The Man of My Dreams

by Curtis Sittenfeld

  Oliver pauses by the door before carrying the trash bag out to the back porch and says, “Fig, don’t be naughty.” Hannah was right a million years ago—that it really is his accent.

  Aunt Polly says, “Caitlin, the duck was fantastic. Were there cherries in the glaze?” At the same time, Hannah hears Fig say to Oliver—quietly but not that quietly—“Maybe I should be spanked for my bad behavior.”

  “Cherries and also apples,” Hannah’s mother is explaining as Oliver steps outside. Really, it is all Hannah can do not to jump up and lock the door. “I wondered if it would be too sweet, but the caterer said it’s one of their most popular dishes.”

  “I’ll bet,” Aunt Polly says.

  “The other way they prepare it is sort of Asian-style, with cabbage and snow peas and whatnot”—here, Oliver reenters the kitchen—“but I was afraid that might be a little outré for Mrs. Dawes. She isn’t the most adventurous of eaters. Hannah, was it you or Allison who offered her hummus that time and she just didn’t know what to make of it?”

  “I don’t remember,” Hannah says, and she is barely listening because she is watching—this is only half surprising—as Oliver creeps up behind Fig, pulls at the neck of her blouse, and drops a snowball down her back.

  Fig shrieks, and Hannah stands. “Just quit it,” she says.

  They all turn toward her. Fig is groping behind her back, and Oliver’s expression—the heat must still be turned way up—is one of sweaty glee.

  “Don’t bother,” Hannah says. “It’s a waste of your time. She’s batting for the other team.”

  No one reacts at all. Hannah can’t help making eye contact with Fig for about a second. Fig appears confused. Hannah glances back at Oliver. A look of curiosity has replaced his glee.

  “She’s a”—Hannah pauses—“a dyke.” She has never used this word before. She is hideous to herself. Her disloyalty to Fig and her prejudice are unattractive, but her awkward delivery is truly grotesque. They are staring at her, the five of them. In the end, there is nothing so strange as a human face. And several at once—how did all of them arrive at this dreadful moment?

  “That’s why you shouldn’t hit on her,” she says to Oliver as she backs out of the room. “Not because she’s my cousin.”

  THE RULES FOR Oliver are:

  He cannot hire prostitutes.

  He can have sex with the same woman twice but not more than twice.

  He can receive oral sex but not perform it.

  He has to use condoms.

  He has to take a shower before he meets up with Hannah again.

  Does she believe he abides by any rules apart from the shower one? Most of the time, of course not. Please. He probably does nothing except eat out hookers, and Hannah herself is probably filthy with STDs.

  At other times, she doesn’t think the rules are so unrealistic. It seems possible they offer enough wiggle room even for Oliver. Once Hannah looked up sex addicts online, but after glancing at a couple of websites, she just felt weary. What does it matter if that’s what Oliver is? Or if he’s an alcoholic? Call it what you like—his behavior is the way it is, he has no plans to change it. It’s not like he hates himself, at least no more than everyone else hates themselves. He just happens not to believe in monogamy.

  This is the rule for her (there’s only one):

  She is allowed to ask him anything as long as she remembers that the answer won’t make a difference; as long as she remembers that it’s better for them both if she doesn’t act on this privilege but saves it, like a coupon, for an indefinite future; as long as really, in point of fact, she never asks him anything.

  The first time this all came up was the second week Hannah and Oliver were together. After eating lunch outside, they’d walked into their office, and when she sat down at her desk, he said, “Turn around. I want to tell you something.” He seemed nervous in the way of someone who urgently needs to urinate. “You know the skirt-chasing?” he said.

  “The what?”

  “Debbie Fenster gave me a blow job this morning.”

  She thought he was kidding. She didn’t think it completely, but she thought it more than, at first, she thought he was serious. She said, “Here?”

  “In the handicapped bathroom.”

  What she felt more than sadness or anger was distaste. Debbie had been kneeling in there, on that dirty tile floor? Hannah knew the bathroom well; it was the one she preferred because the regular women’s bathroom had multiple stalls, but this one allowed you to use the toilet alone, in peace. And what, had Oliver’s ass been pressed against the grimy wall? Under neon lights, at ten A.M., or whenever it had been?

