You Have the Wrong Man (10 page)

She came back into the living room wearing her tattered robe. I saw I was on the money about the sock, because she had exchanged the sock for a velour facecloth and she was dutifully pressing an ice cube against her eye. “How did you rip your kimono?” I asked.

“It’s a thrift-store thing. All the stitches were rotten, and when I washed it—poof. It’s ninety-nine years old to begin with.”

“Why do you girls like that sort of thing? You hunt around until you find something another woman tossed out and you think it’s the greatest.”

“I have an interest in the unknown past,” she said.

“Whose past?”

“The person who owned this robe might have been spectacular. I like to think so, anyway.”

“Did you have imaginary friends when you were a child?”

“Yes!” She was laughing, delighted I had brought this up. “They were the best friends of all. I was totally at ease with them,” she said.

I thought she certainly must be joking. She wasn’t.

She turned to me and said, “You know everything about a woman’s body, don’t you? I mean, you studied everything, didn’t you?”

I answered yes, of course. I had studied it all.

“I thought you would know.”

“Don’t you feel well?”

“It’s just on my mind,” she said.

I had told her before that I never wanted her to ask me for medical advice. It’s funny how medical students are burdened by their friends coming over to show them muscle strains, skin rashes, sore throats. I had refused to look at her ear when Lane had a fullness sensation and she heard clicking. The symptoms were related to common hay fever, I was sure. It was a cranky Eustachian tube, but I didn’t have the right instruments, nor did I want to make an incorrect diagnosis.

“Female troubles? What is it?” I asked, but I could not look at her. “A sore? Cramps? A burning sensation? Abdominal tenderness?”

“No, nothing like that. God, is that what you say to patients?”

“I don’t have patients. I’m not a doctor. You’re being unfair asking me these questions.”

“Sorry,” she said.

I didn’t want to know what ailed her. I was banging an ice tray at the kitchen sink. I hated to have to drink something, but suddenly I had a weak sensation in my knees and at the base of my spine like the feeling I get when I’ve slammed on the brakes to avoid an accident and it takes a few moments for the adrenaline to melt away. I poured bourbon into a glass until I remembered to stop pouring.

Lane said, “It’s some kind of blister.”

“A blister?”

“Yes.” She was sitting on the edge of the sofa. She looked embarrassed, but she also looked incredibly relieved. She was beaming at me.

“I’m not looking at your blister.”

“Why not?”

“You better go to a doctor if you think you’ve got a problem. That’s what they’re there for.”

“Can’t you check it?”

“I’m not looking at your blister. That’s final.” How could my love object detail her imperfections with such aplomb?

The breeze was coming in the window behind her. I noticed the skin on her arms was raised with goose pimples. I went around behind her to shut the window. I wasn’t paying attention when I removed the musty volume
of
The Magic Mountain
and the upper sash slammed down. My fingers were caught between the two tight sashes and I couldn’t free my fingers. I couldn’t jimmy either window. She was at my side, trying to lift the bottom sash, but it didn’t budge.

The pain was immediate, hot, increasing.

I had yelped when it happened but I was quickly moving beyond verbal complaint. I began to feel lightheaded. My fingers were squashed and I could feel the digital arteries pulsing to the second knuckles where the blood couldn’t flow to my fingertips or properly return. The pain crested and subsided, crested again, and almost took my legs from me. I even stopped to consider it, passing out might be the answer. Then I used my brains and asked Lane to get me something—a screwdriver, anything. She returned with an iced-tea spoon. I pried it between the window sashes and tried to use it for leverage but it bent in half, fragile as a daisy stem, and my fingers remained caught. I repeated my request for a screwdriver. She returned with a letter opener which fit easily between the two frames, but it slipped and fell onto the external sill.

“You’re turning white,” Lane remarked. She was quite alarmed, being that I was pretty well bronzed to start out. At last, she came back with what I wanted, a Phillips-head. With my left hand I pried the sashes apart and released my fingers.

