You Have the Wrong Man (17 page)

He was standing in front of the closet mirror in the half-dark. He ran the palm of his hand across his chest, down the hollow of his rib cage and over his stomach muscles. He rubbed the tight hillock below his waist where his navel should be.

He did not have a navel.

This curious deletion, a deviation from the normal anatomical references of the male physique, was a constant annoyance to him. His belly was a tight, empty plain. It had all the typical articulations of the external oblique muscles beneath a thinning zone of baby fat. His abdomen was firm and lean, gorgeous, yet it lacked the tiny, limned vortex of flesh common to his peers. As an infant his umbilical cord had become abscessed and it had to be excised and the tissue resutured. When the incision healed there was nothing to show for the fact that he had ever been attached to his mother inside the womb. He might have emerged, singularly intact, like a casting at a foundry.

In the high school locker room with the other teenaged boys he was sometimes called “Girl,” as if his smooth, muscled waist—with its error in punctuation, its small grammatical oversight—spelled out a feminine trait.

He considered himself in the mirror; he wasn’t girlish in any way. Proof of which, was his colossal erection reflected in the chipped silver plate. It was all or nothing. It was everything. But his masculinity sometimes seemed undermined by his smoother zones. His emerging sexuality, in its ambitious transit from childhood to maturity, was pushed askew by one tiny flaw: without the disruption of a navel, his stomach muscles formed a slight cleft which might somehow, remotely, resemble cleavage.

There was someone screaming outside in the street. He
heard her yelping and ignored it. He was stepping into his mother’s half-slip and pulling it up over his hips. He was not “dressing up like a woman,” but he wanted to feel the nylon fabric stretch over his cock, which, fully erect, pushed the polyester panel away from his body. He turned parallel to the mirror to measure how far the luxury fabric was distended; the half-slip was stretched taut by his hard-on, then it fell in a strict sheet from the secret projection, just like a table scarf. Next, he lifted the chilly hem over his cock and rested it there. He started. He waited. He started again.

The girl next door was screaming her lungs out. It was not unfamiliar to Rick and appeared to be a typical halfway-house scenario, not much different from the usual, yet her demonstrations were stubborn, and above her voice a baby’s thin, staccato cries.

Rick lived with his mother, Carol, in a second-floor apartment next door to the women’s shelter where his mother worked as assistant director. On the opposite side of the house was a bakery that specialized in pizza dough, just the dough, which they shipped out to local restaurants. The sweet odor of the rising dough curled along the windowsill of his room, and he didn’t like smelling it at all hours, especially without the accompanying odor of the spicy sauce, without the sausages and other toppings. The smell of dough was a tantalizing
blank
smell, a tease, and at sixteen his whole life seemed similarly agitated by a swelling list of temptations which, like this virgin dough, had not yet been molded or completed.

The girl outside screamed for assistance. It was nothing new to Rick, who had lived in different women’s shelters with Carol ever since his father was first arrested. She had
always found them a place to stay. She would meet a new boyfriend, which was to say she became someone’s mouse for a few months. When it fell apart, she left the man and took Rick to a new shelter, where he was attended to by grim, no-nonsense volunteers. These volunteers aided “women in transition,” and, together with the victims, they drew up “contracts” based upon their individual goals. The women signed the contracts, placing their names, written in cursive, alongside the signature of the counselor, also in cursive. The filing cabinet in his mother’s office had scores of these signed contracts.

Carol had taken an entry-level position at the Stop Over Shelter, volunteering to do the cleaning. Then she made the casserole dinners and learned how to shop for an uncertain population, remaining prepared and flexible for the unspecified drop-ins. Carol began answering the telephone in the office, and she took on other clerical duties. She learned to help with the intake interviews and she typed up the monthly reports for the executive advisory board.

Her professional duties quelled the tremors and aftershocks of her own violent history. By relating her personal experiences in a daily, instructive narrative for the benefit of the center’s vulnerable residents, Carol believed that she purged herself.

Rick didn’t enjoy living next door to the shelter. He was never free of its heavy moral scheme. The two buildings were separated by a tight alley, and his bedroom seemed directly annexed to the flow of moods coming and going.

