by Dan Deweese
“I guess it depends on what you mean by everything.”
“I could hear more, if you want. I’m a good listener.”
She smiled—though again, it seemed sad. “I guess you know enough. Maybe another time.”
I was about to suggest that there was no time like the present, but our conversation was interrupted by the sound of shouting from out in the lobby. Stepping quickly from my office, I saw that the source of the noise was two men wrestling on the tile floor near the teller stands. I recognized the one having the better part of the fight, since he was wearing the same camouflage pants he had worn each time I had seen him at Catherine’s desk, patiently listening to her explain why he was overdrawn. But now he stood over the second man, twisting the man’s arm and then, awkwardly and from an odd angle, kicking the man in the ribs. When the victim fell, curled in pain, the man in the camouflage pants leaned down and punched him in the face. It was not anything resembling a knockout blow—the victim had been rolling onto his side, and the man in camouflage seemed unable to figure out how best to punch someone from the angle he was at—but the victim of this barrage groaned, writhing in pain. His blue jeans were brown with dirt, and when he raised his face, which he was covering with his hand, one could see that the armpits of his worn white T-shirt were stained a healthy yellow. As he began slowly to crawl toward the bank’s rear exit, his hand still over his face, I saw Catherine repeatedly pressing the alarm button beneath her desk. The man in camouflage said, “Where the fuck do you think you’re going?” before he grabbed the man on the floor by his ragged blond hair and pulled his head back, revealing a face covered in blood, and then punched him again, this time solidly, high up on the cheek, near the outside of the man’s eye. Again the man fell to the floor, emitting a wordless wail, and then dragged himself to his knees and resumed crawling—dragging himself, really—toward the door. Blood dripped from between the fingers of the hand over his face. When the man in camouflage moved toward him again, I heard myself yell, “Let him go!”
The man in camouflage spun and looked at me in outrage, his face flushed. “He was robbing the place! He had a knife!”
“Just let him go.”
It took several seconds for the would-be robber to make his way to the glass doors at the back of the branch, and no one—none of the employees, none of the stunned customers—made a move. The man used the door’s black metal push bar to pull himself to his feet, and then shouldered the door open and staggered out of the bank. I looked back to where Miranda stood outside my office. Her hand was over her open mouth, her eyes wide. “Is everyone all right?” I said, but no one responded. People stared at me dumbly, as if I had spoken in a foreign tongue. As if the question were nonsense.
By the time I got home that day—over an hour later than usual, due to all the procedures and paperwork Catherine and I had to do in order to have the branch ready to open again the next morning—I expected to find an empty house. Sandra and Miranda were both waiting right there in the living room, though. The television was on, but they seemed to have been ignoring it in favor of paging through glossy magazines. “Did they find the guy?” Miranda asked.
She had tried to stay at the branch after the robbery, but the police had plenty of witnesses, and had asked everyone not on staff to leave. “Yes,” I said. “He was only a few blocks away, stumbling down the street. And easy to spot, I guess, since his face was covered in blood.”
“It looks like you have some on your shoes, too,” Sandra said.
I looked down and saw that she was right. The toes of both of my shoes had dark spots dried on the leather.
“That poor man,” Miranda said. “He got so beat up. Was his nose broken? Or his face?”
“I don’t know. They took care of him a bit before they brought him by the branch for us to identify him, but he was only back for a minute before they took him away.”
They nodded. I felt awkward standing there in front of my wife and daughter, giving an account of an event that, for the most part, hadn’t involved me. And a part of me was also thinking: Why didn’t you call, Sandra? I knew Miranda had told Sandra about the robbery, and had told her I was fine, too. So she hadn’t needed information. I understood that. And yet.
I wandered toward my office, thinking maybe things would be quiet there. As soon as I sat down behind my desk, though, I felt something was off. And then I noticed the window. “What happened to the spiderweb? And the spider it belonged to?” I asked toward the living room, trying to sound casual.
“I killed it,” Sandra answered. “With a rolled newspaper. And then I cleaned the web out of the window. That thing was scary. It took a bunch of whacks.”
Somehow, that news was more upsetting than anything else that had happened that day. The living creature I had spent the last few weeks admiring—the being who had created something beautiful right there in my window—had been killed. Its death struck me as incredibly senseless and cruel, and yet also, I knew, a perfectly standard act of housecleaning. I couldn’t stay in the office with the window empty like that, though, and neither did I want to join the women in the living room. In fact, I couldn’t think of a single space inside the house where I would feel comfortable at that point, so I wandered out to the back deck and fell into an armchair, wondering why I was so upset. Why did she have to kill it? I thought. Yes, I knew: anyone would have killed it. So why, when Sandra had only done something that any normal person would also have done, was I so angry at her? And now that the spider was dead, why did I feel so raw and unprotected myself?
The back door opened a few minutes later, and Sandra stepped out. As she took a seat in a chair on the other side of the deck, I had that sense I often have of someone studying me, and I realized I had been conscious of this—of her eyes upon me, searching for something—for years. “Miranda says Ira’s leaving town for a while,” she said. “She says he’s going down to Los Angeles to work for Grant.”
“That’s what I heard.”
