You Have the Wrong Man (13 page)

Ronnie heard the telephone ringing, but the girl didn’t seem to notice. Ronnie was seeing a picture of Roger, his whiskery chin; his cleft was attractive accented with one day’s stubble. Perhaps his flaw resided in his great capacity to love the unborn as if it were more than just the sum of its parts. Ronnie had asked to see it and the nurse revealed a pulpy knob in a stainless-steel dish. “That’s it. That’s everything,” the nurse had said, tipping the shiny bowl so that Ronnie could see its contents. Roger had once told her, “Faith is the art of creative visualization.” Roger had wanted to teach her. She imagined him circling the block, or waiting for her on the cinder path at the cemetery.

On the sidewalk, the women walked abreast into the crowds of people. They split up at the corner. Ronnie went to her car. She looked down at her exotic token, pulsing in just two inches of water. Before she got behind the wheel, she watched her young accomplice walking up the street. She tried to see if the girl was limping from her injury, but the girl took easy strides, spinning her parasol behind her shoulder. The paper cone twirled at a wild velocity until its ornate pattern bloomed into a single bright color.

  
THE GOLDEN THERAPIST

T
he office was quiet. Everyone had left. His blithe, irreverent apprentices had one after another leaned into his cubicle, saying, “Too bad, fella, you’re loaded down,” and “Overworked and underpaid.” “Quittin’ time, asshole.” The men left at five o’clock with the ease of some grammar school boys after snapping their cases shut, each with his own distinct flourishes. Selby didn’t lock his top drawer or stand up from his desk.

He leaned back in his chair and watched the winter sun sink below the window ledge. Its violent shield was twinned when he closed his eyes. When he looked again, an ambulance strobed over the granite of an opposite
building, a soothing focal point compared to the peppery dish of hot sauce on the horizon.

He had promised to walk Pauline outside but she hadn’t yet returned from the ladies’ room. For the past several days, she had complained of a man, an ousted boyfriend or common-law husband, who harassed her after work. That morning, the man had trailed her to her job, following her into the building. The man threw his shoulder against the elevator door as it pinched closed without him. He took the next express elevator, which skipped her floor, but he found the fire stairs and walked back one flight, right past the guard. He entered her offices. Pauline was at her desk. He upset her computer terminal and pitched it to the floor, tugging her keyboard loose and then the surge suppressor. He dashed the plastic components against the wall. He reached across her tabletop and grabbed Pauline by her sweater lapel, twisting the wool into a tight rosette beneath her chin. She pounded him with her pocketbook.

Security arrived, but not until the man had ripped Pauline’s imitation gator-skin purse in half, spilling its contents everywhere. Selby found the torn pocketbook alarming, like a real animal hide in the aftermath of a predator’s strike. The swiftness of the attack and its immediate climax echoed a wildlife spectacle on the Nature Channel.

Her ex-boyfriend wore long, tousled hair and was dressed in a familiar UPS uniform. His shirt’s front plackets were quite rumpled, as if he had worn the same brown shirt for days and perhaps even slept in it. Guards collected at the office doors, resting their styrene coffee cups along the baseboard before they escorted her lover outside, where a police van had been rolled right onto the sidewalk.
He offered no resistance. Pauline sank to the carpet, plucking her possessions from the rug.

Selby stooped beside her, helping her collect her personal items strewn under the chair legs. Her makeup mirror was a tiny sliver with a beveled edge, and he examined its narrow slice. “Just for lipstick,” she told him and she took it from his hand. He repositioned the computer monitor on her desk, and together they tested the system to see if it still retrieved files. It had survived the crash.

