The Man of My Dreams (22 page)

“It was a golfing trip, just a long weekend,” her father is saying. “This is the resort. Gorgeous greens, perfect view of the ocean. It’s in Clearwater, over on the Gulf.”

How strange to think of her father purchasing this blue leather album in a store, then sitting on this very sofa, perhaps, and sliding the photos under plastic. He has not labeled the pictures, nor has he done any weeding, including even the shots that are identical or out of focus or show the men with closed eyes. Here are Howard Donovan and Rich Inslow sitting in the waiting area of their gate at the Philadelphia airport, Rich eating some type of breakfast sandwich; here are aerial photos during the plane’s descent, a photo of Howard driving while Rich holds a map in the front seat, a shot of them unloading their clubs from the trunk of the rental car in the resort parking lot. On and on, her father’s mood steadily climbing as he shows her the pictures, and then comes the clear zenith: photos from what her father refers to as an Oriental restaurant where they ate the night before their departure. There are two shots of Rich with his arm around a young, pretty dark-haired waitress in a navy and white kimono, a few of the decor (heavy on bamboo, with the option—her father and his friends apparently declined—to remove one’s shoes and sit on the floor), and her father’s favorite shot of all from within this favorite setting, a sushi and sashimi tray ordered by Howard. Her father points out the slimy rectangles of pink and maroon fish draped over rice, the tiny heap of ginger. “You know what that is?” he asks, jabbing at a lump of pale green.

“It’s wasabi, isn’t it?”

“That stuff is lethal. It’s the Japanese kind of horseradish. Honest to God, it’ll bring tears to your eyes.”

She is shocked, and also afraid to look at him. As he turns the page, he’s describing a dessert whose name he cannot remember but which arrived at the table in flames. She feels utterly bewildered. This is who her father is: someone tickled by the existence of sushi. Someone who takes pictures inside a restaurant. Her father is
cheesy.
Even his handsomeness, she thinks, looking at one of the few photos in which he appears, is of a certain harmlessly generic sort, the handsomeness of a middle-aged male model in the department-store insert of the Sunday
Inquirer.
Has she only imagined him as a monster? His essential lesson, she always believed, was this: There are many ways for you to transgress, and most you will not recognize until after committing them. But is it she who invented this lesson? At the least, she met him halfway, she bought in to it. Not just as a child but all through adolescence and into adulthood—until this very moment. She realizes now that Allison does not buy in to it, that she must not have for years, and that’s why Allison doesn’t fight with their father or refuse to talk to him for long stretches. Why bother? Hannah always assumed Allison was bullied into her paternal devotion, but no—it is Hannah who has seen his anger as much bigger than it ever was.

After thirty-two minutes, Hannah carries her Diet Coke into the kitchen to throw away (years ago, Allison tried to get him to recycle, and of course he wouldn’t). Hannah wonders, does Sam also recognize that Douglas Gavener is not to be taken seriously? Does Dr. Lewin, from a distance? Does everyone except for Hannah and, for a time—for nineteen years, which is how long Hannah’s parents were married—her mother?

But not truly threatening isn’t the same as not a jerk. He
was
a jerk. Standing in the kitchen, she thinks she will go back out there and ask him just what he had to be so angry about all those years ago. His wife was kind, his daughters were obedient. They had the accoutrements of upper-middle-class life. What more had he expected?

But when she reenters the living room, he says, “Tell your sister or Sam to call me if they want the tickets—Eagles versus the Giants. There’s a chance I could get hold of one for you, too.” Then he extends his hand for her to shake, and this is why she can’t ask him anything. If he is shaking her hand, if he’s being this distant and careful, he knows he was a jerk. He doesn’t need to be asked or told—beneath his sour jocularity, he knows.

She steps forward and kisses his cheek. She says, “ ’Bye, Dad.”

FRANK MCGUIRE IS
sixty-one, eight years older than Hannah’s mother. He’s about five-ten, with both a receding hairline and thinning hair, an ample midsection, pudgy fingers, and full lips; his lower lip in particular is as soft and large as a Hollywood actress’s. During the ceremony, holding a bouquet of freesias and roses, Hannah experiences a surge of thoughts, suppressed until this moment. Do her mother and Frank have sex? Is Frank in essence buying her mother’s middle-aged beauty, and is he able to buy it only because her mother has put it up for sale? What does his gut look like unclothed, and if you have a gut like that, do you go on top or on the bottom? It seems one thing to age together gradually, like maybe the drooping and expansion would be less obvious as it occurred over the years, but to come to each other for the first time this way—don’t you feel terribly apologetic about your own shortcomings, and afraid of what the other person might unveil?

