You Don't Love This Man (2 page)

“Oh,” the woman said, brightening at my identification. “My daughter told me you gave quite a speech at dinner.”

I thanked her for what I accepted as a compliment, though it troubled me. I had assumed that standing before family and
friends to express some thoughts about my daughter and her marriage would be easy, so I hadn't bothered to prepare anything ahead of time. As a bank manager, I was perfectly used to speaking extemporaneously to customers and staff about accounts, cards, procedures, and regulations, and I didn't see any reason a few remarks at a dinner would be different. In the moments before I was to speak, though, I was surprised to find my hands trembling, and when I struck my spoon too hard against my glass, nearly knocking it over before I managed to control the force of my tapping, I realized I was in the grip of an anxiety whose intensity I hadn't seen coming. So though I did speak, afterward I retained no memory of what I had said. I remembered that clang of the spoon against the glass and could recall polite applause when I stopped, but the panic I suffered during the actual speech was such that, like film exposed to intense heat, my memory had been almost entirely fogged. So I couldn't help but note that, technically, the woman's comment that it had been “quite a speech” was not necessarily a compliment. “I hope I didn't go too long,” I said.

“Well, you're the father of the bride, so you have every right to,” the woman said. “But where is the groom I've heard so much about? Will he be here?”

“I don't know,” Sandra said, and turned to me. “Do you?”

I shook my head. “I'm sure he's in charge of his own schedule.”

“No guarantees, then,” Sandra said.

“Oh well,” the woman said, disappointed. “I guess I can wait.”

Someone at a nearby table called Sandra over. She stood with what I suspected was relief, gave me a quick pat on the back as she apologized for having to leave us, and headed across the room.

“And what about you?” the woman asked. “Do you have a significant other somewhere here?”

“Do I have a significant other?” I repeated as if it were some kind of quiz. I actually looked around the bar as if one might appear. “No.”

“Not even a date?”

She had already been at the bar when I arrived, and though it was an ungenerous evaluation—maybe she was just a friendly person—I noted that the drink in front of her was probably not her first. “I guess I forgot to ask someone.”

“That's understandable,” she said. “I'm sure it's stressful being the father of the bride. But listen.” She placed her hand atop mine and leaned toward me. “If you need someone to dance with at the reception, I'll be happy to be your partner.”

“Be careful,” I said. “I'm afraid I have two left feet.”

She glanced at my shoes. “Those feet look fine to me.”

“All right,” I said. “I have to mix right now, but I may come looking for you tomorrow.”

“I'll make sure I'm easy to find,” she said.

I made sure to shake a few hands and trade a few greetings, but it was only a few minutes later that I made my escape from the bar and headed home.

That next morning, though—as I stood there in my dark kitchen, arms crossed and shoulders hunched while I listened to the coffeepot—I felt like calling Sandra and asking that she acknowledge the correctness of my prediction. I was confident she was awake, and that she would have laughed. But there are times of day that one simply doesn't call.

 

W
HEN
I
STEPPED OUTSIDE
not much later, coffee in hand, it was to discover that the rain was really no more than a mist that
hung ghostlike in the air before me, and only slightly fuzzed the surface of the courtyard lawn. The weather here often does this: it gives every appearance of rain, and then doesn't quite deliver. In summer especially, early threats made above are often false, and I could see that watery patches of sky to the east were already fading to a thin blue-gray. The ground-level mist disappeared as I walked through it, a diaphanous curtain endlessly parting, and in movement I took stock of myself. A click of cartilage dispensed its hurtful little jolt in my shoulder, a reminder that the ball caught in the socket there on occasion. A dull pain lay behind my right knee, the result of spending an entire day helping Alan move sofas and tables and beds in preparation for the arrival of Sandra's house-guests. My townhouse had two bedrooms, and I had offered the empty one as potential lodging for visitors, but Sandra hadn't taken me up on the offer. The visiting guests were from her side of the family—maybe she worried that placing someone with her ex-husband would be considered a slight. A pair of joggers, a man and a woman, announced they would be on my left, and then they were, two sets of nylon shorts whisking past as I continued my inventory. Eyesight? I trained my gaze on the lady jogger's round bottom, rejected that as an unscientific test, and squinted instead at the nearest street sign, pleased to find I could read it, though my already knowing the answer certainly helped. And hearing? The breeze in the firs, tisk of a sprinkler, hum of distant traffic, throb of my pulse in my ears: everything was there, present and accounted for. I was not old. I told myself.

