Men and Dogs (3 page)

Hannah is not sure why she does this. It’s as if the parameters of being a decent partner—boundaries once as obvious as brilliant highway dividers—have been covered in snow. Before she was married, she never had the inclination, because Jon was obviously the person she was supposed to be with. This much had become clear to her one certain day in her marketing class at Stanford Business School.

She had already noticed him, of course. Everyone had. He was so appealingly odd. A nice-looking person, with light-brown hair and brown eyes; almost too nice, if not for a scar on his left cheek that Hannah would later find out was from a drunken biking accident while he was at Oberlin. He always sat alone, and every day he wore well-shined dress shoes and a gray suit.
(A suit! To class! In California!) He was distant, spending the time before class with his nose in a book when others were chatting. Most importantly, he paid no attention whatsoever to Hannah, which, naturally, put him squarely in the center of her radar screen.

Hannah’s classmates called him the Suit Guy. They thought he was a douche bag. If you didn’t come for beers at Nola’s after class, you were a douche bag (male) or a snob (female). It was a way of categorizing people that even Hannah, who generally liked being surrounded by people who were certain to be somewhat successful, found tiresome. She was sleeping with a classmate named Skip at the time, a Korean engineer with flawless bone structure and a patent on some sort of hedge-fund-analysis software.
Still, as the semester marched on, she found herself glancing longingly at Nola’s threshold night after night, hoping the
Suit Guy might, by some odd chance, darken its neoned door. So, yes, she was already interested. But it was the thing with
Professor Ellsworth that did it.

“Knock-knock,” Professor Ellsworth would pipe at least once a class. It was a truly pointless prerequisite, and the professor—clearly hired as a favor to some key donor—had an incurable penchant for jokes. When none of the students would answer,
he’d say it again, a few decibels louder. “Knock-knooooooock!”

“Who’s there?” someone would wearily reply.

“Justin!”

“Justin who?”

“Justin time to give me the statistics report on the success of online advertising targeting baby boomers! Ha!”

Then one day, Suit Guy raised his hand before Ellsworth could get his knock-knock out. Hannah turned, fascinated. The professor called on the Suit Guy, obviously annoyed that this young man was getting in the way of his antics.

“Yes?”

“Knock-knock,” the Suit Guy said.

“Excuse me?” the professor asked.

“Knock. Knock.”

“The guy who thinks your class is a complete joke,” Suit Guy said. “Look—I’m sorry, but I have a job. You know, a real one,
to get myself through school. So can we please just get through this material?”

The other students stared, suspended in the thick gelatin of silence. It took the professor a week to fully recover and resume his joke assault.

Bingo, Hannah thought. That’s my boyfriend.

It wasn’t easy. When Hannah urged him to come to Nola’s, he politely refused, saying he had to get to his job in the city.
She invited him to parties, to dinner, even to the opera—no, no, no. Then one day, Hannah ran into him on the fringe of campus. Instead of his now trademark suit, he was wearing white shorts and a yellow T-shirt that read,
KICK
IT!

“What are you doing?” she blurted. Not the smoothest opener, but it was off-putting to accidentally come across her crush sporting striped kneesocks.

“I’m on a kickball team,” he said, suddenly absorbed with his shoelaces. “Stanford has a league. Unofficially. You know—off-the-grid kind of thing.”

“We’re full, actually. We’re sort of the champions, so we’ve got a waiting list.”

By the following week, through a certain amount of applied investigation and light flirting, she had finagled herself a spot on the opposing team. If Jon was surprised to see her on the diamond, he didn’t show it; he simply returned her wave with a nod of what looked like annoyance. When it was her turn at the plate, she treated him to her biggest smile (freshly
Crest Whitestripped), ran to the ball, and kicked it as hard as she could.

What followed was blinding pain and a view of the California sky. She had torn her hamstring, it would later turn out, and landed on her back. A crowd quickly gathered above her, and she spotted Jon’s face bobbing on the edge of the cloud of heads.

“Look,” she said, pointing to him. “I fell for you.”

It was the first of their very own line of horrible jokes.

“I was flattered you followed me to kickball,” he said on their first date (post–emergency room drinks). “Sort of. But to injure yourself? That takes dedication.”

“It does,” she said. “You must really be worth it.”

And he was. He was worth a torn hamstring; worth switching from the Marina to the Mission; worth giving up the Korean’s beautiful cheekbones. Because once one got past the feigned haughtiness, he was the warmest person in the world. Kind, tolerant, able to handle her post–Elbo Room drunken rants and her occasional midnight bouts of panic and tears. Hannah had found her person—someone she was perfectly happy to read next to on the couch without the thought that there might be something better out there. She was thirty, and she thought she was done.

The next four years were a happy, comfortable, adultery-free blur. They moved into a railroad apartment on 18th, across from the Bi-Rite and Dolores Park. Though they were both rather buttoned-up, preppy people, there was nothing to do now but become Mission hipsters. In a year they had both adopted the uniform of skinny jeans and T-shirts with ironic slogans. (CRAZY LIKE FOX NEWS; NUKE A GAY WHALE FOR JESUS!) Everything eventually became ironic: the fact that they hatched their business plan at the motorcycle bar, the way they ran a successful company out of the back of a record store. Once their shared specialty-goods company took off, Hannah and Jon were netting tens of thousands each month in a storage room they rented for $300. Oh, the irony.

