You Don't Love This Man

by Dan Deweese

  “What are you talking about?” I said.

  “We’ll go out Wednesday morning and stay the night. I’ll have you back home by noon on Thursday.”

  I had never been to Los Angeles, and the city’s name elicited only vague images: circling klieg lights, starlets in fur stoles, popping flashbulbs, and red carpets. I automatically and without taking my eyes from the other end of the yard told Grant I didn’t think I could do something like that on short notice, and he responded by taking the metal spatula from my hand and, through a series of artful manipulations, pushing hot dogs to the edges of the grill, sliding hamburgers toward the middle, and continually prodding or flipping the other items while he told me he knew it was short notice, but that it was a business trip, so everything would be paid for and I would receive an appropriate consulting fee. A big opportunity had come up without warning, he suspected there would be financial discussions slightly beyond his depth, and he didn’t have time to interview accountants or financial advisors before the meeting.

  “As a branch manager, I don’t think I’m allowed to do outside consulting,” I told him.

  “But surely you’re allowed to go on a trip with a friend,” he said.

  The confusion I suffered as he switched between characterizing the offer first as a business trip and then as a personal vacation must have registered on my face, because he began to tell me how he wasn’t asking me to become a full-time advisor, he just needed help from someone he trusted, and he didn’t have anyone on call for something like this. “And also,” he said, looking, as I was, across the yard, “why does that boy with Miranda look like someone poisoned his food?”

  Ira was sitting on a lawn chair in the shade of a tree a few feet behind Miranda, taking occasional sips from a can of soda and doing nothing to mask the look of boredom on his face. “That’s Ira,” I said. “I guess he’s Miranda’s boyfriend.”

  Grant shook his head, aghast. “Why?”

  “I’m not allowed to ask. Sandra told me to leave it alone. She said she’ll handle it.”

  “Well. I’m not a parent, but I don’t necessarily believe in women handling men. Even young men.”

  Miranda was doing her best to make enthusiastic conversation with Margo Talbot, holder of the team’s second women’s singles position, and coowner of the interior design firm that employed Sandra. Even at a distance and peering into the shade, I could see Ira on the chair behind them, glowering. “Unfortunately, in our house it’s two against one,” I said.

  Grant started to say something about the limits of democracy, but stopped when Ira stood and began walking toward us. The boy’s gaze ranged everywhere but in the direction he was heading, and an excessive spring in his stride seemed designed to portray a relaxation so coolly extreme that it resembled drunkenness. “Good evening, sir,” he said, shaking my hand when he reached us. “I thought we might see each other again. I hope you don’t mind that I’m here. I know you’re not crazy about me.”

  “I have nothing against you, Ira,” I said.

  “It’s okay,” he said. “I know you’re just looking out for your daughter.”

  Grant introduced himself and, as he and Ira shook hands, said, “So did you play on Miranda’s team this summer?”

  “Oh, I don’t play,” Ira said in a tone that seemed to imply that summer tennis was for children. “I work for the city. I manage the park with the tennis complex in it, so I kind of help make sure everything is in good shape so everyone can have a good season.”

  Grant raised an eyebrow. “I wasn’t aware the city allowed high schoolers to manage parks.”

  “I already graduated,” Ira said. “Last year.”

  “You’re twenty, then?” Grant said. “Miranda’s only going to be a sophomore.”

  Ira’s expression clouded. “But it’s normal for men to date younger women. I bet your wife’s younger, right?”

  “I’m not married,” Grant said. “But the women I go out with are quite a bit older than Miranda, actually.”

  “I meant younger than you, not her,” Ira said, frustrated by Grant’s deliberate misunderstanding. When I asked if Ira wanted something to eat, he chose a bratwurst, thanked me quietly, and headed back across the yard.

  “That wasn’t normal,” Grant said. He left the grill himself then, joining a group that included Sandra. The group cheered upon his arrival, and Grant smiled when one of the men punched him playfully on the arm, while across the yard I saw Ira, jaw tight and eyes ablaze, lead Miranda away by the hand. When the two of them disappeared around the side of the house, I passed an anxious five minutes flipping and reflipping sizzling burgers until I saw Miranda return alone. She wandered to her mother’s side, and when Sandra, without pausing in her conversation and laughter, put her arm around Miranda and pulled her close, I felt that everything was again where it belonged.

  That feeling remained throughout the following two hours, until the last of our guests had departed and I was able to settle into a chair at the table on our back deck and gaze up at the sky. Drifts of cloud bloomed pink in the day’s last light, and it seemed to me that the sky behind them was slightly spinning—the sense was something like the gravitational pull one feels while coasting downhill on a bicycle, which rendered even more strange the announcement I thought I heard Grant make: “I have some good news. I’ve designed a toaster.”

  I sat up, and was startled to discover that everyone was there at the table with me. But no one responded. Sandra regarded Grant as if his announcement were some sort of ruse, Miranda’s face went blank, and I was dumbfounded. Over the previous years, Grant had occasionally chatted with me about business, but the last thing he’d told me was that he’d been forced to lay off the three young designers just out of college who had comprised his staff, and that he was back to working by himself. Never had he mentioned toasters. But he had entered a design competition sponsored by one of the nation’s larger discount retailers, he explained, and his toaster had won, and now was going to be sold in the company’s stores all over the country. If it sold well, he said, they might let him design an entire line of kitchen products.

