The Shadow Man Read online

  I ground myself deeper into my chair. The wind was relentless, pushing and puffing like a huge parachute turned on its side. It was no beach day—cold and full of gusts of stinging sand. The sea, still raging from the storm the night before, pounded heavily on the shore. From the cave I had dug for my chair, over the blockade I made from my bag and extra towel, I watched the waves rearing and stretching, exposing white underbellies as they lunged at the strands of kelp tangled just beyond their reach. The roar of the water was punctuated by a little tinny sound: the clang-clanging of this bit of metal tapping against the mast of the boat. My legs prickled with goose bumps. What a shitty beach day, I thought. I’m the only one here.

  I looked over at the boat. It had always been there, someone having dragged its red hull way up high on the sand. I loved to sit near it for the sound of the sail—this little piece of metal on a part of the sail—that clang-clanged against the mast. It made me feel safe. Is that crazy? Somehow, that little repetitive sound made me feel safe and full, like the world was a comforting, dependable place. And when I lay with my ear on the ground, I could hear the clanging through the sand. The earth itself was echoing this sound, and somehow the sound was the message of a lot more than just the incidental tapping of a rope on a mast.

  Now maybe that seems ridiculous. I tend to see a lot of symbolism everywhere—too much for most people. Larry always told me I read too deeply into things. I knew he hated looking closely at things because he would never admit the responsibility for having caused them. This was the big difference between us and also the dead end to all our conversations. And now I sat there and listened to this tiny little clanging and thought, you know what—this sound is taunting me, it’s telling me he’s not going to come.

  He loves me, he loves me not, he loves me, he loves me not. Today was the test, dear diary. I was skeptical: This person—man, person, whatever you want to call him—Kevin was his name—had eluded me, run away from me, literally, as long as I had known him. And I couldn’t believe that now, today, he had agreed to meet me on the beach. It happened so casually. We were neighbors, and we had both had the same idea of going to the beach that afternoon, and I just happened to mention it to him while I was in the back yard picking up the potted plants that had fallen in the wind. He lived across the fence from me. He might as well have lived on the moon. The only time I ever managed to speak to him was in passing, over the fence, and it was never for more than a few seconds—he always made sure of that. And today, this morning, he said, which beach do you normally go to? And I said 26th Street, but of course I had it wrong, fool that I was, and, what do you know, he said he would meet me. But—since I’d given him the wrong street, I didn’t think he could. Only because he wouldn’t find me. And it was all my own fault.

  So I sat there as the gale blew, trying to concentrate on my book, conscious of the sharp sand shrapnel pelting me in spite of my blockade. Why would he even come, I moaned, deep in the recesses of my desperate brain. It’s so unbelievably windy.

  And then, you know, he was there. Just matter-of-factly climbing over the sand dune by the beached boat with his chair folded up under his arm, and he had sunglasses hooked to this pink fluorescent shoelace, the kind they all wear in California. He said hi to me, and then, taking in the fort I had made, “It’s kind of windy, isn’t it?”

  I said, “Yes. I didn’t know it would be like this. We’re the only ones here.”

  I offered to help him dig another cave, but he wasn’t interested. He sat in his chair, not too close to me, I noticed, and we had our first unaborted conversation. Don’t ask me what we talked about. I only remember a couple of things. I know that it was a detailed but circumspect exchange—almost as though we were measuring each other, extending the yardstick as far as we could while we hoped it seemed invisible.

  I told him about my ballet. He took it well. He was very diplomatic and nonjudgmental. He didn’t look at me bewildered, the way most people do when I explain to them that I stepped on a piece of glass two weeks before my long-awaited audition with the New York City Ballet. I was only fifteen. I came bounding out of dance class, enthralled by the sight of my feet in my silky white toe shoes. I did pointes as I raced to my mother who was waiting in the car. And on the way, I landed on a piece of glass. I noticed only when the ballet shoe that had so bewitched me was splashed with dripping red. I felt sick, not because of the blood, but because I could hear my mother’s voice ringing warningly as she had said so many times before: Leslie, never wear your toe shoes outside class.

