You Don't Love This Man (18 page)

A part of me wondered if it was a mistake to even involve him at all.

My telephone rang. The elevator doors had opened onto the tenth floor by then, and I could see Grant's door open at the end of the hall. The phone's screen showed the call was coming from Catherine's extension at the bank, which meant it was either Catherine herself, or the bank security people. I closed the phone without answering, though, and stepped through the open door to find Grant standing in front of the floor-to-ceiling windows across the room, holding a glass of ice water while he gazed down at the streets below. In a gray T-shirt, worn jeans, and barefoot, he seemed entirely at ease.

“You probably just watched me park and walk up here,” I said.

“I didn't notice,” he said.

“I hope I'm not screwing up your schedule.”

“Not at all. I just got back from letting Alex Massoud beat me at golf, but he still hasn't agreed to extend our contract with him. So now I'm wondering if things would have gone better if I'd just gone ahead and beaten him. But I'm glad to get away from them for a while.” He retrieved a beer from the large refrigerator that dominated his otherwise compact, gleaming kitchen.
Dark clouds still blanketed the city, and everything in Grant's kitchen—the marble countertops, chrome faucet, and stainless steel refrigerator and dishwasher; the bright yellow label on the beer he was opening; the earth-colored liquid that swirled inside the bottle—glowed as if lit from within. A glance overhead revealed the actual source of illumination: bulbs within the concrete ceiling created the pools of light that Grant moved through as he handed me my beer. If there had been a third person in the room with us, watching Grant stand by the counter in his jeans and T-shirt, the person would certainly have guessed him to be a full decade younger than he was. I knew he spent an hour in a health club most weekdays, which made it possible for him to keep fitting into his slim T-shirts and jeans, and to shop on the men's side of the same fashionable clothing stores where Miranda bought her own clothes. His tan was even, his close-cropped hair as dark as it had ever been. Had Grant been dying his hair, lying in the sun, performing exotic variations of sit-ups, keeping his nails carefully manicured and his hands moisturized, and observing any number of other personal-care details not only out of standard vanity, but also out of a desire to minimize the visual dissonance of what people tended to refer to—when in my presence, at least—as an “interesting” age difference between him and Miranda? I was a bit soft in the middle, as is every middle-aged man's right, and my thinning hair contained a liberal mix of gray. I bought my clothing from department stores, in the usual sections for men our age—or the sections for men our age who didn't make time for the gym.

I picked up my beer and asked if he would be joining me, but he shook his head. “I already had a couple on the course. Good speech at dinner last night, by the way.”

“Passable.”

“More than passable. It was honest. And heartfelt. You did a good job.”

I shrugged. The beer tasted shockingly good. I wondered if it was due to the fact that I hadn't had anything to eat since breakfast.

“Sandra called me this morning,” Grant said. “Asking if I knew where Miranda was. Is that why you stopped by?”

“I managed to track her down,” I said. “I sat with her for a few minutes at lunch. But then she left again.”

“What do you mean?”

I summarized the lunch I'd had with Miranda the same way I'd summarized it for Sandra, and finished by saying, “And I guess I assume she'll show up at the hotel sometime soon. Though it's still true that I don't know exactly where she is or what's going on.”

He nodded. “But you think something
is
going on.”

“Yes. Nothing happened between the two of you, did it?”

“No. But have you talked to Sandra?”

“She doesn't know where Miranda is, either. But if she's feeling nervous or anxious, I guess I assumed it might have something to do with you. You
are
the one she's marrying today.”

“Maybe.” He seemed to turn something over in his mind before he added, “It's a big thing, what she's signing on to.”

“But she hasn't said anything to you, has she?”

“No. But she's had boyfriends in the past, and I assume she knows she could have boyfriends in the future. There's a whole alternate future still available to her, but all of those options are about to close down.”

“The two of you will be opening up a lot of new options together, though.”

He smiled, but seemed tired. “Probably not as many as it seems. Not to her.”

Was I overestimating Grant's career success? His wealth? I didn't think so. “At dinner last night she said she adored you,” I said. “She seemed perfectly confident and happy.”

“You mean her speech? That was something she said in front of a group of people. I don't think she actually adores me in the true sense of that word, or I hope she doesn't, since that seems dangerous. She and I have talked about these things over the last couple years, and I think we understand each other. Nothing I said or did last night would suddenly have upset her. I know she's your daughter and you'll always think of her as a girl, but she has a pretty solid sense of herself as an adult.”

“I still think she's upset about something. I trust my sense of that.”

“I just think you're overestimating my role. If Miranda wanted out of what she's in, she could still get out of it and be fine. What she's signing on to now is big. It seems perfectly understandable to me that she would think about escaping it.”

“But for what?”

“For freedom,” he said, as if it were obvious. “The guys I was playing golf with this morning are friends, but they're friends I've made through the course of business, and other than you, those are pretty much the only kind of friends I have. My life these days is about running the firm. I don't draw product designs anymore—I look at other people's designs and say how they should be modified. I live what is probably a vaguely
corporate
existence, if I correctly understand what people mean when they say that word with a sneer. Miranda knows this. And she knows it's not how the painters who show in the gallery live their lives, and it's not how her
musician friends live, and it's not how she has thought about her own life. But the direction she's headed in with me is away from those freedoms. Why wouldn't she second-guess that?”

He had said he felt I was overestimating his role, and then described a scenario in which Miranda's disquiet was probably the result of his role. So what was behind the contradiction? It seemed he was saying it was his
existence
that was the problem—not anything he'd actually said or done. And was he mentioning painters and musicians because there actually was some painter or musician who was a rival for Miranda's affections? The idea that there was a third person involved seemed impossible. Miranda had never, at any time, mentioned another man. “When did you see her last?” I asked.

