You Have the Wrong Man (9 page)

I was tired of her poetry and I walked into the house to find the bathroom. I had an awful desire to brush my teeth as if I’d been riding a motorcycle all day and the wind had dehydrated my smile. I saw this dry smile when I looked in the mirror above two lavender sinks. The bar of hand soap was black. The hostess had left the cake resting on the glossy box it came in, like an objet d’art. The box listed the soap’s ingredients: tar, honey, and the spermaceti of some kind of marine life. Who knows what the hostess was trying to get across to people? The black soap made white suds. I knew I wouldn’t have studied these items, the soap, the silver filigree on the mirror, my petrified lips, if I wasn’t so unhappy with myself.

We had a stylish couple in tow when we left the party. They wore the black leotard–look of the 1950s which they claimed was making its way back. They said they were returning to Zen, butterfly chairs, and the Beat poets. The girl wore novelty earrings, two plastic cherubs copulating. She could pull the tiny figures apart and reinsert them. “Who says angels can’t have a fuck?” she asked me.

I observed that the earrings weren’t “period.” No, she agreed, these weren’t from the Beat generation; they were the very latest. She had a high, squeaky voice instead of the husky, jazz-infused kind I always associate with beatnik women reciting poems in coffeehouses. They wanted to go roller skating at a rink in the city that advertised a rock-and-roll
skating party. I figured I would enjoy watching Lane on skates, wobbly and off balance for a while. But she wasn’t in the mood. She told them we’d drive them there but then she and I had to go back to her apartment because her dog had to go for a walk.

“You mean you have to go walk your doped-up dog when I want to roller skate with you?” I said. She shot me her severe glance, the kind, I imagined, she would one day use against her offspring. Suddenly, I was dying to be skating in a room of swirling unknowns, bodies on wheels, with loud music and the submerged thunder of a thousand ball bearings.

“No,” she said, “I’m not in the mood to roller skate.”

“I’ll get you in the mood,” I said.

“We’ll help. We’ll skate in a chain,” the girl said.

“Stay out of it,” her companion said.

“Oops,” she said in a small, high voice from the backseat, in recognition of our predicament. I kind of liked our hitchers, they seemed awake and still lively, ready to continue life after the sedative effect of the book party. I wanted to ask them what they thought of our Vietnam vet, but I saw Lane had her copy of his book on the seat between us and I didn’t bother with it. I let the pair off at the skating club and from the street I could hear the roar of movement above some nice rhythm guitar. “You’re a drag,” I told Lane, but she wasn’t paying attention. She was looking in the mirror at the rainbow slick beneath her eye.

“It’s even bigger now,” she said.

“Bigger is better,” I said. “I could prove that concept to you. If you’d just let me.” I hated myself when I started hinting around.

“The dog,” she said. “The dog must be going crazy.”

Her place was hot and I went around opening windows. The counterweights were shot and I had to prop the windows open with old books. For one window it was
The Magic Mountain
and for another an old copy of
The Three Little Kittens.
I took some ice cubes out of the freezer and tied them in a sock. I made her hold the sock to her eye until she could not bear the cold. “It works best when you keep it there,” I told her, but she kept leaving the sock on the coffee table, where it left a misty imprint.

“I can’t keep doctoring my eye, Masha has to go out,” she said.

I saw that I should have put the ice in a hankie or a flowered pillow slip, Lane was put off by the sock. I saw that her new white dress was ripped at the hem. Clothes just couldn’t stay on her, they seemed to disintegrate. Perhaps it was a chemical reaction of some kind. It reminded me of the story of the actress Merle Oberon. Merle Oberon was supposed to be extremely seductive and twice as erotic because her normal body temperature was two degrees higher than the average 98.6. Maybe Lane’s clothes were melting off her.

Many times I have tried to explain to Lane what has happened to me, what she had caused me to become. In the off-hours and daily solitude of empty routine, the ragged feather of obsession floats down upon me. White, weightless. It touches my lips. There are no words for it. The perennial seed of my dementia, explosive as a milkweed blossom. After months of close study and examination, an insight awakens—I am gravely lovesick—but then something happens. A wind starts up, as if from an enormous
fan, like those used in movie studios to direct artificial snow or rain. And suddenly, the truth of the matter, the revelation, like a downy speck, is blown out of my hands.

