You Have the Wrong Man (4 page)

Pamela said, “God. You thought I passed it? Like I was pregnant or something? Are you kidding?” She looked intrigued, as if she might have liked to adopt the idea.

I was relieved that the reddened scrap wasn’t the result of an unauthorized abortion. After all, if Pamela tried to remove a tattoo with a razor, what else might she try? Then it occurred to me that something equally bizarre was unfolding, and I tried to follow her explanation.

“It’s the tip,” she insisted. “He was on me, and I bit it,” she said.

I sank down to the floor, my back against the refrigerator. I thought of the chapters of psychology I had read in college. Men feared one thing more than any other. I had always thought their fear outlandish. Then I considered Pamela, she must have been very threatened to do such a thing. I pulled myself up from the floor. “Are you all right? Did he hurt you?”

“My teeth are loose. I think one is falling out, I can push it back and forth. It hurts.” Pamela showed me how she could wobble her front teeth.

I was having some trouble getting her to explain what had happened. “What is that?” I said to her. “What is
that
—on the counter?” I spoke with more depth and volume than I expected. I shouted. My confusion had loosed a basso profundo, to make up for my coming up blank. I still didn’t understand what had happened.

“I told you. It’s somebody’s nose, just the tip. You aren’t going to tell anybody. I mean, it’s awful. Someone could take it the wrong way.”

“A nose? Oh, honey, I thought it was worse.”

Pamela looked at me. She made another double take, as if my ridiculous error in thinking had again outwitted her. My scenario appealed to her. She started to sputter. Her laughter came and went in maniacal waves.

Her laughter startled me, it seemed ghoulish. Of course—she was upset. Her reaction could be excused as hysteria. Finally, I took her shoulders and gave her a shake.

“He was forcing you, so you had to fight back? Is that it?”

“He was on me,” Pamela said, her eyebrows were lifted high, arched in drunken mirth.

“You were attacked and you bit his nose?” I said, trying
to pinpoint the cause and effect while avoiding the tone of a legal technician.

Pamela went over to the counter and looked down at the knob of flesh, too casually I thought. “Shit, he was on me. He was just on me.” Her words were comfortably slurred. She held her fingers against her upper teeth and wobbled them once or twice to show me.

I said, “He wouldn’t get off of you even when you asked him to?”

“I didn’t ask anything. I already had hold of him. It hurt to bite so hard. I saw cold stars behind my eyes. He was snarling. I couldn’t let go. My jaw was locked. Then he hit me and my teeth clicked through like a stapler. He did it to himself.”

I made Pamela rinse her mouth and then I gave her a cold washrag. She held the dripping towel against her lips. “Don’t worry,” I told her. I kept touching my fingertips to my temple where I felt a peculiar stabbing. Pamela sat down in a kitchen chair. She drummed her fingers on the table. This confused me. She seemed to be waiting for me to decide something. I had to consider my niece, and yet, I wondered about the boy. I imagined him stumbling through town in a bloody stupor. I asked Pamela, “Who was it? Did you know him?”

“Yes and no.”

“Yes
and
no? This is important—did he know your name?”

“I’ve seen him at the bar. He was a creep. He pestered me when I came outside. It happened so fast. Please, I need to talk to Leon. Will you call Rhode Island Fish?” Her eyes were strange, bright with anticipation, almost like a child
in the swell of pride that comes directly after a minor peril. She wanted Leon to know.

“Call Leon,” she said again. Her request was chilling because its urgency seemed oddly programmed.

I ignored her wish to telephone Leon and asked her more questions. “Was he a big man, a heavyset man?”

“He was just some guy. A guy is a guy, isn’t that right? Who cares which one? Maybe you can call Leon and tell him what happened to me.”

“Okay,” I told her, and I went over to the counter once more to see it. It looked suspect, this tiny leaf of tissue. It looked peculiar, too white and spongy. Like a sliver of tripe.

“We have to report this,” I wanted to tell her. I wanted to go to the telephone and call the police just to see what her reaction might be. I told her the police would come over in an instant when it was a situation of attempted rape. I imagined the police, the social workers, the rape doctors, all the troops who gather after sex crimes.