Pauline was in a state of exhaustion. She crumpled at her desk in full view of everyone. Selby felt sorry for her. Her desk was stationed dead center in their congested pod of narrow cubicles. Her face was already smudged with inky, dried watermarks from an earlier bout of tears, and again her shoulders started to heave with silent tremors. She seemed completely convinced of the magnitude of her dilemma. She wrung her hands, gripped her waist, or massaged her teary cheeks as if in an interpretation of the Stanislavsky Method. She was heroine, victim, and jaded antagonist assembled in one fretful mask. Selby thought that only Barbara Stanwyck could get this across. He had so admired her in
Double Indemnity.
He wasn’t certain if Pauline was acting.

“Are you all right?” he asked her.

“It’s just the dry heaves,” she told him. “I’ve been swallowing Maalox by the handfuls. It’s not helping.”

“One of the girls might have Valium,” he told her. He thought she might need a binding ingredient.

“Oh, God, no. I don’t want tranks.”

“It might calm you down.”

She looked at him. “I don’t like a chemical solution to a problem.”

“One man’s meat is another man’s poison.”

“I don’t need that kind of love medicine yet.”

Selby said, “I guess not. Not until you’ve tried everything else.”

Pauline reminded him of pretty young women he’d seen behind the chain-link fences of private schools, those institutions for Quaker coeds, Communist debutantes, and out-and-out problem girls. These girls were the walking wounded from whatever war was in fashion. Pauline kept her face tilted in a cagey squint; her mock bravado was reminiscent of the visually impaired, as if she measured her surroundings by sensory clues and committed aural details to memory. When she settled figures or busied herself with work, she talked to herself. It was a crazy monologue, like a clumsy sister trying to learn how to swing. Her lingo seemed exaggerated; her words might have been translated from English into a foreign tongue and back into English again so that her slang, its pitch and syntax, seemed a decade or so behind. Her cornball swearing and her little repellent prayers began to charm Selby. Her comic features and sizzling effects seemed mounted only to correct a great interior doom.

After the events that morning, Selby believed that Pauline was indeed at the lip of a deep peril. She had not really made a “cry for help,” but her ordeal with the man in the UPS uniform had released a trigger. If she was just acting coy, he would find out, but Selby told Pauline that he would see her home after work.

“Okay,” she had said. Her eyes searched his face for a trick of expression, but his face was washed clean.

During the day, she performed her tasks at her desk, but she didn’t seem interested in a career in precious metals.
At least she didn’t chatter on about her sad story or make an inventory of her boyfriend’s detours into that domestic violence terrain. She didn’t have a tract and didn’t complain that she was both a victim at home and overlooked at work, as the other girls would say. Despite her situation after hours, she kept cheerful and expectant. Pauline seemed consoled by some singular hope or idea. She might be waiting for a “dream vacation” or looking forward to a long sunny ride in a convertible. Once or twice Selby saw her warring with her private thoughts—something or someone—a formidable absentee opponent. Her struggle fascinated Selby.

To check on her, he walked over to her desk. She was wearing a cassette headset; she wore it like electronic junk jewelry. She pumped her heel up and down to the beat of the music. Selby couldn’t hear the song, but the casters on her swivel chair squeaked faintly with the changing rhythms.

“May I try it?” he said.

She removed the fragile headphones and handed them to Selby. He held one foam-disc speaker to his ear. “Not exactly easy listening,” he said. “How can you settle with this rock-’n’-roll blaring? You might get the wrong figure.”

“This monkey-work? Who needs to concentrate?” she said.

Now she came up to him, adjusting a mohair scarf around her collar, tugging it between her two white hands.

“All set?” he said.

“Look, you don’t have to take me home. I’ll be fine.”

“Sure I will,” Selby said. “It’s on my way, isn’t it?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “Besides, I’m just going to Filene’s.”

He agreed to let her do her shopping and she walked out. He tried to listen for her footsteps on the plush carpet; he heard the elevator doors close and the whine of the cable, the compartment sinking. Below his window, the ambulance continued, a methodical blue funneling. He wondered if it was serious.