  She drove me straight to the doctor, who pulled out a shard of glass with his surgical tweezers. The rest, and this I wouldn’t know until a year later, was still in my foot. It worked its way out in summer camp. I was teaching a group of kids their tennis serve, and as I caught a stationary ball between my toe and my racket to bounce it up off the ground, the sneaker I was wearing was suddenly red.

  The shard living in my foot destroyed my dance career. I was bothered by a tender purple lump that sat on my arch for months afterward. I never even got stitches, a fact which upset me a great deal—since a few stitches, at least, would have made my demise believable. Otherwise, it was too ridiculous. A little misstep outside the dance building, and suddenly I couldn’t arch my foot again. I blamed the purple lump, often massaging it before I went to bed, rubbing in the wild hope, perhaps, of rubbing it away. Little did I know that its henchman—the real culprit—was carving a silent path through my tender flesh, to emerge, an artist of silent sabotage, from the other side of my foot. A tale of irony and perplexion at its grandest. And one that would happen only to me.

  But, weirdly enough, Kevin seemed very accepting. I always worry that people might think they’re better off not knowing me because I’m somehow doomed. It’s hard to accept the quirkiness of the fact that the thing I wanted to do most was suddenly whisked away from me by a piece of glass on a Tuesday afternoon.

  Life is very strange, my mother would slowly remark, as she put the dishes away or folded the laundry with her silent hands. She never said any more. Then she would look at us for a long moment, as though she meant to leave it up to us to find out what she really meant. I told Larry about that once when we were sitting in a diner and he gave me the same long look and said, turning his gaze to the wall, “Life is very strange, Leslie. But life is very beautiful.” And then he called the waitress so he could pay for our coffee.

  I really don’t feel awful about not being able to dance anymore. I didn’t have to say that to Kevin, but he seemed to know it anyway. He gave me a version of that same long look, as though he were probing, fleetingly, past my eyes, somewhere in my head, sifting for flashes, pieces, crumbs of a part of me that he knew had this tragedy all figured out. Did I? I returned his probing look, and then I let a handful of sand trickle through my fingers, watching it fall perfectly into place wherever it seemed to land.

  He told me an ever-so-teeny bit about his ex-wife. I wasn’t surprised. Men seem to avoid this subject. He said quite a lot about other very safe things—working out, tanning, and eating on the run. I listened politely, thinking all the while, this really isn’t fair. This is all surface baloney. I was willing to tell a lot more about me than he is about him. Which is always what I do. Larry used to say, “Leslie, you tell everyone everything.” And I would retort, “So what?” Larry would then lean back with this stern look in his eye, wagging his index finger in my face. “I am very careful about who I tell things to,” he would say. “Very careful. The people you tell things to should be people you love, Leslie.” Then he would look at me like this was a battle and he had won.

  After a while, I got up and walked to the ocean to put my toes in the water, maybe just to give our seaside interview a break. Everything we said was so choppy, I could hardly stand it. Our conversation went like this:

  Me: “How long have you lived out here?” That’s always the first question anyone asks you in Southern California.

  Kevin: “How long ha
ve I been here? It’s even hard for me to believe—I’ve been here twelve years. Twelve years. Can you believe that?” And then he stared at me as though he were examining himself. As though if I believed what he said, then he could believe it. And why would I not believe him? Twelve years is twelve years. Was I supposed to think he was changing the truth? How would I possibly know how many year’s he had been here? I found myself getting a little anxious. So I went down to the water.

