The Hypothetical Girl (13 page)

Larry was a man who spent much of his days in an office, busy with papers and files and folders, and while he had always felt quite busy before, he found that there
was a lot of time in between various tasks to give pause to the sentence. Somehow that sentence was able to grow and morph, a living thing, with bones and a rib cage and ideas about life.

He actually met this Louise (bar, two martinis, moonlit walk, she gave him a stick of gum, spearmint) and he found her to be pretty, smart, funny as all get out, and very romantic. She took his hand in hers without hesitation and it felt warm and full of heart there, like a small ticking bird. “Now that was a great kiss,” she said, when their lips met briefly after this date. Then, when they kissed again, in a deeper way that involved a pressureful hug and something small that happened with their tongues, his heart did a little back flip like the kind kids did off the diving board at the public pool when he was a teenager. He himself had not been a back flip–doing boy, so he was quite astounded that his emotions could so boldly leap off the board of a moment like that.

That was the beginning. Louise and Larry hung out a number of times after that. Here is a list of what they actually did, for the purpose of accuracy:

“Hi,” he said.

She looked at him and he thought she might be looking right through him, using X-ray vision, like Superman had, to see what was behind and beyond him.

“Hi,” she said.

He wondered how long she had been doing that, watching him. Her long red hair was loose and hung in ringlets around her face and she was naked. All around her was a bright glow from the sun, rising outside, filtered with many minute particles of dust, and he had a thought that she looked like an angel, ringed in a halo, and the dust motes looked at that moment quite shiny
and un-dustlike. They looked like stars. That was it: She was encrusted in stars.

“Want breakfast?” he asked.

“Gotta go to work,” she said, “sorry.”

T
hat is what happened. These are the actual facts. Now, on to the fuzzy part, where the something got out of control and became quite large and then grew teeth.

Minutes became hours became miles became rivers became oceans. Contact with Louise, she of the redgold, star-encrusted hair, was sporadic at best and Larry found himself tabulating and analyzing them, the way you might analyze the gross national product of a country, say Peru. The Peru of Louise was complicated and demanded constant attention. Larry, who liked to work out at a local gym, found himself too tired to go for his ritual morning stint there. He was busy thinking about Louise.

Larry also had a dog, Homer. He had previously spent a lot of time with Homer, walking him, playing with him—he had coached him into a range of impressive Frisbee retrieval stunts. After meeting Louise, this time was cut short and finally abandoned altogether. The Frisbee fetching that had brought both he and the dog, a black Lab stray he adopted from a local shelter, such delight, seemed less delightful to him somehow. And why walk a dog when one has a rather large backyard the dog
can wander around in on his own? It seemed less invigorating to walk and play with him, and he was busy now, thinking about when Louise might text or call him.

Homer, for his part, had become a different kind of dog. A barking and whining sort of dog who was most unpleasant to be around. “Sit, Homer, quiet!” he barked at his dog.

B
y spring, when he had not heard from Louise in over two weeks, he became quite despondent. He would flip through the Louise file on his computer, over and over. In it were all their texts, including the original sentence about the smile, which he had fished out of the trash and placed in there. Most of the texts were quite bland.

T
hen came a time when he would text her daily. “Just saying hi.” “Howdy there.” “Whussup stranger?” To these he received no reply at all. That was even more unsettling.

T
he sun was out more during this time and the days were longer and filled with more Louise-like silence and the annoying chatter of birds. Homer was more restless than ever. This was the time of year when he most enjoyed chasing squirrels and sniffing intensely at the bottoms of trees and certain clumps of grass. He would bark ceaselessly. He would run around the house from window to window, watching the squirrels leap from
branch to branch. Larry was becoming terribly annoyed by these antics, and more than ever he felt as if he was walking in a stew of molasses.

W
hat was Louise doing? Why didn’t she write him back? Most important: What had he done wrong?

T
he something was fully grown now, and had sprouted hairs. On some mornings it had horns and yellow eyes. It lived in every room of his house now. It got in the car with him in the morning and went to his office and left with him.

Sometimes he would read it, that first sentence, and then go into his bathroom and look at his smile. It was a nice smile, he thought. But what had gone wrong from there? Had he not smiled that smile Louise liked enough? Had he been too serious? Too shy? Too forward? Not used enough deodorant?

He was attending the support group religiously at this point because he felt the people in the room in the Methodist Church understood him, understood his
predicament
. They nodded when he spoke; one older woman made a clucking noise with her tongue. Another time, a young girl came over to him after the meeting and asked him, point blank, “Are you all right?”

What did she mean by that, this girl? She couldn’t have been more than eighteen. She herself had confided that she was addicted to Facebook. She went on it all
times of the day and night and was very upset and a little bit sick when her mother hid her cell phone for a day. During the meetings he often saw her reach into her bag and take out her cell phone to quickly check it. Her thumbs, busying away at the keyboard, moved so fast they actually blurred. He often saw younger people doing this. Texting while walking down the street, while sitting at a red light in traffic. At restaurants.

This girl had a problem! Yet she seemed to think he had an even greater problem. One that necessitated a special and private conversation. Did he have such a problem?

