Men and Dogs Read Free Page A

time, had to be worth almost a million dollars. Jon was a bit reluctant, as there would be no room for pets or kids, but that fact,
for reasons Hannah couldn’t clearly explain, only made her want the place more.
    The view has its consequences, of course.
With nothing between the windows and the Pacific, the building is constantly under an onslaught of gale-force wind. Gusts rattle the windows, and sometimes, coming around the corner from the protection of the garage, Hannah finds her own private rainstorm opening up just above her head.
    It’s not raining tonight, but the wind is high. It whips at her hair and through her shirt. She looks up to the third floor.
The lights are out. She’d use her key, but the locks have been changed. She knows this without even bothering to try them.
It’s a ritual she’s gone through several times now: she screws up; her husband gets new locks. Then, after a large amount of seducing, cajoling, and gentle reasoning, he lets her back in and she pays the locksmith to make her another copy of the new key. Ringing the bell isn’t an option either; he’s most likely not home, and if he is, he won’t answer.
    Surveying the building, she thinks of the call she made to her brother a few weeks back. They rarely speak, but she had to do something that day to ward off the afternoon loneliness. Her brother’s voice, still Southern, carried an unmistakable note of annoyance at the news of her separation.
    “It’s marriage,” she explained. “I can’t deal.”
    “How original,” he said, sighing.
    “I know. It’s faith.”
    “Faith?”
    “Being faithful,” she said. And, after a pause, “It’s a problem.”
    The first slipup—shortly after their wedding a year and a half ago—was reasonably innocent. Jon was out of town and she’d gone to a business dinner, after which she’d had too much Maker’s Mark; the next morning, she was naked in a hotel room. Hannah hates secrets, so she told her husband immediately. He was angry but forgave her with sad, unbearably tolerant eyes. Shortly after, she slept with her yoga instructor. And then there was the thing at her college reunion. But when the yoga mistake happened a second time (different instructor), Jon finally took his mother’s heirloom ring back and kicked her out for good.
    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