by Dan Deweese
“Be careful,” I said. “I’m afraid I have two left feet.”
She glanced at my shoes. “Those feet look fine to me.”
“All right,” I said. “I have to mix right now, but I may come looking for you tomorrow.”
“I’ll make sure I’m easy to find,” she said.
I made sure to shake a few hands and trade a few greetings, but it was only a few minutes later that I made my escape from the bar and headed home.
That next morning, though—as I stood there in my dark kitchen, arms crossed and shoulders hunched while I listened to the coffeepot—I felt like calling Sandra and asking that she acknowledge the correctness of my prediction. I was confident she was awake, and that she would have laughed. But there are times of day that one simply doesn’t call.
WHEN I STEPPED OUTSIDE not much later, coffee in hand, it was to discover that the rain was really no more than a mist that hung ghostlike in the air before me, and only slightly fuzzed the surface of the courtyard lawn. The weather here often does this: it gives every appearance of rain, and then doesn’t quite deliver. In summer especially, early threats made above are often false, and I could see that watery patches of sky to the east were already fading to a thin blue-gray. The ground-level mist disappeared as I walked through it, a diaphanous curtain endlessly parting, and in movement I took stock of myself. A click of cartilage dispensed its hurtful little jolt in my shoulder, a reminder that the ball caught in the socket there on occasion. A dull pain lay behind my right knee, the result of spending an entire day helping Alan move sofas and tables and beds in preparation for the arrival of Sandra’s house-guests. My townhouse had two bedrooms, and I had offered the empty one as potential lodging for visitors, but Sandra hadn’t taken me up on the offer. The visiting guests were from her side of the family—maybe she worried that placing someone with her ex-husband would be considered a slight. A pair of joggers, a man and a woman, announced they would be on my left, and then they were, two sets of nylon shorts whisking past as I continued my inventory. Eyesight? I trained my gaze on the lady jogger’s round bottom, rejected that as an unscientific test, and squinted instead at the nearest street sign, pleased to find I could read it, though my already knowing the answer certainly helped. And hearing? The breeze in the firs, tisk of a sprinkler, hum of distant traffic, throb of my pulse in my ears: everything was there, present and accounted for. I was not old. I told myself.
The joggers continued down the street and into the mist while I kept my own pace, covering the route I took most mornings, a neighborhood walk that provided a good half hour in which my thoughts were my own. Satisfied I was in working order physically, I gave myself the mental challenge of recalling that speech. I’d believed I would be able to say something true and moving in two minutes, without preparation. Had I managed this? I knew I had started by dramatically clearing my throat, because immediately upon doing so I chastised myself for already having lapsed into cliché. I clasped my hands before me in order to quell their trembling, then decided I looked odd holding them that way, and shoved one hand into my pocket. The other found its way to my stomach, and I gave up the struggle there—if the pose was good enough for Napoleon, I thought, it was good enough for me. Throughout my search for a natural posture, though, I had been speaking. But about what? Nothing came back. It was a toast—had I raised my glass? Did people drink? I hadn’t the slightest, and neither could I estimate how long I’d spoken. I just remembered Miranda, seated next to me, giving me a kiss on the cheek when I sat down. “It’s okay,” she had whispered to me. “Everything is fine.” I didn’t know what she meant, though. Had I apologized for speaking too long, or for the arc of my entire life? Drunk on the moment, the moment had escaped me.
A calico cat eyed me with suspicion from the edge of a shrub before it turned and disappeared within. A young man pressing a bundle of newspapers to his chest ran past and commenced firing the papers toward doorways. A seagull floated in for a wide-winged landing on the sidewalk not thirty feet ahead of me. There was something clumsy and ad hoc about its landing, but it had succeeded, and when it extended and refolded its brown and white wings I was surprised to note, even from a distance, the flick of a thin red tongue. The lizards are their cousins, I guess. The gull monitored my approach in the sidelong way birds have of turning parallel to their object of examination. A few desultory hops carried it into the street, but one wide blue eye remained trained on me. It opened its beak silently, again displaying that tongue, and then snapped it shut. Had the gesture been directed at me, or was it just the avian mechanism adjusting itself? I continued past the bird and onward, and when I looked back, it was to see the inscrutable creature twitch its head in another direction and hop off, pecking the asphalt every few steps—as if it expected to find something.
