You Don't Love This Man (38 page)

I put the letter back into the envelope, and returned it to the pocket of the jacket I'd placed on the hanger. She doesn't know what she's getting into, I thought. And how could she? She had never been married before, and neither had she been a mother. The nature of those experiences was just speculation for her. She
couldn't know what married life with Grant would be like any more than anybody else could, and she certainly didn't know about raising a child. Becoming a mother would change her, just as the child's presence would change her life with Grant. It wasn't just her future that was uncertain, but who she would be in that future. I would love her no matter who she became, of course, but what was the source of this constant, unceasing desire women had to liberate me from something? Maybe that was the clearest sign Miranda was a woman now, equal to the others: she had joined them in telling me I needed to change. She should have consulted Sandra, Gina, and Catherine before telling me she wanted me to be annoying around her, or to embarrass myself. Was she aware what that meant? She had written this letter, for instance, and had walked with me through the festival, all while still not sharing with me the fact that she was pregnant. How was I to feel about that? My daughter was beautiful, but she was hiding something from me. I loved her more than anyone in the world—and she wasn't telling me something. What option did I have, other than to be quietly patient? That would be far better, at least, than telling her I understood she hoped today didn't mean good-bye, but that although I would of course continue to see and talk to her for the rest of my life, she was going to become a wife today, and a mother soon, and those offices would lay their not-insignificant claims on her. So today was, in many real and inescapable ways, indeed good-bye. Maybe she wished that wasn't true. I certainly did. I had no reasons for wanting time to move forward—the future, for me, seemed nothing but a consolation prize. Why pretend that I looked forward to age? No one in the world was as real to me as Miranda—as far as I was concerned, life went where she went. But as she had said in her letter, she had other things she needed to do now.

There was a knock at the room's door. When I opened it to find Catherine, I acted dismayed. “I was starting to think you weren't coming back,” I said.

“Somebody seems much better,” she said, stepping past me. I followed her out of the claustrophobic little entryway and into the room, watching her cast a surveying glance around the place. “Do you really think I would have left you in the state you were in without coming back?” she said.

“It wouldn't necessarily have surprised me.”

“There, there,” she said, giving me a little pat on the shoulder.

I unfolded the transfer request form I'd been holding and laid it on the little round table by the window. “Patronize me all you want,” I said. “But the bank will still be a mess when you're gone. Where do I sign this?”

When she recognized what I was looking at, she seemed surprised. “I thought you said you wanted time to look it over.”

“It's just a form,” I said. “It doesn't merit reading. Where?”

She pointed to a line midway down the first page. I signed and flipped the form over, and she pointed to a line at the bottom of the second page. I signed, and handed her the form. “There you go,” I said. “I officially consent and recommend you for open positions. Unofficially, I think it's a disaster.”

“There are many capable service managers in the world,” she said, stepping past me on her way back to the door. “You'll find someone.”

I didn't follow her—I stayed where I was, looking out the room's large window. “Maybe. I suppose I'll miss you as a person, though, too. There's always that.”

“As a person?” she said. “Does that mean personally?”

“It means not only as a coworker. I don't understand why you—”

“Stop,” she said. “This isn't right.”

She was behind me. I felt her fingers on the back of my neck, turning up my collar. “You can't see everything in the mirror,” I said.

“Obviously not. And I'm not going anywhere, if that makes you feel better. If you miss me as a person, you can always call. My number is in your phone.” She tugged at the collar, making further adjustments. I felt she was being a little rough. “This seems tight,” she said. “Is it supposed to be this tight?”

“It's fine,” I said. “But if today has taught me anything, it's that just because I have someone's number in my phone doesn't mean they'll actually answer when I call.”

She turned my collar down and ran her index finger along the inside, smoothing it. And then I felt her hands on my shoulder as, before I even understood what she was doing, she kissed me on the back of the neck. “I will answer,” she said.

I was stunned. Yes, I had been flirting with her all day—and maybe for years—but I had never
let on
that I was flirting with her. “That is entirely over the line,” I said. “Now you
have
to transfer.”

“Turn around.”

I complied, and she looked me up and down with a critical eye. She stepped forward, straightened my bow tie, and kissed me on the cheek.

“Stop it,” I said.

“There,” she said. “You're fixed.”

I shook my head. I wasn't done being outraged. I liked playing outraged.

“No. Don't,” she said.

“Don't what?”

“Don't say anything. Don't ruin it. You're already late, so just go.”

