You Have the Wrong Man

by Maria Flook

  Lane had recently moved and was living in a second-floor apartment in a leafy, residential section of Cambridge. It was an exclusive area. I wasn’t surprised at the high rent she was paying because she had confessed to me that she was doing pretty well. She was going to be able to make it through winter without getting a job. She had just published a popular novel that received enough attention to be optioned by a film company, and she was actually getting some checks from it all.

  We had celebrated her good luck earlier that summer at my place on the sea. I was very fond of the cottage I had rented, a tiny Victorian built around 1910. It still had most of the original shingles, quite weathered, and the house was a salted, silvery color with a few asbestos patches.

  “I could buy this place and fix it up. I could start all over, from the floor on up,” she said, and she waved her arms over the room to emphasize how she would have it demolished.

  “It doesn’t need that much done to it,” I said. I was laughing, but I didn’t see anything wrong with the place.

  “I know an architect at MIT who just needs to have the square feet of a place and he draws up whatever you want done. Sunken tubs, skylights, waterfalls, wet bars, cathedral ceilings, anything. From scratch.”

  “You’d have it razed?” I said.

  She said, “Two stories is plenty.”

  Lane had again misconstrued a rather basic vocabulary word. But I was happy to see her looking so thrilled with her news about her book. I didn’t like to think it was just a matter of some money coming in. I wanted her to be pleased she was there with me, walking the narrow gang-planks that edged my lot and led us down to the sea. Then again, she was very excited about her book and didn’t seem impressed by the rough blue presence, the ragged surf, which always made me feel raw and swooning—as if I might, in a spree, drink it all up or let it drink me.

  She didn’t acknowledge the first icy crescents of foam which touched her, the waves which rushed over her legs and rocked her backwards. She followed me into the water completely distracted by her thoughts. I found her very attractive in her preoccupied state, like a woman succumbing to anesthesia—giddy, dreamy, lips parted. One moment she was submerged and the next she was lifted by the waves. I truly believed she would allow herself to be carried out on a raft of amateurish sensations of greed and self-congratulations. I, too, was buoyed by my fascination with her new success. It washed over me as well.

  I hadn’t expected to see immediate rewards for her first efforts. I was surprised. Her writing was that sweet-savage stuff of the popular romance novel coupled with a new frankness and urgency to tell the truth about one’s childhood and coming of age no matter who was implicated. The setting was the rural South, and the novel’s title was Southern Charms. She was going to call it Charms of the South, but I reminded her of Disney’s feature-length cartoon Song of the South, so she avoided that construction. She had tried to write more than a romance, using allusions to up-to-the-minute feminist discoveries and enough pop psychology that she should have included a glossary. She was naïve in her descriptions of sex, paradoxical in her use of muddied lace and bare skin sticking to vinyl car upholstery. But there was an abundance of entertaining childhood symbols: a doll’s arm was twisted, a teddy bear smashed against the headboard in a love scene. Her publisher was a good publicist, making sure the book was noticed by the newspapers and by today’s literary stars. They lined up on the book jacket like the principals in a shotgun wedding.

  I was glad Lane didn’t have to get a job. I’m forever aiming at that goal, but I’m not unhappy to do some manual labor out under the sun. I took my shirt off delivering the propane tanks and in a few weeks my skin deepened in correspondence to a color chart of wood stain preservatives that was left behind at my cottage. That was fine, because I have a severe widow’s peak which suggests a vampire’s if I get too sallow. Women have said it’s the hairline of a tango artist, of a marquis, of a Casanova. A girl once told me, in her love talk, that I had the chiseled profile of tragic figures in history book block-print illustrations. I said, in reply, that the similarity resided in the fact that all romantic heroes died young, before they started to lose their hair. In fact, I know that women are intrigued by a rather dramatic scar that runs down one side of my face. It’s a perfect line, carved like a seam of grout. In our idle games, once I even let a girl roll a tiny BB or ball bearing down its track.

  I was able to get the Friday off and I was glad to be driving north, into the city to see her. It was good to breathe the impurities and diesel fumes of the Southeast Expressway and to inch along with the back-up on Storrow Drive. That carbonized perfume and oily aftertaste was fine with me after too much salt air and the overwhelming scent of hot scrub pines that had intoxicated me all summer.

  That evening we were going to a book-signing party. After the party I would take her to some bars where we would get drunk. Lane was an easy drunk, as some men say about innocents, and I liked to think of her that way too. With a few rounds in her, I could have a little height over her, I could graduate to the head of the class. In daylight hours she was often too bossy with me. She confined me to a mild-mannered, superficial behavior which irritated me the way wool slacks can chafe the inner thigh when you’re walking in a direction you don’t want to be going.

  She sometimes made me feel like a boy climbing the narrow stairs of a choir loft.

  I looked forward to the dark of the coming night. I thought of it this way—I wanted an asphalt-and-glass situation after the white light of the seaside, I wanted to get her immersed in darkness and in the loud music of the times.