The floor was silent. He heard only the air vents blowing the building’s stale, systematized warmth over him. He peeled off his suit coat and opened his belt. He closed his door and switched out the overhead until his cubicle was illuminated only by the refracted city light. Its silvery-alloy tones gave an eerie cast to the routine items on his desk. From his briefcase he removed a small black plastic bag from underneath his folders and the heavy, bound copy of a prospectus he had coauthored. It was typical of sex shops to err in their lame attempts at simple discretion. Certainly, the odd black sack looked more incriminating than plain brown paper. He had quite often identified men returning from Columbus Avenue, where there was a cluster of porn outlets. Selby recognized the opaque handle-sacks the men carried, the tedious wrappers and blank imprints universal to that realm of commerce.

His purchase was neatly coiled in the sack and already it started to work for him. He shook the bag and the toy noose fell on his desk. The silky braid of nylon fiber had come with a sheet of instructions. Selby didn’t need tutoring and he crumpled the page of directions and put the noose over his head. Its extra length dangled past his shins. He looped the cord through the steel pull of his top drawer and cinched it tight, leaving a moderate tail. He took his
key and locked the desk drawer. Securing the slip knot just below his jaw and above his Adam’s apple, he sat in his chair and rolled backwards on the caster wheels until the rope was taut.

He lifted his knees and pushed his feet against the desk drawers to increase tension on the cord. He was expertly tethered and felt the noose tighten with exact compression on his jugular. As the loop contracted, his erection was enhanced. His pleasure corresponded directly to his choking sensation; he controlled his ordeal until he felt nothing above the neck and everything in his cock. If he started to pass out, he fingered the knot, loosening the noose just enough to let the blood return to his head. He started again. Selby had refined his method and only once in the past had he completely lost consciousness, although he had read of these sorts of deaths in the papers.

Pauline could have found him there. His door wasn’t locked. From a distance, he heard maintenance vacuuming the hallway out by the elevators. This usually took them a bit of time. Next they would scour the sinks and clean the coffee machines before collecting trash and combing the individual offices.

The streets were dark when he finally left the building. He walked slowly towards the garage where his car was parked. Once or twice he put down his case and pushed his hands up his cheeks and into his hair. There was nothing vain in it, it was really just a nervous habit. His thick hair assumed a ridiculous, on-end appearance and he walked on.

He stopped to get a drink at the Steeple Street Bar.
Without a drink Selby was flying under poor conditions, a low ceiling, a fog. He didn’t wish to go home to attempt an instrument landing. Thaddeus saw him come in and poured two fingers and set it down. Selby sat in his everyday spot, the farthest stool from the buzzing TV that had a blown speaker.

Selby lifted his glass and held it at eye-level. He revered each tumbler, each flute, each vessel of his every replenishment.

“An inch of the old spinal fluid,” he told the bartender. Thaddeus nodded and made change from a twenty. The television news showed video footage of his own building. A rotor from a rooftop exhaust system had broken free and glanced a pedestrian. “That’s my address,” Selby said.

Thaddeus told him, “Happened right next door, yes, indeed. Makes you feel like Chicken Little.”

“It does just that. Jesus, Doctor, you’re right again.”

When he left the bar he went into Woolworth’s to buy a new handkerchief. His wife would never have noticed, but he wanted to return with everything he had set out with. At the cashier, he spotted a toy for his son, a colorless substance packaged in a plastic blister. The toy was called SLIME. He bought a container of it. He looked forward to giving the toy to his son. He relished a moment of unself-conscious relief which disappeared as soon as he noted it.

In the parking garage, he took the new handkerchief from its cellophane and he rubbed it over his face. He wadded it into a ball and bit down upon it. Then he folded it again, placing it deep in his breast pocket. It was almost seven o’clock, perhaps he could avoid the dinner. This would depend on his wife. If her day had gone well, if she had nothing grave to report and had no complaint against
him, she might have already eaten dinner with their son. She might have gone ahead, and the dishes would be washed, the kitchen light turned off.