You Don't Love This Man (7 page)

“No, he's here,” Catherine said into her phone, gazing impassively at me. “Absolutely, as soon as I can. You don't have to worry about that at all, Sandra. I'll talk to you soon.” She closed her phone and set it on her desk.

Occasionally one stumbles upon a conspiracy of hidden forces that, working in concert, have concealed some essential fact of life. Deducing the world-market-level fraud regarding Santa Claus is an early instance, but one must also stumble upon the truth about sex, or discover that adults lie, you can't actually be whatever you want, crime pays, a tacitly condoned and perpetuated class system rules the population, love is a delusion far more often than a fact,
capitalism is not the only way, death comes for everyone, recreational drug use is almost always harmless, and so on. I had felt no further revelations awaited me in life, but upon hearing Catherine say good-bye to Sandra, yet another seemingly solid boundary had disappeared: in addition to pro wrestling being rigged and innocent people being convicted, I now had to add that Catherine could use her cell phone to call my ex-wife. Sandra had most likely been speaking on
her
cell phone, too. They had each other's numbers. They carried them around in their little phones.

“I didn't know you and Sandra were friends,” I said. “Much less that the two of you would be chatting today.”

“Do you think I've spent the last ten years with my eyes and ears closed? That I've never written a number down and kept it in case of a situation exactly like this?” she said.

“Is it normal for you to call Sandra and discuss our family's personal crises with her? Do the two of you talk regularly?”

Absorbed in some occult activity involving rapid typing on her keyboard, Catherine shook her head impatiently, as if hurrying me through an argument whose opening moves were obvious. “Of course not,” she said. “But I've answered occasional calls from Sandra for ten years, so I'd like to help her. And I can't help unless I ask what kind of help is needed.”

“But you already asked me that. Was my answer not sufficient?”

“It's best to have as much information as possible.”

“Best for whom?” I said.

In the instant in which I turned to walk away, Catherine actually glared at me. I turned back after a few steps, but her eyes were on her computer monitor by then, and she didn't bother to raise them. She leaned toward the screen as if increased intensity
of focus might make the machine work faster, but I could see the color had risen in her cheeks. It was yet another benefit to seeing her without her makeup that day: her pulse was revealed immediately. My question had gotten its intended effect. “Please do not call Sandra any more today,” I said.

“What do you mean?” she said.

“It undermines my authority. It means you don't respect my decision making.”

She laughed, but that was fine, since it at least got her to lift her eyes from the computer. “It doesn't mean anything like that at all,” she said.

“When you're printing out branch sales reports,” I said, “do I call Tony Sacco and ask him what order he thinks we should do them in?”

“No.”

“Let's say you were getting ready to do the reports, and I called Tony and chatted with him about how they do them over at his branch, and then I walked over to you and told you that I had just called your old boss and he said they do the reports in such and such an order. How would you feel?”

“What would it matter what Tony thinks? I haven't worked in his branch for years. He knows less about branch reports than I do, anyway.”

“Right. So when I hear you calling my ex-wife, it's weird. Because what does it matter what she thinks?”

“No, that doesn't work,” she said. “Because I know more about branch reports than Tony, but Sandra knows just as much about Miranda as you do. She probably knows
more
about Miranda than you do.”

I tried to gauge the degree to which the anger Catherine was
raising in me was intentional. She maintained an eyebrows-raised expression of innocence.

“Do you have kids, Catherine?” I asked. I knew perfectly well she didn't.

“No, Paul,” she said. “I do not.”

“Then listen. Never tell one parent that it's the other parent who truly knows their child.”

“I didn't mean it the way you're making it sound.”

“What I'm trying to tell you is that I am going to find my daughter, and I will be in charge of doing that. Not you. Not Sandra.”

“And if I don't help you, you won't sign my transfer form,” she said. Her tone was one of exhaustion. Did she believe I had invented the situation I was in solely to frustrate her attempts to complete paperwork?

“That's not true,” I said. “The thing is two pages of small type and blank spaces that I don't have time to sit down and study right now is all. I promise you, Catherine, that when I have a moment at some point later today, I will take out your form and carefully fill it out and sign it. And then you will not have to work here anymore.”

“It just means I'm allowed to apply for open positions,” she said quietly. “It doesn't mean I'll get one.”

“We both know you'll get one. Notice how I am having confidence in and supporting you, while you are busy questioning and doubting me.”

“You are blowing this out of proportion on purpose,” she said. “And I think you know that.”

During the first few years Catherine worked for me, I sometimes worried whether she found me likable. Eventually, however,
that concern faded—but not due to any evidence. It just seemed unlikely she would have continued working with me over the years if I were truly intolerable.

 

O
N THE AFTERNOON
I was to be discharged from the hospital, an older gentleman stepped into my room and asked Sandra if he could have what he called “another bit of time” with me. Shrugging, she said she would go out to get a sandwich. When she stepped out the door, I heard the man tell me his name was “Detective Buckle,” and that we had spoken before. Sandra had told me a detective visited the day of the robbery, but I had no memory of it, and in my narcotic punchiness that afternoon a few days later, I heard myself tell the detective he had a funny name.

“I do?” he said.

“An interesting one, I mean.”

“I suppose,” he said, offering me his rough right hand while with his left he removed his badge from his shirt pocket, showed it to me, replaced it, and then from the same pocket extracted a loose cigarette. My eyes must have widened at the sight of the cigarette, because he laughed. “Don't worry,” he said. “I won't smoke in the hospital. It's just the holding it that calms me.”