  “What do you think?” he said.

  “I think it’s gross.”

  “Are you breaking up with me?” he asked. Neither of them had, since Newport, used the terms boyfriend or girlfriend; they’d just been sending flirty e-mails to each other from a few feet apart, going to bars after work (getting drunk with Oliver, especially on a weeknight, seemed festive then), and spending the night together. That short week she’d felt uncomfortably happy.

  “I’d be kind of stupid if I didn’t break up with you,” she said. “Don’t you think?” It occurred to her that she should feel more devastated than she did. Receiving the news was strange and unpleasant but not devastating.

  He was still standing there, regarding her anxiously, and then he swooped forward, knelt, and placed his face in her lap, his arms around her calves. The door to their office was open; she could hear two of their coworkers talking about soccer from perhaps twelve feet away.

  “Get up,” she said, which she didn’t want him to do at all.

  He pressed his nose against her pubic bone.

  “Oliver—” Although she’d have been genuinely mortified if anyone walked into their office, she did love this inappropriate posture. And then she saw a flashing image of Debbie Fenster kneeling before Oliver, not unlike the way he was at present kneeling before Hannah. “Really,” Hannah said. “Get up.”

  When he lifted his face and rocked back so his weight rested on his heels, she stood. “I’m leaving for the day. If anyone is looking for me, say I had a doctor’s appointment. This is too weird.” From the doorway, she said, “I know you gave me fair warning in Newport. But it’s still weird.”

  They did not talk the rest of that day or night, and when she got to work the next morning, ahead of him, there was an envelope with her name on it set on her keyboard. Not a business envelope but one for a card, which, when she opened it, turned out to have on its front a dark-hued painting from 1863, of a kingfisher. Inside, in his customary capital letters, it said, DEAR HANNAH, PLEASE FORGIVE ME FOR NOT BEING GOOD ENOUGH FOR YOU. LOVE, YOUR RECALCITRANT OFFICEMATE, OLIVER. Only after several weeks did it occur to her that the note might have represented his gracious farewell, that he believed it was over between them. She had been the one to see the Debbie Fenster incident as a temporary flare-up. But even realizing this, she does not regret her lack of harshness toward him. Harshness then would have felt like a resolution rather than an organic reaction.

  Later that day, as they sat at their desks, Hannah asked enough questions to figure out what the basic routine would be, and then she established her ground rules. The conversation was much less fraught than she’d have imagined; maybe it was the setting, but it felt awfully similar to an amicable business agreement, complete with moments of levity.

  LYING ON HER back atop the bedspread, Hannah hears a knock and then the door opens, yellow light from the hall bisects the bedroom, the door closes again, and Fig is saying, not in a deferential whisper but in a normal voice, “You’re awake, right?” Up until the moment Fig speaks, Hannah still thinks the person might be Oliver. (All women want to be chased.) Is he out in the backyard now, smoking pot with Fig’s brother? Or still in the kitchen, regaling her mother and aunt with tales about life as a Kiwi?

  But maybe this is what Hannah has always wanted: a man who will deny her. A man of he
r own who isn’t hers. Isn’t it the real reason she broke up with Mike—not because he moved to North Carolina for law school (he wanted her to go with him, and she said no) but because he adored her? If she asked him to get out of bed and bring her a glass of water, he did. If she was in a bad mood, he tried to soothe her. It didn’t bother him if she cried, or if she didn’t wash her hair or shave her legs or have anything interesting to say. He forgave it all, he always thought she was beautiful, he always wanted to be around her. It became so boring! She’d been raised, after all, not to be accommodated but to accommodate, and if she was his world, then his world was small, he was easily satisfied. After a while, when he parted her lips with his tongue, she’d think, Thrash, thrash, here we go. She wanted to feel like she was striving cleanly forward, walking into a bracing wind and learning from her mistakes, and she felt instead like she was sitting on a deep, squishy sofa, eating Cheetos, in an overheated room. With Oliver, there is always contrast to shape their days, tension to keep them on their toes: You are far from me, you are close to me. We are fighting, we are getting along.