The morning walk was a new habit for me, adopted from the last woman I had dated, with whom I’d broken up six months earlier. Trish, a Realtor who had just moved into the city from the suburbs, began every morning—or every morning she awoke with me, at least—with a brisk walk through the neighborhood in one of her clean, pressed, nylon sweat suits. She owned these sweat suits, which she called “warm-ups,” in a number of colors: baby blue with white piping, wine red with yellow stripes, and a neon green with electric blue trim were three of her more consistent choices. I’ve never particularly been one for athletic wear, and walked with her in my usual weekend-morning outfit of jeans and a jacket. That relationship had been over for a while, but I’d kept her ritual of the morning walk. I liked it.
IT WAS AT THE breakfast table in Sandra’s house later that morning that I received the call. It was just after nine o’clock, and I had been listening to her brother, Bradshaw, read aloud from a sports Web site he was looking at on his laptop. He’d been noting various teams’ victories and losses, pulling up detailed information on recent draft picks and trades, and estimating likelihoods of future success. I did my best to nod at appropriate intervals. I was supposed to be at Sandra’s disposal that morning to run errands, pick up guests from the airport, or take care of any other pressing tasks, but I had been there almost half an hour and she had yet to come down from her room. Bradshaw’s own wife and two teenage daughters were also upstairs, and though we heard occasional disputes among them over space in the bathroom, not one of them had shown her face yet, either. So I was trapped, drinking another cup of coffee while I watched Bradshaw take his own breakfast in what struck me as the ensemble of a teenager: oversized red nylon athletic shorts and a white T-shirt memorializing a “slo-pitch” softball tournament. Between installments of sports gossip, I asked him why the w had been deleted from slo, and Bradshaw pressed his chin to his chest to examine the usage. “It’s a different word,” he said.
“The pitching is slow,” I said. “So why do they spell it that way?”
“The word is slo-pitch,” he said. “It’s a different word.” He took an overlarge, tearing bite of his toasted bagel, the butter and cream cheese of which had gathered into points of glistening white at the corners of his mouth. Miranda once told me, rather gleefully, that Bradshaw had said he was surprised Sandra had ever married me in the first place, since I was such “a finicky guy.” I don’t think Bradshaw always understands the words he uses. And I was pleased when my cell phone produced its little trill and I was able to consider something other than his T-shirt.
“We were just robbed,” my coworker Catherine said when I answered. “Everyone’s fine, it’s under control, but I thought you would want to know. It was silent, no weapon. Just a guy who pushed a misspelled note across the counter to Amber. The rest of us didn’t even notice until it was over.” She used the same disdainful tone she had when she had called me at home one Saturday morning to report that a stray, floppy-eared terrier was in the bank, had evaded capture for over twenty minutes, and was hiding behind the change machine in the back corner. I had driven to the bank, rattled the machine, and stamped my foot, but it was only after I told the staff to re
turn to business as usual that the creature had emerged from his hiding place and loped out of the branch with a sad look in its eyes, as if disappointed we’d given up the game.
“I’ll be there in a few minutes,” I told her.
“You don’t need to,” she said.
I watched Bradshaw continue to work at the bagel—his movements were tense, relentless. “I have nothing else to do right now.”
“I know that’s not true. Oh, here they are, we’re all saved now.”
“Who?”
“The police. They just pulled up.”
“What was misspelled?”
“It was a robbery,” she said. “One b. I’ll talk to you later.”
