You Have the Wrong Man

by Maria Flook

  Selby stooped beside her, helping her collect her personal items strewn under the chair legs. Her makeup mirror was a tiny sliver with a beveled edge, and he examined its narrow slice. “Just for lipstick,” she told him and she took it from his hand. He repositioned the computer monitor on her desk, and together they tested the system to see if it still retrieved files. It had survived the crash.

  Pauline was in a state of exhaustion. She crumpled at her desk in full view of everyone. Selby felt sorry for her. Her desk was stationed dead center in their congested pod of narrow cubicles. Her face was already smudged with inky, dried watermarks from an earlier bout of tears, and again her shoulders started to heave with silent tremors. She seemed completely convinced of the magnitude of her dilemma. She wrung her hands, gripped her waist, or massaged her teary cheeks as if in an interpretation of the Stanislavsky Method. She was heroine, victim, and jaded antagonist assembled in one fretful mask. Selby thought that only Barbara Stanwyck could get this across. He had so admired her in Double Indemnity. He wasn’t certain if Pauline was acting.

  “Are you all right?” he asked her.

  “It’s just the dry heaves,” she told him. “I’ve been swallowing Maalox by the handfuls. It’s not helping.”

  “One of the girls might have Valium,” he told her. He thought she might need a binding ingredient.

  “Oh, God, no. I don’t want tranks.”

  “It might calm you down.”

  She looked at him. “I don’t like a chemical solution to a problem.”

  “One man’s meat is another man’s poison.”

  “I don’t need that kind of love medicine yet.”

  Selby said, “I guess not. Not until you’ve tried everything else.”

  Pauline reminded him of pretty young women he’d seen behind the chain-link fences of private schools, those institutions for Quaker coeds, Communist debutantes, and out-and-out problem girls. These girls were the walking wounded from whatever war was in fashion. Pauline kept her face tilted in a cagey squint; her mock bravado was reminiscent of the visually impaired, as if she measured her surroundings by sensory clues and committed aural details to memory. When she settled figures or busied herself with work, she talked to herself. It was a crazy monologue, like a clumsy sister trying to learn how to swing. Her lingo seemed exaggerated; her words might have been translated from English into a foreign tongue and back into English again so that her slang, its pitch and syntax, seemed a decade or so behind. Her cornball swearing and her little repellent prayers began to charm Selby. Her comic features and sizzling effects seemed mounted only to correct a great interior doom.

  After the events that morning, Selby believed that Pauline was indeed at the lip of a deep peril. She had not really made a “cry for help,” but her ordeal with the man in the UPS uniform had released a trigger. If she was just acting coy, he would find out, but Selby told Pauline that he would see her home after work.

  “Okay,” she had said. Her eyes searched his face for a trick of expression, but his face was washed clean.

  During the day, she performed her tasks at her desk, but she didn’t seem interested in a career in precious metals. At least she didn’t chatter on about her sad story or make an inventory of her boyfriend’s detours into that domestic violence terrain. She didn’t have a tract and didn’t complain that she was both a victim at home and overlooked at work, as the other girls would say. Despite her situation after hours, she kept cheerful and expectant. Pauline seemed consoled by some singular hope or idea. She might be waiting for a “dream vacation” or looking forward to a long sunny ride in a convertible. Once or twice Selby saw her warring with her private thoughts—something or someone—a formidable absentee opponent. Her struggle fascinated Selby.

  To check on her, he walked over to her desk. She was wearing a cassette headset; she wore it like electronic junk jewelry. She pumped her heel up and down to the beat of the music. Selby couldn’t hear the song, but the casters on her swivel chair squeaked faintly with the changing rhythms.

  “May I try it?” he said.

  She removed the fragile headphones and handed them to Selby. He held one foam-disc speaker to his ear. “Not exactly easy listening,” he said. “How can you settle with this rock-’n’-roll blaring? You might get the wrong figure.”

  “This monkey-work? Who needs to concentrate?” she said.

