You Have the Wrong Man

by Maria Flook

  They had the Providence Sunday Journal and their pencils. They didn’t talk to each other as they read the tiny print and marked the descriptions of possible jobs. Venice looked over at Stephen and watched his eyes descend one column and then another.

  “Here’s something,” Stephen said, and he brought the newspaper up close to his face.

  “What?”

  “This sounds good. It’s right down the street. We could walk to work,” he said.

  “We can walk? Walk where?”

  “It’s a management slot.”

  “That same Walgreen’s ad? They still want assistant managers?”

  “No, the Cheaters Club on North Main. It says here, ‘Couple wanted to manage club.’ ”

  “That strip joint wants a couple?” she said. “Isn’t that the place with the runway right up the bar? It has a wrestling pit with hoses and a drain?” She watched his face.

  “They probably need people to manage the bar. You know, ordering liquor. The back room has video games, pool tables I think. We would have to keep that up. It’s a small setup, really, it’d be okay. It would be mostly nights, don’t you think? You’d have to miss Letterman.”

  “That place? Shit, that place is buzzing in the morning, for God’s sake. They’re loitering around in broad daylight. You ever been there?” she asked.

  “A few times,” he told her.

  “That’s a straight bar. I didn’t know you ever went in there. Is that a twenty-four-hour place?”

  “Hey, I looked in from the sidewalk,” he said. “Tell me you haven’t looked in.”

  “Never. I’m not interested in those ‘happy girls.’ Are you?”

  They decided to go see the place before applying for the positions advertised.

  Venice said, “I think I’m being pretty flexible, aren’t I? Speaking for myself, I’d say that’s an understatement. Shit, I’m burned out with sex clubs, aren’t you?”

  “Say the word, we won’t pursue it.”

  She didn’t say the word. She wasn’t going to be a prude about it. “I’d like to talk to the talent,” she said.

  “Talent?” He laughed. “Shit, this isn’t your premium drag palace, honey. Lower your standards. This is just a flesh room. These are mostly college kids who flunked out of their pastry arts class at Johnson and Wales cooking school. They’re going to get more cash from one lap dance than they would get in their food service careers. These are wised-up Kelly Girls.”

  “And you want to be their boss?”

  “They’re self-governed.”

  “The ad says they want a couple?” she said.

  “We’re a couple. Since when aren’t we a couple?” he asked her.

  He knew what to say to her, but she was glad to hear him say it, just the same.

  He told her, “Look, the mom-and-pop thing is just what these stripfests need to keep an even keel. We could do it. With your stage experience and my bartender’s certificate, we’re perfect. Like any bar, the money’s in the alcohol. Difference being, the girls are walking around in thongs. It’s just a public-awareness problem. We could improve that.”

  Venice didn’t care about any girls wearing tired old thongs. She was curious about Stephen’s sudden mood shift. The managing opportunity had electrified him after weeks in the doldrums. In order to decide what she felt, she needed to see him seeing the strippers. She wasn’t ashamed of this.

  The clientele was enough to make Venice turn right around. Pods of men wore orange hunting jackets and camouflage overalls as if they had just come in from the woods after blowing away a herd of deer. Venice sat down next to Stephen at a small table near the runway. She noticed her lover remove his jacket. He put the jacket in her lap. “Hold this,” he told her. This alarmed her. He was settling in to watch the girls. He looked as if he were giving in to something, to an old ache. Once or twice he lifted his arms over his head to stretch, as if he was trying to curb his anticipation.

  They drank some house bourbon. “This is like a razor,” he told her. “I’ll order something smooth for our regular stock.” Then he pointed to an imitation Tiffany lamp that hung over the bar. “It’s cracked, see? We’ll have to replace that.”

