You Have the Wrong Man Read online

  The place was thick with smoke, as if Hollywood had placed its smudge pots and dry ice in all the niches. The band was loud, clean, using the same four chords to enhance the heartfelt in everything. I was suddenly happy just about the music, and, for a few blesssed moments she didn’t figure in it. As usual, men gawked at my scar. I was competitively handsome until they noticed my disfigurement, then I was a curiosity, a shock. Soon they saw Lane. The crowded tables, the men pinched against the horse-shoe bar, dropped out of their conversations in a hushed, spasmodic response to her beauty.

  Lane was with me.

  People couldn’t ignore us, one on one, and coupled we really buzzed the crowd. It was a gut reaction sort of thing. Tonight she had tied her hair up and it made her look like every guy’s favorite grammar-school teacher. And who is teach’s date tonight—a GQ Frankenstein’s Monster.

  That night must have been hard on the band; the crowd seemed irritable and unwilling to follow their ideas. “Is this the Swimming Pool Cues?” I asked a man at the bar.

  “Beats me,” he said. He noticed my face, the deep line running down my forehead, through my right eye, down my cheek and jumping two inches to begin again at my throat. “Hey, Ron, look at the scarface,” the man said.

  I was turning away, but the patron was drunk and his curiosity had him. He wouldn’t let me get back to where Lane waited and watched. I was quite familiar with comments about my scar. It was a provoking sight, a perfectly straight line, almost a cleft, that halved my face and intensified its features. The scar made me appear twice as hard, twice as edgy or sly, twice as hungry as an ordinary man, and this was intriguing to other men. My scar always seemed to create a mini-dilemma at whatever primitive soirée I might intrude upon. The man pinched my shoulder and wouldn’t let me go before his friend had a good look at my scar. “Where did you get it?”

  “Born with it?” the other man asked.

  I said, “Sure, that’s right,” because I hadn’t even had a beer yet and the music seemed to be fading. I worried it might be my luck to come in at the end of the set.

  “He’s got his mother’s slit on him,” the first man yelled.

  This was an interesting perception and the whole bar turned away from the tight little stage to locate the target of the strange remark. Even the guitarist, who couldn’t have heard it, looked out into the darkness before him, resting his wrist on the neck of his guitar.

  Not even a second passed and I’d thrown one. The first blow to come my way connected and put me off balance, the next got me square. This had me doubled up, but it was just a momentary thing. The men didn’t follow through and I couldn’t believe it when I saw that Lane had stepped into it. Lane was trying to pull somebody off me, someone who wasn’t even part of it. It was so dark in there. She was like one of those little birds which peck at the shoulder of a rhino, and at first nobody noticed her. Then she got a good one, an elbow or the back of someone’s hand which opened a little cut below her eye. I tried to push her out of the way, before she got roughed up. “Jesus,” somebody said when at last they saw her, “what’s she doing?” I shoved Lane ahead of me and we took our leave. Nobody cared. The men were laughing; I was bashed up enough without their help. I pushed Lane outside and up under a lamp where I looked at her bruised cheek. She seemed small to me then, familiar but unreadable, changing before my eyes.

  I’ve lived behind this perfect line since I was thirteen, when I ran through a plate-glass window at a department store. The window was cleaned to a perfect invisible gleam. They had just removed the annual “Price Breaker” signs after a store-wide sale and there were no stencils or decals to inform me of the dangerous sheet. The scar runs down my face and throat and continues through my pectoral muscle, over the small brown plateau of the nipple, down the short ladder of my ribs and it ends below my waist where the hair at my pelvis begins to increase and obscures its path.

