Man of My Dreams

by Curtis Sittenfeld

  “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?

  But it felt like maybe the conversation had soured; the gerbil insult seemed personal. They were sitting at their desks, each half turned toward the other, and she said, “I have to make a call.”

  She was dialing when he said, “Inside me, there beats the heart of a skirt-chasing lion.”

  It was weird, Hannah thought, that Oliver was entertaining, because it didn’t seem like he particularly needed to be. It wouldn’t matter to the Gwens of the world if he were or not. In addition to his accent, it was the tone and rhythm of such conversations that counted, wasn’t it? Not the actual insights. Also his handsomeness, which was considerable: Oliver was six feet tall and broad-shouldered, with hair that had been brown when he’d started at the organization and, three weeks after that, bleached blond. Hannah had asked at the time if he’d gone to a salon to have it dyed or done it himself, and she’d been disappointed when he’d said he did it himself, with help from a female friend. Later, she could see how she had wanted to be scornful of a guy who’d spend hundreds of dollars on his hair. She’d been warding off his handsomeness; it was so easy to see that she’d be damned if she was falling for it.

  After their post-Gwen conversation, Hannah and Oliver talked a little more but not much. Probably within three minutes, or maybe even before she turned back to her own desk, Hannah was already nervous about whether the dynamic between them had shifted. Was she supposed to act different now? Like, cranky but up for repartee? The next morning, riding the elevator to the eighth floor, she felt panicky; while panicking, she assumed a greater and greater degree of stoniness. Oliver typically arrived about forty minutes after she did, and she kept making half-necessary phone calls because it would be better if she
were on the phone when he walked in; there would be less pressure to form a particular facial expression or say anything. But she ran out of calls to make, so when he arrived, she was pretending to be deep into paperwork. She glanced up in the direction of his face without making eye contact and said, “Hey,” then returned to her work.

  In a voice that was perfectly friendly but not overly, notably warm, he said, “Hello, Miss Hannah,” and nothing else. So maybe—maybe he didn’t really want to talk to her, either, he didn’t want yesterday’s conversation to have set a precedent. Maybe yesterday’s conversation hadn’t set a precedent. Maybe he didn’t give a shit. Whatever. The more time that passed—days passed—the more it felt like a relief not to be wound up about nothing.

  The retreat was a few weeks later, in Newport. It was in October, and they were staying overnight, courtesy of one of their major donors. Everyone had boarded the bus that morning in Boston, with lots of cracks about how early in the day they could start drinking, and Hannah noticed when they checked into the hotel that Oliver’s room was three down from hers. Presumably, he would not be sleeping alone; Hannah was pretty sure a new assistant named Brittany had sat next to him on the bus.

  In the evening, after the meetings but before dinner, Hannah showered and dressed and went to stand on her deck, which overlooked the ocean. The temperature was in the sixties, the sky a streaky pink and orange, the air fresh and sweet-smelling, and Hannah felt the hopeful sadness of being in a perfect setting. It may have been the distraction of this sadness, or the indulgent quality of it, that caused her to carelessly rub one hand against the wooden railing. She yanked it back immediately, but it was too late—the splinter’s tiny brown tip protruded from her palm with the rest securely embedded.

  Hannah hates things like this, an eyelash in her eye, a gnat in her mouth, any foreign object where it’s not supposed to be; she just wants time to pass, to be at the part where it’s all cleaned out and you’re moving forward, even if you’re bruised or cut. Without thinking, she hurried, almost running, back into her room and then into the hallway toward Oliver’s door.

  He was there. If he had not been there, would they not have ended up together? “I have a splinter,” she said, and held her hand out to him while he stood in the doorway. She wasn’t so distraught that it didn’t occur to her she might seem prissy, but the splinter was in her right palm, and she’s right-handed. How could she have gotten it out herself? He ushered her in—she thought but was not positive that he touched her back as she passed—and they sat on the edge of one bed. Her room had a king-size bed, but his had two doubles. Below true consciousness, she had the flickering thought that if he was nice about helping her with the splinter, maybe she’d offer to switch rooms so that he and Brittany could have more spacious sex.

