by Maria Flook
Also by
MARIA FLOOK
Family Night
Open Water
Copyright © 1996 by Maria Flook
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Pantheon Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.
Many of the stories in this collection were originally published in the following: Agni Review: “Rhode Island Fish Company” · Bomb Magazine: “Riders to the Sea” (also reprinted in The Pushcart Prize Anthology, 1995) · Michigan Quarterly Review: “Asbestos” · Northwest Review: “Lane” · Playgirl: “You Are Here” (originally published under title “Clean”) · Ploughshares: “Exchange Street” (originally published under title “Cheaters’ Club”) · Triquarterly: “Prince of Motown”
Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following for permission to reprint previously published material: Jobete Music Co., Inc.: Excerpt from “Too Busy Thinking About My Baby,” words and music by Barrett Strong, Norman Whitfield, and Janie Bradford, copyright © 1966 by Jobete Music Co., Inc. Reprinted by permission of Jobete Music Co., Inc. · Jobete Music Co., Inc., and Stone Diamond Music Corporation: Excerpt from “Let’s Get It On,” words and music by Marvin Gaye and Ed Townsend, copyright © 1973 by Jobete Music Co., Inc., and Stone Diamond Music Corporation. Reprinted by permission of Jobete Music Co., Inc., and Stone Diamond Music Corporation. · Hal Leonard Corporation: Excerpt from “Sexual Healing,” words and music by Marvin Gaye and Dell Brown, copyright © 1982 by EMI April Music Inc., Bug Pie Music Publishing and EMI Blackwood Music Inc. All rights for Bug Pie Music Publishing controlled and administered by EMI April Music Inc. All rights reserved. International copyright secured. Reprinted by permission of Hal Leonard Corporation. · Melody Trails, Inc.: Excerpt from “Turn! Turn! Turn! (To Everything There Is A Season),” words from the Book of Ecclesiastes, adaptation and music by Pete Seeger, TRO—copyright © 1962 (Renewed) by Melody Trails, Inc. Reprinted by permission of Melody Trails, Inc., New York, N.Y.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Flook, Maria.
You Have the Wrong Man : stories by Maria Flook.
p. cm.
eISBN: 978-0-307-83162-0
I. Title.
PS3556.L583R48 1996
813′.54—dc20 95-26156
v3.1
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
My thanks to friends who have encouraged me in the writing of these stories: to Kim Witherspoon and John Hoberg, to Claudine O’Hearn, to Lou Papineau, to Kate Flook, for lending me her copy of J. M. Synge, and for her confidence, and to Judith Grossman, for her kinship and faith. My full gratitude to Daniel Frank, my editor, who opened essential windows in this text, from which I saw deeper and deeper.
for John Skoyles
NORMA
I want the coffin to be white.
And I want it specially lined with satin. White, or deep pink.
She picks up the shawl to make up her mind about the color. From under the shawl flops down a dead arm. Gillis stares and recoils a little. It is like a child’s arm, only black and hairy.
NORMA
Maybe red, bright flaming red.
Gay. Let’s make it gay.
Gillis edges closer and glances down. Under the shawl he sees the sad, bearded face of a dead chimpanzee.
Norma drops back the shawl.
NORMA
How much will it be? I warn you—
don’t give me a fancy price just
because I’m rich.
GILLIS
Lady, you’ve got the wrong man.
—Sunset Boulevard
Charles Brackett, Billy Wilder, D. M. Marshman, Jr.