  Now she came up to him, adjusting a mohair scarf around her collar, tugging it between her two white hands.

  “All set?” he said.

  “Look, you don’t have to take me home. I’ll be fine.”

  “Sure I will,” Selby said. “It’s on my way, isn’t it?”

  “I don’t know,” she said. “Besides, I’m just going to Filene’s.”

  He agreed to let her do her shopping and she walked out. He tried to listen for her footsteps on the plush carpet; he heard the elevator doors close and the whine of the cable, the compartment sinking. Below his window, the ambulance continued, a methodical blue funneling. He wondered if it was serious.

  The floor was silent. He heard only the air vents blowing the building’s stale, systematized warmth over him. He peeled off his suit coat and opened his belt. He closed his door and switched out the overhead until his cubicle was illuminated only by the refracted city light. Its silvery-alloy tones gave an eerie cast to the routine items on his desk. From his briefcase he removed a small black plastic bag from underneath his folders and the heavy, bound copy of a prospectus he had coauthored. It was typical of sex shops to err in their lame attempts at simple discretion. Certainly, the odd black sack looked more incriminating than plain brown paper. He had quite often identified men returning from Columbus Avenue, where there was a cluster of porn outlets. Selby recognized the opaque handle-sacks the men carried, the tedious wrappers and blank imprints universal to that realm of commerce.

  His purchase was neatly coiled in the sack and already it started to work for him. He shook the bag and the toy noose fell on his desk. The silky braid of nylon fiber had come with a sheet of instructions. Selby didn’t need tutoring and he crumpled the page of directions and put the noose over his head. Its extra length dangled past his shins. He looped the cord through the steel pull of his top drawer and cinched it tight, leaving a moderate tail. He took his key and locked the desk drawer. Securing the slip knot just below his jaw and above his Adam’s apple, he sat in his chair and rolled backwards on the caster wheels until the rope was taut.

  He lifted his knees and pushed his feet against the desk drawers to increase tension on the cord. He was expertly tethered and felt the noose tighten with exact compression on his jugular. As the loop contracted, his erection was enhanced. His pleasure corresponded directly to his choking sensation; he controlled his ordeal until he felt nothing above the neck and everything in his cock. If he started to pass out, he fingered the knot, loosening the noose just enough to let the blood return to his head. He started again. Selby had refined his method and only once in the past had he completely lost consciousness, although he had read of these sorts of deaths in the papers.

  Pauline could have found him there. His door wasn’t locked. From a distance, he heard maintenance vacuuming the hallway out by the elevators. This usually took them a bit of time. Next they would scour the sinks and clean the coffee machines before collecting trash and combing the individual offices.

  The streets were dark when he finally left the building. He walked slowly towards the garage where his car was parked. Once or twice he put down his case and pushed his hands up his cheeks and into his hair. There was nothing vain in it, it was really just a nervous habit. His thick hair assumed a ridiculous, on-end appearance and he walked on.

  He stopped to get a drink at the Steeple Street Bar. Without a drink Selby was flying under poor conditions, a low ceiling, a fog. He didn’t wish to go home to attempt an instrument landing. Thaddeus saw him come in and poured two fingers and set it down. Selby sat in his everyday spot, the farthest
stool from the buzzing TV that had a blown speaker.

  Selby lifted his glass and held it at eye-level. He revered each tumbler, each flute, each vessel of his every replenishment.

  “An inch of the old spinal fluid,” he told the bartender. Thaddeus nodded and made change from a twenty. The television news showed video footage of his own building. A rotor from a rooftop exhaust system had broken free and glanced a pedestrian. “That’s my address,” Selby said.

  Thaddeus told him, “Happened right next door, yes, indeed. Makes you feel like Chicken Little.”

  “It does just that. Jesus, Doctor, you’re right again.”

  When he left the bar he went into Woolworth’s to buy a new handkerchief. His wife would never have noticed, but he wanted to return with everything he had set out with. At the cashier, he spotted a toy for his son, a colorless substance packaged in a plastic blister. The toy was called SLIME. He bought a container of it. He looked forward to giving the toy to his son. He relished a moment of unself-conscious relief which disappeared as soon as he noted it.