The girl’s voice evaporated in the complicated stagings of his sexual fantasy, which was typically about an imaginary girl who exhibited the collective aspects of all girls, including
some of the bruised visitors next door, whom he sometimes viewed as they crossed the lighted stairwell.

He rolled onto his bed. He shuddered again, with a prolonged abdominal conclusion which radiated upwards from his pelvis and across the empty prairie where he had no tiny well, no navel to collect it. He lifted the corner of the shade to look out. The girl with the baby was being admitted into the house next door. His own mother was leading her by the elbow. Another volunteer took the squalling infant. He saw that the girl had beautiful blond hair like Darryl Hannah. Wavy sheets of platinum fluff, attractive for its unnatural tint, its supernatural loft. The baby wore a knitted cap with a gaudy pom-pom.

Rick’s vigorous routine had provoked his asthma and he grabbed his inhaler. He took a few puffs from the plastic dispenser. His mother would be tied up for a while.

He stood up and pushed his mother’s half-slip down until it circled his feet. He stepped out of it, and left it in a black ring on the floor. He pulled on his jeans and sweatshirt, remembering to return the slip to the hamper in the bathroom before walking through to Carol’s bedroom where a portable TV rested on a chair. He lifted the TV, jerked its cord loose, and brought it into his own bedroom.

The baby was extremely agitated and Carol had difficulty appraising its general condition. Its eyes were puffy and its skin was blotchy from all its wailing. She opened a can of Enfamil and poured it into a plastic bottle. She put the bottle in a pan of water on the kitchen stove. The baby would quiet down with a feeding. There was something pitiful about the child which suggested some greater peril. Carol
saw immediately that the young mother cradled her baby with the dumb ambivalence of a frozen peach tree holding a Sterno pot in its iced branches. The girl was already in flight, receding from her surroundings even as she sat there, across from Carol, writing her name on a form. Carol felt sympathy for the baby and for its mother, the other baby. Yet she had to write an accurate intake report. Iris’s blank response to the shuddering bundle in her lap had to be documented. Carol wrote down exactly what she saw before her at that very moment, at 10:35
P.M.
: “Mother exhibits no positive feelings for the infant.”

“Thank goodness you had the foresight to come here tonight,” Carol told Iris.

Iris nodded.

“You have made the right decision. It’s a first decision. You’ll have to make a lot more of them.”

“Um-huh.”

Carol said, “No kidding. It takes a lot of hard thinking, doesn’t it? This is only the beginning.”

Iris looked back at Carol. She didn’t try to conceal her rising sarcasm, which tightened her mouth into a hard pink bud. “Shit. I guess I thought it would be the best thing to get out of a place where they were trying to kill me.”

“A wise decision.”

“I don’t need to be Einstein.”

Carol didn’t smile. She showed respect for the seriousness of the attack. She had learned of many peculiar weapons used for their immediate availability. Table forks; nail scissors; snow shovels; wall phones; cast-iron door stops; any small appliance that can be hurled across a room. Carol told the girl, “You have to be more than Einstein. You have to time-travel. The future isn’t something
that waits for you. You have to walk towards it or else it pushes you around.”

Iris nodded at Carol as if she suddenly understood the small feat she had accomplished. She had fled from her persecutors.

Carol said, “You got up and walked out of that apartment before your baby got hurt.”

Iris looked down at Terrell. Never once had she thought of his safety as a catalyst for her departure.

A staff nurse had come back with a stainless-steel bowl of warm water to which she added a squirt of Betadine disinfectant. She pulled two gloves from a dispenser and their fine white powder drifted through the air. Wearing the gloves, she soaked a gauze sponge in the soapy water and dabbed it against Iris’s face. Iris winced, but she didn’t protest. The woman cleaned Iris’s face, leaving the orange tint of the medicinal soap across her cheek. “I don’t think stitches will help this.” The nurse pinched the two-inch cuts together with her latex fingertips to see if they needed suturing. “These are probably going to scar one way or the other. Do you think she needs to get these stitched?”

“You won’t do it?” Carol asked the nurse.

“No.”

“I understand,” Carol said. Carol leaned closer to Iris’s face to look at her cuts.

“Are you a doctor?” Iris said.

“Do you want a doctor?” Carol leaned back in her chair.

The nurse peeled off her soapy gloves.