  She put her arms in the sleeves of his jacket, but the lining was icy. Then the house lights dimmed and Stephen’s face deepened. A spotlight fell on the stage and washed over Stephen’s profile and farther into the crowd. The pale blue light reminded her of Atlantic City where she had performed at the Exchange Street Bar. She had been famous for her eclectic concentration of blondes: Carol Lynley, Jean Seberg, Tippi Hedren, Piper Laurie, Eva Marie Saint, even Peggy Lipton. She preferred the svelte examples and avoided cows like Monroe and Mansfield. Every night after her show, she went with Stephen as he shopped for boys on the boardwalk. Stephen trailed the local coin collectors who strutted their stuff until a juvenile curfew drove them inside. Venice watched their young faces change color under the purple bug lights—their skin looked unnaturally radiant and fuzzy like velvet pictures of Elvis. Stephen took his time with the kiddies, buying chances at arcades and shooting galleries, pinging a line of severely perforated targets to win jackknives and neck chains for the teens. He could pick and choose. Venice knew Stephen’s routine as he slipped another trinket deep into a boy’s pocket. Next came the cash, flashed open and closed like a dinner napkin, and the boy went home with them.

  The show started. A girl executed a slow and delicate cartwheel onto the runway and into the circle of blue light. She was wearing a United States Olympic Team sweater. She danced to the right and to the left and then she did some somersaults. She made gestures like a swimmer and then she pretended she was throwing the shot put. She pulled the sweater over her head, and her breasts lifted higher and higher until the sweater was off and her breasts jiggled back to their appropriate level. The girl folded the sweater neatly and placed it to one side of the runway. She was naked except for a transparent g-string fashioned from ordinary panty hose.

  “She’s cute,” Stephen said.

  “Sort of,” Venice said.

  “No, I like the idea.”

  “What idea?” she asked.

  “The Olympic theme.”

  “That’s an old standard.”

  “If it ain’t broke don’t fix it.”

  Stephen was watching the stripper as if she was already in his stable. Her eyes seemed blank, like in archive photographs of sweatshop girls sitting at their sewing machines. She smiled haphazardly in one direction or another, into the dark. Soon the men started to give the stripper money. They inserted dollar bills in the girl’s elastic g-string. Wary of paper cuts, she assisted them when they tried to poke the crisp bills in her muff. She stood at the edge of the bar and turned her back on the men. She bent over, touched her toes and waited. A man rolled a twenty into a tight tube and tucked it in her crack, but she had a glittered cork in her ass and he couldn’t sink it.

  Venice had expected to see just what she saw, but she couldn’t help reminding Stephen that in all her months on stage, she had never stooped so low as to be a mere coin slot.

  Stephen was making a business appraisal, but Venice thought he should still hand this girl some cash. Her months on a runway gave her a feeling of solidarity with the plain-faced coed on stage. She didn’t want the girl to think Stephen might be trying to get something for nothing. When the music stopped, the girl walked off the stage. There was scattered applause and a wave of lewd discussion about her. Stephen applauded the stripper. He said to Venice, “That girl is making a living.”

  “No kidding.”

  “I mean, she’s doing something. You could work this hard for your money. You could do what she has to do,” he told her.

  “Hey, it was your idea for me to get out of it. I was happy at Exchange Street, but I don’t want this end of it. I don’t want to sightsee.”

  “You’ll get used to it.”

  “I don’t think so. I’m finished with these gropers and oglers.”

 
“Well, I could do it on my own,” he said.

  “You want to work here every day for a living? It’s not my idea of a real life’s work.” She looked at him. He was trying to look back at her, at her face, but he followed the next act. Then he turned to look straight at her. He told her she didn’t have to be part of the plan, she might not be included in his decision making. He wasn’t forcing her into it.

  Venice recognized a threat. Since her surgery, she had lost her resilience to his icy warnings, they were harder to brush off.

  “I have to use the ladies’ room,” she said. He nodded his head at her. He fondled his chin and rubbed his shave as he watched a new girl on the stage. He smoothed his palm over his face in a new dreaminess she hadn’t seen before.

  On her way to the lavatory she passed the dressing room, where the girls were arranging their scanty costumes. One of the girls looked up at her and smiled.

