You Don't Love This Man (24 page)
Read You Don't Love This Man Online
Authors: Dan Deweese
Gina never spoke about money, either, and I suspected she joked with me about the place as a kind of placation, probably assuming that I didn't take her endeavor seriously. The result was that I didn't truly realize the depth of her commitment to the gallery until a day that Miranda, in a state of awe, told me how Gina had spent most of a half-hour phone call one afternoon screaming at a patron who had tried to back out of a purchase. She'd told the man he had stolen money from an artist by reserving a piece and then later trying to change his mind, and that she would not let someone rip off one of her artists that way. She would not let some “spoiled, upper-class twat,” Miranda told me Gina had called the man, cause her artist to starve. After bullying the man into paying for his purchase, though, Miranda said Gina had hung up the phone and burst into tears, admitting to Miranda that though what she'd said about the artist getting ripped off was true, it was also true that if she hadn't sold the piece, she wouldn't have been able to pay her next month's rent on the gallery space.
But Gina spoke not a word of this to me, ever. I got only laughter and light flirting from herâonly jokes. Gregory faded away, replaced by a new boyfriend, someone well connected in the city's art scene. When I saw him wearing a navy sport coat with gold buttons at a recent opening, though, I decided he couldn't be someone Gina was serious about. In fact, it didn't seem that Gina was interested in being “serious” about any man. Whatever had happenedâwhether it was one or both of her marriages, or something else entirelyâsharing her life with a man in some traditional way
didn't seem to interest her. There had been only that one, brief admissionâ“Would you believe I thought it was me?”âbefore that voice had been silenced, and in its place had appeared: composure.
And it was that professionalism and composure that I heard Gina use on the afternoon of Miranda's wedding as she spoke to the older couple out in the gallery. I had glanced only briefly at the pieces on my way inâthey appeared to be large pieces of wood, each of which featured a surface spattered with layers of red or green or yellow paint, and then scratched or hacked at with some kind of rough implementâbut I could hear the man and woman murmuring quietly to one another about them. The man was concerned that this wasn't art, while the woman said they would be striking in the foyer. In a tone of cheerful contemplation, Gina validated both responses by saying that one of the interesting things about the pieces, to her, was the very way in which they were both striking and thought-provoking. “They don't just fade into the background,” I heard her say, “when you see them, you look at them. And when you look at them, you think about them. That's what drew me to them.” She told the couple to take as much time as they wanted, and then came back into the office and propped herself against her desk as if doing nothing more than waiting for a bus. “So what was it you were doing here, again?” she said. “When you should be any number of places other than here?”
“I wanted to find out if you've talked to Miranda today. I tried to call, but you didn't answer.”
“I'm sorry, I didn't look. I was with customers,” she said, and whispered: “
And I need this sale
.”
“I don't want to bother you,” I said. “It's just that Miranda
didn't come home last night. And I saw her today for a few minutes, and she seemed upset.”
“About what?”
“She didn't say. And she's supposed to be at the hotel now, getting ready, but she's not. And no one seems to know where she is.”
Gina looked quickly into my eyesâlike a doctor reading the dilation of my pupils it seemed. “She's fine,” she said.
“What do you mean? You've seen her?”
“She stayed at my place last night. And she was here a little while ago.”
“She stayed with you last night?”
“She said her friends and the guests and all of the demands on her were too much, and she needed a quiet place to sleep. She asked if she could stay with me, and I said yes.”
I was dumbfounded by this. Gina hadn't been at the rehearsal dinner. She hadn't even been at the bar we went to after the rehearsal dinner. So Miranda had called her late at night, asking for a place to hide? “What's going on?” I said. “She's acting like someone having doubts.”
“Oh, everyone has doubts,” Gina said, as if the question were irrelevant. “I've had doubts about everything, my whole life. And it's easy to get swept off your feet and fall in love, but the actual day is different.”
“I don't remember doubts. I remember thinking it was the natural next move.”
“And yet we're both divorced,” she said, flashing me a sympathetic little smile as she crossed the room to pull two glasses from the cabinet.
“Well, there's more than one road to Rome.”
She turned, surprised. “Did you say there's more than one road to ruin?”
“To
Rome
.”
“I thought you said
ruin
!” she said, laughing. “The expression is âAll roads lead to Rome.' I like your version better, though.”
