaurant. He is from Worcester, Massachusetts, he tells her. He’s an only child. His parents are divorced, too. When he finds out she’s from Philadelphia, he says, “Don’t tell me you’re Amish.”

“They’re more out in the country,” she says.

“I’m just teasing,” he says quickly.

Their table is in a corner far from the stage. Hannah wonders if this is a desirable table, with privacy, given to them because they’re young and it’s obvious they’re on a first date, or if it’s an undesirable table and they’re being hidden away because they’re not glamorous. Even in the corner, the music is so loud that Hannah feels as if she’s screaming every time she speaks. Eventually, she and Mike take to nodding at each other, half smiling.

Out on the street again, it’s comparatively quiet. He says, “Live music can be so great,” and he seems in this moment like a person who will never say a surprising thing. In the summer, he will ask,
Hot enough for you?
and on the first day of November, he’ll complain (but not even fervently—he’ll complain cheerfully, conversationally) about how Christmas decorations go up earlier and earlier every year, and if a scandal occurs involving a politician, he’ll say that the press is just trying to be sensational, that it’s boring to read about it in the paper day after day. (Hannah herself never feels bored by such scandals.) He will eventually propose marriage—not to Hannah but to someone—by showing up at the girl’s door with a dozen red roses, taking her out to a nice restaurant, and arranging with the waiter to hide the ring in the crème brûlée so she’ll find it with her spoon, and that night, after she says yes, they’ll have sex—he’ll call it making love—and he’ll look deeply into her eyes and tell her she’s made him the luckiest guy in the world. The engagement ring will be a gold band with a small, earnest diamond.

Then they start walking and he says, “But that sucked. You didn’t like it, did you? I could tell.”

“I was a little worried the saxophonist would pop a blood vessel,” Hannah admits.

“Maybe he should have,” Mike says. “Put us out of our misery. You want to get a cab?” He steps away from her, toward the street.

“We can walk,” Hannah says. “Or you can get a cab if you want to, and I can walk. I mean, we’re not—you’re not coming back to my dorm, right?”

He grins. “Those are some nice manners you have.”

“I just meant that I didn’t think we were going to the same place. You can come to my room if you want to.” Why has she made this offer? “But I should warn you that I don’t even have a TV.”

He laughs, and maybe she seems offended by his laughter, because then he touches her shoulder. She can feel his gaze on her face. “You look very pretty tonight,” he says, and the first true feeling she has experienced all evening shoots through her chest. Is she really this easily swayed?

“Hey,” he says. She looks at him, and he smiles and takes her left hand with his right one. (Their hands are roughly the same size, though his fingernails are narrower than hers, and so are his knuckles. Later, Hannah will think that if someone took a picture of their hands side by side and showed it to strangers and told them to guess whose were the man’s and whose were the woman’s, most of the strangers would guess wrong.) They begin walking, their hands linked.

“I’m glad we’re hanging out,” Mike says. “It’s a nice night.”

Hannah says in a very quiet voice, “Yeah, it is.” Intermittently, over the course of the last few hours, she has imagined telling Jenny or Fig about her bad date with a cheesy guy from the financial aid office, but it occurs to her that she doesn’t have to tell them anything. In her dorm, they sit side by side on the edge of her bed, and he rides his thumb down her bare forearm, and the tenuousness of the moment leaves her unable to speak. Mike seems so kind and hopeful (surely this will all go wrong somehow) that she wants to weep. He turns her jaw with his fingertips, and when they kiss, his tongue is warm and wet.

They don’t end up doing much more than kissing, but he stays over, sleeping in his T-shirt and boxer shorts with both his arms around her; he asks her permission before removing his button-down shirt and jeans. The all-night spooning surprises Hannah.
I don’t regret what has happened between us,
Mike’s arms seem to say. And then, toward dawn,
I still don’t regret what has happened.

But in the morning, when he again sits on the edge of the bed, this time tying his shoes before he leaves—she lied and told him her shift at the library starts at eight o’clock—she stands there with her arms folded. When he also stands, he sets his hand on her back, and though it’s a nice gesture, it feels arbitrary and unnatural, as if he could just as easily have placed his hand on the top of her head or gripped her elbow. It feels
symbolic;
they are actors in a play, and the director has told him to touch her so the audience will understand there’s a bond between them. She wants him gone.

NOON ON SUNDAY
comes and goes. When Hannah hears a pounding on her door at 1:20, she briefly considers not answering, and then of course she does. Fig is wearing fitted black pants, a black sweater, and black high-heeled boots. She tosses her bag on the floor, and in one fluid movement—Hannah smells cigarette smoke clinging to Fig’s long auburn hair as she passes—is lying under the covers in Hannah’s bed.

Hannah, who is wearing jeans and a T-shirt, says, “That’s so gross, Fig. Take your shoes off.”

Fig throws back the covers and lifts one leg into the air.

“No,” Hannah says.

“Pretty please,” Fig says.

“You’re ridiculous.” Hannah takes hold of Fig’s right ankle, unzips the boot, pulls it off, then does the left boot.

“Thanks, donut blossom,” Fig says as she pulls the covers back up to her chin. “So I’ve decided to become a cat burglar. I’d be good at it, right?”

