Missing Mr. Wingfield

by E. Christopher Clark

  Michael stepped back into his pool of light. He stared up at her. “You think I can’t make decisions?” he said. “Well, there you go: the toughest decision I’ve ever made.”

  “Except that you didn’t make it,” said Tracy. “Your wife did.”

  He shook his head, stomped from one edge of the circle to the other. “We made the decision together,” he said. “That’s how marriage works, you little—”

  Tracy banged the gavel down. From the darkness on either side of Michael came the guards, each brandishing their weapon of choice.

  “One more insult,” said Tracy, “and I’ll find you in contempt of court.”

  “I have nothing but contempt for this court!” shouted Michael. As he did, something rather odd happened, something he seemed to notice almost as quickly as she did. The darkness around him flashed, for the briefest of moments, to a scene from some cartoon. There was a robot, a car rearranged to look like a man, delivering the same line Michael had just spoken. The first robot, all orange and gold, the hot head, stood beside another robot, all blue and gray, who was complaining about not being to transform. Above them, an egg-shaped robot with many faces was passing judgement. Below them, a school of robot sharks circled in a yellow-green pool.

  Michael raised an eyebrow as the image faded away, then closed his eyes tight, as if in concentration, as if maybe trying to conjure another image.

  Out of the darkness came the briefest flashes of other courtrooms, other scenes. There was a battle-hardened Marine losing his shit on the stand while being grilled by a punk-ass Navy lawyer, a Spartan king kicking a Persian messenger into a vast pit upon his warrior queen passing judgement, a city kid using the Bible to convince a small town’s council members to let him and his friends dance, a bespectacled district attorney playing a horrifying film of an assassination over and over again to make a point.

  This was getting out of hand. Michael knew. He knew now that he wielded as much power as she did. “I am trying to help you,” she called out to him, hoping to break his concentration, to get a reaction out of him, any reaction. “I’m trying to reform you.”

  Michael’s eyes shot open. The visions stopped and the darkness returned. “Reform me!?” he said. “There’s nothing wrong with me! Have you seen any of these women complaining about who I am or how I treated them? You’re the one with the complaint. So, out with it! Quit dancing around the fucking subject and tell me what I did to you.”

  Good, she thought. Crisis averted. She spoke. “I will get there when I’m good and ready,” she said. “But first, one more thing.”

  It was time, she knew, for the big guns. She shuffled through the papers in front of her. From the stack, she pulled a multi-page document that looked like it had been torn apart and taped back together again.

  “Do you know what this is?” Tracy asked him.

  “I have no idea,” said Michael. The gulp of air he took after he said it said otherwise.

  “It is a print-out,” said Tracy, “of a message you composed. Composed, but never sent.”

  “Where did you get that?” said Michael.

  She had hacked his email account, easy enough to do when his idea of a password was his wife’s initials and her date of birth.

  “I was hurt when I wrote that,” he said. “Things were rough.”

  “But you don’t deny writing it?” she said.

  “I don’t even remember what I wrote,” he said. “But I never sent it. I made a choice not to.”

  “You don’t remember what you wrote?” said Tracy.

  “I don’t,” said Michael, though the color of his skin was growing paler and paler.

  “Well then,” said Tracy, “let me remind you.”

  26

  Who You Want to Take You Home

  Carrie,

  The photo is of you, you sitting on a rock on the beach we all drove to on the final afternoon of the Boston conference. It was hot, and we’d known we were headed for the ocean, but none of us had thought to wear shorts (or maybe we had packed none). The cuffs of your jeans are wet, your feet are bare, and you’re leaning back, supported by your hands, your ring finger not yet naked. You don’t see me taking the picture. I didn’t remember taking it until now.

  I have a computer now which organizes my photos for me, which searches long forgotten corners of my hard drive, pushes aside digital cobwebs, and pulls eight-legged memories into the light. The program that does this is connected to a World Wide Web where I can set these spiders free, if I choose, and see if they are squashed as pests or made pets by button-clicking arachnophiles.

  Oh, what a terrible metaphor. How is it that I, with paragraphs like that, was a prize winner, and you, with your ability to turn a phrase, were but the lowly administrator?

  My mouse cursor hovers above an upload button as I wonder about you and the baby in your belly, about my wife and the womb I’ve left barren, about what could have been different, what would still be the same. If only. If.

  This program sorts photos by location too, and my first discovery gets me wondering if there’s more evidence of what happened in those six cities, over the course of those six years. So, instead of saying the hell with it, instead of clicking the button and seeing what happens, I go exploring.

  * * *

  We met in New Orleans, on Bourbon Street, the year before the flood. I’d been nursing Diet Cokes and listening to the house band at a little joint called Fritzel’s, way down past the strip clubs and the sports bars. My colleagues, who’d been hammered since halfway through that evening’s banquet and keynote address, and who hadn’t heard a damned note of the music since we’d arrived, had finally driven me off. I hadn’t gotten out much since the conference started on Friday afternoon, and now that I’d presented my paper and the nerves were gone, I’d been hoping to get a taste of the real N’awlins before flying home. That they’d ruined that for me, as they’d ruined so much else for me that weekend, with their shoddy second-rate scholarship during the conference and their meandering, misogynistic anecdotes after hours, that was unforgivable.

