You Don't Love This Man (12 page)

I understood what a text message was—the tellers at the bank were doing it all the time—but this was the first one I, personally, had ever received. I pressed the respond button and stared at a little blinking cursor. This was a form of communication for young people, I felt—it was ridiculous for me to try to take part. What could one even communicate by pressing numbers on a telephone? And this was a strategy, I thought: Miranda knew a text message would limit my ability to respond. With great concentration and the correction of some mistakes, then, I managed to type:

 

okay.

I stared at the ridiculous response, wanting to add to it. Communicating this way seemed laborious and pointless, though, so I gave up and hit send. A little animated envelope cartwheeled across the screen amid flashes of color, and then the standard display returned, as if nothing had happened. Had the message been successfully sent? I hadn't the slightest idea. When I looked up and saw the waitress walking toward the couple across the room, I briefly considered asking her the meaning of a cartwheeling envelope on a cell phone screen, but decided against it. Instead I said, “Is it too late to cancel our order?”

I didn't think it was necessary for her to slump as dramatically as she did—this was the worst news she had ever received, it seemed. But I left a five-dollar bill on the table anyway, which worked out to a twenty-five percent tip for her on the price of two drinks. And then I walked out of the restaurant and paused, blinking, in the midday sun. I wondered which direction Miranda had gone. There was no way to know.

 

O
N A
S
ATURDAY MORNING
only a few weeks after our trip to the coast, I drove up to St. Joseph's, an older neighborhood on the north side of town. St. Joseph's, which had been its own city until being annexed in the 1920s, had maintained a thriving commercial district into the early 1970s. It had fallen on hard times then, however, and by the 1980s the words
St. Joe's
primarily evoked a sense of crime and disrepair. It had been a couple years since I'd had any reason to visit the neighborhood, but the two-story buildings, faded awnings, and stenciled lettering on the dusty shop windows that lined Petrus Avenue, the neighborhood's main drag, were exactly as I remembered them. When I parked, I examined
the parking meter on the curb to confirm that it was even functioning. It appeared to be, so I fed it a few coins, walked past a hardware store that seemed open for business, an empty pet store that did not, and arrived at the address Grant had given me: a storefront which featured stenciled white letters on its window, spelling a single word:
TAILOR
.

Inside, there was a long, unmanned counter at the front—the place had maybe been a dry cleaner's at one point—and beyond it, a few racks of suit coats and trousers along one side of the room, and some dressing rooms and mirrors on the other. The only people present were Grant and a short, gaunt older man dressed in a three-piece wool suit, whom Grant, after beckoning me to join them, introduced as Mr. Anthony. When Grant had told me he needed a new suit for work and he wondered if I, too, might be interested in the experience of buying a tailored suit, I had been intrigued. Now, though, standing in the old store, in front of an actual Mr. Anthony, I was uncertain. Did I really need a tailored suit? A shirt and tie were required at the bank, but I had never seen a teller, at my branch or any other, wearing a suit. “You can just try some things, if you want,” Mr. Anthony said quietly, reading my uncertainty. “You're not obliged to make any decisions today.”

His tone surprised and reassured me, and it was only five minutes later that Grant and I stood next to one another on small pedestals, wearing white undershirts and unhemmed wool slacks as we studied ourselves in a mirror. Mr. Anthony knelt at our ankles, working quickly and methodically with pins and a measuring tape, a situation so foreign to me that just a few polite questions from Grant about how I was doing elicited a nervous chattiness from me, and I found myself going on about what a nice time Sandra and I had had at the beach, and how much we'd enjoyed spend
ing time with Grant and Gina. I even mentioned how the more I thought about what Grant had said on the deck of the restaurant, the more I realized that this
was
a time in my life when I was entering new situations, and that I really did appreciate his willingness to talk to me about those things. “And then inviting me here today, to a place where I can learn about some of this stuff directly,” I said, “I appreciate it, because I don't know anyone else who would invite me to do something like this, or who would even be able to tell me where I should go if I wanted to try and do it on my own.”

