You Don't Love This Man

by Dan Deweese

  It was when my thoughts had reached that level of melodramatic ridiculousness that I looked down and realized that I, too, had finished my cocktail, as well as my first glass of wine. To avoid reactions with alcohol, I had intended not to take my pain medication before going out that evening. There in the bar, though, I couldn’t recall whether I’d actually remembered to skip my pill, and the confusion caused by the convolution of failing to remember whether I’d remembered not to do something must have been evident on my face, because Grant looked at me with concern and asked if I was okay. When Gina and Sandra turned to look at me, too, I felt as if I’d been thrust suddenly on stage without any lines. But this, perhaps, is where I began to consider Grant a friend: he seemed to sense not only that I could use assistance, but exactly the kind of assistance I needed. “I know maybe it’s not something you want to discuss, but I can’t resist,” he said. “I’d love to hear the story of the robbery.”

  If there was a single story I knew and was confident in, it was the story of the robbery. I felt as if Grant were setting me up—as if he and I had planned for him to warm up the audience so I could then move in to take center stage. And I did. I began the tale in its epic form, with unabridged internal monologues, background information on bank procedures, and detailed character descriptions including names and titles. Toward the beginning of the story I asked the waitress for another bottle of the wine Grant had chosen, and though it was delivered expediently and poured for all, it did nothing to ease my consciousness of Gina’s perfume, of her eyes upon me, her smiles at my attempted jokes, everyone’s laughter, Grant’s enthusiastic responses to each part of the story, the men entering and leaving the cigar room, and the smell of cigar smoke insinuating itself among the aromas of leather and liquor that filled the main room. Grant provided thoughtful prompts where suitable, such as You’ve got to be kidding! or So what were you thinking at that point?, and the question of whether I’d skipped my medication began to fade from my mind as, like an actor who has hit his mark and now begins to ease into the rhythms of his climactic monologue, everything outside of my performance began to fall away. The perfume and wine and attention and energy in the room made me expansive as I moved confidently toward the story’s climax. Here were Mooncalf’s sinister narrowed eyes, the rasping growl of his voice, and my canny refusal to acknowledge his command. Here was the highly polished gun glinting in the light as he raised it overhead. I looked fearlessly into his animal eyes as he delivered the blow, which I took like a man. I staggered and struggled, I stumbled and fell, and by the time I finished the story and fielded questions regarding the ongoing denouements at the bank and with the police, I had indeed ordered scotch for Grant and myself. The ladies excused themselves to visit the powder room, Grant and I sipped our scotch, and for the first time since I’d started my story, I looked around. Bristol’s was packed. Every table, chair, and sofa was occupied, the bar was full, and people stood in the gaps, leaning against walls or the backs of chairs or each other. There was a small jazz band playing with great animation in the back corner. They had spent the majority of the evening covering the Earth, Wind & Fire catalog, and the saxophone player in particular seemed to feel every burst of his instrument. The husky men continued to come and go from the back room, and each opening and closing of the door acted as a kind of bellows that pushed enough cigar smoke into the main room to lend the air the tobacco note I associated with good living.

  Grant swirled the last of the scotch in his glass. “This is fun,” he said. “We should get together again sometime.”

  I had to lean toward him and speak loudly in order to be heard over the crowd and music. “I might have gotten a little carried away,” I said. “I hope I didn’t talk too much.”

  “Not at all,” he said. “You have a good story, so why not tell it?”

  The women returned, and when the waitress brought the bill, Grant handed her his credit card. I couldn’t see the total, but noticed Sandra glance at it and draw her lips into a tense smile. I suggested we split the tab, but Grant said, “Nonsense. We invited you out. We’re your hosts tonight.”

  “It’s too much,” I said.

  “Next time,” he said.

  “All right,” I said. “Next time.” Everyone smiled, both at the resolution of the bill and at the agreement that we would meet again.

  That night, Sandra and I had the best sex we’d had yet. I had been excited by her as an inventory until then, thinking of the curve of her pale neck as one item, the back of her smooth thigh as another, and her small breasts, with their bruise-colored nipples, as a matched set next on the list. I had certainly paid attention to the items on this list, had given each its due of mental-anticipatory and physical-in-the-moment attention, but that night was the first on which I experienced Sandra’s body as a singular, pulsing, integrated entity. This led also to a sense that our bodies were locations—sites of interest and possibility—rather than objects, and that we could become, together, a single location of investigated pleasure. We paid no mind to what we were doing or saying, and I’m sure that if Sandra’s roommate was at home (I can’t even recall the poor girl’s name), she either laughed at what she heard through the wall, or else pulled a pillow over her head in a rage. Because does anything seem more ridiculous than the lusts of other people? To me, at least, they always seem delusions.

