by Dan Deweese
The boy returned to his task, grimacing as he pulled another slab of flooring from atop a stack balanced over a wheeled flatbed cart. The pieces were so long as to render the cart a mere fulcrum over which they bent, the ends touching the ground on either side like the drooping wings of an exhausted cartoon airplane. “If this doesn’t look right, it’s not too late to switch,” he said, and then dropped, from waist-level, the next piece of flooring. It struck the carpet with a meaty thud, raising a faint plash of dust.
The Busby Berkeleyan imagination required to mentally transform the half-assembled dance floor into a fully realized and polished surface onto which I could project an estimated number of dancers was beyond my capacity. I had just left Catherine and the chairs behind at the Quad, and had no desire to enter a new story problem. Avoiding interminable indecision and speculation was one of the reasons I’d left the decisions to Miranda and Sandra in the first place, so all I said was “We’re not big dancers.”
“No, it’s too small,” Sandra said. “Let’s go with the fifteen-foot.”
The boy bent and began slowly to undo his work as the hotel’s event coordinator walked briskly into the room. The sunny smile she wore to every interaction with us—along with her sober-colored pantsuits and designer glasses and immaculately painted red nails—decayed into a perplexed look as she noticed the boy engaged in a process the opposite of what she had expected. When she asked if everything was all right, though, and the boy told her Sandra wanted the fifteen-foot dance floor, she said, “Absolutely,” and then moved swiftly into her intended business, a show-and-tell presentation meant to demonstrate how everything in the room was being set up in accord with the arrangements we had requested, and which were detailed in our contract. Her presentation was as polished as any that someone gives multiple times per week: the dais for members of the wedding party was a certain size and in a certain location; each of the guest tables featured an exact shade of off-white tablecloth, an exact number of place settings, an exact number of candles, and an exact arrangement of flowers; the deejay’s area was clearly marked with yellow electrical tape, and the umbilicus of power-delivering cables that snaked from the wall to the taped area, she warned us, was “hot.” In her business couture she looked thirty, but I assumed she was younger-playing-older, trying to do well. As she moved us through a door at the back of the room, I wondered if she might be younger, even, than Miranda. It was impossible to tell.
We entered the kitchen, a long galley of stainless steel counters and oversized ovens and industrial sinks and huge refrigerators and freezers that ran the full length of the three ballrooms. Somewhere from the far end of the room an unseen radio suffering incredibly fuzzed reception played a rap song whose melody had been lifted from another decade, though I couldn’t immediately name the original. A handful of employees were present, unhurriedly chopping vegetables or pushing large rolling carts of covered trays or sorting dishes and silverware. Our coordinator, whom I felt confident was named Lisa, though it was also possible she was Laura, led us to a small counter where a number of already prepared dishes had been arranged. She picked up two of the plates and placed them in front of us: one featured a bloated piece of herbed chicken bounded by shiny slices of summer squash, and the other held a dry-looking piece of whitefish whose congealed cream sauce managed not to touch the glossy green beans and carrot slices to its side. Lisa explained that the two dishes represented the entrees we had chosen and which would be served to our guests. “And they’ll look like this?” I asked, alarmed.
“Oh no,” she said. “These aren’t real, they’re wax. They’re just to show you how we’re going to plate things.”
Embarrassed by the stupidity of my question, I nodded with all the gravity I could muster, and when Lisa stepped away to ask someone about the location of the desserts, I reexamined the counterfeit food.
“I hope we’re not signing off on a meal that’s not going to be served,” Sandra said as she looked down on the wax food with disdain. “Or even if Miranda doesn’t show up, maybe we should invite everyone to come over here and sit down for a wax dinner. After dinner we can play music but not allow dancing. It will be a theme.”
“It’s probably too late to get a hundred and fifty wax chickens,” I said. I considered not telling Sandra I’d spoken to Miranda, but it felt like a concealment that would take more energy to pull off than it was worth. So I said, “Besides, I talked to her. She said she’ll be here soon.”
“You spoke to her?”
“On the phone.” There. That was the lie that felt right.
Sandra seemed stunned by this. So much so, in fact, that I’ll admit it hurt my pride that she found it so unlikely my daughter would speak to me. “What did she tell you?” she asked.
“She’s just taking some time to herself, and she’ll be around soon,” I said.
“So why doesn’t she answer the phone when I call her?”
“Because she knows it’s you. I called her with Catherine’s phone, and she only answered because she thought it was Catherine.”
“There is something wrong. She’s completely out of touch on her wedding day.”
“She’s not completely out of touch,” I said. “She said not to worry, she’ll turn up. You should just go up to your room and have a glass of wine. Let the stylist finish your hair or do your nails.”
She mimed surprise. “I should get tipsy and paint my nails? How chivalrous of you.”
“If your plan is to wait here in the hotel and worry, then yes, I’m suggesting you get tipsy and paint your nails. Unless you know something I don’t know.”
“What do you mean?”
“She told me she’s taking some time to herself, but she’ll be here. Maybe you know something more about why she’s taking this time to herself than I do, but I assume that means she’ll be here.”
