You Don't Love This Man (13 page)

Not only did that shot play, but so did his next, and the next after that. He moved around the course as if completely at home, and continued to indulge in every opportunity to release his booming laugh across the fairways. Everyone we crossed paths with seemed to know him. He called the teenage snack cart girl by name, and when he asked if she'd think less of him if he ordered another drink, she said, “I brought the pitcher of Bloody Marys out here because I knew you'd want one.” He told her to give Grant and me whatever we wanted and put it on his account, and though Grant asked only for orange juice, I decided to try a Bloody Mary of my own. If it helped Lon's game, I thought, it might help mine. “We'll have a fresh pitcher waiting for you guys at the turn,” the girl said brightly as she handed me my drink. Then she clicked the cart into gear and sped away.

Grant took one look at me after my first sip. “Have you ever had a Bloody Mary before?” he said.

“No,” I admitted. “What's in it?”

“Tomato juice,” he said. “And other things that I, personally, don't think belong in a drink. Enjoy.”

I was just managing to finish the drink while we waited to tee off on a par three toward the end of the front nine when Lon, after finishing an anecdote about Grant throwing a club into a pond when he was a teenager, asked if I'd been taught to play by my own father. I felt the usual wariness rise in me as I admitted I'd mostly taught myself, though Grant had been giving me some pointers recently. “Your folks live here in town?” Lon asked.

“No,” I said. “I'm from New Mexico. I came out here for college.”

“You ever think about going back?” he asked. “Or are you here for good?”

Grant was standing nearby, apparently absorbed in the task of using a tee to clean mud from the grooves of one of his irons, though I could tell he was listening. “There's nothing to go back to,” I said. “My parents are both gone from New Mexico now, too, so that's all over. My mom's in Florida, and my dad's in Texas.”

Lon nodded sagely, glancing again at my cheap golf bag. I didn't quite have a complete set of clubs in those days—I had enough to be allowed on the course, but I was a little light. I knew Lon was appraising the situation, but one drink into a nice autumn afternoon, I didn't particularly care.

“They're just about done, Dad,” Grant said. It was true that the last member of the foursome on the green ahead of us was putting out, but it also seemed that Grant was maybe less comfortable with his dad's questions than I was.

“Well, I can't say I have much knowledge about either Florida or Texas,” Lon said, “but I've heard they have some nice spots.
Hurricane country, though, in both of them.” He pulled an iron from his bag and stepped into the tee box. “We should make sure to get out on the course together a few times this summer, since it's free for you gentlemen when you're with me.” He hit a clean drive that we watched drop onto the green one hundred eighty yards away. I again complimented him on the shot, and he laughed. “That one
was
pretty good, wasn't it?” he said.

Lon downed three more Bloody Marys, had one birdie, five pars, and triple-putted only twice over the rest of our eighteen holes. Two other snack cart girls knew him by name and beverage, and players traveling along parallel fairways continued calling out friendly hellos to him. Grant, on the other hand, seemed bored. The longer we walked the groomed fairways, and the more Lon spoke to me with amiable easiness, the more profound Grant's boredom seemed to become. I studied Lon's gestures—the trophy pose he held after completing his swing, the rhythms with which he spoke, the way he walked the course—but throughout the entire back nine, Grant hardly traded a word with us, and played largely on his own, as if completing a chore. I was baffled by his mood that day, but in recent years I've seen Miranda assume the same demeanor when I linger for any amount of time in a room in which she is with her friends—the presence of a parent can't help but flatten the child's carefully constructed façade of adult sophistication. So though I thought Grant's silence was the result of an uncharacteristically dark mood that day, I can see now that Grant was actually closer to being in no mood at all. It made no sense to think of him as possessing a mood, because it made no sense to think of him as even being himself that day. He was just his father's son, golfing for free.

