You Don't Love This Man (30 page)

“Absolutely,” he said. “So Cathy, I'll catch you at the reception, then?”

I almost laughed as Catherine admitted she would indeed be at the reception, news which sent Kurt marching happily across the grass, almost but not quite at a trot. I waited until he was safely out of earshot to say, “If you're Cathy now, we should probably change the nameplate on your desk.”

“Catherine is fine,” she said. “What have you heard from Miranda?”

“Nothing.”

“And how did things go at the bank?”

“Fine. Though after I left, John called and asked if I would come back. He looked in my employee file and found out I was robbed once back when I was a teller, and he thinks that's something he should talk to me about.”

“Why does he want to talk about that?”

“He wants a promotion, I think. He wants to be super-thorough and tough as nails. So when I told him one conversation was enough and I couldn't talk to him again today, he got upset and told me things would be easier if I came in to talk to him. I think we don't like each other.”

“What did he mean by ‘easier'?”

“I think he was just practicing making empty threats.”

Catherine knew as well as I did, though, that in their company-sponsored zeal, bank security had been known to pester employees for months about the details of even standard robberies. “I imagine they'll be calling me again, too, then,” she said doubtfully. “And now we can be sure that they're really combing through all of our personal accounts.”

“Well, when they call you in, don't let them break you, Cathy.”

She shot me a warning look. “Don't call me that.”

“Sorry, Cathy.”

We stepped from under the trees and headed across the Quad. Little crystalline globes of rain clung to the grass blades, and when I looked behind us, I could see that we were leaving dark, wet footprints in the grass.

“You've been looking for her?” she said.

“Yes.”

“And no one has been able to help? No one knows where she is?”

“No. But I'm starting to think she's doing exactly what she wants to do today.”

“What do you mean?”

I shrugged. “She knows where she is. And she knows my phone number. So wherever she is, it must be where she wants to be.”

Catherine nodded, reserving comment. I watched as she pulled something from her pocket and dropped it into her purse. “What was that?” I said.

“Oh. You can have it,” she said, pulling it back out and handing it to me.

It was Kurt's business card. I flipped it over and found a handwritten number on the back. “I believe they call these ‘the digits,'” I said. “Is this his home number on the back?”

“I don't know.”

“Did you give him yours?”

“No.”

“He seems nice. He said he'll catch you at the reception.”

“I hope not.”

“You should have a good time at the reception. I don't want you continually acting as our family servant.”

She looked at me with a frightening lack of expression. “I guess I didn't realize I was a servant.”

“That's what I'm saying. I'm telling you you're free to enjoy the party.”

“And you're seriously suggesting I hit on your photographer?”

“I'm just saying.”

She had acquired the tightened jaw and deliberate gait of someone genuinely angry. “He's not my type.”

We had reached her car by then and stood next to it in the street. Catherine had never, in the decade that I had known her, given me any clear impression of her personal life. She dated. I knew that. But how often, I did not know. And the gentlemen were not allowed to come by the bank, it seemed. I had tried to joke with her once about it a few years before, saying that if she were
really serious about someone I assumed she would bring him by, and her response had been to immediately assure me that would never happen. “No one needs to visit me at work,” she had said. “I had an issue once with a person who bothered me at work, and there's no reason for that to happen. It's off-limits.” I pressed her for details, but she said it wasn't important, all that was important was that people respected her boundaries. So the next time I had an excuse to do so, I of course scoured her employee file for any reference to an incident. There was none. It was a mystery episode not in the books, so all I could know was that Catherine had boundaries, and that I was on one side of them, and her personal life was on the other. Which, I will admit, was exactly in line with how human resources suggested we manage our personal lives in the workplace, so I was hardly in a position to complain, or even to ask further questions. The manager is not to ask questions about the staff's private lives.

And yet. “But I have no idea what your type
is
,” I said to her as we stood there by her car.

“It's not that guy,” she said. “And there are other things to think about right now, anyway.”

“You always say there are other things to think about.”

She fixed me with another warning look, as if outraged by my behavior.

“What?” I said.

“Stop.”

“Stop what?”

“Just stop. Not today.”

“Not what today?”

She studied me, shaking her head. “I hate that I can never tell
what you're aware that you're doing, and what you're not aware that you're doing.”

“I don't know what you mean by that,” I said.

But I knew what she meant.

 

I
T WASN'T MORE THAN
two or three days after Miranda and I fixed the front door that Catherine stepped into the doorway of my office and said, “You have a visitor.” And then in walked Miranda, in the worn khaki shorts and wrinkled T-shirt she wore around the house in the mornings. Her eyes were red-rimmed and puffy, as if she'd been crying, but she seemed calm as she took a seat across the desk from me. “You're up early,” I said.

Her lips twisted toward what might have been an attempt at a smile, but then she abandoned it. “Something happened,” she said.

“What do you mean?”

“Grant didn't like Ira. He made fun of him. And Ira didn't like Grant, but now he thinks he's great.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Ira just told me he wants me to fly down to Los Angeles with him. He's going there to do some kind of work for Grant. I told him there was no way you would let me go.”

“Not remotely.”

She went on to tell me that Ira had called and told her he was going to make some quick money doing some work for Grant, and might be gone for a few weeks. It was easy money, he said, just making copies and deliveries and buying furniture and supplies for an office, and buying things for an apartment Grant had rented there, too. “Which I don't understand,” Miranda said, “because it
sounds like he's doing something that's kind of a job, but more like just being a gofer. And why wouldn't Grant just have someone who lived there work for him?”

“I'm sure he wanted someone he knew,” I said. “He has to be able to trust the person.”

“But nobody trusts Ira. You said he had negative energy, and Grant made fun of him.”

“And I still think that. But Grant makes his own decisions.”

“Grant didn't talk to you about this? He didn't mention it to you?”

“Grant doesn't ask me how to run his business. And maybe he's doing it as a favor. It sounds like Ira's going to make some money. Are you upset about it?”

“All I was doing was dating someone. It doesn't need to be a big deal.”

“I agree with you.”

She slowly pushed her hair back from her face, a common-enough gesture. This time, though, it seemed an expression of sadness. “You used to take me everywhere,” she said. “You used to answer every question.”

“I still do.”

“No. I think there are things you don't tell me now.”

“And there are things you don't tell me. Should we really be telling each other everything?”

“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.”