You Have the Wrong Man (6 page)

Inside, she showed me a few crumpled pages from the new novel she was working on. She said she had been
working poorly because of the humidity. The humidity in Boston was much worse than the humidity below the Mason-Dixon line. “One is oppressive, the other is sultry,” she explained. The Boston kind was taking its toll on her. Then she blamed her dog. The dog was whining all night. “Masha’s in heat again. I’ve cleaned it up but you might find a trace I didn’t see,” she said.

“A trace of what?”

“You know.”

“Oh, Christ.” I didn’t know what else to say. Lane had named the dog after reading a few paragraphs in
The Portable Chekhov.
Whether Masha was one of Chekhov’s greedy serfs or a member of the aristocracy, Lane couldn’t tell me.

“You should have her spayed,” I said, although I had said it before.

“If
you
had a dog, would you have it altered?” Her voice exaggerated the word
altered
, as if she were speaking of torture situations involving the canine psyche.

“This is all hypothetical, but, yes, I say it’s less cruel in the long run.”

“And what about lobotomy?” she asked. “Is that a merciful procedure?”

How she made these leaps I can’t say, but they amused me. “Except for a few important chemicals, the brain is not the essential organ in reproduction. We’re talking about an overpopulation of mutts.”

“Is that what we’re talking about? Pedigrees?”

I went along with this initial babble, though this was a playful uneasiness, a relentless back-and-forth I wanted to avoid.

She jumped in and said, “Let’s go shopping, I need something cool to wear.”

“Talc is nice,” I said. My voice was strong, still wry, without a desperate edge.

The shopping idea seemed all right—I needed to get outside to get some air. I wanted to breathe the good dust of the automobiles. I stood on the sidewalk as she searched through racks of cheap Eastern sundresses which were arranged in tight rows in front of a shop reeking of incense and herb oils. She chose some shifts and went inside to try them on. In a few moments she came back to show me how she looked in one. It was “like a bandana,” I said, and she frowned. She purchased a plain white dress. “An anorectic’s wedding gown,” I said. “Nurses’ wear at your basic Roumanian hospital,” I told her.

She frowned again.

“An
angel’s underthing
,” I said, and one side of her mouth lifted in a crooked smile. She liked what I was saying. Her smile was disturbing. I felt the first, tiny pinball of optimism shooting around in my belly.

We met in a college town and came to depend on one another without the fulfillment or debt of admitting our love. We never assumed appropriate roles. From there we continued our friendship, wrote letters about our work and about our lives, our landlords and lovers, those kinds of predicaments. She put it this way: “We are cut from the same fabric. If I never see you again, in fifty years we’ll probably end up in the same rag heap.” I didn’t like the metaphor. She seemed to be saying we would never unite in our lifetimes but that at the end of our days, as castoffs,
we would find one another in our solitary tatters. But I was encouraged to believe that we were inseparable in some way. She came through the towns I lived in and stayed for a few days here or there, she slept near me, sometimes in the same bed, her bitch Masha lying at our feet, a swirl of red fur, tail knocking.

After buying the dress, we walked over to the river and sat on a bench in the shade. The park was busy with couples—college students, accountants on their coffee breaks, lovers in difficult stages of reunion or flight. These various pairs were immersed in small games, shoving one another or embracing, flirting, frowning, exhibiting all the comical gestures and little threats of new or steady romances. What these enviable matches did together, in public view—even those couples snoozing on car blankets—amounted to something. I let my imagination walk a straight line from where Lane and I sat to some distant point, but I was walking there alone. The funny thing was, Lane was always holding my hand or shining her huge, flat turquoise ring on the knee of my pants. She put her arm through mine, and we walked along the river. I saw our reflections momentarily sketched and then erased, smeared across the graphite surface of the Charles.

