You Don't Love This Man (19 page)

That day's storm didn't look unusual. But it's also true that one never knows.

 

A
FTER
M
OONCALF,
I was robbed only once more. It happened the summer before Miranda turned sixteen, which was also the summer during which I was forced to remove a boyfriend of hers. She hurt herself, and I removed him. And I would do it again.

The trouble started when I sat on the lowest bench of a set of aluminum bleachers next to a solitary tennis court in one of the city's quieter parks. The day's heat had decayed into a lazy warmth that hung heavy and still as I loosened my tie, waiting for Miranda, a member of a junior tennis team that summer, to face a counterpart from a suburban team. A cheerful man and woman were seated above me on the bleachers, and I assumed they belonged to the gangly teen standing on the court, a girl who flashed them nervous, braces-filled smiles as she gathered her red hair into
a ponytail and twirled her racket. I anticipated watching Miranda and her opponent bounce the ball and play their points, adjust their ponytails and call the score, shriek in frustration or satisfaction, win or lose a set, lose or win another, and at some point leave the court wearing similarly weak smiles. When I asked the girl on the court if she knew where her opponent was through, she said, “Nope. I haven't seen anyone.” After a few more minutes passed without any sign of Miranda, the girl's father rolled up the sleeves of his powder blue dress shirt, climbed down from the bleachers, and shuffled around the court in his penny loafers, hitting ground strokes to his daughter and gamely chasing her errant replies, the soles of his shoes scuffing chalky half-moons onto the court's surface.

“Creepy-crawly on your shoulder,” the woman on the bleachers said. I looked over in time to watch a tiny, dust-colored creature scuttle along my collarbone. The local news had done its best to frighten everyone with multiple stories covering the plaguelike number of spiders that had appeared that summer, but a mere flick of my finger sent this one spinning into oblivion. “Is the girl we're waiting for your daughter?” the woman asked.

“Yes,” I said, looking up to where she sat four rows above me. She was petite, blond, middle-aged, and beaming down at me from an angle that made it difficult not to examine the place where her pale white thigh flattened against the bleachers.

“These teenagers and their sense of time,” she said. “Cassie spent half an hour trying to choose a skirt.”

Children screeched happily from a nearby playground. A brown station wagon purred along the narrow park road. “That's the way, really hit it!” the father called to his daughter as her fore-hand sailed out of bounds.

“Do you play?” the woman asked.

It wasn't merely that her thigh was pale, but that the surface of the aluminum bleachers had pressed an exotic pattern of lines into the surface of her skin. The terrain seemed a provocation. “I used to,” I said. “But I've left it to my wife now.”

“Is she on a team, too?”

Sandra was not only on a team, but was playing a match of her own at one of the main complexes in town that evening, a fact that, as soon as I related it, set in motion a chain of narrowing questions which revealed not only that this arachnid-spotting woman was herself a member of a team, but that she played in the same league as Sandra. It wasn't a surprising coincidence, considering our setting, but it nevertheless filled the woman with a delight that only increased when I described some of the members of Sandra's team. “I think I know exactly who your wife is!” she said excitedly. “She played mixed doubles against me just two weeks ago. Her partner was a man named Grant.”

“Yes. He's a friend of ours.”

“This is just so funny,” the woman said, “because my girlfriends and I had an argument later about whether or not they were together. Nothing unusual happened, mind you, it was just that they seemed to have so much fun playing together, and neither of them was wearing a ring.”

“My wife says the ring gives her blisters.”

“Wonderful! I told my friends those two were having too much fun to be married. So I win the bet.”

“I'm sorry my daughter isn't here,” I said. “I don't know where she could be. I suppose I should forfeit in her name.”

The woman gasped as if I had sadly unsheathed a razor-sharp sword while suggesting a ritual suicide could restore my family's
honor. “I'm sure it's just a misunderstanding,” she said. “And it's such a gorgeous evening anyway. I just hope she's all right.”