  OFFICER MARTINEZ BROUGHT AMBER, Charlotte, and Tina by to take a look at the photos of Mooncalf, but when none of them recognized him, Martinez thanked them for their time, told them they were free to leave, and then very efficiently ushered them out of the branch. Mr. Fingerprints conferred briefly with O’Brien, and if I could trust my reading of the older man’s bearing, the lack of evidence at our little robbery left him no more discouraged than someone who idly checks a pay phone for forgotten change but comes up empty. Fingerprints left without saying good-bye, and Catherine locked the door behind him. Though the photos of Mooncalf were automatically distributed to various law enforcement agencies, Catherine sat down and forwarded the photos to two other e-mail addresses O’Brien not only wrote down, but then, as if he were teaching elementary school, also spoke aloud to her, letter by letter. She did not betray even an ounce of annoyance with him, though I could see that her fingertips were well into composing the body of the e-mail while O’Brien was still spelling out the address. Once the photos were sent, the officers grew uncertain. I couldn’t hear what they murmured to each other as they stood in conference several yards from Catherine’s desk, but the equipment attached to their uniforms clanked and jingled as they shifted their feet impatiently. When they returned to where Catherine and I waited, Martinez said, “When do you expect that videotape from your security people?”

  “I spoke to them a while ago, but their office is in the suburbs,” Catherine said.

  The officers nodded as if this were significant information. Not a person in the room was interested in remaining there, but no one wanted to appear derelict in his or her duties, either. “Security will pull the tape and forward it to these gentlemen as soon as they can, though, right?” I said.

  “They’re supposed to,” Catherine said.

  “Is there anything left for us to provide you, then?” I asked the officers.

  “I think that’s it,” Martinez said. “Something about the guy seems familiar to me, but we’ve got computers these days that zip through and see if the photos match up with any other robberies, so there’s not much to do right now.”

  “Well, we’re sorry to have troubled you today. I can let you out, if you like,” I said, and they followed as I headed toward the door. “It seems like there wasn’t much evidence to collect,” I added. “Almost like coming to the branch was a waste of time.”

  Martinez nodded. “With a car accident or a fight, the results are all right there in front of you. But this place looks normal. There’s not really much evidence that anything ever happened here.”

  I thanked the officers for their work, shook hands wi
th each of them, and closed the door behind them as they left. Returning to Catherine’s desk, I could see that she remained busy. She had a large three-ring binder open on her desk, and looked alternately at the binder and then her computer monitor as she typed what I assumed was another procedurally necessary e-mail. “Bank security called before, while you were outside,” she said. “They’ll be here in half an hour. They probably expect that you’ll be here, too. Will you?”

  “Do I have a choice?”

  She shrugged. “I don’t know what they would do if you weren’t here. What could they do? If you’re not here, you’re not here.”

  “I’m sure the procedures binder you have open there has a policy in it, right?”

  She didn’t even have to look at it—consulting the binder and moving step-by-step through the procedures was probably the first thing she did after the robbery. “It says you’re supposed to be here if you can,” she said. “But if you were out of town, of course you wouldn’t be able to be in the branch, so they must be able to move things along without talking to you right away.”

  “Or ever,” I said. “What if I were hit by a bus?”

  “Let’s not think that way,” she said, flipping to the next page in her binder. The margins of the pages were filled with her own handwritten notes, and at first I tried to remember which training session she’d been to in which she would have written so many notes. When I watched her write a new note in the margin, though—mgr absence?—I realized she was taking notes today. She was keeping track of what happened, writing down questions, and listing topics not covered. Catherine L’Esprit, I thought. The consummate professional.

  “So I heard your call,” she said, turning back to her computer screen. “Is she okay? Where was she?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I’m going to meet her for lunch. And then after that I’m supposed to be at the Quad, to get a bunch of chairs the rental company is dropping off.”

  “So you’re not staying.”

  “No.”

  “You weren’t even here when it happened, anyway,” she said, typing furiously. “Charlotte and Tina did the cash counts with me, so I have all the information security needs. I’ll tell them it’s your daughter’s wedding day. And if anything comes up that I don’t know, I’ll just give you a call.”

  “Thank you,” I said.

  She stopped typing. “And look, I’m sorry about what I said before, about Sandra knowing Miranda best. I just wanted to help.”

  “I know.”

  “I just don’t like feeling like you’re angry at me.”

  “And I don’t like feeling that the things I say or the decisions I make are immediately discussed on the phone by a bunch of other people so that they can secretly manipulate me into doing what they want me to.”

  “That’s not what was going on,” she said.

  “But how do I know that?” I said. “I’ve worked with you for ten years, but now I find out you chat on the phone with my ex-wife. It’s like waking up and discovering there are a bunch of strings on me, because secretly I’m just a puppet, but I didn’t know it.”

  “You’re not a puppet,” she said. “Though you mean marionette. The ones with strings are marionettes.”