  When I arrived at her door, she was dressed in a flowery kimono. The robe was torn and unraveling at the shoulder. This, I can tell you, was completely calculated. She said she was getting into the bath or out of it, so I turned around and went down the street to a Store 24 for a carton of cigarettes, which I knew I’d be ripping through in two days. She already had me biting the nail off my little finger and flicking it into the gutter as I walked back to her place. The sun was heavy and dripping through the leaves like a form of coy lava—I knew it was going to be hard for me to keep calm, the façade was rippling, yet not falling away. I kept saying to myself, this might be the time I get my way. I might be rewarded for my utter patience, but not unless I was able to contain myself. I must continue to relate to the world as mouse to lion, as flea to dog. I had to go on that way just a bit more. I took a deep abdominal breath, like a pearl diver or someone standing below a window starting his serenade. Even breathing had become a secret chore. With Lane, I practiced the nonchalant sigh, the easygoing exhalations of someone trying to go with the flow. In truth, I was fighting against an internal current, a carnal river rising. I could no longer outsmart it with intellectual patter between drags from my Winston Kings. Being with Lane was like doing the crawl in a Swim-Ex, battling the mechanical waves in a bathtub-size stationary swimming pool. You keep swimming and never reach the shore.

  Inside, she showed me a few crumpled pages from the new novel she was working on. She said she had been working poorly because of the humidity. The humidity in Boston was much worse than the humidity below the Mason-Dixon line. “One is oppressive, the other is sultry,” she explained. The Boston kind was taking its toll on her. Then she blamed her dog. The dog was whining all night. “Masha’s in heat again. I’ve cleaned it up but you might find a trace I didn’t see,” she said.

  “A trace of what?”

  “You know.”

  “Oh, Christ.” I didn’t know what else to say. Lane had named the dog after reading a few paragraphs in The Portable Chekhov. Whether Masha was one of Chekhov’s greedy serfs or a member of the aristocracy, Lane couldn’t tell me.

  “You should have her spayed,” I said, although I had said it before.

  “If you had a dog, would you have it altered?” Her voice exaggerated the word altered, as if she were speaking of torture situations involving the canine psyche.

  “This is al
l hypothetical, but, yes, I say it’s less cruel in the long run.”

  “And what about lobotomy?” she asked. “Is that a merciful procedure?”

  How she made these leaps I can’t say, but they amused me. “Except for a few important chemicals, the brain is not the essential organ in reproduction. We’re talking about an overpopulation of mutts.”

  “Is that what we’re talking about? Pedigrees?”

  I went along with this initial babble, though this was a playful uneasiness, a relentless back-and-forth I wanted to avoid.

  She jumped in and said, “Let’s go shopping, I need something cool to wear.”

  “Talc is nice,” I said. My voice was strong, still wry, without a desperate edge.

  The shopping idea seemed all right—I needed to get outside to get some air. I wanted to breathe the good dust of the automobiles. I stood on the sidewalk as she searched through racks of cheap Eastern sundresses which were arranged in tight rows in front of a shop reeking of incense and herb oils. She chose some shifts and went inside to try them on. In a few moments she came back to show me how she looked in one. It was “like a bandana,” I said, and she frowned. She purchased a plain white dress. “An anorectic’s wedding gown,” I said. “Nurses’ wear at your basic Roumanian hospital,” I told her.

  She frowned again.

  “An angel’s underthing,” I said, and one side of her mouth lifted in a crooked smile. She liked what I was saying. Her smile was disturbing. I felt the first, tiny pinball of optimism shooting around in my belly.

  We met in a college town and came to depend on one another without the fulfillment or debt of admitting our love. We never assumed appropriate roles. From there we continued our friendship, wrote letters about our work and about our lives, our landlords and lovers, those kinds of predicaments. She put it this way: “We are cut from the same fabric. If I never see you again, in fifty years we’ll probably end up in the same rag heap.” I didn’t like the metaphor. She seemed to be saying we would never unite in our lifetimes but that at the end of our days, as castoffs, we would find one another in our solitary tatters. But I was encouraged to believe that we were inseparable in some way. She came through the towns I lived in and stayed for a few days here or there, she slept near me, sometimes in the same bed, her bitch Masha lying at our feet, a swirl of red fur, tail knocking.

  After buying the dress, we walked over to the river and sat on a bench in the shade. The park was busy with couples—college students, accountants on their coffee breaks, lovers in difficult stages of reunion or flight. These various pairs were immersed in small games, shoving one another or embracing, flirting, frowning, exhibiting all the comical gestures and little threats of new or steady romances. What these enviable matches did together, in public view—even those couples snoozing on car blankets—amounted to something. I let my imagination walk a straight line from where Lane and I sat to some distant point, but I was walking there alone. The funny thing was, Lane was always holding my hand or shining her huge, flat turquoise ring on the knee of my pants. She put her arm through mine, and we walked along the river. I saw our reflections momentarily sketched and then erased, smeared across the graphite surface of the Charles.

  I was curious to watch what was happening to her as the novel kept selling. She adopted mannerisms and styles from different literary grand dames. She tried to copy Virginia Woolf’s eye makeup from an early photograph of the novelist. Woolf had worn a thin smudged line in the hollow of her eyelid, where the delicate membrane meets the bony socket. The line helped to dramatize her sunken look. But Woolf’s cosmetological method was hard to employ. Lane’s face, no matter how she tried to embellish it or shade it, was too fresh, expectant, blank.

