The Man of My Dreams

by Curtis Sittenfeld

  After the game, we drove home to Chicago, and Bill fell asleep in the backseat, and Henry and I were listening to a classic-rock station, and it was a warm night in early fall. We were talking about the situation with Henry’s sister and then about a new building going up near his apartment. We weren’t talking about Dana; those conversations had already become unbearable to me, embedded as they were with the potential to be either exciting or heartbreaking, and on this night it all just felt ordinary and calm. I stuck my hand out the window so the air pressed against my palm, and I felt in that moment that I could never love anyone more than I loved Henry.

  I loved how he was both a good driver and a relaxed driver; how he’d gotten me a giant foam finger at the ballpark; how he’d cared that I’d come to the game, he’d wanted me to come; how in the first week after I’d moved to Chicago, he’d taught me to open a bottle of wine, to parallel-park, and to say “You’re a tricky bastard” in Spanish, and how these seemed like long-overdue skills that you’d need for a life of happy situations; how, after I said that in high school my sister trained me to sing the Rolling Stones song “Under My Thumb” by replacing all the she and her pronouns with he and him, he sang the song that way, too, unprompted, the next time we heard it on the radio; how he looked cute in his plaid shirt with the pearl snaps and he looked cute in a Brooks Brothers tie and he looked cute when he met me after playing basketball at the gym, still all sweaty, and how he had the good kind of fingers, fingers that are the same width at the top and bottom instead of tapering up; how he knew me really well, and how, once when we ate at an outdoor restaurant, he said, “You can take the far chair,” because one of the things he knew was that I didn’t like having my back to the street. Later, when I’d think of how I ought to cut Henry off, I’d think of teaching another person to know me like he did, and it seemed—with a hypothetical person, especially—like it would be a lot of work.

  That night all I wanted in the world was to sit in the front seat next to Henry, driving home from a baseball game in Milwaukee. Back in the city, he dropped off Bill first, even though it was out of the way, because he always dropped off anyone besides me first. Outside my building, he put the car in park and we talked for ten more minutes, still about basically nothing, and I wanted to touch him so badly that I felt like I wasn’t a body, I was just an aching propulsive meteor, and then abruptly he said, “I’m beat. I gotta hit the sack.” He always was the one who made us part, who could; I just couldn’t. Once I was inside my building, it was terrible to still be a meteor. I was alone with all my pent-up energy.

  I believed, except in the dreadful moments when I didn’t believe this at all, that Henry and Dana would break up and he and I would enter a relationship that would lead to marriage, except that I was afraid when he first kissed me, the fact of our being friends would make me more rather than less tense, and after we kissed tensely, he might, unaware that the situation would improve, never want to kiss me again. But the main thing was that I was sure about Henry, certain my real life had finally started, and all that had come before had been preamble.

  One Saturday in winter when Dana had gone to Washington, D.C., to visit her parents, Henry and I went snowshoeing—this was his idea—and that night we made tacos and drank beer and sat in his apartment listening to Bruce Springsteen. At three in the morning, while I was slumped on the couch with my feet propped on the coffee table and he was sprawled on the floor, I said, “Henry, sometimes I feel like things are weird between us.” No one had ever explained to me that such conversations are futile, that you go ahead and kiss him because what’s a discussion compared to your warm and moving lips? The guy could still reject you, of course, but he’d be rejecting you because he didn’t want to kiss you back, which is a truer reason than anything that can be put into words.

  Henry was quiet, and the moment was huge, it still contained two outcomes, and then he said, “I sometimes do, too,” and even though this was an affirmation of sorts, I could tell immediately that the rest of the conversation would make me sad. There would be bright bursts, but that would be the net of it: sadness. He was quiet for a long time again, then said, “I don’t think you understand how important you are to me,” and I thought he might cry.

  “Henry, you’re important to me,” I said.

  “But Dana’s great, too,” he said. “And she’s my girlfriend.”

  “I just have to say this,” I said. “I’ve liked you since we were in college.”

  Henry squinted. “You liked me back then?”

  “Wasn’t it obvious?”

