You Don't Love This Man (26 page)

“And so this aesthetic differentiation that you're after,” Jeffrey said, “you feel it can be delivered in something like this?”

He held up one of the drawings Grant had given them, and I was finally able to see what we were talking about: it was a mechanical drawing, complete with exact dimensions and material specifications, of a spatula. “Yes,” Grant said. “If I design it.”

After the meeting, Grant and I went to dinner. We were seated at the restaurant's bar and having our first drink, in fact, before I even realized that the light coming up from beneath the glass sections of the floor not only illuminated the entryway and bar, but also an entire sub-floor environment in which immense koi and waving green plants rippled through water lit a white so blinding that it was almost heavenly. Surrounded by a crowd of incredibly attractive and mostly younger people, I mentioned being surprised by how friendly the young women were about apologizing when they reached past me to get a drink from the bartender. Grant laughed. “We're wearing suits in a city of unemployed actors and writers,” he said. “They're wondering whether we might be studio executives.” It wasn't until we were seated and had our dinners in front of us, though, that Grant mentioned he'd been meaning to ask me about Miranda's boyfriend, because Sandra had told him we were having problems with him. This surprised and angered me. Sandra had told me I had limited input on these decisions, but she apparently chatted about things with Grant between sets? “The situation isn't completely clear,” I said. “Miranda's full of secrets and privacy these days.”

“You know, every time I watch TV shows or movies, I feel like the relationships presented as normal are actually either completely preposterous or outright abusive,” Grant said, looking around the restaurant as if the surrounding tables held the writers of the very shows he was referring to. “And I think a lot of young people's first relationships or even marriages are just attempts to copy the crap they've seen on television. And the problem is that when these relationships go wrong and people become unhappy or scared, that unhappiness and fear makes everything seem dramatic and adult and serious in a way they kind of like, but only because the people
who make these shows present serious and mature adulthood as a state of fear or dread or unhappiness, in which people just hurt or cripple each other over and over again. And I guess I think that's mostly just a bunch of bullshit.”

“You think that's what's happening with Miranda?”

“That kid she's hanging around with seemed like a liar, and also kind of crazy. I can't for the life of me figure out why she would give him the time of day, except for the fact that crazy lies told by an older guy might seem sophisticated to her. But you and I know that crazy lies are just crazy lies. It's the opposite of sophistication.”

“Sandra says we shouldn't intervene. That we have to let this run its course.”

“I'll be blunt with you. And I know I'm probably just riding this whole speechifying energy I started using in that meeting this afternoon, but what I'm going to say isn't something I've mentioned to Sandra, and I'd suggest you not mention it to her, either. I don't want to see Miranda get hurt. And it seems to me that the fact that you and Sandra are her parents is the very thing that's preventing you from protecting her right now.”

“What do you mean?”

His elbows were on the table, his chin propped on his fists—just as he had done during the meeting earlier—and he spoke to me as if I were the only other person in the restaurant. “I understand you're trying to treat her with respect, and you're hoping she'll make some of her own decisions and learn something from her relationship with this kid—I get that whole line of approach. But I have to tell you that I think what you're really doing is asking her at age sixteen to understand things about life that a sixteen-year-old can't understand, and you're not keeping in mind that
kids are perfectly capable of hurting each other very badly, in very real ways. Because that Ira guy isn't a kid. And I know you know what I mean, because I could tell how tense you got when he was talking to us at that party in your yard the other day.”

“It's just that it's all new territory for me,” I said. “I've never had a teenage daughter before. I don't know how much freedom she's supposed to have.”

“But why should it be new territory? If you've defended your daughter from dangerous situations before, why stop now? In this very city, right now, kids are hurting or killing other kids. And I'm not suggesting this Ira kid is a murderer, but neither do I see why you and Sandra shouldn't take steps to keep him away from your daughter.”

“It just doesn't seem like he's done anything wrong. It's hard to sell the idea of doing something about it when there hasn't been something to do something about.”

“Why do you need to sell the idea? If you and Sandra disagree and are going to argue about it anyway, why not just do what you want to do, so that you're arguing about the way
you
handled it, instead of complaining about the way
she's
handling it? I think you're asking for permission to do something you don't need permission to do. And he's not going to do anything wrong in front of you, you know. He uses that bizarre fake courtesy in front of adults. It sounds like you're waiting for an event that will give you an excuse to do something, but I'm saying that you should act now, before that event occurs. You don't want that event to happen at all.”

“Of course I don't want anything bad to happen. It's just tough to see how to get there.”

He shrugged, as if what I was saying was difficult was actually perfectly simple. “Look, if things go like I hope they'll go, I'll
be opening a small office in Los Angeles. Not much will happen there, but I'll need an assistant, and a job in Los Angeles, largely unsupervised, would be a pretty hard thing for a kid to turn down. And even a super-low, entry-level salary would probably seem like a fortune to this Ira kid.”

Confused by the rapidity with which Grant was moving between scenarios, the last sentence seemed a non sequitur. When I realized the connection Grant was suggesting, though, I laughed. “Moving Ira to Los Angeles is an attractive idea, but I don't think it's the kind of thing people actually do.”

“Of course it's the kind of thing people actually do,” he said. “In the business world, if someone isn't working out in one place, they find themselves either out of a job, or transferred somewhere else. And I don't see why you wouldn't protect your daughter with at least as much care as a business shows its employees. And though a kid Ira's age might not follow money directly yet, he'll follow sex, and selling him on the idea that money plus Los Angeles will equal starlets taking their clothes off for him can be done very easily.”

I felt as if I were being given the hard sell on a product I knew almost nothing about. “It's too much money,” I said. “Not to mention that it feels like playing God with the kid's life.”