CONTENTS
Cover
Other Books by This Author
Title Page
Copyright
Acknowledgments
Dedication
Epigraph
RHODE ISLAND FISH COMPANY
LANE
YOU ARE HERE
THE GOLDEN THERAPIST
PRINCE OF MOTOWN
EXCHANGE STREET
ASBESTOS
RIDERS TO THE SEA
About the Author
RHODE ISLAND FISH COMPANY
I have been losing sleep because of a fish truck parked outside my bedroom window. The cooling unit on top of the cab makes a constant hum. The hum itself isn’t too bad, I could have adjusted to that, but the pulse of the freon varies in tone. Low gurgles and sudden surges, an almost moody mechanical tempo that is ruining my nights. It’s important to me to keep on top of my fatigue. My twenty-year-old niece has come to live with me for a semester. I’m happy to have someone in the house again. I might have sold it after the dust settled and my husband moved to Denver. My sons were grown. I stayed because I have always liked our street, which crests College Hill. Living on a hill is lucky; I look down at the city and see the metallicized glass and rosy granites of the New Providence. I still like the ashy façades of the old buildings, the chalky dome of the State House upon its brilliant marble plinths. The light here is constant; it enters the house early, arcs across, and in the evening it’s on the other side with nothing to obstruct it.
My sleepless nights worry me because I need to be fresh in order to remain level. I wanted to maintain my initial “openness,” which my niece seemed to appreciate from the start. I have grown to enjoy her company, although she is mercurial, unpredictable, dewy, then full of bile. I try to comfort her, but sometimes I cross a line and I can’t tell until I’m over it and she has already retreated.
I enjoy opening my closet so she might have something “on loan,” and I’m never shaken if she’s slow to return it. My boyfriend, Garland, insists it’s vanity itself that I encourage Pamela to wear my clothes and give her carte blanche with my hundred-dollar shoes. He says I put her in my wardrobe as proof to all that I have kept my figure. He is right. I am pleased that at thirty years her senior, my pinstripe Capri pants, my kitschy pearled sweaters, and a gorgeous rubbed-silk Italian jacket fit Pamela as if she were me. We are similarly svelte, narrow-waisted. My curves have held up. Pam sometimes rifles through my lingerie drawer since we are the same cup size. Not overly buxom, but lord knows, not flat. I found her in my bedroom and we shared the tight oval of the antique pedestal mirror. Reflected there, we discussed what we thought was the sublime optimum. What was perfection? We made our lists and briskly concurred—the ideal was early Loren.
“She’s completely drenched, you remember? Her shirt is clinging,” Pamela said. “She walks out of the water onto the beach in that scene from Boy on a Dolphin.”
It was remarkable to me that my niece should identify that particular Sophia Loren movie. I watched the film with my husband twenty-six years ago in the basement of the university here, when I was eight months pregnant. My ankles were swollen. I suffered from mild toxemia and held an amber prescription bottle of diuretic pills, which I swallowed on the half-hour with a cup of tepid cola. I was disappointed to learn that Pamela had never actually seen the film but only a poster of the starlet in her soaked jersey.
I sometimes recognize a familiar male scent on my sweaters when Pamela hands them back. It’s the rich smoke from unfiltered cigarettes and sometimes the crude, slightly sweet odor of shucked oysters. A briny residue which adheres to her boyfriend, Leon, long after he’s washed up after work. I think Pamela hoards my clothes on purpose, a signal of protest when my warmth becomes too much for her. Yet, when it comes, I like the way her gratitude is expressed in quick, astonished whispers, which she checks.
Sitting across from her at the table, I notice her thick chestnut hair is the impenetrable
red of Renoir’s women. I mentioned this to Pamela because she was enrolled at Rhode Island School of Design and she should know the reference. She looked at me, nodded. She stabbed a green bean and moved it like a push broom over the plate before she put it in her mouth. She kept her left arm in her lap so I couldn’t see the persistent blemish of a tattoo she had recently removed, inexpertly, with a surgical razor. The sore was still raw. I made her go to the doctor and he told her to apply Silvadene Cream and a loose dressing, but Pamela believed that a wound needs some air now and then. Dinner time was the only hour she could squeeze into her schedule to air it.
At the School of Design, Pamela had a rich social life which carried her from one day into the next. Her rituals of health and hygiene, and, in this case, wound-dressing, were always pushed back to suit her schedule of excitements.