  So, I left Fritzel’s and started back down Bourbon, headed in the direction of the Monteleone, where we were all staying. I made my way past Big Daddy’s, where a pair of fishnet-clad mannequin’s legs swung in and out of a window; past a karaoke club where some unseen gentleman screeched his best impression of Jon Bon Jovi; and past a sports bar where the New England Patriots, my hometown team, were on the TVs, beating up on the Buffalo Bills. But, despite the fact that a visit to a kitschy strip club probably would’ve sated my desire to see the real New Orleans just as much as listening to some European jazz, despite the fact that “Living on a Prayer” tops my list of guilty pleasure songs, and despite the fact that I hadn’t missed a Pats game since they played in a blizzard three years before, I did not stop. The night was ruined. It was irreparable.

  And then I spotted you, the prim and proper administrator of our young organization, your hair down both literally and figuratively, walking out of the Gold Club, your face flush, your body too, skin all aglow from your plunging neckline to your sweating forehead. There was an immense smile spreading across your face, and it only spread wider as you saw me draw near.

  “Having fun?” you said.

  “Trying,” I said.

  You shook a thumb over your shoulder, back at the club. “I was just leaving, but if you want to go back in, I’ll buy you a dance.”

  “I doubt my wife would approve.”

  You laughed. “My husband would shit himself. But that’s the whole point. Why else do we go to conferences?”

  “The scholarship, I would hope.”

  Even me, at my most morose, could not bring you down. You shook your head at me. “You headed back to the hotel?” you asked.

  I nodded. “I’d been hoping to catch some jazz, but—”

  “You try Fritzel’s?”

  “Yes,” I said. “I remembered your suggestion. Trouble is, so did everyone else.”<
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  “Yeah,” you said. “That’s the trouble with conferences. You have to discover something early, before all of your friends ruin it.”

  “I wouldn’t call them friends,” I said. “At least not at this point.”

  “A wise man,” you said. “But, anyway, about the jazz: follow me!”

  You grabbed me by the arm and led me off, past the hotel, down one side street after the other, until we found ourselves across the street from a run down sandwich place that was just closing up shop, the sign advertising authentic Po-Boys flickering from bright white to dull gray. The lights went out and then, just as they did, a mournful horn sounded out from inside. You laid your head on my shoulder as we eavesdropped on what seemed to me like a very private lament. I began to ask you if maybe we shouldn’t feel wrong about this, but you shushed me before I was through.

  “You don’t blow like that if you don’t want to be heard,” you told me later.

  * * *

  In Boston the next year, I sat with you in the dark, at the registration desk, as you ate the dinner you’d been too nervous to touch during the banquet. The keynote, given by the eldest scholar of our bunch, had descended, during the Q&A, into a drunken argument between the group’s two belligerent factions. You cut into your re-heated steak with murder in your eyes, and as your meat spilled its juices onto the gleaming white plate, I imagined you imagining your knife slicing through the necks of those argumentative assholes.

  “At least it’s over,” I said.

  “It shouldn’t have even started,” you said. “The way these people can make anything political. Christ!”

  “This stuff matters to us,” I said. “And when something matters to you this much, and you get together with folks who care about it just as much as you do, arguments are bound to—”

  “It’s just a bunch of stories!” you shouted. You blanched as you looked around, searching the hall to see if anyone else had heard you. Then you set down your fork and knife, dabbed at your lips with your napkin, and whispered, “All they’re arguing about are words and pictures on a goddamned page. The little things, the stupid things—that’s all anyone ever argues about.”

  I didn’t know what to say. You were right, of course. But I couldn’t say that out loud, and I had to stop even thinking it before I drove myself nuts with the thought. So, I said, “You want to go to the beach tomorrow and cool off after everything’s wrapped up.”

  You smiled. “Sure,” you said. “That’d be nice.”

  * * *

  In San Francisco, you didn’t want to leave the hotel, but nobody could figure out why. This was your city, after all, and there was an expectation—and not an unreasonable one—that you would be our guide. But you shunted those duties off to an intern and stayed indoors, dashing between sessions, checking in on the volunteers manning the registration desk, disappearing into your room for hours on end.

  It was before dawn on the last day that you collected me from my room and decided to spill the beans. We walked out of the Sir Francis Drake, away from Union Square, and headed north on Powell. Up hills we went, and down them, and up them again. For the most part, you said nothing, the only sounds you made the grunts you directed at the billboards hanging overhead.

  It was only once we reached Fisherman’s Wharf, when you’d grunted for the seventh time, that I commented on this, that I asked you what was wrong.

  “They’re everywhere,” you said.

  “Billboards?”

  “Those billboards,” you said, pointing.

  The sign in question was one of dozens I had seen and immediately forgotten about over the past year, not just there in San Francisco, but back home as well. It advertised a ubiquitous gadget of the moment with a dancing silhouette set against a pastel backdrop. I had no idea why the signs bothered you so—these things were so omnipresent now that they just blended in with the scenery for most of us—but bother you they did. I was about to ask when you spoke up again.