When we finished and Grant added up the scores, I was sur
prised to learn that Lon had beaten Grant by only four strokes. Grant delivered the news as if it were a trivial detail, but Lon seemed pleased, and told us that even though he had to leave, Grant and I should have dinner at the club and charge it to his account. He shook my hand, thanked me for playing, and ambled toward the parking lot.

“I'm sorry if he was distracting,” Grant said after his father was gone. “Half of what he says is just meant to mess with your focus, because he wants to win.”

“He was messing with my focus?” I said. “I didn't realize it.”

“Well,” Grant said, “he may only have been messing with mine.”

“Have you ever beaten him?”

“Once. He was less than thrilled. He didn't speak to me for two weeks.”

Two weeks didn't strike me as a big deal, but I understood my expectations regarding communication with a father were set low. “Did you want to stay to get something to eat?” I asked.

Grant just shook his head. The idea was out of the question, it seemed—he and his father were involved in some ornate series of signifying gestures I wasn't going to catch the subtleties of. And I would never even get another chance to study them, because that October afternoon was the last I ever saw of Lon. Although I went golfing with Grant a handful of times every year, never again was it at the invitation of, or paid for by, his father.

I ended that day with Sandra. When I told her about the breakup, she seemed less surprised than I. Her roommate had gone out of town for the weekend, so it was one of the rare times she and I had her apartment to ourselves, and she had made dinner for the two of us, complete with candles on the table. She first asked
whether Grant had said who broke up with whom, and when I told her I'd gotten the impression it was Grant who had ended things, she wanted to know how I'd gotten that impression, what Grant had said that gave me that impression, how he had said it, and so on, until eventually I just repeated the entire conversation to her.

“Well, I'm glad,” she said as we ate our dinner amid candlelight.

“You're glad?”

“Because I don't have to keep pretending to be friends with her. She was your ex-girlfriend. It was weird.”

“She was hardly a serious girlfriend, Sandra.”

She shrugged. “Let's take Grant to Bristol's some evening. Gina can take care of herself, and besides, Grant's the person you're friends with now, right?”

I agreed, though I couldn't help but feel I was somehow betraying Gina. “I think it's cute that you're jealous,” I said.

“I'm not jealous,” Sandra said. “It's just that with her, I was having to be polite and friendly with someone that I didn't really care about. Grant, at least, gives you tips on new clothes and takes you golfing or whatever. The golf sounds like it's fun for you, and I like the new clothes. But what do we lose if we don't see Gina anymore?”

“It always thought the two of you were getting along.”

“That's what women do,” she said. “We pretend, to be nice.”

“Did you think it was dangerous that we were all going out together?”

She smiled. “Dangerous? No. No offense, but I don't think she was after you. Were you after her?”

“No,” I said. “I'm after you.”

She raised her head defiantly. “Prove it.”

I don't know whether Sandra ever considered it, but the sex life she and I were enjoying at the time had certainly been made possible, in part, by the two months of instruction Gina had given me a few years before. So though I wasn't allowed to say it, and though I understood Sandra's desire to be free of playing nice with Gina, I knew that Gina was someone who had contributed positively to our relationship. Because when I moved my fingers beneath Sandra's dress as we stood there kissing next to the table, I knew where and how to move my fingers once they reached their destination because Gina had shown me how. And one of the reasons Sandra was able to feel pleasure that evening in her apartment was because Gina had shown me how to make a woman feel pleasure. But I suppose that's usually true: the pleasure we find in another person is only possible because of the pleasure that person has already found, with others.

 

I
HAD THOUGHT THE
university district would be empty on a Saturday morning, but driving through it, I found the sidewalks filled with knots of people, all headed in the same direction. There was much chucking of shoulders and fake-wrestling among the college boys in the groups, and whatever they were anticipating, it was clearly a struggle for them to contain themselves. Driving past, I watched to make sure no one darted or was thrown into the street. The day's heat was gathering itself in earnest, and the college kids were dressed for it. The women wore shorts and bikini tops or spaghetti-strap halters, while the men favored baseball hats, baggy shorts, and slogan-emblazoned T-shirts—the more confident young men wore no shirts at all. I hadn't the slightest idea where everyone was headed, but it was
obviously an event at which the sun would have ample opportunity to do damage to skin.