  “Oh, I don’t know. There were times—” He shook his head and exhaled a long breath. “It’s all complicated.”

  Looking back, I think, No, not really. I also think, No, Dana was not in fact great. But I was still inclined then to take Henry at his word.

  Henry said, “When I lived in Seoul, I really wanted you to visit me. Do you remember that?”

  I nodded.

  “I think I kind of had a crush on you then. And when you e-mailed me saying you had a boyfriend, I felt jealous.” He smiled wryly, and my heart sparked—he’d had a crush on me!—and it is not an exaggeration to say I thought probably a hundred times afterward of my mistake in not having visited him then. It took me until I’d moved to New Mexico to understand that it never comes down to a single thing you did or didn’t do or say. You might convince yourself it did, but it didn’t.

  “Can you imagine us together now?” I asked him.

  “Of course.” There was another long, long silence, and he said, sounding pained, “I feel like I’m making a mess of things.”

  “No,” I said. “I’m the one who’s creating awkwardness by bringing this up.”

  “It’s going to be really awkward now. So awkward.” He grinned. We listened to the end of the song—it was “Mansion on the Hill”—and then he said, “It’s late. Why don’t you stay over and sleep in my bed, and I’ll sleep on the couch?”

  When he’d escorted me to his room, we paused in the doorway and he set his hand on my shoulder and said, “This isn’t because I’m not attracted to you, because I totally am.” And that, of everything, probably hurt my feelings the most. It sounded so There, there, little sister. Now I see how he offered opportunities but how, in such opportunities, I had to be the initiator. It had to be my fault, or at least more mine than his. But I didn’t understand that as a condition, or I half understood—I understood subconsciously but I was too shy, and it also wasn’t how I wanted it to happen, while he was still involved with another girl. I smiled like a good sport and said, “Thanks for letting me stay here, Henry,” and we looked at each other a moment longer, and he said, “Sleep tight, Gavener.” His use of my last name hurt, too, at the time.

  I suspect you can imagine the rest. It was so repetitive that even if you can imagine only a portion, you know the entire story. I thought that night was a breakthrough when it wasn’t a breakthrough at all, I thought a relationship was imminent, I thought the conversation was an outrageous anomaly, but it was a conversation we had over and over and over, and every time it seemed less like an acknowledgment of the mutual attraction between us and more like my reminder to him of my unrequited love, and of my unwavering availability should he ever find himself in the mood to indulge. What he reminded me of was how much he valued me, how well I understood him. Sometimes, if our discussion had taken a disagreeable turn, he’d ask, seeming hurt, “Do you not want to be friends with me if I’m not your boyfriend?” And I’d say, “Of course I want to be friends!” Hanging around while he noodled over his feelings, while he soaked in the tepid bath of his ambivalence, contorting my face into expressions of concern and sympathy and unjudgmental insight and unhurt receptivity—that I had no problem with. But what kind of pathetic person would I have revealed myself as if I didn’t want to be friends with him because he wouldn’t be my boyfriend?

  A few times Henry said, “I love our friendship.” Or “I love hanging out with you.” Or t
he closest he got: “I love you in my life.”

  And then there were the evenings I sat on the couch and he lay with his head in my lap while we watched television, and I might set my hand on his shoulder but only in such a way as to treat it like a resting place; I did not run my fingers through his hair. When he lay like that, I was the happiest I had ever been. I was so happy I was afraid to breathe. We never talked about it, and any conversation we had before, during, or after was entirely casual. And we never spoke of it when he stopped doing it, which he did—I don’t know for sure that they were related, but it seems plausible—soon after a wedding he and Dana attended together. After he stopped, when we sat on the couch, the absence of his head on my lap was bigger than the television program, or my apartment, or the city of Chicago.

