A Less Intelligent Man

I’m not a smart man. Or rather, I’m a man who tells people I’m not smart. That’s only because I’m actually a lazy man. People tend to want something out of a smart man. But a not-smart man? Well, he’s left to his own whims and leisures.

You see, when other people want something from you it has a sneaky way of forcing you to end up in a life you didn’t design. I saw it early, this oppression of expectations.

My father was a painter. A good one, too. He could do things with a watercolor set that would blow your mind. Unfortunately, he was also smart, and male to boot, so society expected more from him than pretty pictures. That’s why he shouldered the burden of a job he hated to make money. And then, because he was intelligent enough to be good at it, everyone expected him to keep climbing. No one seemed to care that he was perfectly content as a low-level grunt who had his evenings free to paint. He was smart, why didn’t he want more? Didn’t he want to be challenged? To achieve? The questions became so frequent and so fervent that soon my father began to question his own desires. Maybe he should want the things that everyone else did, being brilliant and all. Perhaps not wanting them meant that something was broken in him. And because he couldn’t let anyone see that brokenness, he let himself get carried away on the current of what others thought until he was so far from his own shore that swimming back wasn’t just challenging, it seemed impossible.

It was a prison. Late nights at the office. Explosive anger when the stress of it all pressed on him. Absence for all the little moments in my life that felt big to me — class recitals, nativity plays, basketball games — because he was needed elsewhere. I could have forgiven it if work made him happy, but it didn’t. Each time he was asked about his job, he would grumble about the grind, the terrible bosses, the long hours. I can’t think of a single time I heard my father say something complimentary about work, which is really terrible, given that it was the most important part of his life for more than forty years.

My father died a few years ago. Everyone at his funeral spoke in reverent tones about all he’d done. And while I’d say his last few years were happy — he spent most of his days rediscovering his love of painting — the thought of his joy placed on the altar of expected achievement haunts me.

But my mother? She was a different story. She was a woman growing up in the fifties. No one expected intelligence from her, even though she had it in spades. And because they never thought she could do anything great, they never asked her to. They asked different things of her, of course, but even within the confines of misogynistic predeterminants, my mother was in charge of her days.

I look back on her life and see her laughing in the sunny backyard with her friends, while I was shooed away to play in my room. I see her curled on the couch reading or under the trees on a mid-day hike. I remember spontaneous trips with her on my summer breaks. She didn’t work so she was free to peek her head into my room and mischievously ask, “Want to go to the lake?” She’d load me and my sisters up in the station wagon and we’d go. Because no one expected anything of her other than to care for kids and a house (tasks which no one seems to value much), they left her alone. As long as the kids were alive and the dishes we done, her life was hers.

She’s still kicking, my mom. I’ll be sad to see her go, of course, but her life doesn’t haunt me like my fathers. Sure, she’s never achieved anything others would take note of, but her freedom echoed in my mind. That’s the kind of legacy I wanted.

So, because I am in fact a very smart man, I was able to see the nearly invisible strings the world would have tried to attach to me. And I resisted as best I could. In school I did enough to pass through unremarkably, neither failing nor highly achieving. In love, I gave just enough to never be the sole reason for its demise but never gave everything required for it to soar. In my career? Let’s just say I’ve skated by, never investing in a true vocation but also never flagrantly shirking the duties required for me to stay gainfully employed.

It was all going reasonably well for me. I had friends, lots of free time and just enough money to maintain a comfortable life. It was nothing spectacular, but that was sort of the point. Up until Mae, that is.

I met Mae when she came into the bank where I was working. She poured in from the middle of a rainstorm. Her hair was soaking, despite the valiant attempt from the newspaper she held above it. Her cheeks were flushed and there was a franticness about her. I was captivated. So much so I think I gave the guy in line ahead of her an extra five-spot.

She slowly approached the counter, tucking her dripping hair behind an ear with a sweet, embarrassed look that had my heart hammering.

“Hello,” she started then glanced down at my nametag. “Hello, Tim. My name is Mae Nelson and I need to open an account. I’m new to town and—”

“Welcome,” I awkwardly interjected.

“Thank you,” she replied with a toothy smile that stole my breath. “I just moved in, so the address on my driver’s license isn’t correct. Will that be a problem?”

“No. No, not at all.” I tripped over my words in an attempt to sound helpful. It was, in fact, a bit of a problem, but there was no workaround I wouldn’t gladly do for this woman. “It should be fine so long as you have some mail with your name and the new address.”