I did, too, but by the time I gave up waiting and headed back to my car, the sky was shifting into dusk. As I drove home, warm evening air rushed past the open sunroof, and trees along the streets pressed their silhouettes against the plum-colored sky. Stopped at a light, I watched people wander into a retro ice cream parlor playing hits of the fifties, file into a fast-food place that reeked of fried hamburgers and potatoes, stand in line outside the air-conditioned movie theater, or wander with no destination in mind at all, on the street simply to be on the street, amid the pulsing and twisting chaos of shorts and T-shirts and sandals, of ragged hats and churning limbs and flapping mouths. Groups in conversation spilled past the edge of the sidewalk and stood laughing and chatting along the margin of the street, while an army of people passed in the crosswalk before me, talking and laughing only a few feet from where I sat behind the wheel. Not a person acknowledged my presence, of course, until two groups traveling in opposite directions failed to successfully negotiate each other, sending a young woman in a magenta halter top off balance. She pressed her palm to the hood of my car to steady herself and she met my eyes through the wind-shield just as her top slipped down enough to reveal the healthy brown nipple of her left breast. I offered her a weak smile. She laughed, righted herself, corrected her top, and moved on.

By the time I drifted the car to a space in front of my home, the evening's first stars shone clearly in the sky. Our Japanese maple lowered its head in a shadowy corner of the yard, the cherry tree at the side of the house rose in a column of darkness, and light from the living room window revealed a robust constellation of spider silk entwined within the tangled rhododendrons beneath the front
window. Climbing the creaking stairs to the porch, I spotted in the branches of the nearest bush one of the web's dark architects—he scrambled away from me, silver filaments swaying beneath his fluid weight.

At my first touch, the front door swung inward. It had been left slightly open, I realized as I stepped into the entryway and found three pairs of shoes in a line against the side of the staircase: the tongues of my grass-stained yard shoes yawned boredly, the waxy soles of Miranda's tennis shoes shone in the bright entryway light, and the frayed Velcro straps of a pair of large black sandals that I had never seen before rose stiffly skyward like something vegetal. I heard a faint cry from the back of the house then—a strained, vaguely animal bleat that stopped almost as soon as it began. As I moved down the hall and through the kitchen, I heard the cry again and knew, though it wasn't a sound I'd heard from her before, that it was Miranda. I opened the back door and stepped into the glaring incandescence of the porch light, where I found her standing there in the white skirt and T-shirt of her tennis uniform, her hair pulled into the ponytail she wore when playing. The bleat, apparently, had been an odd new laugh she had offered to a shirtless young man who reclined on a deck chair nearby, casually grinding a cigarette into an empty plastic planter tray as if he'd been smoking on our back porch all summer long. His thin, nearly hairless torso glowed burnt orange beneath the outdoor bulb, and his shirt, if he owned one, wasn't in sight. He had a large Roman nose, its prominence accentuated by his decision to shave his hairline an inch higher than his ears, and the balancing act of reaching across himself to his plastic cup had caused his bare feet to rise from the surface of the porch in a way that struck me as canine. “Hi Daddy,” Miranda said. “This is Ira.”

The boy jumped to his feet and shook my hand with an exacting precision. Though his eyes met mine, his focus seemed that of someone looking through rather than at me as he said, “Pleased to meet you, sir. I hope you don't mind my spending some time with your daughter this evening. We've just met, but I think she's a fine young woman.”

“She certainly is,” I said. “But she was supposed to have been playing tennis tonight.”

“I twisted my ankle,” Miranda said. “During practice. It's not serious, but I'm not supposed to play on it.”

“I haven't noticed you limping,” I said.

“I said it's not serious,” she said in a tone meant for the obtuse. “I just don't want it to get worse. I tried to call Coach, but nobody answered.”

“Did you try to call me?”

“I didn't know you were coming to the match, or I would have. I'm sorry.”

It wasn't normal for Miranda to lie to me, and the transparent falsity of her statements, combined with her shirtless friend's grating pseudo-formality, annoyed me. Returning to the kitchen, I filled a glass with ice and tipped a generous amount of vodka into it, watching the liquid trickle down. I took two healthy sips on the way to my office, and felt a welcome warmth spread across the base of my skull.

