You Have the Wrong Man

by Maria Flook

  The dog was not one to run and find its own leash. After a search I offered my belt, but Lane decided to tie a scarf to its collar. I thought the accessory looked too flimsy for a shackle, it was just a chiffon streamer from somewhere deep in the closet. Then we were back on the street for a nice midnight stroll. Masha had recuperated from the Valium and strained against the scarf.

  After going a few blocks down Mount Auburn, I stopped Lane and kissed her. She would accept an occasional mild demonstration. I kissed her for too long and she pushed my chin away with the heel of her hand.

  Out of nowhere, rogue dogs appeared, circling our Masha. I picked up a stone from the crumbling curb and threw it at the largest beast. It hit him square in the nose but it had no effect. The stone dropped to the sidewalk in front of the animal and he sniffed it once dutifully. We kept walking.

  “Puppies are out of the question,” Lane was telling her dog.

  “We better go back before they get at her,” I said.

  “Don’t let them.”

  “I’m not a canine bodyguard. That costs extra.”

  “Oh, that’s nice. Don’t go out of your way or anything.”

  Another dog trotted towards us. He was exceptionally motivated and made a beeline for the bitch. In surprise, or defeat, Lane let go of the chiffon scarf and the whole pack of dogs took off after her pet. We could hear them barking up one sidewalk and down another block as we ran after. Then there was silence. I imagined her dog and another locked together, the chiffon ribbon ruffling in the wind.

  “Isn’t there some sort of leash law in Cambridge? Dogs shouldn’t roam the streets like that.” I tried to sound indignant, but I was weary. “Oh, well. She’ll come back when she’s knocked up.”

  “Are you crazy? We have to find her. Don’t just stand there like that.”

  I got the car and we patrolled the neighborhood blocks. We found a mangy convention of canines and Masha jumped into the car, still sporting the chiffon scarf.

  “She’s dog-tired,” I said.

  “Oh great. Now you’re a punster,” Lane said. “If this dog gets pregnant, I’ll kill her!”

  “Spay her. She needs a breather.”

  “But the money,” Lane said.

  Like Cagney, I wanted to rotate a grapefruit in her face.

  “Have you got an extra pair of underpants?”

  “No, not for a dog,” I said. I fell on the sofa, and stretched out my legs. I shut my eyes the way I do when I feel like making a point while still holding my tongue. Then I removed my boots, heel to toe, without using my hands. That’s another good one. “What’s on TV?” I said. I really wouldn’t have minded watching something.

  “Didn’t you bring any underwear?”

  “I don’t wear shorts in the summer, I put ’em in mothballs.” I pulled the palm of my hand over my face. I followed my scar with my index finger, a mannerism I no longer tried to restrict.

  “What have you got against me and my dog?” she said, but she wasn’t serious. She came over to the sofa with some microwaved food. We sat together and ate.

  “You go to a lot of trouble,” I said.

  “Cooking is for housewives,” she said.

  “You can’t be bothered with simple domestic courtesies,” I said.

  “Exactly, but you don’t believe me. You don’t really think I’m an artist, that I belong to this world.”

  “Sure, you belong. There’s room for one more.”

  She looked worried that I might not have understood. “I don’t mean museums,” she said. “I don’t mean one specific place.”

  I looked around the apartment. I saw nothing but junk. One time a renowned painter had offered her a painting. He must have been campaigning for her when he gave her one of his better pieces. She accepted the painting but later returned it saying it wouldn’t fit in with her “decor.” She had initially thought the colors had matched her slipcovers, but the art wasn’t suitable. It was abstract art. Lane couldn’t understand the picture. “Doesn’t it look like a huge molar? An X-ray of teeth?” She was thinking about buying some Audubon prints. Birds, insects, flowers.

