by Dan Deweese
“Her coworkers are me,” she said. “And this is a pretty local gallery—local artists, local buyers, nothing exotic. I’m sure she’s told you that there’s nothing complex about the place. And greeting people and answering the phone probably isn’t particularly stimulating for someone as intelligent as she is. I imagine she’d like to do more than that at some point.”
“Do you have more for her to do?”
“I have as much as she has time to do. In fact, I wish she had a sister. I’ve never been able to trust anyone with the details here before, but Miranda seems to be able to do everything exactly the way I would have done it. You’re not hiding another one, are you?”
“No. Sandra wanted to get back into the workforce. I didn’t disagree.”
“I’m sure it’s difficult,” she said. “But I’ve forgotten my drink. Would you like one?”
I told her I would, and she headed to the back room, leaving me to contemplate the paintings. There was a fuzzy blue canvas that called to mind headlights in fog, and next to it a pinkish-rose one that, upon closer inspection, was colored by a fine scarlet spray. A short but extremely wide canvas appeared at first to be a uniform light blue, but when I looked closer, I realized that the intensity of the blue wavered slightly along the length of the canvas, defeating my sense of depth. One second it was a painting against the wall, but the next, my eye decided maybe we were looking through a window at a distant sky. The involuntary refocusing was dizzying, and when I tried to resolve it by staring fixedly at the canvas, the visual stuttering only worsened, until eventually I had to step away and look elsewhere.
Gina returned and handed me a glass of white wine. “What do you think?”
“They’re skillful. What’s the artist like?”
“A mess.” She stepped past me to straighten the painting on the wall behind me. It was the blue one that had bothered me, so I didn’t turn to watch. I waited until she stepped back from it, apparently satisfied. “So is this just a social call?” she asked.
“I did have something a bit awkward that I wanted to ask you,” I admitted.
“What?”
“Do you think Grant and Miranda are dating?”
Though she maintained a level façade, I sensed gears turning. “Why do you ask that?”
“A number of reasons. But mostly because I took Miranda out to dinner the other night and she ate almost nothing. And I know she stops eating whenever she falls for someone new.”
“Why do you think it’s Grant? She could be spending time with any number of people, couldn’t she? Do you really know that much about her social life?”
“No. That’s why I’m asking you.”
“I don’t know,” she said, looking around the gallery as if she had just realized every painting was in the wrong place. “It’s true that Grant has been around lately. He stops by, semiregularly.”
“To take Miranda out?”
“No, just to say hello. Though now I don’t know.”
“Do they leave together?”
“We’ve all left together, more than once. And then we go our separate ways. But if he was dating Miranda, he wouldn’t let me know about it any more than he would let you know about it.”
“I’d like to think he would ask me before doing something like that.”
“If he were a boy,” she said, amused by my logic. “Miranda wouldn’t want him to ask you, anyway. And it’s also true that this is exactly the kind of thing that appeals to him.”
“What do you mean?”
“There’s an energy around him when he’s going after something. He gets sharper. It’s like he starts playing a game, and you’re in it, but he doesn’t tell you about it, because not mentioning the game is part of the game.”
“And you think that’s what he’s doing? That they’re having a grand and secret affair?”
“I don’t know what he’s doing any more than you do. But it’s true that I’ve had that feeling around him this last month—that sense that he’s playing.” She laughed then, covering her face with her hand. When she dropped the hand, though, it was to reveal a smile of pained, comically melodramatic heartbreak, so that her actual emotions were concealed behind her parody of them. “Would you believe I thought it was me?”
“You thought he was interested in you?”
“I thought—” she started, but didn’t finish the sentence. Instead, she drew herself up into a posture of formal composure. “I don’t know what I thought. I haven’t seen you in twenty years, and maybe I’m just babbling. It’s good to see you. I’m glad you came in to say hello, but I don’t really know whether Grant is going out with Miranda. And Gregory is probably waiting for me, so can we chat again sometime soon? And can I at least give you a hug?”