Grant had no reaction to any of this other than to nod while studying himself in the mirror, as if the cut of his pants were a subject so consuming that it made responding to anything else impossible. And when Mr. Anthony, bustling about my ankles, accidentally stabbed me with a pin just above the heel and I cried out in an embarrassingly girlish fashion, Grant just smiled politely. Mr. Anthony quietly apologized to me, the four or five straight pins he held between his lips lending him the diction of a street tough in an old gangster movie, and then told us he had the measurements he needed.

It wasn't until we were slipping back into our own clothes that Grant spoke. “I'm glad you've enjoyed spending time with us,” he said. “And I'm glad you're okay with what I said at the beach. I felt like I didn't do a very good job of explaining what I meant. I probably came off like the exact asshole I didn't want to be. But there's something I have to tell you that I guess is kind of regrettable now, which is that Gina and I have broken up.”

I wasn't sure what to make of the entirely neutral expression on Grant's face as he watched himself tucking in his shirt in the mirror. “I'm sorry to hear that,” I said, dismayed by the strangely modulated tone of voice I heard myself use.

“It's my problem, really,” he said. “Because Gina is wonderful. It's just that sometimes things don't work out. I mean, if anyone knows what I mean, it's you, right?”

Did I? I had dated Gina for a couple months during my junior year of college, and our relationship had occurred primarily because she had just broken up with some kind of long-term, supposedly serious boyfriend, and I was a nice, unthreatening guy who happened to be doing a group project with her in a communications class. I suspect Gina asked if I wanted to see a movie with her mostly because she so outclassed me socially that she could feel completely in control—she could be confident she was signing up for nothing more than a movie, a confidence that was certainly confirmed when, after shocking me by asking if she could stay the night, she had gently made so many suggestions in bed that she was, for all practical purposes, taking on the role of instructor. I had perfect attendance to my college classes, delivered pizzas four nights a week, had been inside a bar no more than three or four times, had never done any drugs, and had had sex all of two times. After what was certainly fairly unsatisfying sex for her, Gina had told me it was good for her to be with “a nice guy, for once,” a remark I naively took as a compliment. A couple months later, she thanked me for being so nice, but said she felt it would be better for her if she weren't in a relationship at all for a while, so maybe we could just be friends. Summer break started a few weeks later, and I never heard from her again.

If that's what Grant meant by “sometimes things don't work out,” then yes, I suppose I understood that sometimes things didn't work out. I didn't think that was what he meant, though.

“I hope you and Sandra know that I really like both of you, and I'd like to stay friends with you,” he said. “I know you've known Gina longer than you've known me, and that she's probably going
to be pissed off and say all sorts of angry things about me. But I'm being serious when I say it's been fun to hang out, and I'd be disappointed if that had to end. Though I guess I would understand.”

Ending my friendship with Grant because of something that had happened between him and Gina seemed preposterous. What would the point be? The reality of their breakup, and of how we would or wouldn't continue to know each other in the future, seemed entirely theoretical and irrelevant. “I can't say how Sandra will feel, but I'd definitely like to keep hanging out,” I said, noticing again how often, when speaking to Grant, I found myself uttering sentences that embarrassed me.

He gave me a friendly pat on the shoulder. “Good,” he said, and then headed to the front of the store to pay Mr. Anthony for the suit he'd picked out.

We said nothing more about Gina, but in an impulsive show of solidarity, I told Mr. Anthony I would go ahead and buy the suit he had measured me for, too. “It's a beautiful suit,” he said, nodding. “And you'll be able to wear it to just about any kind of event, so you know you're going to get your money out of it. I think it's an excellent decision.”

He was right. I wore that suit countless times over the years. And even though I stopped being able to fit into it a few years ago, it still hangs in the back of my closet.

