The Shadow Man Page 10

  Geoff and his outrageous charade were doing us two women a favor.

  “So he’s at work today?” I asked.

  She nodded. She was getting excited, as much as she could while still producing a look of unconcealed disgust. “He called me this morning after I talked to you—he was so sweet,” she said mockingly, prissiness crossing her face. “He said how much he loves me and that he hopes I have a good day.”

  Have a good day, America. I once read a clever response to bank tellers and the like who tossed out this pleasantry: “I have other plans.” Unfortunately, whenever I had tried that, nobody caught the wit of it. With every “have a good day,” the national scaffold of phoniness piled up a plank or two higher. With every phony overture Geoff made to us, the spider had sprung another hairy leg.

  We had both been given Plan A. He had no Plan B. Plan A was this set of carbon-copy tactics that he funneled from one woman to the next. I remembered how he had pulled my copy of The Little Prince from the bookshelf. “An interesting book,” he had remarked. “So you have this, too?”

  “Do you know that this is the first book he has read in years?” Cornelia practically shouted at me. “I bought it for him this summer and he tried to read it—so slowly he was reading it—you cannot believe how slow. And it is such a simple book—I watched him—he was reading ten minutes for each page!”

  And there was the music. The CDs he would bring over in a knapsack, spreading them out on my couch, picking selections to play to me, humming and murmuring the words as if in a private serenade to a private lover. The CDs, it turned out, were her music, music she had asked him to buy over the summer. And I realized as she talked that he had not been serenading her as he sang vacantly in front of me: He had been serenading himself, cupping us—the little players—in his hands, blowing on us to make us come to life in the orchestration of his little scheme. He was the little prince, atop the highest turret of his castle as the pennants waved around him in the wind, singing quietly to his power, the limitless possibilities that danced in front of his conscience, flashing black, white and then gray.

  He had passed evenings with me picking the songs they had shared in their relationship, all the while peering at my face, searching out my reactions so that he could make the same songs ours, cement our bond in them, pirate their significance with her into a mimeographed significance with me. And I would listen to the music, cocking my head at him, watching as his eyes and mind traveled with the lyrics … waiting … waiting … for me to bite, to exclaim “Oh! This is wonderful!” so he could dig the hook into my throat, sewing us together forever in the notes. But I didn’t know what he was up to then. I would only listen and say, “That’s very nice,” and then get up and check a pan on the stove.

  Larry had once called me Pamela, grinning at the puzzled look that crossed my face. “Come on, Pamela, let’s go,” he repeated, standing up and reaching for my hand. I followed him out to his motorcycle, strapping on my helmet and clasping the plump down of the jacket around his waist as we rode home along the roads lined with forests on either side and I wondered who she was. And once or twice he called me Patricia, grinning afterward in the same amused way. The names rang endlessly in my head for months.

  So we were Pamelas and Patricias, Cornelia and I. We had the same identity, the same potential for pain. We would all think we were the first one, the only one, the first and only different one. What insect is it, I thought, as all of us—Cornelia/Pamela/Patricia/Leslie—dug for truth in the living room—that lives for only one day? The dragonfly. The promise of the dragonfly. Good for only a day. I stared at the fluted tucks of fabric on my pink lampshade.

  “What are you going to do?” I asked Cornelia. Her legs still jutted out in front of her, white feet shod in canvas pointing awkwardly at the tabletop.

  “I don’t know. I will have to see.” Her words were vacant and slow.

  We sat together for hours. About once every hour we had to go to the bathroom—both of us at the same time. We laughed about it when we realized that the interruptions had become a pattern—and one that made us even more alike. The hairy spider was dying: Cornelia/Pamela/Patricia/Leslie were the same; we had very little or nothing to hide. Our bladders were even the same. We were pals—first one and then the other of us waiting in the living room until the whirling water of the toilet churned and our nemesis came traipsing down the hallway, giggling and flushed.

