You Don't Love This Man

by Dan Deweese

  We found a table on the small cedar plank porch and, out of boldness, affectation, or both, ordered whiskey. A bored waitress brought us our drinks, and Grant studied the view of sea and sand as if it were an impressive painting. The waves did not curl gracefully to the sand, but fell as broad walls of water that hit the beach with heavy, thudding slaps, and as we watched the waves do their violence to the shore, Grant asked me about work. Had I studied banking, he wanted to know, or was the bank something new? I told him I had majored in business, but the bank was just a place I was working until I found something better. Did I have ideas, he asked, was it just a question of financing, that kind of thing? “I’m really just surveying my options right now,” I remember saying, in place of admitting I had no particular plan or even sense of what I could do. Trying to shift the focus, I asked Grant about himself. Sandra and I had seen Grant and Gina a few times since Bristol’s, but it had only been for drinks or dinner, and the conversation had been light. “I understand you do some kind of art,” I said. “But I don’t know enough about that kind of thing to even know what to ask.”

  He smiled, but in a pained way. “I got a degree in fine art—that’s true. And I paint once in a while. But I just put the canvases in my dad’s basement, or else throw them out.”

  “I’m sure it takes time to learn how to do something like that.”

  “It’s also possible I’m not very good,” he said, laughing. “But what I do for money is work at an ad agency one of my dad’s friends owns.”

  He looked down into his whiskey as if he were looking into the ad firm itself, and when he raised his glass and finished his drink, I did the same. The whiskey tasted of smoke and heat. Dark clouds were gathering over the ocean and the breeze grew cool, but I felt fine—as though the drink had rendered me immune to conditions. A group of gulls on the glassy sand near the waves stood there as if at a loss about what to do next. When the next wave rolled in, they fluttered into the air long enough for the water to roll back, and then settled in the same spot as before. I couldn’t tell if they were amusing themselves or were truly stupid and forgot, each time, that a new wave was on its way.

  “The job I have is something my dad got me, and I’m lucky to have it,” Grant said. “He told me how to do everything I needed to do. How to write my résumé, how to speak to the people who work there, how to dress, the whole thing.”

  “It sounds like a good deal,” I said.

  “What do your parents do?”

  I sensed the degree to which he was particularly alert to this answer. And I suppose I was, too. I was hardly going to tell him I grew up in a small apartment across the street from the bowling alley where my mother worked. “My mom moved to Florida a few years ago,” I said. “But I’m not sure what she and her husband are doing for money right now. My dad usually has restaurant jobs, so he moves around a lot. He was in Dallas the last time I talked to him.”

  Grant nodded, watching the gulls as if it were somehow his job to monitor them. “Well, maybe this will sound odd,” he said. “But would you mind if I passed some suggestions on to you?”

  I had no idea what he was talking about, and blurted the first thing that came to mind: “You mean about jobs? My résumé?”

  “No,” he said. “I just mean it seems like you could use some things I know.”

  I remember shifting uncomfortably, pained to hear him speak so directly about something he wasn’t naming and that I couldn’t figure out.

  “Look,” he said, facing me. “You have to get rid of your blue blazer. The buttons make you look like you’re headed to a yacht. And I don’t have anything against yachts, but it’s not a good look for you.”

  This stung more than I let on, not only because the blazer was a new purchase, but because I had liked and trusted the salesman who’d helped me pick it out.

  “And you should get your hair cut more often,” he said. “By a barber who knows what he’s doing. I know I’m probably offending you, but these are the kinds of things I’m talking about. I feel like we’re friends now, but I don’t know you well enough yet to really know how to talk to you, so I’m doing this kind of clumsily. I’m probably coming off like an asshole, but I hope you understand I just want to help.”

  He didn’t say anything more. We sat in silence, watching the gulls mill nervously about, and I wondered if I needed to revise my understanding of every previous interaction we’d had, keeping in mind that Grant had always been secretly amused by something I was wearing. All I could think to say, finally, was “Okay. I understand what you mean.”

