I Knew You’d Be Lovely

Alethea Black

His birthday was only three days away, and Hannah had to find Tom the perfect gift: prescient, ingenious, unique, unforgettable. All week long, she’d been looking for clues from the universe. She scoured the Internet, scanned mail-order catalogs, stole peeks inside other people’s briefcases. Finally, she found herself resorting to desperate measures, and was trying to read the minds of men seated across from her on the commuter train. She stared at them under the bright lights and asked telepathically: “What do you want most in the whole wide world that costs under $200 and would fit in a box?”

Her psychic acumen, however, was proving to be as dim as her prospects. To make matters worse, she’d been caught more than once squinting purposefully at strangers, postures she quickly tried to pass off as attempts to read the contact lens advertisements. By the time she got to work, she had the kind of headache that made her think she might in fact need contact lenses. She was also on the verge of full-scale panic. Hannah knew that if she didn’t find the gift that demonstrated she, better than anyone else, understood the contours of Tom’s soul, she could very well lose him.

There was another woman. Tom had done everything he could to assure Hannah the woman was just a pen pal, and described what they had as that clever little word, a “correspondence.” But it was easy for Hannah to tell that her nemesis was no mere pal of the pen. She was more like a centerfold with stationery.

Tom had met the woman six months ago at a summer writing seminar in Prague. Hannah’s first warning signal came when she was relating the story to her best friend.

“He met her at some summer camp? What’d they do, sit around, toast marshmallows and sing by the campfire?”

“No, it wasn’t summer camp, it was a writing workshop.”

“Oh,” Nihan said, her eyes gleaming wisdom. “So they sat around, drank whiskey, and screwed.”

As it happened, when Tom returned to Boston in September, he was somewhat aglow, but Hannah assumed that had something to do with renewed confidence and nutritious Czechoslovakian food. True, he proceeded to commit to his work with inordinate enthusiasm (retreating from Hannah a bit in the process), but that seemed the natural consequence of a summer of encouragement. In fact, she thought she’d read something about that in the brochure. The brochure that had pictured all kinds of attractive young writers, huddled in clusters of smiling excitement.

Back in college, when he was first courting her, Hannah used to tease Tom about his wavy brown locks and gold-rimmed spectacles.

“You’re too good-looking to be a poet.” Now, five years later, she’d learned better than to encourage him along those lines. But she did encourage his writing. So although he seemed distant, Hannah stood by her belief in the need for solitude and selfishness—of the good kind—when it came to one’s work. Nihan rolled her eyes.

“True intimacy embraces a certain distance,” Hannah said, in her own defense.

“Yeah, sure,” Nihan chuckled. “Whatever.”

But Hannah let Tom have his space and tried not to feel threatened. She reasoned she would have every advantage over an opponent: She knew Tom; knew his weakness for low-budget documentaries, knew his favorite food was Vietnamese noodles, knew he often laughed in his sleep. She knew that he considered himself to be “Capricorn, non-practicing,” and that he’d once set out to read the whole dictionary but had only gotten as far as D. When he was bored, he liked to go to the movies by himself, and when his back was giving him trouble, it sometimes helped if she walked on it for him. This nefarious newcomer would be no match for her; why, she lived with Tom (had the home court advantage), and his would-be seductress didn’t even live in the same state.

But as soon as the summer ended and the leaves began to turn, her letters started to arrive. No, they couldn’t have used e-mail like the rest of the world. Evidently, either the girl had some quaint notion about the benefits of real paper and real penmanship, or she was simply too dumb to know how to connect to a server. Before long, Hannah resented the postman and was rethinking his holiday bonus of baked goods. She cringed at the heavy, eggshell-colored envelopes addressed with slanted loops of red ink—the felt-tipped marker of Satan’s minion, to be sure.

Hannah and Tom had a happy relationship built on five years of intimacy and trust: qualities that were beginning to feel like small, cold pebbles compared to the heated rush of novelty. So when the New York postmark started showing up more and more frequently—sometimes twice in the same week—Hannah started asking questions.

“So, what does she look like, anyway?” she asked one Saturday morning in October as she placed a stack of mail on the kitchen table. Tom looked up from the paper just as the kettle started to hiss. He hadn’t even had his coffee yet.

“Who?” he asked, predictably.

“Girl.” He and Hannah both knew who “girl” referred to by now, no use feigning ignorance. Better just to tell the truth and hope for mercy.

“Well, she’s blonde,” he said, toeing the water cautiously.