She was trying to be bold, but behind those freckles, I could see that she was blushing. I was probably blushing, too. We talked to customers, and to each other, every day. But Catherine and I were both quite shy, really. “I was just going to say thank you, Catherine,” I said. “What did you think I was going to say? Something embarrassing?”

“Just go!” she said, opening the door and pushing me into the hall. It wasn't a mild push, either, but a shove, surprising in its force—she could probably have sent me right over the wall, had she wanted to.

 

T
HE FLORA IN THE
Quad were in full bloom, the air heavy with the scent of grass and blossoms. The food and drink had restored the color to my face, and the change of clothes, though it consisted only of replacing one suit with another, had rendered me at least presentable. And I had made it, somehow, to the head of the concrete walk that ran down the center of the Quad. A black limousine entered from the opposite end, turned onto the curved drive, and crept slowly in my direction. Seated before me in the clean white chairs—half of them on one side of the walk, half on the other—were the assorted guests. And thirty yards away, waiting patiently with the pastor at the front of the crowd and wearing a tuxedo exactly like mine, stood Grant. It seemed far away, that end of the walk.

The sky was bright, and the sun hung lazily in the western half, as if determined to extend the day. As the limousine continued its
slow journey around the Quad, though, I noticed that the sky to the east was already a deeper blue. The shift occurred somewhere overhead, I assumed. I felt outside of myself, as if watching silently while neither of us—the self standing and the self watching—was able to move or speak. When the limousine stopped at the head of the walk, the driver who emerged wore a black cap and dark glasses. I never saw his eyes, or even a distinguishing feature, as he opened the back door and Miranda stepped out. She, too, had been transformed, and much more dramatically than I. So much so, in fact, that at first it was difficult for me to recognize her. It was her, and it was not. This was not the way she dressed. It was not her makeup, not the way she wore her hair. But I suppose that is how people marry.

There were no flower girls or ring-bearing boys—she hadn't wanted them. It was just Miranda and I, standing there before the guests, all of whom had risen. She took hold of my arm, trembling. “I feel like I'm in a costume,” she whispered.

I smiled, though it wasn't what I felt. What I felt was that it made no sense for me to walk down that aisle with her. The correct choreography would be for the bride to kiss her father, and then just walk away from him. She wasn't mine to give away.

But the musicians were already playing the march. There's still time, I thought. But I was wrong. Time was up. Miranda stepped forward.

About the author

Meet Dan DeWeese

About the book

The Sidelined Character

Read on

Author's Picks

About the author

Meet Dan DeWeese

I
GREW UP ON A DIRT ROAD
in the foothills of the Rocky Mountains, just west of Loveland, Colorado, during the 1970s and 1980s. I lived on what one might call “the first foothill”: to the west were the undulating hills that form the doorsteps of the Rockies, and to the east were the unbroken plains that run from Northern Colorado through Nebraska, Iowa, and on into Illinois, where my maternal grandparents lived in Chicago.

The lack of intrusion from outside forces available to a child in those years, especially in a rural location before the introduction of the VHS tape, has been erased forever. Much of my childhood took place in that context, however, and I think fondly of it—my parents, sister, the 1970s in general—quite often. Even as a child, I had the freedom of being able to walk out the front door without anyone needing to ask where I was going, since there wasn't anywhere I
could
be going, other than outside to play. I rode a Denver Broncos Huffy bicycle both on and off the road, and raged, usually with tears, whenever the Broncos lost.

Loveland's newspaper, the
Reporter-Herald
, was an afternoon paper. I often grabbed it from the box by the road as I walked home from the school bus stop, and then read it, sometimes in its entirety, as soon as I walked into the house. What had happened in the world over twenty-four hours previously would, for the most part, still be news to me at four o'clock the next day, and my belief that the
Reporter-Herald
was both timely and authoritative remained intact throughout most of my childhood.

After high school, I was accepted into the production program of what was then called the Department of Cinema and Television at the University of Southern California. I was in South Central Los Angeles during the riots that followed the announcement of the verdict in the Rodney King case, as I was on the night of the North Ridge earthquake that collapsed apartment buildings and a section of Interstate 10. I lived and worked in Los Angeles long enough also to be there for the announcement of the verdict in the O.J. Simpson case, as well as for the day that two masked gunmen covered in body armor engaged in a protracted, post-bank-robbery automatic weapons shootout with Los Angeles police. These years were a unique education.