  My parents were given five thousand dollars in insurance, which was to be saved for my college education. My father squandered the money before I was out of high school. He used to say, “Life is an education, and you’ve got living expenses to cover.” So the cash went for rent and for a used car which still sits out in back of the house where I grew up. Its windshield sports a crack right down the center where I tried to kick it with the steel toe of my boot. I was standing on the hood to face my father who was behind the wheel, driving away, going ten, then twenty miles an hour until I slid off the hood making sure I landed on my feet. I straddled the white line of Route 138, waiting for my father to turn the car around. When he did, he was screaming at about seventy miles an hour, coming straight for me. It wasn’t a simple test. I lost my nerve and dived out of the way when there was still a little time left, I’d say less than a few seconds, but I was too shook up to take advantage of it. When he passed by, I saw he was way over on the opposite side, nowhere near me. I was ashamed of my cowardice, ashamed of my gratitude.

  I put Lane back in the car. “You could have lost some teeth,” I said. She curled her tongue up over her front teeth at the idea. Her eye was a deep half-moon, but there wasn’t much swelling. The tiny cut was below her eye so I knew that her eye wasn’t going to close. I told her, “Never get between two goons going at each other.”

  “But they were all after you,” she said, and she sounded like she’d been heroic instead of plain stupid.

  “I take care of myself,” I told her.

  “Not too well,” she said in a soft, regretful voice, imitating a mommy.

  “I’m not the one with the banged-up eye,” I said.

  “It’s always terrible for you, isn’t it? I mean, that remark—” She couldn’t hide her fascination.

  “He’s got his mother’s slit on him” was new to Lane, but to me it was nothing. I went across the street to a soda machine and bought a can of White Rock ginger ale for her eye.

  “For my eye?” she said.

  I held the icy can against her cheek. We sat in the car for a while and she kept twisting the rearview mirror to study her puffy wheal. Jesus, she likes the shiner, I thought. She thinks it’s romantic like Van Gogh’s ear, or Ahab’s wooden leg, or Quasimodo’s hump. I could see she was thinking of the book-signing party. She would explain how she broke up a gang fight down in the red-light district. Lane didn’t care that it was just Chelsea, and that the night hadn’t even hit its low point yet.

  She had not talked about my scar since the first months I knew her, but tonight she was back on the subject. She was saying how impressed she was with my attitude about my disfigurement. She said that I was well-adjusted and so very tolerant of other people’s feelings about my scar.

  “Actually,” she was saying, “I’ve always found your scar to be sort of attractive. It’s Clint Eastwood or Burt Lancaster. I can picture them wearing it.”

  “I don’t exactly wear it.”

  “We all do. We wear our misfortunes.” She was joking, but I could see she really felt something, felt desire for those actors. It shouldn’t surprise me. Sometimes I feel a whip cracking, herding my secret thoughts out in front. I can feel the oiled leather unravel from its coil and snap the air in front of my face.

  I guess I told her all my scar stories. I told her about a teacher in tenth grade who was appalled by my face. At that time, the sutured skin was newly reconstructed, swollen, oyster-colored and knotty, not the thin pencil gouge it is now.

  Lane said, “But it’s not really a pencil line. It’s more like a seam in a paper bag, or a good crease in a pair of chinos if you turn the leg inside out.” She touched the scar as I was driving, rode her fingertip down the indentation from my forehead to my jaw. Then she put her hand back in her lap, although she knew the line kept going.

  I was telling her how this teacher was really upset about me. She bent over backwards to see I was doing fine. She drilled me extra when I flunked a test and she handed me the hall pass whenever I wanted it, instead of giving me the third degree. The thing was, she never could ge
t my name right. She kept calling me the wrong name; she called me Mark.

  Lane didn’t seem impressed by this story, it didn’t describe the bandages and the hospital room. But she said, “How weird. It’s like Jung’s synchronism idea.”

  Lane always had this maddening half-knowledge about everything. I told her it would be more like Jung if my name had really been Mark. In truth it was more like Freud that the teacher made this mistake.

  “Oh, you mean a Freudian slip.”

  “That’s right. Jung is something else.” I gave her some examples such as a girl who worked for Xerox whose last name was Copy, and a horse trainer whose last name was Furlong, a child beaten to death by her father whose name was Brandy Mallet.