I allowed her the hug, but in the couple of years that had passed after that evening, we shared no particularly deep or personal conversation. When, on occasion, I stopped by the gallery to take Miranda to dinner, Gina joked with me about the pieces she had on the wall, or about the artist who had made them, or about the people who had looked at them. This gallery running was all a lark, her manner suggested, an eccentric goof. Her lightness about the place was so charming, as was the easy and knowing way in which she touched my elbow before relating an anecdote, or the way in which she sometimes exclaimed, upon my walking through the door, that here, finally, was a person she could actually talk to, that I sometimes had to remind myself that her flirting was just a part of her professional persona. And despite not earning much, Miranda enjoyed her job there immensely, and it was clear she viewed Gina as something of a model in how to be a successful and stylish professional, an attitude that, quite frankly, cheered me. Miranda was young, intelligent, and responsible. There would be plenty of time for her to worry about money when she was older, I felt.
Gina never spoke about money, either, and I suspected she joked with me about the place as a kind of placation, probably assuming that I didn’t take her endeavor seriously. The result was that I didn’t truly realize the depth of her commitment to the gallery until a day that Miranda, in a state of awe, told me how Gina had spent most of a half-hour phone call one afternoon screaming at a patron who had tried to back out of a purchase. She’d told the man he had stolen money from an artist by reserving a piece and then later trying to change his mind, and that she would not let someone rip off one of her artists that way. She would not let some “spoiled, upper-class twat,” Miranda told me Gina had called the man, cause her artist to starve. After bullying the man into paying for his purchase, though, Miranda said Gina had hung up the phone and burst into tears, admitting to Miranda that though what she’d said about the artist getting ripped off was true, it was also true that if she hadn’t sold the piece, she wouldn’t have been able to pay her next month’s rent on the gallery space.
But Gina spoke not a word of this to me, ever. I got only laughter and light flirting from her—only jokes. Gregory faded away, replaced by a new boyfriend, someone well connected in the city’s art scene. When I saw him wearing a navy sport coat with gold buttons at a recent opening, though, I decided he couldn’t be someone Gina was serious about. In fact, it didn’t seem that Gina was interested in being “serious” about any man. Whatever had happened—whether it was one or both of her marriages, or something else entirely—sharing her life with a man in some traditional way didn’t seem to interest her. There had been only that one, brief admission—“Would you believe I thought it was me?”—before that voice had been silenced, and in its place had appeared: composure.
And it was that professionalism and composure that I heard Gina use on the afternoon of Miranda’s wedding as she spoke to the older couple out in the gallery. I had glanced only briefly at the pieces on my way in—they appeared to be large pieces of wood, each of which featured a surface spattered with layers of red or green or yellow paint, and then scratched or hacked at with some kind of rough implement—but I could hear the man and woman murmuring quietly to one another abo
ut them. The man was concerned that this wasn’t art, while the woman said they would be striking in the foyer. In a tone of cheerful contemplation, Gina validated both responses by saying that one of the interesting things about the pieces, to her, was the very way in which they were both striking and thought-provoking. “They don’t just fade into the background,” I heard her say, “when you see them, you look at them. And when you look at them, you think about them. That’s what drew me to them.” She told the couple to take as much time as they wanted, and then came back into the office and propped herself against her desk as if doing nothing more than waiting for a bus. “So what was it you were doing here, again?” she said. “When you should be any number of places other than here?”
“I wanted to find out if you’ve talked to Miranda today. I tried to call, but you didn’t answer.”
“I’m sorry, I didn’t look. I was with customers,” she said, and whispered: “And I need this sale.”
“I don’t want to bother you,” I said. “It’s just that Miranda didn’t come home last night. And I saw her today for a few minutes, and she seemed upset.”
“About what?”
“She didn’t say. And she’s supposed to be at the hotel now, getting ready, but she’s not. And no one seems to know where she is.”
Gina looked quickly into my eyes—like a doctor reading the dilation of my pupils it seemed. “She’s fine,” she said.
“What do you mean? You’ve seen her?”