  He nodded as another set of waves hit the beach and the gulls, screaming, took to the air. “Should we have another round?” he said. “Or would that be too much?”

  “Another,” I said. “On me.”

  The drinks were delivered, Grant moved the conversation to pro football, and the gulls flew off down the beach. When Sandra and Gina returned, they had a glass of wine with us while complaining at length about the cheapness of the trinkets and clothes in the shops. We made jokes about the town, and laughed, and had more wine, until neither Grant nor I was in any shape to drive. Someone suggested we stay the night in town, so we found rooms in a motel down the street—they had two right next to each other—and then walked to Point Perdition’s nicest restaurant, an Italian place in the basement of one of the last buildings on Main, where we ate huge plates of pasta and drank more wine amid the flickering candlelight. When we finished and stumbled up the stairs to the street, Grant suggested we go back to the beach, so we wandered toward the sound of the surf. Crossing from the sidewalk into the sand, we passed beyond the muddy orange glow of the last streetlight and stepped into darkness.

  The waves hissed against the sand, but the ocean beyond was silent, and extended to the horizon like an immense field of silver and black, above which the moon hung like a flattened coin. Sandra walked next to me, her face aglow in the moonlight, but when she smiled and said something, I didn’t catch it. I asked her to repeat herself, but she shook her head, laughed, and said it was nothing. Grant and Gina were peering with great interest at something out over the water, and when I followed their gaze, I noticed a small but steady light on the horizon. We all stopped walking to study it. Gina said it must be a fishing boat, but Grant said it was too bright for that. I said it was a cruise ship or some other kind of ocean liner, while Sandra claimed it was a rich person’s yacht, and the point of light was actually the whole boat lit up for a party. I stared at it as if I might discover further detail, but there was nothing to find—it remained a spot of light.

  “Where are we?” Grant said, turning slowly around. Dark, tree-covered hills rose sharply at the back of the beach, with no houses visible. The only lights were at least half a mile inland, nestled up in the hills. He stared out to sea again. “It’s not a boat. It’s the lighthouse,” he said.

  He was right. We’d walked along a string of crescent-shaped beaches, but had forgotten that the series of beaches themselves, like the linked pieces of a necklace, comprised the coast of a large bay. At one tip of the bay was the lighthouse, and we had walked far enough that looking back involved gazing across the entire expanse of water, so that it appeared the lighthouse had floated to sea.

  “How did we get so far?” Sandra asked. “And now we have to walk all the way back?”

  We didn’t, though. After ten minutes of trudging back the way we’d come, Grant spotted a gap in the trees that revealed itself to be a path. We followed it up to a two-lane road where a small market sat, its whitewashed walls phosphorescing in the moonlight. The store was dark, but the pay phone next to the door worked, and only five minutes after Grant made a call, a jovial cabdriver pulled up to take us back to the motel. Gina and Sandra thanked him effusively, and when we explained why we’d had to call him, he laughed. “It’s always harder getting back, especially across the sand,” he said. “But it sure beats swimming, don’t it?”

  After we wished Grant and Gina good night and
made it to our room, Sandra kicked her shoes off and collapsed facedown on the bed. “God, they’re exhausting,” she said.

  “Grant and Gina?” I said.

  “It just goes on and on, drinking and eating and walking and walking and walking. Why are we even here? Why are we in this crappy motel in this crappy town?”

  “It’s a weekend trip,” I said.

  “I didn’t sign up for a weekend trip. I signed up for a day.”

  “Sometimes you have to be spontaneous.”

  “Spontaneous? It wasn’t spontaneous. You decided we were staying here the minute you started drinking whiskey with Grant. Whose idea was that?”

  I was too surprised by Sandra’s anger to remember. “I think it was mutual,” I said.

  “Making decisions for everyone else isn’t spontaneous,” Sandra said drowsily. “It’s just taking control.”