  And where exactly was Dana in all of this? She was working at the law firm downtown, then rowing on the Erg at her gym on Clark Street, then, on Fridays and Saturdays, drinking gin and tonics at gatherings Henry did not invite me to, at swanky bars where I’d never been. Once when I used the bathroom in Henry’s apartment, I saw a tampon wrapper in the wastebasket and wanted to weep. A few times he said, “I think Dana’s threatened by you. She’s threatened because she doesn’t know what to make of you.” And didn’t I love the idea that broad-shouldered, gin-drinking Dana could be threatened by me, didn’t I, in certain ways, love my own sadness? On weekends, when I walked to the supermarket and the movie rental store at seven-thirty P.M. in corduroy pants and a sweatshirt while around me couples in black clothes held hands and hailed taxis, wasn’t I stirred by the poignancy of my loneliness, by how deserving I was of Henry’s love, by how much more exquisite it would be, coming after my suffering?

  On the one hand, I feel that I was the biggest fool ever: If a man wants to be romantically involved with you, he tries to kiss you. That’s the entire story, and if he doesn’t kiss you, there is never a reason to wait for him. Yes, in the history of crushes, one person has come around for another—during this time, I collected such stories—but it happens rarely. Again, though, no one had told me. And it wasn’t that I didn’t know spending so much time with Henry was unwise. It was that I didn’t really care. I didn’t want to keep my distance from him, to pick up the pieces and meet some pleasant fellow on the El one day, a guy who’d appreciate me as I deserved to be appreciated. I wanted Henry.

  Our wedding, I believed, would not be a victory in and of itself but would be merely a by-product of the fact that we enjoyed each other’s company so much, and that it seemed impossible to imagine a time when we wouldn’t. My certainty was like a physical object—a telephone, a running shoe, nothing precious or sparkly—and I did not need to be in the same room with it to know it existed. For his twenty-ninth birthday, I bought him a set of twelve orange dinner plates costing over two hundred dollars, and though the purchase felt extravagant, I understood—not in a cute way, not as an inside joke with myself, but matter-of-factly—that the plates would ultimately be both of ours.

  Henry and Dana were still going out in February when he met Suzy, a meeting at which, I, too, was present. (I have heard that many of those at Harvard University’s 1947 graduation did not realize, in listening to Secretary of State George C. Marshall’s commencement address, that they were hearing the announcement of the Marshall Plan.) Henry and I got pizza one evening on Damen Avenue, and Suzy was at the table behind us, smoking by herself, while Henry and I waited for our slices. She looked so, for lack of a better word, undergraduate-ish that it didn’t occur to me to feel nervous. She wore a jean jacket, she kept most of her long hair loose but had a few tiny braids in front, and she had silver rings on almost all her fingers. She was small and pretty, and I don’t remember that she actually did smell like patchouli, but she seemed like she could have. If you’d asked me that night how we got into a conversation with her, I probably wouldn’t have known immediately, but later, I forced myself to remember, and it seemed not coincidental that it was when I went up to the front counter to get a cup of water that she and Henry started talking. Probably he was the one who started talking to her. When I returned, they were discussing gun control. And the next week when I called his office midmorning he announced he was hungover. He’d seen Suzy at a bar, he told me, but I still didn’t understand, and I was surprised when he said that they’d stayed until closing time.

  “That’s weird that you keep running into her,” I said. “Maybe she’s stalking you.”

  “No, we met up on purpose,” he said. “I called her.” There was a silence, the silence of my receiving this information and Henry—what?—dignifying my receipt of it.

  “How’d you get her number?” I asked, and I felt that familiar slide down the icy precipice: the slick burn of my hands, the endlessness of the drop.

  “When we saw her before,” he said, which didn’t really answer my question, while telling me pretty much all I needed to know.

  Even when he and Dana officially broke up, I thought it couldn’t be serious for him and Suzy. She was nineteen and probably loved giving blow jobs or something. The three of us had dinner once, and she wasn’t stupid—I wanted her to be, obviously—but she wasn’t particularly interesting. She wasn’t someone who asked other people questions, or maybe she just didn’t ask me. She was from Madison, majoring in sociology at DePaul, working twenty hours a week as a waitress. At one point Henry said, “I got the weirdest e-mail from Julie today,” and Suzy said, “Who’s Julie?” and I said, “Henry’s twin.” I didn’t say it pointedly, I was just answering the question. Suzy said, “You have a twin?” and again (Dr. Lewin, I hope it does not seem like I am being gratuitously crude), all I could think was blow jobs.