My right hand was squashed across the second knuckles, changing color in front of my eyes, but I saw that my fingers weren’t broken. “Ice,” I said. “Did we use all the ice?”

“Oh, God, I think it’s gone. I’ll ask next door.”

“Take this with you.” I gave her a wastebasket.

“That’s an authentic Cherokee basket,” she said.

I couldn’t believe she was stalling over some moldy trinket from a reservation.

When she returned with ice, I put my whole hand in a bowl of it and tried to ignore the throbbing. It was difficult not to think of everything in bad terms. I wished I had not taken the day off nor left the seaside town. I imagined that my delivery job might be in jeopardy without the use of one hand. Then I saw I was feeling sorry for myself. I knew the fingers would be sore for a period of time, worse if I allowed any error in lifting and unloading the tanks, but I would be able to keep working.

Lane’s shiner was in full swing, a crooked Ferris wheel of broken blood vessels. I let myself imagine that her robe, its rotten seams, might dissolve and fall from her shoulders as the night wore on.

“I could read to you from my new novel,” she said. “It might relax you and take your mind off your hand.”

“That would be fine,” I told her.

I stretched out on the sofa. The pain was lessening; there’s a threshold which is met, and then a steady retreat from it. I was learning to live with it. But I couldn’t stop imagining Lane’s blister. Who had she dated who might have given her a virus? “Maybe too much masturbation,” she had admitted with a shrug, but I didn’t want to explore her secret lesions, those raw spots that had occurred with no impulsion from me.

She began to read from her manuscript. I wasn’t surprised to hear that the main character had quite a sizable scar. I didn’t really follow the story, I was drifting. It started to rain. I heard the heavy droplets brushing the leaves, too
weighty to cling. I could smell the dust of the streets as the rain stirred the litter and tapped the metal awnings.

Lane put down her pages and asked me again, “Can’t you look at it, please? It’s stinging.”

She lifted her threadbare gown and opened her knees. I adjusted the gooseneck lamp until the brilliant cone fell directly on the subject. She pulled my fingers to the flaming spot, a tiny oblong sore spoiling the silky vestibule below her clitoris.

I wanted to kill her.

I split my time between MCI Framingham and MCI Cedar Junction in Walpole. Walpole is off the beaten path and I guess I can’t expect her to visit me here, although I keep inviting her to come. I want her to see my arrangements, but Walpole gives Lane the drears and makes her jittery. She would have to endure walking through several electronic kiosks to get back to my unit, where I’m set up.

It isn’t your glam slot at a major hospital. My work here, as a physician for the Department of Massachusetts Correctional Institutions, is mostly HIV housekeeping and stitching torn lips and ears after everyday brawls in the yard. I do my fair share of hemorrhoid operations and rectal suturing due to the violent lifestyle in here—the general stasis encourages a high rate of consensual sodomy, and then, of course, it’s often rape. A few catatonic inmates require tube feeding, and I dislike the wretched task of tube insertion and squeezing a plastic bulb of high-protein glop directly into the patient’s gut. I have come to see how the catatonics are wise fools. It’s a natural reaction for the body to shut down in prison. Why force these men to continue
to ingest a superficial sustenance? Bread isn’t everything.

When an inmate’s catatonia becomes too severe, I am required to administer electric shock treatments. I perform the procedure routinely. I carry the compact machine, the size of a laptop computer—I call it, excuse the pun, my “powerbook”—back and forth between Framingham and Walpole, according to jottings on my weekly planner. I had the machine in the trunk of my car the last time I went to see Lane. Imagine what I might have done? Today, I have an appointment with a firebug at four o’clock in Framingham. I’ll zap the remorseful goon and he’ll get his appetite back in time for dinner.

Acute AIDS patients are sent to Mass General when they’re just about dead. I am pressured to keep them in the system as long as I can. The infirmary is a death house.