“He didn’t tell you about this ahead of time?”
“No. Did he tell you?”
When she had returned home from her tennis tournament the previous afternoon, Sandra had told me she and Grant lost their first match, waited most of a day to play another match, and then lost that one, too, and that was it. Instead of being disappointed, though, she had seemed vaguely embarrassed about the whole thing. I wondered if Grant hadn’t lost those matches on purpose so that he could get back to town, and back to work on getting Ira out of town. “He didn’t mention it at all,” she said. “Which I find odd.”
“He told me he was going to open an office in Los Angeles, but not that he was going to hire locally.”
“Well. She’s pretty upset about it.”
“It doesn’t seem like it to me.”
She looked at me again. “Did I do something to you?” she asked.
“It’s just clear to me that I’m the lesser person in this relationship.”
I was surprised to see that she had placed a pack of cigarettes on the arm of the chair. She fished one out and—slowly, deliberately—lit it. “What do you mean?” she said. “What does ‘the lesser person’ mean?”
“It means I can’t talk to you anymore, because you disagree with everything I think and feel,” I said. And finally I began to speak. In an unstopping rush of bitterness, I told Sandra I no longer knew if she disagreed with everything I thought or felt, or if she had disagreed with me on so many things that I now simply assumed the disagreement was complete and total. And likewise, it seemed hardly to matter whether she was entirely bored with me, or if I was just assuming her boredom had become entire. I no longer had a desire to speak to her, because it felt like the only feelings left for me to learn about from her had to do with how high, exactly, her levels of disagreement and boredom and frustration with me had risen. I told her I understood she enjoyed her job and the tennis team and other social groups or functions that we took part in, or that she took part in without me,
but that the fact of the matter was that I didn’t enjoy a single one of them, because they had nothing to do with me. I was being pulled through a life I didn’t care about, I told her, and I knew she was just as tired of dragging me around as I was of being dragged around. “And somehow the person I am, or wish I could just be allowed to be, has become indefensible,” I said. “Because how can I argue against all of our success? How can I argue against having all of our friends and parties? I realize it’s what people do. It’s how people have fun. But the fact of the matter is that I don’t like it, and I don’t know why, and I’m sorry, but I don’t. And I don’t like being in this house, knowing that you’re frustrated with me, and knowing that I’m angry about the fact that you’re frustrated with me, and knowing that Miranda can tell we’re frustrated, and I can tell she feels uncomfortable any time the two of us are in the room together, and now she’s starting to get frustrated with us, just like we’re frustrated with each other. And so this is just spiraling into some weird place, and I’m tired of it, and I’m exhausted by my own frustration and anger, and it has to stop. I need to get out of here, to go somewhere where I can think about things. I have to get out of this house and whatever is happening inside it. And I don’t know how you feel about that, but I know that what I’m feeling right now is that no one here needs me like this, the way I am in this house. I can’t keep fighting with you about how to live, because quite frankly, you’ll just crush me. I understand that. You are much stronger and faster than me. I get it. And I don’t know how to explain or argue for my right to not take part in all of the nice and good and social things that you enjoy, but I don’t want to. I’m sure that’s very clear to you by this point, and I’m sure that’s what you were talking about when you came to me a few months ago and told me you were unhappy. The fact is that I want to be left alone. And I can’t change that. And I understand that means I need to find a new place for myself, somewhere that isn’t here. So I’m going to do that.” I wasn’t bold enough to look at Sandra when I was finished. I stared out across the backyard instead, embarrassed. I didn’t understand why I couldn’t just keep going, or change myself somehow so that the parts of me that were a problem would just no longer be parts of me. But I felt I had tried those things, and I had failed.
I didn’t sense any movement from her. Was she looking at me? Or was she, like me, looking away, toward the horizon? I didn’t check, because I didn’t want to risk accidentally meeting her eyes. But when she spoke, she didn’t dispute a word of what I’d said. She just said, “So do you want to see someone? Should we get counseling?”
“You didn’t mention counseling a few months ago.”
“No. But I would do it.”
“As an exercise, so that we could say we did it. And I’ll just attack the counselor, you know.”
She laughed. And because I hadn’t been looking at her, the hoarseness of her laugh was the first I realized that she was crying. “You would. I can hear it.”
“I wonder why,” I said. “Why is it so obvious that I would attack the counselor?” I may as well have asked: Who am I?
“Because you don’t respect experts.”
“It’s because I can’t stand it when someone who doesn’t know me tries to tell me who I am. Or how the world works.”
“I know you,” she said. I finally looked at her then, and I could see in her eyes, and in the openness of her entire expression, that what she had said wasn’t a statement, but a true-or-false question. And she wanted me to give her the answer.
“No,” I said. “Not lately.”
“No. Not lately,” she repeated softly.
The trees waved gently in the breeze. Somewhere down the block, wind chimes produced their glistening little tones. It was a perfectly beautiful summer evening, and I remember wishing I could just remain there—in that warm breeze that was neither the confused past nor the uncertain future—and somehow stop time.
But that is not the way the world works. Sandra shifted. Seconds passed. “So what are we doing?” she said. “Do you have some kind of plan?”