“Sorry. I don't know my expressions. I'm just trying to figure out what's going on with my daughter.”
She filled the glasses with ice and water, exactly as she had for her customers not three minutes earlier, and handed me one. “I feel like I'm in a privileged position here,” she said. “Though not necessarily in a good way.”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, I've dated both the groom and the father of the bride, for starters.”
“A lifetime ago.”
“Thank you. I always enjoy hearing how ancient I am.”
“That's not what I meant.”
“Maybe yes, maybe no. But I've spent most of the last two years working with Miranda, and I consider her a friend of mine, too. So I'm happy to tell you that she stayed with me last night, and she was here earlier today. And she's fine. But the rest of it is between you and her.”
“The rest of what? If she has doubts about getting married, she didn't have to agree to it.”
“Why do you keep asking about doubts? Is someone smarter, better-looking, and with more money than Grant really going to come along?”
The woman who had been out in the gallery stepped past the back wall then, her lips pressed into a polite smile as she asked if
Gina could answer a few questions. Gina said of course, and then, as she stepped past me on her way out to the gallery, she whispered: “It seems to me like you're the one with the doubts.”
As she disappeared around the wall, I stared at the glass of water she had poured for me. The imprint of a lip was visible beneath the rim, and I set it down without drinking. Two years earlier, Gina had covered her face in embarrassment over having thought Grant had been pursuing her, but now I was supposed to believe she was fine with things, and I was the emotional slow-poke? Did she really think she was helping me uncover some hidden emotional life I was unaware of? She felt I had doubts about the fact that my daughter was marrying a man almost a quarter century older than her, who had known her since she was a child? Of course I had doubts. That should have gone without saying. Did she expect me to run through the streets screaming about it? I could hear her chatting with the old couple in her voice of quiet enthusiasm, confirming each hesitant opinion they put forth, validating the soundness of their aesthetics and the wisdom of their responses, trying to make her sale while I thought: Miranda is a grown woman. She and Grant went to get a drink one evening, and then went to get a drink another evening. Things proceeded from there. There was nothing to be done about it.
The building's back door stood halfway open, offering a view of the alley's potholed asphalt, and of the weeds growing up from the base of the building opposite. The upper half of that building's cinder-block wall was so intensely ablaze with the heat of the afternoon sun that it appeared almost white, and I noticed, sitting on the corner of one of the desks, a pair of black sunglasses I knew were Miranda's. In their lenses, I could see a reflection of the
room: a little warped image in which I was nothing but a stretched shadow.
When Gina returned, she raised her eyebrows in a way that suggested the couple in the gallery was serious. “Maybe,” she whispered. “Maybe, maybe.”
“So you think my concerns are just in my head,” I said. “And I shouldn't worry.”
Again I got the level gaze from her. Did a shift in countenance really allow her to see something in my head? “She's going to be fine. But you should keep in mind that your daughter thinks you're Superman.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean you don't seem to care about the opinions of other people. Or maybe you do, but you hide it.”
“And Superman is like this how?”
She sighed. “Fine. Maybe not Superman. You know what I mean.”
“How much is a person supposed to care about the opinions of other people?” I asked. “What's the norm?”
“That's what I mean,” she said. And she smiled then in a way that unnerved me, because as I looked into her eyes, I felt that the person smiling at me was not the joking gallery owner, but the Gina I had known long ago, who had been kind to me in school. I hadn't seen that person in years and years. “I worry about you,” she said.
“I don't think so.”
“I do. Though I don't know why, since I know nothing about you. Do you have anything else going on in your life right now other than this wedding? Even as just a distraction? What about that woman you work with? The little one. What's her name?”
Gina knew Catherine's name. “You're saying that if I sleep with my coworker, maybe it will distract me from being concerned about whether my daughter is going to be okay in her marriage?”
“I'm saying that if you had other relationships in your life, maybe you wouldn't be so fixated on this one.”
So she had dropped her persona and come back from the past in order to fix me. It was charity. “I can't remember,” I said. “How many children was it that you have?”
She laughed, but it was forced now, and her eyes had gone flat. The Gina who had reappeared for an instant had vanished again. It was in her usual, ironic tone that she said, “Has anyone ever told you that you don't take advice well?”
