The Man of My Dreams

by Curtis Sittenfeld

  Less than five minutes have passed when Hannah hears the front door open again. There are two people, a guy and a girl, both of them laughing and whispering. Soon they are not even whispering, just speaking in low voices. The girl, Hannah realizes, is Jenny, and she assumes the guy is Dave, the one from the kitchen.

  “I left it inside the sleeve of my coat, so if it fell out, it should be on the closet floor,” Jenny says. “But don’t turn on the light. Hannah’s sleeping.”

  They are quiet for a while, and when Dave speaks, his voice is different—it is thicker. “Do you even have a hat?” he says.

  Jenny laughs. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “What do you think it’s supposed to mean?” This must be when he touches Jenny’s forehead or her neck. “It’s okay if you don’t,” he says. “I like being alone with you.”

  “I swear it’s here somewhere,” Jenny says. Her voice is different, too, softer and slower. The apartment is silent—Hannah feels as if she’s holding her breath—and then there is the slight smack of their lips meeting, the rub of their clothes.

  To Hannah’s horror, they move from near the closet onto the other couch. They don’t talk much, and soon they’re both breathing more quickly. Hannah can hear snaps being pulled apart. After several minutes, Jenny says, “No, it fastens in the front.” Their feet point toward Hannah’s head, separated from her by only a few inches of cushions and the armrests of the two couches. “You’re sure she’s asleep, right?” Dave says, and Jenny says, “She went out like a light.” Hannah wonders if Jenny really believes this.

  There is more rubbing around. It seems to last for a long time, fifteen minutes maybe, though Hannah has not opened her eyes since Jenny and Dave entered the apartment and has no idea what time it is. A zipper comes undone, and after a few seconds, Dave says quietly, “You like this, don’t you?”

  Actually, Jenny’s moans sound like weeping, except that clearly they aren’t. But there is something soft and mournful, something infantile, in the noises she makes. Please just don’t have an orgasm, Hannah thinks. Please. She finds that she herself is crying. One at a time, the tears fall from between her squeezed eyelids in long drops, tip off her chin, and settle around her collarbone.

  Dave murmurs, “You’re so hot.”

  Jenny says nothing, and even through her tears, Hannah is surprised by this. It seems like Jenny should acknowledge the compliment. Not by saying thank you, necessarily, but by saying something.

  “Hold on a second,” Jenny says suddenly, and her voice is almost normal. They shift, and Jenny rises from the couch.

  After a minute, the sound of vomiting is clearly audible from the bathroom. “Holy shit,” Dave says. He stands and walks toward the noise.

  Hannah opens her eyes and exhales. She wishes she could move into one of the bedrooms, even the outside hall—she doesn’t care. But if she moves in their absence, they will know she was awake all along and maybe it will seem like she wanted to overhear them.

  At the approach of footsteps, she snaps her eyes shut. She assumes the footsteps are Dave’s, but it is Jenny who hisses, “Hannah. Hannah!”

  Hannah makes a grumbling noise.

  “Wake up,” Jenny says. “I just got sick. And I’m hooking up with this guy. He’s in the bathroom cleaning it up. Oh God, I want to get out of here. Can we leave? Let’s leave.”

  “And go where?”

  “Back to school. I have Kim’s keys. And you can drive, right? You didn’t have that much to drink?”

  “If we leave, how will Kim and everyone get back?”

  “We can go by the bar and pick them up. And if they don’t want to come, which I’m sure they won’t, we can get them tomorrow.”

  “But what about this guy?”

  “Oh God. I don’t know what I’m doing with him. He just tried to kiss me in the bathroom, after I threw up. I was like, are you out of your mind? So let’s go. Can we go?”

  Hannah props herself up on her elbows. “The car’s not stick, right? Because I can’t drive—”

  Jenny pushes her down. “He’s coming. Go back to sleep.”

  “Hey,” Hannah hears Jenny say. “Talk about a party foul.”

  “Not a problem,” Dave says. “It happens to all of us.”

  “You know what?” Jenny says. “I’m going to call it a night and head back.”

  “Are you serious?”

  “I just feel like it would be better.”

  “Don’t worry about this,” he says. “You should stay.”

  “I really think I want to go. Hannah, wake up.” How can Jenny refuse Dave? He will accept her, vomit and all, and she is refusing him. It doesn’t seem gross to Hannah that he tried to kiss Jenny after she threw up; it seems kind.