  “It’s suspicious that you know so much about the terminology,” I said. “So am I a marionette, then? Are you and Sandra secretly pulling my strings?”

  “No,” she said. “You have no string. To hold you down.”

  “Do you and Sandra hang out?” I said. “Do you make plans and trade information?”

  “We’re women,” she said, as if I had forgotten some fundamental rule about the way things worked. “If we like each other, we help each other. And I like Sandra. But no, we don’t hang out.”

  “Because you and I don’t even hang out,” I said. “And I know you a lot better than Sandra does. Or at least I thought I did.”

  She sighed one of her long, slow sighs of vexation as she sat there, staring ahead at nothing, her hands at rest on her keyboard. “We hang out all day, Paul,” she said finally. “Every day. In this place.”

  “I guess that’s true,” I said, and made sure to shake my head ruefully before adding: “Though not for much longer. You can stop what you’re doing right now, though? I need to leave.” No one was ever to be left alone in the branch, which meant that if I was leaving, Catherine would have to wait somewhere else until security arrived.

  She grabbed her phone and purse without bothering to answer my question, and studied her computer as she stood, clicking a last screen closed. “So are you done being angry?” she asked.

  “I think I’m still a little angry,” I said.

  “When will you stop?”

  “I don’t know. Why don’t you just not think about it?”

  “Because it bothers me,” she said in the neutral tone she often uses when referring to her feelings. Over the years, she has reported any number of other items—anger at an employee who walked off the job, alarm over a teller’s large cash shortage at the end of the day, concern after a robbery at another branch—in the same dispassionate voice. It took me quite a few years to realize that the more carefully neutral Catherine’s tone sounded, the more serious the situation.

  “I’ll probably get angry at someone else within the hour,” I said as we stepped outside and I locked the doors. “And then you’ll be off the hook. Does that work?”

  “Fine.”

  “You’re aware that I’m teasing you, right?”

  “I’m aware that you’re teasing me because that’s what you do when you’re angry,” she said. “But I don’t understand why you’re angry, and I’m not in the mood for it right now.”

  “Fine,” I said. “I’ll stop. Where will you wait for them?”

  “I don’t know!” she said, finally properly angry. “Does it matter? Do you care?”

  The intensity of her anger always thrilled me. And though I preferred to enjoy her anger when it was directed at a departed customer or absent teller, there were occasions, like that one, on which the absence of other targets meant I had to draw fire myself. “Of course it matters, Catherine,” I said as I headed toward my car. “Of course I care.” It was greatly satisfying to use the same condescending tone with her that she had just used with me a minute before. “It’s just that I have to leave now. Call and let me know how things go, all right?”

  She said nothing, and remained in the small area of shade outside the door even as I started my car and pulled out of my space. Because she was fishing around in her purse—or pretending to fish around in her purse—she didn’t appear to see me wave as I drove past. But she probably saw me wave, I thought. Why else would she have been fishing around in her purse like that, if not to ignore me?

  NOT TOO MANY WEEKS after that evening at Bristol’s, Grant, Gina, Sandra, and I drove to Point Perdition, one of the many imaginatively named and determinedly picturesque little towns that dot the nooks and crannies of the coastline throughout the Pacific Northwest. It had rained the previous night, and the day remained cool and damp as we walked the beach in our cable-knit sweaters and blue jeans while a breeze that smelled of moss and sea salt sent grains of sand skittering past our feet. Gulls wheeled and cried overhead, and the point’s lighthouse did stalwart scenic duty in the background, a whitewashed enchantment atop a rocky promontory a mile behind us. In town, images of the restored giant graced postcards, T-shirts, key chains, magnets, thermometers, and, in certain shops, suggestive boxer shorts and negligees. It looked smaller in life than on the postcards, but also nobler, perched there above the waves and spray. We walked away from rather than toward it, though—there were tide pools in the other directions, we’d been told. We tired before reaching those, though, and abandoned the beach by climbing a bluff-embedded staircase to the town’s main street, where we found a little café, enjoyed a lunch of steaming clam chowder, bread, and apples, and then wandered past the small shops that lined the street. Point Perdition was smaller then th
an now, and many of the shops were housed in old two-story clapboard buildings whose wooden siding had gone gray and fibrous decades before. The whole town was either a firetrap or designed, in the interests of quaintness, to look like one, and I half expected to find a grizzled sailor in one of the thin alleys, singing drunkenly about how Brandy was a fine girl, what a good wife she would be. What happened instead, though, was that as we passed a bar that featured signs announcing the presence—with the same combination of all-caps type and suggestive photography found outside strip clubs—of a back deck with a view of the lighthouse, Grant suggested he and I rest there while the ladies shopped. Sandra and Gina looked at each other, shrugged, and said okay.