I didn’t. All that I held in my mind was the image of an empty room. And it had been so long since I’d made a decision that wasn’t just a reaction to something someone else had done, that I struggled even to hit upon a tone of voice appropriate for speaking. So I just whispered. “I’ll move out. Somewhere small.”
“What about the house? It’s too big for me to take care of by myself. And how will we tell Miranda?”
“We’ll figure it out. But not right now.”
She nodded. “Okay,” she said. “Okay.” We seemed to be in agreement, but I think we were both in shock, too. Though when Sandra headed quietly back into the house, I can also remember thinking: She can’t be too upset. This is what she wanted.
Later, I went back into my office and sat at my desk, by the window. It had been just one spider out of millions, I reminded myself—it was just as well that he was dead. I hadn’t been there long, though, before I heard Sandra’s voice again. “I forgot to say thank you,” she said. “For fixing the door. It looks good.” Because I was facing the window, I was turned partially away from where Sandra was standing in the doorway, and all I did to acknowledge her was silently raise my hand, as if to suggest the whole thing was nothing. But the reality was that I didn’t speak because I couldn’t. And I didn’t turn toward Sandra because I didn’t want her to see me crying. Though I’m sure she could tell.
Long after I had heard Sandra’s footsteps recede down the hall, I continued to gaze out the window: at the patch of ground that was our neglected side yard, and at the blistered and peeling paint on the side of the neighbor’s house beyond. Without the web there, though, the window felt like an empty square—just a framed view of nothing.
WHEN THE MAN AT the Sycora Park Suites front desk told me Sandra’s room was on the eighth floor, my first thought was that no one should ever be given a room on the eighth floor of an atrium hotel. To my mind, anything above the third floor was cruel. Are there really people who enjoy the precipice? Who want to stand up against the abyss so that they might peer past the edge, and fantasize a fall down into the stunted trees and churning fountain? But my second thought was: I bet she requested a high room. It’s classier. It’s quieter. It’s more private. The abyss offers an element of drama, but the railing makes it safe. Gazing down at the people milling, antlike, below—while sipping a glass of wine, probably—would be relaxing for Sandra. She had never had a fear of heights.
The glass elevator ride eight stories up was enough for me. It was not only the height, but the fact that behind the machine’s glass panels, and then while treading the open hall that circumscribed the building’s gaping center, I felt exposed. I walked next to the wall, as far from the open side as possible, until I found Sandra’s room. And though I rapped solidly on the door, it seemed to make almost no sound at all.
“There you are. I’ve been calling you. How are you?” she said upon opening the door only as much as was necessary for her to peer out. With her hair and makeup immaculately done and only her head visible, I felt as if the bust of an ancient Greek goddess was peering at me.
“I’m fine,” I said, surprised by her concern.
“Are you hungry? There are snacks in the room. You can’t come in, but I can get one if you want—sandwiches and popcorn and things.”
“Is Miranda here?”
“No.”
“But all of you are getting ready. So have you talked to her?”
She turned and told someone in the room that she would be right back, and then slipped around the door and out into the hallway, letting the door swing shut behind her. Still in her jeans, black T-shirt, and flimsy pedicure sandals, she seemed now like the goddess caught on her day off. “No,” she said. “But we have the photos”—she looked at her watch—“at the Quad, in fifteen minutes. I don’t know what else to do but assume things will happen. You need to be in your tux.”
What had happened
since I’d last seen her? Earlier, she’d been telling me about how this wedding wasn’t going to happen and it was all going to be a disaster, but now she seemed to have changed her mind. She was not given, in my experience, to magical thinking, and neither was optimism her mode. And yet she was speaking to me now in the matter-of-fact tone of simple wisdom, and the anxiety she should have been working out on me had disappeared.
“I just talked to the photographer,” I told her. “I said we had some scheduling issues, and we’d do the photos after the ceremony. He said that was fine.”
She seemed stunned by this. “Why didn’t you tell me? You should have discussed it with me before making that decision.”
“I wasn’t aware it was a decision. We haven’t heard from Miranda. Without her, there are no photos to be taken.”
“Have you told anyone else?”
“This is that. This is me asking you how to best go about doing that.”
Her shoulders dropped. She closed her eyes and sighed. It seemed I had committed some kind of colossal blunder.
I’d had enough. “My phone is dead,” I said. “Can I borrow yours for a second?”
She pulled it from her pocket and handed it to me. “Who are you calling?”
“Gina.”
“Why?”
When she gave me the phone, I flipped it open and, before dialing, glanced at the list of incoming calls: there was Gina’s name, more than once. And so, while looking at Sandra, I dialed Gina.
“Hello, Sandra,” Gina answered.
“Nope. Not Sandra.”
“Certainly not,” she said upon hearing my voice. “I hope you haven’t done something with her.”
“She’s right here. She’s been bringing me up to speed.”
“Would you believe that couple bought not only the piece they were looking at when you were here, but two more? They wanted one for each of their houses. Who knew, right?”
“Not I,” I said. “But listen, Sandra’s busy getting ready for the photos, and she wants to know if Miranda has come back by the gallery yet.”