“Oh, she’s blonde, is she?” Hannah said, as if “blonde” were the Czech word for fellatio addict. Hannah was strawberry blonde herself, with a summery dusting of freckles across her nose.

“That figures,” she muttered.

“Huh?”

“Oh-nothing,” she said in a singsong voice, lifting her chin away. “Go on. Continue.”

“And she’s …well, I guess she’s, you know, about your height.” Five feet six inches of Hannah was standing in front of his chair. Tom scanned from her ankles to her eyebrows.

“Yeah, your height,” he said. “If I had to guess.”

Hannah tapped her foot in ongoing irritation. Evidently, she was going to have to help him along.

“And breasts?” she asked, crossing her arms.

“Yes, she had breasts.”

“Ah-Ha! I knew it. So just what were these breasts of hers like?” Hannah’s breasts were a little on the small side, although perfectly shaped, well-rounded with pretty pink nipples.

“Jeez, Hannah, how am I supposed to know what her breasts were like? I slept through the class where everyone came topless.”

Hannah stepped up and straddled his chair, standing over his knees. “Don’t try to tell me you haven’t imagined what they’re like, mister,” she said, wagging a finger at his nose in order to be herself and make fun of herself at the same time. “Even I’ve imagined what they’re like by now.”

He snapped at her finger with his teeth.

She jerked her hand away and slapped his head with it. “I mean it. Don’t make me hurt you.”

“Please, hurt me!” he said, laughing. Then he lifted his knees, causing her to fall into his lap. He drew his arms around her ribcage and put his mouth next to her ear. “Give the man a break,” he whispered. “He doesn’t know what he’s doing; he isn’t all that sharp.” Then he placed a gentle kiss at the base of her neck. “Besides, you know he’d pull the moon for you.”

Tom imagined she knew full well he would, too.

He also imagined Sydney’s breasts were magnificent: smooth and luscious.

Although Tom was somewhat charmed by Hannah’s unprecedented antics at first, before long he was curious to know what kind of justice could exist in a world that would allow him to be punished for sex he didn’t even have. He was smart enough not to want points for resisting temptation, because he realized that the need for resistance betrayed the presence of temptation, which for most women, was as much a sin as mattress-gripping, pore-cleansing sex that lifted the bedposts and rattled the fish bowl.

But then again, Hannah wasn’t like most women.

The two met their senior year in college while she was working at the Student Union. Hannah was blue-blooded but poor; her Mayflower ancestors had become potato farmers in Maine. Tom loved to watch her, her hair twisted back, dewy and serious as she steamed milk for other undergrads’ cappuccinos. It didn’t take long for him to develop a serious caffeine habit. Soon they were an item.

They would go to the library together and stack their books on the long window table in the quiet section. Tom knew the sign language alphabet, and liked to think he could invent intuitive hand signals for everything else he might want to say. But every gesture he made involved some version of a hula-dance wave, and he would only make Hannah laugh, and then they’d be asked to leave.

Hannah knew Tom would dump his pen pal if she asked him to, which was part of the reason she would never ask. She wasn’t the kind of girl to issue mandates or start sentences with phrases like, “If you loved me.” She wasn’t even sure how other women pulled that off. If you loved me, you wouldn’t …write letters? Or simply, no letters to women? No letters to attractive women? How did they get away with these sorts of distinctions? Ah, yes: “You wouldn’t do something you knew upset me.” But the very thing that was upsetting, and that made the letter-writing woman a fiend, was that her influence was insidious and her presence was unassailable.

In the end, it wasn’t that Hannah wanted to take all the spice out of Tom’s life. It was just that as the conspicuous correspondence grew and grew, she couldn’t help feeling left out.

One night in mid-December, while they were having dinner at their favorite Thai restaurant and deciding what to do afterward, Hannah uncharacteristically suggested they rent a “skin flick” just as the chicken with peanut sauce was arriving. That was when Tom realized he was going to have to do something. When they returned home that evening, he handed over the stack of envelopes. She took them into the bedroom and closed the door.

For the next two hours, she roamed through the childhood embarrassments, watershed moments, and spiritual questionings of a woman named Sydney. The young writer’s life seemed to consist mainly of repeated encounters with ridiculous situations wherein she was lacking adequate monies, workable transportation, appropriate clothing, or some absurd combination of all three.

As Hannah had anticipated, flirtation and innuendo were there, sneering at her all over the place. But, truth be told, there was nothing that betrayed any untoward activities. At one point, Sydney even referred to something Tom had apparently written about Hannah as “candid and tender.”