“I was thinking maybe we could go to a movie,” Hannah says. “Is there anything you want to see?”

“I actually need to get home pretty soon, because Henry is supposed to call.” Fig turns to look at Hannah’s clock. “What time is it?”

Just his name—it’s like remembering you have a wonderful party to look forward to. How unreasonable, really, for her to expect that she’d feel for someone like Mike, whom she barely knows, the certainty of affection she feels for Henry. His best e-mail ever arrived a few weeks ago:
You should think of paying a visit here. Fig has talked about it, but I’m not sure she’ll make it over. There is lots to do in Seoul (most of which I have not taken advantage of), and we could also travel. It would be so great to see a familiar face, and I hear Korean Air has some relatively cheap tickets
. Relatively cheap—she checked—turned out to be nearly a thousand dollars, which was out of the question. Still, it was an excellent e-mail.

“How’s Henry doing?” Hannah asks. She has never known if Fig is aware she and Henry communicate—it doesn’t seem like it, but it’s safer to assume she is. Perhaps not surprisingly, Fig tends to be a better source of information about Henry than Henry himself, regularly dropping some detail about his life that makes it apparent how sanitized his communications with Hannah are. The most recent tidbit was that he and a few colleagues went to a nightclub where, if you asked your waiter to bring a girl to you, the waiter would find the most attractive woman in the club and, by force if necessary, deposit her at your table. This phenomenon, according to Fig—who appeared utterly unthreatened by the idea of other women being tossed at Henry—was called “booking.”

“He sounds tired,” Fig says. “Half the time when he calls, it’s three in the morning there and he’s still at the office. So aren’t you curious about my cat burglary?”

“Should I be?”

“I stole something.”

“That’s great, Fig.”

“Look in my bag.”

Hannah has taken a seat in her desk chair, and she doesn’t move.

“Go ahead and look,” Fig says. “It won’t bite. You’ll get a kick out of it.”

Hannah reaches for the bag. Inside are several one-dollar bills fastened with a rubber band to a driver’s license, a tube of lipstick, a pack of cigarettes, and a small silver picture frame containing a black-and-white photo of a woman in an apron and cat’s-eye glasses. “Who is this?” Hannah asks.

“It’s Murray’s great-grandmother.”

“Who’s Murray?”

“The law student. I was trapped in his apartment until half an hour ago.”

“I thought you didn’t like law students.”

“I definitely don’t now. He was a total snooze. But he’s obsessed with me, so I threw him a bone.”

“Does Henry know?”

“It’s don’t ask, don’t tell. Remember? Anyway, after last night, no more bones for Murray.”

“Do you think Henry is involved with any women over there that he hasn’t told you about?”

“Mmm…” Fig seems to consider the possibility in an entirely disinterested way. “Nah,” she finally says, and Hannah feels a warm, surging relief. The idea that Henry could just find someone else and be whisked out of both their lives is worst of all. At least as long as he is bound to Fig, he’s trackable.

“The picture’s so kitschy, right?” Fig says. “I couldn’t resist.”

Hannah looks again at the framed photo. The woman has a broad smile and eyes that crinkle behind her glasses; she looks perhaps sixty. “Don’t you feel guilty?” Hannah asks.

“I feel horribly guilty. Unspeakably guilty.”

“You should.”

“I’m wearing a hair shirt right now to punish myself. You can’t see it because I’m under the covers, but it’s itchy as hell.”

“Fig, it’s his grandmother.”

“Great-grandmother.” Fig grins. “And the sex sucked, so I thought I should get something out of Murray.”

“It sucked? Really?” The idea of Fig having bad sex is novel.

“It must have taken an hour for me to come. Speaking of which, any progress on your epic dry spell?”

“I really don’t feel like talking about this right now,” Hannah says. The irony is that Fig has no idea how epic it had gotten, prior to Ted from the summer—she has never paid close attention to Hannah’s life. But to tell Fig about Mike, to tell her about him not as a joke, is unthinkable.

“You’ve got to put yourself out there,” Fig says. “God gave you big ta-tas for a reason, Hannah.”

Hannah closes her eyes. “Didn’t you say you had to get going?”

“There’s something I want to talk to you about,” Fig says. “I think I’ve met the man of my dreams.”

“Fig, please.”

“For real,” Fig says. “I’m serious.” She seems in this moment to be on the cusp of having genuinely hurt feelings.

“I assume it’s not Henry or Murray?” Hannah says.

“His name is Philip Lake. I met him over the summer at Tracy Brewster’s sister’s wedding—do you remember when I went home for that? It was when you were in Alaska.”

Hannah nods.

“I didn’t even talk to him at the wedding, but that was the first time I saw him. He was wearing a seersucker suit, which not every guy can pull off, but he has this air of total confidence. He was with a kind of clingy woman, so that’s why I didn’t go up to him. But after the wedding, I couldn’t get him out of my mind. I finally asked Tracy for his address, and I should have saved a copy of the letter I wrote. It was really good.”

Did she enclose a photo, too? Knowing Fig, probably, and a dirty one at that. Also, thinks Hannah, it’s unlikely the clingy date was the reason Fig didn’t talk to this guy at the wedding. If she’d wanted to, she would have approached him. What she must have wanted instead was the mystery of contacting him later, luring him from afar.