I went over to the counter and looked down. The bubbly scrap in its congealing web made me reconsider contacting the police. Something didn’t add up. I had to be firm and canny all at once. I had to be one step ahead of Pamela and one step ahead of my own first instincts. My first instincts keep me within the routine patterns of good deeds, indifferent allowances, and blank permissions that normal people live their lives by. Let the poor be poor, the murderers be jailed, the average citizens be left alone. If I wasn’t always exactly innocent, I knew which side of right and wrong I was meandering in, and I knew something more. I knew about crimes of loneliness, and this was shaping up to be one. I could not be sure if my niece was
justified in what she had done, but there wasn’t any reason to call the authorities. This was a family matter.

I called the emergency desks at Rhode Island Hospital and at Miriam Hospital and asked the receptionists if anyone had come in. I asked them if a young man with a facial cut had registered to get care. Neither hospital would tell me if such a boy had arrived. One receptionist said that there were always a lot of nose injuries because of all the car wrecks. The nose was the first to strike the dashboard, it was the “pointer.” “People are lucky if it’s just the nose. A nose can be reconstructed.” It’s really just a decorative appendage, like an awning, and it could be reaffixed. I called all the hospitals. I interrogated the emergency-room receptionists for Pamela’s sake. She watched me as I talked to the switchboard operators, the nurses, the interns. She looked very peaceful, pleased I was doing everything I was expected to do. She listened as I told one hospital receptionist that my son was supposed to be there, he had a bad laceration, a dog bite, and could they tell me his condition. The receptionist told me she couldn’t give me the information I wanted, but just between her and me, there was nothing like that, no dog bites had come in for days. She asked me if we owned a pit bull terrier. The hospital had to report pit bull incidents directly to the Providence police.

I asked Pamela what she wanted me to do with the bit of flesh. I could wrap it in something and put it in the freezer
or I could destroy it, I told her. Flush it like a goldfish with tail rot, a condom in its rumpled length.

“You decide,” she said.

“The toilet,” I said.

“Good,” Pamela said, and she stood up to hug me. She went upstairs. In a few minutes I heard her dialing the telephone on the landing. She was telling Leon about the attack. Her voice was breathless, yet perfectly modulated as it expressed her alarm, her pain, her triumph. I put my face close to the gooey lump and studied the snip. I pushed it up and down the Formica, making sure. Pamela kept talking to Leon, explaining how her teeth were loose. There was something in her tone that made me shut my eyes and throw my head back. I listened to her talk to Leon, tell him how he never should have left her on her own. He should come over. She would forgive him. I took the piece of flesh over to the sink and pushed the faucet open. I rinsed it under the stream, passing my hand back and forth until it felt clean, rubbery, then I bounced it lightly in my open palm.

Tripe. I had thought so. It was a relief, but it was a sad confirmation.

I greeted Leon at the front door. He looked truly upset and I wanted to tell him what I knew. He shouldn’t assume any responsibility for Pamela’s performance tonight. When Pamela joined my household, I had felt such rich swells of a permanent kind—one might call it loyalty or love. Now I was forced to feel caution. Forced! I watched Leon climb the stairs. I studied his narrow hips, the hollow of his broad shoulders beneath his shirt, which suggested brute strength at rest. Brute strength looks vulnerable this way. I heard
Pamela lock the bedroom door after him. When I went to bed, the truck was going full swing outside my window. It had a new tic, an unmistakable gushing followed by a sizzle, then nine or ten drips slowing, until the last drip never seemed to come before the gushing started over again.

The next day I took Pamela to my dentist. The dentist bonded her front teeth together so they would stay in correct alignment as her gums healed over the jostled roots. She would not lose any teeth. She told the dentist she had had a fall playing tennis. He lifted his eyebrows, and I too wondered how she had been injured, since the rest of the story was a charade. Her teeth were indeed loose, but from what? Perhaps it was a self-inflicted injury, but I didn’t hope for that. It was more upsetting to think Pamela had created her own assailant, imitated his anger, and invented his violence against herself. It was more likely that someone had become irritated with her and slapped her hard.

Pamela was lying on the sofa eating ice cream that I had bought for her, hand-packed, at the Portuguese grocery. She had not mentioned the bloody snip, and so I asked her about it. “Where did you get tripe at that hour?”

Pamela sat up straight. She put the bowl of ice cream on the floor. “You knew it was tripe?”

“Not at first.”

