You Don't Love This Man (8 page)

From beyond the room's closed door came the muffled, mellow
warning tones of the public address system followed by a woman's voice calmly announcing,
Dr. Murphy, code orange. Dr. Murphy, code orange
. I straightened my sheet and blanket, wondering if orange meant someone was dying. Buckle stood in front of the window, tapping his cigarette against his lips. Then, as if he'd settled on something, he jotted another note in his pad.

“Did you need to know anything about the robbery itself?” I said.

“No,” he said. “You told me all of that the other day. You were generous and expansive. I think I have everything I need.” He flipped his notepad closed then, and thanked me for my time and effort as he headed toward the door.

“The things I've told you are confidential, right?” I said.

He smiled, though whether out of benevolence or amusement, I couldn't tell. “Of course,” he said. “Everything is strictly confidential. It's the only way.”

He disappeared into the hall then, leaving me alone, and surrounded by my flowers. There were so many in that small room that I couldn't help but feel like the star attraction at a funeral.

 

I
HAD SETTLED INTO
one of the chairs in the customer waiting area and was pretending to read one of our procedures manuals—and pretending not to be growing more and more desperate and angry about being stuck there—when Catherine, at her desk, announced, “I have the photos.”

Officers Martinez and O'Brien had been waiting, and were already standing behind her and trading enthusiastic comments about whatever image they were looking at as I crossed the lobby. I noticed Catherine open her cell phone and look thoughtfully at it,
as if something interesting were happening there, too. She closed it and set it on her desk, though, as I stepped around and joined the officers in looking over her shoulder.

The camera had been to his right, and offered a semiprofile from mid-chest up. His gaze was directed down, probably at the cash he was putting in his bag, though in the absence of any visual context he appeared pensive and downcast, as if focused not on what was before him, but on some other, inward consideration. What I thought, though, was: How many people receive calls or messages from Catherine? When Catherine had called Sandra earlier, Sandra had obviously looked at her phone, saw the call was from Catherine, and decided to answer it.

“Look familiar?” Martinez said.

With a start, I realized that Catherine, Martinez, and O'Brien were all looking at me. “Oh,” I said. “No, I don't think so.”

“I'll pull up another one,” Catherine said.

I looked at her cell phone, sitting there on her desk. “Can I borrow your phone for a minute, Catherine?” I said. “I need to make a call about the wedding.”

“Sure.”

I flipped the phone open, dialed, and listened to the little purr of the ringing line.

“He doesn't look like your usual bank robber,” O'Brien said.

Catherine had pulled up a different photo now: the man was gazing straight ahead, probably at Amber. He had every appearance of a patient and somewhat bored customer going through a standard transaction. I gazed at the face on the screen while on the phone I heard a faint rustling, and then heard my daughter say, “Hello? Catherine?”

“No,” I said. “I'm borrowing her phone, though.”

There was a pulsing silence on the line—a faint, shifting hiss, like the closing of a sealed door. And as the hiss gave way to a clean silence, it was only because I was on the phone that I managed to resist saying something in surprise when I realized I recognized the eyes of the man on the screen.

“Why are you using Catherine's phone?” Miranda said.

I turned from the desk and walked away from the others. “Because it was sitting here. Where are you?”

There was another bout of static on the line as I looked back at Catherine's screen and studied the downcast eyes in the photo there. They were older now, and seemed more sad than angry.
Son of a bitch
, I thought.
Mooncalf
.

“You tricked me,” Miranda said.

“Are you all right?”

“Oh,” she said, drawing the sound into two syllables. “I suppose.”

I was all the way across the branch by that point, but continued to speak quietly. “Could we meet somewhere?” I asked quietly, moving further across the branch. “To talk?”

I heard her breathe once, and then a second time. “I guess.”

“Where?”

“I need to eat,” she said. “And I left some things at the rehearsal dinner last night, so I need to go by the restaurant. Can we meet there? They open at eleven.”

“Okay. I'll see you there at eleven.”

“Wait,” she said. “You're not going to bring anybody, are you?”

“I'll be alone,” I said. “And no guns.”

“What?” she said.

“It's a joke.”

“Oh. Because of the not bringing anybody.”

“Yes.”

“That's good, Dad,” she said. “I'll see you there.” She hung up.

When I returned to Catherine's desk and set her phone down, Martinez looked at me. “Everything okay?” he asked.

“Sure,” I said.

