Free You Have the Wrong Man by Maria Flook

all after you,” she said, and she sounded like she’d been heroic instead of plain stupid.
    “I take care of myself,” I told her.
    “Not too well,” she said in a soft, regretful voice, imitating a mommy.
    “I’m not the one with the banged-up eye,” I said.
    “It’s always terrible for you, isn’t it? I mean, that remark—” She couldn’t hide her fascination.
    “He’s got his mother’s slit on him” was new to Lane, but to me it was nothing. I went across the street to a soda machine and bought a can of White Rock ginger ale for her eye.
    “For my eye?” she said.
    I held the icy can against her cheek. We sat in the car for a while and she kept twisting the rearview mirror to study her puffy wheal. Jesus, she
likes
the shiner, I thought. She thinks it’s romantic like Van Gogh’s ear, or Ahab’s wooden leg, or Quasimodo’s hump. I could see she was thinking of the book-signing party. She would explain how she broke up a gang fight down in the red-light district.Lane didn’t care that it was just Chelsea, and that the night hadn’t even hit its low point yet.
    She had not talked about my scar since the first months I knew her, but tonight she was back on the subject. She was saying how impressed she was with my attitude about my disfigurement. She said that I was well-adjusted and
so very
tolerant of other people’s feelings about my scar.
    “Actually,” she was saying, “I’ve always found your scar to be sort of attractive. It’s Clint Eastwood or Burt Lancaster. I can picture them wearing it.”
    “I don’t exactly wear it.”
    “We all do. We wear our misfortunes.” She was joking, but I could see she really felt something, felt desire for those actors. It shouldn’t surprise me. Sometimes I feel a whip cracking, herding my secret thoughts out in front. I can feel the oiled leather unravel from its coil and snap the air in front of my face.
    I guess I told her all my scar stories. I told her about a teacher in tenth grade who was appalled by my face. At that time, the sutured skin was newly reconstructed, swollen, oyster-colored and knotty, not the thin pencil gouge it is now.
    Lane said, “But it’s not really a pencil line. It’s more like a seam in a paper bag, or a good crease in a pair of chinos if you turn the leg inside out.” She touched the scar as I was driving, rode her fingertip down the indentation from my forehead to my jaw. Then she put her hand back in her lap, although she knew the line kept going.
    I was telling her how this teacher was really upset about me. She bent over backwards to see I was doing fine. She drilled me extra when I flunked a test and she handedme the hall pass whenever I wanted it, instead of giving me the third degree. The thing was, she never could get my name right. She kept calling me the wrong name; she called me Mark.
    Lane didn’t seem impressed by this story, it didn’t describe the bandages and the hospital room. But she said, “How weird. It’s like Jung’s synchronism idea.”
    Lane always had this maddening half-knowledge about everything. I told her it would be more like Jung if my name had really
been
Mark. In truth it was more like Freud that the teacher made this mistake.
    “Oh, you mean a Freudian slip.”
    “That’s right. Jung is something else.” I gave her some examples such as a girl who worked for Xerox whose last name was Copy, and a horse trainer whose last name was Furlong, a child beaten to death by her father whose name was Brandy Mallet.
    “Branded by a mallet. Oh, I see,” Lane said. “Then what was the point of your story about the teacher?” She seemed a little irritated that she didn’t have her psychological terms exactly right.
    “The teacher was just nervous, a real mess. She couldn’t handle my presence in her class. That’s all.”
    Lane said, “I’d write this down for a book or something, but I guess it’s your life, isn’t it? So it’s your prerogative.”
    I wasn’t exactly