The joggers continued down the street and into the mist while I kept my own pace, covering the route I took most mornings, a neighborhood walk that provided a good half hour in which my thoughts were my own. Satisfied I was in working order physi
cally, I gave myself the mental challenge of recalling that speech. I'd believed I would be able to say something true and moving in two minutes, without preparation. Had I managed this? I knew I had started by dramatically clearing my throat, because immediately upon doing so I chastised myself for already having lapsed into cliché. I clasped my hands before me in order to quell their trembling, then decided I looked odd holding them that way, and shoved one hand into my pocket. The other found its way to my stomach, and I gave up the struggle there—if the pose was good enough for Napoleon, I thought, it was good enough for me. Throughout my search for a natural posture, though, I had been speaking. But about what? Nothing came back. It was a toast—had I raised my glass? Did people drink? I hadn't the slightest, and neither could I estimate how long I'd spoken. I just remembered Miranda, seated next to me, giving me a kiss on the cheek when I sat down. “It's okay,” she had whispered to me. “Everything is fine.” I didn't know what she meant, though. Had I apologized for speaking too long, or for the arc of my entire life? Drunk on the moment, the moment had escaped me.

A calico cat eyed me with suspicion from the edge of a shrub before it turned and disappeared within. A young man pressing a bundle of newspapers to his chest ran past and commenced firing the papers toward doorways. A seagull floated in for a wide-winged landing on the sidewalk not thirty feet ahead of me. There was something clumsy and ad hoc about its landing, but it had succeeded, and when it extended and refolded its brown and white wings I was surprised to note, even from a distance, the flick of a thin red tongue. The lizards are their cousins, I guess. The gull monitored my approach in the sidelong way birds have of turning parallel to their object of examination. A few desultory hops
carried it into the street, but one wide blue eye remained trained on me. It opened its beak silently, again displaying that tongue, and then snapped it shut. Had the gesture been directed at me, or was it just the avian mechanism adjusting itself? I continued past the bird and onward, and when I looked back, it was to see the inscrutable creature twitch its head in another direction and hop off, pecking the asphalt every few steps—as if it expected to find something.

The morning walk was a new habit for me, adopted from the last woman I had dated, with whom I'd broken up six months earlier. Trish, a Realtor who had just moved into the city from the suburbs, began every morning—or every morning she awoke with me, at least—with a brisk walk through the neighborhood in one of her clean, pressed, nylon sweat suits. She owned these sweat suits, which she called “warm-ups,” in a number of colors: baby blue with white piping, wine red with yellow stripes, and a neon green with electric blue trim were three of her more consistent choices. I've never particularly been one for athletic wear, and walked with her in my usual weekend-morning outfit of jeans and a jacket. That relationship had been over for a while, but I'd kept her ritual of the morning walk. I liked it.

 

I
T WAS AT THE
breakfast table in Sandra's house later that morning that I received the call. It was just after nine o'clock, and I had been listening to her brother, Bradshaw, read aloud from a sports Web site he was looking at on his laptop. He'd been noting various teams' victories and losses, pulling up detailed information on recent draft picks and trades, and estimating likelihoods of future success. I did my best to nod at appropriate intervals. I was
supposed to be at Sandra's disposal that morning to run errands, pick up guests from the airport, or take care of any other pressing tasks, but I had been there almost half an hour and she had yet to come down from her room. Bradshaw's own wife and two teenage daughters were also upstairs, and though we heard occasional disputes among them over space in the bathroom, not one of them had shown her face yet, either. So I was trapped, drinking another cup of coffee while I watched Bradshaw take his own breakfast in what struck me as the ensemble of a teenager: oversized red nylon athletic shorts and a white T-shirt memorializing a “slo-pitch” softball tournament. Between installments of sports gossip, I asked him why the
w
had been deleted from
slo
, and Bradshaw pressed his chin to his chest to examine the usage. “It's a different word,” he said.

