Missing Mr. Wingfield

by E. Christopher Clark

  “Told me what?”

  “I’ve met someone.”

  “You have?”

  You bit down on your lower lip, tucking it underneath teeth tinted yellow by all the orange juice we’d been drinking, and you nodded, blushing.

  “Me too,” I said.

  Your eyes widened and you looked down at my left hand, checking to see if the ring was still there. “You have? But wait,” you said. “What about… what about—”

  “Only a matter of time,” I said. “She hasn’t been happy in years. Nor I.”

  “Who?” you asked.

  “A student,” I said. “A former student, that is.”

  “For real?” you asked.

  “Yes,” I said, though every word of this was a lie.

  “Wow,” you said. “I’m glad. I was worried that… well, given what happened in Philadelphia last year. I…”

  I ran a consoling hand along your shoulder. “I’m a big boy,” I said.

  “How big?” you joked. “After all, I’ve only just met the other guy.”

  We roared with laughter, falling into each other, into a hug that told the truth that I could not tell.

  After a few moments, you pulled away and looked at me. You looked and you waited. And when still I said nothing, you tucked your bottom lip up under your teeth again and squinted at me. Then you grabbed the ninth of the shots that had been laid out for us and handed me the tenth and final one. We threw them back, then the chasers, and it was as you were wiping your mouth with the back of your sleeve that you asked me if I remembered Top Gun.

  I nodded as you stood, as I looked up at you and tried to puzzle out what you were playing at.

  You ran your fingers through my hair and I melted into you, closing my eyes as I rest my head against your stomach. You asked me, “Do you remember what Meg Ryan says to Goose? When they’re in the bar?”

  I couldn’t. I shook my head no, the wool of your skirt scratching against my nose as I did.

  It was as you slipped a hand down my neck and underneath my loosened collar that you said it. “Take me to bed,” you said. “Or lose me forever.”

  I waited for you to laugh, to feel against my face the ripples of you busting a gut. But you didn’t.

  I remember fumbling up the escalator behind you, sweaty hand wrapped around sweaty hand. I remember looking down at the moving stairs to keep from looking at you, and then catching myself staring at your skirt instead, staring and thinking the drunken and/or juvenile thought that the view would be so much better from a couple steps further back. I remember punching myself in the thigh with my free hand, just for thinking that thought.

  But I don’t remember much after that. I think we opened your mini-bar for a bit more courage, but I’m not sure. All I do know is that I woke up in your arms the next day, that our shoes and socks and bottoms littered the floor around the bed, but that our shirts and underwear were still on.

  “Did we?” I asked you as I sat up and rubbed at my temples.

  You shrugged and smiled. “Does it matter?” you asked, and you patted a hand on my pillow, willing me to come back. When that didn’t work, you held out your arms to me and gave me your best puppy dog eyes.

  But I couldn’t, and I told you as much as I dressed. I just couldn’t.

  * * *

  I’m still with Jenna, and you must know it; all it would take to know it is a glance at my status on this web that connects us ever so slightly, ever so completely. Things are better. We’re getting there.

  But I can’t stop thinking, as I look at the photo of you and your swollen belly that ornaments your own corner of the web. I can’t stop wondering if maybe it does matter what we did that night, if maybe it matters more than any other thing I’ve ever done in this world.

  It wasn’t supposed to happen. The doctors told me and Jenna as much. Told us again and again. But what if it did, Carrie? What if it did?

  I can’t stop wondering.

  Yours,

  Michael

  27

  A Dog Who Has Eyes for Every Bitch

  Tracy folded the pages of the letter in half, then ran a finger along the crease, waiting for Michael to do something, to say something. But he didn’t move. Though the rest of the scene had disappeared, he was still sitting up in bed, eyes on his laptop, its glowing screen all that illuminated his weary face. It was a long time before he said anything, but for the first time since they’d begun Tracy had no urge to fill the silence. She would wait, and wait she did.