  I thought for sure he was watching me as I stepped over the big kelp radishes strewn upon the beach. I walked carefully, not too fast, wondering if he would think I looked way too skinny and frail. I was built like any dancer—angular, slight, and to many men, unattractively skinny. As teenagers in dance class we starved ourselves, staving off the fat that escorted puberty, desperately dieting to stall the cells that piled on hips and breasts screaming to be left alone. We were a reedy, high-strung, critical group ruled by limits and standards as accessible as the Milky Way, lunging frantically for diamonds pinned far beyond our reach. And now, many moons later, as I bent to wet my hands in the cold, pounding surf that swirled around my legs, I was conscious of my thinness, of every line I cut as I moved and breathed, wondering if I might have overpaid, over-reached, gathered too many diamonds to pin to the sleeves of a uniform of rigor that was now mine for keeps. I might need to think about eating more.

  I trudged up the slope to Kevin, watching my feet press King Kong pawprints into the heavy sand. He was reading a copy of Vanity Fair.

  So that was our day at the beach. He kept it pretty short. He said he had to get ready to meet someone for dinner. I let him keep it short. I had gotten what I wanted. I wasn’t going to put up a fuss or a fight.

  We drove up the coast road separately. I tried not to be conscious of his silver car in my rearview mirror at the stoplights. Luckily, he took a right turn by the railroad tracks and the heat, thank God, was off. I watched him climb up his front stairs with two brown bags of groceries a little while later. I can’t really remember what I did for the rest of the night; I think I spent the evening paging through magazines, marvelling that the miracle had finally occurred. And you know what? That was the only such miracle. He ran away from me the rest of the summer. He scurried—literally scurried—every time he saw me. It was hopeless.

  And then I met Geoff.

  CHAPTER TWO

  The Fire Walk

  It was the day I went down to this tiny hole-in-the-wall athletics store to trade in a pair of sneakers that didn’t fit right. I was speeding along the freeway, wildly and egotistically—a single, magical pearl in a string of soulless rush-hour tailgaters. I hung right in position, drawing elation and power from the looming mountains and deep gullies that flanked the interstate. I was high on height, might and speed, and closing the distance to the bumper of the car in front of me was a game I loved to play with my own mortality. I can’t help tailgating. It’s kind of like picking at a scab: you know it’s the worst thing you can do, but you do it anyway. Everyone else in California does it, too. Tailgating, I mean. It actually gives you a wonderful inside look at other people’s lives. I’ve seen women putting on eye makeup as they crane into the rear-view mirror, men using battery-powered shavers and brushing their teeth, and once I drove past a woman turning the pages of a Victoria’s Secret catalog while she made an order on her car phone.

  So I was driving along thinking I really ought to kick this tailgating habit when a tremendous pop made me jump in my seat. It was obviously someone backfiring—some slob on the freeway who didn’t maintain his car. The second pop was just as loud. I turned my head to the car whizzing along on my left. It sped past me and I heard the third pop. Which sounded too much like it was right under my seat. I turned crimson, even though there was no one to see. My car? My shiny black hatchback? I was the slob with the backfiring car? It had never happened before. I thought frantically of what I should do.

  Another pop, and my blood was racing. I pulled off the freeway and headed west. I figured it was perfectly legitimate to stop at a gas station and ask why my car was exploding. I waited anxiously for the next pop, sick with agitation, and—luck must have been with me—it never came. I shut down the ignition at the shoestore and the engine nodded off like a kitten.

  The man behind the counter was a typical runner: tiny, skinny, and pale. He almost didn’t notice me as I walked in. I stood in front of the shoe display and he eventually walked over to clear a bunch of shoeboxes out of my way. He turned to me with his cardboard tower. “Need any help?”

  “Hi,” I said. “These are the shoes I called about earlier. You said you would do a trade for me.”

  He set the shoebox tower on a stool. “Be glad to,” he said. “Are you looking for another pair?”

  I told him I was. He brought me four or five different boxes and set about lacing the right shoe of each pair. I worked on the lefts. He was pretty friendly and low-key. “I run without socks,” I said. “Do you mind if I try these on without socks?”

  “Whatever you want to do.” He set a loosely laced shoe on the floor for me, holding it open for my foot. “The way you’re going to be wearing them is the way you should try them on.”

