Missing Mr. Wingfield

by E. Christopher Clark

  “Wow,” said Amber. “Harsh much?”

  “Sure, but it’s also true,” said Michael, sketching now the parts of her he might have been embarrassed to approach earlier: her nipples, her narrow strip of pubic hair. “And it makes me worry,” he said.”

  “Looking at another girl isn’t a crime,” she said. “Neither is thinking about one.”

  “But acting on those thoughts,” said Michael, “acting on those thoughts is a crime. The worst crime. Isn’t it?”

  Amber broke her pose and turned toward him, but it didn’t matter now. He was almost done.

  “Have you ever done that?” she asked him. “Do you have any real reason to be worried?”

  “Kinda,” said Michael. “Yes.”

  “You’ve cheated on your wife?” said Amber.

  “I cheated with my wife, back in the day. Or, well, the other relationship was pretty much over. So—”

  “OK,” said Amber, “so that doesn’t count.”

  “But there was this woman that I met while attending conferences over the last couple of years…”

  As he trailed off, Tracy leaned forward in her seat. This was it. Was he going to admit to this stranger what he couldn’t tell her. What he wouldn’t tell her?

  “We had this one night,” said Michael.

  “And what?” said Amber. “You fooled around a little? She sucked your dick?”

  “I don’t know,” said Michael. “We had a lot to drink.”

  “Well,” said Amber. “That doesn’t count. Or, well, you can’t be sure. So what the hell, right? Give yourself a break!”

  “But I wanted it to happen,” said Michael. “I wanted it to happen so Goddamned much.”

  “And have you ever felt that way before?” said Amber. “About anyone else.”

  “I feel that way right now,” said Michael.

  “Oh,” said Amber, smiling.

  “But I don’t want you to,” said Michael, putting his hands up in front of him. “I want you to ignore that, to resist—”

  “I don’t know,” said Amber, staying put, heeding him in action if not in speech. “You’re looking mighty cute in your underwear there, Mr. Silver.”

  “You mean you would?” said Michael. “If I wanted to, right now, then you—”

  “Of course I would,” said Amber. “But you don’t want to.”

  “But I do,” said Michael.

  “If you wanted to,” said Amber, “you’d be over here right now.”

  Michael wove his way through the easels to her. And, as he did, she stood to receive him. They moved ever so close to each other, ever so close, but still far enough away that he could feign innocence if they were caught. Then they drew closer. His hands hovered over her hips; hers reached for his ass. Their fingers curled in anticipation, the two of them ready to puncture that final invisible barrier. He pressed his face close to hers, their eyes closing, their mouths opening. Tracy caught sight of the head of his penis, that awful, deceitful creature rising from its slumber, seeking out the fertile ground it could smell, could almost taste.

  Then, at the last minute, Michael pulled away. He shoved his dick back into the folds of his boxers and stalked back across the room. “I am such an asshole,” he said. “I love my wife, but—”

  “Does she know about these moments?” said Amber.

  “Every single one,” said Michael. “I haven’t been able to keep a secret from that woman since the day I met her.”

  Tracy found this hard to believe. Did Jenna know about the email yet? Would he tell her about this night, the one he was showing Tracy right now, or would it be Amber who did that? How could Jenna know all of this and still hold his hand? How could she know this and still laugh at his jokes—his terrible jokes?

  “So, she knows,” said Amber. “Key question then is, is she OK with it?”

  “She says she’s fine with it,” said Michael. “She says she understands. But how can she? Does she really understand how close I’ve come?”

  “Close only counts in horseshoes and hand grenades,” said Amber.

  “What if I am a grenade?” said Michael. “What happens when I go off?”

  Amber crossed to him and grabbed ahold of his crotch. She pulled him close, pressing her breasts against his naked chest, rubbing a thigh against him, pulling his package toward her own groin. It was an invitation she was waiting to see if he’d RSVP to. But he gave no response, neither accepting nor declining.

  Instead, he blurted out “I’m worried I got her pregnant.”

  Amber let him go and laughed. “Who?” she said. “Your wife?”

