The Hypothetical Girl (14 page)

When he got home he took his new antidepressant medication and scrubbed for a good long time at the bathtub, which had become gray with soot and stains.

He realized around noon that he had not looked at the Louise file one time, and the very thought of doing so turned his stomach a bit. “Limerence,” he said. He drove to work by a new route and specifically did not drive by Louise’s house. He got to work and had an
unusually productive day, which was a good thing, since there were unattended files and papers all over his desk. He spoke to his computer, which he did not use to go online and check his personal e-mail. “Limerence,” he said.

T
hat week at the support group meeting, he hardly felt like sharing, but the leader called him out. “So how is it going with you, Larry?” he asked.

All eyes in the room turned to him. The old woman who clucked, the eighteen-year-old girl who was concerned, the guy with a tattoo of Jesus on his neck, and someone he had never noticed before, a very pretty lady in a dark-blue dress. “There is a name for the thing,” he said. “I found out it is like a disease. It is called limerence.”

“What is that?” the leader asked.

“It’s complicated. Look it up.”

The room went silent and everyone made a mental note.
Look up “limerence.”

Larry had looked it up and read about it for hours. Limerence was apparently a biological thing that can happen to people on occasion. There were statistics about it. Twenty percent of all people would go through it at some time in their lives. He just loved that there was math involved. Things with math had substance. They were actual.

Limerence erased the very small sentence that had grown so large. It had pushed the four dates into
a corner and swept them into a dustbin. It had taken all the uncomfortable and troubling silences and spun them in the air into a small and quite pretty rainbow. And then the rainbow flew out the window. Just flew away, like a small and silent bird.

When he did research on Google he found out that limerence was very old. It went back to the Romans. It went back to the Greeks. It probably went back to the cavemen.

The important thing now was the something that became an everything that had a name and it was not Louise.

It had never been love. It was limerence.

If you doubt this story or are curious about it, look it up yourself.

Limerence.

There was a glowing and nuclear power in the word, a very ancient thing that is written on our bones. That was what Larry realized. There is power in a story made of words and language.

The author would like you to know that you can use just such a word, such a story as this one, to survive.

H
e was Whimsy999. She was Vivacious002. He was seeking a woman. She was seeking a man. He was looking for fun. She was looking for a good time. They both thought, in the long term, it might be good to “find real love.” Oh, and he made whirligigs.

“Really,” Vivacious wrote, “whirligigs?”

“Really,” wrote Whimsy. “And wind chimes. I make lots of those, they’re popular.” He made his living by going to trade shows, setting up his little kiosk-tent at outdoor music festivals in the summer. He followed a festival circuit, he told her, which meant he had winters pretty much off. “That is when I make new designs, I do my creative stuff.”

He also made mobiles, blue and gold and some the color of sunrise over the Rocky Mountains. “I like to make things that move,” he said. “I like motion.”

Vivacious tried to decide if that was a sexual innuendo. If he was getting at something.

They decided to meet at a farmers’ market in Corrales, New Mexico, on a Wednesday afternoon, during the International Balloon Fiesta. “I hear they have nice soup,” said Whimsy. “Corn chowder and such.”

“I like that,” said Vivacious, who wasn’t feeling really sure about meeting for soup at a farmers’ market, but what the hey?

“I’ll be the guy wearing the earring. And the scarf.”

“A scarf?” asked Vivacious.
An earring
, she thought. She was beginning to feel funny about this.

“Yes,” he said, “blue. By the way, my name is Al.”

Al. She liked “Whimsy” so much better than “Al.” In fact, she wasn’t really sure about going to eat chowder at a farmers’ market with a guy named Al who wore an earring and a blue scarf, a man who made whirligigs, especially during the International Balloon Fiesta, a time when the town was crawling with available men. And she wasn’t even really sure what a whirligig was. Something that swirls and moves and makes shadows, she thought. She might have seen one once in a movie. Or at her aunt Tania’s farm. Her aunt Tania was into things like that. In fact, maybe she should introduce this Al to Aunt Tania. They might have more in common.