“I guess she’s too spooked to stitch me up. Well, I don’t give a shit about stitches,” Iris said.

Carol reached up to her head and collected clumps of
her wavy hair, pulling it behind her ear. “See what I have here?”

Iris saw a raised scar at Carol’s temple. The scar looked like pink piping edging Carol’s hairline and upper cheek where her ear had been reattached, sewn a little off-center.

“He ripped it right off of me,” Carol told her.

“He tore your ear off?”

“Just about did. I waited too long to get it fixed, that’s why it looks like it does, kind of messy. Because I waited. That’s a mistake. We’re asking you what
you
want to do about your cuts. It’s your decision. I told you, once you make the first decision there’s a string of them.”

Iris looked at Carol’s ear. She turned back to look at the skittish nurse. “Well, don’t stitches leave those railroad tracks? Like Frankenstein?”

“You don’t want to go to emergency?”

“Not for now.”

A resident came into the room looking for help. The nurse was relieved to have the excuse, and went out. Carol remained with Iris and walked over to the sink. She carefully emptied the sudsy water from the bowl and turned it under the tap. She saw her face smeared or constricted as she rinsed the shiny hip of the stainless-steel bowl. Her ex-husband assumed an important role in all her routine Stop Over indoctrinations. She brought him up at each intake interview, each time she pulled her hair away from her ear. The scars he had left her with were Carol’s “tools of the trade.” She pushed the cuffs of her sleeves past her elbows to show the new girl the ruddy burn marks on her forearms. “I got these burns from some Scottie-dog andirons when he tried to push me into the fireplace. You should have seen the blisters.” She liked to describe these Scottie
andirons to the girls—their absurd cuteness at that frozen moment. She opened her mouth to reveal a lopsided hump in the middle of her tongue. She had bit right through it when her husband slammed her against the hood of his car and her chin banged shut on the tough wedge of muscle. Repairs to her tongue required both internal and external sutures to reconnect blood vessels, nerves, and the pebbly surface where her taste buds were shunted, clustered on one side. She believed that this particular injury had a metaphoric resonance. She had to bite her own tongue before she could speak out against his infractions.

“That bottle’s ready for your baby,” Carol told Iris. Carol took the bottle of formula from the pan of tepid water and handed it to Iris. Iris followed Carol upstairs to one of the bedrooms. The hallway smelled of Murphy’s Oil Soap and somebody’s hairspray. Iris recognized the scent, a light alcohol odor laced with a sweet varnish smell. It was oddly reassuring; although she didn’t use hairspray herself, she liked the fact that the other residents were far enough along in the game to be primping instead of swabbing facial cuts. Over and above the hairspray scent, the smell of fresh dough from the bakery, two doors away, added a sickening expectation to everything.

“In here,” Carol said.

The room was small, with one single bed and a tiny baby crib, not a full-sized model, but good enough. “I get a private room? Why?” Iris was stung by her exclusion from the rest.

“You don’t need to meet the other residents tonight. There’s time for that tomorrow at Morning Meeting.”

Iris didn’t plan on attending any “meetings” or putting forth any effort.

Carol said, “Diapers are there. I think these are his size, right?”

“I guess he’s wet. I should change him.” Iris didn’t move to check the baby’s diaper. Terrell was already working at the bottle. His sucking was strong and consistent as if he were not only drinking the formula but losing himself again in its familiar contents. His shoulders heaved once, twice, until his back wasn’t arched. His tiny hands opened and closed across the fat neck of the plastic nurser. His eyes were still dewy from his brutal course of tears.

Carol watched Iris to see if the girl herself took comfort in the infant’s respite. The teenaged girl looked down at the baby with only a mild acknowledgment of the baby’s level of comfort, which waxed in direct correspondence to the diminishing amount of formula left in the bottle. Carol saw that Iris had little available kindness after her turmoil and with the consistent stinging of the soap upon her bizarre cuts.

After another moment, Carol left Iris in the room and went down the stairs and out through the front door, leaving the house to the night attendant. She walked next door and climbed to her second-floor apartment. She heard the television going in Rick’s room. When she looked in, he was asleep. The TV movie was reaching its conclusion and police sirens increased to a remarkable, sharp crescendo. She turned off the set. The abrupt evaporation of decibels caused her son to stir but he did not wake up.