by Russ López

I had been living in Truro, about ten minutes from Provincetown, for six months by that May, and the experience had been everything I had hoped it would be. Surrounded by a quiet pine forest with no neighbors to be seen or heard, I’d get up when I wanted to, eat when I felt like it, and go for long bike rides. I had agreed to stay at my grandparents’ house to oversee the construction of their retirement home which didn’t involve more than a daily visit. As a coder, I can work anywhere, and I had been looking forward to getting out of the rat race that is Silicon Valley and coming home to Massachusetts. Furthermore, because my team was scattered across seven times zones that straddled the globe, my hours are crazy no matter where I sleep, so why not kick back on Cape Cod?

I needed a break. Kimberly, my ex-girlfriend had been perfect, on paper. She was a quiet studious biomedical researcher, so you know she was smart. But though we had some good times, for the most part I could never make her happy and she walked around with in a cloud of disappointment I could never dissipate. We didn’t as much break up as simply end things out of boredom. Yet I still found the final months with her exhausting, and after it was over, Silicon Valley seemed claustrophobic. The hills, which I once found breathtakingly beautiful, now closed in on me, interrupting my breathing. I felt like the Valley’s traffic and congestion were strangling me, and I no longer found joy in its endless sunny days. When my grandparents suggested I go to Truro for them, I had my out.

Self-sufficient, I could order most things via the internet and get everything else I might need at the grocery store in Provincetown. I also went to Commercial Street for dinner when I felt in the mood. This had the bonus of getting me some face-to-face interaction with humanity. If left to my own devices, I could go to months without seeing anyone, but I thought that was unhealthy. Altogether, I created a quiet lifestyle that might not appeal to everyone, but one I liked it. Go ahead, call me a nerd. I’m used to it.

One evening I went for fried clams at the base of the wharf, and then walked along Commercial Street to see what was going on. I’m straight and look like every other twenty-something techie in the universe: medium height, floppy brown hair, and dark brown eyes. So I don’t attract much attention and I could stroll down the street without anyone noticing me. That’s how I like it.

I was about to return home to play computer games when I passed by Herring Cove Books and decided to go inside. Not having been in a bookstore since I was in school, I forgot what they looked like. This one had floor to ceiling shelves full of books: fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and coffee table books. They were green, blue, red, black, and sunset orange and together they produced a wonderfully musty smell of carefully crafted words and special, low acid paper. There were a half dozen patrons browsing, some arguing over the merits of an author I had never heard of, others profoundly discussing the current state of the universe. I haven’t bought a physical book since middle school, I stick to electronic copies for my science fiction and fantasy kicks, but the quaintness of paper made me smile. It made me feel connected to people who lived long ago including Gutenberg and his press, ancient Chinese scholars, and the authors of Mexican codexes. As I thought about the rise of empires long since crumbled to dust, I spent a good hour randomly pulling books off the shelve to read their jackets.

“I’m recommending Pearl Watson’s book this week,” the proprietor said as he interrupted me by handing me a copy of Galatea’s Revenge. “She is coming to read from her novel on Saturday and if you buy the book now, you can have her sign it this weekend.” Short compared to me, thin as a wire with glasses and the serious air of a public scholar, the guy was nice and obviously knew a lot about books. Embarrassed for having spent so much time inside his store, I bought the book. But I had no intention of reading it. Why waste an evening on print when you can get to the next level of Fortress Invincible, my current fave game.

Around midnight, however, when my neck was sore from defending my home asteroid from external invaders and internal dissidents, I pushed myself away from my computer, knocking the book off my desk. Picking it up, for reasons I never figured out I started reading it.

At the beginning, the main character is the kind of girl I might have sat next to in advanced calculus but would ignore if we met online or at a party. For the record, I have never dated girls who wore overalls and plastic flats, nor could I imagine how a medical billing specialist could get through a day of work without going screaming mad from boredom, while spending weekends with someone who liked to create online albums of cats in Easter bonnets would make me break down in tears. Altogether, I found Helene so dull and unattractive that I almost tossed the book after ten pages. But then she walks into the garage and discovers her mother having sex with the married next-door neighbor, a mafia hitman, in the back of her father’s SUV. Horrified, Helene takes off on a cross country journey.

Over the next three hundred pages, Helene undergoes a dramatic transformation. She dons high heels and slinky dresses to disguise herself from the bad guys chasing her. Where once she wore a plain ponytail, now she cuts her hair and puts it up. She applies a lipstick in a shade of red that I imagined was the steamiest possible as she barks orders to the rogue cop trying to keep her alive. The sex scenes between the two are some of the hottest I’ve ever read. When she finally crashes her jet skis into the villain’s boat to rescue her mother, I was sad the book ended.