I returned to Colorado, this time to Fort Collins, where I studied literature and English education at Colorado State University, and taught as a student teacher at Fort Collins High School. I left Fort Collins for Portland, Oregon, but found no jobs available in the Portland Public School system. I showed up on the doorstep of a new journal called
Tin House
, but since I had no previous experience in publishing and was, as it were, a complete stranger,
they had no open positions for me, either. Eventually, I took a job as a teller in a Wells Fargo branch.

I began to publish short fiction. Early stories appeared in
Missouri Review
,
New England Review
, and
Northwest Review
. Over the years, I went on to place work in places including
Pindeldyboz
,
Ascent
,
Washington Square
, and, yes, eventually, a few stories in
Tin House
. Foolishly, I also began work on a novel. After some years of work on that, I took the additionally imprudent step of founding
Propeller
, a quarterly magazine of art, literature, film, and culture, and Propeller Books, an independent literary press whose first book,
Nine Simple Patterns for Complicated Women
, is a collection of stories by Mary Rechner.

In 2011, this novel,
You Don't Love This Man
, was published by Harper Perennial.

About the book

The Sidelined Character

P
AUL, THE MAIN CHARACTER
in this novel, is not a typical main character. A detective trying to catch a criminal makes for a traditional main character, and likewise a criminal himself—a man of action, pulling off capers or on the run—often takes center stage. Many main characters in literature are people having florid breakdowns, because a person in the midst of a breakdown can engage in any number of impulsive, dangerous, or self-destructive acts which, when they occur in the pages of a novel rather than in real life, can be greatly entertaining. (In real life, they're usually less so.) There is also the illness-and-recovery narrative, of course, whose main character starts essentially where the florid-breakdown character ended, and whose story covers the character's journey back to health and happiness. And it's possible to string these kinds of characters together. Writers have gotten a lot of mileage out of a main character who starts as someone investigating or trying to get away with something, suffers a florid existential breakdown with episodes of diverting insanity, and then finds the road to redemption. The end.

A fellow writer once told me he was intrigued by how, in my novel, the voice of “a guy who is so sidelined” became so compelling to him. When I asked what he meant by “sidelined,” he said that it was standard to read all sorts of things about a team's star or main players, but that there are always other players good enough to be on the team, but who rarely make it off the bench. Fans sometimes forget these players' names or that they're even on the team, even though the players are in practice every day, and then right there on the sidelines during every game. He said my novel was like reading the story of one of these players, and then realizing that you learn entirely different things about the team—and sometimes about the sport as a whole—when you hear about it from the sidelined guy.

I thought about this for a while. The first thing that occurred to me—and I was still following the sports metaphor here—is that a lot of players on the sidelines don't necessarily feel they actually
belong
on the sidelines. They believe that if they were given the opportunity to get in the game, they could have great success. For these players, using the word as a verb (“to be sidelined”) makes sense, because they're not out of the game willingly—someone has put them there. Coaches, fans, and other players might disagree, of course, and suggest that the sideline is exactly where that player belongs. Controversies over who should be on the field and who should be on the bench are perpetual.

Then I thought about how strange it is that we don't read more
stories about “sidelined” characters, because
everyone
, at some point, gets sidelined. People who were stars at one level find themselves struggling at the next, their previously effective skills and strategies no longer working. And even someone who has achieved success at the highest level, who has maintained the role of a team or organization's dynamic central character for years, has to accept less time in the spotlight as his or her career winds down. It doesn't matter who you are, how good you are, or what situations you have thrived in, and which you've struggled against—at some point, someone will tap you on the shoulder and point to the bench. You will be sidelined.

I think that because this moment is one we all fear and try to avoid, we don't often tell stories in which the central character is going through this crisis. A proper tragedy of dramatic Shakespearean proportions is almost easier: a confluence of events, combined with some fatal flaw in the main character, leads to a sudden downfall. Poison! Stabbings! Murders intentional and accidental! Yelling, screaming, gasping for air while commanding someone to
Remember me! Remember…argh…me…guh.

Good fun.