There was, however, one passage that struck her as somewhat alarming:

I must have been born defective, without the jealousy gene, because I never feel the possessive kind of love. Today I was at the museum, looking at one of those really beautiful nature paintings, the kind where the loneliness almost looks holy. I felt something akin to solidarity with the other people who were standing there admiring it with me. The feeling was: Yes, isn’t it beautiful? I imagined someone in the group running up and shielding it with his arms, how ridiculous that would be. Yet how common it is to encounter people who think, “I love you because you’re mine.” It stuns me, all the things we’re willing to forsake for security, which is only ever imaginary anyway.

Hannah emerged from the bedroom. She wanted to reward what she knew had been a broad-minded and magnanimous gesture by keeping her questions to a minimum.

Tom looked up from his book. “Still want to rent a skin flick?”

She handed him the stack of letters, this one on top, and pointed to the passage. “What are your thoughts on all this?” she asked, keeping her tone neutral.

“You see? It’s plain. I told you not to worry. She doesn’t even want a boyfriend. She talks of nothing but liberty. Besides, I get the feeling she might pitch for both teams.”

“Oh really?” Uh-oh. Accusatory. “And just how does one get a feeling like that?”

So it was on this day, after Tom let her read the letters, that Hannah had resolved to find a resplendent gift with as much shimmering complexity as Sydney’s words. Her mission was to procure something wonderful.

The clock was ticking and she could think of nothing.

She spent all of Saturday morning brainstorming. There were just two days to go. Unfortunately, she had the habit of creating expectations of such superhuman heights that she, a mere mortal, became paralyzed by her own ideals. By the time Tom went out to play basketball with some friends at 1:30, she felt quite unable to leave the house. It was all she could do to slap together some Christmas-cookie dough and stick it in the oven. Lying in bed, staring at the ceiling, she decided to play an exercise DVD to get her heart beating again.

Halfway through, the doorbell buzzed. Although she wasn’t expecting anyone, she was grateful for an interruption just as the routine was reaching its absurd zenith. Maybe a neighbor needed a cookie-cutter. But she opened the door, jogging in place, only to discover a beautiful woman standing in the hallway with a package in her hand. A disturbingly beautiful woman.

“Hello,” the stranger said, in a sheepish voice. “Are you Hannah?”

“I am,” she said, still jogging.

“Hi. I’m Sydney. I’m—friends with Tom.” Luckily, Hannah was cardiovascularly primed for fight-or-flight and was able to avoid an immediate heart attack. Sydney took a breath. “I hate to bother you like this, but I was back in town for the holidays, and I knew Tom’s birthday was Monday. And I …well, to be honest, I didn’t make it to the post office in time. I keep forgetting that in Boston, things actually close.”

Hannah stopped jogging and stood looking at her. So this fresh-faced, long-legged interruption was Sydney.

“Anyway, I’m so sorry to have disturbed you. I just wanted to drop this off so he’d get it in time.”

The package was unevenly wrapped in brown paper with a hurried address—in red ink, of course. Hannah put it on the counter and wiped her hands on the front of her yoga pants. She would greet her reckoning with as much dignity as she could muster, wearing spandex. Sydney seemed to be waiting for her to speak.

“Come on in,” she said.

She offered Sydney a chair but before she herself sat down, Hannah ran to silence the DVD player, where a bald man was shouting something about inner thighs much too loudly for an occasion like this. When she returned, she found Sydney glancing about the room.

“Tom’s out for the afternoon,” she said as she took a seat, deciding at the last minute to leave off the “I’m afraid” part.

“Yeah, no, I—”

“What’d you get him?” she asked, jerking her head toward the counter where the package lay. She couldn’t hold out any longer.

“Oh, well, it’s an Angry Salad CD. They’re this band.” Suddenly Sydney’s face opened up a bit. “Actually, they’re amazing. Completely new. With really thoughtful lyrics. They have that edge of the planet kind of feel.”

Edge of the planet? Hannah wondered if Columbus had for some reason fallen out of fashion among the fresh young writing pack.

“You might like them,” Sydney said.

She found this rather unlikely, especially since she was considering throwing them into the trash as soon as Sydney’s blonde ponytail was out the door. She smiled.

Sydney smiled back rather intently, almost warmly. For a moment, the two came close to exchanging a kind of conspiratorial glance that is sometimes passed between people of similar style and intelligence. Sydney leaned forward. “I take it back. You’ll love them,” she said. She touched Hannah’s arm. “I promise.”

At that moment, the air became noticeably redolent of toasted walnuts and brown sugar. The cookies! Hannah ran to the stove and pulled on a zebra-striped oven mitt.