  He bent his head over her extended arm and spread the flesh of her palm in both directions, using his thumbs. “It’s pretty well in there,” he said.

  Right away, her awareness of him, of their proximity, had become greater than her distress over the splinter. She didn’t care about the splinter at all. Maybe it had only been an excuse to begin with. His hair was back to brown again, the dyed part had grown out, and she liked his bent head, she liked his man’s fingers, she liked how they barely needed to speak, how unsurprised he’d seemed to find her outside his door. It felt inevitable. In their lives together, he’d recognize her as a member of his tribe: He wouldn’t mistake her quietness for niceness, her sense of responsibility for humorlessness; he wouldn’t even mistake her prudishness for real prudishness. He’d be boisterous and obnoxious, and he wouldn’t think (Mike had thought this) that talking about other people was slightly immoral. She wouldn’t feel the loneliness of being the only one who had opinions. When leaving a restaurant where they’d eaten with a group, if she remarked on what a small tip one person had left, or on how long and dull another person’s story about his trip to France had been, Oliver would have noticed these things, too. He wouldn’t say in an aggressively pleasant way, “I really enjoyed hearing about the trip.”

  “I need some tweezers,” Oliver said.

  It seemed a little embarrassing that she had some, but they were necessary. In the time it took for her to return to her room, find the tweezers, and walk back down the hall, her realization about their destiny reversed itself—clearly, she was insane—and back in his room, it reversed itself again. Yes. Soul mate struck her as a dumb term, but whatever the non-dippy equivalent was. They could always keep each other company, she could take care of him, she could keep him on track. Surely he needed to be kept on track. Maybe, she thought brightly, he’d been trying unsuccessfully to kick cocaine.

  “Hold still,” he said. “I’ve almost got it. Ah, there we are. Would you like to see?” He held the tweezers aloft; the splinter, in its stubby brown spindliness, almost did not exist, it almost was nothing.

  When he looked at her, she knew she was looking back at him too heavily. He smiled—heartbreakingly—and said, “Remember, Hannah, that I’m a skirt-chaser.”

  “I remember,” Hannah said.

  “Well, then.” Still, neither of them moved.

  Finally, she said, “If I were another woman, you’d kiss me right now.”

  “True,” he said.

  “So kiss me.”

  Leaning in, his mouth close to hers, Oliver said, “I always knew you were a dirty slut.”

  AFTER WEDDING CAKE, the younger generation—Hannah, Oliver, Allison, Sam, Fig, and Fig’s twenty-two-year-old brother, Nathan—end up in the den, watching ESPN. Allison asks, “Fig, where’s your beau?”

  “What beau?” Fig sounds blasé.

  “You know who I mean. The hottie you introduced me to last year.”

  “Oh, that guy,” Fig says. “Ancient history.”

  “Geez,” Allison says. “They can’t hold on to you, can they?”

  “You’re a man-eater, then,” Oliver says over his shoulder. He is sitting on the edge of the couch between Hannah and Fig, leaning toward the TV, his elbows set against his knees and a Scotch (his fourth? his ninth?) in his hand. Fig is slouched all the way back against the cushions, her feet propped on the coffee table. This is the couch, pulled out, that Oliver slept on last night.

  “Sometimes I am,” Fig says. “When I’m hungry.”

  No, Hannah thinks. No, no, no!

  “Why are you called Fig, anyway?” Oliver asks, and Hannah thinks, I forbid it. This is not negotiable. Plus, Oliver’s question is bullshit, because Hannah has told him about the origins of Fig’s nickname not once but twice. She told him early on, when she was first describing her family, and she told him about it again on the plane to Philadelphia. Fine if he doesn’t remember the first time, despite his excellent memory, but he must remember the second.

  “It’s Hannah’s fault,” Fig says. “She couldn’t pronounce Melissa.”

  “Yet you choose the nickname now,” Oliver says. “You could change it if you wanted.”

  “It suits me,” Fig says. “I’m figgy.”

  “You mean flaky,” Nathan says without turning away from the television. Fig balls up the napkin beneath her glass of wine and throws it at him, and it hits the back of his head. Still without turning around, he swipes at the place it landed.

