The Hypothetical Girl (8 page)

“A woman writer gets her dream job as a professor, teaching about irony in literature, but that same day she gets a phone call. ‘You have breast cancer,’ she is told. ‘It is stage two.’ ”

The class was silent, waiting for the ironic part.

“What is ironic about that?” one student finally asked. “Exactly?”

“Well, she has her dream come true in life, but she is going to die.”

Suddenly the class seemed to see her, her frailty, her skeletal frame. Her bad wig. Her whole demeanor. And the pink pin on top, like a rose made of frosting on a cake. She was their dying professor of irony.

“I am so sorry,” Amanda said. “I thought you were doing better.”

In fact, she was. She had completed the treatment and was waiting for the results of tests; “It all looked very good,” her oncologist had told her. But late the previous night she had opened a single e-mail, sent to her inbox from a real person, in the sea of spam hawking everything from Ab Magic to home business opportunities to a letter from a sheik who said he owed her two million dollars. The lone e-mail was from Henrik. She braced herself for the onslaught of happiness news. Wedding pictures, perhaps an invitation. Their online love had taken and bloomed. They would survive cancer together, each one a raft of hope for the other.

“This is about Anna Lin,” Henrik wrote. “She got pneumonia … double pneumonia actually, it was all very fast and she was just too weak … She didn’t respond well to any treatment. She will be buried in her family’s plot in Worcester, Mass., next week. I thought you should know. Henrik.”

Rita blinked back a veneer of tears as she scrolled through the message several times. There was nothing ironic in it. Nothing at all. It was just shocking, and sad.

She had been so jealous of them, of their bond. Rita just sat there and stared at the computer screen for a long time, as if looking at it could somehow rearrange the message, bring Anna back to life. Or make it not so, some dream of an e-mail.

“What is ironic about that,” Rita told her inquiring student, “is that the professor thought she had just
won the lottery of life, getting this amazing job teaching you all. But in fact she was facing her own death. The lottery doled out a life and a death sentence at the same time.”

The class was silent. Nobody spoke. Everyone felt sad, but they were also unsure if this was a good example of irony. Was it? The minutes ticked away and Rita didn’t speak either. One by one the students shuffled out of the room.

Long before this happened, years before, Rita’s boyfriend Alex, the love of her life, had broken up with her. It had taken her by surprise. She had thought they were happy. Or at least okay. There had been no fight, no incident precipitating the breakup. Just one day he came over and said, “I think we are over.”

How could he leave? Was he angry at her? Had she hurt him in some way she did not know? Didn’t he love her? Did he hate her? He had taken her hand and looked right into her face. “Rita, the opposite of love isn’t hate.”

“What?” she asked.

“I realized that, in our relationship.”

“What is it then, the opposite of love?”

“It’s indifference,” he said. “Just feeling nothing.”

She often thought about that, the feeling of nothing. A blank space, a caesura, a hole-punch in the heart.

At Anna Lin’s funeral, Rita finally met Henrik. To her surprise he was a much older man than she thought, a man with a limp, who leaned heavily into a carved
wooden cane. He wore ill-fitting clothes and spoke with a stutter that was so severe as to make him almost incomprehensible.

“I lo, lo, love, loved her,” he said. “I, I, I, didididd.” He was weeping.

“I know,” said Rita, who had driven eight hours, shakily, to make the funeral. She wrapped her thin arms around him and felt, for the first time, as if this cancer had brought her closer to someone in the world. “You cared so much. She knew that.”

He bowed his head and it touched the top of her head. Their two foreheads pressed together hard, actually adhering a little through some combination of sweat and the elastic properties of skin and sadness. They were bent into a sort of triangle of grief. Between them there was a feeling she could not name. But it seemed to her then that, if such a thing could be, it was the very most opposite thing in the world from irony. The opposite of love. The opposite of happiness. The opposite of opposite. The opposite of all known and yet-to-be-known things.

A
llison had a special sponge for cleaning the inside of glasses, thin with a scrubby green tip, perfect for removing the goo from the O.J. glass, sludge from old coffee mugs, whatever that stuff was in the bottom of her father’s Ensure.