Also, what about the information you disclose? With all that has happened to you by then, you must by necessity be picking and choosing, so do you simply jettison the most excruciating parts of your past? Would Hannah’s mother ever mention to Frank that her first husband once forced her and her daughters to leave the house in the middle of the night? Does Hannah’s mother remember this? She must. Not that they would ever talk about it, but she must.

“I’M GOING TO
tell you something I haven’t told anyone,” Fig says, “but you can’t react at all.”

Hannah and Fig are sitting on the living room couch, holding plates on their laps. The food is catered, and Hannah’s mother has brought out the blue-and-white china and monogrammed silver, and all around them the other wedding guests, the majority of whom are relatives, talk noisily. The ceremony was brief, and it is now almost six and dark outside the unshut curtains. Inside, the room has a rosy glow: The glasses and silverware are shiny, and people’s cheeks are flushed, maybe because of the champagne or maybe because Mrs. Dawes, the oldest friend of Hannah and Fig’s deceased grandmother, has been dutifully included in the festivities and the thermostat has therefore been jacked up to seventy-five.

“I’m serious,” Fig adds. “No gasping.”

“Fig, just say it.”

“I’m seeing someone new,” Fig begins, and Hannah thinks,
Of course you are
and is halfway to tuning her out, and then Fig says, “and it’s Dave Risca’s sister.”

At first Hannah thinks she didn’t hear correctly. “His
sister
?” she repeats.

“What did I just tell you about reacting?”

“I’m not reacting,” Hannah says. “I’m clarifying.” Fig is dating a
woman
? “You don’t mean seeing-seeing,” Hannah says. “You mean you made out at a party.”

When Fig says, “No, I mean we’re in a relationship,” Hannah thinks how this news will force her to reconsider the world. “I ran into her a few months after I moved back to Philly,” Fig says. “We were talking on the sidewalk, and I start to get this vibe, and she asks if I want to have a drink. And then one thing led to another.”

“What does she look like?”

“She’s stylish.” In Fig’s charmed, protective tone, Hannah can hear her attraction to the woman. The relationship might be partly a lark for Fig, but not completely. “She has, like, a delicate jaw and green eyes. Her name’s Zoe.”

“Long or short hair?”

“Short.”

This relieves Hannah. It would be somehow unfair, though not unsurprising, if Fig were dating a lesbian with long blond hair. “Is it really different from being with a man?” Hannah says.

“Not especially. I always found it easier to climax through oral sex than penetration anyway.”

“Fig, ew. That wasn’t what I was asking.”

“Sure it was.” Fig smirks. “Everyone’s curious about girl on girl. How’s your sex life with Oliver?”

“Never mind,” Hannah says.

“Oliver’s cute,” Fig says, which depresses Hannah. Mostly, it depresses her because soon after she introduced Fig and Oliver—Fig is wearing a low-cut black blouse—Oliver whispered in Hannah’s ear, “Your cousin has magnificent breasts.” Probably right now, with Oliver across the living room, he and Fig are exchanging some sort of extrasensory signals that only the highly attractive are privy to:
You’re hot, bleep bleep. Yes, I know, same to you, bleep bleep. I can’t believe I’m sitting next to Hannah’s snooze of a stepfather.
In that moment when Oliver remarked on Fig’s breasts, Hannah said, “You should ask her if you can touch one,” and Oliver replied, “Why ask? It would ruin the surprise.”

“My mom thinks he’s cute, too,” Fig is saying. “Hey, Mom.”

Aunt Polly is by the fireplace, talking to Allison.

“Hannah’s boyfriend is cute, right?” Fig says.

Aunt Polly cups one ear.

“Hannah’s boyfriend,” Fig repeats and gives a thumbs-up gesture. (
Hannah’s boyfriend
—they will always be the weirdest words Hannah can imagine.
Jumbo shrimp,
she thinks.
Military intelligence.
)

“Oh, he’s fabulous, Hannah,” Aunt Polly calls. “That Australian accent!”

“Actually, New Zealand.” Hannah feels like she’s screaming.