  She seemed to drift into sleep then, and I turned off the light and sat in a chair by the window, looking at the gravel parking lot through a gap in the curtain. Had I made the decision to stay overnight, or had Grant? I couldn’t remember, but neither did I work particularly hard to dredge from memory some singular, decisive moment. It had just made sense to stay.

  I heard voices then, muffled and hollow: they were the tones of Grant and Gina in the room next to us. I couldn’t make out any words, but there was an odd urgency to the pitch and rhythm that made me wonder if maybe they, too, were arguing. Then Gina’s voice rose to where it was barely audible: “It’s so good,” she said. “It’s so good.” There was a growl of response, and then again, “Oh, it’s so good.” It felt unseemly for me to just sit there listening, but to go to sleep would have meant lying even closer to the wall between our rooms.

  As I pulled Sandra’s sweater off, she woke up enough to sit up and help me. I pulled her shirt up over her head and tugged her jeans off, too, and she may have thought I was helping her to bed, but when I unhooked her bra and pressed the center of my palm to her breast, she understood. “I’m pretty tired,” she mumbled.

  “Just lie down,” I said, a command she seemed content to comply with. I pulled her panties off, and ran my tongue along the inside of her leg and thigh. At the first press of my tongue, she gave the little humming sigh I had hoped for. She was not one to talk during sex, but did employ the full array of feminine sighs, coos, and groans. I was not, at twenty-four, particularly experienced or skilled at what I was doing, but I had one thing going for me, which was insecurity. The insecure young man is eager to please, and I was happy to work my tongue between Sandra’s legs, and to listen to her respond, for a long time. I don’t think, at first, that she was aware of Grant and Gina in the next room—I had barely heard them even when our room had been silent, so it was the motel’s thin walls that had created the situation more than any particular theatricality on their part. But at a certain point Sandra heard something, and though she didn’t say anything, I think that was why she laughed a bit when I pressed my tongue against her more insistently. “Come here,” she said, grabbing my arms and pulling me toward her. I slid easily inside, but because we hadn’t planned on spending the night in town, I hadn’t brought any condoms. Sandra wasn’t on the pill—she said it made her feel sick—but when I told her I didn’t have anything, she said, “It’s okay, we’re okay.” She liked to keep her hand on the back of my neck when I was over her, and during orgasm would pull down as if she wanted the full length of my body directly on top of her. Did she pull me toward her that night, though? It would be nice to think so, but I don’t remember. What I remember is that though I was fairly shy and usually silent during sex, I made sure to groan with pleasure that night. “Yes,” Sandra whispered. “Yes, come, yes.”

  How embarrassing, these unsubtle competitions. Who will fuck more loudly in the motel? Who will cry more passionately, who will groan with more ferocity? How does one even decide a winner? At least we had the decency, when the four of us walked to breakfast the next morning, not to say anything.

  WHEN A WAITRESS UNLOCKED the front door at precisely eleven o’clock, I was the only person waiting outside the restaurant. Miranda’s rehearsal dinner had been held in a private room there the previous evening, and after dinner, when we walked past the main dining room on our way out, the place had been packed. All evidence of that evening had now been erased, of course. Trying to be as classy as a restaurant can be while still brewing beer on the premises, every heavily lacquered table in the dining room featured carefully folded white napkins and spotless place settings. The waitress—college-aged, with a full figure and long, frizzy hair—betrayed not an ounce of false enthusiasm as she escorted me to a table in the middle of the room and then departed to the kitchen, from where I could hear the scattered voices of the kitchen staff chatting and laughing as they finished their prep work for the day. I felt that if I could be the first person to locate Miranda, I would earn some kind of privilege or opportunity that others—Sandra, Grant, the rest of the world—would be denied. She would tell me she wanted to get out of the thing, probably, but that she didn’t know how to go about it, and needed help. I would reassure her that people make mistakes, and walking out on a wedding was hardly the end of the world. She would certainly feel awful about all the money I had poured into the event, as well as the time and money many of the guests had spent on travel, and I would have to tell her that sometimes a person has to be strong enough to shrug off the pressures of a social context. If she didn’t want to get married, she shouldn’t get married. That was a simple fact, and plenty of people on the guest list were themselves the veterans of ill-conceived marriages, or were even currently in one. These people probably wouldn’t blame Miranda one bit for changing her mind, and the ones who actually did feel put out about it would care much less after their second drink. Besides, her honesty would make for a far more interesting weekend than the same old mundane wedding procedure would, and everyone would go home with a dramatic story to share with friends. People would end up getting more out of the wedding if there wasn’t a wedding, so there was really no social or financial pressure to worry about. She was free to do what she wanted.

