You Have the Wrong Man (5 page)

In an hour, we dressed and walked out to the curb.

There was the fish truck, newly washed. Its silvery panels still looked wet beneath the street light, blue-white and iridescent as haddock skin.

“So, you’re all loaded for tomorrow?” I asked him.

“It’s all set,” Leon said.

“The usual?”

“The same. The cod’s a little ripped up tonight, weird. But, we’ve got some nice tinker mackerel, tiny as slippers.”

When I told him how much I liked tinker mackerel he went around and opened the padlock on the truck. He hopped into the mist; his shoe slipped on the wet tread but he regained his balance and he pulled me up into the narrow aisle. I stood beside him, between the tiers of fish, as he found the plastic tray of mackerel and lifted the lid off. The fish were tiny, mottled with gold and silver dapples; the flesh along their spines was deep cobalt. “They’re beautiful,” I said.

“For breakfast?” he asked me.

“I can’t wait until breakfast, maybe tonight.” I said. We both laughed at my greed for the taste of the local delicacy.

Leon looked around the truck for a container, but there wasn’t anything. I pulled out the hem of my jersey and we laughed as he stretched the fabric around a half-dozen fish. He was begging off, leaving just these fish as keepsakes. I forgave him. He got behind the wheel of the truck and rested his elbow out the window, showing his luxurious ease, which I still admired. He seemed to know it impressed me and he smiled. I waved to him with my free hand as I steadied the icy hammock of fish at my waist.

Pamela came home at midnight. I broiled the fish with mustard and vinegar and set it down in front of her. She was touching her nose with a wadded Kleenex. Her tears were real. “I’m not on drugs,” she said.

“Of course you aren’t,” I said.

“It’s usually what people think,” she told me, “but it’s worse than drugs. I get crazed for a while, then it passes. Can you forget it?”

“Sure I will. Don’t worry,” I said.

“I don’t know why I do these things,” she said.

“Your arm is almost completely healed,” I told her. I lifted her wrist and stretched her arm out towards me. She tugged against my pull, but she relaxed as I cradled her elbow in my palm. The raw patch had calmed and a new field of pink had surfaced, hairless and glossy. I wanted to mention the ancient statuary in Greece. I had seen marble limbs discolored, worn concave at the wrist and fingertips, marred by centuries of human touch. Unchecked, these habits of adoration can wear away their subject. To tell her this might sound too much like a tour guide’s expert monologue, and already Pamela had pinned her napkin beneath her plate and was standing up from the table. How would I say, “Sit down, let me describe these treasures”?

  
LANE

I
t was the end of summer. I was living in a seaside town where the rent was cut to nothing during the off-season. I had a good part-time job delivering propane tanks. The tanks were heavy and I enjoyed the physical work. The truck was old and had character; I grew to expect its misfirings and to enjoy the low warble of its engine. I liked the people I saw on my job. They were busy hanging wash or shaving with cold water since their gas had run out, and they were always pleased to see me. I had much time to think about my life. Mostly, I thought about a woman. I saw how the end of an affair is an end to the suspension of disbelief, a lot like the close of a circus act when we see the sword swallower collect his array of knives. The
lights go up and we see the nets and wires which we had not noticed before. The tent is dismantled, fluttering down, like the huge dusty petals of an inverted flower.

For the past few years I had been studying medicine, but I was dependent on financial aid, which had become increasingly difficult to arrange, and I decided on a year away from the university. It wasn’t that I didn’t fare well or didn’t have the stomach for it. After working with cadavers, and having numbered and labeled their remnants, I was at ease with the great stillness they presented to me. Nothing upset me, really. Blood, with its broad spectrum of reds, from Campbell’s soup to valentine satin, had become an ordinary sight. The abscessed sacs and tumors and the wild geometries of accidental lacerations could not unnerve me. Surgical instruments steamed and wrapped in sterile towels had once excited me, but they started to look like silverware wrapped in linen napkins at a place where I used to work as a waiter. Only once, when I was required to dissect a single hand, did I find myself skittish, unable to concentrate.

There is nothing that represents the soul more than the hand. To find the digital arteries and nerves I had to peel back thin, elastic ribbons of muscle from each finger: the “flexor profundus”; the “flexor sublimis”; the “flexor ossis metacarpi”; and so on. These strips of muscle, snipped and flayed open, gave the hand the appearance of a party-popper.

I felt uneasy, even in the glaring light. These shredded bands of muscle had once represented the human touch. But I didn’t leave my studies over something like that. I thought that maybe I wasn’t entirely interested in a medical career, and I needed some time to think about it.

Lane had invited me to spend another weekend with her. Our relationship remained undefined, and these weekends were nerve-racking to me because I never knew what to expect. Although on the surface it was casual, even comfortable in a disappointing way, I was edgy. It was like registering for the draft; I was pretty sure I wasn’t going anywhere but there was always an outside possibility of something urgent occurring that would require my participation. It’s funny how one word means more than one thing. In war, seeing some action was a bad thing, but it was different from
getting
some action. The latter phrase is something you might hear when you’re standing five deep at the bar rail in the safety of your neighborhood tap. I have always disliked the swells and shivers of anticipation. Despite its great symptoms, it is a passive emotion. One can only endure it, drive faster, run up the stairs, move closer. It’s a waiting game.

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.