  “No,” he said. “The other woman. Carrie.”

  Amber nodded. Then she held up a finger and crossed to the door that led to the other room. She held an ear to the door for a few moments, smirked, then nodded again.

  “There are tests,” she said, as she collected her clothes from the floor.

  Michael, taking her cue, began to get dressed himself.

  “Have you asked her to get the baby tested?” she asked. “I think it’s pretty simple. You swab the inside of your cheek, she swabs the inside of the baby’s, and you send the swabs off to a lab.”

  “I wrote her an email,” he said as he zipped up his jeans. “But I never sent it.”

  With her hands behind her back to fasten her bra, Amber couldn’t throw anything at him, but it looked like she wanted to. Instead, she rolled her eyes and sighed.

  “How do you even broach that subject?” said Michael.

  “Is the other guy still around?” asked Amber as she stepped back into her dress. “Or other guys, plural?”

  “Only one,” said Michael as he pulled his shirt back on. “And no,” he said. “That dude split the moment she told him she was pregnant.”

  “Mind giving me a hand?” she asked him, nodding over her shoulder at the zipper to her dress.

  He had a bit of trouble with it and he asked, “How did Isis do this with her teeth?”

  “Girl’s got skills,” she said. “Anyway,” she said, turning around to face him, “way I see it is that you want to let this woman, this—”

  “Carrie,” he said.

  “Carrie,” she said. “You want to let Carrie know that you’re not like the other dude, right? That you’re not going to duck your responsibilities.”

  “Right,” he said.

  “And your wife already knows?” she said. “She knows all of it?”

  Michael nodded. Tracy couldn’t believe it, but Michael nodded.

  “Then it’s settled,” she said, pulling a phone from her purse and swiping its screen to unlock it. “Give me their numbers. I’m going to make shit happen.”

  “You?” he said with a snicker. “I didn’t see ‘making shit happen’ on your menu. What’s it going to cost me?”

  She shook her phone at him. “Phone numbers,” she said. “And no more stalling. Like your sister said, you can’t say no to a pretty girl.”

  He took her phone and tapped away at it for a minute. Then he handed it back to her. She stuffed it back into her purse as the door to the other room began to creak open.

  “Why would you do this for me?” he asked, slipping his coat back on. “We just met.”

  “Almost Famous,” she said. “Or Elizabethtown. Or any Cameron Crowe movie you’d like, really. See,” she said, smiling as she straightened the lapels of his jacket, “I’ve been one cliché for most of my life. I’ve always wondered what it would feel like to be a different one.”

  He smirked. “The manic pixie dream girl,” he said. “You do look a little like Kirsten Dunst.”

  “All I need is a beret,” she said. “Right? And then the picture’s complete.”

  “And a quirky saying,” he said with a laugh. “You need a quirky saying.”

  “It’s all happening,” she said, kissing him on the cheek as Isis emerged from the other room. Then the scene faded away and Michael and Tracy were back in the courtroom, the jury abuzz with hushed c
onversation, a hundred redheads whispering into each other’s ears about good old Michael Silver. His dream come true.

  “She made good on her promise,” said Michael, still lost in the memory and not looking at Tracy. “She made shit happen. On the Tuesday evening before Thanksgiving, this past year—”

  “Waitaminute,” said Tracy. “You mean to tell me—”

  “Oh yeah,” said Michael, turning finally to face her. “The same night you thought I ruined my marriage for good was the night that Amber helped me make it all better. I was just coming back from my last class before the Thanksgiving break. And when I walked onto my porch, what did I see?”

  He snapped his fingers and they were back on the lanai. But this time it was earlier, and it was his story, and the sound was on.

  28

  Tears on the Sleeve of a Man

  When Michael walked in, Jenna was just finishing the tale of a camping trip she and Michael had taken some ten years before with her dance company back home. The girls in the company had left clumps of sodden toilet paper and spilled dog food behind for Michael, the conscientious former Boy Scout, to clean up, and he had grumbled about it the whole time, wondering aloud if the toilet paper was wet because of the rain or because of what it had been used to wipe, but somehow over the course of that chore, or during the drive home afterward, he had convinced himself to ask Jenna to marry him.