  “We don’t have to do anything,” Dave is saying. “We could just sleep.” He’s saying it in a light way, as if acting casual will be more likely to convince Jenny.

  “Another time,” Jenny says. “Hey, sleepyhead Hannah.”

  For the third time tonight, Hannah pretends to awaken. Now that Jenny knows she is faking, Hannah wonders if Jenny realizes she is acting exactly the way she did the other times.

  “We’re taking off,” Jenny says. “You get to sleep in your own bed.”

  “Okay.” Hannah sits up and glances at Dave. “Hi,” she says.

  “Hi.” He is watching Jenny as she pulls on her coat.

  Jenny tosses the keys to Hannah. As Hannah retrieves her coat from the closet, Jenny hugs Dave. “Great to meet you,” she says.

  “When you guys come back, you should stay for longer,” Dave says.

  “Definitely.” Jenny nods. “That’d be fun.”

  Then they are out in the hallway, the door to the apartment shut, Dave left inside. Jenny grips Hannah’s wrist and whispers, “That guy was so cheesy.”

  “I thought he seemed pretty nice.”

  “He was creepy. If we’d woken up together, he would have said he loved me.”

  Hannah says nothing.

  “You were smart to go to sleep,” Jenny says. “Good decision.”

  Decision? Hannah thinks incredulously. I didn’t decide anything. Then she thinks, Did I?

  They reach the car. It is freezing outside, the air icy. The bar is at the bottom of the hill, and Hannah keeps the motor running while Jenny hurries in to tell the other girls that they’re leaving. Hannah suspects the girls will be angry, but Kim appears in the window of the bar, smiling and waving. Hannah waves back.

  “We’re supposed to call them tomorrow afternoon,” Jenny says as she climbs in again. “But probably we don’t need to come get them until Sunday morning. You’ll drive back with me, won’t you?”

  The request surprises Hannah—it seems she has not behaved so oddly tonight that Jenny plans to drop her altogether. This fact should probably make Hannah grateful.

  They take only one wrong turn before finding the highway. Few other cars are out—it is after three, Hannah sees when she looks at the digital clock on the dashboard—and shadowy clumps of trees line either side of the road. Michelle’s car drives smoothly, so smoothly that when Hannah looks at the speedometer, she sees that she is going almost twenty miles over the limit. She knows she should slow down, but there is something heartening in the movement of the car. She realizes that she was disappointed to leave. Underneath it all, she must have harbored some secret belief that the others would return from the bar, that Todd would have tired of Michelle, and that she, Hannah, would end up making out with him—that, by the end of the night, she would have kissed someone. But now she is glad to be gone. If she and Todd ran into each other tomorrow on the street, he probably wouldn’t recognize her.

  As her disappointment fades, so does her resentment toward Jenny. It would be unnerving for a guy to say he loved you a few hours after meeting. Only in theory does it sound appealing. Either way, it is difficult for Hannah to imagine such an event in her own life. She wonders how long it will be before she kisses someone,
before she has sex, before a guy tells her he loves her. She wonders if these delays are due to something she does that other girls don’t do, or something they do that she doesn’t. Maybe she will never kiss anyone. By the time she is old, she will be as rare as a coelacanth: a fish, according to her Evolutionary Biology textbook, that was thought to have gone extinct seventy million years ago until one was found off Madagascar in the 1930s, and then again in a marketplace in Indonesia. She will be lobe-finned and blue-scaled and soundless, gliding alone through dark water.

  Half an hour elapses in silence. Just after they pass a sign advertising a truck stop at the next exit, Jenny says, “Want some coffee? My treat.”

  “Do you want some?” Hannah says. She doesn’t drink coffee.

  “If you don’t mind.”

  Hannah puts on the turn signal and pulls off the highway. From the end of the exit, she can see a blazing hundred-foot sign featuring the name of the truck stop, and a mostly empty parking lot aglow with light. She waits for the stoplight to change.

  “Weird,” Jenny says. “I’m having déjà vu.”

  “About the truck stop?”

  “About everything. This car, you driving.”