  Twice she stood up to go. Twice we got sidetracked on another tangent, unconscious of the hand on the clock sweeping its circle yet another time. It was close to nine when she finally made it over to the door. We were laughing at the number of hours that had passed. And it was during our laughter that the rapping, tuneful and brazen, sounded through the wood of the door. I stared at her. I had heard it many times before. Her black, open pupils fixed on me, the skin of her face very white against them.

  I reached across her to unlock the door.

  He was standing right up against the frame of the doorway, his hands on his hips, the short sleeves of the blue shirt jutting angularly from his arms. He smiled as though he had caught a pair of adolescents necking.

  “Is this a private party, or am I invited?”

  She stared at him blankly, her face ghostly white. He grinned at both of us, first at me, then at her.

  “It is a private party,” I said, “and you are not invited.”

  He ignored me, watching Cornelia instead, amused at her petrification. “I was wondering where you were,” he said. “I was on my way to get a bite to eat. Would you care to join me?”

  She had become a marionette—hung on a hook, wooden and stiff at the end of frozen strings. He watched her, smiling over his clever victory; I watched all of us, the blood in my head pounding. She gulped, tried to hug me, and took off down the steps outside, her rubber soles pattering on the concrete.

  “Do I get a hug, too?” he asked me.

  “No!” I banged the door, an inch from his ribs. Then I turned the key. The deadbolt shot loudly and firmly.

  I saw the lights of the truck as they pulled away.

  He had won. Miserable weasel. I made another cup of tea and pierced a potato under the faucet, rubbing its skin with my thumb. I shut it into the microwave, watching it spin on the carousel. She was gone. He had her again. His smooth blue eyes played before me, and over and over I heard the sound of her footsteps scuttling down the stairs. Asshole.

  The potato hissed, small foam bubbles erupting from the holes I had made with the fork. I ate it slowly, sections still raw, crunching like water chestnut under my teeth. Cornelia was gone, sucked back by the tornado. Every storm had its pocket of stillness—an island where the air was sweet, warmed by the sun, and the illusion of peace lived on. He had taken her there, and would keep her in his thimble of paradise, where she could not see down to the chaos that rained. I worked through the hot potato. Then I put my bowl in the sink.

  CHAPTER TEN

  The Heron

  I had hunted for the Unicorn. From the coast highway, as I ran on the weekends, I would crane my neck to search the boulders. I never saw the chair. Weekdays I ran after work, in the dark, and it was hard to believe that he would sit there, in the pitch black, listening to the pounding surf. Besides, it was cold. Daytime, with the sun high, was the only warm hiatus at the ocean, and even then, hours of the wind and salt would be enough to drive the strongest to the peace of a ceiling and four walls. Still, the Unicorn had his van.

  Muriel thought I was being a fool. “Don’t be taken in by him,” she scoffed. “He’s just another West Coast freak.” I protested, trying to describe how he was different—eccentric, poetic, and very deep—but she continued to shake her head. “Uh-uh, Wesley.” It was the name she had once given me as a little joke. “I’m telling you. He’s a bum. A weirdo. Don’t waste time kidding yourself.”

  I kicked at a pebble. We were taking an evening walk. “I know that’s what he sounds like, but he isn’t! He’s smart, smarter than a
nyone I’ve ever met. He knows things, Muriel, he knows things the way you and I don’t.”

  “Well.” Muriel sounded unconvinced and stooped to duck a vine that trailed from over a fence. “Maybe that’s just how it seems.”

  We walked in silence.

  “I want to get to know him,” I said. “I wish he would come back.”

  Muriel gave something between a sigh and a snort. “Leslie. Sometimes I wish I could shake you. You keep missing the obvious.”

