You Have the Wrong Man (14 page)

“Did you eat in town?” she asked him.

“Yes,” he told her.

She watched him as he poured a scotch for himself.

“A little touch of the golden therapist,” he said, but she wasn’t watching what he measured. He was grateful for that. Yet, because of her kindness he felt he had to give a careful performance in everything. Her disappointment was deep. She seemed to savor each regret, doubling its strength, as if it were a morphine elixir, addictive and luscious despite its toxicity. Even so, she showed her best face, she gleamed before him. Her looks were unchanged, they had only seemed to intensify with the years. Her features were still sharp. She was like an edge of clear amber or petrified wood, a little sliver of another time, glittering there.

The length of the evening ahead seemed overwhelming. He felt the rich pulse of his Glenfiddich kick in, and to arrest it he waved his arm over the living room, directing his announcement to his son. His voice was too loud. “I have a surprise.”

The boy took the paper bag and squealed his pleasure when he recognized the SLIME.

“My God,” his wife said.

“It’s what the kids like,” Selby told his wife.

The package stated that the SLIME would glow in the dark, so the lights were switched off. They crowded together on the living room carpet as the boy tore open the plastic and the stuff dripped into his hands. But his hands were too small. Both Selby and his wife cupped their palms to catch the overflow. “Be careful,” she said.

“It won’t stick to anything,” the boy said.

“It’s awful,” she said.

They all shared a portion of the stuff. The boy giggled and cleared his throat in private happiness and his wife groaned in an exaggerated way to disguise the truth that she, too, was pleased. Selby held his share of the formless gel; it did not glow in the dark after all. He could not see it in his hands. There was something both intuitive and lewd in its method of escape. After a few moments in the dark, he surrendered to the same heavy feeling of the night before, and the night before that. He withdrew from the small circle, but his wife was first to stand up. She regained her crisp posture and with her elbow flicked the wall switch until the room blazed.

Although Pauline had many duties, and there were others in whose offices she collected mail or delivered faxes and internal memos, Selby decided to assume a primary role in the situation of her current romantic dishevelment. He waited to hear the scratchy tones of her headset as she slipped it off, and then he went out to talk to her about her stalker.

He grew to anticipate the spicy smell of her smoke when he heard her hunting in her purse for a lighter. The other girls hated the smell. They called her “Orient Express” because she chain-smoked clove cigarettes. He liked its Eastern scent coming secondhand to him. There was a recent memo forbidding workers to smoke at their desks, but Selby didn’t turn her in.

Pauline could look like a gymnast in shiny stretch pants gathered in tight wrinkles at the shins, a chorus-line dancer
in a feline production, a circus clown when she wore oversized polka dots. She never wore her camouflage overalls without her plastic banana brooch. Once she wore a pair of leopard sneakers with shark teeth on the laces. “Grrr,” she said, and she clawed the air with her hand when he admired these. Selby liked to believe she wore her thrift-store costumes to hide a ballooning despair just like his own, the same covert gloom that forced him to prowl Columbus Avenue.

He scolded her for coming to work wearing clothes he’d already seen. “A repeat?” he said.

“It takes time to shop for this stuff, you have to go all over to find it,” she told him.

Often he sat at his desk without a desire to do the transfers before him. It was no longer a passing boredom or frustration. He looked at the clock all day. The hands barely moved. The clock looked like a photograph of a clock. He searched in his drawers for a pen that didn’t squeak. He couldn’t find anything. He started to stand up more than usual. He walked around his desk, and then he would walk past Pauline to the big east window. He asked her, “He show up last night?”

“Nope.”

“You know what to do if he comes around?”

“Yeah, yeah. I know. Nine-one-one. I promise.”

“Good girl,” he said, avoiding her eyes.

He liked leaning over her desk and letting her fasten the tiny foam headphones over his ears. She would look at his face and judge him.

Pauline knew nothing about music, he thought. Someone was leading her on a goose chase. Back at his desk, he stared through the window at the small slot of city it allowed
him. Across the alley, a shade was snapped open which had remained cockeyed for over a year.