  He closed his laptop, the glowing apple on its backside blinking out as he did. Then he stepped out of bed and trudged back toward the defendant’s platform, where the light shone down from above once more.

  “So that’s it?” he said, holding a hand to his stomach as if he’d been punched in the gut. “That’s what all of this is about.”

  It was the beginning of it, she told him, but not all of it. “Mr. Silver,” she said. “Do you recall where you were on the Tuesday evening before Thanksgiving this past year?”

  “That was the night before your college visit,” he said. “Right? When you came out to see the Manoa campus?”

  “It was the night I arrived,” said Tracy. “I flew in early.”

  “No, you didn’t,” said Michael. “We picked you up at the airport the next day.”

  “I came early,” said Tracy, “to surprise you. But I was the one who was surprised.”

  “Waitaminute,” said Michael. “When did you come? What did you see?”

  Tracy banged her gavel down one last time, the judge’s bench melting away as she did. The guards, too. She was on Michael’s level now, where, she now realized, she should have been all along. The theatrics, the long and winding road to get here—they had been all for naught. He had scored just as many points as she had, maybe more. What mattered, all that mattered, was this: the confrontation. It was good that it would happen at the scene of the crime, rather than in any old room, but that was about all the magic was good for.

  Hawaii was back, but not Michael’s paradise. Not anymore.

  Tracy stood in the shadows at the edge of Michael and Jenna’s lanai, seeing but unseen. A real trick, that. But high atop the hill, with so much ocean to look at on two of the veranda’s three open sides, wasn’t it understandable that they might spend the least amount of time examining the side by the trees? If Tracy’s mother had been with her, there might have been cause to look over here; they might all have been focused upon Veronica at the piano, the palms swaying in the breeze behind her as she made a requiem out of some piece of Top 40 schlock. But Veronica was not here. Tracy was alone, a backpack slung over shoulders slick with sweat from the climb, her suitcase leaned up against the side of the house. And before she could jump out from the trees to make them jump from their skins, she was stopped dead in her tracks by twin tableaux that made her own skin crawl.

  Jenna was sitting on the chaise longue, her head hung low, a letter and an envelope clutched between trembling hands. Another woman, a lithe figure Tracy took to be one of Jenna’s dancers, had her muscled arm around Jenna and was running a consoling hand up and down Jenna’s shoulder.

  Just a few feet from them, though it might as well have been at the other edge of the deep green sea, Michael was seated opposite a third woman. The two of them sat in wicker arm chairs and looked deep into each other’s eyes as the woman held a baby in her outstretched arms, waiting. Waiting, it seemed, for Michael to take hold of the child himself.

  This, Tracy would discover only later, was Carrie. And the child—the way that Michael looked at the child as he took it into his arms, his smiling face stained by tears; the way Carrie’s concerned countenance twitched between Michael and Jenna, Jenna and Michael—Tracy decided that it had to be his. It wasn’t possible—everyone knew he couldn’t have kids—but here it was.

  Tracy sank back further into the shadows, steadying herself on her suitcase and praying that none of them had seen her there. She closed her eyes,
thought of the Michael she knew instead of the one before her now. Michael hadn’t started things with Jenna until long after it would have been clear to anyone else that his relationship with Robin was over—it wasn’t fucking, she finally admitted to herself; it was indeed making love. And then later, despite what happened, when the press dubbed Robin “Boston’s most notorious rock and roll slut,” Michael was the first person there to defend her and to call them out on their bullshit. When Veronica was pregnant with Tracy, and he wasn’t even 15 yet, Michael was the one who stood up at Easter dinner and said it should be Vern’s choice about the baby and not her father’s.

  Michael was a legend to Tracy, the perfect father figure for a girl who already had two awesome parents in the form of her moms. He was the cool rock and roll dad, but without all the bullshit baggage. He answered every email you sent him with an ass-kicking anecdote, he swooped in twice a year from 5,000 miles away with a new portrait of you gussied up as the bad-ass heroine du jour, and he was there when you and your moms needed him but got the hell out of the way when you didn’t. When her mothers told her that Michael and Jenna weren’t going to have kids, she cried because of how unfair it was that nobody would ever get to call him Daddy.

