by Dan Deweese
“Then why didn’t he sit down?”
“He probably thought we were just being courteous.”
Sandra raised her eyebrows. “Finicky, finicky,” she said.
Miranda arrived a few minutes later. I was facing the entrance when she did, and watched her step through the front door and peer into the room with an expression of bemusement, as if playing a game of hide-and-seek. When she caught sight of my raised hand, she smiled, as if pleased that she had won the game. As she crossed the room at a brisk pace, I noticed a number of people—men and women alike—look up at this young woman in loose black slacks and a red silk Chinese blouse. Her cheeks were flushed nearly as crimson as her blouse, and she sighed dramatically as she leaned down to hug her mother and kiss me on the cheek. “I’m sorry I’m late,” she said, shaking her head as if dazed. “It’s been a weird day. I just got a new job.”
Only a year removed from finishing her undergraduate degree in liberal studies, she had spent the previous six months as a filing clerk at a law firm whose senior partner, Eli Bernhardt, was an account holder at my branch. When I told him my daughter was out of college and looking for a job, he had offered to take her on without so much as an interview, but Miranda had quickly assured me the work was dull—“soul-sucking,” she called it. So there in the restaurant, while carefully adjusting the two black enamel sticks she was using to keep her hair up, she told us how a woman had come into the firm that morning, and that unlike most clients, who were fidgety and anxious while waiting, this woman had been well dressed, relaxed, and composed, and had actually had a conversation with Miranda instead of just chatting in her direction. It turned out the woman owned an art gallery, and used the law firm to help her write contracts with artists and collectors. While she spent a few minutes in the reception area waiting for her lawyer, she told Miranda she was looking for a “gallerina” for her gallery—a hostess who would welcome people when they came in the door, answer their questions, handle the telephone, and do some general office work. “I thought about it for a couple hours, and it sounded a lot more fun than working at the law firm,” Miranda said, “so I called her this afternoon and asked if I could interview, and she said I should stop by after work. And then she offered me the job as soon as we finished the interview.”
“But do you even know anything about art?” Sandra said.
“She said I would pick everything up soon enough. And now, here I am.”
Sandra looked at me as if it were my turn to say something. “I assume you’ve given Mr. Bernhardt two weeks’ notice,” I said.
“I’ve never seen Mr. Bernhardt in the office, Dad. I asked my actual supervisor if he wanted two weeks, but he said Gina had already talked to him about it on the phone, and they have temps and assistants who can cover. So I start tomorrow.”
“What’s the name of the gallery?” Sandra said.
“That’s the other thing. As soon as she saw my full name on my résumé, she asked if you were my parents, and when I said yes, she said she knew you. Her name is Gina Crivelli.”
I tried to recall any occasion during the years I had known her on which Gina had expressed an interest in art or owning a gallery, but I came up with nothing. Sandra laughed with what sounded, to my surprise, like genuine pleasure.
“Why are you laughing?” Miranda said.
“I’m just surprised,” Sandra said. “Gina is an old girlfriend of your father’s. And of Grant’s, too.”
“She was a girlfriend of yours and of Grant’s?”
“You should see if she’s still single,” Sandra said to me. She had taken to making occasional comments like that over the years, as if we were buddies. I could never tell if her tone signaled earnest encouragement, though, or if it was closer to the tone police use when making jokes over a homicide.
“He’s here tonight, too,” I said.
“Who?” Miranda said. “Grant? For my birthday?”
“It’s a coincidence,” I said. “He’s in the bar.”
No sooner had I completed the statement than Miranda stood and headed in that direction. And a minute later, she emerged from the bar leading Grant by the elbow through the maze of tables, while he did his best not to spill his drink. “He tried to resist, but I wouldn’t let him,” she said as she pulled out the fourth chair at our table and pushed Grant into it. I saw Grant no more than once every five or six months in those years—at the occasional birthday gathering, holiday party, or similar social event—and I had never once seen Miranda handle him that way. “If the birthday girl gives the command, I guess you have to follow it,” he said.