“Well, let me look,” she said, rummaging around in her purse.

“Where’d you move from?” I was trying for casual politeness but somehow coming off desperate instead.

“Tennessee,” she said with another one of those smiles.

“Country music fan?” I asked, eager to keep our conversation going. It wasn’t exactly protocol to engage with customers like this, but I was always being told to be friendlier. Besides, Janice, the mortgage broker, was the only other person in the branch with me and I was fairly certain she was absorbed in her game of solitaire.

It turned out Mae lacked both an appreciation for the banjo and a piece of mail with her new address. That didn’t stop us from talking. We stood there laughing and chatting until her hair was dry and Janice was shooting me dirty looks.

I was enthralled with her. So much so I asked if I could keep talking to her once I got off work. She blushed something awful but said yes, and suggested a bar around the corner that served decent burgers. I practically ran there after my shift and found her perched on a stool reading Tchaikovsky with a pint of Guinness. We talked all night. Or, rather, I listened to her talk all night. I didn’t mind. The stories she told reminded me of a movie. She was an industrial engineer who traveled the globe applying her expertise. Volunteering to build wells during an African refugee crisis. Working to repair aqueducts in Rome. Harnessing the wind in Greenland to modernize the energy grid. She had a handful of degrees and even held a patent. There was something otherworldly about the way she’d navigated her life, and I was absorbed in every detail.

I saw Mae the next day and the one after that. Every conversation unearthed another one of her adventures or achievements. I’d try to share tidbits about my life, but given that I hadn’t done all that much, it felt better to be quiet than to attempt to keep pace.

Mae was the first person I ever met who made me want to try. Not just to impress her, though that was definitely part of it. It was more that I wanted to test a theory. Simply by sharing the story of her life, she was dismantling my whole belief system. Talking to Mae made me wonder if I’d played it all wrong. The questions that now spun around my head both intrigued and terrified me. What would happen if I leaned into my intelligence? What if I took a risk and tried?

Prior to Mae, I always believed that there was only one answer to these questions: indentured servitude to the capitalist machine. But Mae’s life was pure freedom. She had somehow harnessed her brilliance to enable a life of adventure. It seemed magical and I wanted a piece of it. I didn’t tell her any of this, of course. I was too worried that if I admitted I could have been achieving great things, but was just too lazy to do it, she’d be disgusted and dump me.

After a month of dating regularly, Mae seemed to realize that our relationship was a bit lopsided. At least, that’s what I figured when she started asking me about my life. Like I said, there wasn’t much to tell. I still lived in the same town I grew up in. I hung out with the same people I’d known since high school. I worked at the same boring job for a decade. But she didn’t seem to mind. She would ask me how the city had changed and what I still liked about my buddies after all this time. I preened under the attention, even though a little part of me was embarrassed when our lives were stacked next to each other. I hoped that after enough time, maybe Mae would take me away on one of her adventures and her zest for life would be fueling my own.

One way Mae expressed interest in me was by asking about my workday. It’s a typical thing couples do, so I didn’t think much of it at first. But each week, the questions got successively more detailed. Questions about customers went from graciously interested to unusually inquisitive. Did I know what they did for work? How often did they come in to deposit checks or take out money? Questions about working the till started as companionable. Wasn’t it tough being on my feet all day? Then they veered into oddly specific. Did I always have the same amount of money in the register, or did it vary?

Now, a less intelligent man may not have caught on. Mae was subtle. Questions about work were peppered in with a light hand and always followed up with effusive praise. Mae would often remark on how smart I must be to count cash all day. A not-so-smart man would puff his chest out at that, maybe feeling like he was finally getting his due. But I was able to do advanced calculus in ninth grade, so I knew that counting cash was no great feat.

Once I realized what Mae was up to, I was heartbroken. I had foolishly believed that she liked me in all my ordinariness. That belief gave me hope in myself and my future. Finding out that it was all a ruse devastated me almost enough to send me spiraling back into my sea of self-sabotage.

But the initial sadness faded into anger as I realized what Mae’s duplicitousness meant; there are expectations for unintelligent people too. She’d seen the product of my laziness and assumed I wasn’t that smart. I forgave her for that, given that it was how I’d designed my life. But what angered me was that her assumption caused her to expect that I’d be unobservant and bad at puzzles. And that she expected me to fall into stereotypes, like being too preoccupied with sex to notice that she didn’t have any friends for me to meet. She conflated unintelligence with simplicity, like so many people do. For the first time, being seen that way made me resentful.