  And yet—she opened her eyes again—here he was. Here he fucking was.

  Tracy looked at Jenna again and began to cry for her now. Tracy knew how Jenna doted on her nieces and nephews up in Maine. She’d seen photos and videos of Jenna dancing with the tiny little girls and boys who took her creative movement classes back home in Hawaii, a line of smiling children bedecked in grass hula skirts and nearly fluorescent leis, each of them swaying their hips slightly out of time with the kid next to them. Jenna would never have any of that, thanks to the man she married. But now he had it! Now there was a baby falling to sleep on Michael’s shoulder as he ran his fingers through its mop of brown hair.

  That was enough for Tracy. She ran into the woods, down the hill, and out to the main road. She grabbed a taxi back to the airport, slept on a bench there, and waited to put on the show that she knew she must, the performance she’d been giving ever since.

  “And that’s all you saw?” said Michael, once they were back in the courtroom.

  “Did I need to see more?” said Tracy.

  “Yes!” yelled Michael. “See, the trouble is that, so far, you’ve only seen what you wanted to see. Let me show you—”

  “What I wanted to see?!?” she shouted. “I didn’t want to see any of it.”

  Michael stepped off of the accused’s stand and, with a swift kick, sent it crashing into the darkness. “If it pleases the court,” he said, “I’d like to submit a scene from the spring of 2010. It had been a month since I composed the email referenced by the prosecution, and several months before the scene we’ve just been made to watch. I was hosting the bachelor party for a colleague from the university.”

  As he continued speaking, the scene formed around him. He was in a hotel room, a half-dozen easels standing between him and a naked woman sprawled out on a couch. It was Jenna’s dancer friend, Tracy realized after a moment of gawking, the one who had been consoling her. Tracy scoffed, wondering how this scene would help prove his innocence. Then Michael’s clothes disappeared, save his boxers.

  “Christ,” she mumbled. What the fuck was this meant to prove?

  “It was only once we were alone together that I began to sweat,” he said. “Half the guys had left by midnight, thanking me for the invitation and for the entertainment. The groom-to-be had left for the next room, led off by the bustier of the two performers. And the last guy, a gay poet whose motives for coming had been unclear all night—once he’d finished counting out the five hundred-dollar bills he had agreed to leave for the groom’s seductress, he stepped out into the yard with a couple of cold ones to chat it up with the security guy, who, it turned out, was gay too.

  “That left Amber and me—”

  Tracy scoffed again. The stripper’s name was fucking Amber? Of course it was.

  Michael ignored her and continued. “That left Amber and me, and now she was asking—”

  “Where do you want me?” said Amber.

  Michael scanned the room, then pointed. “Over there, on the floor, against that bare wall. And you’ll need…” He looked around again. “Your stockings. Your stockings and shoes.”

  She pushed herself off of the couch, then navigated her way through the maze of easels toward where’d directed her.

  For the first time, Michael seemed to notice his own near nakedness. “Shit,” he said, “you don’t mind that I’m down to my—”

  “All’s fair in love and Strip Pictionary,” she said.

  “I know,” he said, “I know. But I did take off my shirt of my own free will after the beer-induced hot flashes began. I can put everything back on, if it’d make you feel more comfortable.”

  She shook her head, chuckling. “This has to be the strangest party I’ve ever done.”

  Michael searched the room for a clean canvas as she pulled on the first of her stockings. “Only one should be all the way on,” he said, not even looking at her. “The right one. The pose will be you pulling on the left one.”

  “Got it,” she said.

  He set the last blank canvas on the easel he’d been using all night.

  “Do Isis and I get to keep any of these?” she asked as she sat down.

  “To be honest,” he said, “most of them are crap.”