“She stayed at my place last night. And she was here a little while ago.”
“She stayed with you last night?”
“She said her friends and the guests and all of the demands on her were too much, and she needed a quiet place to sleep. She asked if she could stay with me, and I said yes.”
I was dumbfounded by this. Gina hadn’t been at the rehearsal dinner. She hadn’t even been at the bar we went to after the rehearsal dinner. So Miranda had called her late at night, asking for a place to hide? “What’s going on?” I said. “She’s acting like someone having doubts.”
“Oh, everyone has doubts,” Gina said, as if the question were irrelevant. “I’ve had doubts about everything, my whole life. And it’s easy to get swept off your feet and fall in love, but the actual day is different.”
“I don’t remember doubts. I remember thinking it was the natural next move.”
“And yet we’re both divorced,” she said, flashing me a sympathetic little smile as she crossed the room to pull two glasses from the cabinet.
“Well, there’s more than one road to Rome.”
She turned, surprised. “Did you say there’s more than one road to ruin?”
“To Rome.”
“I thought you said ruin!” she said, laughing. “The expression is ‘All roads lead to Rome.’ I like your version better, though.”
“Sorry. I don’t know my expressions. I’m just trying to figure out what’s going on with my daughter.”
She filled the glasses with ice and water, exactly as she had for her customers not three minutes earlier, and handed me one. “I feel like I’m in a privileged position here,” she said. “Though not necessarily in a good way.”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, I’ve dated both the groom and the father of the bride, for starters.”
“A lifetime ago.”
“Thank you. I always enjoy hearing how ancient I am.”
“That’s not what I meant.”
“Maybe yes, maybe no. But I’ve spent most of the last two years working with Miranda, and I consider her a friend of mine, too. So I’m happy to tell you that she stayed with me last night, and she was here earlier today. And she’s fine. But the rest of it is between you and her.”
“The rest of what? If she has doubts about getting married, she didn’t have to agree to it.”
“Why do you keep asking about doubts? Is someone smarter, better-looking, and with more money than Grant really going to come along?”
The woman who had been out in the gallery stepped past the back wall then, her lips pressed into a polite smile as she asked if Gina could answer a few questions. Gina said of course, and then, as she stepped past me on her way out to the gallery, she whispered: “It seems to me like you’re the one with the doubts.”
As she disappeared around the wall, I stared at the glass of water she had poured for me. The imprint of a lip was visible beneath the rim, and I set it down without drinking. Two years earlier, Gina had covered her face in embarrassment over having thought Grant had been pursuing her, but now I was supposed to believe she was fine with things, and I was the emotional slow-poke? Did she really think she was helping me uncover some hidden emotional life I was unaware of? She felt I had doubts about the fact that my daughter was marrying a man almost a quarter century older than her, who had known her since she was a child? Of course I had doubts. That should have gone without saying. Did she expect me to run through the streets screaming about it? I could hear her chatting with the old couple in her voice of quiet enthusiasm, confirming each hesitant opinion they put forth, validating the soundness of their aesthetics and the wisdom of their responses, trying to make her sale while I thought: Miranda is a grown woman. She and Grant went to get a drink one evening, and then went to get a drink another evening. Things proceeded from there. There was nothing to be done about it.
The building’s back door stood halfway open, offering a view of the alley’s potholed asphalt, and of the weeds growing up from the base of the building opposite. The upper half of that building’s cinder-block wall was so intensely ablaze with the heat of the afternoon sun that it appeared almost white, and I noticed, sitting on the corner of one of the desks, a pair of black sunglasses I knew were Miranda’s. In their lenses, I could see a reflection of the room: a little warped image in which I was nothing but a stretched shadow.
When Gina returned, she raised her eyebrows in a way that suggested the couple in the gallery was serious. “Maybe,” she whispered. “Maybe, maybe.”
“So you think my concerns are just in my head,” I said. “And I shouldn’t worry.”
