You Don't Love This Man (22 page)

“Obviously not,” I said. “You're talking about me, and being tired of being married to me.” “I just think we've become different people over the years. Don't you think we've become different people?” Though I wasn't, at the time, sure what she was working toward, I knew enough to realize I needed to dispute her narrative. “We've gotten older,” I said, “But I think we've grown in ways that are good.” “But are we still in love?” she said, “Do you still love me? Are you still
in
love with me?” “Of course,” I said—though yes, it felt like a lie. Because what, after all, did it mean to be
in love
? That I couldn't bear to be away from her? That I counted the hours until I could see her again, shuddering through paroxysms of anticipatory anxiety? I felt nothing like that, and doubted that any adult actually did. Why would anyone even want to? We were married. Sandra was my wife. I loved her. These were simple facts. They had been well established. I thought. “Do you still love
me
?” I asked. “I'll always love you,” she said, “I'm just not sure that I'm
in
love with you anymore.” “I don't know what that means. What does that mean?” “I don't know how to explain it, but you know what I'm talking about.” Though lost in thought, she held
her hands demurely in her lap, as if at a formal occasion. “It's the difference between a brother and a lover—that's what it is,” she said. “So you're not attracted to me anymore.” “We've been together since we were in our early twenties! How could things not grow stale after sixteen years?” “So you're leaving. Is that what you're saying?” “I'm just trying to tell you what I'm feeling.” “But how am I supposed to take this? You're telling me you're unhappy, and unhappy with me, specifically, and there's nothing I can do about it—because you're just not in love with me anymore.” “I'm trying to sort through some things—things about myself and my life. And I want to be able to talk to you about them.” “And when you were planning on talking to me about this, how did you imagine I would react?” “I don't know. I guess I hoped we would have an honest conversation.” She looked at me as if I were some kind of captor she was imploring for mercy. And I hated that look. I had no intention of being her captor. I was not her captor. “We never seem to talk about anything anymore,” she said, “I feel like it's been years since we've had any kind of heart-to-heart talk at all.” “But how can we have a heart-to-heart talk when you're telling me you're leaving me because you're bored with me? It's like you're saying you're dumping me, but you were hoping it would be a really touching moment between us.” “I'm not saying that!” she said angrily, and then, in a controlled tone: “I haven't said that. But maybe you're right. Maybe this was a bad idea.” “So what are you going to do? Am I on some kind of probation now? You're going to be evaluating me to see if you can stand being a part of this marriage anymore?” “I'm not going to be evaluating you. I'm going to be evaluating myself.” “I see,” I said, “Well, let me know when you've finished your evaluation.” She shook her head in apparent anguish. “My inability to talk to you about this in any kind
of productive way is part of the entire problem.” “But it sounds like in your mind, you hoped you could deliver a monologue to me, and I wouldn't respond. Maybe you even thought I would be moved by it? But the reality of talking, if that's what you feel like you can't do, is that I am allowed to talk back. Which I guess ruins your fantasy.” “Yes,” she said quietly, “I guess it does.” And then she stood and walked out of the room.

And then for the next three months, Sandra did not raise the subject of our marriage even once. The conversation just hung there, coloring every interaction between us. When she'd said she hoped I hadn't been uptight about Ira smoking cigarettes on our porch, for instance, what had she meant? Had I lost points with her, and was I moving ever closer, with my
uptightness
, to being disqualified from being her husband? It seemed clear she was, in some secret part of herself, mulling over whether she could continue to stand to be with me. If she was evaluating me, then, I felt it was only fair to let her see my truest self.

Which was, to be honest, fairly liberating.

