You Have the Wrong Man (26 page)

Christine said, “That’s Miller’s insulin infusion pump. It regulates a steady flow of insulin through a little tube taped to his abdomen.”

The explanation disturbed Bell; he wasn’t alarmed about the man’s problem, but he realized Christine had been privy to this tube inserted in Miller’s belly. Bell saw that this high-tech medical toy might be an attraction for Christine. Her lovers seemed to have chronic maladies, a skin condition or a joint replacement. Then she dated new arrivals, Cuban boys and Cape Verdeans with English as a second language; there was always some obstacle she enjoyed tackling.

Her current squeeze: a diabetic stage technician. For someone suffering a condition, Miller appeared self-assured and arrogant. Thin and sallow, he looked utterly confident in his underweight condition. His smile, reinforced with
plastic brackets, had a sinister depth. He had Christine up against the GE, kissing her, the buzz of the freon increasing. Bell took the keys to the car and looked back once, hoping his sister had disentangled, but she wasn’t rushing for his sake.

He drove his mother’s car the full perimeter of the island. He went up West Main Road, watching the late sun touch long ribbons on the bay, wakes from tankers and little frothy bows behind pleasure boats. He came back on East Main, seeking blue splints of the Sakonnet all the way down. He drove out Ocean Drive, where breakers crashed against the jetties in bright crescents, glassy as chandeliers. He loved the spectacle of the sea, the ornament of its lighted spray against notches of granite. After seeing something like that, he sought the smeary ambience of a tavern. It was the tiled bar at the Narragansett, black and white inches of cracked ceramics like a littered shoreline and stale spills puddled around the table legs.

“They’re all gone now, and there isn’t anything more the sea can do to me.”
Christine was just coming in the door, home from Raytheon. She was in character, the keening voice of an Irish matron whose sons have all been drowned. Her authority always surprised Bell. She took the spinning wheel from the closet and went into the living room. Bell watched as she placed it on the floor and the wheel revolved slowly. It was like something he might see at the helm of a small ketch. She wanted to rehearse while spinning a snag of yarn and she asked him if he would read the lines and cue her.

“This play is in Irish?” he asked her.

She told him, “Don’t be stupid, of course it’s English, but it lilts. I’ll show you.” She recited a phrase, an insistent querying dirge. “Everything sounds like a question,” she told him. “The words go up at the end, the sentences just keep ascending like climbing switchbacks.”

“No kidding?” he said.

“There’s someone-in after crying out by the seashor-ir,”
she recited. The words were echoey, lifting at the final syllables.

“Okay,” he said.

“He’s gone now, and when the black night is falling I’ll have no son left me in the whar-ald,”
her voice climbed and faltered, climbed again.

Bell read from the script like a mechanic running his eyes over a parts-and-service ledger in the metric system, rubbing his chin with the back of his wrist. Christine enjoyed his shyness and she let him founder.

“
Riders to the Sea
is supposed to be a tragic play,” she told him. She wanted to share the winey taste of the lines, and she told him the words should feel exciting on the tongue, like capers or wild mushrooms.

He asked her, “Why are they doing this one? Why not the usual
West Side Story
? What about
Hair
?”

“This is a real play,” she told him. “You know, there are just two themes in life. No musical soundtracks necessary.”

“What themes?”

“Love and death.”

“When did you decide this?” he asked her.

“We’re all born with the secret,” she told him.

Christine wasn’t just teasing. Her remark emerged whisper-smooth, the way a U-2 submarine rises all glossy and serene in the middle of a giant swell.

“Real drama,” she told him, “is pain kept brewing all the
weeks before the curtain goes up, so that no one can misinterpret pain as performance. It’s supposed to be pain
alive
.”

He wanted to get out of the house. Christine was tilting something. She looked pale and eerie, but maybe this was from working deep in the windowless complex at Raytheon.