“That might be because I feel like I'm trying to get permission from you in order to speak to my own daughter. Which seems odd to me.”
“Miranda chose to come to me. Not the other way around.”
“And what did she say to you?” I askedâand loudly enough that the couple in the gallery could hear.
She glared at me for a fraction of a second, but with a sigh, the anger faded from her expression. “One thing she asked was if I would do it if I were her.”
“Do what?”
“Marry Grant.”
“And what did you say?”
She fluttered her eyelids, supremely annoyed. “I said if I loved him, then yes.” Then, with a defiant look, she whispered: “And you. Are being. An asshole. Darling.”
“Only because I was asked to,” I said, my voice again at an appropriate level. “Sandra doesn't know where our daughter is, and
she asked me to try and find her. And I think you know where she is.”
“I don't. She was here earlier today, but I don't know where she is now. And you need to talk to
her
. Not me.”
I looked at my watch. “Her wedding is supposed to start in three hours. But at some point between now and then, she's going to call you, isn't she?”
“Maybe.”
“And you'll tell me when she does?”
She shruggedâso tiredly, though, that it was clear she was conceding only because I had worn her down. “Fine. Yes. I'll call you.”
I stood to leave. “Thank you. Sorry about raising my voice.”
She nodded toward the alley. “Back door, please.”
Fair enough, I thought. And that was how I left.
Â
C
ALIFORNIA.
A
ND
I
FLEW THERE,
with Grant, on only three days' notice. We drove along a patchwork street of grooved concrete and crumbling asphalt. Small stucco houses held space between tired apartment complexes, and the signs above the businesses in the strip malls were paragons of simplicity:
ZAPATOS
, said one, or
TELEFONOS
, and
CARNICERIA
. There were palm trees and bus benches and graffitied billboards, and all of itâevery surface, it seemedâhad been stained a dull, rusted brown by whatever pollutants or smog filled the air. Grant had offered me the window seat on our morning flight, and I had tried to smile while I gripped the armrests and watched the earth tilt away. By the time we leveled off, the cabin pressure had stopped my ears every bit as ef
fectively as if they were filled with cotton, and I had to ask Grant to speak louder when he told me he had just been in Los Angeles a few weeks before to meet with potential clients, tour an injection molding plant, and visit a former stepmotherâor maybe, he said, he should just say she was a nice older lady who had been part of his family for a few years when he was a kid. I knew Grant's father had been married a few times, but Grant had never spoken about the specifics, and because what I knew of Los Angeles was derived entirely from television and movies, it seemed odd that a person would have a stepparent there or, for that matter, would go there to visit factories.
Once we retrieved our bags and picked up our rental carâa BMW, because it was “the easiest way to blend in,” Grant saidâhe moved smoothly in and out of various lanes on the freeway while I unfolded the rental company's map, a bewildering latticework of freeways both named and numbered, and which bent toward or twisted into each other seemingly at random. Only a few minutes after we'd exited the freeway and passed the strip malls, though, he pulled to the curb in front of a crisp glass box of a building, six stories tall. Grant handed his keys to a valet in black slacks and a tight black polo shirt while I tried to look up through the immense plate-glass windows that fronted the building. The sun's reflection in the glass was blinding, though, and I was still seeing spots as I stepped into a large, air-conditioned lobby, where sofas and chairs draped in white fabric sat on a white-planked wood floor. Pale candlesâthe source of the room's jasmine scent, no doubtâburned in glass jars on birch shelves, and an Asian man and a white woman sat quietly behind the front desk, both of them young, with short, dark hair, perfect complexions, and the same outfits as the valets. Grant spoke to the man behind the desk, but I moved slowly around the
lobby, examining various pieces of what appeared to be nothing more than large swatches of wrinkled white fabric that had been framed beneath glass and hung on the wall. Sandra would love this, I thought.
She and I were barely on speaking terms by that point, though. The previous day I had ignored a call on my line at the bank as I worked through lunch, trying to get as many things as possible taken care of before my trip. But my phone had rung again, with the insistent chirp that indicated a call from within the bank, so I picked it up. “Your wife is here to see you,” Catherine had said at the other end of the line.
“No,” I said.
“Yes,” she said.