“Last night, toward midnight. At Jo's.”

“Who is Jo?”

“It's a cocktail bar downtown. You've been there.”

He said this as if it somehow resolved the situation—or as if there
were
no situation, other than my inability to immediately place the name of this particular bar. “I'm sorry,” I said. “I don't remember the name of every place I've ever been.”

“I'm not—”

“There are days that I feel like every person I know is talking down to me,” I said. “And maybe you're not. Maybe it's in my head. I don't care. I'm not asking to take a quiz on bar names. I'm asking you what happened when you saw her last.”

“I'm not talking down to you.”

“I don't care. It doesn't matter. What happened?”

I had never been that aggressive with Grant, but he seemed to accept it. Or his response, at least, was to accede to my questioning with nothing more than a slight shrug. “We only ended up there
by coincidence,” he said. “Or not a coincidence, really, since we've been there a number of times together—but we picked the same place. She was with her bridesmaids and some other friends, and I was having a drink with some people I know who didn't make the invite list.”

If it had been anyone else, I would have found it odd to spend the evening before your wedding with people who weren't invited. But Grant's parents were both dead, and I knew his only sibling, a half sister, had manufactured a vague story about pressing business that would prevent her from leaving her home in Minneapolis to attend the wedding. So Grant was friendly, and well-off, and unencumbered by family. And if people, for whatever reason, like to collect things, then it was probably true that what Grant liked to collect was people. Even if he claimed the only friendships he had were business-related, that was still twenty-five years of friendships. It was a rare occasion that I walked into a restaurant or bar with Grant and one or two people didn't immediately wave, or call his name, or walk up to him. And though many of these friends were people currently involved in his professional life, I'd had a sense on more than one occasion that Grant also kept in touch with people who were no longer active in his professional sphere, and that he maintained those friendships not because it was professionally useful, but because he actually did like people. Between all these professional and semiprofessional relationships, Grant could have easily filled three hundred chairs on his side of the ceremony alone, so it didn't necessarily surprise me that he wanted to do something for the people he couldn't invite. And I was probably a little embarrassed about it, too, since I'd been insistent on paying for the wedding myself—an insistence that had necessitated a budget, and a budget that had included a guest limit. And Grant had never once
complained about this. He had acceded to my budgetary limits in every detail.

“Did you notice anything unusual?” I asked. “Was she upset?”

“Not that I know of,” he said. “She didn't stay very long, because she said she didn't want me to see her on the day of the wedding. She left just before midnight.”

“And you haven't talked to her since then.”

“No,” he said, frowning. “But you have. What did she say that has you so rattled?”

“She was asking about control. About Sandra and me, and our marriage. It seemed like she was worried she's going to lose some kind of control. Like she's going to drown.”

“Drown how?”

“She didn't say drown—that's just the word I'm using. There was something about marriage that had her worried she was going to lose herself.”

His face tightened, almost as if he were in pain, but I couldn't figure out what I had said that had caused the reaction. “I don't think you should be telling me this,” he said.

“Why?”

“Because she was sharing that with
you
. Not with me.”

“She hasn't spoken that way to you?”

“No.” He shook his head slightly, as if confused. “She could be at the hotel right now, getting ready and feeling fine. This could all be idle speculation.”

“Maybe. I don't know what's speculation and what's not.”

“Look,” he said, “you don't need to be subtle with me. I know what people think about me. And maybe you think it, too. I haven't been married before. I've traveled a lot, and I've had my share of girlfriends, but I don't have some super-complicated life or danger
ous power. I feel like there's a perception out there that I'm some kind of playboy who's been jet-setting around the world at my leisure. But I actually find life as difficult as anyone does. I've succeeded at what I do, and I have the money I have, because I worked harder than anyone else I know. I took risks and worked to succeed. And then when I hit my forties, I realized there were other things I wanted, and I realized I was lucky—damn lucky—that I hadn't been married before. Because I meet guys all the time who have just plowed through marriage after marriage, creating all of this carnage behind them that they joke about. And they baffle me. I don't understand them. And I avoided it until in my forties I thought, Here I am, I'm lucky to have what I have, but I'm ready to try and get to know another person, and to learn to share myself. And now that turns out to be the hardest thing I've ever tried to do. And if Miranda is having doubts, they don't have to do with something that happened between the two of us last night. If she's worried about something, it's just whether she wants to do all of this. Because she can still get out. And maybe she wants to. And maybe I wouldn't blame her.” He looked silently down into his glass of water, which was empty. I realized then that my beer was gone, too, though I couldn't remember drinking it. “Did you want another?” he asked.

“No,” I said. “I should go. I have things I'm supposed to do. And I'm sorry. Maybe I'm worrying you about nothing.”

He gave me an earnest look, as if desperate to have me understand something. “I don't want Miranda to drown,” he said. “I never wanted that. But I'm not going to bother her today. She said she didn't want us to see or talk to each other today. If she wanted to talk, she would have called me.” And then he smiled, as if we had just launched a little conspiracy. “So if there's something wrong, it's in your hands.”

“I'll do my best,” I said.

He nodded. “I know you will,” he said.

By the time I made my way back down to the street, the rain was falling harder, soaking the now-empty streets. To the west, though, I could see the dark back edge of the storm coming over the hills like the edge of a curtain being drawn slowly back. The storm would make its way out over the plains to the east next, where it would give the farmers some rain, and then probably break up and evaporate. Once or twice each summer, though, these seemingly innocuous clouds turned black and, with little or no warning, hammered the earth with a maelstrom of hail. A storm like that could break windows, total cars, and destroy an entire summer's crop in the space of ten pounding minutes.