“The pitching is slow,” I said. “So why do they spell it that way?”

“The word is
slo-pitch
,” he said. “It's a different word.” He took an overlarge, tearing bite of his toasted bagel, the butter and cream cheese of which had gathered into points of glistening white at the corners of his mouth. Miranda once told me, rather gleefully, that Bradshaw had said he was surprised Sandra had ever married me in the first place, since I was such “a finicky guy.” I don't think Bradshaw always understands the words he uses. And I was pleased when my cell phone produced its little trill and I was able to consider something other than his T-shirt.

“We were just robbed,” my coworker Catherine said when I answered. “Everyone's fine, it's under control, but I thought you would want to know. It was silent, no weapon. Just a guy who pushed a misspelled note across the counter to Amber. The rest of us didn't even notice until it was over.” She used the same disdainful tone
she had when she had called me at home one Saturday morning to report that a stray, floppy-eared terrier was in the bank, had evaded capture for over twenty minutes, and was hiding behind the change machine in the back corner. I had driven to the bank, rattled the machine, and stamped my foot, but it was only after I told the staff to return to business as usual that the creature had emerged from his hiding place and loped out of the branch with a sad look in its eyes, as if disappointed we'd given up the game.

“I'll be there in a few minutes,” I told her.

“You don't need to,” she said.

I watched Bradshaw continue to work at the bagel—his movements were tense, relentless. “I have nothing else to do right now.”

“I know that's not true. Oh, here they are, we're all saved now.”

“Who?”

“The police. They just pulled up.”

“What was misspelled?”

“It was a robbery,” she said. “One
b
. I'll talk to you later.”

I folded the phone in time to watch Bradshaw stuff the remainder of the bagel into his mouth and commence strenuous bovine chewing. He swallowed dramatically, and then again, and then a third time, tipping his head back to better reveal the contortions of his trachea as it convulsed beneath the slack skin and gray stubble of his neck. “There's a problem?” he said finally, feigning concern.

“Yes. Do you think Sandra will be down soon?”

He shrugged. “You can go up there.”

Upstairs, someone was running the sink in the bathroom, a hair dryer roared from the master bedroom, and I sensed the press of footsteps within one of the smaller bedrooms. Miranda was staying in her old room here for the weekend, which meant there were,
theoretically, at least five women trying to share the single upstairs bathroom. To my relief, though, all I was currently faced with was an empty hallway with four closed doors, so I knocked quickly on the door to the master bedroom and called Sandra's name. The hair dryer ceased, there was some shifting and rustling as she told me to come in, and then the hair dryer resumed. I found her seated at her dressing table bundled in a white terry-cloth robe, her head inclined toward the hand in which she held and waved the dryer while with her other hand she tugged at her long, blond hair. She has always kept her hair long, and in concert with her quick, dark eyes, her looks have held a slightly intimidating power over me. I waited for her to shift her gaze to mine before I told her, over the hair dryer's howling, that the bank had been robbed. She immediately killed the dryer, creating a portentous silence. “
Your
bank?” she said. “Was anyone hurt?”

“I don't think so.”

“Can you get out of going?”

“No.”

She restarted the hair dryer, waved it through her hair a few times, and turned it off again. “It's your daughter's wedding day.”

“It will only take an hour. I'll talk to the police, fill out the forms, hand tissues to the tellers. And you don't need me this morning, anyway. There's nothing left to do.”

She arched an eyebrow, just as she had the previous evening. “There's nothing left to do?”