  “He makes those things,” you said. “My husband.”

  “Your husband?”

  “Yes,” you said. “Or, well, my ex… or soon-to-be… Or, well…”

  “Oh,” I said. “And these billboards, they’re the reason you haven’t gone out?”

  “Do you notice what’s wrong with them?”

  I turned my critic’s eye to the billboard, trying to spot something.

  “Her ribcage,” you said. “She’s been Photoshopped, and her ribcage is slightly out of proportion. Slightly,” you said again.

  “I know Photoshop,” I said, squinting. “Like, I know Photoshop. But I don’t see it.

  “No one does,” you said. “No one except him. And now me. He made me stare at it until I couldn’t help but notice it, until it was all I noticed.”

  “The little things,” I said.

  “The stupid things,” you said, pushing the palm of your hand into the corner of your eye, wiping away something you didn’t want me to see. “Anyway,” you said. “Want to go see the Golden Gate?”

  * * *

  In Chicago, we shared a deep-dish pizza the night you told me that it was finally over, that the papers had come through and you were officially a “free” woman. But you didn’t want to talk about it. You were ready to move on. And so, before I had a chance to ask you how you felt, or what was next, you asked me, “Why sausage?”

  “You don’t like sausage?” I asked.

  “No,” you said, taking a bite of the pizza and speaking now with your mouth full, “I was just wondering.”

  “Well,” I said. “Me and some of the other guys in the department back home, we go to Uno’s a lot, and we order the Chicago classic, which—”

  “Has sausage on it,” you said, cutting me off. “I get it.”

  “So,” I said, “I figured I might as well see how the real thing compares.”

  “And?” you asked.

  “It’s good,” I said. “Hearty.”

  You smiled, kept eating.

  On the way back to the hotel, we passed by a store that was selling the latest version of your ex-husband’s gadget. You paused there and said to me. “I appreciate you not asking me about it. I appreciate you not digging.”

  “You’re welcome,” I said, responding to the thank you that was said but not spoken.

  We shared a cab out to O’Hare a couple of days later for our flights back home. You laid your head on my shoulder again, for the first time since New Orleans, and I think you fell asleep for a spell, but I didn’t look. I closed my own eyes instead, and breathed in the scent of your hair—lavender and jasmine—remembering the conversation we’d had in the Crescent City.

  “I doubt my wife would approve.”

  “My husband would shit himself.”

  Only one of them remained an obstacle, I thought to myself, before pushing the thought aside. An obstacle to what, I wondered. An obstacle to what?

  * * *

  Philadelphia was bedlam. Or, well, the most memorable night of it was.

  It was pouring rain and the two of us were out in it, trying to find a town car in which sat our keynote speaker for the evening, down from New York just for the occasion and trapped inside that vehicle with a driver who refused to take directions.

  You were on your cell, trying to calm the poor woman, trying to, through her, convince the driver to just pull over. “A moving target,” you said into your phone, “is only going to make this more difficult.”

  I checked my watch. We were already half an hour behind schedule. I asked you if you wanted me to head back inside and say something to the crowd.

  You said, “I want you to keep looking for the car.” So that’s what I did.

  It was a few minutes later that, patrolling the corner of Dock and 2nd Streets, I spotted the car a block north, driving west along Walnut. I screamed, “STOP!” at the top of my voice and the driver seemed to have heard me, even at that distance, for stop he did. You ran to me as I pointed.

  “Look,�
�� I said, as one of the rear doors of the town car opened.

  “I could kiss you,” you told me. “And, in fact,” you said, grabbing hold of my face in both your hands. “Why not?”

  You pulled me in and laid one on me, a kiss that was trying so hard to be chaste that the effort involved erased any chance it had at innocence. You pulled back, held my left hand in both of yours, and fiddled with my wedding band. You stared at it for a moment but then, down the street, a door slammed, and that noise broke you from your reverie.

  “Gotta go,” you said, looking up at me.

  And then you were gone.

  * * *

  It was in Denver that we said goodbye, a three-day-long goodbye that began with Hawaiian fish flown in that day to the most expensive seafood place you could find; that continued with a drunken evening of spoken word poetry in front of a pop art mural of a pair of puckered red lips; and that ended, with more drinking, in front of the hotel’s piano at two in the morning the day that you handed in your resignation.

  You played the opening riff to a song we had both known in college, and you sang, “Closing time. One last call for alcohol, so finish your whiskey or beer.”

  Then you pointed at me and I followed up, “Closing time. You don’t have to go home, but you can’t stay here.”

  We laughed, collected ourselves, then gulped down the seventh and eighth of the ten pancake shots the bartender had laid out for us.

  “He had a crush on you,” I told you. “No way he would have laid out this much otherwise.”

  You threw back the orange juice chaser. “It really does taste like pancakes,” you said, licking your lips. “How does that work? I mean, seriously: how does that work?”

  “I know not,” I said. “I know not.”

  Out of nowhere—or at least it seemed like it came out of nowhere—you grabbed my leg and squeezed. “Have I told you?”