“I just got some gossip on you and Dad,” Miranda said. “And I want to grill you about it. Do you remember Gina Crivelli?”
The same puzzled look passed over Grant’s face that had appeared when he heard about Miranda’s birthday. “This city gets smaller every year,” he said.
“She hired me to work at her gallery. And Mom says Gina went out with each of you at some point.”
“That was a long time ago,” Grant said.
“Did she break up with one of you to go out with the other?” Miranda said, pressing her palm to her cheek in an expression of mock horror. She may have felt she was allowed more leeway on her birthday than usual, or maybe she was still energized from getting a new job in just one day, but either way, she seemed perfectly comfortable and greatly entertained by her aggressive questioning. When I assured her that I dated Gina in college and Grant dated her a couple years later, and that regardless, these things had happened almost a quarter century ago, in a past so distant as to be almost prehistory, she laughed. “Oh, Dad,” she said. “She broke up with you, didn’t she?”
“Why do you say that?”
“I can tell from your explanation. And what about you?” she asked Grant. “Who broke up with whom?”
His expression went blank. “I’m sure I don’t remember.”
She studied him. “You broke up with her.”
“You don’t know that,” he said.
“You guys give yourselves away,” she said.
“Miranda, this is not particularly elegant,” Sandra said. “Should we ask about your personal life? Are you seeing anyone lately? Any interesting dates?”
Whether Sandra was stopping Miranda out of dinner-conversation politeness or due to some other motivation was unclear, but the question was effective: Miranda’s face clouded, and her shoulders dropped in annoyance. “Not really, Mother, no.”
“No dates at all? No one we should know about?”
“No. No one you should know about. And I get it. You can stop any time.”
“Then I’m done, darling.” Sandra refilled Miranda’s wineglass, and as often happens when I watch them speak to each other, I sensed that they were communicating through a series of tones and gestures too subtle for me to fully understand. I also knew that if I were to ask either of them about it later, they would profess to have no idea what I was talking about.
“And what has our old girlfriend hired you to do?” Grant asked.
“I’m a host. I say hello when you walk in the door, and I ask if you have questions, and I answer the phone when it rings.”
“But will you still be able to read novels on the clock, like you do at the law firm?” he said. He suggested she was underestimating the importance of that perk, and as we were served our appetizers and the meal proceeded, he continued controlling the conversation until he had guided it into breezier territory. The warm, day’s-end light that had suffused the room at the beginning of the meal slowly dimmed, and we found ourselves a little party of four at a candlelit table. We had a bottle of wine, and then another, and then ordered a third as Sandra complained about eccentric clients at the interior design firm she worked at, and Miranda pretended to help by suggesting ridiculous room themes: she described a bedroom of nothing but leopard prints, a dusty reading room presided over by a mannequin dressed as a spinster librarian, a kitchen with a variety of microwaves but no oven
, and a handful of other fantasy propositions. I expected Grant to play along, but he seemed content to do little more than smile and listen until dinner was finished, at which time he placed his napkin on the table, thanked us for inviting him, and wished Miranda a happy birthday. When I told him we were planning on dessert, too, and he should stay, he shook his head. “I’ve enjoyed this, but I should go,” he said. He shook my hand, patted Miranda and Sandra on the shoulder, and then returned to the bar. It was only a few minutes later that we saw him through the restaurant’s windows as he moved down the sidewalk and then passed out of view. It wasn’t until after dessert, when I asked for the check, that the waiter informed me the bill had been taken care of.
Sandra shook her head angrily. “He shouldn’t have done that.”
“He was being nice,” Miranda said. “For my birthday.”
“I know,” Sandra said. “But he shouldn’t have done that.”
