You Have the Wrong Man (2 page)

It was remarkable to me that my niece should identify that particular Sophia Loren movie. I watched the film with my husband twenty-six years ago in the basement of the university here, when I was eight months pregnant. My ankles were swollen. I suffered from mild toxemia and held an amber prescription bottle of diuretic pills, which I swallowed on the half-hour with a cup of tepid cola. I was disappointed to learn that Pamela had never actually seen the film but only a poster of the starlet in her soaked jersey.

I sometimes recognize a familiar male scent on my sweaters when Pamela hands them back. It’s the rich smoke from unfiltered cigarettes and sometimes the crude, slightly sweet odor of shucked oysters. A briny residue which adheres to her boyfriend, Leon, long after he’s washed up after work. I think Pamela hoards my clothes on purpose, a signal of protest when my warmth becomes too much for her. Yet, when it comes, I like the way her gratitude is expressed in quick, astonished whispers, which she checks.

Sitting across from her at the table, I notice her thick chestnut hair is the impenetrable red of Renoir’s women. I mentioned this to Pamela because she was enrolled at Rhode Island School of Design and she should know the reference. She looked at me, nodded. She stabbed a green bean and moved it like a push broom over the plate before she put it in her mouth. She kept her left arm in her lap so I couldn’t see the persistent blemish of a tattoo she had recently removed, inexpertly, with a surgical razor. The sore was still raw. I made her go to the doctor and he told her to
apply Silvadene Cream and a loose dressing, but Pamela believed that a wound needs some air now and then. Dinner time was the only hour she could squeeze into her schedule to air it.

At the School of Design, Pamela had a rich social life which carried her from one day into the next. Her rituals of health and hygiene, and, in this case, wound-dressing, were always pushed back to suit her schedule of excitements.

The tattoo was a leftover from her teen years in Philadelphia, when she joined a girl gang. The gang was called the Fem Fatals. The name lacked the French pronunciation. The gang had shortened their name to just the Fatals, then they called themselves, quite simply, the Fates. I remember discussing this with Pamela at the time. She must have been fifteen when I asked her about the three goddesses, Atropos, Clotho, and Lachesis. I wondered if her group of girls had known about them. Pam had said, “Three fates, really?” She had looked quite skeptical. She said, “Don’t we just have one fate? The thing is, you buy it. Right? It’s just a matter of when it’s going to happen. It doesn’t matter how.”

Pamela was more sophisticated since she had started college, and she didn’t like to talk about the years she roamed with the girl gang. Most of all, she seemed embarrassed that her gang had been all of one gender. She wore long-sleeved sweatshirts over her tattoo, and finally she decided to rid herself of the actual mark. Pamela said, “You have to remember, it was the early eighties. We didn’t have anything to do but hang out. Tattoos were the hot thing, they were contagious. Like a spider’s web.”

I said, “How is a spider’s web contagious?”

“The idea. The
idea
gets on you like a sticky web. It trapped all the girls in the neighborhood. Maybe it was because of Cher, I don’t know. Cher was a curse on us.”

“Cher was?”

“Yeah. She was, like, a hero at first. She was cool, at first. But it wasn’t like the sixties when people knew how to go about it.”

“Go about what?” I said.

“You know, change the world. Don’t you remember, didn’t you try it?”

I told her I was busy raising my baby sons, though I was sympathetic and wore black armbands on occasion. I wasn’t trying to rile her, but she looked at me in astonishment. She was trying to picture me pushing a baby stroller in the park while the war raged in Vietnam. “You had your babies in the sixties?” She stared at me hotly. She couldn’t believe it. She hit the saltcellar against the palm of her hand. Nothing.

“It’s the humidity,” I said. I apologized for the salt shaker; I wasn’t going to apologize for the other.

She told me she didn’t think a black armband would be much help then or now.

Pamela’s teens had been hardest for my brother, who didn’t have the gift of flex. I hated to watch him square off with Pam. It was like looking at a flood on the television. The news footage shows the muddy current plunging through a town, taking everything, but there’s always a big tree standing against it. Pam was twenty now, and going to school. I was pleased to have her stay with me during her first semester. Then it was up to her and her father to figure
out where she would go. Dormitory, apartment, loft. There were many reasonable options.

“It’s better to be scarred than to have a tattoo,” Pam was saying.