Life had to change. Hannah and Jon couldn’t be real hipsters anymore. They now had too much money to pull it off. They wouldn’t admit to being yuppies, but they were something else in between. They started going to Tahoe to ski. Hannah hired the private yoga instructor. They threw open-bar parties and ordered takeout from slow-food restaurants. After the close of the third fiscal year, Jon announced they had more than a million dollars in the bank.

A million dollars, they marveled, toasting each other over a $115 pasta dinner from Delfina. What should we do with it all?

Buy an apartment. Get married.

It’s not that, in the midst of all this youth and glory, Jon and Hannah didn’t fight. Their arguments were flash storms that disappeared as quickly as they arrived, leaving the surfaces cleaner, cooler. These, Hannah knew, were what kept things interesting. They were not the cause of Hannah’s postwedding crack-up. It was something else. Sometimes Hannah thinks it might actually be less about the marriage and more about the apartment. When they lived on 18th Street, there was nothing to see out of the windows. They were safe there, in their own little country, surrounded by craigslist furniture and stacks of Jon’s emo records. But from Upper Terrace, she could literally see everything in the city out of her window. All the things she might be missing.

They pushed and rearranged the stacks, but it helped only slightly. Opening the gifts made it worse, because now there were all these things to store and mountains of empty boxes to recycle. Hannah began secretly throwing the boxes away without even opening them. Even that didn’t make her feel better, so she started getting rid of things: clothes, appliances, the matching sets of polished chopsticks that had always inexplicably annoyed her.

“Where’s the blender?” Jon asked, his hands full of smoothie-ready fruit. “Have you seen the microwave?”

Hannah claimed ignorance. She knew Jon wouldn’t understand. Because while she wanted more personal space, he wanted less.
Marriage was supposed to make them closer, he—rightly—reasoned. But whatever she conceded never seemed to be enough. Love wasn’t enough; sex wasn’t enough; sharing work problems wasn’t enough; starting a business together, not enough; learning to backcountry ski (six weeks of avalanche training) and mountain bike (three Saturdays at Rock Hard Training School) just so they could have “new adventures together”—not enough. These things, her husband says, are necessary for a successful marriage. But that’s not all he’s demanding. Often it seems to her that he wants the very inside of Hannah’s brain.

She knows, objectively, that this is not OK. Being innately screwed up is not grounds for cheating. Yet in those moments,
somehow, it has been.

So she tells him she doesn’t know. I don’t know why I did that. I’m sorry. I’ll never do it again. She lies because she needs him. She knows this, now that she may really have lost him. He is her person. He shields her from her mother, for one thing.
And he holds her when she despairs over the thought of her father wandering through an empty landscape, lost.

She needs Jon. She cannot live without him. Which is why, though she has majorly screwed up these last few months, she will now climb up into her own window and humiliate herself. It’s not the most brilliant plan. Professor Ellsworth certainly wouldn’t approve of it. But it’s also the only one she has.

Hannah hesitates. Getting up the fire escape itself will not be a complicated procedure; the only tricky part is climbing the neighbor’s latticework. As she puts her foot up on the thin, flimsy wood, her sandal slips and she falls onto the pavement with a loud smack. She freezes and listens for stirrings inside the first-floor apartment. All remains quiet. Kicking off her shoes to get a better grip, she steps up again. The goal: to scale the lattice, hop up to the fire-escape ladder, and then quietly and quickly climb to her apartment, taking care not to wake the trustafarian couple on the first floor or the perky, permanently running-shoed couple on the second.

Creeping onto the fire-escape landing, she presses up on the window, then rocks perilously back in disbelief. It’s locked.
Since when does Jon lock his windows? She looks in and sees the bed is empty, then looks up at the roof. If she keeps climbing,
taking care not to wake Mrs. Wong (the gold rush–era widow who bangs on the ceiling with a broom when they have sex), she can traverse the roof deck, scale down the emergency ladder that laces the front of the building, and drop onto the front terrace. That door will almost definitely be unlocked, as she broke the lock herself before leaving last time and never told
Jon about it. It’s all very easy, she tells herself. As long as I just keep looking up. She takes one last deep breath and resumes. Step, step. Keep climbing. Keep—

Suddenly, out of the depths behind Mrs. Wong’s open window, a black, hairy being lunges at her with a demonic snarl.

It’s the shock. It’s the vodka. The wine. It’s the loss of her husband. It’s the Red Bull. It’s the delicate combination of all these things, and with even one variation in these elements—one less drink, or, even better, one less Denise—she might be able to hang on. But all of these factors, along with Mrs. Wong’s new Scottish terrier puppy, are now perfectly poised,
no, stacked against her. So that Hannah Legare, as if at last facing an invisible wave of all her sins, is left to fall three long stories into the next unwanted chapter of her life.