The Wrong Man Read Online Free PDF Page B

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