  Most of all, Lane was fond of photographs. The walls of her apartment were ruined with industrial-size tacks and masking tape which she had used to arrange pictures of her friends and family. She had enlarged the prints until everything looked grainy. She had pictures of me. Pictures of Masha. She had very little talent as a photographer, but she had learned how to read the light meter and to adjust the focus in Photography 101 at college. Since then, she seemed interested in documenting her life in an offhand, confused way. She took her own portrait when she had dressed to go to her father’s funeral. There she was, sitting on the mortuary stairs, her white gloves in her lap. She had taken her self-portrait every day during the weeks following an abortion. “I have to remember how sad I was,” she said. She didn’t look very sad at all. She had just permed her hair and it extended over her shoulders like heavenly froth.

  “I was sad. I was devastated,” she told me. “That doesn’t mean I stopped shampooing my hair.” These details made me think there was something more to her. Was this darkness contrived? It continued to puzzle me. It was the same feeling I get when I search my house because I think I detect the smell of smoke, perhaps I’ve left a butt in the sofa. I walk through every room expecting to find something smoldering, maybe blazing, and I can’t find anything. In one way it’s a relief not to find a fire, then again it’s a matter of concern, I keep thinking I haven’t looked hard enough and the place will go up in the dark of night.

  Every girl I have ever known has had some nude photographs of herself. A nude series taken by an old boyfriend, a college roommate, a brother maybe. It’s not just vanity, but plain curiosity. Women like to know what they look like front and back. Lane had cheesecake pictures of herself and she gave me my choice of them. A student photographer had taken a series of her in an old garage. Lane tried several poses which even the mainstream girlie magazines would have considered cornball. In almost all of the shots she held a Mae West parasol or a fake revolver. Wild West–style. One of these pictures interested me, though. The photographer had asked her to hold a junked windowpane. She cupped a large piece of glass in the palms of her hands; its two thick edges crossed her at the waist and thigh and magnified her pelvic terrain, the slope of her belly, the smoky triangle I had seen only once before in true life. There it all was. Behind glass. I chose that picture, but she refused to give it to me. She said she wanted me to have the one where she’s holding the ruffled parasol.

  Lane had been taking a photography course when we first met. I’d seen her at different events, and at the Health Center when she came in for a ringworm infection that she had contracted from her dog. Then she called me one evening to ask me if I would like to be her “subject.” “Would you mind?” she said.

  I didn’t know what she meant. I thought maybe she was conducting a sociological experiment or one of those tests where you’re asked to avoid sugar or required to take massive doses of vitamin A while they test your urine or they see if your lips have developed fissures and cracks. When she mentioned pictures, I figured it was something to do with my scar. I’d had a number of medical photographs taken over the years. It’s funny how scar tissue can draw medical interest years after the initial laceration. Once or twice I was paid for some photographs, but usually the doctors had said it was just for my chart. I have since learned how patients are exploited in a thousand ways like this.

  Lane told me she just needed to take some portraits for her photography class. She said, “I think you’d be interesting.” I figured she was flirting with me then, and I agreed to meet her the next afternoon.

  My girlfriend at that time was in the process of leaving me for another man, but she couldn’t resist hanging around to see what was happening with this photographer. I had spent the morning in a chipper mood, enjoying the second thoughts of my girlfriend. The photo session was spoiling her plans. She had wante
d to leave me “high and dry.”

  I expected Lane’s camera to be large, perhaps the kind that required a tripod. It was a tiny Rolex, the size of a cigarette box. Lane held it before her eye as if she were reading the Surgeon General’s Warning. I couldn’t hear the shutter. My girlfriend was getting pretty irritated; she didn’t believe that there was any film in the camera. I, too, had wondered about that—how often do you load that camera, how many shots on a roll? Lane seemed to be snapping a thousand shots, but after a while I started to like it. She bossed me. She told me to sit where the light edged my profile. She had me stand against a white wall; then she made me stand beneath a small arch between rooms. Lane took me through all the rooms of my apartment, as if she were looking for a place she had seen before. “Here,” she said, “stand here at the foot of this rumpled bed. Now sit down. That’s right. Now get in.”

  She came back into the living room wearing her tattered robe. I saw I was on the money about the sock, because she had exchanged the sock for a velour facecloth and she was dutifully pressing an ice cube against her eye. “How did you rip your kimono?” I asked.

