by Dan Deweese
Once we retrieved our bags and picked up our rental car—a BMW, because it was “the easiest way to blend in,” Grant said—he moved smoothly in and out of various lanes on the freeway while I unfolded the rental company’s map, a bewildering latticework of freeways both named and numbered, and which bent toward or twisted into each other seemingly at random. Only a few minutes after we’d exited the freeway and passed the strip malls, though, he pulled to the curb in front of a crisp glass box of a building, six stories tall. Grant handed his keys to a valet in black slacks and a tight black polo shirt while I tried to look up through the immense plate-glass windows that fronted the building. The sun’s reflection in the glass was blinding, though, and I was still seeing spots as I stepped into a large, air-conditioned lobby, where sofas and chairs draped in white fabric sat on a white-planked wood floor. Pale candles—the source of the room’s jasmine scent, no doubt—burned in glass jars on birch shelves, and an Asian man and a white woman sat quietly behind the front desk, both of them young, with short, dark hair, perfect complexions, and the same outfits as the valets. Grant spoke to the man behind the desk, but I moved slowly around the lobby, examining various pieces of what appeared to be nothing more than large swatches of wrinkled white fabric that had been framed beneath glass and hung on the wall. Sandra would love this, I thought.
She and I were barely on speaking terms by that point, though. The previous day I had ignored a call on my line at the bank as I worked through lunch, trying to get as many things as possible taken care of before my trip. But my phone had rung again, with the insistent chirp that indicated a call from within the bank, so I picked it up. “Your wife is here to see you,” Catherine had said at the other end of the line.
“No,” I said.
“Yes,” she said.
By the time I opened my office door, Sandra had already made her way across the lobby and, as she stepped past me and into my office, said she hoped she wasn’t interrupting me. I looked to where Catherine sat at her desk. A chubby-faced young man in a crew cut and camouflage pants anxiously bounced his leg as he sat across from her. The young man wore an expression of outraged disbelief I had seen from so many customers over the years that I needed no other information to know that he was overdrawn, had probably written a few checks without realizing he had no funds, and then, when the checks bounced, the whole situation emerged as a nasty and baffling surprise to him. Catherine had joined the branch only a few weeks previously, and we were still on formal terms. So when she turned from the man and raised her hand in a shy, abbreviated wave, I nodded politely before closing the door. She was, from what I could tell, working comfortably in the face of the man’s anger.
“She seems nice,” Sandra said. “Before I told her I was your wife, she even made an excuse for you. She said you were on a conference call.”
“I told her I wanted to get some work done, and I didn’t want to get bogged down in going over elderly customers’ statements with them.”
“You don’t do that anymore? Too bad. I thought it was sweet.”
Sandra had visited me at work only a few times in the two years since I’d moved to a new branch to become a branch manager. On each visit, her presence had struck me as awkward. My spousal self diminished my managerial self, it seemed, and I could only return to being the branch manager after Sandra left. Now she was opening up the shopping bag she had carried into my office. “I bought you something for your trip, to wear with your beige suit. I think it looks like something a financial advisor would wear, don’t you?” She laid a silk tie across my desk: a pattern of small red ovals against a field of black.
“Unless the ovals represent zeroes,” I said.
“The ovals represent sensitivity. Financial advisors are sensitive. That’s why they’re able to advise.”
“I see.”
She wandered the small space of my office, idly examining shelves filled with procedure manuals. “I also came by to tell you something that I don’t want you to respond to right away,” she said, “because your first response will probably be emotional, and that’s not what’s important right now.”
“What do you mean?”
She stole a glance at me as she plucked a withered leaf from a dead plant on my filing cabinet. “I just came from taking Miranda to the doctor’s office. She’s going on birth control.”
So this visit wasn’t about clothes for my trip. It wasn’t about me at all. “When am I allowed to respond?” I said.
“You can respond.”
“Then I don’t agree to this. She’s fifteen.”
Sandra was prepared. “She’s almost sixteen,” she said. “And she’s starting to go out with boys, and they’re not going to go away.”
“No,” I said, feeling an anger more elemental than any I had felt before.
“What do you mean, no? You don’t have the slightest idea what it’s like to be a teenage girl.”
“You should have talked to me. I would have told you I don’t want this.”
“Well, it’s already done.”
“We could not do it.”
“No. Emotionally, no, that doesn’t work. She and I have already talked about it.”
“So you’re just going to allow this creepy Ira kid to have sex with her.”
“You’re about a week behind,” she said tersely. “I’m trying to prevent something horrible from happening.”
“You’re not preventing, you’re encouraging.”
“It’s easy to criticize when you haven’t done a thing yourself.”
“You asked me not to. You told me not to be uptight. Now I see it was so you could just go ahead and screw everything up.”