“That’s a doozie of a scar,” I said, eyeing the sore patch on her forearm.

“I just hope I got all the ink out,” Pam said, “it looks pretty awful. At least you can’t read what it says.” She studied the place on her arm where the deep writing had been. “Illegible,” she said, “thank God.”

Her arm looked like the fell on a leg of lamb, the blotted violet ink of a meat inspector’s stamp beneath a yellow scab the size of a small wallet. “It will heal,” I told Pamela. “You didn’t want the word
Fatals
written there forever. You were right to remove it. I’m just glad you went to see the doctor. Your arm could have become infected.”

Pam said, “The doctor was okay. He didn’t ask me about it. He knew I made a mistake, but he didn’t grill me.”

“He didn’t ask what the tattoo had said?”

“No, he was cool about it,” Pamela said.

I was happy my doctor had behaved himself. It felt strange to have someone in my charge again. My two boys were grown and thousands of miles off. I tried to remember the last time I had driven either one of them to a doctor. It was David with a split lip that wouldn’t heal. The physician sprinkled graphite powder or something just as sooty on his mouth, and after a time the crack disappeared. Then, David was gone to college in Denver to be near his father. Denver. What a place to go to college. David just had to leave New England. New England can be suffocating to some. My oldest son, Michael, dropped out of college.
He was running a healthy business writing and printing résumés for law and medical school graduates and for hundreds of others whose impressive fields I had imagined my own sons might have pursued.

Pamela, sitting across from me, dabbing her arm with a two-ply napkin, was an absurdity, really. But I welcomed her. She was always changing her appearance; her lovely hair was fluffed one day and gluey the next with a hair dressing that smelled peculiarly familiar, like diaphragm jelly. “Don’t knock it,” she said. “It works like Dippity-Do.” Her clothing was sometimes too tight. Her jersey leggings exposed both curves and muscle, the taut fabric exposed a clenched tendon or shimmied over a hollow dimple, made evocative creases at her pudendum.

I too wear running tights, but I make sure my oversized T-shirt falls past my hips.

Pamela was immersed in contemporary culture, but she at last had a focus. She was studying graphic design, something for a career in advertising. She could never make it all the way through her explanation of what she planned to do. I knew she hadn’t really decided on a final goal; it went against her grain to do so. At least she went to class every day. I trusted something would emerge. I was nosy and I once opened her portfolio to find it empty except for a book of wallpaper samples: daisies, fleurs-de-lis, imitation marbles, paisleys, and washable vinyl plaids. I couldn’t resist asking her about it, and she told me these books of wallpapers gave her ideas. “Design breeds design,” she told me. “One curlicue leads to another more defiant and ultimately awesome spiral. Curves and planes, everything has to oppose or relate.”

I started backing out of her room, but she was smiling, teasing. If she was bluffing she wasn’t trying to hide it, and this made me believe she wasn’t bluffing after all.

My friend Garland wasn’t pleased to hear I took her in. “You never mentioned this niece,” he said, as if to accuse me of conjuring up my niece out of the thin air. I assured him that Pamela was never around in the evenings and we could still have our privacy. I told him perhaps he might invite me to his house for once. I could bring fresh linens over there. He always said his own sheets were soiled and rumpled and he didn’t want me to have to rough it. “Now’s your chance to tidy up,” I said. I was tired of Garland’s “I’m an old recluse living amidst towers of old newspapers and crusted sardine tins” routine. Garland was a poseur. He was theatrical, phobic, but only to a degree that enabled him to avoid a full-blown obligation. His house at the university was a rather calculated mess. It was meant to ward off all but the most undiscerning strays, graduate students who came and went, unafraid of Garland’s three-day-old coffee and greasy glassware. Garland’s apartment sported a door-length poster of a bullfighter and a few faded Chinese lanterns strung from the ceiling fixtures with nylon fishing line. These eyesores were leftovers from previous tenants, from the pre-Beatles era, and yet Garland had lived there, in that one apartment, for twenty-two years, more than two decades, and with two different wives. The lanterns, the bullfighting poster remained. Certainly, these things were meant to imply he wasn’t settling down yet; he wasn’t a permanent tenant within any specific ethos, time frame, or any imprisoning building structure. He didn’t wish to redecorate his surrounds; he didn’t want furnishings
and artwork that might accurately clock or log his existence. Therefore, he needn’t knock down the fading paper scraps of the early dwellers; their imprint was still important to him because it prevented his own. Even the few souvenirs or relics left over from his two marriages were arranged here or there as if he had come upon them after the fact. I actually preferred my own house to his, but something made me want to assert my presence in his apartment, and I was always trying to do it.