  It was then that the flurry began.

  “What does it look like?” Miranda said.

  “We should have champagne,” Sandra said.

  “I thought you were into chairs, desks, and furniture,” I said.

  Grant assured me that he was interested in furniture, but that this was an opportunity that had come up. I heard Miranda ask again what it looked like while I wondered aloud if this would solve Grant’s staffing problems. There followed rapid and simultaneous conversations between Grant and Sandra and me regarding which brand of champagne to serve, how this would change things, and how Grant’s firm would now be expanding or hiring or adjusting its financial structure and attendant accounts. Miranda had stood and, glass of lemonade in hand, walked out into the backyard grass during our discussion. I probably thought she was taking a little stroll, or getting some air, or probably I didn’t think anything particular at all as I idly watched her make her way to the barbecue and look down into it. And then, in one unhesitating motion, she placed the palm of her hand on the grill.

  For an incredible second, she said and did nothing. Then she threw her head back like a startled colt and cried out, dropping her glass to the lawn as her face contorted in pain. I jogged across the yard, angrily demanding to know what she had done, and when I arrived at her side, she held her burned hand in the palm of the other as if it were some kind of gift. Four parallel red lines were already blistering across her palm, and she looked at me as if she had been betrayed by some natural phenomenon—stung by a bee, or struck by a falling branch. “I didn’t know it was hot. It didn’t look hot,” she cried.

  Sandra wanted us to go to the emergency room, but Miranda shook her head so forcefully that Sandra relented, and instead filled a bowl with ice and told Miranda to sit at the table. Seated between me and Grant, Miranda didn’t seem particularly uncomfortable once she wa
s settled with her hand on the ice, and she even smiled when Grant told her he had ordered medium, not rare. “Grant,” she said as if his name were a perfectly familiar command: “What does the toaster look like?”

  He studied her with the same look I had seen him use on the golf course when trying to estimate his distance to the pin. “Like a block of slightly melted ice cream.”

  Miranda nodded, satisfied. Sandra brought out a bottle of champagne and three glasses, and the evening resumed. When the phone rang a bit later, Miranda hopped up and ran into the house to answer it as if there were nothing wrong with her hand at all—and she didn’t return to the porch.

  “Do you think she’ll be okay?” Grant asked. “Those burns looked pretty bad.”

  “We’ll look at them tomorrow,” Sandra said, waving her hand as if shooing a fly. “Sometimes I don’t know where her head is these days. It’s just her age, I guess. It’s all about boys now. And she acts like I’m an evil stepmother.”

  “I met the boyfriend,” Grant said.

  “You did? I’m surprised. He seems shy around people. But very polite.”

  “Polite, yes,” Grant said. “But I didn’t sense the shyness.”

  Sandra shrugged. She seemed tired, and it was only a few minutes later that, citing exhaustion, she disappeared into the house herself. Night had descended by then, but neither Grant nor I moved from our chairs. “It must be hard to be the father of a teenage girl,” he said.

  “She’s in a strange place these days,” I admitted.

  “Though I suppose locking her in the house wouldn’t work any better.”

  “That’s what I’m told.”

  We sat in the dark listening to the chirping crickets and the bubbling aspiration of the champagne until those sounds disappeared beneath the hiss of rushing water when Sandra turned on the shower in the master bathroom, which was directly above the porch.

  “You know, maybe I will go on that trip,” I said.

  “Of course you will,” Grant said. “Why wouldn’t you?”

  I hadn’t really been thinking about the trip, and was surprised to hear myself agree to it. It felt as if some obscure part of myself was daring me to do it, though it was also unclear to me why taking a simple two-day trip would require a dare.

  “Did you see her put her hand on the grill?” Grant asked quietly.

  “Yes.”

  “She didn’t even hesitate.”

  I watched it happen again in my mind—the way she had studied the thing before it happened. “I don’t think she realized it was still so hot.”

  “Maybe,” Grant said, unpersuaded. “Maybe.”

  ON THE AFTERNOON OF Miranda’s wedding, I found Gina in the back office of her gallery, propping open the door of a miniature refrigerator with her shin while she poured water into two tall glasses of ice. Upon seeing me, she dropped her jaw in a theatrical expression of shock, though when she spoke it was barely above a whisper. “I didn’t expect to see you here today,” she said. “Aren’t you getting married tonight?”

  I had just walked past an older couple out in the gallery’s main room, both of them thin, white-haired, and examining paintings through the bottom halves of their bifocals. I assumed it was their presence that necessitated a lowered voice, so I played along. “Close. You’re one generation off.”

  “Your mother is getting married tonight?”

  “Still off.”