He possessed a tremendous shock of white hair that stood straight out from his head, and the heavy fabrics he wore further enhanced his dramatic appearance: buttoned nearly to his chin, his flannel shirt was a shade of green so deep as to be almost black, and his dun-colored corduroy pants were fuzzed with age—a broken belt loop rose from one hip like an unruly cowlick. The clothes appeared to be a size too large, and this, in combination with the fact that he couldn't have stood more than five and a half
feet tall, lent him a shrunken quality, as if life had at some point drowned and then roasted him, and though he had survived, it was in this reduced state. He stood near the bed at a point almost even with my head, and I had to crane my neck to look up at him when he asked how long I'd been working at the bank, what the routines were, who I'd been working with the day of the robbery—standard stuff—until he frowned down into his little notebook as if he'd just discovered an obscenity scrawled there in someone else's hand. “You mentioned the other day that just before the robbery you'd seen an old girlfriend for the first time in a couple years,” he said. “I was wondering if you could tell me a bit more about that.”

“About my girlfriend?”

“You said she was your
former
girlfriend.”

“Sure,” I said. “But why do you want to know about her? She's not the one who robbed me.”

The detective had maintained a sophisticated though apparently unconscious bit of theatrical business while we talked, putting his cigarette through the standard paces—from fingers to lips and back, propped on the tabletop, and so forth—without ever actually lighting the thing. Now he held it thoughtfully against his temple while fixing me for some seconds with the impassive gaze a headmaster assumes when assessing the prospects of a student.

“If you want, I can get up, and we can walk outside to where you can smoke,” I said.

“It's your comfort that's important, not mine,” he said. “Memory works best when you're relaxed. A man sifts things over when he's in a porch swing, not when he's on the rack.”

Skillfully crafted aphorisms have always appealed to me. “What do you want me to sift over?” I said.

“You're the victim of a crime, and what we've discovered is that
things go better if we recognize you're a victim, and let you talk about what's happened to you—not just the crime, but the effects of the crime. Not just the criminal, as they say, but the personal.”

“I'm just not sure what you mean by the personal.”

He flipped through some pages in his notebook, and then read aloud in a rapid and strangely toneless voice: “
Jesus she was amazing in bed, I had no idea what that could be like, I was practically a virgin, I've never told anyone this, not even her, so please don't tell her if you talk to her, but Jesus, that kind of stuff—
”

“Stop!” I said. “Did I tell you that? Was Sandra here when I said that?”

“The girl who just left?”

“Yes.”

“No.”

“Good,” I said. “And I was obviously saying crazy stuff. They've got me on drugs here. You shouldn't have talked to me when I was out of my head like that. And I don't see what this has to do with the robbery.”

“But that's exactly what I'm wondering,” he said. “I don't know you, and I don't know this girlfriend of yours whose name has already slipped my mind.” He flipped through the notebook again.

“Gina,” I said.

“I've written Sandra,” he said.

“Yes, Sandra is my girlfriend,” I said with mounting frustration. “But she wasn't there at all.”

“Right, it was this Gina girl and the other fellow, what's-his-name.” He flipped more pages. “Here. Grant.
The cool customer
.”

“The cool customer? Did I say that? Wait, it doesn't matter if I said it or not. I was obviously drunk on painkillers.”

“Grant and Gina,” he said. “They're in the bank, you're in
the bank, this Mooncalf fellow's in the bank—that's a lot of paths crossing.”

“Well, we're open to the public,” I said. “But only one person robbed the place.”

“Calm down,” he said, raising his hands in a gesture of self-defense that was preposterous, since I remained fully supine on the bed. “I'm not accusing anyone of anything. I know things are probably difficult for you right now, and it can't be easy having lost your parents at such a young age.”

“What do you mean?” I said.

“Your parents. You said the other day that they've passed on.”

“They haven't passed on,” I said, exasperated by inaccuracies that, since the detective was relating them, seemed his own.

“You told me to look at all the cards on the flowers and tell you who was missing,” he said. “You said it was family, because you didn't have any.”

“I'm sorry,” I said. “We're just not close. If I told you they passed on, I don't know why.”

“So they're living?”

“As far as I know.”

“Surely you would know if one of your parents had died.”

If I hadn't been medicated, or maybe if I had just been older than twenty-three and not so quickly cowed by authority, I might have corrected him. My mother was in Florida, and yes, I spoke to her on the phone once every couple months. She had raised me in New Mexico, though, and the man she married when I was in high school—I never called him my stepfather—would certainly have called me if something happened to her. My father, on the other hand, had moved to Minnesota when I was in middle school. A self-taught cook who called himself a chef, he had never been
married to or lived with my mother, and when a friend of his convinced him they were going to get rich taking over a failing restaurant in St. Paul, he went for it. The restaurant failed anyway, but he then picked up a job cooking somewhere in Wisconsin. After that he moved every year or two, usually after the restaurant in which he was working shut its doors. Never back to New Mexico, though. I saw him once a year, when he would come to town for a few days to see how much I'd grown, and to assure me that his was not the life he had planned, but the breaks had been bad. It had been almost a year since I had last spoken to him, and if he were to die, whether anyone presiding over the details of his death would know how to contact me—or would even know of my existence—was far from certain. But I was medicated and tired, and that all seemed too much to try and communicate. So what I ended up saying was “We're not completely out of touch. But they're thousands of years from here.”

The detective tapped his pad thoughtfully. “I don't know what that means,” he said.

“My mother is in Florida and my dad is somewhere else. I'm not sure.”

“But you said they were thousands of
years
away. So you were being poetic?”

“No,” I said. “I meant miles. I'm on medication and it's mixing up my words.” I collected myself, and made sure to slowly and correctly say: “I'm just not in
regular contact
with them.”

“Hmm. Estranged, then,” the detective said, making a notation in his pad with all the care and attention of someone filling in a crossword puzzle. Did he really write
estranged
? I have, over the years, sometimes wondered if he actually wrote anything at all.