Perhaps because I had nothing else going on in my life, I fell in love with a fictional character. There I was, overwhelmed by that vision in black and white prose. As far as I was concerned, Helene was the ideal woman: smart, bold, intelligent, and not afraid of what other people might think. She was the kind of partner you could bring flowers to a thousand nights in a row and still dream all day of the roses you’d give her that evening. As I finally slept, I had a vision of her in my mind, and I fantasized about her all the next day. Enchanted by her strong sense of irony and adventure, I needed to know more about her. I searched the internet for reviews of the book and visited chat boards that discussed the plot. Soon, I had planned my life with Helene. But even that was not enough. I wondered what the author of the book must be like. Obviously, she had to be the real Helene. After all, aren’t all novels somewhat autobiographical? Thus, I barely slept, ate, or worked as I waited to meet the creator of the perfect woman. Once we met each other and fell in love, we’d spend the summer solstice at the North Pole and raft down the Amazon a week later. I could picture us scaling Mount Everest or even better, climbing the Empire State Building or the orange towers of the Golden Gate Bridge. There was nothing we wouldn’t accomplish.

I had never been to a book reading. I imagined a room full of tweedy professor types that spoke in stilted swamp Yankee accents. The men would have unfashionable facial hair, the women would wear no jewelry except hand me down pearls and wedding rings that had been in the family for generations. They’d be half in the bag from sipping cheap gin and members of clubs that I had never heard of, much less have a shot at being admitted to. None of them would notice me.  

To my surprise, the crowd was diverse: gay and straight, Asian, White, Black and Latinx. There were aging hippies with grey hair, a few young partying types who might have been interesting to meet but weren’t the kind of people who ever talked to me, and a scattering of what looked like MFA graduate students: thin, pale regardless of their skin color, and smelling of cigarettes and patchouli no matter where they were on the gender spectrum. I sat at the back, next to a slender, nervous looking woman who was the complete opposite of Helene. Meek, detached from the world, and afraid to assert herself, I pitied her because the poor thing must have spent hours wishing she was Helene. Impossible as the two didn’t even inhabit the same universe. She probably envied Helene’s spontaneity and despaired she’d never match her bravado.

I am nice, however, and I thought I might calm her some. “Have you read the book?” I asked. She recoiled, startled by my attention. “Can’t you just imagine meeting Helene in real life? I bet she would bowl over every guy she meets. I think someone should put a statue of her in a museum: the perfect woman.” I was Helene’s evangelist, ready to tell the world of her charms. “She proves you can fall in love with an ideal.”

The woman stared at me but stopped herself before any words got out of her mouth. Her reaction made me realize how rude I had been. No one should have to be judged against my idol’s standard. As the woman started to shake her head, I apologized. “I’m sorry. That was out of line. Helene is so much my idea of a perfect woman, that she’s made me forget my manners.”

The woman sat there silently and so I turned towards the front where the owner of Herring Cove began to speak. After several minutes of promotions for upcoming readings and inside jokes which most of the audience laughed at but left me confused, the owner said, “Let me introduce the wonderful, talented Pearl Watson.” To my horror, the young woman I had been talking to stood up and walked to the front of the room. I was confused, then shocked. How could that quiet, studious, bookish girl produce that untamed Helene? I tried to imagine what she had pulled out of herself that she used to mold that dynamo I desired but came up empty. Helene must be based on a friend, I concluded. Maybe she was a distant relative. I had to know. I needed to meet the inspiration for the woman I wanted so badly.

“Helene is every woman who dreams of a life bigger than the one she has,” Pearl began. That thin, pale wisp had a strong voice. “How many of us sit in our small, closed worlds, yet long to live large?” She paused to look around the audience before settling her eyes on me. “What would you do if your smug, hermetically sealed container you live in suddenly shattered and you were forced to rely on your wits to survive? Could you rise to a new level? Or would you shrink when fate delivers its final judgement?” By her smirk, I knew how she thought I would answer her questions. For the next hour, I felt small, weak, and helpless as she relentlessly tore me apart.

Rather than flee, however, I sat there through her reading and the questions that followed. Nor did I run out of the store when she finished, and people lined up for autographs. I had to talk to her. I had to know more about how Helene came to be.