“You’re the one who’s talked to her today, Paul,” she said. “Not me.”
Lisa returned then, telling us that though the wax desserts had been misplaced, their disappearance would in no way compromise the kitchen’s ability to confect the actual items, and she was entirely confident that the staff understood the menu and our wishes, and that everything was in hand.
“I think Sandra and Miranda tried all of these things a few months ago,” I said. “They drank the wine and ate the entrees and desserts and said it was all fine, right?”
“We did,” Sandra said. “I’m sure everything is fine.”
“So I doubt we need to worry about any of this,” I said. “I, at least, am not worried.”
Lisa smiled. “Some people just like to triple-check things,” she said. “Overpreparation makes them feel secure. But as you can see, everything is swinging into motion here.”
When we stepped from the kitchen and passed back through the ballroom, it was empty. It seemed like we had only been gone for a minute, but in that brief interval, the dance floor, and the boy who had been working on it, had somehow ceased to exist.
After Lisa wished us a wonderful ceremony and headed down an unmarked hallway to what I assumed was the safety of a hidden office, Sandra continued across the lobby, straight past the fountain, and toward the main doors. “I’m going out for some fresh air,” she said. “Come with me.”
When we moved through the doors and stepped outside, though, it began to rain. Clouds did not build or gather, thunder did not rumble, and no scalpels of lightning sliced the horizon. The sky appeared simply to have crumpled, wearily. A mist floated in under the concrete apron covering the drive outside the lobby entrance, and I watched it roll forward to where we stood. Brief showers visited regularly on summer afternoons—warm air moving eastward shed its moisture as it rose to cross the hills to the west of town, and that moisture would become a phalanx of impressively dark storm clouds. At some point on most summer afternoons, the clouds would break free of the hills and descend on the city to deliver what often appeared, from the dark wall of water overhead, to be a storm of serious cons
equences. The shower usually lasted no more than twenty minutes, though, before the clouds dissolved or moved on, and this pattern was precisely the reason Miranda had scheduled her ceremony for six o’clock. So the pin-pricks of mist against my face, the scent of camphor and ozone in the air: a case could have been made that things were proceeding exactly according to plan.
“And now it’s going to rain,” Sandra said. “This wedding is going to kill me.” She had told me she wanted some fresh air, but her true motivation became clear as soon as we exited the lobby: a portly, sunburned gentleman in khaki shorts and a wrinkled oxford was stepping from a white airport van, and Sandra, without the slightest bit of hesitation, asked him for a cigarette. He fumblingly responded in the manner of someone authentically stunned, working to extract a pack from his chest pocket. Having scored her cigarette and then a light from the man, she and I moved down the sidewalk and away from the valets and bellboys. She hugged herself with one arm while the other remained upright, the cigarette poised before her lips. The practiced manner with which she was holding her cigarette implied it wasn’t the first she’d enjoyed recently.
“When did you start smoking again?” I asked.
“Five minutes ago,” she said. “And I’m quitting again five minutes from now. Did you want one? I can ask the guy for another.”
“That’s all right. I’ve quit, too.”
“You never started.” She studied the rows of cars parked in the lot before us. Beads of mist were collecting on the windshields, but the scuffed and dusty bumpers were still dry. “So when you talked to Miranda, did she tell you where she was?”
“No. But I didn’t just talk to her on the phone. I met her for lunch, too.”
“What?” she said. “Why didn’t you say that before?”
“Because she sat down at the restaurant for a few minutes, asked a few questions about our marriage, said she was going to the bathroom, and then snuck out the back door of the restaurant. She sent me a text message.” I opened my phone, found the message, and showed it to Sandra. “What do you think that means? It doesn’t sound good to me.”
“I don’t know,” she said. “All text messages sound like that. What did she want to know about our marriage?”
“That wasn’t clear,” I said. “But look, this morning you said Miranda didn’t come home last night, and you acted like it was something I should be taking care of. So I found her. But I still don’t know what’s going on.”
At first Sandra looked at me without any expression at all, but then she shrugged. “You’re right,” she said, as if I’d made a point of such commonsensical persuasiveness that it had returned her to her senses. “It wasn’t fair of me to ask you to spend your day tracking her down. Did you even get to eat lunch? The little bar at the back of the lobby has sandwiches and things. I’ll talk to Miranda when she gets here. There’s no need for you to worry about it anymore.”
She was managing me. I thought I was managing her, and she thought she was managing me. And when Miranda had asked about control issues between married couples earlier in the day, I had responded using the past tense. “I might get lunch,” I said. “But I don’t think I’m going to stop worrying about Miranda. I’m having to call her with other people’s phones, and she’s disappearing out back doors. I’m not a stranger or some visiting cousin. I’m her father, and I’d like to know why she’s so upset. I’m going to track Grant down so I can ask him what’s going on, but if you can save me time by telling me what you know, that would be helpful.”
“I’m the one who suggested you talk to Grant in the first place,” she said. “This morning, on the phone. I’ve told you I don’t know anything more than you do.”