I was not so assured of my decision at the time, though. The amount of money I'd just spent made the suit the single largest purchase I had ever made, eclipsing even the price of the used Dodge Dart I was driving in those days. I felt simultaneously dizzy and grown-up as I drove across town in that very vehicle, and a belated sense of financial prudence—or penance, probably—might have spurred me to cancel the round of golf I was heading toward,
had Grant not already assured me the whole thing would be taken care of that day: we were going to play with his father, whose club membership allowed anyone in his party to golf for free.

So when I next parked my humbled Dart, it was in the lot of the Pheasant Valley Country Club. It was autumn by then, but the air at the course was heavy with the scents of damp soil and cut grass. Summer had been coaxed into lingering, it seemed, and though there had been scattered showers earlier in the day, the clouds had cleared by the time I arrived, leaving the place a carefully mowed, still-dripping Eden. Finches whirred among the trees and golf carts trilled in the distance. I found Grant at the driving range—he'd already spilled a bucket of red-striped range balls across the dark grass for me. I pulled a driver from my vinyl bag and squinted out toward the flagsticks set at short, intermediate, and long distance. The trio of flags lent the range exactly no resemblance to golf as actually played, but I sized them up as if they were of importance while I asked Grant when his father would join us.

“Oh, he doesn't believe in the driving range,” Grant said. “He's probably having a drink right now.”

A smattering of laughter carried from the direction of the first tee, among it a laugh that was deeper and louder than the others. I wondered if it might be the laugh of the source of Grant's career and fashion advice, and when Grant and I made our way to the first tee a few minutes later, I was happy to find that I was right: the foursome ahead of us was trading a few last quips with a tall, broad-shouldered man shouting rejoinders to them as they sped off in their carts. Grant introduced the man to me as his father. “It's nice to meet you, sir,” I said.

“Don't bother with the mister or sir stuff,” he said. “Call me Lon.”

If I'd seen them together on the street, I wouldn't have guessed Grant and Lon were related at all. Grant had the compact build of a distance runner, but his father, a few inches taller than Grant and heavier by a good fifty or sixty pounds, looked like a retired football player gone comfortably soft. His wide face was dominated by an open smile, and he chatted unhurriedly, as if a round of golf were best undertaken as casually as a conversation over a backyard fence.

“Grant tells me you're a banker,” Lon said. “That's a fine line of work to go into. Always a need for a good banker.” When I told him I wasn't sure it would be a career I stuck with, but that it was fine for the short term, he shook his head. “Don't dismiss it. Markets can go down and businesses can go under, but banks are always there. There's nothing wrong with a small compromise in the direction of long-term stability.”

“Or with using it as a short-term position before moving on to something else,” Grant said.

Lon raised a brow as he tapped a divot back into the soil with the head of his driver. In his grasp, the club looked as if it were intended for a child. “I suppose,” he said. “Though my first business was auto parts distribution, and I wasn't really interested in auto parts at all. But making that company work is how I bought the house your mom and I lived in. And it's how I clothed and fed you when you were just a kiddo. We had to buy you that little plastic suitcase so you could pretend it was a briefcase full of sales pamphlets and rate sheets like your old man's briefcase.”

Lon laughed heartily, and though Grant forced a smile at what was clearly a familiar anecdote, the confidence I had come to expect from him seemed replaced that day by a moody remove. Grant examined the toes of his shoes, picked through a handful of
tees he extracted from his pocket, and studied the trees that lined the fairway—he directed his gaze anywhere, it seemed, other than at his father. Meanwhile, Lon adjusted the fit of his golf glove, a worn leather item that made my own glove—new, soft, and glaringly white—look painfully effete. Addressing the ball, Lon peered down the fairway with the nonchalance of someone looking for a bus, then frowned down at the tee. Bringing his club slowly up and back, he exhaled as he uncoiled, striking the ball with a percussive note that carried through the afternoon air like the sound of a hatchet splitting wood. We watched the ball rise and hang against the blue sky, suspended and seemingly motionless, until it drifted slowly back to earth and bounded eagerly down the right side of the fairway. I told Lon it was a nice shot, and he nodded. “It'll play,” he said.