“You don’t want our daughter to grow up, so you’re burying your head in the sand. You don’t understand what she’s dealing with.”
“What is my role in this family?”
“What do you mean?”
“If you’re going to raise Miranda from here on out, then what is my role? Should I just be satisfied with the closeness of our relationship?” As with my agreement to go to Los Angeles with Grant, the comment seemed to have been spoken by someone else.
“I understand that we are not on great terms with each other,” Sandra said quietly, “but that doesn’t mean you’re allowed to attack me.”
“I’m not attacking you,” I said. “What I do is go to work and come home, and I don’t bother you at all. I stay out of your way. And now you’re telling me to stay out of your way even further when it comes to Miranda. So how is it that I’m attacking anyone?”
“If you want to talk about our marriage, this is not the time to do it.”
“And if you want to talk about Miranda and birth control, you shouldn’t have come to my workplace to tell me about it. You did this because you thought I wouldn’t get angry here.”
“I was obviously wrong about that.”
“Have I thrown things? Have I cursed or insulted you? I’m expressing my feelings. Isn’t this the emotional honesty that’s supposedly so good for people?”
“Not when it’s so ugly.”
“So who’s attacking now?” I said. “Take this tie away. I know how to dress myself.”
She took the tie off my desk and dropped it back into her bag. “Boy, you’re a piece of work today.”
“What does that matter?”
“Please stop,” she said so quietly it was almost a whisper. “Treat me with some respect.”
“You mean you don’t like being treated like a subordinate? You don’t enjoy having someone talk down to you as if you’re stupid?”
She rose. “I’m going to leave now. Maybe this little vacation of yours with Grant will be good. And maybe it’s a good idea if we just avoid each other until you get back.”
“That sounds fine.”
She paused in the doorway. “Do you want the door open or closed?”
“Closed, please.”
She closed it quietly behind her and became, through the door’s fro
sted glass, a blotch of wavering color that bobbed a bit, grew smaller, and then disappeared. When I reopened the door five minutes later, I was surprised to find the same beefy young man still sitting across from Catherine. His cheeks were flushed and his forehead shone with the sweat of what I assumed was restrained frustration, but he was following along and nodding as Catherine went carefully over a list of each and every one of his transactions. Intent on their study of his account, neither of them raised their eyes or took note of me in any way.
Sandra and I hadn’t spoken since then. So while looking at swatches of fabric in a lobby that seemed more fit for a spa than a hotel, while the little monochrome nirvana and its attractive, black-clad staff exuded a decadence pitched so low it felt almost stoic, I thought of Sandra, and how she would love the place. But I also knew I would never even tell her about it.
I was interrupted in my examination then by a Hispanic bellboy—also young, immaculate, and in the same black uniform as the others—who asked if he could show me to my room. Grant seemed intently involved in conversation with the young woman behind the desk, so I followed the bellboy into a small elevator at the back of the lobby. The level of fitness present in these employees was daunting. The bellboy held my hanging bag over his shoulder, and carried my suitcase with just the three outside fingers of his opposite hand so that his index finger was free to operate the elevator. Faced with the same task, I would have leaned or hobbled my way through it, but he moved swiftly and gracefully through the entire procedure, and even, after the door closed, politely asked whether I was visiting Los Angeles on business or pleasure.
“Business,” I said.
“The movie business?”
“No. Home appliances.”
“For real?”
“Yep.”
“Like washers and dryers and shit?”
“Toasters, actually.”
He nodded. “Hmm.”
When the elevator opened, he showed me to a small room that contained a bed with a white birch headboard and white comforter, a small white desk with a white chair, and in the corner, a white bureau upon which sat a small television. When the bellboy asked if everything was all right, I told him I wasn’t sure what else I could possibly need, handed him five dollars, and then he was gone. And I was alone in a boutique hotel room in Los Angeles.
I turned on the television, flipped through the channels with dissatisfaction, and turned it off. I skimmed the magazines and information left in the hotel’s fake leather binder on the desk, thinking there should probably have been some bit of preparatory business for me to take care of, though I couldn’t think of what. I could call Sandra and tell her I’d made it, but that seemed pointless. It was just a flight and a drive, and I felt there was a mutual understanding that we wouldn’t be talking to one another while I was there. It occurred to me then that Miranda had recently left a message on our home phone’s voice mail system without my ever having heard the phone ring. When I’d naively complained that it seemed like sometimes the phone didn’t work, she had smiled at my lack of telephone sophistication while explaining that a person could leave a message without actually calling. And so there in Los Angeles, I resorted to the strategy I’d been taught by a teen: I dialed the number of our voice mail system, worked my way through the options, and left a message saying I had arrived, was fine, and would call sometime soon. And then I hung up with—like a teen—no actual intention of calling.