  “Déjà vu is when your eyes absorb a situation faster than your brain,” Hannah says. “That’s what I read somewhere.” Jenny doesn’t respond, and then—Hannah can feel herself blurting this out, talking quickly and breathlessly—she says, “But that’s such a boring explanation. It’s so clinical. Sometimes I think about, like, ten years from now, I think, what if I get married and have kids and I live in a house and what if some night my husband and I are making dinner and I’m chopping vegetables or something and I have déjà vu? What if I’m like, oh, wait, this is all familiar? I just think that would be really weird, because it would be like I always knew that things were going to end up okay. I knew that I would turn out happy.” Hannah’s heart is pounding. “That probably sounds strange,” she says.

  “No.” Jenny seems very serious in this moment, almost sad. “It doesn’t sound strange at all.”

  They turn in to the parking lot. Advertisements for a sale on two-liters of soda hang in the window, and behind the counter, Hannah can see two women in red smocks. The whole complex seems to buzz with electricity.

  “I haven’t hooked up with that many guys,” Hannah says.

  Jenny laughs softly. “You’re lucky,” she says.

  3

  April 1997

  RIDING THE T back to school after her appointment with Dr. Lewin, Hannah takes notes on their conversation. Jared probably flattered, she writes. Why freakish gesture? Why not thoughtful? She is using her Islamic Art notebook, and in the dorm, she’ll rip out the paper and stick the notes in the manila file she keeps in the top drawer of her desk. When enough pieces of paper have accumulated, Hannah will, she hopes, understand the secret of happiness. It is not clear how long this will take, but so far Hannah has been seeing Dr. Lewin for a year, every Friday afternoon since her freshman spring. Dr. Lewin charges Hannah ninety dollars an hour, a seemingly outrageous amount that actually reflects a sliding-fee scale. To cover this cost without asking either of her parents for money—that is, without telling her parents she is seeing a psychiatrist—Hannah has gotten a job shelving books in the veterinary library. “What are you worried it will make them think?” Dr. Lewin once asked, and Hannah said, “I just don’t want to talk about it with them. I don’t see the point.”

  Dr. Lewin is in her late thirties, trim and fit; Hannah guesses she is a runner. She has dark curly hair that she keeps short, fair skin, and intense blue eyes. She favors white or striped button-down shirts and black pants. They meet in the finished basement of Dr. Lewin’s large gray stucco house in Brookline. According to the diplomas on the wall in Dr. Lewin’s office, she attended Wellesley College, graduating summa cum laude, and went on to medical school at Johns Hopkins University. Hannah has a hunch Dr. Lewin is Jewish, though Lewin does not sound to Hannah like a Jewish name. Dr. Lewin has two elementary-school-age sons who appear to be adopted, perhaps from Central or South America—in the framed photo on Dr. Lewin’s desk, they have caramel-colored skin. Hannah knows nothing of Dr. Lewin’s husband. At times she imagines him as a fellow psychiatrist, a man Dr. Lewin met at Hopkins who admired her intelligence and seriousness, but at other times (Hannah has a preference for this version) Hannah imagines him as a sexy carpenter, a smoldering guy with a tool belt who also, though in a different way, admires Dr. Lewin’s intelligence and seriousness.

  The subject they talked about in today’s session was how Hannah gave a bottle of cough syrup to a guy in her sociology class named Jared. It’s a small class, only twelve students, and the professor is an earnest bearded guy who wears jeans. The students all sit around a large table, and Hannah and Jared usually sit next to each other and never talk, though a benign energy sometimes passes between them; she suspects he is noticing the same things she is, finding the same other students amusing or annoying. Jared dresses in a very particular style that is possibly punk or possibly gay: large red or navy or olive denim shorts that are much longer than normal shorts, hanging well past his knees; white tube socks that he pulls up over his thin ankles and calves; suede sneakers; and nylon warm-up jackets that zip in the front and have vertical white stripes on the arms. If you leave the classroom behind him, you can see a silver chain running between a back pocket and a front pocket, conspicuously connecting something Hannah isn’t sure of (a wallet?) to something else she isn’t sure of (keys? a pocket watch?). He has dyed black hair and she sees him around campus on a skateboard, with other guys who dress about like he does, and with a girl who has her right eyebrow pierced.