He cued her lines. It was a depressing story. All the men drown and the women are left weeping before a rough-hewn coffin. “This is a little hard to swallow,” he told her.

He told her that he was happy she was just practicing for a performance when sooner or later it gets dark on its own. “Don’t ask me what I saw in jail. Not just the crowd on the inside, I’m talking about the families who come to visit. Talk about the sad truth.”

Christine nodded, she was trying to picture the unhappy relations queuing up outside the prison doors. “I would have visited you, Bell, if it wasn’t Virginia. Didn’t I come to see you all the time at the Training School?”

“I’m not complaining,” he told her. He was wondering. Maybe acting in a tragic one-act play can make a girl responsible and wary. “This Miller dude,” Bell told her, “what’s the story with him?”

Christine turned her face to the window to secrete her grin. The beach light touched her profile as it reached into the house, splicing through glass curtain pulls and lifting the grain on the woodwork. Bell saw that Christine was pleased he worried about her; or, perhaps she was pleased, simply, to think of Miller.

She began again. This time her voice was too high, the singsong of leprechauns. She halted mid-sentence and started over. Finding the right pitch, she recited a long passage
and tried her best to keen at an appropriate octave, with the complexity of a vibrating cello string, the way her director had explained it should sound.

He was in the first booth at the Narragansett Tavern. He liked to watch the door sweep open and ratchet slowly back. He glimpsed the harbor outside, a dense stand of masts like a glaring aluminum atrium. The girl from the CVS drugstore was rolling a ballpoint over the curve of his knee, inking a burning dot on the stiff denim of his linedried jeans. The other week, he had found her sorting the magazines in the front of the store. Stacking the older issues on a trolley. He asked her what she did with the old issues. Do they get recycled? He took a heavy issue of
Computer Shopper
out of her hands, thick as a phone book. She didn’t say anything as the weight was transferred. She looked back in a steady, instinctive perusal of his face the way a bird and its worm exchange a moment of awakening.

“We send them back on the truck,” she said after a while. She looked pretty young. But youth is a pie with many slices. She told Bell, “I can punch out for an hour at about seven-thirty. Come get me if you want. Or do you just want one of these periodicals?”

“I’ll be back,” he had told her. He was smiling. He liked the way she had said “periodicals,” as if she were some kind of librarian. No names were exchanged. He didn’t tell her his name was Bellamy, Bell for short, and she seemed just as happy to stand, unidentified, in the center aisle, surrounded by waist-high stacks of glossies.

She finished writing her telephone number along his inside seam and he told her, “You could have spared my
mother the annoyance. Besides, I have a photographic memory.”

“Really? Well, what’s my number, then?” she said. She flattened her palm against his eyes.

He recited the telephone number.

“God, that’s scary,” she said. She didn’t look scared.

“Lucky try,” Bell said. It was easy to please this girl. He didn’t have to encourage her. She sat next to him, pushing her cuticles back as if her fingertips were a key to everything. She wasn’t like Christine, who might get bored without conversation. Christine might demand to play cards or challenge him to match historical data with highlights from the last three decades of rock-’n’-roll. Christine had said, laughing, “Rock stars are noble primitives. They have their roots in ancient culture, like the Saturnalia.”

When he was in the company of a thriving slut like the CVS girl, why was he thinking about his sister, trying to nestle her image against the drugstore clerk? The CVS girl already failed to intrigue him beyond his first inspiration, which was never a thrill for long. He might go with the CVS girl again. For a couple of hours, park on a side street near the Cliff Walk. Relief, without an immediate rekindling of tension, is often a disappointment.

Never calling it forth, still he saw the dark fleck on the drowned woman’s thigh. Its tiny circumference seemed to recur in his vision like a vitreous floater or a snag in the retina. He faced his companion. She wet her lips and waited. He spoke and her eyes squeezed shut in tight winces of approval. She agreed. It didn’t matter what he was saying.