I folded the phone in time to watch Bradshaw stuff the remainder of the bagel into his mouth and commence strenuous bovine chewing. He swallowed dramatically, and then again, and then a third time, tipping his head back to better reveal the contortions of his trachea as it convulsed beneath the slack skin and gray stubble of his neck. “There’s a problem?” he said finally, feigning concern.
“Yes. Do you think Sandra will be down soon?”
He shrugged. “You can go up there.”
Upstairs, someone was running the sink in the bathroom, a hair dryer roared from the master bedroom, and I sensed the press of footsteps within one of the smaller bedrooms. Miranda was staying in her old room here for the weekend, which meant there were, theoretically, at least five women trying to share the single upstairs bathroom. To my relief, though, all I was currently faced with was an empty hallway with four closed doors, so I knocked quickly on the door to the master bedroom and called Sandra’s name. The hair dryer ceased, there was some shifting and rustling as she told me to come in, and then the hair dryer resumed. I found her seated at her dressing table bundled in a white terry-cloth robe, her head inclined toward the hand in which she held and waved the dryer while with her other hand she tugged at her long, blond hair. She has always kept her hair long, and in concert with her quick, dark eyes, her looks have held a slightly intimidating power over me. I waited for her to shift her gaze to mine before I told her, over the hair dryer’s howling, that the bank had been robbed. She immediately killed the dryer, creating a portentous silence. “Your bank?” she said. “Was anyone hurt?”
“I don’t think so.”
“Can you get out of going?”
“No.”
She restarted the hair dryer, waved it through her hair a few times, and turned it off again. “It’s your daughter’s wedding day.”
“It will only take an hour. I’ll talk to the police, fill out the forms, hand tissues to the tellers. And you don’t need me this morning, anyway. There’s nothing left to do.”
She arched an eyebrow, just as she had the previous evening. “There’s nothing left to do?”
“You’re all going to the hotel. Why are you doing your hair when it’s supposed to get done at the hotel?”
The hair dryer erupted, undead, and I made it out of the room and to the top of the stairs before the machine was strangled silent again.
“Have you heard from Miranda?” she called.
“No,” I said toward her doorway. “Should I have?”
“Could you come here, please? And close the door.”
Warily, I returned to the bedroom, and pressed the door until the latch clicked in place.
“Her bed hasn’t been slept in,” she said. “And I didn’t hear her come in, so I don’t think she came home last night.” She continued ministering to her hair in the mirror, as if we were doing no more than chatting in a salon.
“Maybe she slept at her apartment,” I said.
“Two of the bridesmaids are staying there. I called, and they said she’s not there.”
“She’s with Grant.”
“No. He doesn’t know where she is, either.”
I heard voices and laughter behind me in the hall—Bradshaw’s wife and daughters. They had never particularly cared for me, and I waited for them to finish galloping down the stairs before I said, “Do you want me to look for her?”
Sandra turned on her little bench to examine me directly. When she was younger she had used this expression to convey anger, but the crow’s feet and smile lines that now filigreed her features transformed the look into one of attractively wry disdain. Before she answered, though, something shifted—it was a relaxation of her eyebrows, perhaps, or a slight dilation of her pupils—and she asked, in her amused-by-me tone, “But where would you look for her?”
“I don’t know,” I said.
“You should go to the bank.”
“I could keep trying her cell, or call the gallery. I could call the other bridesmaids. How many bridesmaids does she have again?”
“Nope. I’ll do that. Go to the bank.”
“Did she say anything to you last night? After I left?”
“I’m sure she’s fine,” she said. “Take care of what you have to take care of.” She restarted the hair dryer, and I remained in place long enough for her continued silence to confirm that the discussion was truly closed.
It was. So I went to the bank.