  When I actually saw Miranda, I realized what a fantasy all that was. She wore khaki shorts and a black T-shirt, a bit of purple elastic held her hair in a ponytail, and she walked toward me as casually as someone who was nothing more than slightly late for a picnic. Taller and more athletic than most of her peers from even a young age, she had been the captain of her high school tennis and volleyball teams, and still carried herself with the lazy ease of an athlete at rest, but prepared to join a game, should one spring up. I found myself thinking not only of her high school volleyball days, though, but also of a vaguely synchronous image: falling snow blanketing cars, sidewalks, and streetlights beyond a restaurant’s windows as Miranda, seated across from Sandra and me, celebrated officially becoming a teenager by crossing her eyes in mock effort as she noisily sucked the last of a huge milk shake through a striped straw, and then laughed, coughing, at her gluttony—so a teenager, yes, but also still a child, cackling and mischievous. As she sat across from me on the day of her wedding, though, I realized she was nearly twice as old as she had been on that winter evening. She was not going to be outwardly trembling or in some kind of anguish she would lay bare, because when had she ever? She didn’t operate that way.

  “I hope you haven’t been waiting long,” she said. “It’s so empty in here.”

  “They’ve only been open a few minutes.”

  People sometimes claimed they could see my features in Miranda, but tan, smiling, and offering the menu a cursory glance, she struck me as a variation primarily on the pattern of her mother. “So why were you with Catherine?” she asked.

  “They needed my help with something. And what have you been up to?”

  “Having a quiet morning. Trying to relax.”

  “And not answering your phone,” I said. “Unless you think it’s Catherine.”

  “That was so random, I
thought something might be wrong,” she said. “You know, it’s a little like lying, Dad, calling with someone else’s phone.”

  “It’s not lying, it’s deceit. And your mother is worried.”

  The waitress appeared from the back room, and when Miranda asked her what was good, it turned out that despite her dismissive treatment of me earlier, she did have enthusiastic beliefs about the sandwiches and chips. In the room’s uneven midday light, I watched the two of them discuss the relative merits of rye versus sourdough for a turkey sandwich, and admired the way Miranda looked the waitress in the eye, negotiating their little exchange with a cheerfulness that did not seem false.

  “So did your quiet morning help?” I said after the waitress left. “Have you been able to relax?”

  “That’s not going to happen,” she said, the cheerfulness vanishing. “But there’s nothing to be done about it.”

  “About what?”

  She sighed in the same way she did when I used to ask what she had learned at school. “A lot of things. Or maybe just that I’m twenty-five, and that people seem to assume that means I’m naive, or that I don’t know what I’m getting into, or whatever it is they say.”

  “Who has said that to you?”

  “No one. But I know what people talk about when I’m not in the room.”

  “Which people?”

  “Don’t do the fake obtuse thing right now, Dad. You know what I’m talking about.” She dropped her napkin into her lap with a disdainful little flip of the wrist. Those wrists, the taper of her fingers, the way she tapped them on the table while training a heavy-lidded look of impatience on me: those were her mother all over.

  “So this is about what other people think?” I said. “Not about what you think?”