John Katzenbach - The Wrong Man

The last words of this statement were lost, overcome by a burst from the nearby table: “I’ll tell you what Derek Jeter’s good at. He’s good at bending over and…”

She had to smile to herself. It was a little like being trapped in a uniquely Bostonian version of the twilight zone, caught between the pretentious and the plebeian.

She continued to shift about in her seat, maintaining a neutral distance that neither discouraged nor encouraged Will, and thought about how she had always been wildly unlucky in love. She wondered whether this was merely something that would pass, like so many moments growing up, or was, instead, a predictable vision of her future. She sensed that she was on the edge of something, but of what, she was unsure.

“Yes, but the dilemma with shocking and showing the true nature of war through art is that it never stops the war, but gets celebrated as art. We flock to see Guernica and we revel in the depth of its vision, but do we really feel anything for the peasants who were bombed? They were real one day. Their deaths were real. But their truth is subordinated by art.”

This was Will-the-date speaking. Ashley thought it a wise observation, but, at the same time, one that a million politically correct college kids would have made. Ashley glanced over at the loud baseball players. Even alcohol-fueled, their argument was exuberant. She felt a twinge of doubt. She liked sitting at Fenway with a beer. She loved wandering through the Museum of Fine Art. For one long second she wondered which of the two arguments she really belonged in.

Ashley stole a sideways glance at Will, who she guessed was thinking that the fastest way to seduce her was with all sorts of pompous intellectualisms. This was standard graduate-student thinking. She decided to confuse matters for him.

Ashley shoved her seat back abruptly and stood up. “Hey!” she shouted. “You guys, where you from? BC? BU? Northeastern?”

The table of baseball players quieted immediately. Young men being shouted at by a beautiful girl, Ashley thought, always gets their attention.

“Northeastern,” one replied, half-standing, making a small bow in her direction, with a Far Eastern sense of courtesy, a decorum mostly lost in the rowdy bar.

“Well, rooting for the Yankees is just like rooting for General Motors or IBM or the Republican Party. Being a Red Sox fan is all about poetry. At some crucial point, everybody makes their choice in life. Enough said.”

The boys at the table exploded with laughter and mock outrage.

Will leaned back, grinning. “That,” he said, “was succinct.”

Ashley smiled and wondered if he wasn’t all that bad after all.

When she was young, she thought it would be better to be plain. Plain girls, she knew, can hide.

Right at the start of her teenage years, she had gone through a dramatic phase of opposition to just about everything: loud, stamped-foot disagreeing with her mother, her father, her teachers, her friends, wearing baggy, sacklike, earth-colored clothing, putting a streak of vibrant red next to a streak of ink black in her hair, listening to grunge rock, drinking harsh black coffee, trying cigarettes, and longing for tattoos and body piercings. This phase had lasted for only a couple of months, just long enough for it to come into conflict with just about everything she did in school, both in the classroom and on the athletic field. It cost her some friends, as well, and it made those who did remain with her a little wary.

To Ashley’s surprise, the only adult who she’d been able to speak with in any modestly civil fashion during this portion of her life had been her mother’s partner, Hope. This had surprised her, because a large portion of her inwardly blamed Hope for the breakup of her parents, and she had often told friends that she hated Hope because of it. This untruth had bothered her, in part because she believed it was more what her friends wanted to hear from her, and she was unsettled by the idea that she might comply with their perceptions for that flimsiest of reasons. After grunge and Goth, she had gone through a khaki-and-plaid preppy stage, followed by a jock stage, then a couple of weeks as a vegan eating tofu and veggie burgers. She had dabbled in acting, delivering a passable Marian the Librarian in The Music Man, written reams of heartfelt diary entries, fashioned herself at various times into Emily Dickinson, Eleanor Roosevelt, and Carry Nation, with a touch of Gloria Steinem and Mia Hamm. She had worked building a house for Habitat for Humanity and had once gone along with the biggest drug dealer in her high school on a frightening visit to a nearby city to pick up a quantity of rock cocaine, an event that had turned up on a police surveillance camera and prompted a call from some detectives to her mother. Sally Freeman-Richards had been furious, grounded her for weeks, shouted at her that she’d been extraordinarily lucky not to be arrested, and that it would be hard to regain her mother’s trust. Separately, Hope and her father had reached more benign conclusions, talking more about adolescent rebellion, with him remembering some pretty stupid things that he had done while growing up, which had created some laughter, but had mostly reassured her. She didn’t think she was consciously setting out to do dangerous things in her life, but Ashley knew that on occasion she engaged in a risk or two, and that she was fairly charmed to have avoided true consequences up to that point. Ashley often thought she was like clay on a potter’s wheel, constantly turning, being shaped, waiting for the heat blast from some furnace to finish her.

She felt adrift. She did not particularly enjoy her part-time job at the museum, helping to catalog exhibits. It was a stuck-in-a-back-room, stare-at-a-computer-screen sort of job. She was unsure about the art history graduate program she was waiting to hear from and thought sometimes that she had fallen into these fields only because she was adept with pen, ink, and paintbrush. This troubled her deeply because, like so many young people, she believed that she should only do what she loved, and, as yet, she was unsure what that might be.

They had left the bar, and Ashley pulled her coat a little tighter against the evening chill. She realized that she should probably have been paying attention to Will. He was good-looking, attentive, and might just have a sense of humor. He had an odd, loping stride at her side that was disarming and, probably, on balance, was someone she might consider more carefully. But, she recognized, as well, that they’d been walking for nearly two blocks and only had fifty yards to go before they reached the door to her apartment, and he had yet to actually ask her a question.

She decided to play a small game. If he asked her something she thought interesting, then she’d give him a second date. If he only asked whether he could come upstairs with her, then he was going to get dropped.

“So you think,” he said suddenly, “that when guys in a bar argue about baseball, they do so because they love the game, or because they love the argument? I mean, ultimately, there are no right answers, there is only team-based loyalty. And blind loyalty doesn’t really lend itself to debate, does it?”

Ashley smiled. There was his second date.

“Of course,” he added, “Red Sox love probably belongs in my advanced abnormal-psychology seminar.”

She laughed. Definitely another date.

“This is my place,” she said. “I’ve had fun tonight.”

Will looked at her. “Maybe we could try a slightly quieter evening? It might be easier to get to know each other when we’re not competing with raised voices and wild-eyed speculation about Derek Jeter’s predilections for leather whips and outsized sex toys and the orifices where they might be imaginatively employed. Or deployed.”