The tattoo was a leftover from her teen years in Philadelphia, when she joined a girl gang. The gang was called the Fem Fatals. The name lacked the French pronunciation. The gang had shortened their name to just the Fatals, then they called themselves, quite simply, the Fates. I remember discussing this with Pamela at the time. She must have been fifteen when I asked her about the three goddesses, Atropos, Clotho, and Lachesis. I wondered if her group of girls had known about them. Pam had said, “Three fates, really?” She had looked quite skeptical. She said, “Don’t we just have one fate? The thing is, you buy it. Right? It’s just a matter of when it’s going to happen. It doesn’t matter how.”
Pamela was more sophisticated since she had started college, and she didn’t like to talk about the years she roamed with the girl gang. Most of all, she seemed embarrassed that her gang had been all of one gender. She wore long-sleeved sweatshirts over her tattoo, and finally she decided to rid herself of the actual mark. Pamela said, “You have to remember, it was the early eighties. We didn’t have anything to do but hang out. Tattoos were the hot thing, they were contagious. Like a spider’s web.”
I said, “How is a spider’s web contagious?”
“The idea. The idea gets on you like a sticky web. It trapped all the girls in the neighborhood. Maybe it was because of Cher, I don’t know. Cher was a curse on us.”
“Cher was?”
“Yeah. She was, like, a hero at first. She was cool, at first. But it wasn’t like the sixties when people knew how to go about it.”
“Go about what?” I said.
“You know, change the world. Don’t you remember, didn’t you try it?”
I told her I was busy raising my baby sons, though I was sympathetic and wore black armbands on occasion. I wasn’t trying to rile her, but she looked at me in astonishment. She was trying to picture me pushing a baby stroller in the park while the war raged in Vietnam. “You had your babies in the sixties?” She stared at me hotly. She couldn’t believe it. She hit the saltcellar against the palm of her hand. Nothing.
“It’s the humidity,” I said. I apologized for the salt shaker; I wasn’t going to apologize for the other.
She told me she didn’t think a black armband would be much help then or now.
Pamela’s teens had been hardest for my brother, who didn’t have the gift of flex. I hated to watch him square off with Pam. It was like looking at a flood on the television. The news footage shows the muddy current plunging through a town, taking everything, but there’s always a big tree standing against it. Pam was twenty now, and going to school. I was pleased to have her stay with me during her first semester. Then it was up to her and her father to figure out where she would go. Dormitory, apartment, loft. There were many reasonable options.
“It’s better to be scarred than to have a tattoo,” Pam was saying.
“That’s a doozie of a scar,” I said, eyeing the sore patch on her forearm.
“I just hope I got all the ink out,” Pam said, “it looks pretty awful. At least you can’t read what it says.” She studied the place on her arm where the deep writing had been. “Illegible,” she said, “thank God.”
Her arm looked like the fell on a leg of lamb, the blotted violet ink of a meat inspector’s stamp beneath a yellow scab the size of a small wallet. “It will heal,” I told Pamela. “You didn’t want the word Fatals written there forever. You were right to remove it. I’m just glad you went to see the doctor. Your arm could have become infected.”
Pam said, “The doctor was okay. He didn’t ask me about it. He knew I made a mistake, but he didn’t grill me.”
“He didn’t ask what the tattoo had said?”
“No, he was cool about it,” Pamela said.
I was happy my doctor had behaved himself. It felt strange to have someone in my charge again. My two boys were grown and thousands of miles off. I tried to remember the last time I had driven either one of them to a doctor. It was David with a split lip that wouldn’t heal. The physician sprinkled graphite powder or something just as sooty on his mouth, and after a time the crack disappeared. Then, David was gone to college in Denver to be near his father. Denver. What a place to go to college. David just had to leave New England. New England can be suffocating to some. My oldest son, Michael, dropped out of college. He was running a healthy business writing and printing résumés for law and medical school graduates and for hundreds of others whose impressive fields I had imagined my own sons might have pursued.
