Free You Have the Wrong Man by Maria Flook Page B

wave curling over, like the famous Pipeline. One edge sliced right through him.”
    I was tired of her poetry and I walked into the house to find the bathroom. I had an awful desire to brush my teeth as if I’d been riding a motorcycle all day and the wind had dehydrated my smile. I saw this dry smile when I looked in the mirror above two lavender sinks. The bar of hand soap was black. The hostess had left the cake resting on the glossy box it came in, like an objet d’art. The box listed the soap’s ingredients: tar, honey, and the spermaceti of some kind of marine life. Who knows what the hostess was trying to get across to people? The black soap made white suds. I knew I wouldn’t have studied these items, the soap, the silver filigree on the mirror, my petrified lips, if I wasn’t so unhappy with myself.
    We had a stylish couple in tow when we left the party. They wore the black leotard–look of the 1950s which they claimed was making its way back. They said they were returning to Zen, butterfly chairs, and the Beat poets. The girl wore novelty earrings, two plastic cherubs copulating. She could pull the tiny figures apart and reinsert them. “Who says angels can’t have a fuck?” she asked me.
    I observed that the earrings weren’t “period.” No, she agreed, these weren’t from the Beat generation; they were the very latest. She had a high, squeaky voice instead of the husky, jazz-infused kind I always associate with beatnik women reciting poems in coffeehouses. They wanted to go roller skating at a rink in the city that advertised a rock-and-rollskating party. I figured I would enjoy watching Lane on skates, wobbly and off balance for a while. But she wasn’t in the mood. She told them we’d drive them there but then she and I had to go back to her apartment because her dog had to go for a walk.
    “You mean you have to go walk your doped-up dog when I want to roller skate with you?” I said. She shot me her severe glance, the kind, I imagined, she would one day use against her offspring. Suddenly, I was dying to be skating in a room of swirling unknowns, bodies on wheels, with loud music and the submerged thunder of a thousand ball bearings.
    “No,” she said, “I’m not in the mood to roller skate.”
    “I’ll get you in the mood,” I said.
    “We’ll help. We’ll skate in a chain,” the girl said.
    “Stay out of it,” her companion said.
    “Oops,” she said in a small, high voice from the backseat, in recognition of our predicament. I kind of liked our hitchers, they seemed awake and still lively, ready to continue life after the sedative effect of the book party. I wanted to ask them what they thought of our Vietnam vet, but I saw Lane had her copy of his book on the seat between us and I didn’t bother with it. I let the pair off at the skating club and from the street I could hear the roar of movement above some nice rhythm guitar. “You’re a drag,” I told Lane, but she wasn’t paying attention. She was looking in the mirror at the rainbow slick beneath her eye.
    “It’s even bigger now,” she said.
    “Bigger is better,” I said. “I could prove that concept to you. If you’d just let me.” I hated myself when I started hinting around.
    “The dog,” she said. “The dog must be going crazy.”

    Her place was hot and I went around opening windows. The counterweights were shot and I had to prop the windows open with old books. For one window it was
The Magic Mountain
and for another an old copy of
The Three Little Kittens.
I took some ice cubes out of the freezer and tied them in a sock. I made her hold the sock to her eye until she could not bear the cold. “It works best when you keep it there,” I told her, but she kept leaving the sock on the coffee table, where it left a misty imprint.
    “I can’t keep doctoring my eye, Masha has to go out,” she said.
    I saw that I should have put the ice in a hankie or a flowered pillow slip, Lane was put off by the sock. I