Again I got the level gaze from her. Did a shift in countenance really allow her to see something in my head? “She’s going to be fine. But you should keep in mind that your daughter thinks you’re Superman.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean you don’t seem to care about the opinions of other people. Or maybe you do, but you hide it.”
“And Superman is like this how?”
She sighed. “Fine. Maybe not Superman. You know what I mean.”
“How much is a person supposed to care about the opinions of other people?” I asked. “What’s the norm?”
“That’s what I mean,” she said. And she smiled then in a way that unnerved me, because as I looked into her eyes, I felt that the person smiling at me was not the joking gallery owner, but the Gina I had known long ago, who had been kind to me in school. I hadn’t seen that person in years and years. “I worry about you,” she said.
“I don’t think so.”
“I do. Though I don’t know why, since I know nothing about you. Do you have anything else going on in your life right now other than this wedding? Even as just a distraction? What about that woman you work with? The little one. What’s her name?”
Gina knew Catherine’s name. “You’re saying that if I sleep with my coworker, maybe it will distract me from being concerned about whether my daughter is going to be okay in her marriage?”
“I’m saying that if you had other relationships in your life, maybe you wouldn’t be so fixated on this one.”
So she had dropped her persona and come back from the past in order to fix me. It was charity. “I can’t remember,” I said. “How many children was it that you have?”
She laughed, but it was forced now, and her eyes had gone flat. The Gina who had reappeared for an instant had vanished again. It was in her usual, ironic tone that she said, “Has anyone e
ver told you that you don’t take advice well?”
“That might be because I feel like I’m trying to get permission from you in order to speak to my own daughter. Which seems odd to me.”
“Miranda chose to come to me. Not the other way around.”
“And what did she say to you?” I asked—and loudly enough that the couple in the gallery could hear.
She glared at me for a fraction of a second, but with a sigh, the anger faded from her expression. “One thing she asked was if I would do it if I were her.”
“Do what?”
“Marry Grant.”
“And what did you say?”
She fluttered her eyelids, supremely annoyed. “I said if I loved him, then yes.” Then, with a defiant look, she whispered: “And you. Are being. An asshole. Darling.”
“Only because I was asked to,” I said, my voice again at an appropriate level. “Sandra doesn’t know where our daughter is, and she asked me to try and find her. And I think you know where she is.”
“I don’t. She was here earlier today, but I don’t know where she is now. And you need to talk to her. Not me.”
I looked at my watch. “Her wedding is supposed to start in three hours. But at some point between now and then, she’s going to call you, isn’t she?”
“Maybe.”
“And you’ll tell me when she does?”
She shrugged—so tiredly, though, that it was clear she was conceding only because I had worn her down. “Fine. Yes. I’ll call you.”
I stood to leave. “Thank you. Sorry about raising my voice.”
She nodded toward the alley. “Back door, please.”
Fair enough, I thought. And that was how I left.
CALIFORNIA. AND I FLEW THERE, with Grant, on only three days’ notice. We drove along a patchwork street of grooved concrete and crumbling asphalt. Small stucco houses held space between tired apartment complexes, and the signs above the businesses in the strip malls were paragons of simplicity: ZAPATOS, said one, or TELEFONOS, and CARNICERIA. There were palm trees and bus benches and graffitied billboards, and all of it—every surface, it seemed—had been stained a dull, rusted brown by whatever pollutants or smog filled the air. Grant had offered me the window seat on our morning flight, and I had tried to smile while I gripped the armrests and watched the earth tilt away. By the time we leveled off, the cabin pressure had stopped my ears every bit as effectively as if they were filled with cotton, and I had to ask Grant to speak louder when he told me he had just been in Los Angeles a few weeks before to meet with potential clients, tour an injection molding plant, and visit a former stepmother—or maybe, he said, he should just say she was a nice older lady who had been part of his family for a few years when he was a kid. I knew Grant’s father had been married a few times, but Grant had never spoken about the specifics, and because what I knew of Los Angeles was derived entirely from television and movies, it seemed odd that a person would have a stepparent there or, for that matter, would go there to visit factories.
