The Man of My Dreams

by Curtis Sittenfeld

  He smiles. “All the girls are.”

  “The competition.” Hannah waves a hand in the air. “Forget about them.”

  “Is that right?” Ted says, and he’s still grinning, but his expression has become a mix of curiosity and surprise. He is, Hannah realizes, appraising her, and abruptly, she can’t think of anything to say.

  She glances down, then looks back up at him. “So is ten dollars okay?”

  “That depends if you want to treat half the office.”

  Hannah always offers to pay more than she knows she should, mainly out of a fear of appearing stingy. Most other people don’t object.

  “Five bucks should cover it,” Ted says. “You’ll be eating, what, two slices?” Then he adds, “You keep writing me poetry until then,” and Hannah realizes that the mood before—the weird light energy passing between them—has been replaced with awkwardness only for her, not for him.

  WHEN THE PIZZAS arrive, nine or ten people crowd into the kitchen. It turns out that only younger members of the staff are in today. Someone has ordered beer, and a bottle is passed to Hannah. “I didn’t pay for any,” she murmurs, but no one is listening, and then Lois, who is five months pregnant, hands Hannah the bottle opener. “None for me,” Lois says, patting her stomach. She is eating a slice of mushroom pizza.

  “So what are your plans for the Fourth?” Hannah asks.

  Lois has just taken a bite, and she waves her hand in front of her mouth.

  “Oh, sorry,” Hannah says.

  Lois swallows. “No major plans. Jim and I are having dinner with a few other couples.”

  “Like a potluck?” Hannah asks brightly. Inside her head, she sneers at herself. Usually, she eats lunch alone, heading to a food court in the Prudential Building for Cobb salad in a clear plastic box and a waxy cup of Sprite.

  “I suppose it’s a potluck,” Lois says. “But fancy, you know? I’m making dessert.”

  “Oh, really? What are you making?”

  “I made it last night. It’s a chocolate torte Jim’s mother gave me the recipe for.”

  “That sounds tasty,” Hannah says. She has polished off her first slice of pizza. About thirty seconds pass, during which neither she nor Lois speaks, and Hannah begins chugging her beer. It’s dark and heavy, like bitter soup.

  “Hi, girls,” Sarie says, approaching them. “How deserted is the office today?”

  “You’re telling me,” Lois says.

  “Han, you want to come over and get dressed at my place tomorrow?”

  “That’s okay,” Hannah says. “I won’t be getting too decked out.”

  “You two are hanging out for the Fourth?” Lois asks.

  “Indeed we are,” Sarie says. “My brother-in-law’s apartment has a roof deck with an awesome view of the fireworks.”

  Hannah tries not to cringe. But she hates herself for cringing—why does it matter what Lois thinks anyway?—and she just wishes to be away from both women. “I’ll be back in a second,” she says, and squeezes out of the kitchen.

  In the hall are a cluster of men Hannah hardly knows: Ted, an AV guy named Rick, a copywriter named Stefan, and a guy whose name she can’t remember. When Ted sees her, he lifts the beer out of her hand and squints at it. “Looks like you need a replacement,” he says.

  “I think one is plenty for the middle of the day,” Hannah says, but Ted has already gone into the kitchen.

  “Any day when Nailand is out is definitely not a workday,” says Stefan.

  “Didn’t Nailand come to the office the day his wife was in labor?” Rick says, and everyone laughs.

  “Actually, that’s impossible, since the Nailands adopted their child,” Hannah says.

  Ted is back by now, and at this comment, he leans over, puts an arm around her, and brings his mouth up to her ear as if to whisper. “Drink your beer,” he says in a normal voice, and the guys all crack up again.

  For lack of anything better to do, Hannah does drink the beer. The men start talking about weekend plans, where people are traveling.

  “I talked my girlfriend out of Nantucket, thank God,” Rick says. “I fuckin’ hate that scene.” Rick is the person at the agency whom Ted seems closest to, and also—this is the primary way Hannah thinks of him—someone Sarie had a fling with right when she started interning, unbeknownst to his Nantucket-loving girlfriend.

  “So who’s playing the crappy music so loud today?” asks Stefan.

  “Watch it, dude,” says Ted.

  “Does that mean it’s you?” Stefan asks.

  “Actually, no,” Ted says. “But I’m not embarrassed to say that the seventies were a beautiful time musically. Show me the man who doesn’t love ‘I Will Survive.’ ”

  “You’re kidding, right?” Hannah says. “You know that’s, like, a feminist anthem, don’t you?”