“Care for a cookie?” she asked, swiftly removing them from the heat. They weren’t burnt, but they were definitely well done.

“Sure,” Sydney said. She selected one from the corner. “Thanks.”

“I’ll get us some milk.”

Hannah watched Sydney’s mouth as she chewed. She had full lips and almost imperceptible dimples. “I usually need a little something to cancel out the exercise,” Hannah said.

Sydney laughed and neatly pressed her fingertips to the crumbs that had fallen on the table. “You’re a good cook,” she said, and for the next half hour, the two women talked with what could only be described as surprising ease, considering they were both in love with the same man.

“Well, I should probably get going,” Sydney said. She brushed off the tops of her jeans and stood up. “Thanks for everything.”

“My pleasure,” said Hannah, getting up to put the milk away. As she opened the refrigerator, its rubber suction breaking with a sticky sigh, Sydney shocked her while her back was turned.

“You know, I could tell from the things Tom said about you,” Sydney said, while she stared at orange juice and casserole and pickles. “I just knew you’d be lovely.”

When Tom came home, a little after 5:00, Hannah was in the shower. He opened the bathroom door and stuck his head in.

“Hey there, gorgeous,” he called out as steam slipped into the hallway. “Mind if I join you?”

“Not at all,” she said loudly, above the running water. “Come on in.” Tom stepped inside the bathroom, peeled off his socks, and unzipped his pants.

“A package came for you this afternoon,” she said, as he got down to his underwear. “A birthday present.”

“Oh yeah?” he replied, not really paying attention. He slipped off his boxers and added them to the pile of her workout clothes. Then he pulled aside the shower curtain as a bouquet of foam slid down her back.

“ Yeah,” she said, her face lifted toward the water nozzle. “It was dropped off in person.” She stepped out from under the stream and kissed him on the cheek. “From Sydney,” she added, and handed him the bar of soap.

Underneath it all, Hannah’s worldview was largely laissez-faire. Many of her friends, who had previously seemed perfectly sane, had in the past couple of years started talking an awful lot about bait-cutting and cow-buying. But to Hannah, it invariably seemed that forcing things only led to the most Pyrrhic of victories: the captive sparrow, twitching in your hand, limp with defeat; or the pacing tiger, remaining out of dry duty, parched and angered by his own obligation. Ultimately, she was only out for her own best interest: She wanted the pleasure of being with someone she knew freely, in his deepest heart, wanted to be with her. If Tom’s wish was to run off with his little correspondent, so be it. Hannah just wanted to be sure that before he left, he knew her for the generous and clever creature she truly was.

That night, a thick, soft snow fell, muffling the rooftops of the tiny town with cashmere quiet. Hannah had a dream. It was summer; she was flying over the house she grew up in, in Maine. There was no roof; she could see into her childhood bedroom. Tom and Sydney were in it, dancing.

Sydney was kissing him, touching him. She kept pausing and looking up at Hannah.

This? Like this? Is this okay?

Hannah kept trying to communicate down to her: Yes. Yes. Just like that.

Sydney put her lips against Tom’s neck. He closed his eyes. She slid her hand under his waistband. He was slipping. Wait, stop. Where was Hannah? He couldn’t breathe, he was going to suffocate. “Hannah!” he cried out, into the open sky.

It’s okay, I’m here … Hannah said, concentrating, into his mind. She looked at Sydney. Tell him, Sydney. I love you. Tell him: I love you.

Tom was anxious; Hannah was concentrating; Sydney was reaching. Suddenly she took hold of him, in one smooth grip, and Tom’s head fell back as a wave of pleasure passed through him. And up in the sky, Hannah felt the pleasure, too.

The next morning, while Tom was in the shower, she went to the phone book and called Sydney.

“I have an idea,” she said.

“Let me see if I get this straight.” Nihan was highly amused. “It doesn’t count as cheating if you’re in the same room, naked.” Hannah smiled, hoping she knew what she was doing. “And what exactly is your role in this Bacchanalian jamboree going to be?” Nihan asked.

“I don’t know. We didn’t write a script,” Hannah said. “I just told her to bring a couple bottles of wine.”

“And the young Thomas doesn’t know this is going to happen?”

“No.”

“You’d better make that three bottles.”

Hannah felt a stab of doubt. She was still a little uneasy about scheduling dates for Tom’s penis without consulting him first.

“Do you think he’ll mind?”

“Uh, honey,” Nihan said, draping an arm across her friend’s shoulders, “this has been every man’s fantasy since he learned to count to three. No, I don’t think he’ll mind.”