  “Where’s the john?” Venice said.

  The stripper told her how to get to the lavatory and she warned Venice that one of the toilets didn’t work. She told Venice which toilet she should use.

  “We all use that one toilet,” another girl said.

  Venice thanked the girls, wondering at her inclusion in such an odd, protective detail. One stripper helped another get dressed. She used a pliers to tug a zipper. “Getting it up is one thing, getting it down is a scream. Every guy has to give it a shot,” the girl said.

  “Can they get it down?” Venice asked.

  “Only after I’m stuffed with loot. Then I decide when.”

  “Oh,” Venice was smiling, “it’s a trick?”

  “A technological miracle,” the stripper said, “that’s what I’d call it.”

  “There’s a lot of science in this,” one of the other girls said.

  “It’s not just bump and grind. It has to do with centrifugal force. Centrifugal force is behind every move you make.”

  Venice laughed, remembering that her basic high school science didn’t prepare her for what really lay ahead.

  “I bet you’d like to try it,” one of girls told Venice. They all turned to watch her face.

  “Maybe,” Venice said.

  “There’s a cash advance if you decide.”

  “An advance?”

  “Henry will give you a cherry popper. Two-hundred-dollar stipend on your first night.”

  Venice smiled at the word stipend. She recognized how these initiates might want to whitewash their everyday commerce with fancy words.

  “In a little while, Cindy takes a shower.”

  “You take a shower out there?” Venice asked.

  “About ten times a night.”

  “Hence the drain,” Venice said.

  “That’s right, the drain. Who needs Liquid Plumr?”

  “Forty dollars, they can soap us up. That’s forty dollars per customer.”

  Venice said, “I guess you really clean up.”

  The girls had heard this a lot.

  Venice enjoyed the farce.

  The one named Cindy unscrewed the cap from a big bottle of Spring Green Vitabath. She invited Venice to sniff the fragrant contents.

  “That’s nice.”

  “It costs me, but it’s extra emollient. Five showers in here and your skin gets chapped. We have to look out for ourselves.”

  In the lavatory, Venice noticed the roach tape along the baseboards. She saw it the way an accountant follows the diagonal line through graph paper. For some reason she could not urinate. That part of her body wouldn’t open. Her whole pelvic triangle was tender. She stood over the sink. A tiny mirror framed only her eyes. Seeing her eyes like that, without the rest of her face, was unnerving. Her eyes revealed something which her mouth, her lips would have erased with a quick smile.

  She sat down beside Stephen. Another girl had climbed onto the runway. She said her name was Pepper. Pepper had red hair. She wore a minuscule g-string and she had combed her red frizz over the tight border of nylon. The men were calling her “Spicedrop” and “Fireball” because of her red hair. The men kept proposing new names relating to the combustion metaphor, drifting over to an arson theme, and everyone laughed. Venice thought of the rabbit with the twenty names. Stephen was laughing with the crowd, a short, disciplined bleat that was easy to discern.

  She walked back to the dressing room. “Well. Where’s this Henry guy?”

  “He’s in Atlantic City.”

  “No kidding? I was there last summer.”

  “So, you want to dance tonight?”

  “That’s right.”

  “You need to change into something. There’s a rack of stuff in here.”

  Venice pulled the hangers across the rod until she saw a prom item, a floor-length gown in peach-colored satin.

  She tugged the dress over her head and borrowed the lip pencil and mascara left out on the table. “You need one of these thongs,” a girl said holding out a wastebasket full of panty-hose sashes.

  “I don’t need it,” Venice said. “I’m wearing a string, à la Calvin Klein.”

  “You’re all set?”

  Venice was ready. “I’ll go next,” she said.

  The music churned on. Venice flounced down the runway, swinging her hips and paddling the air with her forearms, breaking her wrists in haughty birdlike gestures just like Bette Davis. The audience seemed stunned by the sudden shift from the continuous nude mural to this higher plateau of entertainment. They chided the new “actress,” for stalling. The men yelled at her to disrobe.