Even in all her conniving lies, Mae was still inspiring me to be better. My anger toward her was an ironic source of inspiration, but one I wouldn’t waste. If she wanted to play a game, then I’d give her one. Hell, I would rally my discarded intelligence to win the damn thing.

I kept the relationship going. It was easy, even while knowing that everything she said was a lie. In fact, watching her manipulate me and expertly duck honesty day after day slowly wore down my anger. It was hard to stay mad watching her work. She was brilliant. I hadn’t tried to keep pace with her before, but now that I was, I was even more impressed with the quickness of her mind or the slyness of her plotting.

The questions about the bank kept coming and I answered them all to varying degrees of truth. It was electrifying to think on my feet for the first time in my life. My hypothesis was that her line of questioning would begin to focus to the point where I could figure out her plan through inference. I was right.

Mae’s questions began to swirl around the safe and the movement of cash from it. She was magnificent, dropping by the bank on days I’d mentioned that the armored truck came around. Eventually she timed a visit just right in order to meet the usual driver, Henry. It was enough fodder for her to invent a dislike for him. Did I notice that Henry had been checking her out? That made her uncomfortable, so of course she wanted to avoid him. Could I please give her the schedule of times he came to the branch so she could avoid him? I did, like any good boyfriend would.

She also became interested in the amount of money in the safe. This was where I was able to use white lies to create the foundation for my plan. I told her the truth, which was that the bank only ever had enough cash on hand to keep up administrative expenses. The lie was in telling her the total of our expenses. We were the smaller of the town’s two branches, so at most we only had $50,000 at once. But I heard enough of her stories to see a pattern: a little time in the states followed by a long stretch abroad. My guess was that she wanted enough to keep her comfortable for a few years. I told her we always had about a million in cash — enough to intrigue her but not so much that it seemed improbable. She bought it and the game kept going.

As it played out, I did my research. When I wasn’t with Mae, I was diving into public records. I hadn’t worked that hard at anything in my life. My nights of endless TV or overindulgence at the bar were replaced with long stints at the library hunting for the real Mae. But even when she wasn’t in the room, she outsmarted me. I couldn’t find any reference to a Mae Nelson that was more than a few years old. Unsurprisingly, I also couldn’t find a record of her patent or any of her degrees. While it was certainly possible that she was an engineer once upon a time, it became obvious to me that Mae was mostly made of smoke. I should have been irritated, but I was just more enamored. Every dead end had me shaking my head and smiling with affection at the brilliance of my girlfriend.

We were six months into our relationship when I put the final stages of my plan in motion. I’d spent the last few weeks dropping crumbs about the imminent departure of a patron who always cashed his paychecks rather than depositing them. I made a big show of being annoyed at it, especially because this fictitious man had made so much money that his move meant that we would soon have less petty cash on hand. Mae bought my story that this was the reason I had to pick up a shift at the bank’s other branch, given that this patron was such a big part of our business. She also bought the lie that this meant the cash delivery changed from three times a week to once. I was narrowing down her window of opportunity, daring her to make a move.

While all this was going on, I did what any good bank teller would do and ratted out my girlfriend. I told our district manager that I was suspicious of a patron’s interest in our armored trucks. I called the driving service that ferried our money and told them the same. I gave everyone, including the cops, a detailed description of her, right down to her alleged string of prior addresses. Did I actually care about the bank? Not in the slightest. I knew they’d get reimbursed for any loses. What I did care about was winning a game Mae had no idea I knew I was playing.

She’d expected to be conning a fool. In a way, she was. I’d spent all my life tempering my intelligence to give myself freedom. While it had saved me from a cage like my father’s, it had cornered me into one of my own making. I hadn’t fully lived and that was foolish. Our game required that I tap into a long-dormant brilliance and work toward a self-defined goal. While I would have liked for it to have happened under different circumstances, I couldn’t deny that Mae had brought me to life and irrevocably improved me. It made me love her.

So when she blew into the bank on my alleged day off donning a trench coat, ski mask and Glock, I beamed with pride. Maybe I was also a little giddy at the shock in her eyes when she saw me behind the counter.