I was curious to watch what was happening to her as the novel kept selling. She adopted mannerisms and styles from different literary grand dames. She tried to copy Virginia Woolf’s eye makeup from an early photograph of the novelist. Woolf had worn a thin smudged line in the hollow of her eyelid, where the delicate membrane meets the bony socket. The line helped to dramatize her sunken look.
But Woolf’s cosmetological method was hard to employ. Lane’s face, no matter how she tried to embellish it or shade it, was too fresh, expectant, blank.

Yet, she was publishing’s new pretty one with a knack for fancy phrases. Her imagery and metaphors made readers want to scratch their heads, but a smitten public forgave the numerous incongruities in her prose. The text didn’t matter. Her looks were the whole package. People said, “Look at that
face
,” when they saw her picture. Lane had a face that made you think a child was staring, home-sick, out of a woman’s eyes. For a few weeks, her photograph was everywhere.

In one picture, Lane was walking away from the photographer, her face tilted, turning back to look over her shoulder in shy gratitude. It was a come-on. Her eyebrow was lifted in submissive wariness. Lane melded the prim and the sexual with angelic perfection. Yet, don’t angels, especially those ones painted on cathedral ceilings, dressed in their gauzy bolts, just look like whores on Sunday?

During this time of celebration about her book, she often called me to complain about her situation. With all the distractions, she was not able to work on her next novel, and, then, could she actually write a novel any better than the first? When I tried to encourage her, she changed the subject abruptly. She just wanted me to listen as she listed the obligations and burdens of sudden fame. I told her she looked beautiful on the cover of the novel. She said, “I think my hair is too full.”

“Sphinxlike,” I reassured her. “You look like a sphinx.”

“Doesn’t it stick out like a shelf?”

“No, really. You’re just a sphinx.”

Several months ago, in the dead of winter, she called me in a frantic mood. “I need your advice,” she told me. “I really don’t know what to do.” Her voice was breathy, humid as if from tears.

I was lonely those days and I was greatly warmed by her voice. Her apparent confusion and neediness activated my numbed-up charms and ignited the braided wick of all my complex humane impulses. After weeks of poor-me solitude, I was happy to offer my support, if I could. When she was off-balance like this, I felt stronger on my own legs. I was reminded of my talents and abilities; I could feel my height and weight as a man; I would test the fabric and flex of my character. It was good to entertain these ideas of myself against the backdrop of her frailty.

“What is it?” I asked. “You can tell me—”

“
People
magazine,” she said,

“People?”

“They want to do a thing on me. Should I go with it? What do you think?”

Her news felt like when I took some buckshot; a row of burning cinnamon Red Hots had been grafted to my thighs and buttocks. I had wanted her to admit to a station of loneliness that might have paralleled my own. By comparing our trials we might have engendered a mutual sympathy which in turn could have ignited a further commitment, a reciprocal desire.

“People?”
I told her. “Hell, why not
People
?”

“Oh, great,” she said with exaggerated relief. “I thought it might be, well, sort of tacky. But they say it sells books.”

“Sure it would,” I said.

“Well, should I wear my hair up for the picture? I could
leave it down, but up looks better. Won’t I look more serious if I put it in a french braid or something? I mean I don’t want to look like just anybody.”

“Up is good,” I told her. Then I told her that I had a medical problem. I said I might have found a lump somewhere, and maybe it was something. She paused, she seemed truly concerned. She asked me if I was certain it was cancer and shouldn’t I go to a doctor despite the fact that I was almost a doctor myself. I didn’t actually say it was cancer. Later that night I called her back, I said I had lied, but I couldn’t say why. I didn’t know why. It wasn’t because of
People
magazine. It was a lie that assumes its position in desire. It appears suddenly, without rehearsal or further explanation. It swells up like a physical hurt, a nodule, an unnameable lump, a lie. I’ve studied some research that proved that
loneliness can kill you.
Lonely people are more likely to have infections, kidney stones, even fatal illnesses. People living alone get three times as many cold viruses and are more likely to develop digestive ailments and skin disorders. Perhaps this was happening to me.