  At this, the men positively roar with laughter, although Hannah wasn’t trying to be funny.

  Ted sets his beer on the floor, walks a few steps away, turns around, and takes a breath: “ ‘First I was afraid, I was petrified / Kept thinking I could never live without you by my side…’ ”

  “Goodness,” Hannah says. She reenters the kitchen, picks up another beer, and says to Sarie and Lois, “You guys should come see this.”

  Out in the hall, Ted is prancing around singing the chorus, and the women join in, except Hannah. She’s buzzed already, she’s even kind of smiley, but she’s not drunk. She does feel pretty good, though. She rarely drinks, and then when she does, she wishes she could be tipsy all the time.

  Ted’s performance prompts the others to start singing songs they know all the words to: “Stayin’ Alive,” then “Uptown Girl.” In the excitement, Lois kicks over Ted’s half-full beer, but no one besides Hannah seems to notice as the liquid gets absorbed into the carpet. The atmosphere feels cheesily surreal: a scene from a sitcom about office life instead of a real office where, supposedly, people accomplish things during the day.

  Then Ted grabs Hannah’s shoulders from behind, whirls her around, and pulls out her arms. She laughs. But when he releases her, she stumbles backward and says, “I’ve got to get back to work.”

  “Work, huh?” Ted says. “Fat chance.” Back in the intern cubicle, the walls look like they’re shifting. She sits at her desk and grasps the mouse to the right of her computer monitor, checking her e-mail. No new messages, she sees, and shuts the account again quickly, before she mass-mails some incriminating message to the entire office—I have never in my life seen so much mediocrity amassed under one roof, or perhaps Working with all of you is like dying a very slow death—or, even worse, before she dashes off a declaration of love to Henry. Since the drive to Cape Cod over a year ago, they have exchanged sporadic and not particularly flirtatious e-mails (he once wrote to tell her there was an article in that day’s Globe about state mottoes), but the e-mails are increasing in number now that Henry lives in Korea. He was transferred in March to the Seoul office of the same consultancy he worked for in Boston.

  Less than twenty minutes have passed before Ted appears again. “Hey there,” he says, and she says “Hey” back. She feels extremely shy. It’s not that she doesn’t like the people here, she thinks. How could she not like them as individuals, standing before her with their own private tics and appetites, their intermittent gestures of friendliness? No, like this, like Ted is now, they’re fine. She’d have to be cruel not to think they were fine. She just hadn’t expected that offices—adulthood—would seem so ordinary.

  “So the day is pretty much shot,” Ted says. “We’re heading over to Rick’s if you want to come.”

  “Where does Rick live?” Hannah asks, which feels like a pleasant way to turn down the invitation without turning it down.

  “In the North End. And you’re in Somerville, right? You can catch the T again at Haymarket to get home.”

  Hannah is astonished that he knows where she’s living this summer. “Just give me a minute,” she says.

  It is thre
e thirty by the time they’re all out on the street: Hannah, Ted, Rick, Stefan, and Sarie. The T is weirdly crowded for midday, and they joke that the rest of Boston has been playing hooky while they’ve worked. They are talking loudly, but everyone else seems to be talking loudly, too. An electricity is in the air, the anticipation of the holiday weekend.

  Rick’s girlfriend isn’t home when they get there. The apartment has a black leather sofa and upside-down milk crates for tables. What an awful combination, Hannah thinks. Then, based on the sofa, she finds herself wondering how much Rick makes.

  Stefan and Ted are discussing what to get from the liquor store down the street, and Rick gives them directions. When they’ve left, he goes into the bedroom to change, and Hannah and Sarie sit on the sofa. “Did I tell you about the Puerto Rican dude who called today?” Sarie says.

  “I think I heard you on the phone,” Hannah says.

  “It was so annoying. He was looking for some girl named Margaret, and I kept being like, ‘There’s no intern here by that name.’ And he’d be like, ‘Please to give me Miss Margaret?’ ”

  Hannah reaches forward and picks up an issue of Sports Illustrated from the milk crate in front of her. She starts paging through it, looking at the ads.

  Sarie keeps talking. As the story progresses, the caller changes from Puerto Rican to Mexican. After four minutes, Hannah glances at her watch and wonders if they all would think she was really strange for the rest of the summer if she got up right now and left.

  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 meeti
ng 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.