Sidelined characters, on the other hand, have to keep right on living, even though they're often not even sure if they're in a comedy or a tragedy. They exist in an uncomfortable marginal space: on the team, but not often in the game. They have to mull over whether they've been unfairly sidelined, or whether the sideline is where they in fact belong. They might cry about the situation at times, and then at other times laugh. They may want fervently to be in the game, but then find that when their number is called, they experience a sense of dread. The sideline has become comfortable, and now that they're going into the game, they have to face the possibility of failure, and do so while knowing that one of the reasons they've been on the sideline in the first place is that they've made mistakes in games in the past. They may even feel the mistakes aren't their fault. Maybe if they were in the game more often, they would be able to relax a bit, and wouldn't make as many mistakes. Maybe the sideline has a spooky, dangerous power to turn great players
into
sideline players.

These doubts, crises, struggles, and examinations mean that though a story with the star character at the center of it can be quite rousing, there are actually many other fiendish little narratives that occur parallel to the star's story. And these other narratives, with their sidelined central characters, involve just as much love, desire, conflict, doubt, and struggle as any story. It's just that our eyes are often elsewhere, drawn to the dramas that are broadcast under the brightest lights. We know there are other players on the team, over there on the sidelines, but do we know their names?
Not always. Are they given an opportunity to tell their stories? Not as often.

So I suppose that word, if it
is
a word, is accurate: the main character of this story is a man who is sidelined. And this novel is what we hear when this man, who has spent the greater portion of his life standing quietly to the side, decides to start talking.

Read on

Author's Picks

T
HROUGHOUT THE YEARS
I spent writing
You Don't Love This Man
, readers of drafts (pronounced:
my friends
) often asked to what degree I felt the main character was aware of how others see him. I was never able to answer this question definitively, but I will now claim this is mostly because I didn't want to say something like: “He is highly aware of how others see him, but he can't do anything about it, because he is almost entirely blind to how others see him.”

I think most thinking and feeling human beings are trapped in that same nonsensical sentence, and I'm far from the first person to have written about it. The following are things I sometimes refer to when trying to explain to someone that I have a strong sense of self, but I have a hard time communicating it, because I haven't the slightest idea who I am.

Blow-Up
, directed by Michelangelo Antonioni

Antonioni's landmark depiction of the fact that the more closely we examine an image, the less clarity we have on what we see—or think we see—within its borders. It's not that we fail to see accurately, it's that each image is really just a smaller part of a larger, more complex image. And the reason we can't see the larger image with any clarity is that we're inside of it. It's the world.

Late Spring
, directed by Yasujirô Ozu

Ozu is a master of depicting situations in which characters feel compelled to say or go along with something socially acceptable, while simultaneously revealing the degrees, sometimes desperate, to which they wish they could refuse. Setsuko Hara smiles and smiles and smiles in this film, and it's a stunning, beautiful smile. It is also, often, a mask.

Low
, David Bowie

David Bowie, Brian Eno, Tony Visconti, Europe, the mid-1970s. The brilliance of this album isn't news. But in a world that often feels designed to reduce the opportunities for headspace, these artists crafted music—here and elsewhere—that created not only more opportunities for headspace, but offered brand-new flavors of it. My son was playing a cheap retro version of the old video game
Pole Position
the other day when a track from this album came on, and I started laughing. It was “Always Crashing in the Same Car.”

Solaris
, directed by Andrei Tarkovsky

If you could live with your thoughts and memories instead of in the real world, would it be paradise or hell? Tarkovsky's answer, built atop the scaffolding of Stanislaw Lem's novel, only complicates the question, but in a way that feels moving and true. Late in the film, the sequence of weightlessness and a Bruegel painting breaks my heart, every time.

Eclipse
, by John Banville

Here and elsewhere, Banville reveals his mastery at treading the line—he has expanded it into an entire territory, really—between what we call a “literary novel” (a suspicious redundancy) and that item named “the detective story.” In addition to his crackling lexical energy, Banville's work hums along on the delightful paradox that “the literary” has always been that sound thrumming at the heart of the detective story, while the desire to make investigations has always been a motor that drives literature. So which is a subcategory of the other? Like Clint Eastwood in
A Fistful of Dollars
, Banville doesn't dissolve the two forces—he exploits them.

The Friends of Eddie Coyle
, directed by Peter Yates

A low-level, working-class con in Boston has gotten busted again, and now he's going to have to do time. Unfortunately, he happens to be married, with two kids, so he can't let that happen. He begins the game of acquiring, or crafting, information about fellow criminals, to offer the cops in exchange for his freedom. He believes he's good at this game. The degree to which we can see that this man is far from evil, but neither is he clever, is heartbreaking. This is 1970s filmmaking at its best, and with Robert Mitchum at the center of it, to boot. The film feels like a gift.