  “Actually,” I added, “I run best without shoes. Barefoot. On the beach.” I pushed my foot into the sneaker, and as my arch slid past his hand, he saw the scar.

  “You’re one of the lucky ones.” He smiled. “Most people can’t.” Then, very lightly, he touched the thick, irregular piling of skin. He looked up at me. “Was that from running barefoot?”

  I shook my head. I wondered if I would have to go into the whole story, but the phone rang and he got up to answer it. When he came back, I was busy trying on the various shoes and he had forgotten about my scar. The pair that was most comfortable turned out to be half the price of the others. I was glad he hadn’t tried to push the expensive ones. I decided to ask him why.

  He seemed very honest. Again, he smiled. “A person who runs barefoot doesn’t need a lot in a shoe. I figured you would naturally pick what was right for you.” He stood behind the register as I signed my name to the Visa slip.

  “I wonder why it is that I can run barefoot,” I said.

  He shrugged. “Feet were meant to run without shoes. Most of the problems people have are because their feet are desperately trying to correct what bad shoes force them to do. But most people don’t know that. So they go out and buy what they think is a better, more expensive shoe.” He shut the register drawer. “But really it’s not. More expensive is only something that makes more decisions for your feet.” He leaned over the counter, across the clutter of shoelaces and race flyers. “We need to let our feet make their own decisions,” he said firmly. “Know what I mean?”

  I decided to stop at the health-food store on my way home. I was tired, but not too tired to wind up the list of rice and nuts and rolled oats and things I had carried around for the last couple of weeks. Some people buy everything at the health-food store, even toilet paper. Not me. I know it might be better for you, not being bleached or tinted or dyed, but I guess I just need to stay somewhat mainstream.

  I got my stuff together quickly. I move in and out of food stores pretty fast, causing other shoppers, particularly the older ones, to swear under their breath as I rush past them through the aisles. I never use those big silver grocery carts because the wheels invariably track wrong and if you like to shop in a hurry, there’s not a lot you can do to stop them from grazing displays and veering at customers. But in deference to the quiet of the health-food store, I tried hard to be calm, filling my hand basket as peacefully as the Madras-garbed sandal-footed hippie types around me.

  The herb-tea aisle was blocked by a man in a blue shirt with a silver shopping cart. I skipped it, got some tortilla chips in the next aisle and headed to the checkout. I stopped to ponder a bag of raisin English muffins, and suddenly felt I was being watched. I turned around. It was the man with the blue shirt and the silver shopping cart. Embarrassed,
I joined the nearest checkout line and tried to act entirely nonchalant.

  It didn’t work. I felt terribly exposed. What was the matter with me? I left the line and squeezed past the man to escape into the vegetable aisle. Earth-stained turnips and curled chili peppers stared mutely up at me. I put my basket on the floor and bent over to redo my hair. The click of my banana clip made me feel better, and again I headed for the register.

  This time I stood behind him. I was very close to the back of his blue shirt. He was reading a newspaper, some freebie race report for triathletes. I could see his silver digital watch. It was not a watch I liked. It was not a black plastic triathlete’s watch. He was obviously not a triathlete.

  The cashier was painfully slow, hesitating over every last item in what looked to me like a perfectly simple grocery order. The man in the blue shirt remained absorbed in his newspaper. I left the checkout and returned to the line I had originally stood in, staring absently at a slit in the cellophane of a box of igloo-shaped coconut treats.

  I heard a newspaper rustle on my left. It was the man in the blue shirt. He had now moved to my line. He continued to read his paper. I forced myself to look at only his watch, and then pulled my tofu forward as the checker finished up the order ahead of me. The water in the tub of tofu, yellow and murky, swirled hideously. I held the container closer and examined it. The man in the blue shirt folded his paper to the side and leaned to peer into my tofu.

  “Looks pretty bad, huh?” He laughed. His eyes were very blue.

  “Yes,” I agreed, panicking. I hurried to the refrigerators for another tub of tofu. They were all packed in the same murky liquid. I grabbed a different brand.