I see men after they have been raped. I see them transported on gurneys to “chapel” for their state-funded last rites. Sometimes, a man comes to me for a minor ailment, perhaps right after visiting hours if his girlfriend complained of his halitosis. I give him a tube of baking-soda toothpaste. These individuals are mobsters, baby molesters, cold-blooded killers. It still surprises me that they should tell me their stories and want to hear mine. My scar is an icebreaker. Yet, I believe they see it written elsewhere across my face: Here’s a man, a free man, still in harm’s way.

“You got trouble at home, Doc?” “Does the bitch be bitching?” they try to get alongside. The other day, I examined an inmate whose persistent jock rash presented like a rust-corroded chastity belt. He tugs my hand and says, “What’s the daily mail? What bad deeds she be doing now?”

I talk about Lane. I hope to expunge her with each installment of my narrative. As I pump a rubber syringe of Hi-cal All-in-One Diet or I’m giving some hunger-strike zombie a Com-Electric cocktail, as I reposition a prolapsed colon, feeding it back through the traumatized sphincter, as I exfoliate bedsores, peeling scabbed doilies from the tender living cells—her story goes on. Every word rewords itself. My wind-and-piss monologues have earned their audience. She wouldn’t like to know it, but Lane is famous across these secret tiers. From our hallmark mafioso all the way down to some pimply JD, and in the teeming holding tanks, everyone knows what she’s done to me.

  
YOU ARE HERE

R
onnie left a small coastal town after ending a two-year romance. She moved back to Providence, safely inland, and started a day job as a receptionist at Swan Point Cemetery. Visitors came into the office to ask for directions to their distant ancestors’ monuments. Even the newly bereaved became confused in the huge network of cinder paths and had to return to the office to get their bearings. Ronnie looked up names of the deceased in a ledger and then she marked individual maps for the visitors. The illustrated sheets had a tiny ruby arrow pointing out the building where she handed out the maps. Beneath the arrow were the words YOU ARE HERE. Ronnie thought that this was a silly error. Shouldn’t such notations
be placed only on stationary objects? Once the map was removed from the office and consulted in the complicated twists and turns of the cemetery, the defining words, YOU ARE HERE, would have no meaning at all.

There were small, colored markers at the cemetery intersections and Ronnie told visitors, “Go left at the blue dot, right at the green dot, and then it’s straight ahead. It’s the black granite one between two old Victorians.” Ronnie had memorized the monuments when she took inventory walks with her boss, who was resizing plots on a master blueprint, trying to squeeze new sites next to the antique markers whenever there was a bit of extra space. Every square inch would be sold. There was nothing to read in the office besides the maps of the graves, and Ronnie learned the layout pretty fast. The regulars didn’t need directions to the graves, but they sometimes stopped in to say hello to Ronnie or to ask for keys to the mausoleums. They would tell her one thing or another: the grass was cut too short or burned from too much fertilizer. There was new evidence that local gangs had duped security again and bursts of chartreuse spray paint highlighted the erogenous zones of a white marble angel.

Several times a day, the office telephone jangled, but when Ronnie picked it up and said, “Swan Point,” there wasn’t anyone on the line. People often had difficulty making arrangements for a loved one’s memorial service. A new widow might weep uncontrollably, or a husband, simply planning ahead, might feel uncomfortable asking for the price list. But when the phone rang and it was dead, Ronnie wondered if it was Roger. Once Ronnie thought she saw her old boyfriend driving around in the cemetery.
It can’t be him, she thought, but it was just like Roger to take a pleasure drive through a place like that. He had often stopped with her in graveyards to smoke a little crack. He made a production about lining up the little rocks across his knee, like baby teeth, before choosing one for his pipe. Then he would try something with her. She didn’t imagine he would be looking for her now. Yet, at odd times during her shift, a car pulled into the gravel circle outside the office. It looked like Roger’s car, but she couldn’t see the driver’s face. The driver steered away. It was like a ghost car, because she could never identify who was driving, although she thought she recognized Roger’s plaid flannel shirt-jacket. Maybe the whole scene, car and driver, was a materialization. Then again, it was more likely that Roger himself was trying to stalk her.