  I slid in front of Muriel where the pineapple trunk of a squat palm narrowed the sidewalk. She had always been my very good friend. At times I wondered why and how. We bickered. We had differences. Yet in some ways, we were like two sides of the same coin. I was patient, more reticent, and liked to observe. Muriel was tough, stood for no nonsense, and blabbed her mind at the drop of a hat. And we were linked by our art. Mine was dance; she was a painter. To me, she was a wonderful painter. She had finished this one large canvas she called Inner Earth. It was amazing. Instead of the dark, murky torture you thought you were going to see, Muriel’s painting was full of reds and blues and something between a purple and a black, twisted together almost geometrically, like the underside of a dried-grass basket. And here and there were streaks of this beautiful pink, like the legs of a heron, flashing in between the rest. The woven lines moved and swelled before your eyes. She had the painting in her bedroom, tipped against the wall beside her bed, and when she would disappear to answer the phone or go to the kitchen, I would stare at the lines, seeing them rumble and quiver and call me in.

  And then Muriel would shoot back into the room, her long bones ferrying her like a schooner in a high wind. “Like that, Leslie?” she would say, adjusting the window blind or shaking out a sweater. “It’s a decent painting, isn’t it?”

  A little cat slinked in the shadows. Muriel bent to the sidewalk. “Here, kitty, kitty,” she called, her hand outstretched. The cat dove behind the shelter of a bush.

  We rounded a corner. “What are you going to do about moving?” I asked.

  “Nothing right now,” replied Muriel.

  “Why not?”

  “Why should I?”

  “Well, don’t you want to open up the road for your art and your business?”

  “Not if I have to experiment,” said Muriel. “Why should I try something just for the sake of trying and then deal with all the problems? I have enough problems now, but at least I know what they are. I don’t want to bring in a whole bunch of new problems and then have to figure out what to do with those.”

  “Oh,” I said.

  “See, Leslie,” said Muriel, “you ask for problems. I don’t know how you can make yourself do that. I prefer not to ask for more problems, but to deal with the ones I already have.”

  I digested that. It was true; everybody came from a different place. A different energy level, maybe. Some had less to put out than others. I thought about Muriel’s past. She had gotten married once. It was really a dumb idea. She had been stuck at an airport during a storm and had met a guy in the cocktail lounge, and it turned out they were connected through a set of mutual friends. They talked that afternoon for all the hours Muriel had to wait for the weather to clear. And then Muriel finally took off and they kept up a telephone relationship, in the course of which they learned a strange and awe-inspiring fact. It went something like this: Years ago, Muriel had lent her copy of Shogun to a friend, on whom another friend had played a trick. Because the book makes no sense without the last page, the trickster tore out the last page. It turned out that Jack, the man Muriel met at the airport and was now in love with over the phone, had been the trickster who had yanked the crucial page from her copy of Shogun so long ago. For years, not knowing whose it was, he had kept the page, and Muriel had had the book without the final page. It was somehow on the strength of this that they wound up getting married. “Don’t ever marry anyone you meet in a bar,” Muriel had often warned me.

  We walked in silence. The streetlights, bright coronas atop cold, gray metal, burned away the moon and stars. Looking very hard, I could make out the faintly twinkling specks, pinpricks singing a melody up above the atmosphere. The moon, pasted to the wide night sheeting, fought with the electric glow. I remembered the sad song, the song Larry would burst into, the freedom song. Freedom’s just another word for nothing left to do, nothing ain’t worth nothing, but it’s free. To do. It was something we could choose, or choose against. We all came from a different place, and it was not up to me to judge.

  The phone rang loudly from behind the front door. I jammed my key into the lock and lunged into the living room just before the machine picked up. The voice on the line was Cornelia. There was noise and static in the background.

  “What are you doing for Christmas?” she asked.

  I had forgotten all about Christmas. “Nothing,” I said.

  “Are you going to the East Coast?”

  “No.”

  “Do you want to spend Christmas with me?”

  “Sure,” I said. “Why not?”

  “I can’t talk now,” she went on, as other people’s voices rose louder in the din behind her. “I am at a restaurant—we went there for dinner—and Geoff is in the bathroom. Are you home tomorrow? I call you in the morning.”

  My alarm had just gone off and I was climbing into wakefulness when she called.

  “He went to work,” she said. We were both sleepy. “I can talk a little more now.”