  “It’s a thrift-store thing. All the stitches were rotten, and when I washed it—poof. It’s ninety-nine years old to begin with.”

  “Why do you girls like that sort of thing? You hunt around until you find something another woman tossed out and you think it’s the greatest.”

  “I have an interest in the unknown past,” she said.

  “Whose past?”

  “The person who owned this robe might have been spectacular. I like to think so, anyway.”

  “Did you have imaginary friends when you were a child?”

  “Yes!” She was laughing, delighted I had brought this up. “They were the best friends of all. I was totally at ease with them,” she said.

  I thought she certainly must be joking. She wasn’t.

  She turned to me and said, “You know everything about a woman’s body, don’t you? I mean, you studied everything, didn’t you?”

  I answered yes, of course. I had studied it all.

  “I thought you would know.”

  “Don’t you feel well?”

  “It’s just on my mind,” she said.

  I had told her before that I never wanted her to ask me for medical advice. It’s funny how medical students are burdened by their friends coming over to show them muscle strains, skin rashes, sore throats. I had refused to look at her ear when Lane had a fullness sensation and she heard clicking. The symptoms were related to common hay fever, I was sure. It was a cranky Eustachian tube, but I didn’t have the right instruments, nor did I want to make an incorrect diagnosis.

  “Female troubles? What is it?” I asked, but I could not look at her. “A sore? Cramps? A burning sensation? Abdominal tenderness?”

  “No, nothing like that. God, is that what you say to patients?”

  “I don’t have patients. I’m not a doctor. You’re being unfair asking me these questions.”

  “Sorry,” she said.

  I didn’t want to know what ailed her. I was banging an ice tray at the kitchen sink. I hated to have to drink something, but suddenly I had a weak sensation in my knees and at the base of my spine like the feeling I get when I’ve slammed on the brakes to avoid an accident and it takes a few moments for the adrenaline to melt away. I poured bourbon into a glass until I remembered to stop pouring.

  Lane said, “It’s some kind of blister.”

  “A blister?”

  “Yes.” She was sitting on the edge of the sofa. She looked embarrassed, but she also looked incredibly relieved. She was beaming at me.

  “I’m not looking at your blister.”

  “Why not?”

  “You better go to a doctor if you think you’ve got a problem. That’s what they’re there for.”

  “Can’t you check it?”

  “I’m not looking at your blister. That’s final.” How could my love object detail her imperfections with such aplomb?

  The breeze was coming in the window behind her. I noticed the skin on her arms was raised with goose pimples. I went around behind her to shut the window. I wasn’t paying attention when I removed the musty volume of The Magic Mountain and the upper sash slammed down. My fingers were caught between the two tight sashes and I couldn’t free my fingers. I couldn’t jimmy either window. She was at my side, trying to lift the bottom sash, but it didn’t budge.

  The pain was immediate, hot, increasing.

  I had yelped when it happened but I was quickly moving beyond verbal complaint. I began to feel lightheaded. My fingers were squashed and I could feel the digital arteries pulsing to the second knuckles where the blood couldn’t flow to my fingertips or properly return. The pain crested and subsided, crested again, and almost took my legs from me. I even stopped to consider it, passing out might be the answer. Then I used my brains and asked Lane to get me something—a screwdriver, anything. She returned with an iced-tea spoon. I pried it between the window sashes and tried to use it for leverage but it bent in half, fragile as a daisy stem, and my fingers remained caught. I repeated my request for a screwdriver. She returned with a letter opener which fit easily between the two frames, but it slipped and fell onto the external sill.

  “You’re turning white,” Lane remarked. She was quite alarmed, being that I was pretty well bronzed to start out. At last, she came back with what I wanted, a Phillips-head. With my left hand I pried the sashes apart and released my fingers.

  My right hand was squashed across the second knuckles, changing color in front of my eyes, but I saw that my fingers weren’t broken. “Ice,” I said. “Did we use all the ice?”

  “Oh, God, I think it’s gone. I’ll ask next door.”

  “Take this with you.” I gave her a wastebasket.

  “That’s an authentic Cherokee basket,” she said.