  Grabbing her brown linen dress at either thigh, she wiggled her hips while tugging downward, then smoothed the front with a quick sweep of her palms. “Well, don’t get married yet. I’ll be back in a minute.” She carried the glasses of water around the corner and out into the gallery. I heard the older couple thank her, after which the three of them began trading comments about the beauty of a particular piece.

  When Miranda started working at Gina’s gallery, it had been over twenty years since I’d seen Gina. Miranda passed along bits of information she gleaned while working: Gina had lived in New York for a few years, Miranda said, and had also lived in Los Angeles. She had been running the gallery for less than a year, and before that had worked as some kind of counselor or administrator at the city’s school of art. Gina had said that starting the gallery had been her big leap, Miranda told me—the thing she had been thinking about doing for years, but had never done until she inherited money after the death of her father and decided to use it to make the gallery dream a reality. She had been married twice, was twice divorced, and had some kind of current boyfriend Miranda had said hello to on the phone, but hadn’t yet seen in person. I was intrigued by this information, of course, but the more I learned, the more I also felt reluctant to see Gina myself. She had known me in my mid-twenties, and I felt confident that my mid-forties self could only be a disappointment. My male-pattern baldness was advanced, I was fifteen pounds overweight, and if I wanted to see Gina clearly I would need to wear my glasses, despite my fear that they produced a grandfatherly effect. And when it came to the positive aspects of age, to stories of life and experience, what would I have to offer? Gina had gone places and done things. I was still at the bank.

  Months passed this way: Miranda worked for Gina, and I made sure never to appear there. The situation felt like a school reunion that I had the power to delay while I held out for some kind of personal transformation that was never actually going to occur. And eventually it was only circumstance that forced my hand, because although Miranda had answered my questions about Gina, there came a point when I needed to ask Gina a question about Miranda. So after closing the bank one evening, I drove to the gallery.

  Its name—IDÉE FIXE—was emblazoned in large block letters across a picture window that fronted the sidewalk, and the large, open room I stepped into featured olive-colored industrial carpet and the bright white walls of any typical gallery. I had been hoping to find Gina there alone, but the first person I noticed was a stocky, middle-aged man in blue jeans and a denim shirt. Though he didn’t strike me as the type of man to be pacing the orderly confines of an art gallery, he was patiently following a woman in gray wool slacks and a collared white dress shirt as she walked slowly along the opposite side of the gallery. Gesturing toward the wall, she told him how a certain arrangement would accentuate the depth of a composition, but it wasn’t until he looked doubtfully at the wall she indicated that I realized she wasn’t referring to the canvases currently in the room, but to some speculative, future arrangement. When she turned briefly in my direction and told me I was welcome to look around, but that the gallery would be open for only a few more minutes, I said, “Actually, I was hoping to chat with you.”

  She looked at me again, trying to divine why I would need to chat with her, and I watched the recognition hit her. “My God,” she said.

  “You didn’t recognize me.”

  “It’s been a while.” As she walked toward me, I realized she was taller than I recalled, and also thinner. Her hair, as long and dark as ever, was gathered loosely at the back of her neck, and though she may have intended to give me a hug, by the time she reached me I had turned my attention to one of the paintings on the wall—a field of gray marked by a single slash of deep, brilliant blue. “I would ask how you’ve been, but the others have already told me,” she said, examining me through her oval glasses.

  “Which others?”

  “Sandra. Grant. Your daughter. She works here, you know.”

  “I heard something about that.”

  She introduced the man with her as “Gregory, a very talented gentleman I’m happy to represent,” and explained to him that I was “an old friend.” When Gregory stepped forward to shake my hand, his large, worn work boots made my shoes appear dainty. I noticed, though, that his nails were bitten to the quick. “I’ll head over and get us a table?” he said. Gina told him that sounded good, and after telling me it was nice to meet me, he lumbered out into the night, leaving us alone in the gallery. Recorded music—a female singer with an accent that compounded the oddness of the m
usic’s electronic burbles—came from somewhere behind the gallery’s back wall, which didn’t quite extend the full width of the room. There was a second, smaller space behind the wall, though I couldn’t see into it.

  “So of course I know you and Sandra aren’t together anymore,” Gina said. “And when I asked Grant about you, he said that if I knew you before, then I know you now.”

  It occurred to me that once, briefly and long ago, I had been a project of hers. A bracelet of small green stones circled her left wrist, and she wore a silver ring on her right hand, but the fingers of her left hand were unadorned. “Miranda told me you’re divorced, too,” I said.

  “Yes,” she said, smiling. “Twice.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that.”

  “I’m not,” she said.

  When the light struck her hair, a dark red tint revealed itself in the highlights. I wondered which salon had earned the trust of the city’s aesthetically demanding gallery owners. “I’m sorry it’s taken me so long to make it in to see you,” I said. “I guess I was trying to get in better shape.”

  “I’m flattered,” she said. “Did you?”

  “No. This is the me I thought I might get into better shape.”

  She laughed. “You look fine. I don’t think you need to get in better shape.”

  “You’re being kind. But I’ve wanted to see what your place looks like. When Miranda said she was going to work here, I realized I didn’t know how galleries work, or what she would do, or who her coworkers would be—anything about it at all.”