  “And he says to me,” said Jenna, “‘I hope this isn’t considered some form of infidelity, me touching the TP they used to wipe their pee-pees and all.’”

  Amber and Carrie laughed and laughed, spilling wine in the process, as Michael, pale as a ghost, said, trying to make a joke, “Honey, I’m home.”

  The three women turned to face him, silencing their laughter. Jenna finished off her glass of wine, then stood up, wrapped her arms around him, and planted a big kiss on his cheek.

  “Hello, dear,” she said. “Surprise!”

  Amber stood to hug him next. And, as she did, she told him that she and Jenna had picked Carrie and the baby up at the airport that afternoon.

  “The baby,” Michael mumbled as Jenna stepped aside to let Amber hug him.

  “Logan,” said Carrie, who stood now too, and who nodded at a cloth play mat that had been laid upon the floor.

  As Amber drew back and Carrie waited her turn to greet him, Michael looked down upon the sleeping boy who might be his son. It was a different look than the one Tracy had seen, not yet that mash-up of sadness and joy that would be playing upon his face when she snuck through the trees in just a few minutes. It was a look of pure wonder.

  “He’s beautiful,” he said.

  “Thank you,” said Carrie as they hugged, as they held each other for the first time in over a year. Tracy watched them, waiting for some sign of… of what she wasn’t sure. But some sign of something.

  “We have the results,” said Jenna as Michael and Carrie parted. She held up the still sealed envelope, a nervous smile on her face.

  “You got any more wine?” he asked.

  Jenna poured them each a glass and they took up their positions in the tableaux that Tracy was about to walk in on. Jenna and Amber sat off to the side, giving space to the other two. Michael held the envelope in his hands, but they were shaking so hard that Tracy didn’t see any way he could open it himself.

  And that’s when he, weakling that he was, asked his wife to do it for him.

  “I wasn’t weak,” he said aloud, addressing Tracy as if he had heard her thoughts. “She had asked me if she could open it when it came. It was as much her right as it was mine.”

  But Tracy didn’t care. She didn’t want to hear any more. She just wanted to see. She wanted to see it happen, the moment she had missed.

  Jenna slipped a finger under the sealed flap of the envelope and tore it open. Slowly, she removed the single sheet of paper that was inside. And even more slowly, she unfolded it. She read silently for a moment, and then the first tear slipped out of the corner of her eye.

  “He’s not yours,” she told her husband.

  Tracy gasped. She felt her body quiver at the sound of the words. Her arms began to tremble first, then her legs, and then something deep in her chest—her heart, she supposed—began to shudder from the effort to keep her upright and conscious. She doubled over just as Jenna bent forward, just as Amber wrapped her arm around her.

  Then the baby let out a soft cry. He was awake and his mother was picking him up.

  “Would you like to hold him?” Carrie asked Michael.

  “But he’s not,” Michael began, then trailed off.

  “Does it matter?” asked Carrie, holding the baby out for him to take.

  Tracy looked up and caught sight of herself creeping through the trees. She studied the look on her face, the anger there, the incredible sadness. Then she watched herself disappear.

  “I held him for a few minutes,” Michael told her now, as the scene began to fast-forward before them, “before he fell asleep again on my shoulder. Then I brought him to the other room, to the pack-and-play crib Carrie had brought with her. When I came back, the girls were drinking again, trading more stories about me, and they had come up with an idea.”

  Michael returned to the scene and stepped into the room. The women looked back at him with conspiratorial smirks upon their faces.

  “What?” he said, taking a seat and running his fingers through his now-disheveled hair.

  “I’ve had an idea,” said Carrie. “Something we’re going to do to turn this night around and turn that frown upside down.”

  “Please don’t tell me we’re going for the Chasing Amy,” said Michael. “Because, as hot as that scenario was in my mind’s eye like thirteen years ago, the realities of it, now that it’s right in front of me, are too Goddamned weird.”

  “Nope,” said Jenna. “We’re going to recreate a painting.”