And so at our little tennis team party, I felt no compunction to be outgoing and social, and neither did I try to hide the fact that I cared nothing about the adults at the party, and that my attention was directed primarily toward my daughter—because not more than half an hour into the event, I had noticed that her friend Ira had shown up. He and Miranda had walked to where Sandra stood on the opposite side of the yard, but I could see him match Sandra's social effervescence by smiling widely as he greeted her, and I saw Sandra gesture toward the rest of the yard—probably telling Ira to feel free to get some food from the grill I was tending—and then trade a laugh with the two of them before turning back to the guests she had been chatting with before. Miranda and Ira remained
at that end of the yard, though, and I was still trying to monitor them when Grant, who had wandered past more than once, finally stepped behind the grill with me and said, apropos of nothing: “So I want you to go to Los Angeles with me.”

“What are you talking about?” I said.

“We'll go out Wednesday morning and stay the night. I'll have you back home by noon on Thursday.”

I had never been to Los Angeles, and the city's name elicited only vague images: circling klieg lights, starlets in fur stoles, popping flashbulbs, and red carpets. I automatically and without taking my eyes from the other end of the yard told Grant I didn't think I could do something like that on short notice, and he responded by taking the metal spatula from my hand and, through a series of artful manipulations, pushing hot dogs to the edges of the grill, sliding hamburgers toward the middle, and continually prodding or flipping the other items while he told me he knew it was short notice, but that it was a business trip, so everything would be paid for and I would receive an appropriate consulting fee. A big opportunity had come up without warning, he suspected there would be financial discussions slightly beyond his depth, and he didn't have time to interview accountants or financial advisors before the meeting.

“As a branch manager, I don't think I'm allowed to do outside consulting,” I told him.

“But surely you're allowed to go on a trip with a friend,” he said.

The confusion I suffered as he switched between characterizing the offer first as a business trip and then as a personal vacation must have registered on my face, because he began to tell me how he wasn't asking me to become a full-time advisor, he just
needed help from someone he trusted, and he didn't have anyone on call for something like this. “And also,” he said, looking, as I was, across the yard, “why does that boy with Miranda look like someone poisoned his food?”

Ira was sitting on a lawn chair in the shade of a tree a few feet behind Miranda, taking occasional sips from a can of soda and doing nothing to mask the look of boredom on his face. “That's Ira,” I said. “I guess he's Miranda's boyfriend.”

Grant shook his head, aghast. “Why?”

“I'm not allowed to ask. Sandra told me to leave it alone. She said she'll handle it.”

“Well. I'm not a parent, but I don't necessarily believe in women handling men. Even young men.”

Miranda was doing her best to make enthusiastic conversation with Margo Talbot, holder of the team's second women's singles position, and coowner of the interior design firm that employed Sandra. Even at a distance and peering into the shade, I could see Ira on the chair behind them, glowering. “Unfortunately, in our house it's two against one,” I said.

Grant started to say something about the limits of democracy, but stopped when Ira stood and began walking toward us. The boy's gaze ranged everywhere but in the direction he was heading, and an excessive spring in his stride seemed designed to portray a relaxation so coolly extreme that it resembled drunkenness. “Good evening, sir,” he said, shaking my hand when he reached us. “I thought we might see each other again. I hope you don't mind that I'm here. I know you're not crazy about me.”

“I have nothing against you, Ira,” I said.

“It's okay,” he said. “I know you're just looking out for your daughter.”

Grant introduced himself and, as he and Ira shook hands, said, “So did you play on Miranda's team this summer?”

“Oh, I don't play,” Ira said in a tone that seemed to imply that summer tennis was for children. “I work for the city. I manage the park with the tennis complex in it, so I kind of help make sure everything is in good shape so everyone can have a good season.”

Grant raised an eyebrow. “I wasn't aware the city allowed high schoolers to manage parks.”

“I already graduated,” Ira said. “Last year.”

“You're twenty, then?” Grant said. “Miranda's only going to be a sophomore.”

Ira's expression clouded. “But it's normal for men to date younger women. I bet your wife's younger, right?”

“I'm not married,” Grant said. “But the women I go out with are quite a bit older than Miranda, actually.”