Al was Jewish and made much of it, using Yiddish words and such. “I make all this
mishegas
, and people, they love it,” he said.

Vivacious was Latina and made much of it. She pronounced it
Lateeeena
. When she wasn’t being Vivacious,
she was called Blanquita. She cooked a rocking chili con carne and made huevos rancheros on the weekends for her two sisters and their mother, who all shared a condo in Albuquerque’s Northeast Heights. She worked as a hairdresser at A La Beauté. She wasn’t really sure what that translated to, or quite what language it was, but she thought it might be French, or Italian. Her boss was Rico, a transvestite Puerto Rican (hence “Rico”), who liked to use French-ish words whenever possible, like “croissant,” which he pronounced
cwaaasohn
. Blanquita wasn’t sure if it was a real aspiration to speak French or a gay thing, so she just tried to steer clear of it, to keep on the safe side. She wanted to keep her job. It was the third salon she had worked for in the past six months. She’d been fired from one because her clients complained about her smoking. “Who wants to be touched with tobacco hands?” said one old blue-hair who came in for the same do every week, what she and her fellow dressers called the “high and dry.” (Reference to the fact that these women wanted their hair teased up high to cover the thinning and sometimes bald spots beneath. And they were willing to sit under a hot dryer for half an hour to achieve this effect.) The woman’s name was Lucille and she demanded that Hot Cuts fire Blanquita or she and all her friends would decamp down the street to Le Boutique Rose.

After that, Vivacious, aka Blanquita, quit smoking but was fired from her next job for the smacking noise
she made while chewing the nicotine gum that had helped her quit.

Rico, at A La Beauté, had a very strong jawline and smelled of Chanel No. 5. She knew this because she had once bought a bottle and still had it, in her closet, for a special occasion that had yet to arrive. The idea of the perfume tucked in the closet reminded her of the way spring could be tucked underneath winter snow, waiting to bloom. Rico, on the other hand, wasn’t waiting. He was a closet intellectual, reading the existentialists, especially Sartre and Camus, in between customers. He wore Chanel No. 5 every day. And that stuff was expensive.

When Rico hired Blanquita he did so with a warning: “You watch your customers, you act nice and you give them a nice look, Blanquita, sweetie. And I give you a beeg raise. Okay, sweetie? You give me problemas and
sayonara
. Okay, sweetie?
Me entiendes?
Si vu play?”

She did.
Entender
, that is.

Al was in Albuquerque for the International Balloon Fiesta and had searched online for “single hotties” to keep him company, which is how he came upon Vivacious. He had been to the festival every year for the past twenty years and found it a very good venue for selling his wares. But he had another reason for being there this year, one he had not told anyone about, not a soul.

It was a hot and dusty day, and already the haze was setting in. Air pollution in Albuquerque tended to get trapped in the bowl of the Rio Grande valley like a gray
and toxic soup. The balloons suspended over the haze looked odd and festive. In contrast to the gray and putrid air they seemed out of place, overly bright. Everywhere, people were peeling off jackets and pointing up at the sky. Pretty, pretty inflatable things! Large and bright. Some were in shapes like a teapot and a phone book that said “Yellow Pages.” Over the years more and more of the balloons seemed to be advertisements. There was a giant bottle of Tabasco sauce balloon. There was a globe balloon. There was a Nike sneaker balloon and several basketballs. There was a carton of milk from a local dairy.

Vivacious looked across the farmers’ market for a man in a blue scarf, with an earring. A man who might be called “Al.” What the heck was she doing anyway? How desperate does a girl get? “Ah, Jewish, so he has some
dinero
, does this one?” teased her sister Madelena. Madelena was studying at TVI—the Technical Vocational Institute—for her electrician’s license, after which she thought she might get a degree in engineering at UNM. After that she would go and work for Intel on the West Mesa in Albuquerque. Then she would get a house up there and a nice car (Volvo station wagons actually
called
to her) and marry an engineer. She would like a daughter named Violeta and a son named Miguel. She could call him Miguelito.

“Um, do you think you might be, like, getting ahead of yourself a little?” Blanquita would ask when Madelena would rhapsodize about her possible future.