  What made Hannah give Jared the cough syrup was, logically enough, that he was coughing a lot for several classes in a row. Sitting next to him one day, Hannah had a sudden memory of a bottle of cough syrup in a box in her dorm closet, left over from when she would take it to get to sleep. (She stopped last year around the time she became friends with Jenny, which is also the time she found a therapist.) The bottle still had a clear seal over the cap; the syrup was cherry flavored. When Hannah placed it in her backpack before the next class, she noticed that the expiration date on it had passed, but whatever, right? It wasn’t like it was milk. She gave it to him as they were leaving the classroom—when she said, a few steps behind him, “Jared?” it was the first time she had used his name—and he seemed first mildly confused and then, after she explained, mildly pleased. He thanked her and turned again and kept walking. They did not begin walking together, not even just out of the building. The next time the class met, which was today, he said nothing to her, in fact they never made eye contact, which Hannah thinks might be unprecedented for them. As the minutes of the class ticked away, Hannah felt a building, billowing regret, practically a nausea. Why is she so fucking weird? Why did she give this punky boy she’s never talked to expired cough syrup? Did she think she was flirting? Also, what if the expiration date on cough syrup actually does matter and there was gross cherry mold floating inside when he opened the bottle, if he opened the bottle, although he probably wouldn’t have and his cough is merely from using some kind of new club drug Hannah has never heard of.

  Listening to all of this, Dr. Lewin remained, as always, unfazed: less concerned with discussing whether Jared now sees Hannah as strange than why Hannah herself thinks she wanted to give him the cough syrup, why Jared would have interpreted the syrup as anything other than a gesture of kindness, and what non-syrup-related reasons might have caused him not to make eye contact with Hannah during today’s class.

  “You want me to name actual reasons?” Hannah asked.

  Dr. Lewin nodded calmly. (Oh, Dr. Lewin, Hannah sometimes thinks, let it be true that you’re as decent and well adjusted as you appear! Let the life you have put together be genuinely gratifying, make you exempt from all the nuisances and sorrows of everyone else.)

  “I don’t know—maybe if he was tired because he sta
yed up all night writing a paper,” Hannah said. “Or if he had a disagreement with his roommate.”

  Both perfectly plausible, Dr. Lewin said. Also, she did not see a reason for Hannah to announce to Jared in class this coming Monday, in case he hadn’t noticed it, the fact of the cough syrup’s expiration. Dr. Lewin considered there to be no major health risk, and she is, after all, a doctor.

  The way Hannah ended up seeing Dr. Lewin was by calling the Tufts student health services center and getting a referral. What prompted her to call the student health services center—who prompted her—was Elizabeth. They talk on the phone every few months, and once Elizabeth called on a Friday at seven P.M. and awakened Hannah. “You’re taking a nap?” Elizabeth asked, and Hannah said, “Sort of.” That Sunday, Elizabeth called again and said, “I want to tell you something, and you have to understand this isn’t a comment on your personality, which is spectacular. I think you’re depressed and you should find a therapist.” Hannah did not reply immediately, and Elizabeth said, “Are you offended?” “No,” Hannah said. She wasn’t. The possibility that she was depressed had occurred to her; what hadn’t occurred to her was to do anything about it. “Some therapists are real weenies,” Elizabeth said. “But the right one can make a difference.” Dr. Lewin was the first person Hannah called from the list she received, and she liked her right away. In fact, Dr. Lewin initially reminded Hannah of Elizabeth, but as time passed, Hannah saw that this was a false association, no doubt sprung from the circumstances of her seeking therapy, and the two women were not particularly similar at all.

  By the time Hannah is back in her room, it is nearly six o’clock. She opens the top desk drawer, inserts the new piece of notebook paper into the manila file, slides the drawer shut, and sits there a minute at the desk, motionless. She is scheduled to work in the veterinary library tonight, a prospect that makes her think, Thank God. Friday-night intimidation, the impulse to hide in her room, doesn’t overtake her as easily if she knows there’s a place she’s supposed to be later on. She can sometimes swing by the cafeteria, not to eat a real meal, but she’ll pick up an apple or a granola bar. And then, in the library, sliding the books in their clear plastic sheaths onto the metal shelves, tidying the gray or pale blue periodicals, the table of contents on their covers listing the articles—“Equine Arthroscopic Surgery of the Musculoskeletal System”—in the quiet stacks, in the unstrenuously preoccupying and repetitive activity of those moments, Hannah is almost peaceful.