  Yet, she was publishing’s new pretty one with a knack for fancy phrases. Her imagery and metaphors made readers want to scratch their heads, but a smitten public forgave the numerous incongruities in her prose. The text didn’t matter. Her looks were the whole package. People said, “Look at that face,” when they saw her picture. Lane had a face that made you think a child was staring, home-sick, out of a woman’s eyes. For a few weeks, her photograph was everywhere.

  In one picture, Lane was walking away from the photographer, her face tilted, turning back to look over her shoulder in shy gratitude. It was a come-on. Her eyebrow was lifted in submissive wariness. Lane melded the prim and the sexual with angelic perfection. Yet, don’t angels, especially those ones painted on cathedral ceilings, dressed in their gauzy bolts, just look like whores on Sunday?

  During this time of celebration about her book, she often called me to complain about her situation. With all the distractions, she was not able to work on her next novel, and, then, could she actually write a novel any better than the first? When I tried to encourage her, she changed the subject abruptly. She just wanted me to listen as she listed the obligations and burdens of sudden fame. I told her she looked beautiful on the cover of the novel. She said, “I think my hair is too full.”

  “Sphinxlike,” I reassured her. “You look like a sphinx.”

  “Doesn’t it stick out like a shelf?”

  “No, really. You’re just a sphinx.”

  Several months ago, in the dead of winter, she called me in a frantic mood. “I need your advice,” she told me. “I really don’t know what to do.” Her voice was breathy, humid as if from tears.

  I was lonely those days and I was greatly warmed by her voice. Her apparent confusion and neediness activated my numbed-up charms and ignited the braided wick of all my complex humane impulses. After weeks of poor-me solitude, I was happy to offer my support, if I could. When she was off-balance like this, I felt stronger on my own legs. I was reminded of my talents and abilities; I could feel my height and weight as a man; I would test the fabric and flex of my character. It was good to entertain these ideas of myself against the backdrop of her frailty.

  “What is it?” I asked. “You can tell me—”

  “People magazine,” she said,

  “People?”

  “They want to do a thing on me. Should I go with it? What do you think?”

  Her news felt like when I took some buckshot; a row of burning cinnamon Red Hots had been grafted to my thighs and buttocks. I had wanted her to admit to a station of loneliness that might have paralleled my own. By comparing our trials we might have engendered a mutual sympathy which in turn could have ignited a further commitment, a reciprocal desire.

  “People?” I told her. “Hell, why not People?”

  “Oh, great,” she said with exaggerated relief. “I thought it might be, well, sort of tacky. But they say it sells books.”

  “Sure it would,” I said.

  “Well, should I wear my hair up for the picture? I could leave it down, but up looks better. Won’t I look more serious if I put it in a french braid or something? I mean I don’t want to look like just anybody.”

  “Up is good,” I told her. Then I told her that I had a medical problem. I said I might have found a lump somewhere, and maybe it was something. She paused, she seemed truly concerned. She asked me if I was certain it was cancer and shouldn’t I go to a doctor despite the fact that I was almost a doctor myself. I didn’t actually say it was cancer. Later that night I called her back, I said I had lied, but I couldn’t say why. I didn’t know why. It wasn’t because of People magazine. It was a lie that assumes its position in desire. It appears suddenly, without rehearsal or further explanation. It swells up like a physical hurt, a nodule, an unnameable lump, a lie. I’ve studied some research that proved that loneliness can kill you. Lonely people are more likely to have infections, kidney stones, even fatal illnesses. People living alone get three times as many cold viruses and are more likely to develop digestive ailments and skin disorders. Perhaps this was happening to me.

  I wasn’t irked by her success. I was happy for her. I cringed when a critic called her book, “Fantasy Tales of Daisy Mae and Li’l Abner.” It was true, she had a whitetrash background that
she exploited mercilessly. She knew the speech patterns, the drawls and twangs of the West Virginia mining regions. Even when her prose was tangled and purple, she had learned to exploit her native communities, the destitute Appalachian landscapes, the tar-paper shacks and abandoned rail yards, body and soul.

  She was in the small kitchen, spooning out ice cubes from an aluminum pitcher and filling our glasses with tea and shaved lemon slices cut so thin they looked like the gills of a fish. I would have preferred a little of the bourbon that I had remembered to bring with me. Lane was satisfied with fruity wines or syrupy brandies. I had learned to look after my own thirsts. I went into the bathroom to find an unpleasant scene. The floor was smeared and there were dark paw prints everywhere. I was used to a little mess now and then, but this could have been cleaned up before my arrival. “Expecting any guests?” I called back to her.

  “Oh, God,” I heard her say, “I forgot. The dog was in there last night. I had to lock her up and I haven’t tidied up yet.”

  “Didn’t you say you took a bath in here today?” I was looking at the dog hair and red smears in the tub where the dog had scratched the porcelain. “Masha must have had a bad night,” I said. Lane came into the bathroom with a bucket of Spic and Span and two new sponges. I started on the tub and she went to work on the floor.