“Tim,” she murmured. It gave me a thrill that my name was the first thing on her lips, rather than what I assumed was a well-rehearsed speech about giving her all the money in the safe.

“Hey, Mae,” I said. “I’m not supposed to be here, am I?”

“No. No you’re not,” she narrowed her eyes at me before looking around the building. “Where’s Janice?”

“I told her I’d cover for her while she ran some errands. Tuesday’s a slow day for new mortgages, you know.”

“So it’s just you?” she asked.

“Just us,” I corrected her.

Mae lowered the gun and slowly approached the counter. She pulled up the ski mask to reveal a flushed face and wild tendrils of hair. It reminded me of how she looked after we made love. As she leaned on the counter, her eyes shrewdly took me in. Then, as if finally connecting a series of unseen dots, she gave me one those toothy smiles that still devastated me.

“How long have you known?” she asked.

“About nine months,” I replied.

She whistled low. “Damn, honey. That’s impressive. I had no idea.”

“I know,” I smirked. “That was kind of the point.”

“So, is this when you tell me that you’ve tripped the silent alarm and the cops are on their way?”

“Something like that,” I answered.

“Well, Tim. I guess you win.” Mae was conceding, but there was a glimmer of something else in her eyes. I wanted it to be love, or at the very least admiration.

From blocks away, a symphony of sirens wailed. There had to be at least five cop cars all speeding to the scene of the crime I had tipped them off about. This is where a noble man would feel guilty. But I only said that I was a smart man, not a noble one.

Mae turned her back to me, ready to face her fate. I never loved her more than in that moment; squared shouldered and calm. She was the smartest person I’d ever met, which meant she was smart enough to know when she’d been caught. There was no sense in fleeing the scene or shooting the place up in a rage. She knew that and was likely already five steps into her next plan.

The sirens grew deafening as they neared. I resisted covering my ears. If Mae could take it, so could I. The red and blue lights started to bounce and reflect off all the neighboring buildings, careening into the vestibule of the bank and threatening to make their way to where we stood. Then our heads swiveled in unison as the roar of the convoy crossed the glass front of the bank and sped down the block. Mae spun to look at me with a cocked head and confused expression.

“I told them you were robbing the other branch,” I explained with a smirk. “That’s why I took that other shift there. Throw them off the scent.”

At that, Mae burst out laughing. “Jesus, Tim. I can’t believe it.”

Pride unlike any I had ever known coursed through me. I’d done it. Well, almost. I opened the cash register then walked around from the counter. “Who knows how long you’ve got until they realize I gave them a bad tip. You might want to get moving.”

“You’re not serious,” Mae incredulously said.

“Very,” I answered while detaching my name tag. “The register’s open. Here’s my key card for the safe. The code’s 082185.”

Mae’s eyes narrowed in disbelief. I didn’t mind. If I were in her shoes, I wouldn’t believe me either. I walked over to her, standing close enough for our breaths to mingle.

“Good luck, Mae,” I said. “Knowing you has changed my life.”

At that, her eyes softened and a sad smile danced across her lips.

“Goodbye, Tim,” Mae said and leaned into kiss my cheek. “I’ll never forget you.”

I gave my own sad smile and started to walk out of the bank. Later I would tell the police that I ran for it when Mae came in waving a gun. When they asked, I’d be baffled that the security cameras were glitching. I’d been practicing how to make myself cry so they believed me when I told them I got too flustered to remember to hit the alarm before making a break for it. There’s something about a weeping man that makes a cop find another thing to do real fast.

“Hey, Tim!” Mae’s voice stopped me as I pushed my way out of the first set of doors. I turned to see her already behind the register, stuffing fistfuls of bills into a bag she’d pulled out of nowhere. She was beaming. “I hear Malta is having a hell of a time getting fresh water. Major desalination projects going on along the Southern coast.”

“You don’t say,” I quipped, beaming a bit myself. “Sounds like they’re in need of a good engineer.”

“Sure does,” Mae said, then winked before she ran to the back where we kept the safe.

I chuckled and made my way out to the empty street. As I walked home, I wondered how hard it could possibly be to earn, or maybe fake, an engineering degree. Couldn’t be that bad. Not for a smart man like me.  

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Authors Note: This story was written as a response to a prompt provided by my friend. The first paragraph is theirs. The rest is mine, but wouldn’t have happened without the brilliant beginning.