When I handed her my copy and said, “Sign it for me, William McGrath, please,” she looked at me with a grin that said she had assumed I’d be the last in line. I’ve always hated being predictable. All my life I had yearned to break out and do something crazy. But that isn’t me. I am steady, obvious, and dependable. Then inspired by Helene, for once I did something bold. I took Pearl’s smile as an invitation to ask her to dinner and fifteen minutes later we were seated at the restaurant across the street. She ordered a Manhattan to go with her mole enchiladas, I had a margarita to complement my birria tacos.

Before I could ask anything about the book, Pearl said, “I am not Helene. I am just a quiet woman with a loud imagination.” I gave her points for honesty. “I don’t mean to be unkind,” she looked at me with her big grey eyes, “I can understand your infatuation with Helene. If I was a man, I’d also want to spend my life with her. But tell me, why would a woman as dynamic as Helene want to date you? What would you have to offer a woman like her?”

There wasn’t any cruelty in her face, just curiosity. That prompted me to sit up straight and be as tough sounding as I could. I wished my voice had been soiled by years of cigarettes and whiskey, but alas, I am nothing but a soft-spoken baritone. “I have one degree from MIT and another from Stanford. I am the number seven hire of a startup that will go public in a year with a valuation approaching a billion dollars.”

She only half suppressed a laugh, and I appreciated she was trying to be kind. A meaner woman could have left by now. “Right. When Helene steals a hang glider to escape the pack of rottweilers desperate to rip her to shreds, she is going to be thinking of settling down with a guy with stock options and a couple of computer science degrees under his belt. Try again, William.” I knew women have different tastes, and money was clearly not the way to impress Pearl. I switched to playing up my physical assets.

I almost pulled up my shirt to show her my abs, a standard way of greeting people in Provincetown even among heterosexuals but I knew my plain, unremarkable body would not get me anywhere with her. Pearl had her own special beauty that was more than her big eyes and a face that was becoming more attractive by the minute. She had inner peace, a self-confidence that made her both attractive but also unattainable. Oddly, I had as little chance of getting with her as I did with Helene. Less.

Pearl looked at me as if she was assessing an animal she was thinking of buying for a farm. “You are perfectly okay.” I could see her dismissing my appearance. “I’ll concede Helene might look you up when she needs a sperm donor because you look safe. But a relationship? I don’t think so.” She pitied me. I could see it and I grew desperate.

I wanted to find the key to Pearl’s mind. This was no longer about figuring out Helene, the in the flesh person in front of me was the one who now mattered. “I like walks along the beach at sunset. And puppies. I love puppies.”

“And piña coladas and getting caught in the rain, I suppose. Come on, we aren’t flirting online. This is real life. Why you?”

Humiliated, I should have walked out. But at that point, I would have done anything to impress her. I wanted Pearl to like me. It was only when I had nothing else to use that I turned to honesty. Really, who would ever be impressed by me? I was the dull companion to the page twelve Helene, not the exciting boyfriend to the Helene on page one forty-two. But sometimes, you just have to be yourself. “If you open my skull up and poke around my brain, you’ll find all the normal things that a twenty-eight-year-old computer nerd has stashed there: discarded pizza boxes, a ticket stub from a basketball game from five years ago, and the memory of the first girl I ever made it with. I have no superpowers, I possess no intriguing secrets, I would be the first to admit. I am just an average guy trying to make it through the world. I’m not a guy that Helene would want. I’m not anyone she’d ever go out with.”

I couldn’t look at Pearl. The last thing I wanted to see was her contempt. “However, I am nice. I call my mom once a week and when I visit my parents, I always play a round of golf with my dad though I detest the sport. Sometimes, I even let him win. I’ve never hit anyone for any reason, never bullied, and have never been intentionally cruel, though I have probably done all the little mean things we all do to each other that make the world such a cold place. Just so you know, I am nice to puppies and want to get back to having a dog someday. So there.”

I expected her to walk out on me. Who knows what I would have done? But to my surprise, she smiled, leaned forward, and kissed me on the cheek. I pulled her close and made it a proper kiss.

Russ López is the author of six nonfiction books including The Hub of the Gay Universe: An LGBTQ History of Boston, Provincetown, and Beyond. He is the editor of LatineLit, an online magazine that publishes short fiction by and about Latinx people, and his work has appeared in The Fictional Café, Somos en escrito, Bar Bar, Northeast Atlantic, Agapanthus Collective, Night Picnic, The Gay and Lesbian Review, The Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), and elsewhere. López has written numerous academic articles, book reviews, and works in other formats. Originally from California with degrees from Stanford, Harvard, and Boston University, Russ lives in Boston and Provincetown.