By the time I opened my office door, Sandra had already made her way across the lobby and, as she stepped past me and into my office, said she hoped she wasn't interrupting me. I looked to where Catherine sat at her desk. A chubby-faced young man in a crew cut and camouflage pants anxiously bounced his leg as he sat across from her. The young man wore an expression of outraged disbelief I had seen from so many customers over the years that I needed no other information to know that he was overdrawn, had probably written a few checks without realizing he had no funds, and then, when the checks bounced, the whole situation emerged as a nasty and baffling surprise to him. Catherine had joined the branch only a few weeks previously, and we were still on formal terms. So when she turned from the man and raised her hand in a shy, abbreviated wave, I nodded politely before closing the door. She was, from what I could tell, working comfortably in the face of the man's anger.
“She seems nice,” Sandra said. “Before I told her I was your
wife, she even made an excuse for you. She said you were on a conference call.”
“I told her I wanted to get some work done, and I didn't want to get bogged down in going over elderly customers' statements with them.”
“You don't do that anymore? Too bad. I thought it was sweet.”
Sandra had visited me at work only a few times in the two years since I'd moved to a new branch to become a branch manager. On each visit, her presence had struck me as awkward. My spousal self diminished my managerial self, it seemed, and I could only return to being the branch manager after Sandra left. Now she was opening up the shopping bag she had carried into my office. “I bought you something for your trip, to wear with your beige suit. I think it looks like something a financial advisor would wear, don't you?” She laid a silk tie across my desk: a pattern of small red ovals against a field of black.
“Unless the ovals represent zeroes,” I said.
“The ovals represent sensitivity. Financial advisors are sensitive. That's why they're able to advise.”
“I see.”
She wandered the small space of my office, idly examining shelves filled with procedure manuals. “I also came by to tell you something that I don't want you to respond to right away,” she said, “because your first response will probably be emotional, and that's not what's important right now.”
“What do you mean?”
She stole a glance at me as she plucked a withered leaf from a dead plant on my filing cabinet. “I just came from taking Miranda to the doctor's office. She's going on birth control.”
So this visit wasn't about clothes for my trip. It wasn't about me at all. “When am I allowed to respond?” I said.
“You can respond.”
“Then I don't agree to this. She's fifteen.”
Sandra was prepared. “She's almost sixteen,” she said. “And she's starting to go out with boys, and they're not going to go away.”
“No,” I said, feeling an anger more elemental than any I had felt before.
“What do you mean, no? You don't have the slightest idea what it's like to be a teenage girl.”
“You should have talked to me. I would have told you I don't want this.”
“Well, it's already done.”
“We could not do it.”
“No. Emotionally, no, that doesn't work. She and I have already talked about it.”
“So you're just going to allow this creepy Ira kid to have sex with her.”
“You're about a week behind,” she said tersely. “I'm trying to prevent something horrible from happening.”
“You're not preventing, you're encouraging.”
“It's easy to criticize when you haven't done a thing yourself.”
“You asked me not to. You told me not to be uptight. Now I see it was so you could just go ahead and screw everything up.”
“You don't want our daughter to grow up, so you're burying your head in the sand. You don't understand what she's dealing with.”
“What is my role in this family?”
“What do you mean?”
“If you're going to raise Miranda from here on out, then what is my role? Should I just be satisfied with the closeness of
our
relationship?” As with my agreement to go to Los Angeles with Grant, the comment seemed to have been spoken by someone else.
“I understand that we are not on great terms with each other,” Sandra said quietly, “but that doesn't mean you're allowed to attack me.”
“I'm not attacking you,” I said. “What I do is go to work and come home, and I don't bother you at all. I stay out of your way. And now you're telling me to stay out of your way even further when it comes to Miranda. So how is it that I'm attacking anyone?”
“If you want to talk about our marriage, this is not the time to do it.”
“And if you want to talk about Miranda and birth control, you shouldn't have come to my workplace to tell me about it. You did this because you thought I wouldn't get angry here.”
“I was obviously wrong about that.”
“Have I thrown things? Have I cursed or insulted you? I'm expressing my feelings. Isn't this the emotional honesty that's supposedly so good for people?”
“Not when it's so ugly.”
“So who's attacking now?” I said. “Take this tie away. I know how to dress myself.”
She took the tie off my desk and dropped it back into her bag. “Boy, you're a piece of work today.”