  I walked home after that dinner, and it was a rainy April evening, and I thought—I was by this point constantly trying to impose these types of limits—that I should never again hang out with Henry in Suzy’s company, and that from then on I should see him no more than twice a week and I shouldn’t talk to him if he called me at work. Or maybe I am mixing this up, and maybe this was the time I decided I shouldn’t talk to him at home and should only talk to him at work.

  Either way, we met for lunch the next week, and I had the feeling I so often had with him, that between us no words or gestures were impossible. I wanted to reach across the table and cup his chin and feel all the bones of his face beneath the skin. He always seemed like mine. Or I wanted to say I feel gutted like a fish, without any more explanation. But I didn’t cup his chin, I didn’t say anything weird, and I didn’t ask him about Suzy, because that was another of my resolutions: to quit acting like talking about his girlfriends didn’t bother me.

  We weren’t in touch for ten days. I intentionally didn’t call him, and I felt proud for holding out. And then on a Thursday morning when he called me at work, I thought, Of course, of course, he always needs to check in, and he said, “I have some news, and I hope you’ll be happy for me,” and then he said, “Suzy’s pregnant.” They had been dating then for less than four months.

  I was sitting at my desk, and all the objects on it—the red mouse pad, the mug of pens, the line of plastic binders—seemed suddenly obvious; I noticed them in a way I never had before.

  “I need your support,” he said, and I observed the fat spine of the Chicago phone book. “My family is flipping out.”

  Finally, I asked, “How many weeks along is she?”

  “Nine.”

  “Are you not pro-choice?”

  “Do you hear yourself, Hannah? I guess you can’t imagine this, but we want the baby. We feel like this happened for a reason.”

  “You mean a reason other than Suzy not taking her birth control pills?”

  “That’s completely sexist,” he said. “I’m more ready than she is. She’s the one who’s still in school. But we really are in love.” For a split second, I thought he was talking about us. “I wish you wouldn’t make this weird,” he said.

  “I think you already have.”

  He was silent.


  “Are you guys getting married?” I asked.

  “Not for now, but probably at some point.”

  “What does her family think?”

  “They’re cool with it. We were up there this past weekend. They’re wonderful people.”

  I thought again of the afternoon we’d driven to Cape Cod, and of how Henry had changed since then—I think he’d become less honest with himself—but also how what had been true that day turned out to be true seven years later: that he liked to rescue girls who needed rescuing. He’d been wrong only in predicting his proclivity would change.

  And surely Henry would have been disappointed had I not reacted negatively to the news. Wasn’t this the pattern we were supposed to follow, that he’d tell me, I’d freak out, I’d calm down, I’d then talk him through how to smooth things over with his family, we’d figure out a way for these developments to reinforce the idea that he was a good, thoughtful guy whose life was headed in the right direction? We’d say his decision was honorable; also, he’d mention in passing how gorgeous he found Suzy, so I knew they were having good sex and didn’t get the idea he was acting entirely out of duty.

  “Well, good luck,” I said, and he said, “It’s not like we’ll never see each other again.”

  I began to cry as soon as I’d hung up. I was sitting at my desk, and the door to my office was open, but I didn’t care. I was crying partly because Suzy got him and I didn’t, but more than for the loss of Henry, I was crying for my own wrongness, a wrongness of which there now was incontrovertible proof. My intuition, my gut instinct—whatever you want to call it, it had been wrong. Henry and I weren’t each other’s fates. We weren’t going to spend the rest of our lives eating dinner off orange plates, I wasn’t ever going to actually rub his head while he rested it in my lap, we’d never travel together to a foreign country. None of it. It was over. Or maybe it wouldn’t work out with him and Suzy and he’d want me later, in a few years, or he’d want me much later, he’d come find me when I was sixty-eight and he was seventy, but by then, who cared? I wanted him while we were still the people we were now. Besides, he’d violated the terms of what I’d seen as our unspoken agreement.