  Venice started to peel the satin neckline off her shoulders, then tugged it back on. She rolled her shoulder free, then covered it up again. This went on for a while. She searched the bar rail for Stephen, but the tables were too dark to see him. She minced up and down the stage. Her fluid gait perpetuated a pendulum effect; she allowed her hips to slip left, then lock, slip right, then lock. She tossed her hair, wiped her bangs from her forehead with exaggerated pathos, like the crone in Sunset Boulevard. Again she looked for Stephen to see how she should proceed. Behind the runway, there was a screen with projections. Slides of sandy beaches alternated with slides of pinto horses. A single moth followed the cone of light back and forth, dipping from one end to the other. The insect landed on the screen, fanning its wings. Once it became the white eye of a horse, then the slide flipped and it was gone in the foam of the sea. The moth pulsed forward again. Instinctively it climbed the smoky column above Venice and its shadow grew monstrous against her.

  ASBESTOS

  It was dark at 5:00 P.M. The streetlight churned with large, boxy snowflakes like erratic frozen June bugs. Peterson watched the snow until buildings lost definition. He was meeting a client and waited in a company truck, a new wide-bodied 4×4 that made him feel pleasantly self-conscious. He was working for his brother at Dover Environmental Consultants. At his brother’s request, he affixed a Dover sign to the passenger-side door, knowing it would leave an outline of adhesive when he removed it.

  Last winter he had the snow-removal contracts for food franchises on Route 202 north of Wilmington. Then he worked on a crew clearing the Delaware Memorial Bridge. He plowed nights, driving back and forth across the double span, raising the blade at the little hitches at each expansion grid. Using guardrail posts as checkpoints against the dark industrial skyline, he knew when to elevate the blade and when to drop it back down.

  The client was scheduled to meet him outside of the Glenside United Methodist Church. She would stop by on her way to work. She was hostess at the Fairfax Supper Club and had to be there by six. It might be just as well if she was a no-show, because the woman sounded a little too fired up; she wasn’t going through the proper channels. His brother instructed him, “If she doesn’t have anything on paper, say goodbye.”

  A car pulled in behind his truck and he was surprised to see it was an old Caddie, salmon pink. Then he recognized it, one of those used Mary Kay Cosmetics sedans; the chrome rims of the headlights were rusted out and lacy as garters.
A rock must have hit the right side of the windshield leaving a shattered web a good foot in diameter. He watched her in his mirrors as she locked her car and walked slowly across the white scrim. She was wearing spike heels that didn’t grab the snow. She walked carefully, with a delicate wobble, but she didn’t seem threatened by the unpredictable surface. He focused ahead as she came up beside him. The snow was still light but it had a funny, gluey look as it touched the truck’s glossy hood and layered the smoked windshield.

  She tapped on the truck window. He turned, his breath rising on the glass. He was out of the truck shaking her hand in a quick tingling motion.

  “Mr. Peterson?” she said, when he dropped her hand.

  “No, not the Mr. Peterson. I’m his younger brother.”

  “And, your name is?”

  “Peterson,” he told her.

  “Of course. How stupid of me,” she said. She looked over his shoulder for a moment then looked at him again. “Angela Snyder. Angela,” she said.

  “Angela? That’s nice,” he told her. “Root word being angel, I guess.” He looked the other way.

  “Just another cross to bear,” she said.

  At the Halloween party at the firehouse just a couple of months ago Peterson had seen a little girl in a white satin costume. Her mother had written across the skirt with a gold glitter pen: “Daddy’s Little Angle.” Hardly a soul noticed the spelling error. Who was going to break the news?

  “So it’s Peterson, plain and simple?”

  “Right,” he said. He knew she had expected him to give his first name, but he wasn’t happy to tell it to people. He was named after a middle child who had died in the cradle. He didn’t trouble her with the story, but throughout his whole childhood he had to visit the cemetery and stand before the marker with his own name chiseled on it. He went by his last name only. The one name.