“What does that matter?”
“Please stop,” she said so quietly it was almost a whisper. “Treat me with some respect.”
“You mean you don't like being treated like a subordinate? You don't enjoy having someone talk down to you as if you're stupid?”
She rose. “I'm going to leave now. Maybe this little vacation of yours with Grant will be good. And maybe it's a good idea if we just avoid each other until you get back.”
“That sounds fine.”
She paused in the doorway. “Do you want the door open or closed?”
“Closed, please.”
She closed it quietly behind her and became, through the door's frosted glass, a blotch of wavering color that bobbed a bit, grew smaller, and then disappeared. When I reopened the door five minutes later, I was surprised to find the same beefy young man still sitting across from Catherine. His cheeks were flushed and his forehead shone with the sweat of what I assumed was restrained frustration, but he was following along and nodding as Catherine went carefully over a list of each and every one of his transactions. Intent on their study of his account, neither of them raised their eyes or took note of me in any way.
Sandra and I hadn't spoken since then. So while looking at swatches of fabric in a lobby that seemed more fit for a spa than a hotel, while the little monochrome nirvana and its attractive, black-clad staff exuded a decadence pitched so low it felt almost stoic, I thought of Sandra, and how she would love the place. But I also knew I would never even tell her about it.
I was interrupted in my examination then by a Hispanic bellboyâalso young, immaculate, and in the same black uniform as the othersâwho asked if he could show me to my room. Grant seemed intently involved in conversation with the young woman behind the desk, so I followed the bellboy into a small elevator at
the back of the lobby. The level of fitness present in these employees was daunting. The bellboy held my hanging bag over his shoulder, and carried my suitcase with just the three outside fingers of his opposite hand so that his index finger was free to operate the elevator. Faced with the same task, I would have leaned or hobbled my way through it, but he moved swiftly and gracefully through the entire procedure, and even, after the door closed, politely asked whether I was visiting Los Angeles on business or pleasure.
“Business,” I said.
“The movie business?”
“No. Home appliances.”
“For real?”
“Yep.”
“Like washers and dryers and shit?”
“Toasters, actually.”
He nodded. “Hmm.”
When the elevator opened, he showed me to a small room that contained a bed with a white birch headboard and white comforter, a small white desk with a white chair, and in the corner, a white bureau upon which sat a small television. When the bellboy asked if everything was all right, I told him I wasn't sure what else I could possibly need, handed him five dollars, and then he was gone. And I was alone in a boutique hotel room in Los Angeles.
I turned on the television, flipped through the channels with dissatisfaction, and turned it off. I skimmed the magazines and information left in the hotel's fake leather binder on the desk, thinking there should probably have been some bit of preparatory business for me to take care of, though I couldn't think of what. I could call Sandra and tell her I'd made it, but that seemed pointless. It was just a flight and a drive, and I felt there was a mutual
understanding that we wouldn't be talking to one another while I was there. It occurred to me then that Miranda had recently left a message on our home phone's voice mail system without my ever having heard the phone ring. When I'd naively complained that it seemed like sometimes the phone didn't work, she had smiled at my lack of telephone sophistication while explaining that a person could leave a message without actually calling. And so there in Los Angeles, I resorted to the strategy I'd been taught by a teen: I dialed the number of our voice mail system, worked my way through the options, and left a message saying I had arrived, was fine, and would call sometime soon. And then I hung up withâlike a teenâno actual intention of calling.
I put my hanging bag on the rod near the door and removed and hung each item of clothing: a tie, a polo shirt, two dress shirts, and, as per Grant's suggestion, a simple navy blue suit. I elaborately laid my razor and toothpaste and toothbrush in a line on the counter next to the sink, and was in the middle of reading the back of the tiny, complimentary bottle of shampoo when there was a knock on the door, and I opened it to find Grant there, changed now into a tan suit over a white dress shirt open at the neck. “Ready to go?” he said.
“I didn't know I was supposed to be ready,” I said. “I thought we were going to discuss things first.”
“Right.” He stepped into the room, examined the place idlyâwas his room not exactly the same?âand sat down at the desk. “I guess I just meant ready existentially.”
“How do you want me to act?” I said. “I'm a bank manager, but here I'm supposed to be your CFO?”