And now, less than two years later, I had driven through that same neighborhood—and right past that very restaurant—on my way to Grant’s building. I had expected the streets to be lively, but the lingering storm clouds and the overriding sense of clean and seamless functionality in the neighborhood had combined to produce a surprising degree of order and quiet. Grant hadn’t asked why I was stopping by, or what I needed, or how long I would be there, but that didn’t surprise me—he wasn’t inquisitive in that way, and especially not on the phone. He was used to people—employees and clients especially, but probably just about anyone who knew him—coming to him with problems. The exquisite courtesy he had developed over the years, in fact, was probably not only a way of being respectful toward people, but also a defense against them. Grant certainly believed that it was more productive to speak about a problem face-to-face—he had said that to me more than once over the years—but he also seemed the type who not only hates emotional phone conversations, but dislikes the phone in general. And here I was, on the day of his wedding, calling him on the phone with a problem. Did he have a tight schedule that I was intruding on? I had no idea. And I also knew that even if the answer to that question was yes, he would tell me it was no.
A part of me wondered if it was a mistake to even involve him at all.
My telephone rang. The elevator doors had opened onto the tenth floor by then, and I could see Grant’s door open at the end of the hall. The phone’s screen showed the call was coming from Catherine’s extension at the bank, which meant it was either Catherine herself, or the bank security people. I closed the phone without answering, though, and stepped through the open door to find Grant standing in front of the floor-to-ceiling windows across the room, holding a glass of ice water while he gazed down at the streets below. In a gray T-shirt, worn jeans, and barefoot, he seemed entirely at ease.
“You probably just watched me park and walk up here,” I said.
“I didn’t notice,” he said.
“I hope I’m not screwing up your schedule.”
“Not at all. I just got back from letting Alex Massoud beat me at golf, but he still hasn’t agreed to extend our contract with him. So now I’m wondering if things would have gone better if I’d just gone ahead and beaten him. But I’m glad to get away from them for a while.” He retrieved a beer from the large refrigerator that dominated his otherwise compact, gleaming kitchen. Dark clouds still blanketed the city, and everything in Grant’s kitchen—the marble countertops, chrome faucet, and stainless steel refrigerator and dishwasher; the bright yellow label on the beer he was opening; the earth-colored liquid that swirled inside the bottle—glowed as if lit from within. A glance overhead revealed the actual source of illumination: bulbs within the concrete ceiling created the pools of light that Grant moved through as he handed me my beer. If there had been a third person in the room with us, watching Grant stand by the counter in his jeans and T-shirt, the person would certainly have guessed him to be a full decade younger than he was. I knew he spent an hour in a health club most weekdays, which made it possible for him to keep fitting into his slim T-shirts and jeans, and to shop on the men’s side of the same fashionable clothing stores where Miranda bought her own clothes. His tan was even, his close-cropped hair as dark as it had ever been. Had Grant been dying his hair, lying in the sun, performing exotic variations of sit-ups, keeping his nails carefully manicured and his hands moisturized, and observing any number of other personal-care details not only out of standard vanity, but also out of a desire to minimize the visual dissonance of what people tended to refer to—when in my presence, at least—as an “interesting” age difference between him and Miranda? I was a bit soft in the middle, as is every middle-aged man’s right, and my thinning hair contained a liberal mix of gray. I bought my clothing from department stores, in the usual sections for men our age—or the sections for men our age who didn’t make time for the gym.
I picked up my beer and asked if he would be joining me, but he shook his head. “I already had a couple on the course. Good speech at dinner last night, by the way.”
“Passable.”
“More than passable. It was honest. And heartfelt. You did a good job.”
I shrugged. The beer tasted shockingly good. I wondered if it was due to the fact that I hadn’t had anything to eat since breakfast.
“Sandra called me this morning,” Grant said. “Asking if I knew where Miranda was. Is that why you stopped by?”
“I managed to track her down,” I said. “I sat with her for a few minutes at lunch. But then she left again.”
“What do you mean?”