“At the restaurant, before she left, Miranda said she had talked to you about ‘it.’ She didn’t say what ‘it’ was, but it seemed like it was something specific.”
“I’m sure it was,” she said angrily. “But I talk to Miranda every day, about all sorts of things. I’m sorry I don’t know what she was thinking about when you saw her at lunch, but I wasn’t in her mind then.”
“I’m not accusing you of anything.”
“Then why are you interrogating me? You’re acting like I know what’s bothering her, even though you’re the one who has seen her, not me. I can’t tell if you’re acting this way because you’re trying to help our daughter, or if you’re just creating some kind of drama so that you can be the good guy in it.”
“Miranda isn’t worried about her relationship with us, Sandra. She’s worried about Grant. And if we knew what was going on, we could help her, or at least know whether she needs us or not. I feel like there’s a piece missing somewhere. And I don’t like this feeling.”
“I’m sorry you feel that way,” she said. “But I don’t think you have to investigate all of these things today, Paul. We’re not prosecuting a case here. We’re just trying to make sure she’s okay. Have you talked to Grant?”
“No. He’s been busy with his friends from out of town. They’re guys he knows professionally, I think—people he’s made money with.”
“So if they’re business types, try the country club. Or go by his condo. That’s where he entertains, isn’t it?” She tossed her cigarette to the sidewalk, and it rolled over the curb and into the gutter, from where it sent up a last, sad curl of smoke. “This is your friend, not mine.”
I didn’t know how to respond to that—there was more than one element in the statement that I felt like disputing. So I said nothing, while Sandra looked again at the sky, standing there alone in her jeans and T-shirt by the sliding glass entrance doors, her hair done and her face set. The breeze picked up, and it began to rain harder. I was close enough to the edge of the overhead roof that I felt some chilled drops hit my arms and neck.
“Call me if you find out anything,” Sandra said. The lobby doors slid open as she walked toward and then through them. When they closed, she disappeared behind the wobbling, canted reflections in their glass: the cars in the lot, the trees swaying in the breeze, and behind and above them all, the sky gone gray and cold.
II
AS THE ELEVATOR IN Grant’s building carried me upward with a whir of motors and mechanics, I wondered if I was making a mistake. I had called him on my way over, at least, and had asked if he was at home, and whether I could stop by for a few minutes. “Of course,” he had said. “Should I fix you a drink?”
“Just a beer would be fine,” I told him.
“I’ll leave the door open.”
He lived in a tenth-floor condo in a neighborhood just north of downtown, which only a handful of years before had been blocks of run-down and forgotten five-and six-story warehouses. Developers had gotten hold of the warehouses, though, and remodeled them into expensive lofts with polished concrete floors, track lighting, marble countertops, and stainless steel appliances, and when they had run out of authentic warehouses, they bought up the adjacent square miles of abandoned rail yards and open land that stretched down to the river. Eighty years earlier, stables had housed hundreds of draft horses on the land, but now the developers had put in new buildings designed to look as if they, too, were rehabbed warehouses, and in the space of a few short years had created a whole new section of city from almost nothing, complete with parks and fountains, restaurants, banks, upscale clothing and gardening stores, designer eyeglass shops, and at least one business that provided nothing but specially designed stalls in which residents washed and dried and kissed their dogs.
But it had been on an evening almost two years earlier—I had been happily anticipating the arrival of a vodka tonic I had ordered at Prosperity, a new restaurant in Grant’s neighborhood that featured a lone orchid in a white bud vase at the center of each linen-covered table, and a wine list that ran to fifteen pages—when I felt a pair of hands settle on my shoulders. Sandra has a weary tight-lipped smile she gives to only one person and when I saw that look on her face, I knew who the hands belonged to even before I turned to look up.
/> “Always a pleasure to run into old friends,” Grant said. His khaki pants and knit polo shirt suggested a just-completed round of golf, and although Labor Day was a fading memory—through the restaurant’s tall windows, I saw an occasional yellow-orange leaf flutter to the ground from the maples along the street—Grant was as tan as if it were midsummer. I asked if he’d been traveling, and he admitted he’d just spent four days alone on a beach on Maui. It was a reward he’d given himself for finishing a big project, he said.
“Alone on Maui?” Sandra said. “Have you run out of places to chase women in our own state?”
Grant’s smile didn’t falter, but neither did he manage to respond before Sandra, who seemed as surprised by the comment as any of us, said: “That didn’t come out the way I meant it.”
“Is there an event of some sort this evening?” Grant asked. I’m sure he was wondering why he should encounter Sandra and me sitting together in a restaurant. When I told him it was Miranda’s twenty-third birthday, and that she was supposed to arrive any minute, he seemed stunned. “She’s twenty-three? Are you sure?”
“Fairly sure,” Sandra said.
“This is a family occasion, then.”
“But you qualify,” I said. “Sit down with us.”
“No, no,” he said, “but wish her a happy birthday. I’ll catch up with you another time.” And still smiling, he wished us a good evening and headed back across the room and behind the wall that divided the dining room from the bar.
“I didn’t think what I said was that bad,” Sandra said.
“I don’t think he cared,” I said.