Hannah and Sydney had found planning the logistics rather difficult. They discussed hiding Sydney in the closet with a glass of wine and the door cracked open so she’d get enough air. They joked around about using lines like, “Okay, Tom, now you let us take care of everything,” and, “Just let us know if the blindfold is too tight.” Hannah figured it probably wouldn’t be very funny if she lost her nerve right when they all took off their clothes and said something like, “Just kidding.” There really was no getting out of it now. Well, perhaps the joke would be on them: Tom would take the opportunity to announce he was gay, and she wouldn’t have to go through with it.

Monday, December 22, 2008. The day Thomas Groff turned twenty-six. The day he would remember on his deathbed.

Sydney was hiding in the bedroom, with the cake. She and Hannah had decided to surprise Tom by emerging together, with the lights down and the birthday candles lit. The bedroom was right off of the kitchen, so Hannah could slip in for “the cake” whenever. Depending on how much wine they’d had, the two of them might or might not quickly strip down to their underwear. They were waiting to decide that on the spur of the moment, feeling much too sober at present to make such an important decision. Besides, Tom was expected any minute. Before he arrived, they opened a spare bottle of champagne so they could make a toast together.

“To surprises,” Hannah said.

When Tom walked through the door, she went to hug him but his arms were behind his back. When she stepped back, he produced roses. Three. She thought, for one terrifying instant, that he’d divined her plan, but of course, he hadn’t: He’d just gotten lucky. It was, after all, his lucky day.

“You’ve got it backwards, darling,” she said, beaming. “Your birthday is when I give you the gifts, remember?”

“I know,” he said, passing the flowers from one hand to the other as he pulled out of his winter coat. “But the genius on the corner knows a sucker when he sees one.” She took his coat and was about to go looking for a vase for the flowers when he removed everything from her hands and placed it on the counter.

“Come here,” he said, arms wide.

He pulled her to him and held her so snug against his chest that she had to turn her face to the side to breathe. He rested his chin on top of her head for a moment, tired and happy from the holiday streets.

“You’re so good to me, baby,” he said, gazing out the kitchen window. “You’re the reason I’m glad I was born.”

Hannah was grateful he couldn’t see her face. She was so giddy with excitement, so nearly bursting with secret anticipation, that she was sure her expression would have given her away.

Sydney was observing this heartwarming scene from the bedroom, where she was crouching in the dark by a crack in the door, like a burglar. It must have seemed as though she were out in the night, looking in someone else’s warmly lit windows, waiting in the bushes for a chance to sneak in. To rob them. She may have felt afraid, touched by what she’d just witnessed and knowing that everything could change after something like this. She might have felt guilty, knowing it was she who had everything to gain and Hannah who had everything to lose. For whatever reason, she stood up and quickly dashed for the door.

“I’m so sorry,” she said, racing past them and out of the apartment. “Bye.”

Hannah couldn’t believe her eyes. Neither could Tom.

“I’ll be right back,” she said, pressing her palm against his chest and then running out the door.

“Sydney, wait!” she called down the hallway. But Sydney didn’t stop. She was already halfway there, moving fast and within reach of the exit. “What’s wrong? Wait! Come on—hold on for a second—Sydney!”

When Sydney stopped walking, Hannah realized how desperately she wanted her to come back. And this was how she knew she had succeeded in finding the perfect gift: She had stepped into the kind of gesture that, like all inspired unselfish acts, had left her feeling more like she was receiving something than like she was giving something away.

Sydney stopped walking and turned around. Her eyes reflected the sad yellow lighting of hallways.

“What’s wrong?” Hannah asked again, her head gently tilted to one side. “C’mon. Come here.”

“I don’t know,” Sydney said. She looked like she didn’t know what to say. She opened her mouth, then closed it again.

Hannah was walking toward her under the familiar, flickering lights. Sydney tried again. “It’s just—he really loves you, you know?” she said, but before she could get to the rest, Hannah had taken her hand and was leading her briskly back to the apartment. Of course she knew.

“March!” she said, stomping her feet. Tipsy and determined, she pulled Sydney—reluctant still, but willing to be led.

When they reached the doorway, Hannah stopped abruptly and Sydney bumped up against her back. She put her hand on the doorknob with Sydney right behind her. She put her hand on the doorknob, but before she opened it, she turned. She turned around and she kissed Sydney, kissed her soft, warm lips.

It was a delicate, grateful, exciting kiss, and when she pulled away, Sydney’s eyes were still closed.

“I knew you’d be lovely,” Hannah said, and opened the door.

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