  In the parking garage, he took the new handkerchief from its cellophane and he rubbed it over his face. He wadded it into a ball and bit down upon it. Then he folded it again, placing it deep in his breast pocket. It was almost seven o’clock, perhaps he could avoid the dinner. This would depend on his wife. If her day had gone well, if she had nothing grave to report and had no complaint against him, she might have already eaten dinner with their son. She might have gone ahead, and the dishes would be washed, the kitchen light turned off.

  “Did you eat in town?” she asked him.

  “Yes,” he told her.

  She watched him as he poured a scotch for himself.

  “A little touch of the golden therapist,” he said, but she wasn’t watching what he measured. He was grateful for that. Yet, because of her kindness he felt he had to give a careful performance in everything. Her disappointment was deep. She seemed to savor each regret, doubling its strength, as if it were a morphine elixir, addictive and luscious despite its toxicity. Even so, she showed her best face, she gleamed before him. Her looks were unchanged, they had only seemed to intensify with the years. Her features were still sharp. She was like an edge of clear amber or petrified wood, a little sliver of another time, glittering there.

  The length of the evening ahead seemed overwhelming. He felt the rich pulse of his Glenfiddich kick in, and to arrest it he waved his arm over the living room, directing his announcement to his son. His voice was too loud. “I have a surprise.”

  The boy took the paper bag and squealed his pleasure when he recognized the SLIME.

  “My God,” his wife said.

  “It’s what the kids like,” Selby told his wife.

  The package stated that the SLIME would glow in the dark, so the lights were switched off. They crowded together on the living room carpet as the boy tore open the plastic and the stuff dripped into his hands. But his hands were too small. Both Selby and his wife cupped their palms to catch the overflow. “Be careful,” she said.

  “It won’t stick to anything,” the boy said.

  “It’s awful,” she said.

  They all shared a portion of the stuff. The boy giggled and cleared his throat in private happiness and his wife groaned in an exaggerated way to disguise the truth that she, too, was pleased. Selby held his share of the formless gel; it did not glow in the dark after all. He could not see it in his hands. There was something both intuitive and lewd in its method of escape. After a few moments in the dark, he surrendered to the same heavy feeling of the night before, and the night before that. He withdrew from the small circle, but his wife was first to stand up. She regained her crisp posture and with her elbow flicked the wall switch until the room blazed.

  Although Pauline had many duties, and there were others in whose offices she collected mail or delivered faxes and internal memos, Selby decided to assume a primary role in the situation of her current romantic dishevelment. He waited to hear the scratchy tones of her headset as she slipped it off, and then he went out to talk to her about her stalker.

  He grew to anticipate the spicy smell of her smoke when he heard her hunting in her purse for a lighter. The other girls hated the smell. They called her “Orient Express” because she chain-smoked clove cigarettes. He liked its Eastern scent coming secondhand to him. There was a recent memo forbidding workers to smoke at their desks, but Selby didn’t turn her in.

  Pauline could look like a gymnast in shiny stretch pants gathered in tight wrinkles at the shins, a chorus-line dancer in a feline production, a circus clown when she wore oversized polka dots. She never wore her camouflage overalls without her plastic banana brooch. Once she wore a pair of leopard sneakers with shark teeth on the laces. “Grrr,” she said, and she clawed the air with her hand when he admired these. Selby liked to believe she wore her thrift-store costumes to hide a ballooning despair just like his own, the same covert gloom that forced him to prowl Columbus Avenue.

  He scolded her for coming to work wearing clothes he’d already seen. “A repeat?” he said.

  “It takes time to shop for this stuff, you have to go all over to find it,” she told him.

  Often he sat at his desk without a desire to do the transfers before him. It was no longer a passing boredom or frustration. He looked at the clock all day. The hands barely moved. The clock looked like a photograph of a clock. He searched in his drawers for a pen that didn’t squeak. He couldn’t find anything. He started to stand up more than usual. He walked around his desk, and then he would walk past Pauline to the big east window. He asked her, “He show up last night?”