“He wants to play God with Miranda's life. I can assure you of that. You can see it in his eyes. And I know all this might sound extreme, but I'm telling you, there are a hundred thousand young men exactly like Ira in Southern California, and it's very normal for them to prowl around and attack each other and live out their generally fucked-up lives with great satisfaction and brutality. I'm more familiar with it than I'd like to admit, and the fact that it's not normal in your family, and that this kind of fucked-up stuff doesn't exist in your life, is why your family is important to me.
So sleep on it, but let's decide soon. Because I think we need to act quickly.”

When we returned to the hotel after dinner, Grant thanked me for my help, and then apologized for being too tired to show me any more of the city. “I think I'm not only tired, but I'm even tired of myself at this point. I'm tired of hearing my own voice,” he said. So I returned to my room, took off my shoes and, sitting on the edge of the bed, turned on the television. Neither Sandra nor Miranda had called, and I couldn't help but think, as I moved through the channels without finding a single interesting program, that they were each probably happy to be rid of me for a day. Casting the television remote aside, I stood and went to the window. The traffic below, the chattering television behind me, the contents of my suitcase open on the bed: these all seemed items to be considered idly, from a remove. It was still early, and I still had my suit on, but I had nowhere to go and nothing to do, and the question of how to get through life—how to kill all that time, really—seemed pressing. I stretched out on the bed and searched the texture of the ceiling for recognizable images, until what seemed only a few minutes later, when I was startled by the ringing phone, and discovered that I was wrapped in the bed's comforter, though still in my suit, and that sunlight was coming through the window. It was morning, and Grant was calling to make sure I was up, because our flight home was an early one. I told him I would be ready shortly, and as I washed my face, brushed my teeth, and straightened the suitcase I had brought but had hardly touched, I tried to figure out how I'd slept through the night in my suit and shoes. I hadn't the slightest idea what time we had returned to the hotel, though, so it was impossible for me to know if I'd been asleep a long time or hardly at all.

It was after our flight back, upon climbing the porch steps, that I discovered the front door of our home had been damaged. Stupefied by the injury, I knelt to examine the point where the bottom corner of the door should have met the jamb. The splintered wood that remained testified to some kind of blast, and the resulting hole was large enough for any small animal to wriggle through. The door was locked, at least, though after I turned my key, I had to use my shoulder to pop the thing out of the jamb, and then had to do the same from the inside to press it closed.

I found Sandra in the kitchen, working at a counter covered in slices of bread, tomatoes, cucumbers, cream cheese, and various lunch meats. A huge platter sat nearby, half filled with sandwiches. “You're not at work today?” I said.

“It's my turn to provide lunch for the staff meeting, but I forgot,” she said, too busy spreading cream cheese to even look at me.

“Why is the door broken?”

“Ask your daughter.”

“Just tell me.”

She shrugged as if the whole thing were mystifying. “She says her boyfriend broke it.”

“How?”

“I don't know. I wasn't here.”

“But what did she say, Sandra?”

“She said he kicked it.”

“He kicked our door hard enough to break it?”

“I really have to get this done,” she said, slicing a sandwich into triangles. The providing of the staff meeting meal was obviously a competition Sandra did not want to lose. Stray locks of hair had come loose from her headband and hung in her face. Her forehead
shone with perspiration as she focused on stacking the sandwiches just so. There was a quickness to her in those days, a confident flutter of fingers and a surety of movements, especially in the house. The making of little sandwiches or salads or snacks, the selection of a picture frame and the photo that went in it, the placement of pillows on a couch or the angle of an armchair: she knew these tasks and made sound choices without thinking. When she pulled her hair back into a ponytail, she could spin her energy and bounce into a youthful vivacity that still carried something of the ingénue about it. Tennis, yard work, and the hustle of professional and social life had been good to her. She was in excellent shape, and I'm sure there were male developers or vendors or customers she worked with who were quite taken with the way she looked in a pair of slacks and the serious-business glasses she often wore at work, though the prescription was weak enough that her optometrist, who didn't want to be seen as a pusher of lenses, had mentioned more than once that her use of them was entirely optional. And yet the idea that I would reach out and touch her myself had somehow come to seem an impropriety. It was like we were children again, really, and there were lines one did not cross. When she had placed the sandwiches on her platter and arranged them to her satisfaction, she paused to look at me. “So how was Los Angeles? Did Grant's meeting go well?”

“It went fine. Grant has interesting ideas.”

“Good for him,” she said, and returned to stacking the sandwiches at breakneck speed.

“Yes. Good for him.”

I returned to the front door. Stepping back through it and onto the porch, I closed it as well as I could, so that I could study it again. The ability to see the wood of our entryway floor from out
side seemed vaguely obscene. And though I knew it was paranoid, I couldn't help but feel as if the hole would somehow, through the simple fact of its existence, elicit the appearance of a person deranged enough to attempt to use it.

Neither Sandra nor Miranda knew how to fix a door, of course. That was a problem I knew I would have to deal with myself.

 

I
WAS NO MORE
than twenty steps out the door of Gina's gallery when my phone rang. The display indicated it was Catherine's line at the bank, so I took the call, but it wasn't Catherine. It was “John with security,” as he called himself, and he was calling to tell me that he and Annie were still in the branch, and could I come back by for a few minutes to look at a couple things?

“I don't have time right now, John, but I'm happy to talk on the phone.”

Two college-aged guys loped past on the sidewalk, their faces sunburned, their movements loose. Laughing, they were so filled with exuberance that they were almost shouting their conversation, though they were right next to one another. They went past as if I wasn't even there.

“It will only take a few minutes,” John said. “But it's really something that needs to be done in person.”