I summarized the lunch I’d had with Miranda the same way I’d summarized it for Sandra, and finished by saying, “And I guess I assume she’ll show up at the hotel sometime soon. Though it’s still true that I don’t know exactly where she is or what’s going on.”
He nodded. “But you think something is going on.”
“Yes. Nothing happened between the two of you, did it?”
“No. But have you talked to Sandra?”
“She doesn’t know where Miranda is, either. But if she’s feeling nervous or anxious, I guess I assumed it might have something to do with you. You are the one she’s marrying today.”
“Maybe.” He seemed to turn something over in his mind before he added, “It’s a big thing, what she’s signing on to.”
“But she hasn’t said anything to you, has she?”
“No. But she’s had boyfriends in the past, and I assume she knows she could have boyfriends in the future. There’s a whole alternate future still available to her, but all of those options are about to close down.”
“The two of you will be opening up a lot of new options together, though.”
He smiled, but seemed tired. “Probably not as many as it seems. Not to her.”
Was I overestimating Grant’s career success? His wealth? I didn’t think so. “At dinner last night she said she adored you,” I said. “She seemed perfectly confident and happy.”
“You mean her speech? That was something she said in front of a group of people. I don’t think she actually adores me in the true sense of that word, or I hope she doesn’t, since that seems dangerous. She and I have talked about these things over the last couple years, and I think we understand each other. Nothing I said or did last night would suddenly have upset her. I know she’s your daughter and you’ll always think of her as a girl, but she has a pretty solid sense of herself as an adult.”
“I still think she’s upset about something. I trust my sense of that.”
“I just think you’re overestimating my role. If Miranda wanted out of what she’s in, she could still get out of it and be fine. What she’s signing on to now is big. It seems perfectly understandable to me that she would think about escaping it.”
“But for what?”
“For freedom,” he said, as if it were obvious. “The guys I was playing golf with this morning are friends, but they’re friends I’ve made through the course of business, and other than you, those a
re pretty much the only kind of friends I have. My life these days is about running the firm. I don’t draw product designs anymore—I look at other people’s designs and say how they should be modified. I live what is probably a vaguely corporate existence, if I correctly understand what people mean when they say that word with a sneer. Miranda knows this. And she knows it’s not how the painters who show in the gallery live their lives, and it’s not how her musician friends live, and it’s not how she has thought about her own life. But the direction she’s headed in with me is away from those freedoms. Why wouldn’t she second-guess that?”
He had said he felt I was overestimating his role, and then described a scenario in which Miranda’s disquiet was probably the result of his role. So what was behind the contradiction? It seemed he was saying it was his existence that was the problem—not anything he’d actually said or done. And was he mentioning painters and musicians because there actually was some painter or musician who was a rival for Miranda’s affections? The idea that there was a third person involved seemed impossible. Miranda had never, at any time, mentioned another man. “When did you see her last?” I asked.
“Last night, toward midnight. At Jo’s.”
“Who is Jo?”
“It’s a cocktail bar downtown. You’ve been there.”
He said this as if it somehow resolved the situation—or as if there were no situation, other than my inability to immediately place the name of this particular bar. “I’m sorry,” I said. “I don’t remember the name of every place I’ve ever been.”
“I’m not—”
“There are days that I feel like every person I know is talking down to me,” I said. “And maybe you’re not. Maybe it’s in my head. I don’t care. I’m not asking to take a quiz on bar names. I’m asking you what happened when you saw her last.”
“I’m not talking down to you.”
“I don’t care. It doesn’t matter. What happened?”
I had never been that aggressive with Grant, but he seemed to accept it. Or his response, at least, was to accede to my questioning with nothing more than a slight shrug. “We only ended up there by coincidence,” he said. “Or not a coincidence, really, since we’ve been there a number of times together—but we picked the same place. She was with her bridesmaids and some other friends, and I was having a drink with some people I know who didn’t make the invite list.”