  “In ancient Syria, the fig was considered an aphrodisiac,” Oliver says, and Hannah stands and leaves the room. She’s pretty sure that the comment is, among other things, not even true. It’s not that she didn’t know bringing Oliver home for her mother’s wedding was a questionable idea—it’s that she couldn’t help herself. This good-looking, charismatic man is, sort of, hers; she wanted witnesses.

  In the kitchen, Hannah’s mother and Aunt Polly are washing dishes. Hannah’s mother is wearing an apron over the beige satin dress she got married in. “Mom, you shouldn’t be doing that,” Hannah says. “Let me.”

  “Oh, I don’t mind. You know what you can do that would be a huge favor to me, though, is go with Frank to take Mrs. Dawes h
ome. Just ride along so he doesn’t get lost. They’re in the front hall.”

  This feels decidedly dicey—leaving Oliver and Fig in the house together without her supervision—but what can she say? Also, she doesn’t really want to be around them.

  AS HANNAH, FRANK, and Mrs. Dawes make their way down the eight steps from the condo to the car (it stopped snowing in the early afternoon, and Hannah was the one who shoveled the steps clean), Hannah thinks that an observer, someone standing across the street, would assume they are close family members—Hannah as twenty-something daughter, Frank as middle-aged son, Mrs. Dawes as grandmother—when the truth is that none of them know one another well. Mrs. Dawes holds on to Frank’s arm, and Hannah walks just in front of them. They move excruciatingly slowly. Mrs. Dawes wears low black heels with black grosgrain bows on the front, sheer flesh-colored stockings, and a black-and-red wool suit currently obscured by a full-length black wool coat. She carries a black leather pocketbook. Her ankles are as thin as Hannah’s were in elementary school, and her hair, a dry gray bob that flips up in a little curl at the bottom, is thinning in such a way that slivers of her pink scalp show through. She should be wearing a hat or scarf, Hannah thinks, though she herself is wearing neither.

  Thanks to Frank, the car is running already, the heat on. At the foot of the steps, they negotiate Mrs. Dawes into the front seat, and just before Frank shuts the door, Hannah says, “Mrs. Dawes, do you want your seat belt on? I can do it for you.”

  “That won’t be necessary,” says Mrs. Dawes.

  Hannah gets in back, directly behind Mrs. Dawes, and Frank gets in front. His car is a Mercedes. Where her father, like a Doberman pinscher you want to keep entertained, well fed, and unthreatened by disagreement or surprise, has always been the defining presence in every situation, Frank is so agreeable that Hannah is not sure what his personality is like. Before this weekend, Hannah had met Frank twice: first in the summer and then when Frank, Hannah’s mother, Hannah, Allison, and Sam went to Vail for Thanksgiving, the five of them staying in three separate rooms paid for by Frank. Prior to this, Hannah’s mother had not skied since 1969, but she did so pretty much all day, every day, starting with lessons the first morning on the bunny hill, then quickly joining Frank; Allison had skied only a few times with Sam up at Lake Tahoe but also enthusiastically took to the slopes, even snowboarding a few times; Hannah had never skied before and did not choose to do so after the single lesson with her mother. Observing her mother and sister as they returned to the lodge in the evening, their faces burned a healthy pink, their spirits high, Hannah felt impressed and betrayed. That trip was designed to help Frank, Allison, and Hannah get to know one another, as Hannah’s mother expressed repeatedly, even when all of them were in the same room—she’d say, “I hope you’re getting to know one another!” Hannah and Frank’s conversations were the type you’d have with a pleasant-seeming person sitting next to you on a plane: weather, movies, the meal presently being consumed. Frank was in the middle of a large hardcover biography of an early-twentieth-century British member of Parliament. Frank enjoyed crosswords. He wore ties to dinner, except on the night when Allison announced, “We’re taking you to a dive, Frank!” and led them to a restaurant she’d read about in a magazine where horns and antlers hung from the walls and the waitresses wore tight jeans and even tighter long-underwear tops or flannel shirts. To this place, Frank wore his usual blazer and button-down but left the collar open. The bill for the five of them at the so-called dive was (Hannah peeked) $317, and as always, Frank picked up the check.