I might have turned to her right then, torn away her gauzy dress and crushed her with my weight, the weight which was her. Instead, I took her icy hand and lifted her up, whistled for the mutt. “Let’s go,” I said.

The dog was not one to run and find its own leash. After a search I offered my belt, but Lane decided to tie a scarf to its collar. I thought the accessory looked too flimsy for a shackle, it was just a chiffon streamer from somewhere deep in the closet. Then we were back on the street for a nice midnight stroll. Masha had recuperated from the Valium and strained against the scarf.

After going a few blocks down Mount Auburn, I stopped Lane and kissed her. She would accept an occasional mild demonstration. I kissed her for too long and she pushed my chin away with the heel of her hand.

Out of nowhere, rogue dogs appeared, circling our Masha. I picked up a stone from the crumbling curb and threw it at the largest beast. It hit him square in the nose but it had no effect. The stone dropped to the sidewalk in front of the animal and he sniffed it once dutifully. We kept walking.

“Puppies are out of the question,” Lane was telling her dog.

“We better go back before they get at her,” I said.

“Don’t let them.”

“I’m not a canine bodyguard. That costs extra.”

“Oh, that’s nice. Don’t go out of your way or anything.”

Another dog trotted towards us. He was exceptionally motivated and made a beeline for the bitch. In surprise, or defeat, Lane let go of the chiffon scarf and the whole pack of dogs took off after her pet. We could hear them barking up one sidewalk and down another block as we ran after. Then there was silence. I imagined her dog and another locked together, the chiffon ribbon ruffling in the wind.

“Isn’t there some sort of leash law in Cambridge? Dogs shouldn’t roam the streets like that.” I tried to sound indignant, but I was weary. “Oh, well. She’ll come back when she’s knocked up.”

“Are you crazy? We have to find her. Don’t just stand there like that.”

I got the car and we patrolled the neighborhood blocks. We found a mangy convention of canines and Masha jumped into the car, still sporting the chiffon scarf.

“She’s dog-tired,” I said.

“Oh great. Now you’re a punster,” Lane said. “If this dog gets pregnant, I’ll kill her!”

“Spay her. She needs a breather.”

“But the money,” Lane said.

Like Cagney, I wanted to rotate a grapefruit in her face.

“Have you got an extra pair of underpants?”

“No, not for a dog,” I said. I fell on the sofa, and stretched out my legs. I shut my eyes the way I do when I feel like making a point while still holding my tongue. Then I removed my boots, heel to toe, without using my
hands. That’s another good one. “What’s on TV?” I said. I really wouldn’t have minded watching something.

“Didn’t you bring any underwear?”

“I don’t wear shorts in the summer, I put ’em in mothballs.” I pulled the palm of my hand over my face. I followed my scar with my index finger, a mannerism I no longer tried to restrict.

“What have you got against me and my dog?” she said, but she wasn’t serious. She came over to the sofa with some microwaved food. We sat together and ate.

“You go to a lot of trouble,” I said.

“Cooking is for housewives,” she said.

“You can’t be bothered with simple domestic courtesies,” I said.

“Exactly, but you don’t believe me. You don’t really think I’m an artist, that I belong to this world.”

“Sure, you belong. There’s room for one more.”

She looked worried that I might not have understood. “I don’t mean museums,” she said. “I don’t mean one specific place.”

I looked around the apartment. I saw nothing but junk. One time a renowned painter had offered her a painting. He must have been campaigning for her when he gave her one of his better pieces. She accepted the painting but later returned it saying it wouldn’t fit in with her “decor.” She had initially thought the colors had matched her slipcovers, but the art wasn’t suitable. It was abstract art. Lane couldn’t understand the picture. “Doesn’t it look like a huge molar? An X-ray of teeth?” She was thinking about buying some Audubon prints. Birds, insects, flowers.

