The Shadow Man Page 3

  The checker was very pregnant. As she rang up my order, the man in the blue shirt, realizing he had made me nervous, tried to calm me down. “Did you find another box of tofu?”

  I nodded.

  “It’s kind of tasteless, isn’t it?”

  I nodded again, trying to smile. I cast an eye on his cart. He had two massive bags of oranges and several bunches of dirt-caked carrots. The tops, wilted and drooping, hung like a weeping willow from the side of the cart.

  “Eleven eighty-seven,” the checker said. I wrote a check. The man in the blue shirt watched me write. I picked up my bag of groceries and, hugging it, smiled politely over the sawtooth zigzag of its paper edges.

  “Nice talking to you,” I said.

  The checker was struggling with his tremendous tangle of carrots. He gave her the okay to twist off the greens. “I won’t be needing those,” he said grandly, and then, turning to me, tilted his head. “Won’t you hang on just a minute?” he asked.

  I was amazed. I didn’t know what to say.

  “My rabbit will love these,” the checker gushed at the carrot fronds.

  The man in the blue shirt eyed the checker as though he had made her day. Smoothly, turning on his molten-golden smile, he paid for his produce, sliding the heavy bags, one at a time, into the cart. Slipping his wallet into his back pocket, he turned to me. He was symmetrically, beautifully good-looking. Inwardly, I was shaking my head. Yet I made no move to leave the store.

  “After you,” he said. I started toward the door. As he followed me with his cart, I turned back to the checker. “I hope your baby is wonderful,” I said.

  “Thank you,” the checker replied, closing the register happily.

  We stopped on the sidewalk in the parking lot. With effort that I wasn’t meant to see, he lifted his two bags of oranges out of the cart. “Would you like to set your groceries down and chat for a while?”

  I looked at the ledge he gestured to. It was one of those huge concrete flowerpots they install at outdoor shopping malls. This one housed a sprinkling of small blossoms turned orange by the lights on the storefront above us, and in the center of the blossoms grew a ficus tree. The watch on his wrist said eight o’clock. I readjusted the paper bag on my hip. “They’re not that heavy,” I said.

  He put his two giant bags of oranges on the ground. “I’m Geoff,” he announced.

  “My name is Leslie,” I returned. “Can I ask you something?”

  “Why not?” He straightened up and cocked his brown head at me. He had an even, delicate nose with one tiny horizontal wrinkle where it turned up very slightly at the tip.

  “What are you going to do with all those oranges?”

  “Oh, eat them, I imagine.” His eyes, cool aquamarine, were circles of ice, wordlessly, watchfully calculating. Up close, I noticed the blue shirt he had on was made of a soft, brushed cotton, thick and velvety—the kind you find in expensive mail-order catalogs—that gets better with every wash. I could see the furry blue nap it had grown, a stamp of dignified age.

  “I eat a good deal of fruit,” he said levelly. I watched him size me up. He was very calm, steady, almost hypnotic. I shifted the bag. The box of tofu at the bottom was cold against my hipbone.

  “I was raised on a holistic diet,” he explained. He held one of the oranges in his hand, turning it around as he talked. It was a typical organic orange—dwarfish, sickly yellow, with a greenish tinge on one side. “My parents were pretty ahead of their time. I never ate a single preservative until I left home. My mother would drive miles to find vegetables and fruit that were grown without pesticides. And we’re talking thirty years ago. Kind of outrageous at the time.”

  “Sounds like it,” I said. “And what do you eat now?”

  “Oh, everything.” His eyes crinkled into a smile. “I sort of went through a period where I rebelled, I guess you would say. I ate a lot of junk food in my twenties. Ate and drank, too. By that I mean alcohol.” He bounced the orange on his palm, still smiling. I said nothing. There was a smudge of a mole on his cheek. His brown hair was short and cut very even. “I did my share of drugs, too,” he added. The orange took a wayward bounce and he caught it with his other hand. “But not too many drugs.”

  “How old are you now?” I asked.

  “Thirty-four. And you?”

  “Twenty-nine. What do you do for a living?”

  “I work with my hands.” He held one of them open for me. The other stayed closed on the orange. “I’m an aviator. Right now I’m building an airplane. And you?”

  “I’m a paralegal.”

  “What kinds of things do you eat?” He tilted his head at me, narrowing his eyes so that the crinkles deepened. It was an invitation.

  “Tuna fish, peanuts, artichokes,” I said.

  “Artichokes?” He raised a single eyebrow, which is not something, incidentally, a lot of people can do. “I don’t think I’ve ever had an artichoke. But I eat lots of vegetables. Usually about four hours before I go to sleep. I eat protein about an hour before I go to sleep.”