  I couldn’t believe she was stalling over some moldy trinket from a reservation.

  When she returned with ice, I put my whole hand in a bowl of it and tried to ignore the throbbing. It was difficult not to think of everything in bad terms. I wished I had not taken the day off nor left the seaside town. I imagined that my delivery job might be in jeopardy without the use of one hand. Then I saw I was feeling sorry for myself. I knew the fingers would be sore for a period of time, worse if I allowed any error in lifting and unloading the tanks, but I would be able to keep working.

  Lane’s shiner was in full swing, a crooked Ferris wheel of broken blood vessels. I let myself imagine that her robe, its rotten seams, might dissolve and fall from her shoulders as the night wore on.

  “I could read to you from my new novel,” she said. “It might relax you and take your mind off your hand.”

  “That would be fine,” I told her.

  I stretched out on the sofa. The pain was lessening; there’s a threshold which is met, and then a steady retreat from it. I was learning to live with it. But I couldn’t stop imagining Lane’s blister. Who had she dated who might have given her a virus? “Maybe too much masturbation,” she had admitted with a shrug, but I didn’t want to explore her secret lesions, those raw spots that had occurred with no impulsion from me.

  She began to read from her manuscript. I wasn’t surprised to hear that the main character had quite a sizable scar. I didn’t really follow the story, I was drifting. It started to rain. I heard the heavy droplets brushing the leaves, too weighty to cling. I could smell the dust of the streets as the rain stirred the litter and tapped the metal awnings.

  Lane put down her pages and asked me again, “Can’t you look at it, please? It’s stinging.”

  She lifted her threadbare gown and opened her knees. I adjusted the gooseneck lamp until the brilliant cone fell directly on the subject. She pulled my fingers to the flaming spot, a tiny oblong sore spoiling the silky vestibule below her clitoris.

  I wanted to kill her.

  I split my time between MCI Framingham and MCI Cedar Junction in Walpole. Walpole is o
ff the beaten path and I guess I can’t expect her to visit me here, although I keep inviting her to come. I want her to see my arrangements, but Walpole gives Lane the drears and makes her jittery. She would have to endure walking through several electronic kiosks to get back to my unit, where I’m set up.

  It isn’t your glam slot at a major hospital. My work here, as a physician for the Department of Massachusetts Correctional Institutions, is mostly HIV housekeeping and stitching torn lips and ears after everyday brawls in the yard. I do my fair share of hemorrhoid operations and rectal suturing due to the violent lifestyle in here—the general stasis encourages a high rate of consensual sodomy, and then, of course, it’s often rape. A few catatonic inmates require tube feeding, and I dislike the wretched task of tube insertion and squeezing a plastic bulb of high-protein glop directly into the patient’s gut. I have come to see how the catatonics are wise fools. It’s a natural reaction for the body to shut down in prison. Why force these men to continue to ingest a superficial sustenance? Bread isn’t everything.

  When an inmate’s catatonia becomes too severe, I am required to administer electric shock treatments. I perform the procedure routinely. I carry the compact machine, the size of a laptop computer—I call it, excuse the pun, my “powerbook”—back and forth between Framingham and Walpole, according to jottings on my weekly planner. I had the machine in the trunk of my car the last time I went to see Lane. Imagine what I might have done? Today, I have an appointment with a firebug at four o’clock in Framingham. I’ll zap the remorseful goon and he’ll get his appetite back in time for dinner.

  Acute AIDS patients are sent to Mass General when they’re just about dead. I am pressured to keep them in the system as long as I can. The infirmary is a death house.

  I see men after they have been raped. I see them transported on gurneys to “chapel” for their state-funded last rites. Sometimes, a man comes to me for a minor ailment, perhaps right after visiting hours if his girlfriend complained of his halitosis. I give him a tube of baking-soda toothpaste. These individuals are mobsters, baby molesters, cold-blooded killers. It still surprises me that they should tell me their stories and want to hear mine. My scar is an icebreaker. Yet, I believe they see it written elsewhere across my face: Here’s a man, a free man, still in harm’s way.