  Hannah has not responded to Fig, and without warning, Fig flings herself onto the bed next to Hannah. As Fig rearranges the pillows, she says, “So I didn’t know dyke was in your vocabulary. Pretty racy.”

  “I’m sorry about outing you to our moms,” Hannah says. “Now will you leave?”

  “My mom already knew, and yours did, too,” Fig says. This shouldn’t come as a surprise. When Fig said earlier that she hadn’t told anyone, she didn’t really mean anyone. Probably she herself told Oliver, and probably he ate it up. “They both read some article in Newsweek about bisexual dabbling, so they’ve decided that’s what this is.”

  “Is it?”

  “Well, I’ve been dating Zoe since June. What do you think?”

  “You’ve been dating Zoe since June? That’s twice as long as I’ve been dating Oliver.”

  “How about that?” Fig says. “Maybe I really am a big lesbo.”

  “Fig, if you are, I’ll support you. Obviously, there’s nothing wrong with being gay.”

  “Whatever,” Fig says, and she seems to mean it. How does she go so unanxiously about her life? For some reason, Hannah thinks of the summer after they were in fourth grade, when the public library sponsored a program for girls in which, if you read biographies of all the first ladies, your name was printed on a paper star and pinned to the corkboard in the children’s section. (If you were a boy, you read about the presidents.) Hannah loved these books, their cheerful, orderly recounting of lives—Martha Washington was a poor speller, Bess Truman threw the shot put—and by August she’d read all the way up to Nancy Reagan. Meanwhile, Fig, whose dyslexia would not be diagnosed for several years, was stalled around Abigail Fillmore. For Hannah, things had seemed good then, it had seemed like she was headed somewhere.

  “Anyway,” Fig says, “I came to tell you Oliver and I were just joking around. It was totally harmless.”

  Hannah says nothing.

  “And it wasn’t like anything was going to happen,” Fig adds.

  Both of them are quiet for nearly a minute, and then Hannah says, “He cheats on me all the time. It’s not even like it’s cheating. It’s our normal lives. It’s like saying that I’m breathing oxygen, or, oh, I think I’ll go swimming in water.”

  “He’s having an affair or it’s different women?”

  “The second one.”

  “I know I haven’t always been the poster girl for fidelity, but maybe you should dump him.”

  “Lately,” Hannah says, “I’ve been thinking I’ll marry him.”

  “You just think that because he’s the first guy you’ve gone out with since Mike. You’ve always taken men far too seriously.”

  “That’s easy for you to say now.” And yet this assessment is not inaccurate. All these years, Hannah has seen Fig as defined by men and her attractiveness to them, and that is part of why it’s shocking—almost wasteful—that Fig is now involved with a woman. But in reality, perhaps it is Hannah who has allowed herself to be defined by men: first by worrying about what it meant that she wasn’t dating them, then by making up new worries when she was.

  “If you won’t break up with Oliver,” Fig says, “at least you should confront him.”

  “He knows I know. We’ve talked about it plenty.”

  “No shit—you’re in an open relationship?”

  “I’m not sure I’d call it that. It’s not open for me. On the plane, I asked him to restrain himself here, and I was thinking of you. I didn’t want to mention you specifically because I didn’t want to plant the idea in his head, but I was thinking of you.”

  “Hannah, give me some credit. When we were teenagers, I might’ve kissed him or something, but it’s not like I would now.”

  “Well, he definitely would have kissed you. And I almost admire him for how he acts—for not altering his behavior depending on circumstances. I mean, he was pawing you in front of my mom. If he behaves this badly, isn’t that a form of honesty?”

  “You’re cutting him a lot of slack,” Fig says. “There are decent guys out there.”

  “Yeah, and I used to be going out with one. When Frank and I were at Mrs. Dawes’s house, I was thinking about how Oliver would never take care of me if I were old and feeble. And then I was thinking, hell, Oliver wouldn’t even help me take care of someone else, like my mom. But Mike was a total caretaker, and I had complaints about him, too. Oliver and I have a good time together. It’s not as if it sucks nonstop. Maybe this is the best I can do.”