Pamela, sitting across from me, dabbing her arm with a two-ply napkin, was an absurdity, really. But I welcomed her. She was always changing her appearance; her lovely hair was fluffed one day and gluey the next with a hair dressing that smelled peculiarly familiar, like diaphragm jelly. “Don’t knock it,” she said. “It works like Dippity-Do.” Her clothing was sometimes too tight. Her jersey leggings exposed both curves and muscle, the taut fabric exposed a clenched tendon or shimmied over a hollow dimple, made evocative creases at her pudendum.
I too wear running tights, but I make sure my oversized T-shirt falls past my hips.
Pamela was immersed in contemporary culture, but she at last had a focus. She was studying graphic design, something for a career in advertising. She could never make it all the way through her explanation of what she planned to do. I knew she hadn’t really decided on a final goal; it went against her grain to do so. At least she went to class every day. I trusted something would emerge. I was nosy and I once opened her portfolio to find it empty except for a book of wallpaper samples: daisies, fleurs-de-lis, imitation marbles, paisleys, and washable vinyl plaids. I couldn’t resist asking her about it, and she told me these books of wallpapers gave her ideas. “Design breeds design,” she told me. “One curlicue leads to another more defiant and ultimately awesome spiral. Curves and planes, everything has to oppose or relate.”
I started backing out of her room, but she was smiling, teasing. If she was bluffing she wasn’t trying to hide it, and this made me believe she wasn’t bluffing after all.
My friend Garland wasn’t pleased to hear I took her in. “You never mentioned this niece,” he said, as if to accuse me of conjuring up my niece out of the thin air. I assured him that Pamela was never around in the evenings and we could still have our privacy. I told him perhaps he might invite me to his house for once. I could bring fresh linens over there. He always said his own sheets were soiled and rumpled and he didn’t want me to have to rough it. “Now’s your chance to tidy up,” I said. I was tired of Garland’s “I’m an old recluse living amidst towers of old newspapers and crusted sardine tins” routine. Garland was a poseur. He was theatrical, phobic, but only to a degree that enabled him to avoid a full-blown obligation. His house at the university was a rather calculated mess. It was meant to ward off all but the most undiscerning strays, graduate students who came and went, unafraid of Garland’s three-day-old coffee and greasy glassware. Garland’s apartment sported a door-length poster of a bullfighter and a few faded Chinese lanterns strung from the ceiling fixtures with nylon fishing line. These eyesores were leftovers from previous tenants, from the pre-Beatles era, and yet Garland had lived there, in
that one apartment, for twenty-two years, more than two decades, and with two different wives. The lanterns, the bullfighting poster remained. Certainly, these things were meant to imply he wasn’t settling down yet; he wasn’t a permanent tenant within any specific ethos, time frame, or any imprisoning building structure. He didn’t wish to redecorate his surrounds; he didn’t want furnishings and artwork that might accurately clock or log his existence. Therefore, he needn’t knock down the fading paper scraps of the early dwellers; their imprint was still important to him because it prevented his own. Even the few souvenirs or relics left over from his two marriages were arranged here or there as if he had come upon them after the fact. I actually preferred my own house to his, but something made me want to assert my presence in his apartment, and I was always trying to do it.
“It’s ugly now,” Pam said, showing Garland the oozing strip of skin. “It will smooth out eventually. It has a few phases to go through. The doctor said it will get crinkly like a second-degree burn.”
“A second-degree burn is not something to sneeze at,” Garland said.
“Yeah, but at least it won’t say ‘Fatals’ anymore,” Pam told him.
“Praise the lord,” Garland said.
“She’s showing you something, you don’t have to criticize,” I said to him.
“Maybe I’m being churlish, but I just ate a heavy meal,” he said.
“No sweat,” Pam said, “it takes stomach to look at it for long.”
“Why don’t you cover it up?” Garland said.
“She does. She does cover it up. I bought her the gauze sponges and the tape,” I said.
Pam held her arm extended so that it divided the room. “Men don’t like this kind of thing,” she said. She stood there and waited to see if I would defend Garland, who had moved to the leather sofa. I shrugged my shoulders, but I turned my back slightly on Garland and she was satisfied.