I SUPPOSE THE PUBLIC’S romantic attachment to bank robbers—from Butch Cassidy and John Dillinger to Patty Hearst and local “gentlemen” bandits all across the country—stems from the belief that bank robbery is a noble act of defiance in the face of a corrupt social system. The persona of the bank robber isn’t burdened with the repulsive deviance of the pedophile, the depraved insanity of the serial killer, or the arrested adolescence of the domestic abuser. Robbers of property seem empty-headedly compulsive—they steal the same make and model of car over and over, or snatch purses in the same way, or cut bicycle locks again and again. White-collar crime possesses the veneer of intelligence, but depends on deceits like counterfeit accounting or the cowardly resort to tax shelters, and often pays in stock options, debt financing, or other rewards too financially abstract to fire the imagination. What attracts the public to bank robbers is that bank robbers just want cash, and now. And so, the theory goes, we understand their motives.
This has not been my experience. And that experience began before I ever owned a suit, a car, a big-screen television, or any of the other trappings of my middle-class life. It began when the young woman with whom I had achieved the greatest pleasure of my life appeared one day at my teller window on the arm of another man.
It has always struck me as odd that I noticed Grant that day before I noticed Gina. It may have been a question of geometry: he walked slightly in front of her, perhaps, or I was stationed to the side. I remember the bank lobby suffused in the narcoleptic lemony haze of a summer afternoon as a Muzak version of an old standard played over the lobby speakers. A lilting flute carried the melody, and as I wondered at the choice of instrument, a young man stepped into the bank. On the street, the eyes of a stranger will occasionally fix on me and light up until, after a closer look, the person either averts his eyes as we pass, or else smiles and admits with a laugh that he’s sorry, he thought I was someone else. The young man in the bank approached me with that same sense of familiarity: he executed a modest little duck of his head as he handed me his deposit, but his conspiratorial smile and bright eyes were those of someone who knew me well. He had the high cheekbones and clear complexion of a television actor, and his hair was trimmed short and neat, despite those having been the ragged Carter Administration years, when men visited their barbers less often. It was his suit, however, that struck me with the greatest force. I had never seen someone my own age wear a suit other than to a graduation, funeral, or wedding, but this young man wore his tan slacks and jacket over a white, open-necked dress shirt with the ease of someone who wore a suit every day. The terms class and classy were so poorly differentiated in my mind in those days as to be entirely conflated, so although I had previously thought I was quite professional and well turned out in my powder blue dress shirt and tie, after seeing that suit, I felt my shirts and ties were no more remark
able than the uniforms worn by employees of fast-food restaurants.
I had already set the growling dot matrix printer to producing his receipt by the time I noticed that the woman standing next to him was Gina. Her straight brown hair fell to the small of her back, and she wore a simple black skirt and royal blue blouse that revealed her figure without appearing immodest. It had been two years since I’d seen her, and her brown eyes, heavy-lidded and wide set, possessed a harder intelligence than I remembered, while her body seemed softer and more relaxed. The transformation in her—the way she carried herself and studied the room, and her smile when finally we made eye contact—was the beginning of my realization that women in their college years are coltish and ungainly to any man possessed of decent aesthetics. “This is Paul. He and I went to college together,” she told the young man with her. Of him, she simply said, “And this is Grant.” Though she left the exact nature of her relationship with each of us unspoken, it seemed clear enough, so I was surprised when Grant cheerfully said, “We should get a drink together sometime.”
I said that would be nice, but before I could look to Gina for a hint as to how to proceed, he had turned her way as well, annihilating any chance of a private glance. “Where should we go?” he said, “Bristol’s?”
She chewed her lip in feigned thoughtfulness. “That sounds good.”
“Do you know it?” he asked me. “Bristol’s, by the river?”
I said of course I knew it, by which I meant I knew that Bristol’s was the bar where the city’s local heroes and any real celebrities passing through town spent their evenings drinking scotch in leather armchairs. The last I’d heard, two Hollywood actors filming on location along the city’s picturesque river for a few weeks had made it a habit to end their evenings in Bristol’s. One of them, if the newspaper’s gossip columnist was to be believed, had even gotten into some trouble over a woman there.