“Shit. You’re unbelievable, you know that?” Pamela looked at the floor and moved the bowl of ice cream with her foot distractedly until it was halfway to me. “You let me go on and on like this since yesterday? You knew it was
bullshit? God, what is it like to be so
perfect
? You go around trying on other people’s shoes? I guess you have so much
insight.
You’re so sweet. Sweeter than sugar—”

“Where did you get tripe in the middle of the night?” I asked her.

“Where? Star Market. It’s open twenty-four hours, remember?”

“You hurt my feelings,” I told her. I picked up a magazine and fluttered the pages, to show her that I was living with it. I wasn’t put off. When she saw this, she stormed out of the room. I must have appeared too much like one of those teachers who can’t be ruffled by a spitball, and this infuriated Pam. Maybe she was hoping I would use the techniques from my brother’s paperback book about “tough love.” If I had followed those puerile hints, she could stomp off feeling justified. She was paralyzed by my cheery intrusions, by my unfathomable maternal impulses—loving shrugs, my shoulders shifting like downy wings. My tactics were for my own survival as much as for hers. Mothering someone helps keep me in line, but I couldn’t admit that to her, could I?

In a few minutes, Pamela walked back down the stairs and straight out the front door. That night Leon showed up. He told me he didn’t intend to stay long, just long enough to tell Pamela he wasn’t interested in her games. I suspect he didn’t know the whole truth about the “nose,” but he told me he assumed it was bullshit or Pam would have opted for the extra publicity that going to the police would have brought into it. If there was an ounce of truth in it, she would have contacted the newspapers. He told me he had watched her tricks, several times, and he had had enough.

“She needs professional help,” Leon told me, and I nodded. I felt sad that we weren’t everything she needed. Why couldn’t we be everything, Leon and I? I have felt powerless before. Several times in my life I have looked at my mirror and tried to gauge my level of psychic energy, how much was left? I’ve always wondered at the tiny ration of strength we all start with and how it either intensifies or lessens. Like with watercolors, a little bit goes a long way; diluted, it makes a wash that can cover a whole lifetime with one weak color, or you might use it in a concentrated dollop here or there. I suppose the way I have lived my life, my strength has surfaced as an unremarkable sky blue, a domestic sky with neither the exuberance of dawn nor the inky ritual of night.

Leon sat down across from me for a few moments. It didn’t seem as if Pamela would be coming home soon. He said he wasn’t going to waste his time waiting to say goodbye to someone a second time. He asked me to convey the message for him.

“What should I tell her exactly?” I asked him.

“Tell her she’s immature. How about that?”

“That’s a little harsh.”

“Now, you. Why can’t she take you as a model?”

I smiled.

Leon said, “Pamela better behave herself or she’ll be losing something when you give her the heave-ho.”

I won’t give her the heave-ho, I thought to myself. Leon, of course, had already excused himself from any further involvement with Pam. He looked at me across the table. His eyes didn’t dismiss me as we stood up. He took my elbow and tugged me around to face him.

“Where’s Garland?” he said.

“Where’s Pam?” I answered, as if our exchange had been rehearsed and cued, delivered with the bold alacrity of a witty stage production.

“I mean it,” he told me. “Where are they?”

I walked ahead of him up the stairwell. I killed the hall switch and followed the moonlight’s slack bed sheet across the old planking. I was first in my bedroom and I turned around in the doorway to greet him. Given his youth, Leon’s perceptions of me had been accurate from the start, that moment when we maneuvered through the dark and were unmoored in a momentary swell which took these weeks to crest.

He untied the collar loop on my robe. The satin piping dangled, and then the robe fell. I pushed the heel of my hand up the tight trellis of his ribs, rotated my wrist at his shoulder, and coasted my fingertips down his spine. Despite a fear that Pamela would show up, our lovemaking was sweetly edgy, prolonged, and forgiving. Leon betrayed Pamela in each hesitant discovery and into the next. I sensed it was a slave’s secret worship at the eve of his freedom, and he still thought of her. After all, it was she who led us to this union and she would serve to unlink us afterwards. Perhaps I am too seasoned, but her echo didn’t spoil any of it for me. Leon endured the halting scrutiny in my touch, and, in turn, I indulged his playful, cantankerous urges, which he had not dared to introduce to her. How often would we come across these same luxuries?