Most of all, Lane was fond of photographs. The walls of her apartment were ruined with industrial-size tacks and
masking tape which she had used to arrange pictures of her friends and family. She had enlarged the prints until everything looked grainy. She had pictures of me. Pictures of Masha. She had very little talent as a photographer, but she had learned how to read the light meter and to adjust the focus in Photography 101 at college. Since then, she seemed interested in documenting her life in an offhand, confused way. She took her own portrait when she had dressed to go to her father’s funeral. There she was, sitting on the mortuary stairs, her white gloves in her lap. She had taken her self-portrait every day during the weeks following an abortion. “I have to remember how sad I was,” she said. She didn’t look very sad at all. She had just permed her hair and it extended over her shoulders like heavenly froth.

“I
was
sad. I was devastated,” she told me. “That doesn’t mean I stopped shampooing my hair.” These details made me think there was something more to her. Was this darkness contrived? It continued to puzzle me. It was the same feeling I get when I search my house because I think I detect the smell of smoke, perhaps I’ve left a butt in the sofa. I walk through every room expecting to find something smoldering, maybe blazing, and I can’t find anything. In one way it’s a relief not to find a fire, then again it’s a matter of concern, I keep thinking I haven’t looked hard enough and the place will go up in the dark of night.

Every girl I have ever known has had some nude photographs of herself. A nude series taken by an old boyfriend, a college roommate, a brother maybe. It’s not just vanity, but plain curiosity. Women like to know what they look like front and back. Lane had cheesecake pictures of herself and she gave me my choice of them. A student
photographer had taken a series of her in an old garage. Lane tried several poses which even the mainstream girlie magazines would have considered cornball. In almost all of the shots she held a Mae West parasol or a fake revolver. Wild West–style. One of these pictures interested me, though. The photographer had asked her to hold a junked windowpane. She cupped a large piece of glass in the palms of her hands; its two thick edges crossed her at the waist and thigh and magnified her pelvic terrain, the slope of her belly, the smoky triangle I had seen only once before in true life. There it all was. Behind glass. I chose that picture, but she refused to give it to me. She said she wanted me to have the one where she’s holding the ruffled parasol.

Lane had been taking a photography course when we first met. I’d seen her at different events, and at the Health Center when she came in for a ringworm infection that she had contracted from her dog. Then she called me one evening to ask me if I would like to be her “subject.” “Would you mind?” she said.

I didn’t know what she meant. I thought maybe she was conducting a sociological experiment or one of those tests where you’re asked to avoid sugar or required to take massive doses of vitamin A while they test your urine or they see if your lips have developed fissures and cracks. When she mentioned pictures, I figured it was something to do with my scar. I’d had a number of medical photographs taken over the years. It’s funny how scar tissue can draw medical interest years after the initial laceration. Once or twice I was paid for some photographs, but usually the doctors had said it was just for my chart. I have since learned how patients are exploited in a thousand ways like this.

Lane told me she just needed to take some portraits for
her photography class. She said, “I think you’d be interesting.” I figured she was flirting with me then, and I agreed to meet her the next afternoon.

My girlfriend at that time was in the process of leaving me for another man, but she couldn’t resist hanging around to see what was happening with this photographer. I had spent the morning in a chipper mood, enjoying the second thoughts of my girlfriend. The photo session was spoiling her plans. She had wanted to leave me “high and dry.”

I expected Lane’s camera to be large, perhaps the kind that required a tripod. It was a tiny Rolex, the size of a cigarette box. Lane held it before her eye as if she were reading the
Surgeon General’s Warning.
I couldn’t hear the shutter. My girlfriend was getting pretty irritated; she didn’t believe that there was any film in the camera. I, too, had wondered about that—how often do you load that camera, how many shots on a roll? Lane seemed to be snapping a thousand shots, but after a while I started to like it. She bossed me. She told me to sit where the light edged my profile. She had me stand against a white wall; then she made me stand beneath a small arch between rooms. Lane took me through all the rooms of my apartment, as if she were looking for a place she had seen before. “Here,” she said, “stand here at the foot of this rumpled bed. Now sit down. That’s right. Now get in.”