“It’s ugly now,” Pam said, showing Garland the oozing strip of skin. “It will smooth out eventually. It has a few phases to go through. The doctor said it will get crinkly like a second-degree burn.”

“A second-degree burn is not something to sneeze at,” Garland said.

“Yeah, but at least it won’t say ‘Fatals’ anymore,” Pam told him.

“Praise the lord,” Garland said.

“She’s showing you something, you don’t have to criticize,” I said to him.

“Maybe I’m being churlish, but I just ate a heavy meal,” he said.

“No sweat,” Pam said, “it takes stomach to look at it for long.”

“Why don’t you cover it up?” Garland said.

“She does. She does cover it up. I bought her the gauze sponges and the tape,” I said.

Pam held her arm extended so that it divided the room. “Men don’t like this kind of thing,” she said. She stood
there and waited to see if I would defend Garland, who had moved to the leather sofa. I shrugged my shoulders, but I turned my back slightly on Garland and she was satisfied.

“Well, I’ll see you later,” Pam said. “I’m going downtown with Leon. Leon knows what I’m going through. He wrecked his mountain bike and skinned the meat off his elbows. It took a while to come back.”

Garland turned to me and said, “The tone of the evening has been irrevocably set. Who can think of the flesh now?”

“Suit yourself,” I said and I sat down in the firm captain’s chair that always helps me face someone squarely. I leaned back in the deep seat, aligning my spine with the rigid center dowel. I cupped my palms over the smooth knob-ends of its arms. I was ready for the edgy debate that always took us into sex.

I didn’t mind Leon coming to the house. Pamela and Leon were adults; I couldn’t baby-sit them. I soon adjusted to seeing Leon coming naked from the bathroom, strolling down the full length of the hall.

The first night we met, Leon walked towards me, backlit by the moon coming through the fanlight window. I couldn’t avert my eyes in time. In that glimpse, I couldn’t help but notice that his penis was still partially erect in its dreamy recovery from sex. He nodded to me and smiled and kept walking. He didn’t cover up. He wasn’t ashamed of his body and didn’t turn his hip to hide himself. Why should he? My alarm was overcome by something stronger, an affection. A warmth so familiar and even, a level surge that I found pleasing. I thought of my own sons moving
through these halls, and although Leon wasn’t their double—he wasn’t my sons’ equivalent in any way—he looked too comfortable to be a mere guest.

I closed my bedroom door. Seeing Leon wasn’t like seeing my sons, at all. I felt the current of heat that flows upward from the pelvis to the brain in an instant recognition. I felt its flashpowder aftertaste in the back of my throat.

My nights were altered after that. The kernel of my sleep disorder had germinated with my first glimpse of Leon. His lanky gait. His long strawberry-blond hair, newly shampooed, seemed quite lion-like when it fluffed in golden tiers along his shoulders. When I saw him again the next night, he mumbled, “Hello.” He might have whispered something else. He stood still beside Pam’s door and shrugged his shoulders, as if he couldn’t decide if he should return to her bed or join me in mine. Of course, I might have imagined this. I told myself my sleep troubles arose from Leon’s part-time job. Leon drove a refrigerator truck for Rhode Island Fish Company. Leon loaded the truck with fish in the evenings, sliding four-gallon plastic trays of whole flounders, cod, bluefish, and swordfish steaks onto galvanized racks like built-in bookshelves on either side of the truck. Then he stacked bushels of shellfish, quahogs and mussels, in the forward part of the truck, making sure the bushels were squared and wouldn’t topple. The next morning, before rush hour, Leon would leave the house to deliver the fish to processors and seafood distributors, sometimes driving all the way into New York or over into Hartford. If he was going into New York City, he had to leave Pamela’s bed at 4:00
A.M.
in order to keep to his schedule. If he was delivering locally, he could sleep through until the morning. The fish stayed fresh overnight
in the refrigerator truck. After 11:00
P.M.
, because of Providence’s off-street parking ordinance, Leon had to park the truck in the drive, beneath my bedroom window. The unit on top of the cab was loud when it switched on and off, and it kept me awake.