  “Branded by a mallet. Oh, I see,” Lane said. “Then what was the point of your story about the teacher?” She seemed a little irritated that she didn’t have her psychological terms exactly right.

  “The teacher was just nervous, a real mess. She couldn’t handle my presence in her class. That’s all.”

  Lane said, “I’d write this down for a book or something, but I guess it’s your life, isn’t it? So it’s your prerogative.”

  I wasn’t exactly thrilled by this observation. I said, “Use what you want, it’s the point of view that matters. You ought to write about your black eye. That’s a firsthand experience.”

  I saw her looking at herself in the side mirror. She examined her bruise and smiled the way a woman smiles when she feels pleased by her attire. She’s wearing her virgin smock, her black eye, and an added touch—something to increase her authenticity—her grandmother’s cameo.

  There were a hundred paper sacks of light winding along the sidewalk of the Brookline Colonial when we arrived at the book bash. I peeked in one sack and saw that it was filled with fine white sand in which a votive candle was centered. “Now that took some tinkering,” I said.

  “I told you it was special.”

  “Looks like we’re not too late, look at that table of food,” I told Lane, but she had paused a few sacks back to embrace someone, a Lord Byron type, so I headed for the pyramid of cherry tomatoes and the dolphin-sized sculpture of tuna salad. The yard was illuminated by lanterns strung from dogwood to dogwood, and in a discreet corner I could hear the Bug Assassinator going full blast, removing the insect sector from that elite neighborhood. On the flagstone patio, I saw a table of hardcover books, and a little man was sitting on a lounge chair signing one. He must be the author of The Five Lives of a Vietnam Vet. I wondered at the figure, it seemed random, why not the classic number nine? Turns out the guy had been hit five times and lived to write a book about it all. He looked pudgy and tanned, as if he, too, might live in this neighborhood and sit out by his pool. I made a promise to myself that I was going to avoid the whole literary notion of that evening and stick to food and the friendly talk of some ladies nearby. I knew I wouldn’t see much of my escort; she was in her own world, describing her new novel to some people, and then she was talking about her shiner as if it were her new creation, a result of her slumming muse. I could hear little snatches of her conversation in her aloof and dreamy southern tones, the drawl she had once tried to overcome and then had relearned to stupefy her publisher and fans. I heard her saying to someone that she was putting some Vietnam stuff in her new book, but of course she would be dependent on research. Then she was saying how she loved to go to the “li-berry,” which seemed to charm the partygoers, though to me, it just sounded dumb blonde.

  I was happy for a while. The caterer was running back and forth with trays which he continually placed near me as if I were his official taster. I kept nodding my approval to him, but once I had my fill of the basic four food groups, I went over to a table where the caps had been left off all the bottles of booze. This encouraged me to slosh as much as I pleased into a lone tumbler which was smeared with lip color. I do like the taste of their lips left on fine glassware—it’s even better on a longneck beer bottle. Soon Lane brought some bright-eyed, nervous people over to me. I wiped my palms on my jeans, ready to shake hands, but I saw she had steered them over for one purpose only, to show them my scar.

  “This is what started the fight,” she said. “The amazing thing is that he didn’t bleed to death right there at the department store. They ripped up a brand-new Ralph Lauren, all silk, right off the rack, to make tourniquets,” she went on.

  “Why is it such a straight line?” a fellow was asking her.

  She didn’t even look at me. She had made up the Ralph Lauren part, they didn’t have shirts like that at Montgomery Ward, and the EMS personnel didn’t use tourniquets. There weren’t any arteries involved.

  She was saying, “It’s a straight line because he was stunned and didn’t move out of the way when the whole thing cracked and came down like a sheet of ice right on him; he just stood there. He was in a state of shock and all. It was like a wave curling over, like the famous Pipeline. One edge sliced right through him.”

  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.