  And Tracy knew just which one they were talking about. There was a Nick Gold pin-up called “The Temptresses,” one of Michael’s favorites—the one he’d referred to the most in his thesis, as it happened—and it involved three naked women surrounding a dapper young man in a suit. There was a blonde, a brunette, and a redhead, just as there were here and now, and they each draped themselves over or wrapped themselves around a different part of the dude, trying to draw his attention away from the painter, the viewer, who he had locked his eyes on.

  “And you’re okay with this?” Michael asked Jenna. “Me, surrounded by three naked women?”

  “We’re not the ones who are going to be naked,” said Amber.

  “Wait,” said Michael, fidgeting in his seat, “what?”

  “It’s a reversal,” said Carrie.

  “So get up,” said Jenna, gulping down the last of her wine. “And get naked.”

  “Uh-uh,” said Michael. “No way.”

  Amber laughed, reminded Michael that he was outnumbered, and then gave him some speech about how torturing himself wasn’t doing him any good, wasn’t doing his marriage any good. She intimated that maybe them torturing him instead would be a bigger help.

  Michael folded his arms across his chest, defiant.

  “Who do you think is going to do this more gently,” said Carrie, “you, or us?”

  He shook his head.

  And that was Jenna pulled him to his feet. As she did, Amber raced over and tugged at his shirt, untucking it, trying to get it off of him. But then he skittered away, putting the table between them. Then they chased each other, taunting and teasing each other as they ran.

  “You’ve probably jerked off to this very idea at least a half dozen times,” Carrie told him.

  “Only once,” he said.

  Jenna caught her husband and got his shirt up over his head. He blushed and looked down at the floor. Amber poured him a glass of wine—quite sloppily, Tracy noted—and handed it to him.

  “Is this really going to solve anything?” he asked, in between gulps from the glass.

  Jenna lifted
his chin up before he could have himself a good and proper sulk. “It will if you let it,” she said.

  Michael took a moment to think, then nodded, convinced. Amber yanked his pants to the floor and he stepped out of them, clad now only in a pair of SpongeBob SquarePants boxers emblazoned with the words “It’s a Yellow Thang!” Amber laughed at them.

  “My niece bought them for me as a joke one year,” he said. “Though she was little, and probably didn’t get it, and it was probably her mothers’ idea.”

  Jenna latched her fingers onto the waistband of Michael’s underwear now, as if to pull it down. “You ready?” she asked him.

  “Who’s going to paint it, anyway?” said Michael, stalling.

  “You, silly,” said Amber. “We’ll shoot reference photos, and you can get started as soon as we’re done.”

  “I don’t have to do it tonight,” said Michael, trying, as always, to get out of anything uncomfortable.

  “Oh yeah, you do,” said Jenna. “That’s part of the plan. Operation Catharsis. We’re going to stay right here and watch you do it.”

  “This is ridiculous,” said Michael.

  “No,” said Carrie. “Living the way you live, like guilt is some cologne you put on, or a body wash you scrub into your pores every day—that’s ridiculous.”

  Jenna’s fingers were still latched onto Michael’s underwear, ready to do the deed, a deed she’d probably done hundreds of times before, but never, Tracy thought, in front of a third party, let alone a fourth.

  “Jenna,” said Michael, “I—”

  Jenna took his face into her hands. “What?” she said.

  “Can’t I just paint in the naughty bits later?” he asked.

  “Do you really think that would have the same effect?” said Jenna.

  “I know what my dick looks like,” said Michael.

  “Yeah,” said Carrie, setting up the camera now, “but we don’t!”

  Michael and Jenna stared at each other for a moment, until Michael blinked and looked down.

  “I promise,” he said. “I promise—”

  “I know,” she said, giving him a kiss. “I wish you wouldn’t.”

  Tracy cried at this, at Jenna’s generosity, her understanding. How could she forgive him, not only for the betrayals gone by but for all those yet to come? Tracy could never do that, would never. She wiped at her eyes with the sleeve of her judge’s robe. Was Jenna the better woman, or the worse?