His father was standing in the kitchen holding a heavy paper bag. The bag was leaking from its bottom folds and Bell could see from its dripping mass that it must be some two-pounders. His mother had the big speckled kettle whining on the stove. Christine was peeling the wax paper from a pound of butter. She put the pale block in a saucepan and adjusted the gas until the flame steadied. She set the burner very low, using her expertise so that each flame kept separate, lifting from the jets like the beads of a blue necklace. The butter started to slide in the pan.

“To celebrate. You’re back home. Man of the house,” his father announced.

Bell looked at his mother, but she didn’t seem put out by the intrusion. She accepted his father’s presence in her kitchen now and again, the way she was tolerant of plumbers, electricians, painters, anyone she had to incorporate into her household for small allotments of time until maintenance was complete, a repair job finished. She showed no familiarity, yet she tried to stand at ease, without knotting her apron too tight as she might do in moments of distress. Then again, she didn’t confirm the notion that, by default, Bell should be “Man of the house.” She didn’t seem to want anyone in that role.

“Supper is a surprise,” his mother said.

“Are you staying to eat, then?” Bell asked his father.

“Oh, no. I just brought these over for you and Chrissie. Your mother’s got one there, if she desires.”

Bell lifted a heavy lobster out of the paper sack. “This one’s mine,” Bell said, trying to keep the talk going. “And for you, Christine?” Bell reached into the bag and pulled another one forth. “This one’s seen it all.” Bell held the lobster high so every one could admire it.

“His big claw looks funny,” Christine said, seeing the lobster’s aggressive, thumping arms, its large, palsied claw.

“It’s a fighter,” his father said, looking back and forth between his son and daughter. “Vinnie Pazienza.”

“The Paz.” Bell was smiling.

“Twelfth round,” Christine said,
“ding!”
She lifted the lid off the big pot.

The lobsters went in the kettle and the water stilled for a moment before churning back. Bell’s father said his goodbyes. “Come over any time,” he told Bell.

“When?”

His father shook his head. He wasn’t good at calibrating dates and times, and he didn’t land on any specific day and hour.

Bell walked him out to the street and drummed the trunk of the car as it rolled away. When he went back in the house, Christine was arranging newspaper over the kitchen table, opening the sections and layering the wide sheets. “Look at that,” she said to Bell, her fingertip touched the newsprint. It was a picture of the drowned woman at First Beach. The photo was from Con-Temp, a temporary office pool where she had been on the roster for a year. The woman’s name was Kelly Primiano, from Medford.

“Irish-Italian,” Bell’s mother said. “Where was her luck that day?”

“If she’s half-Italian, that cancels out the luck factor right there,” Bell said.

“Says here she wasn’t drunk. No bones broken.” Christine read the print. “Her parents say she was a good swimmer. They taught her in Marblehead every summer.”

“You can be an excellent swimmer, but if it’s too far to swim, you might as well not know how,” Bell said.

“Are you saying she tried to swim the cove?”

“Maybe she was pushed off a skiff,” Bell said. “Anything.”

Christine read some more: “There wasn’t any fluid in her lungs.”

Bell dropped his face down to the sheet of newsprint. “Shit. She didn’t drown, then. See what I’m saying?”

“She wasn’t
dressed
for the beach; it must have been something awful. Maybe she just slipped and hit her head on the rocks,” Christine said.

Bell looked at the face in the newspaper. Her hair was twisted in two elegant braids high over her forehead, as if she were going to the opera. He thought she looked “lace curtain” but must have crossed the tracks at some point in time.

“Says here she was engaged,” Christine said.

Bell said, “Is that so? Who was the lucky guy? Her fiancé was Davy Jones? Man-of-war in her trousseau. Honeymoon cruise on the
Titanic
.” He listed the possibilities until his mother set the lobsters in the center of the table. Bright shells steaming, long red whiskers tilted at odd angles like extra-sweep second hands on a tourist clock.