I pulled onto campus at the south end of the Quad, an immense rectangular lawn surrounded by the university's oldest buildings, and parked along the curb. Massive oaks bordered a concrete walk that ran lengthwise down the center of the area, their wreathed branches forming a vaulted arboreal hall the university featured in its marketing brochures each year, and I felt myself break into a sweat as I walked across the lawn toward the trees. The only other visible human was someone riding a bicycle along the opposite end of the Quad, two hundred yards from where I stood. When the rider steered his bike over the edge of the curb and onto the sidewalk, the clatter of wheel and frame arrived a quarter second after the act, and I was surprised, as always, at the phenomenon of sound lagging image. And then I was surprised again when I arrived at the walkway and found there was actually another person present, hidden within the trees and shade: Catherine.

“I thought you were talking with the security people,” I said.

“It was a brief conversation,” she said. “So I thought I'd stop by here just in case. How is Miranda?”

I was comfortable relying on Catherine at the bank, but this attention to my family life made me wary. We'd worked together for ten years, of course, so Catherine knew a bit about my life outside of work. But I wasn't a sharer of personal information, and had even done my best to keep private the fact that I was dating Trish. This proved impossible, since Trish banked at the branch, and changed her behavior toward me there after the first time we slept together. Being called “honey” was difficult enough for me, but being called that in front of Catherine was mortifying. So my instinct was to hide private struggles and uncertainties from Cath
erine. But when had her presence ever been anything but an advantage, really? And here she was. So I went ahead, cautiously. “I'm not sure,” I said. “I sat down to lunch with her, but then she disappeared.”

“What do you mean?”

“She said she was going to the bathroom, but then she sent a message to my phone saying she couldn't talk now. Or didn't want to, I guess. And she didn't come back.” Intending to produce my phone so that Catherine could see the message, I discovered it wasn't in my pocket—I had taken it out to reread the message while driving, and must have left it on the passenger seat. I looked toward my car from where we stood. A hot breeze moved over the vast lawn, the blades of grass rippling in the sun. The shaded sidewalk felt like a protected port, and I was reluctant to move from it.

“Was she okay?” Catherine asked.

“I don't know. We only talked a few minutes.”

“She must have been upset about something, if she left like that.”

“Maybe,” I said, “I should call Grant, but I left my phone in the car. You wouldn't happen to have his number, would you?”

“Oh, I don't know about that,” she said, knitting her eyebrows as if taxed by a great mental effort. I'd been joking, but her response seemed suspicious. She pressed some buttons on her phone and squinted at it. “I guess I do,” she said, handing it to me. There on the little screen was Grant's name and number.

“What a stroke of luck,” I said.

“Yes,” she said, nodding in placid agreement. She maintained such impressive discipline in her responses that at times, her stoicism approached the theatrical.

“Just how many numbers do you have in this phone?” I said.

“What do you mean?”

“You and Grant speak often enough that you keep his number in your phone?”

“He calls you at the branch, just like Sandra,” she said. “You should be thanking me, not cross-examining.”

“Thank you,” I said.

“Is that the truck?”

At the opposite end of the Quad, a white delivery truck was trundling slowly around the corner, headed our way.

“Probably,” I said. “But I don't think Grant calls me at the branch that often, and he's not a member of my family. Why would you have his phone number? Do you have a crush on him?”

“You're being a jerk. I have his number for the same reason I have Sandra's.”

I pressed the dial button on her phone and listened as Grant's line rang. “You're blushing,” I said.

“I am not,” she said.

Grant didn't answer. I turned the phone off without leaving a message, and handed it back to her.