  “What’s going on?” I asked.

  “I cannot stand this anymore. I cannot stand to be here. I don’t know what I am doing in this.”

  “I know,” I said. “He’s a liar.”

  “I am getting out. I thought I could spend Christmas here, but this is bullshit. I cannot stay one more minute with him.”

  “So you’re going to leave?”

  “I guess so.” She put the stress on the “so.”

  “Where are you going to go?”

  “This I do not know.”

  I thought for a minute. “You can always come here,” I said.

  “Ya, maybe.” She paused. “Are you looking for a roommate?”

  “No.” I said.

  “I only have this two-hundred-seventy-five dollars for rent.”

  “Don’t worry about it,” I said. “I don’t need rent.”

  The phone silence quivered between us.

  “I am housecleaning till four,” she said. “After that I will come back here and pack. What time are you home?”

  “I don’t know. Six,” I said.

  “Okay. I will be there after six.”

  I made a big omelet when I got home. At six-thirty I heard her Karmann Ghia trundle up the road outside. I flipped the outside light switch and opened the door. She stayed in the dark car for a couple of minutes. I saw her bending down inside it. I went down to the sidewalk to meet her.

  She had opened the door. The Ghia smelled like an old, worn car—that comforting, leathery, old-car smell. It was piled with zipped-up duffelbags and clothing on hangers. She had on a sweatshirt with the sleeves torn off and her pink elastic ponytail holder was slipping out of her hair. We carried the bags up the front steps. It took a couple of trips. She ran ahead of me, the sleeves of her clothes grazing the stairs as she clambered up with armfuls of hangers. I stumbled behind her, the bursting nylon bags bumping against my legs.

  “I saw this friend of Geoff today. This ridiculous woman, Kelly. She asked me, ‘Ya—how is everything with you and Geoff?’, and I told her I am moving out this afternoon, and she said, ‘Oh, too bad.’”

  We dumped the bags in the living room.

  “Then she asked me where am I moving,” Cornelia went on as we trotted down the steps again to the car.

  “What did you say?” I asked.

  “I told her, ‘I am going to the girl he fucked while I was gone.’ And then—” she continued as I shut the front door after the last of her things were inside, “I pack my things at the apartment and call
ed this girl—some little girl, sixteen, I think she was—that he was asking to do ‘paperwork’—” She paused. “Do you know about this?”

  I shook my head and gestured to the couch. Cornelia sat on the floor.

  “He found this girl, she was—how you call it—hitchhiking? And he gave her a ride and he asked her if she would like to help him with paperwork.”

  I raised my eyebrows in a well-we-know-better attitude.

  “Right,” said Cornelia. Fatigued and seemingly relieved to be out of Geoff’s slippery clutches, she sank back on her elbows. “So I called this girl’s number—he had it by the telephone. She is living with her sister, and her sister answered, and I said, ‘Excuse me, I am just calling to tell you so you should tell your sister that if this Geoff Martin is calling her for paperwork, it is not for paperwork—it is for fucking.’”

  “Oh my God,” I said. “You told the sister that?”

  “Ya. This Geoff Martin is not calling your little sister for paperwork.”

  “And what did she say?”

  “She said, ‘Thank you for telling us this.’ I told her too many people are already getting hurt.”

  She had brought a bottle of wine that we drank as we ate the omelet. After the call to the girl’s sister, she had written him a note, she told me, that took her all of two minutes. Dear Geoff, I have been thinking for many days and thinking is not doing anything for me. I know what I have to do now. I am sure you will figure out where I am.

  The phone rang only a couple of hours later. I gave her the receiver and went into another room. I heard her start to cry. She went on crying and answering him in this plaintive, tiny voice for about fifteen minutes. I stared out of the dark window in my room at the now-dead bougainvillea and the wooden fence beneath its sprawling tendrils, colorless in the lightless night. A cat on its night prowlings thudded onto the roof of the toolshed outside. I heard Cornelia hang up the phone.