Free You Have the Wrong Man by Maria Flook Page A

thrilled by this observation. I said, “Use what you want, it’s the point of view that matters. You ought to write about your black eye. That’s a firsthand experience.”
    I saw her looking at herself in the side mirror. She examined her bruise and smiled the way a woman smileswhen she feels pleased by her attire. She’s wearing her virgin smock, her black eye, and an added touch—something to increase her authenticity—her grandmother’s cameo.
    There were a hundred paper sacks of light winding along the sidewalk of the Brookline Colonial when we arrived at the book bash. I peeked in one sack and saw that it was filled with fine white sand in which a votive candle was centered. “Now that took some tinkering,” I said.
    “I told you it was special.”
    “Looks like we’re not too late, look at that table of food,” I told Lane, but she had paused a few sacks back to embrace someone, a Lord Byron type, so I headed for the pyramid of cherry tomatoes and the dolphin-sized sculpture of tuna salad. The yard was illuminated by lanterns strung from dogwood to dogwood, and in a discreet corner I could hear the Bug Assassinator going full blast, removing the insect sector from that elite neighborhood. On the flagstone patio, I saw a table of hardcover books, and a little man was sitting on a lounge chair signing one. He must be the author of
The Five Lives of a Vietnam Vet.
I wondered at the figure, it seemed random, why not the classic number nine? Turns out the guy had been hit five times and lived to write a book about it all. He looked pudgy and tanned, as if he, too, might live in this neighborhood and sit out by his pool. I made a promise to myself that I was going to avoid the whole literary notion of that evening and stick to food and the friendly talk of some ladies nearby. I knew I wouldn’t see much of my escort; she was in her own world, describing her new novel to some people, and then she was talking about her shiner as if it were her new creation,a result of her slumming muse. I could hear little snatches of her conversation in her aloof and dreamy southern tones, the drawl she had once tried to overcome and then had relearned to stupefy her publisher and fans. I heard her saying to someone that she was putting some Vietnam stuff in her new book, but of course she would be dependent on research. Then she was saying how she loved to go to the “li-berry,” which seemed to charm the partygoers, though to me, it just sounded dumb blonde.
    I was happy for a while. The caterer was running back and forth with trays which he continually placed near me as if I were his official taster. I kept nodding my approval to him, but once I had my fill of the basic four food groups, I went over to a table where the caps had been left off all the bottles of booze. This encouraged me to slosh as much as I pleased into a lone tumbler which was smeared with lip color. I do like the taste of their lips left on fine glassware—it’s even better on a longneck beer bottle. Soon Lane brought some bright-eyed, nervous people over to me. I wiped my palms on my jeans, ready to shake hands, but I saw she had steered them over for one purpose only, to show them my scar.
    “This is what started the fight,” she said. “The amazing thing is that he didn’t bleed to death right there at the department store. They ripped up a brand-new Ralph Lauren, all silk, right off the rack, to make tourniquets,” she went on.
    “Why is it such a straight line?” a fellow was asking
her.
    She didn’t even look at me. She had made up the Ralph Lauren part, they didn’t have shirts like that at Montgomery Ward, and the EMS personnel didn’t use tourniquets. There weren’t any arteries involved.
    She was saying, “It’s a straight line because he was stunned and didn’t move out of the way when the whole thing cracked and came down like a sheet of ice right on him; he just stood there. He was in a state of shock and all. It was like a