“Allison told me you two met in the office. Let’s—” Aunt Polly angles her head to the right and points.
We’ll talk later in the kitchen,
she means.
Or at least we’ll pretend we will, so we can stop howling at each other.

“Have you noticed that Mrs. Dawes has obscenely bad breath tonight?” Fig asks, and Hannah can feel it abruptly, that she needs to check on Oliver. Maybe she has the extrasensory perception after all, maybe it’s not tied to personal hotness. Talking to her mother and Frank, Oliver has grown restless, he wants a cigarette, and he wants Hannah to keep him company while he smokes. She knows it. “It’s like she ate a garlic clove before coming over,” Fig says.

Hannah touches Fig’s forearm. “Hold on,” she says. “Sorry. I’ll be back.”

THIS IS WHY
Hannah fell for Oliver: because he took out her splinter.

She sometimes thinks to herself, as if it’s some kind of excuse, that before he became her boyfriend, she didn’t even like him. She knew him, she shared an office with him, and she didn’t like him. But does her initial resistance, given what’s happened between them, mean she’s even more of a sucker?

At work, their desks faced opposite walls, and when she’d hear him on the phone or, worse, when some youngish, attractive female colleague who often was new to the organization would come and linger in the doorway, clearly either gearing up for or giddily descending from an extra-office sexual encounter with Oliver, Hannah would ignore both him and the woman. The game of it all, the pattern of their words, the way the woman was either as jaded and crass as Oliver, or else the way she was entirely uncynical, ready to be swept away—either possibility was nauseating. Except that after a while, Hannah mostly stopped noticing. That was how much Oliver didn’t interest her, how unable he was to upset her. (Later, she felt the nostalgia of remembering the time before she took him seriously.)

One day after a woman named Gwen had stopped by—she and Oliver were, apparently, heading to a bar in Downtown Crossing that evening—Hannah said, “I just hope you know that it’s ninety percent your accent.”

“My sex appeal, you mean?” Oliver was smiling. In the space between when she’d spoken and when he’d responded, she’d imagined maybe he wouldn’t know what she was talking about, and she’d been relieved. But he did not appear offended.

“That’s not what I’d call it,” Hannah said. “But suit yourself.” If he hadn’t understood and she hadn’t offended him, she’d have stopped. The fact that he had understood and that she hadn’t offended him—yet—only meant she needed to try harder.

“Animal magnetism,” Oliver said. “You could call it that.”

“I could.”

Had they ever had a conversation before? It suddenly seemed like they hadn’t. They’d been sitting eight feet apart for four months, overhearing every word out of each other’s mouths while directly exchanging only the blandest of pleasantries:
Did you beat the rain? Enjoy the weekend!
And now she could see, he was slimy but also intelligent.

“Of course,” Oliver was saying, “you raise two questions, or two to start with. Undoubtedly, you raise many more, and we’ll have to spend the rest of our lives untangling them. But the most pressing question is, is it safe to assume you don’t include yourself in the category of women seduced by anything as superficial as an accent?”

“Obviously not,” Hannah said, “and the other ten percent is basic aggression. That was your second question, right?”

“You’re clairvoyant!” Oliver exclaimed. “Which is just as I always suspected. But aggression has predatory overtones, and I’m such a peaceful chap.”

“Assertive, then,” Hannah said. “You’re a skirt-chaser.”

“Now, that I don’t mind—it sounds charmingly old-fashioned.”

“A cad,” Hannah said. “How about that?”

“A swashbuckler.”

“In your dreams.”

“If I’m a skirt-chaser,” Oliver said, “then you must admit that every woman wants to be chased.”

“And
no
always secretly means
yes,
right? And if you’re riding the T next to a hot woman and you want to cop a feel, you should, because I’m sure she’d be totally into it.”

“
No
doesn’t always mean
yes,
” Oliver said. “But it probably does with you more than most. Under your prim exterior, I’m sure there beats the heart of a lusty animal.” In spite of herself, Hannah felt flattered, and then he added, “Perhaps a gerbil.”

Had he been waiting, these last few months, for her to start a conversation with him? Had he
wanted
to talk to her? No. He’s cocky—if he’d wanted that, he’d have initiated it. It must just have been that in the moment of her insulting him, he, too, was bored, ready for some minor conflict. It was three thirty in the afternoon, the deadest part of the office day. Why not?