Well, yes, he did. It was summer and the something that had abducted his old everything had become a new everything. There was no minute that went by when he did not want to check his cell phone or his e-mail inbox, or rake over the text messages in the Louise file.

Jonathan, the therapist, was quite concerned that these feelings had not subsided, and he was particularly disturbed to hear that Larry had begun driving by Louise’s house, sometimes several times a day. “Some people might call this stalking, Larry,” he said.

“But I don’t knock on her door,” Larry protested.

“Doesn’t matter,” said Jonathan. “The definition of stalking is quite broad. This behavior fits into it, I think.”

Two people were concerned. Jonathan and the eighteen-year-old girl in the support group. Add to this
Larry’s mother. “I never hear from you,” she said, on the phone. “This isn’t like you. Are you okay?”

Add to these his next-door neighbor, Barry. That made four people who were concerned. But Barry’s concern was a bit more like anger. Barry thought Larry might be abusing Homer. He had seen him strike Homer on several occasions in a violent way. And Larry left Homer outside on a very short tether for entire days, without enough water. “Homer is fine,” Larry insisted. “He has water!”

“Larry, honestly, this barking is driving us nuts.”

Barry was an “us” with a woman named June. June seemed nice enough. She was pretty and smiled a lot and reminded him of Louise a bit. The way she held Barry’s hand sometimes when they went out for a walk was like the time he and Louise had held hands. Come to think of it, most women reminded him of Louise. They weren’t as awesome, of course.

Now that the something had become an everything, Larry was quite unable to do much else. He skipped breakfast, noshed on dried peanuts for lunch, and made himself a bowl of cereal for dinner. The dirty bowls were stacked in his sink. He didn’t tidy up the way he used to, and, embarrassingly, there were some messes Homer had made that were still sitting there around the house. One day he noticed one was covered in flies.

It was midsummer and quite hot, so the messes had begun to smell and Larry himself had begun to smell,
too. Jonathan mentioned this at a session. “When was the last time you showered, Larry?” he asked.

Larry considered the question. He was sure he had showered sometime but the days and times and activities blurred. He looked at his personal planner, a book that up until March was crammed with notes and scratched-out appointments, which was now oddly empty. He could not pinpoint a date for this showering question.

“Larry,” said Jonathan. “I believe you are suffering from limerence.”

“Limerence?”

“Yes. I think you have a pretty obvious case of it. Read this.”

He handed Larry a paper on the topic. It was a long and turgid thing, filled with words he didn’t know. “Can’t you just sum this up for me, doc?”

“I have been thinking hard about this thing you are going through and I am pretty sure this is it. Limerence is an obsessive, unrequited love. It is actually a disorder. A disease, if you will. I will write you a scrip for a new antidepressant. The last one wasn’t helping enough; this one should.”

The something that had become an everything had a name!

“But how long does it take to get rid of this disease?”

“Well, the good news is, it does go away, most of the time. The bad news is, it can take up to two years.”

Larry liked the idea that he had contracted a disease. It was not a disease called Louise. it was a disease called limerence. All day long he repeated it: Limerence-​limerence-​limerence-​limerence-​limerence-​limerence-limerence-​limerence-limerence.

I
t was August and quite hot out when Larry woke one morning, covered in sweat, to find Homer chewing on a shoe. He wasn’t just chewing, however. Larry realized that Homer was actually eating the shoe. At that moment the thought of Louise, encrusted in stars, was trying to force its way into his thoughts, pushing out the sight of Homer eating a shoe. But then the word, the newfound name of the everything, popped into his mind and pushed Louise away. “Limerence,” he said.

Homer stopped chewing the shoe and looked up at him, as if to say
Yes, dude, run with that thought
.

Larry got up and made his bed and got in the shower.

He got out and got dressed and made himself breakfast. He was in the mood for eggs. When he got to his kitchen he was sort of surprised to find clutter everywhere. He hadn’t seen that the night before. He opened his dishwasher and started loading it up. Then he added soap and realized he was actually enjoying the chugging sound the machine made as it churned the soap and hot water onto his dirty cereal bowls. He threw in a load of laundry and, again, enjoyed the sound the machine made, spinning and whirring away at the dirty clothes that lay
in mounds around his house. He got a roll of paper towels and some spray cleaner and picked up several unpleasant mounds of dog doo. “Homer, you bad bad boy,” he said. Homer barked and looked a bit sorry for it, he thought.

After eating his eggs and rinsing his dishes he got the leash and took Homer for a walk. By this time the wet clothes were in the dryer, and he enjoyed the hot dryer air exhaled from the side of the house into the morning. “Limerence,” he said.

The morning seemed to like the word. It rewarded him with the sight of blooming rose bushes. “Limerence,” he said to the roses. He greeted the neighbor with a nod and a smile. “Hi, Barry,” he said. Barry grunted.

Homer strained against his leash, delighted to smell all the smells of the world. Dog pee, cat spray, squirrel essence, garbage, grass, small bugs inhabiting the grass. He felt infected by Homer’s enthusiasm, and the walk they took was farther afield than any walk before.

A woman he once worked with drove by and waved at him. “Limerence,” he mouthed.