I put my hanging bag on the rod near the door and removed and hung each item of clothing: a tie, a polo shirt, two dress shirts, and, as per Grant’s suggestion, a simple navy blue suit. I elaborately laid my razor and toothpaste and toothbrush in a line on the counter next to the sink, and was in the middle of reading the back of the tiny, complimentary bottle of shampoo when there was a knock on the door, and I opened it to find Grant there, changed now into a tan suit over a white dress shirt open at the neck. “Ready to go?” he said.
“I didn’t know I was supposed to be ready,” I said. “I thought we were going to discuss things first.”
“Right.” He stepped into the room, examined the place idly—was his room not exactly the same?—and sat down at the desk. “I guess I just meant ready existentially.”
“How do you want me to act?” I said. “I’m a bank manager, but here I’m supposed to be your CFO?”
“Aren’t those close to the same thing?”
When I explained to him that I didn’t work with big businesses, and that there were certainly plenty of people in Los Angeles who were actual CFOs, and who would possess much greater sophistication than me, he rubbed his forehead and looked out the window into the hazy sunshine. “I think I just want you to be yourself,” he said. “You can act however you think is appropriate.”
That meant nothing to me. “I’ll do my best,” I said.
I slipped the pants and jacket on and looked at myself in the full-length mirror, trying to decide what knot the financial consultant of an industrial designer would use. Full Windsor, I decided. Grant was writing something on the hotel stationery—notes to himself, probably—while I looked at myself in the mirror and wondered why I was finding it so difficult to imagine being a suit-wearing financial advisor when I actually was a man who wore suits and advised people on their finances. And I was about to laugh at the idea of Grant dressing me as a prop when I suffered a brief temporal collapse. I was standing in a suit, in front of a mirror, and Grant was speaking to me. This was all just as it had been when he had helped me choose my very first suit at his tailor’s, years ago. I had somehow completely forgotten about that.
Later, while he again negotiated the streets of Los Angeles, Grant drummed his fingers anxiously on the steering wheel and told me a bit more. “I just have a sense that I’m on the edge of things,” he said. “I’ve been working hard, and I feel like I have what it takes to work with these people, but I’m operating on a mix of intuition and bluffing. So all I can do is walk into a room and know that you’re the financial guy wearing a dark suit and tie, and I’m the creative guy wearing a light suit open at the neck. It’s a calculated effect, but that’s just because effects are all I know how to calculate right now.”
“But that’s what I meant before,” I said. “You don’t want me to be me. You need me to be a certain kind of character. And this is like a job interview for you, right?”
“Yes,” he said, “but only to the degree that every social interaction is a job interview. I don’t want you to be a character, I want you to play a role. And you already are that role. You don’t have to do anything more.”
After we parked in the lot of a large, square, glass building in Culver City half an hour later, Grant pulled something from his briefcase: a miniature bottle of Maker’s Mark, no more than a couple ounces. He broke the seal on the plastic lid, closed his eyes, and drank the contents in one gulp. “That’ll be good for the nerves,” he said.
“Do you have one for me?” I said.
“Sorry,” he said, “but listen, remember that you don’t need to do or say anything in there. Just follow my lead and use one rule: never say more than one sentence at a time. If there are documents you need to say something about, keeping it to a sentence will make everything easier.”
“But what if things are more complex than one sentence?”
“We can talk about complexity later.”
We entered a lobby of highly polished marble, where a receptionist directed us to the seventh floor. Grant said nothing as an elevator paneled in honey-colored wood carried us upward, and I sensed that having prepared me, he was now preparing himself. I wondered what rules for himself he might be going over as the elevator doors slid open and another receptionist showed us to a conference room with a long, black glass table, upon which sat a silver tray with a crystal pitcher of ice water, and five glasses. Grant sat at the head of the table, propping his large black portfolio case against the side of his chair. I sat to his left, from where I could look out a wall of windows tha
t gave on to the parking lot, where hundreds of BMWs and Mercedes and SUVs glistened in the afternoon sunshine. These were the boom years of aggressive financing and acquisition, and I couldn’t help but think how much interest was accruing on the car loans represented in that lot. As Grant wrote another little note on a pad of paper he had pulled from his portfolio, I wondered how aggressively he was financed. I knew he was living in an unfinished warehouse loft in a low-rent district, but I had always assumed that was by choice, for aesthetic rather than financial reasons. But here in Los Angeles, we were staying at a chic Sunset Boulevard hotel and driving a BMW. Was it usual for Grant to make these leaps from city to city and life to life? And how much did they cost him? I had, at some level, assumed that the way Grant lived was standard for his means. The idea that some—or many?—of his flourishes were achieved on credit hadn’t occurred to me before.
“Any last questions?” he asked.
“No.”
He nodded. “We’re going to do well,” he said. He didn’t sound like himself when he said it, though. Or maybe I’d just never heard him speak that way: nervously.