When I reached my office, I thought to open the window and catch some floating bits of conversation, but the room was on the north side of the house, and I couldn't recall if I'd ever actually opened that window. A casual upward push had no effect, and it was only when I got my shoulders down beneath the sash and pressed with my full weight that that it gave way, rocketing upward
with a squeal before jamming crookedly, halfway. The move had not been expertly accomplished, but I did detect the faint tones of Miranda and her friend: their rising pitch and staccato cadences betrayed a nervous energy, and I felt an instant and intense animosity toward the boy—I wanted to throw him bodily from my property while telling him never to come within ten miles of my daughter again. I realized my anger was out of proportion to anything he had actually done and that it was reasonable to keep open the possibility that he was unaware of the degree to which smoking shirtless on my patio would antagonize me, but something in me also felt greatly confident the boy was perfectly aware of his behavior. I filled my glass again, and when I stood a few minutes later, the room wobbled a bit as I wandered out of the office and through the dining room, whose walls confronted me with so many framed images: me with Miranda, Sandra with Miranda, Sandra and me together with Miranda, and, in one photo, Miranda by herself. I could hear her and the boy through the back kitchen window, and then I saw them through it, lit up like goblins in the orange porch light as the boy added another stubbed cigarette to the pile he'd formed in the planter tray. “Miranda,” I sighed tiredly through the screen, “it's time for your friend to leave.”

“Okay, Daddy,” she said.

Miranda had called me any number of things over the years—from loving nicknames to ironic formal addresses to angry insults—but she hadn't called me “Daddy” since she was five. When Sandra got home, I thought, we would all of us have a talk, review some rules, and put a stop to this “Daddy” business. I wandered the house straightening things, was briefly cheered when I heard the bathroom door close—I thought it meant the boy had finally left—and was then disappointed to hear the hollow, thunderous
plash whose source could only be male. The sound's suggestion of liquid disorder disgusted me, especially when the noise continued well beyond the period of physiological modesty until, when it finally ceased, the toilet's flush was followed much too quickly by the sound of the door opening, and then here came the boy toward me through the dining room, casting in my direction a glassy and un-blinking gaze as he asked, again with that grating formality, if he could speak with me. A person of intelligence would have blunted or concealed the naked aggression that rang out from this boy as he pretended to need to catch his breath while saying, “I know this is fast, sir, but I like Miranda a lot, and I wanted to know if you'd mind if I took her out on a date—with her consent, of course.” When I told him her mother and I wouldn't let her date until she was sixteen, he didn't miss a beat before asking if maybe he could just take her for coffee or ice cream, then, because she was
almost
sixteen, wasn't she? I told him the type of date didn't affect the policy, and he nodded while affecting a thoughtful contemplation so extreme that I almost laughed. Could they spend time in a group, he wanted to know, or maybe with friends at the mall? “The number of people or location or time of day doesn't matter,” I said. “She's simply not to date.”

His face clouded into a tight-jawed expression of contempt so clear that I knew he couldn't be aware of it. A second later he had replaced it with a mime's version of hurt feelings, though, as with a self-pitying shrug he said, “Okay, so maybe you just don't like me.”

“It has nothing to do with you,” I said. “I don't know you at all.”

He sighed, lips pursed in frustration. “All right,” he said, “I understand. And believe me, I really respect that you're protecting your daughter. I wish my own dad had half the commitment to
being a parent that you have. But maybe I'll see you again sometime.”

“Maybe,” I said.

He returned to the porch. I returned to my office, where I spent the next half hour pretending to go through financial files while I waited for him to leave. But he did not leave. I continued hearing their wordless voices and staccato laughter through the open window as my anger spun restlessly, and I realized that though I had no memory of it, at some point I had brought the actual bottle of vodka into the office with me. Finally I wandered to the back door and asked Miranda if she could please come inside and speak with me. She sighed as if incredibly put out by this, and I walked back to my office telling myself that certainly I was my usual, composed self. Except, of course: part of me was not. But that angry self seemed separate from me, like an animal that had climbed into my lap and was content to sit there, purring, until a whispered command from me would send it bounding off toward a creature into which it could sink its teeth.