  “Nope.”

  “You know what to do if he comes around?”

  “Yeah, yeah. I know. Nine-one-one. I promise.”

  “Good girl,” he said, avoiding her eyes.

  He liked leaning over her desk and letting her fasten the tiny foam headphones over his ears. She would look at his face and judge him.

  Pauline knew nothing about music, he thought. Someone was leading her on a goose chase. Back at his desk, he stared through the window at the small slot of city it allowed him. Across the alley, a shade was snapped open which had remained cockeyed for over a year.

  When the flower was delivered, the girls stood in a crunch around Pauline. As she opened the box, the women dipped at the knees and groaned with delight. “A gladiolus—” someone said.

  Pauline shrugged.

  “One means the beginning or the end,” a woman announced.

  “Lucky kid,” another said. In turn, they all expressed their jealousy.

  “It beats me,” Pauline said. “I’m really not into flowers.”

  “Don’t look a gift horse in the mouth,” they told her. It was her bland acceptance, her innocence, which they mistook for an unwillingness to divulge intimacies.

  Pauline asked the women if they knew how many flowers were put on Elvis’s grave.

  “Plenty, I guess,” somebody said.

  “It was millions,” she told them. “It smelled just like heaven.”

  “That was years ago,” a girl said.

  “They still bring them to the house. It’s got flowers there all the time. Like an endless wonder,” Pauline told them.

  Then she was alone again. Selby walked out, but it was just as a couple of workmen had come to spackle the wall beside Pauline’s desk. The men were joking with her.

  “A little home improvement?” was all he managed to say as he went by. She smiled, lifting her face to him; it was pure tolerance, he thought, that was all.

  The week before, he had been late for a company awards luncheon. They were handing out the knickknacks to “ten-year employees” and “five-year employees,” and to Selby, who had been working at the bank for fifteen years. The gifts were humiliating. Cross pen-and-pencil sets and imitation Mont Blancs. Faux-leather desktop planners. Women who were honored were encouraged to take the floral centerpieces back to their desks. Selby had stopped
to see Thaddeus before coming to the luncheon. When he finally arrived at the event, he was surprised to see a handful of VPs, and even the CEO. He stood in the doorway of the banquet room and shifted his shoulders under his suit coat—his shoulders felt disconnected from his spine. After three doubles at Thad’s, his gait was altered, his posture shifted from one dubious alignment to the next. With all his might, he tried to walk with brisk informality around the huge oval conference table to the one remaining chair. In his nervous haste he walked right past the empty seat. He then had to decide whether to turn around and backtrack or circle the table again. Neither option could save him. He paced out the door where he came in.

  Pauline was not at her desk. Gone, too, the workmen, who had finished their repairs. There was a sour odor of caulk and plaster, and the waxy perfume of the flower was lost. On the blotter he saw a single salmon-colored petal, but then he realized it was an artificial fingernail. He pushed himself away from the desk, but she came up to him.

  “Did you see the flower?” she asked.

  “Very nice.” He nodded, examining the solitary stalk. It might have cost as much to send a dozen.

  “He thinks I’m letting him come back just because he orders me a flower?”

  “It’s a reconciliatory gesture,” he told her.

  “No dice,” she said, lifting the flower from its vase. A fine white powder covered it.

  “That’s some kind of instant plaster,” he said.

  “Yeah, they were mixing it out here by my desk.”

  “It’s ruined. I’m sorry,” he said.

  She looked at him. Her eyebrows hitched a quarter-inch higher. “It’s not ruined,” she said, still eyeing him. She stood up and took the vase over to the sink. He followed. She turned on the tap and ran the flower back and forth beneath the stream. She rubbed its petals between her fingers, letting the water fill each floweret and overflow. She tapped the stalk against the sink to remove the excess water droplets. “There,” she said.