She gave him a cup full of that crap twice a day. It came in cans and was touted as the ultimate nutrition. But when she read the ingredients it sounded more like a chemistry experiment.
This is what they feed us
, she thought,
at the end, when we have no choice
. Whenever she gave it to him he winced. Her father, Joe, had been a sous-chef at a five-star French restaurant. She had been serving him the stuff for four years.
That is 365 times four
, she thought, doing the math,
minus one day for leap year
. That made 1,459 days of a drink that was an insult to his every taste bud. She felt a surge of guilt flood her veins like some distant cousin of adrenaline, pumped out of
a special guilt gland, secreted away in the corner of her heart. Her guilt gland was very active.

Allison also had sponges for the kitchen counter. Smooth but tough, to get off the schmutz without scratching the Formica. She had a really intense sponge for stuff burned onto the bottoms of casseroles. And, of course, she had steel wool. Steel wool, wool of steel, harvested from the flock of steel sheep that grazed on Iron Mountain, she thought. It worked for the worst-case scenarios. Crusted meat loaf that will not release from the pan; that grainy brown material that comes about if you leave the cereal bowl sitting for an afternoon.

Yes, Allison had a plethora of cleaning tools, and it actually made her feel happy to have options when she was doing dishes. She would look into her cabinet and there they were, organized in neat bins, according to the difficulty of the task. Laugh if you want, but it worked for her. And, by the way, if you ever find yourself in a life that revolves completely around taking care of someone else, wiping the drool off his chin, the poop off his butt, because his brain decided to take a long hike and his body said “I think I’ll just stay here behind …,” well, we will remember not to laugh at you for your organizational schemes.

Just as Allison had her sponge-filing system, she had developed a love strategy. She had Doctorlove.com for highbrow online dating; Letsgethooked.com for serious
dating; Flirtypants.com for flirting, and Yummybaby.com for when she felt like slumming it. She had paid a small fee to belong to each of these communities, and within each of them she felt comfortable. She had a system. “A girl needs a system,” she liked to quip, if anyone asked why so many, or why at all, about anything.

“Like, do you ever, like, meet anyone in there you, like, think is for real?” asked Babette, her best friend forever, or her BFF, as she liked to say. The two had known each other since kindergarten.

Even though she was pushing fifty, Allison liked to use the online vernacular of those thirty-five years younger than she. It made her feel relevant. “IDK,” she wrote back, “jury is still out.”

And the jury was definitely out, she thought. For who in his right mind would want a woman saddled with an eighty-eight-year-old father who could not feed himself? A man so divorced from his former self that he no longer even remembered his own name? “That would be one hell of an online man,” said Babette.

“Yeah, thanks for that insight there,” Allison said.

Then, two weeks before her fifty-first birthday, it seemed just such a man appeared.

“Yo hey,” he wrote in an instant message. “Cool old white dude seeks happening mate!”

“Yeah hi,” she wrote back. “Very happening white chick seeks cool old dude.”

And so their banter began. They chatted this a way and that a way, they talked yoga and pie crust, sunsets and anime. They talked books (he was partial to Hemingway; she to Joyce Carol Oates). They talked poetry (he was a Billy Collins guy; she was an Anne Sexton gal). They talked music (Nirvana, him; Tori Amos, her) and art (Picasso, him; Judy Chicago, her). Film (
Seven Samurai
, him;
Harold and Maude
, her).

“Well, don’t we just define the gender wars?” she wrote.

“That we do,” he wrote back.

They each chuckled before their screens. Chuckled into a nothingness that was a somethingness that was the oblique landscape where they courted. A tangle of wires and laser signals, flipping through a cyberscape where no human foot could tread.

Their late-night texting habit would morph into conversations that would get so hot sometimes the phone burned her. (It actually did, because she had it on for so long and held it to her ear so tightly as she lay on the couch chatting. Her ear would turn cherry red … Research has revealed that this cell phone burn syndrome could prove devastating to brain tissue, possibly even cause deterioration and disease … something that a girl caring for an old man with dementia certainly worries over.)

