You Don't Love This Man (23 page)

“Do you think she'll be okay?” Grant asked. “Those burns looked pretty bad.”

“We'll look at them tomorrow,” Sandra said, waving her hand as if shooing a fly. “Sometimes I don't know where her head is these days. It's just her age, I guess. It's all about boys now. And she acts like I'm an evil stepmother.”

“I met the boyfriend,” Grant said.

“You did? I'm surprised. He seems shy around people. But very polite.”

“Polite, yes,” Grant said. “But I didn't sense the shyness.”

Sandra shrugged. She seemed tired, and it was only a few minutes later that, citing exhaustion, she disappeared into the house herself. Night had descended by then, but neither Grant nor I moved from our chairs. “It must be hard to be the father of a teenage girl,” he said.

“She's in a strange place these days,” I admitted.

“Though I suppose locking her in the house wouldn't work any better.”

“That's what I'm told.”

We sat in the dark listening to the chirping crickets and the bubbling aspiration of the champagne until those sounds disappeared beneath the hiss of rushing water when Sandra turned on
the shower in the master bathroom, which was directly above the porch.

“You know, maybe I will go on that trip,” I said.

“Of course you will,” Grant said. “Why wouldn't you?”

I hadn't really been thinking about the trip, and was surprised to hear myself agree to it. It felt as if some obscure part of myself was daring me to do it, though it was also unclear to me why taking a simple two-day trip would require a dare.

“Did you see her put her hand on the grill?” Grant asked quietly.

“Yes.”

“She didn't even hesitate.”

I watched it happen again in my mind—the way she had studied the thing before it happened. “I don't think she realized it was still so hot.”

“Maybe,” Grant said, unpersuaded. “Maybe.”

 

O
N THE AFTERNOON OF
Miranda's wedding, I found Gina in the back office of her gallery, propping open the door of a miniature refrigerator with her shin while she poured water into two tall glasses of ice. Upon seeing me, she dropped her jaw in a theatrical expression of shock, though when she spoke it was barely above a whisper. “I didn't expect to see you here today,” she said. “Aren't you getting married tonight?”

I had just walked past an older couple out in the gallery's main room, both of them thin, white-haired, and examining paintings through the bottom halves of their bifocals. I assumed it was their presence that necessitated a lowered voice, so I played along. “Close. You're one generation off.”

“Your mother is getting married tonight?”

“Still off.”

Grabbing her brown linen dress at either thigh, she wiggled her hips while tugging downward, then smoothed the front with a quick sweep of her palms. “Well, don't get married yet. I'll be back in a minute.” She carried the glasses of water around the corner and out into the gallery. I heard the older couple thank her, after which the three of them began trading comments about the beauty of a particular piece.

When Miranda started working at Gina's gallery, it had been over twenty years since I'd seen Gina. Miranda passed along bits of information she gleaned while working: Gina had lived in New York for a few years, Miranda said, and had also lived in Los Angeles. She had been running the gallery for less than a year, and before that had worked as some kind of counselor or administrator at the city's school of art. Gina had said that starting the gallery had been her big leap, Miranda told me—the thing she had been thinking about doing for years, but had never done until she inherited money after the death of her father and decided to use it to make the gallery dream a reality. She had been married twice, was twice divorced, and had some kind of current boyfriend Miranda had said hello to on the phone, but hadn't yet seen in person. I was intrigued by this information, of course, but the more I learned, the more I also felt reluctant to see Gina myself. She had known me in my mid-twenties, and I felt confident that my mid-forties self could only be a disappointment. My male-pattern baldness was advanced, I was fifteen pounds overweight, and if I wanted to see Gina clearly I would need to wear my glasses, despite my fear that they produced a grandfatherly effect. And when it came to the positive aspects of age, to stories of life and experience, what would
I have to offer? Gina had gone places and done things. I was still at the bank.

Months passed this way: Miranda worked for Gina, and I made sure never to appear there. The situation felt like a school reunion that I had the power to delay while I held out for some kind of personal transformation that was never actually going to occur. And eventually it was only circumstance that forced my hand, because although Miranda had answered my questions about Gina, there came a point when I needed to ask Gina a question about Miranda. So after closing the bank one evening, I drove to the gallery.

Its name—
IDÉE FIXE
—was emblazoned in large block letters across a picture window that fronted the sidewalk, and the large, open room I stepped into featured olive-colored industrial carpet and the bright white walls of any typical gallery. I had been hoping to find Gina there alone, but the first person I noticed was a stocky, middle-aged man in blue jeans and a denim shirt. Though he didn't strike me as the type of man to be pacing the orderly confines of an art gallery, he was patiently following a woman in gray wool slacks and a collared white dress shirt as she walked slowly along the opposite side of the gallery. Gesturing toward the wall, she told him how a certain arrangement would accentuate the depth of a composition, but it wasn't until he looked doubtfully at the wall she indicated that I realized she wasn't referring to the canvases currently in the room, but to some speculative, future arrangement. When she turned briefly in my direction and told me I was welcome to look around, but that the gallery would be open for only a few more minutes, I said, “Actually, I was hoping to chat with you.”

She looked at me again, trying to divine why I would need to
chat with her, and I watched the recognition hit her. “My God,” she said.

“You didn't recognize me.”

“It's been a while.” As she walked toward me, I realized she was taller than I recalled, and also thinner. Her hair, as long and dark as ever, was gathered loosely at the back of her neck, and though she may have intended to give me a hug, by the time she reached me I had turned my attention to one of the paintings on the wall—a field of gray marked by a single slash of deep, brilliant blue. “I would ask how you've been, but the others have already told me,” she said, examining me through her oval glasses.

“Which others?”

“Sandra. Grant. Your daughter. She works here, you know.”

“I heard something about that.”

She introduced the man with her as “Gregory, a very talented gentleman I'm happy to represent,” and explained to him that I was “an old friend.” When Gregory stepped forward to shake my hand, his large, worn work boots made my shoes appear dainty. I noticed, though, that his nails were bitten to the quick. “I'll head over and get us a table?” he said. Gina told him that sounded good, and after telling me it was nice to meet me, he lumbered out into the night, leaving us alone in the gallery. Recorded music—a female singer with an accent that compounded the oddness of the music's electronic burbles—came from somewhere behind the gallery's back wall, which didn't quite extend the full width of the room. There was a second, smaller space behind the wall, though I couldn't see into it.

“So of course I know you and Sandra aren't together anymore,” Gina said. “And when I asked Grant about you, he said that if I knew you before, then I know you now.”

It occurred to me that once, briefly and long ago, I had been a project of hers. A bracelet of small green stones circled her left wrist, and she wore a silver ring on her right hand, but the fingers of her left hand were unadorned. “Miranda told me you're divorced, too,” I said.

“Yes,” she said, smiling. “Twice.”

“I'm sorry to hear that.”

“I'm not,” she said.

When the light struck her hair, a dark red tint revealed itself in the highlights. I wondered which salon had earned the trust of the city's aesthetically demanding gallery owners. “I'm sorry it's taken me so long to make it in to see you,” I said. “I guess I was trying to get in better shape.”

“I'm flattered,” she said. “Did you?”

“No. This is the me I thought I might get into better shape.”

She laughed. “You look fine. I don't think you need to get in better shape.”

“You're being kind. But I've wanted to see what your place looks like. When Miranda said she was going to work here, I realized I didn't know how galleries work, or what she would do, or who her coworkers would be—anything about it at all.”

“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.