He nodded toward Catherine's screen. “Any recognition here? Friend of yours?”

It was in that moment, while I pretended to study the image, that I made an instinctive decision—more of a reflex, really—that would end up affecting the rest of the day. “Nope,” I said. “I don't recognize him. Catherine?”

“Me neither,” she said.

Martinez shrugged. “Well, we should be able to run these through our database pretty easily,” he said. “He's done us a big favor here. The guy takes a good photo.”

“We should frame it,” I said.

And everyone laughed—which caught me by surprise, really. I hadn't been aware I was making a joke.

 

I
T WAS ONLY A
week after my release from the hospital that Grant, Gina, Sandra, and I made good on our plans to go out together. I recall preparing for the evening primarily by studying the skin of my face with closer scrutiny than I ever had before, as if perhaps success, class, and their attendant trappings were nothing more than a question of dermatology. I also checked the back of my head to make sure my hair was properly combed over the shaved spot where the doctors had stitched my wound closed. It wasn't as hard to cover the stitches as I had worried it would be—a single tug of the comb took care of it.

Sandra had purchased a new fuchsia flower-print dress specifically for that evening, and encouraged by her example, I had gone to a department store and bought a new blazer. By the time we approached the entrance to Bristol's, then, we had done everything we could to look the part of a sophisticated couple, and all that was left was to carry out our roles. I played my part by feigning boredom as the doorman looked over my identification, while Sandra chose to flutter her eyelids in a way I found unsettling. She also wore a sparkling necklace and earrings I hadn't seen before. She certainly never wore anything like that when she came into the bank to make weekly deposits for her parents' business, and neither had she on any of the dates we'd been on since I'd finally gotten up the courage to ask her out. I was pleased to see the gold buttons on my navy blue blazer shining in the muted light of the Bristol's entryway as we stepped into the club and, seeing neither Grant nor Gina, settled at the black marble bar that ran the length of one side of the room. The rest of the place was filled with small tables and leather furniture arrangements, the latter mostly the more decadent black leather in vogue at the time. The coffee and end tables were glass, their beveled edges a watery green, and it seemed patrons were encouraged to experience the place as a publicly situated living room. The bartender was tall, polite, and delivered our cocktails immediately, acknowledging my payment with a subtle nod. It was still early in the evening, but I noticed occasional wisps of smoke escaping the doorway of a closed back room, in and out of which flowed a steady traffic of husky middle-aged men in wool sweaters, pleated slacks, and tasseled loafers. Most of them exuded a boyish enthusiasm, and some approached the room already brandishing the cigars they would enjoy behind the door. When I wondered aloud if the cigar room was open to the public,
Sandra said I wouldn't fit in even if it was, because I was too young and thin. We were discussing how much weight I would need to gain to get into the room when I felt a hand on my shoulder, and turned to see Grant smiling at me.

“So you've survived,” he said, leaning back to examine me. “And no worse for the wear.” He wore a charcoal suit over a royal blue shirt open at the neck, and seemed perfectly relaxed and pleased as he shook my hand. Gina stood next to him, her smile somewhat less natural, though the simplicity of her khaki slacks and loose, long-sleeved white blouse, in concert with her long hair and deep brown eyes, was striking—she seemed equally prepared to sit for high tea or plunge into the bush with a rifle over her shoulder.

“I have a lingering hangover,” I said. “But yes, I think I'll be all right.”

“You've promised me a scotch,” he said.

“I hear I promised a number of things,” I said, my face growing warm.

“You were funny,” Gina said. “And now I can only hope we run into someone famous.”