When the flower was delivered, the girls stood in a crunch around Pauline. As she opened the box, the women dipped at the knees and groaned with delight. “A gladiolus—” someone said.

Pauline shrugged.

“
One
means the beginning or the end,” a woman announced.

“Lucky kid,” another said. In turn, they all expressed their jealousy.

“It beats me,” Pauline said. “I’m really not into flowers.”

“Don’t look a gift horse in the mouth,” they told her. It was her bland acceptance, her innocence, which they mistook for an unwillingness to divulge intimacies.

Pauline asked the women if they knew how many flowers were put on Elvis’s grave.

“Plenty, I guess,” somebody said.

“It was millions,” she told them. “It smelled just like heaven.”

“That was years ago,” a girl said.

“They still bring them to the house. It’s got flowers there all the time. Like an endless wonder,” Pauline told them.

Then she was alone again. Selby walked out, but it was just as a couple of workmen had come to spackle the wall beside Pauline’s desk. The men were joking with her.

“A little home improvement?” was all he managed to
say as he went by. She smiled, lifting her face to him; it was pure tolerance, he thought, that was all.

The week before, he had been late for a company awards luncheon. They were handing out the knickknacks to “ten-year employees” and “five-year employees,” and to Selby, who had been working at the bank for fifteen years. The gifts were humiliating. Cross pen-and-pencil sets and imitation Mont Blancs. Faux-leather desktop planners. Women who were honored were encouraged to take the floral centerpieces back to their desks. Selby had stopped to see Thaddeus before coming to the luncheon. When he finally arrived at the event, he was surprised to see a handful of VPs, and even the CEO. He stood in the doorway of the banquet room and shifted his shoulders under his suit coat—his shoulders felt disconnected from his spine. After three doubles at Thad’s, his gait was altered, his posture shifted from one dubious alignment to the next. With all his might, he tried to walk with brisk informality around the huge oval conference table to the one remaining chair. In his nervous haste he walked right past the empty seat. He then had to decide whether to turn around and backtrack or circle the table again. Neither option could save him. He paced out the door where he came in.

Pauline was not at her desk. Gone, too, the workmen, who had finished their repairs. There was a sour odor of caulk and plaster, and the waxy perfume of the flower was lost. On the blotter he saw a single salmon-colored petal, but then he realized it was an artificial fingernail. He pushed himself away from the desk, but she came up to him.

“Did you see the flower?” she asked.

“Very nice.” He nodded, examining the solitary stalk. It might have cost as much to send a dozen.

“He thinks I’m letting him come back just because he orders me a flower?”

“It’s a reconciliatory gesture,” he told her.

“No dice,” she said, lifting the flower from its vase. A fine white powder covered it.

“That’s some kind of instant plaster,” he said.

“Yeah, they were mixing it out here by my desk.”

“It’s ruined. I’m sorry,” he said.

She looked at him. Her eyebrows hitched a quarter-inch higher. “It’s not ruined,” she said, still eyeing him. She stood up and took the vase over to the sink. He followed. She turned on the tap and ran the flower back and forth beneath the stream. She rubbed its petals between her fingers, letting the water fill each floweret and overflow. She tapped the stalk against the sink to remove the excess water droplets. “There,” she said.

His stomach roiled at the sight of the drenched flower. He had certain aversions and sensitivities to different phenomena without the cushion of alcohol. He shivered if he walked past a lawn sprinkler. He couldn’t take a foot bridge over a busy highway without severe pain in the testicles, and he didn’t ride escalators if by chance the rubber tread was white like jagged molars. Recently, someone had put a spindle on his desk. A spindle! It was just another stimulus for one of his attacks. He asked Pauline about it.

“That spindle? There was a whole box of them. I handed them out. Everybody got one,” she told him.

Selby mentioned the spindle to Thaddeus who assured
him his random aversions and fears were universal. “We all have our fair share of the jitters,” he told Selby.

“Good as new,” Pauline said when the flower was rinsed. She went back to her desk and replaced the stalk in its vase. She pulled her headset over her ears. She did not look up as he walked back to his chair. He studied the dewy hybrid again; the bloom looked harsh, its color magnified by the beads of water that trapped the office light.