“Just because some of us have dreams, Blanquita, and aren’t settling for some lame hairdressing career.”

“It’s not lame, I go to workshops!” Blanquita said. But now that she stood in the farmers’ market in the sultry and somewhat unbreathable air, in the rotund shadows of passing balloons like a festival of bright clouds, looking for some guy she met online, she did have to admit—this was hardly a life. Okay, it was lame. Just then a man stepped up behind her.

“Hey there, gorgeous. You must be Vivacious,” the man said.

“How did you know?” she asked, checking the man out. He was about five feet four inches and had a beard. And, yes, an earring and a blue scarf tied over his head behind his ears, like a gypsy.
Probably bald under there
, she thought. Bald guys always wore baseball hats and scarf things and stuff. It was as if covering it up made it cool to be losing hair. She preferred it when they just shaved their heads. A bald head could be sexy, even. Look at all those pro basketball players.

“The way you are looking,” Al said. “Like you don’t know quite who you are looking for. So, wanna have some lunch?”

This was the problem with the online thing. You meet someone and they are mysterious, they are cool and funny and cloaked behind a screen. In the real world they are short and hide their baldness. “Sure,” she said, wishing she could just go home.

They drove in his little RV to a park and sat under a tree at a picnic table and Al bought them each a burrito. Nearby a checkered balloon sailed above the tree line. People pointed and stared, like it was a rare bird or a lunar eclipse. Blanquita smiled. “Seen one balloon fiesta, seen ’em all,” she said.

Al nodded. He sort of liked her jaded attitude, this Vivacious. It was sexy.

“So, you like to swim?” he asked. His motel had a pool. “I live in the RV almost all year, so when I can I get a hotel room,” he said, with a wink.

Here we go with the motel
, she thought. But the day was getting hotter and the idea of floating in warm chlorine-laden water was somewhat appealing just then. It was her day off and she didn’t want to spend it home with her sisters and mother, who could get on her nerves. “I do, we could,” she said.

So they finished up their burritos, she picked up a suit Walmart, and they headed to the Days Inn. Al’s RV was full of boxes and cartons packed with stuff. On the floor a few things were laid out, as if he had been working on them. He picked up a whirligig and it immediately began to twirl, like a little wooden tornado.

“So that,” she said, “is a whirligig. I was trying to remember.” He held up another one and it twirled as well. It was inlaid with bits of glass and colored beads. She drew a breath. “It is so beautiful,” she said. “I
like
that one.”

“Then it is yours,” said Al. She had nice eyes and generous thighs he could imagine touching, like soft pillows. He would like to sink into her, a feather bed of a woman.

They swam in the pool and then had drinks with the chase team for the Tabasco sauce balloon, who were also staying at the Days Inn, two guys named Steve and Jerry. They invited Al and Blanquita to go up in the balloon. “It’s fun. It’s not at all scary,” said Steve. “It’s like being a cloud, very peaceful.”

“I have never wanted to be a cloud,” laughed Blanquita. “And I hate heights. But thanks, that’s sweet.”

I
n the morning Al’s cell phone rang. There beside him was Blanquita, snoring softly. They had drunk wine spritzers and swam in the hotel pool until midnight.

Al gave Blanquita a little shake, brushing her hair out of her face. She looked older in the morning light but still very beautiful and very exotic. He liked the way she said “Al,” like
all
. She tasted of something oddly sweet. He had realized it was the nicotine gum. It had a chemical sweetness that was not unpleasant. He liked it. He had to wake her because of the important thing he had to do. He had an appointment at noon.

She waved him away. She would sleep in.

He walked over to the window and pulled back the curtains to reveal the sky already gray with hot smog.
His heart started up a little. He had not told anyone about this day. And here he was with this woman on it. It was possibly the most important day of his life. He had spent a day selling his wares in his tent at the fiesta grounds, which meant that it must be the fifth. He looked at his watch. It was. The fifth. He had an appointment with the social workers. He had had six interviews, and had gone through all sorts of screenings. They had done background check after background check. And then he had gone online and hooked up with this … Blanquita. What was he thinking?