  “Oh my God,” Fig says. “That’s so depressing.” She turns her head to look at Hannah. “Don’t take this the wrong way, but it’s time for you to lose your low-self-esteem shtick. It’s gotten kind of stale, you know what I mean?”

  “I don’t have low self-esteem,” Hannah says.

  “Right.”

  “I don’t,” Hannah says.

  “Listen carefully,” Fig says, “because I’m only doing this once. You have a lot of integrity. That’s one of your good qualities. And you’re not fake. Probably you’d enjoy yourself more if you were fake, but you’re not. You’re very reliable and trustworthy. You’re not that funny—no offense—but you do have a good sense of humor, and you appreciate other people’s funniness. You’re just overall a sturdy presence, and that’s something very few people are.”

  “Please tell me,” Hannah says, “that you mean a steady presence.”

  “That’s what I said.”

  “You said sturdy, which is what a dining room table is.”

  “Hannah, I’m heaping compliments on you. Quit pretending you don’t realize it. Oh, also, when you rescued me from my creepy professor on Cape Cod, that was one of the top three nicest things anyone ever did for me. I knew I should call you that day because you were the only person who would just get in the car without making me go through some massive explanation.”

  “Yeah, but then I abandoned you when you went to see Philip Lake.”

  “Who’s Philip Lake?” Fig says.

  “Are you serious? He’s that man in L.A., the man of your dreams.”

  “No, I knew the name was familiar.”

  “Don’t you wonder what became of him?”

  “Not particularly,” Fig says.

  They both are quiet.

  “As long as we’re soul-baring,” Hannah says, “I should also tell you that the Cape Cod rescue mission was the beginning of my obsession with Henry. I had a huge crush on him for years after that.”

  Fig sits straight up in bed. Hannah assumes her cousin is angry—in spite of time and everything else, Fig is angry—but she sounds practically joyful when she says, “Of course! I can completely see you and Henry together. We should call him right now.”

  Hannah pulls her back down toward the mattress. “Fig, I haven’t been in touch with Henry for years. I lost track of him when he was living in Seoul.” She pauses. “Do you even have his number?”

&n
bsp; “I’m sure I can get it. I think he’s in Chicago now. This is so perfect. I was always way too insane for him, but you guys would definitely be compatible. I can’t believe I didn’t think of this before. Did I ever tell you he has a huge penis? He’ll rearrange your internal organs, but you’ll enjoy every minute of it.”

  “You seem to be forgetting that I already have a boyfriend.”

  “I thought we just decided you’re breaking up with Oliver.”

  “You decided it. Anyway, why are you so sure Henry would want to date me?”

  “This is exactly what I mean,” Fig says. “Enough with the defeatist crap. Why not assume from now on, until you have evidence to the contrary, that every man you meet finds you irresistible?”

  Lying next to Fig—their heads are now on the same pillow—Hannah cannot help smiling. “So that’s your secret,” she says. “I always wondered.”

  HANNAH DOESN’T LEAVE her room again before going to bed, and she sleeps fitfully. Each time she wakes up, the idea of having to face her mother, Frank, or Aunt Polly after her outburst seems increasingly mortifying. Oliver she doesn’t worry about—she knows by now she’s incapable of offending him.

  She rises at seven thirty, thinking she will eat a quick bowl of cereal before anyone else is up, and finds her mother already in the kitchen, standing at the sink in her pink quilted bathrobe and fiddling with one of the bouquets from the wedding. Immediately, it is clear that her mother is willing to pretend that Hannah did not mar the festivities last night with her personal vileness. “You cut the stems on the diagonal so they stay fresh,” her mother says and holds out a single flower toward Hannah, stem first. “Like so,” her mother says. “And you want to change the water in the vase if it starts getting cloudy.”

  Hannah nods. Her mother has always been a font of tidbits useful for a life Hannah is pretty sure she’ll never have: Don’t use too harsh a cleaning agent on marble; when you’re stacking good china, put a flat paper towel on top of every plate.

  “You just missed your sister going for a walk,” her mother says. “Would you think of saying to her that she should be careful exercising in this kind of temperature, especially while she’s pregnant?”