The next day the flower was gone and in its place was a small glass aquarium which held a speckled mouse.

“Isn’t it cute?” she asked. “When I told my friend about the anonymous flower, he sent me this mouse.”

“What friend? The UPS driver?”

“Not him. A real friend gave me this pet. It’s against the rules, I guess, but I’ll take it home tonight. It doesn’t eat cheese, you know. It eats these pellets.” She picked up a plastic bag of pet food and handed it to Selby.

“I guess it’s more nutritious than regular cheese,” he said. He put the rat food down on Pauline’s desk. “Your friend is very imaginative,” he told Pauline.

“Yeah,” she looked at him straight in the eyes, and he stopped prying.

The afternoon went on. The sun moved downwards at a hard angle, then rested outside his window. It seemed painless staring at the dying thing until he closed his eyes and saw it stayed with him. Then he heard voices, and he heard Pauline laughing. Her laughter was airy, with a few throaty catches, like the sound of pastel tissue being torn into strips. With the laughter, he heard the short, high
squeaks of the mouse. He went to see what it was and found three young men standing before Pauline’s desk. One held the animal by its tail and dropped it into the palm of his hand; as the mouse walked forward, the man tugged it back by the tail. The boys were all dressed the same, in huge, baggy trousers. He saw it was the uniform of the day, something resembling North African pajamas made from one bolt of cloth tugged loosely between the legs and cinched imaginatively at the waist.

“These are my friends.” Pauline stood up. “The City Editors.”

“A group?” he asked.

“You must have seen the piece about us in
Boston After Dark
,” one of the men said.

“I’m sorry to have missed it,” Selby said.

“You didn’t catch it?” the boy was incredulous.

“They’re playing tonight at the Living Room,” she said. “They’re the greatest.”

“It’ll be packed,” the boy said.

They leaned against the files and the office equipment. One took a Xerox of his hand. Another picked up Pauline’s phone and punched through the lighted buttons. They gathered at the fax machine daring one another to try it.

“They like electric stuff,” she told Selby. “Come on, guys,” she said, but she was beaming.

Selby wondered about the young men. He saw Pauline, tilting her face from one to the other and even towards him as he was asked to agree about rock-’n’-roll—that it was finally an industry like any other industry; it had its tycoons, its slaves, its gal Fridays. The group laughed and hugged Pauline around the waist. One fellow grasped her by the
hips and lifted her up, lifted her above their small circle as if she belonged to them all.

It was the end of the day. Girls drifted by in twos and threes, calling to their friends over the partitions that separated the desks. He had not been invited for a drink in quite some time. He didn’t like to be surrounded and preferred to hide out beside Thaddeus when he indulged in his routine. They gave up asking and the girls started to call him “Mr. Gloom.” He didn’t mind their joke. He had once heard them call Pauline a name. They called Pauline “Miss Hopeless Case.” Once he listened to the late afternoon talk and was pleased to hear the two of them paired. He didn’t catch the explanation, but he heard one of the girls say, “Miss Hopeless Case and Mr. Gloom,” as if, at least in the minds of the office girls, they were linked. So what if the others considered them outcasts? It only intensified and made bittersweet their unavoidable connection.

Soon the place was empty. He was sure of it. He hunched down in his seat, but he couldn’t see any point in staying longer. He had avoided the chattering crush, that was it. At five-twenty Pauline came to the doorway. “Still here?” she said.

“What about you?”

She shrugged. He felt an odd lightness and he turned to look out at the sun, which was setting. He saw some spots before his eyes and he could not be sure if the sun he was facing was the real sun or just its savage aftereffect. He started to tell her that she had awakened his feelings, but she interrupted him. He thought he heard her saying she liked a clear conscience.

“I just wanted to tell you I found an item of yours—”

“You found what?”

She opened her purse and unfolded a crinkled piece of paper. She gave him the instruction sheet. “I saw it on the floor,” she told him. “At least it was me. Imagine if someone else came across it—”

“Who else?”

“Maintenance,” she said. “They might have collected it. You know, same as every night.”

She didn’t paint the whole scenario; he was grateful for that.