“I meant younger than you, not her,” Ira said, frustrated by Grant's deliberate misunderstanding. When I asked if Ira wanted something to eat, he chose a bratwurst, thanked me quietly, and headed back across the yard.

“That wasn't normal,” Grant said. He left the grill himself then, joining a group that included Sandra. The group cheered upon his arrival, and Grant smiled when one of the men punched him playfully on the arm, while across the yard I saw Ira, jaw tight and eyes ablaze, lead Miranda away by the hand. When the two of them disappeared around the side of the house, I passed an anxious five minutes flipping and reflipping sizzling burgers until I saw Miranda return alone. She wandered to her mother's side, and when Sandra, without pausing in her conversation and laughter, put her arm around Miranda and pulled her close, I felt that everything was again where it belonged.

That feeling remained throughout the following two hours, until the last of our guests had departed and I was able to settle into a chair at the table on our back deck and gaze up at the sky. Drifts of cloud bloomed pink in the day's last light, and it seemed to me that the sky behind them was slightly spinning—the sense was something like the gravitational pull one feels while coasting downhill on a bicycle, which rendered even more strange the announcement I thought I heard Grant make: “I have some good news. I've designed a toaster.”

I sat up, and was startled to discover that everyone was there at the table with me. But no one responded. Sandra regarded Grant as if his announcement were some sort of ruse, Miranda's face went blank, and I was dumbfounded. Over the previous years, Grant had occasionally chatted with me about business, but the last thing he'd told me was that he'd been forced to lay off the three young designers just out of college who had comprised his staff, and that he was back to working by himself. Never had he mentioned toasters. But he had entered a design competition sponsored by one of the nation's larger discount retailers, he explained, and his toaster had won, and now was going to be sold in the company's stores all over the country. If it sold well, he said, they might let him design an entire line of kitchen products.

It was then that the flurry began.

“What does it look like?” Miranda said.

“We should have champagne,” Sandra said.

“I thought you were into chairs, desks, and furniture,” I said.

Grant assured me that he was interested in furniture, but that this was an opportunity that had come up. I heard Miranda ask again what it looked like while I wondered aloud if this would solve Grant's staffing problems. There followed rapid and simultaneous
conversations between Grant and Sandra and me regarding which brand of champagne to serve, how this would change things, and how Grant's firm would now be expanding or hiring or adjusting its financial structure and attendant accounts. Miranda had stood and, glass of lemonade in hand, walked out into the backyard grass during our discussion. I probably thought she was taking a little stroll, or getting some air, or probably I didn't think anything particular at all as I idly watched her make her way to the barbecue and look down into it. And then, in one unhesitating motion, she placed the palm of her hand on the grill.

For an incredible second, she said and did nothing. Then she threw her head back like a startled colt and cried out, dropping her glass to the lawn as her face contorted in pain. I jogged across the yard, angrily demanding to know what she had done, and when I arrived at her side, she held her burned hand in the palm of the other as if it were some kind of gift. Four parallel red lines were already blistering across her palm, and she looked at me as if she had been betrayed by some natural phenomenon—stung by a bee, or struck by a falling branch. “I didn't know it was hot. It didn't look hot,” she cried.

Sandra wanted us to go to the emergency room, but Miranda shook her head so forcefully that Sandra relented, and instead filled a bowl with ice and told Miranda to sit at the table. Seated between me and Grant, Miranda didn't seem particularly uncomfortable once she was settled with her hand on the ice, and she even smiled when Grant told her he had ordered medium, not rare. “Grant,” she said as if his name were a perfectly familiar command: “What does the toaster look like?”

He studied her with the same look I had seen him use on the
golf course when trying to estimate his distance to the pin. “Like a block of slightly melted ice cream.”

Miranda nodded, satisfied. Sandra brought out a bottle of champagne and three glasses, and the evening resumed. When the phone rang a bit later, Miranda hopped up and ran into the house to answer it as if there were nothing wrong with her hand at all—and she didn't return to the porch.