Men and Dogs Read Online Free

bouts of panic and tears. Hannah had found her person—someone she was perfectly happy to read next to on the couch without the thought that there might be something better out there. She was thirty, and she thought she was done.
    The next four years were a happy, comfortable, adultery-free blur. They moved into a railroad apartment on 18th, across from the Bi-Rite and Dolores Park. Though they were both rather buttoned-up, preppy people, there was nothing to do now but become Mission hipsters. In a year they had both adopted the uniform of skinny jeans and T-shirts with ironic slogans. (CRAZY LIKE FOX NEWS; NUKE A GAY WHALE FOR JESUS!) Everything eventually became ironic: the fact that they hatched their business plan at the motorcycle bar, the way they ran a successful company out of the back of a record store. Once their shared specialty-goods company took off, Hannah and Jon were netting tens of thousands each month in a storage room they rented for $300. Oh, the irony.
    Life had to change. Hannah and Jon couldn’t be real hipsters anymore. They now had too much money to pull it off. They wouldn’t admit to being yuppies, but they were something else in between. They started going to Tahoe to ski. Hannah hired the private yoga instructor. They threw open-bar parties and ordered takeout from slow-food restaurants. After the close of the third fiscal year, Jon announced they had more than a million dollars in the bank.
    A million dollars, they marveled, toasting each other over a $115 pasta dinner from Delfina. What should we do with it all?
    Buy an apartment. Get married.
    It’s not that, in the midst of all this youth and glory, Jon and Hannah didn’t fight. Their arguments were flash storms that disappeared as quickly as they arrived, leaving the surfaces cleaner, cooler. These, Hannah knew, were what kept things interesting. They were not the cause of Hannah’s postwedding crack-up. It was something else. Sometimes Hannah thinks it might actually be less about the marriage and more about the apartment. When they lived on 18th Street, there was nothing to see out of the windows. They were safe there, in their own little country, surrounded by craigslist furniture and stacks of Jon’s emo records. But from Upper Terrace, she could literally see everything in the city out of her window. All the things she might be missing.
    The first signs of her unraveling appeared as soon as they returned from their Cuban honeymoon. Usually, upon throwing down their bags after a trip, Hannah would be happy to be home, celebrating with a book on the couch or even, say, a quick screw.
But something was wrong this time. The apartment, usually flooded with light, was so full of boxed wedding presents that the windows were blocked. There was no longer any room .
    They pushed and rearranged the stacks, but it helped only slightly. Opening the gifts made it worse, because now there were all these things to store and mountains of empty boxes to recycle. Hannah began secretly throwing the boxes away without even opening them. Even that didn’t make her feel better, so she started getting rid of things: clothes, appliances, the matching sets of polished chopsticks that had always inexplicably annoyed her.
    “Where’s the blender?” Jon asked, his hands full of smoothie-ready fruit. “Have you seen the microwave?”
    Hannah claimed ignorance. She knew Jon wouldn’t understand. Because while she wanted more personal space, he wanted less.
Marriage was supposed to make them closer, he—rightly—reasoned. But whatever she conceded never seemed to be enough. Love wasn’t enough; sex wasn’t enough; sharing work problems wasn’t enough; starting a business together, not enough; learning to backcountry ski (six weeks of avalanche training) and mountain bike (three Saturdays at Rock Hard Training School) just so they could have “new adventures together”—not enough. These things, her husband says, are necessary for a successful