  “Not yours,” she said.

  “Even mine aren’t all that—”

  “You’re too damned modest,” she said.

  Michael blushed. “Okay,” he said, getting back to business. “Lean back against the wall. Keep your right leg flat on the floor, and lift your left leg up.”

  She nodded, then did just as she was told.

  “Right,” he said, “that’s great. Keep your knee at about the same level as your chin—yes, bring the chin down if you need to—and keep your eyes focused on the stocking as you’re pulling it down.”

  “How far down?” she asked.

  “About mid-calf,” he said. “And make sure you’re using both hands to pull it down. But gently,” he added. “Slowly, I mean. You’re not in a rush.”

  She smiled. “You needn’t be in a rush, either, Mr. Silver. I can’t leave until Isis is done in the other room. We’ve got plenty of time.”

  “I don’t know about that,” he said. “This is only my friend’s second or third time. He’s only a PhD candidate, after all. They were probably done before she got his pants down.”

  Amber chuckled.

  “Sorry if I seem frazzled,” he said. “I just want to get this one right.”

  “You apologize too much, too,” she said. “Your wife the cause of that?”

  “No,” he said. “That’d probably be my sister.”

  “Your sister, the stripper?”

  “That’s the one,” he said, beginning to sketch the line of Amber’s arched back. “She’s been making me feel like I have something to apologize for since the day my parents brought her home from the hospital.”

  “And she’s the reason that this evening was about easels instead of dildos, right?”

  Michael nodded. “The others had him convinced about the traditional bachelor party, but I’ve never been one to keep things traditional. And, I mean, when your sister’s in the profession…”

  Amber said, “She the reason you’re so afraid of looking at me?”

  Michael stopped sketching. “What do you mean?” he said.

  “You haven’t looked at me all night,” said Amber. “Not really. At least not since I took my clothes off. The sketches you’ve done have been great, but they’ve all been from memory. Haven’t they?”

  Tracy watched the lump form in Michael’s throat, watching him swallow it back. He was caught. Guilty. Again, Tracy wondered why he was showing her this scene, what it was meant to accomplish. A stripper calling him on his subterfuge? This was meant to make him l
ook less guilty?

  “This one’s a Nick Gold,” he said. “From an old trading card set of her best pin-ups.”

  “Her?” said Amber. “Isn’t Nick a man’s name?”

  Michael put down his pencil—in order, it seemed, to pontificate. “It was a pseudonym,” he said. “Nick was actually a woman by the name of—”

  “Pick up the pencil,” said Amber. “Isn’t that the rule, that you never take your pencil up off the page?”

  In spite of herself, Tracy was beginning to like this one. She’d comforted Jenna at a critical moment, or, well, she was going to eventually, and she was giving Michael shit when shit was what he deserved—why should Tracy let Michael’s infatuation with this woman influence her opinion of her?

  Michael began to sketch again. “How did you know?” he asked. “How did you know I was doing it from memory?”

  “I saw how nervous you were when one of your buddies picked a pose early on, when he set up something you had never seen before.”

  Michael snickered. “I don’t think that pose had been seen by anyone on Earth before.”

  “It was pretty hard to hold,” said Amber.

  Michael smiled, lightening up. His hand flowed across the canvas now, no longer skittish and uncertain. He captured the arc of her back, the slight roll of flesh at her midsection, the way one breast drooped just a smidgen more than the other. He seemed the least certain of his work on her feet; an old insecurity, Tracy happened to know.

  “Can I be honest?” he asked her.

  “Absolutely,” said Amber. “Lay it on me. I did take one semester of psych at U of H before dropping out.”

  “It’s all about something my sister said to me once. Or, well, something she said about me.”

  “And that was?”

  Michael worked fast now, as if the conversation had drowned out the nagging voice of his inner critic. He said nothing for a moment as he captured her pouty lips, the severe line of her bangs. Then he said, “My sister once told me I’d never been able to say no to a pretty girl in my life.”