They shared a laugh at my expense, and I joined them. I began to introduce Sandra, but was quickly reminded that introductions had been taken care of in the hospital, over my unconscious body. The bartender greeted Grant by name, they shared a few private words, and the man departed through a door behind the bar as Grant suggested we settle around one of the large coffee tables that had a love seat behind it and armchairs at either end. Grant said that as the guest of honor, I should take a chair at what he called the head of the table. Sandra sat at the end of the love seat closest to me, Grant sat next to her, and Gina took the armchair at the
other end of the coffee table—in the geometry of tennis, Gina and I would have been playing singles while Grant and Sandra looked on. A waitress arrived with glasses and a bottle of wine that she opened expertly. She poured a luminous red swirl into Grant's glass, and I noted the simple way he inhaled and sipped without dramatizing the process, a skill I had yet to master. Every time a cork was placed before me back then, I felt as if a spotlight had swung in my direction, and I couldn't help but start communicating with wild shifts of my eyebrows. Grant nodded, the waitress filled our glasses, and Sandra and I now had two drinks in front of us, since we still had the ones we'd ordered at the bar. I could sense Sandra's discomfort, and watched as she instantly downed the remains of her cocktail and pushed the glass to the other side of the table. We chatted about the wine, which turned out to be something Grant and Gina had discovered on a trip they'd taken to “the wine country,” which I took at first to mean France, though I realized my error soon enough. From the details they related of their trip, I was able to conclude they had been together maybe six months. It was hardly a long amount of time, but still made them seem a more established couple than Sandra and me. And though we were all getting along well—Grant's narration of their Northern California adventures was interrupted by frequent laughter and joking asides from the ladies—at a certain point I found myself struggling to follow the thread of the story, because even though she was at the other end of the table from me and the room was crowded, I had detected the scent of Gina's perfume. Not only was the return of my sense of smell, absent since Mooncalf had hit me, something of a momentary miracle, but the fragrance Gina wore that night was the same she had used when she and I had dated a few years before. The aroma instantly called up a whole array of
sense memories, and I could picture her as she smiled up at me or down on me or back at me, could see the way she closed her eyes and tilted her head, the way her hair fell, the tones in which she whispered or moaned, the rhythm we fell into as we pressed against one another—

It was when my thoughts had reached that level of melodramatic ridiculousness that I looked down and realized that I, too, had finished my cocktail, as well as my first glass of wine. To avoid reactions with alcohol, I had intended not to take my pain medication before going out that evening. There in the bar, though, I couldn't recall whether I'd actually remembered to skip my pill, and the confusion caused by the convolution of failing to remember whether I'd remembered not to do something must have been evident on my face, because Grant looked at me with concern and asked if I was okay. When Gina and Sandra turned to look at me, too, I felt as if I'd been thrust suddenly on stage without any lines. But this, perhaps, is where I began to consider Grant a friend: he seemed to sense not only that I could use assistance, but exactly the kind of assistance I needed. “I know maybe it's not something you want to discuss, but I can't resist,” he said. “I'd love to hear the story of the robbery.”

If there was a single story I knew and was confident in, it was the story of the robbery. I felt as if Grant were setting me up—as if he and I had planned for him to warm up the audience so I could then move in to take center stage. And I did. I began the tale in its epic form, with unabridged internal monologues, background information on bank procedures, and detailed character descriptions including names and titles. Toward the beginning of the story I asked the waitress for another bottle of the wine Grant had chosen, and though it was delivered expediently and poured for all, it did
nothing to ease my consciousness of Gina's perfume, of her eyes upon me, her smiles at my attempted jokes, everyone's laughter, Grant's enthusiastic responses to each part of the story, the men entering and leaving the cigar room, and the smell of cigar smoke insinuating itself among the aromas of leather and liquor that filled the main room. Grant provided thoughtful prompts where suitable, such as
You've got to be kidding!
or
So what were you thinking at that point?
, and the question of whether I'd skipped my medication began to fade from my mind as, like an actor who has hit his mark and now begins to ease into the rhythms of his climactic monologue, everything outside of my performance began to fall away. The perfume and wine and attention and energy in the room made me expansive as I moved confidently toward the story's climax. Here were Mooncalf's sinister narrowed eyes, the rasping growl of his voice, and my canny refusal to acknowledge his command. Here was the highly polished gun glinting in the light as he raised it overhead. I looked fearlessly into his animal eyes as he delivered the blow, which I took like a man. I staggered and struggled, I stumbled and fell, and by the time I finished the story and fielded questions regarding the ongoing denouements at the bank and with the police, I had indeed ordered scotch for Grant and myself. The ladies excused themselves to visit the powder room, Grant and I sipped our scotch, and for the first time since I'd started my story, I looked around. Bristol's was packed. Every table, chair, and sofa was occupied, the bar was full, and people stood in the gaps, leaning against walls or the backs of chairs or each other. There was a small jazz band playing with great animation in the back corner. They had spent the majority of the evening covering the Earth, Wind & Fire catalog, and the saxophone player in particular seemed to feel every burst of his instrument. The husky men continued to come
and go from the back room, and each opening and closing of the door acted as a kind of bellows that pushed enough cigar smoke into the main room to lend the air the tobacco note I associated with good living.