I wasn’t irked by her success. I was happy for her. I cringed when a critic called her book, “Fantasy Tales of Daisy Mae and Li’l Abner.” It was true, she had a whitetrash background that she exploited mercilessly. She knew the speech patterns, the drawls and twangs of the West Virginia mining regions. Even when her prose was tangled and purple, she had learned to exploit her native communities, the destitute Appalachian landscapes, the tar-paper shacks and abandoned rail yards, body and soul.

She was in the small kitchen, spooning out ice cubes from an aluminum pitcher and filling our glasses with tea and shaved lemon slices cut so thin they looked like the gills of a fish. I would have preferred a little of the bourbon that I had remembered to bring with me. Lane was satisfied with fruity wines or syrupy brandies. I had learned to look after my own thirsts. I went into the bathroom to find an unpleasant scene. The floor was smeared and there were dark paw prints everywhere. I was used to a little mess now and then, but this could have been cleaned up before my arrival. “Expecting any guests?” I called back to her.

“Oh, God,” I heard her say, “I forgot. The dog was in there last night. I had to lock her up and I haven’t tidied up yet.”

“Didn’t you say you took a bath in here today?” I was looking at the dog hair and red smears in the tub where the dog had scratched the porcelain. “Masha must have had a bad night,” I said. Lane came into the bathroom with a bucket of Spic and Span and two new sponges. I started on the tub and she went to work on the floor.

“I gave her my Valium,” she told me.

“How much Valium do you give to a dog?”

“I must have given her too much, because she seems real sleepy.”

I walked through the apartment to find the dog. She was lying quietly at the foot of the bed, wearing men’s underwear.

There are many ways to react to the harsh sights of our times. We can laugh at six people in wheelchairs crossing a busy intersection on an icy day, or we can feel miserable about it. I have learned to embrace the grimy little mysteries I come across, giving full rein to my sense of humor. My
sense of humor has saved me on every occasion. But I felt distressed when I found the dog in the bed of a woman whom I’ve wanted for a long time, and this dog is wearing some man’s underwear. I reminded myself that it was common to put underwear on dogs in heat. The ASPCA didn’t have to learn about Lane’s bitch, in its pathetic, biannual phase of receptivity. The dog was drugged but not stuporous.

“It will be a while before the Valium wears off,” I told her, “and please, no tea for me,” I said to her. “I’m starting now.” I made no small production of pouring myself a real drink.

It was around dinnertime then, and Lane took a carton of jumbo shrimp in black bean sauce out of the fridge. How long the carton had been sitting there, I didn’t know. We ate it cold, right out of the box. I liked dipping my fork into the carton and stabbing randomly at its fleshy contents, biting a tangy pink crescent right off the fork; it mirrored my mood somehow. I started to feel better from the bourbon. I was going though my carton of cigarettes, and nicotine surges pulsed in both my wrists, dancing up one arm and down the other.

We had to be in Brookline at the house of a small-press publisher. It was a book-signing for Lane’s friend who had written a group of stories about Vietnam. Lane had written something for the sleeve, some patriotic phrases. I read the blurb and saw that Lane didn’t have any idea about that war.

She took a few extra minutes putting a line along her eyelid with a sharp, waxy pencil. She scolded me for
watching her as she applied her makeup, and for a minute I was bored and edgy as I stood beside her; she treated me like her handmaiden or a younger sibling.

“The smeary look is in,” I said. “You put on your makeup like you’re working on a drafting board; that lip liner is thin as a blueprint. Why don’t you muss yourself up some?”

“I don’t tell you how to zip your pants,” she said.

“Unzip them,” I said. I stood directly behind her as she leaned into the bathroom mirror. There was a hairsbreadth between us, yet I did not fit myself against her. I just dropped my face to her hair, my lips to her shoulder. I stood behind her and faced her face in the mirror. That was all.