But Allison was fifty and her brain still seemed fine. Her thumbs, on the other hand, were not as agile and
fast as younger people’s when it came to texting, but her mouth worked okay, so when they had those occasional phone calls in between marathon texting and e-mailing sessions, she learned a great deal about this man, whose name was Chuck. Including what seemed to her oddest of all the things she learned about him: Chuck lived, apparently, on a boat.

“Yeah? A boat?” she had asked.

“Twenty-five footer, a sloop,” he wrote. “Call her
Tequila
. Or
Tila Tequila
. Depending on my mood.”

“Like the drink, or the celebrity?”

“Just like that,” he said, not answering.

He’d previously had a twenty-two-foot sloop named
Jenny
, this boaty man, but the
Tequila
was his baby. He had a life on the
Tequila
. A life at sea, or in harbor or at dock. Allison began to learn all about it, this existence. She heard about all the tasks involved, daily, in boat residence. Further, the problems that could come up. Like, say, leaks.

And what she did not learn about from their exchange, she learned of through his pictures. He sent her cell phone pictures of the boat that seemed purposely designed to give her very little bites of information. The boat was red. It had some scratches. The water was like a mirror reflecting the moon. There were frequent bird visitors.

When it stormed she found she was worried about this man Chuck on his boat. A man she had not once
met. But Chuck told her not to bother worrying. In the winter he lived in the terrarium created by a taut coat of plastic shrink-wrap. He was like a hothouse plant in there, he said. “It is actually quite toasty,” he insisted.

For his birthday, Allison made him curtains for the boat, tequila-themed. With bottles labeled “Mescal.” She found the material online. She sent them by FedEx to the harbor address.

He, in turn, sent her groceries. They would come next-day air. Specialty foods she would never buy. Pumpkin butter and almond butter and cashew butter and goat cheese encased in tough herbed rinds; canned hominy. And soups, such soups, fresh dill and tomato bisque; things from Trader Joe’s, where he apparently ran a credit line, this boat man, Chuck.

They told each other about their hobbies. Hers was kayaking across the pond near where she lived to the other side, where she was involved in an elaborate earth-work project. She would balance large stones atop other stones and make cairns. She would name them.

His was sailing in little regattas, going out to sea and coming back. Cleaning and rebuilding parts of the
Tequila
(a boat that
was
a girl, apparently, as he referred to it as “she”), and, for some time, replacing her windows. Making her “tight,” as he said.

Chuck also liked yoga. He would do it on the deck of the
Tequila
. “One of the greatest myths of our time is
that yoga must be done in a class,” he wrote to Allison. After each e-mail he sent her, he wrote, “Namaste.” A yoga salutation, she learned. She hadn’t done much yoga, but she did like the fact that it came with its own lingo. “I spent the morning in Child’s Pose,” he would write. She looked it up: Child’s Pose. And imagined him rocking on the
Tequila
, folded up on his knees like a sea-bird, nesting.

Oh, and one other little hobby, or favorite activity, this Chuck had: He liked to go to the little pub near the harbor. He went there almost every night. Maybe that explained the mornings spent in Child’s Pose, she thought. Hangover?

Allison told her friends and family very little about Chuck. “He lives on a boat,” she told her friend Elisa.

“And that’s not weird?” Elisa replied. But then Elisa lived in a McMansion in Norwalk. She would think most things weird.

She told her sister, Anika, “He does a lot of yoga.”

“And you like that … why?”

“I don’t know, he seems nice,” she said.

“Well, namaste to that,” Anika joked.

“Right,” she said.

And to her very best friend Babette, she wrote, “He sends me food.”

“Why?” Babette asked.

“I think he is just being nice. It is very nice food.”

“Well, food is good …,” Babette said.

The problem for Allison was not the yoga or the boat or the food but that this cool dude named Chuck was in the wrong category. She was very clear about her categories; she took them oh-so-seriously. And Chuck had not been in the serious dating category. She had met him on Yummybaby.com, not Letsgethooked.com, which she realized made her hesitate with him. Perhaps it was why she never suggested meeting. His boat was docked about an hour from where Allison lived, yet neither one had suggested a rendezvous. It had been almost six months.