  “What for?” I asked.

  “It’s what my body likes the best. My body is pretty sensitive to what I put in it. I eat fruit when I wake up, two or three pieces, and then I’ll have another two or three pieces at about ten-thirty. That’s why you see all these oranges. I’ll probably go through them in a week or so.”

  “That’s hard for me to believe,” I said. “But if you say so.” I shifted the bag on my hip again. My hipbone, cold and paralyzed, felt like a fossil from the Arctic. “Well, it was nice talking to you, but I need to get going.”

  “Have you eaten?” he asked. The question was neat and deftly placed. “Would you like to join me for a bowl of soup?”

  “Sorry, but I really have to go home. I haven’t been home since early this morning and I need to put away my groceries.”

  “Would you like some time to go home first?” He was pushing, ever so gently, but he was good at it and he knew it. “Would you like to meet me in half an hour?”

  Oh, boy, I thought. Without being obvious, I looked him over again. He seemed safe, if a little dull, and I was tired, but for some crazy reason I wanted his attention. “Fine,” I said. “Where do you want to meet?”

  “The Underground Carrot? Have you been there?”

  “I have,” I said. “Can you wait half an hour?”

  I drove home. He watched me pull out of the parking lot as he loaded his oranges into the back of his red pickup truck. Good God, I thought, when am I going to not meet men who drive pickup trucks?

  I hopped into the shower and as I was towelling dry Muriel called. “I can’t talk,” I mumbled frantically, jabbing my arms through the sleeves of a T-shirt. “I met this guy. I have to eat dinner with him at the Carrot.”

  “Wow,” said Muriel. “Who is he?”

  “I told you, I can’t talk. I’ll tell you all about it later.” Muriel would understand. Friends always did. I thought about that as I rushed over to the Carrot. Women were always tolerant of new males that happened to friends of theirs. The wait-and-see game. Vicariously, they shared your hope that this would finally be the one. And when it wasn’t, they were quiet and calm, like the mailbox that sat at the bottom of the steps every day—yours ever, whether you could pay your bills or not.

  The Carrot was dim inside. I found him with his back to the door, a pile of papers next to an empty plate of what had to have been a small salad, Italian dressing. I knew the whole Carrot menu by heart. Once, on a whim, I had applied to the surly Syrian owners for a waitress job, but they only shook their heads and said, “Ve dontheenk you can poot ahp vith uss.”

  I moved into the booth opposite Geoff and breathed an apology for being somewhat late.

  “I thought you weren’t going to come,” he said, moving his papers out of the way. I stole another look at them. It was hard to tell what kind of papers they were.

  “Are you glad I showed up?” I asked.

  His eyes crinkled at
me again. Inwardly I squirmed. There was something about this aviator that wasn’t kosher, as New Yorkers say. Very smooth, he was. But I wanted to be sucked into that smoothness the way a cake decorator works icing—siphoning it, swirling it, gliding it around with a beautiful silver spatula.

  “Will you get something to eat?” he asked me. “I ordered a soup already, but here’s the waitress. We can have her bring you one, too.”

  She brought us two broccoli soups. I was much hungrier than I was admitting and would have liked to stuff myself, but I hate to eat more than anyone else I’m with. He ate, somewhat disturbingly, like a little girl, nibbling his toast and taking tiny spoonfuls of soup, raising them repeatedly to his mouth with little jerks of his wrist.

  Naturally, I told him all about myself. The ballerina story, all about my last few boyfriends, my parents, my brother, my life. He nodded, eating more little bites of his soup, dipping the corners of his toast in what was left of the dish of Italian dressing. In contrast, I seemed to be ramming my soup into my mouth in great spoonfuls as I paused for breath between sentences. Occasionally, fleetingly, I thought over the assessment I was making of him: the brown hair, blue eyes, smooth voice all too regular to earn a place in my soul. But I didn’t care. As we paid our check, he let me leave two dollars and fifty cents on the plastic tray the waitress left with us. Pretty crass, I thought. If I were a guy, I would have picked up the tab.

  I invited him home for tea.

  We sat on my black parachute-material couch with our mugs of boiling water, chamomile tea bags floating on the surface, puffed up comically with air. He left his on the table to cool, as most people do. I can down hot drinks immediately, having learned how from a job at McDonalds when I was sixteen. They give you this ten-minute break in this horrible little back room piled to the ceiling with boxes of French-fry cartons and shake cups, and as you sit there eating your oily sandwich, the acne-covered manager breaks in shouting, “How many more minutes ya got?” They would always lunge through the door six minutes into your break, as though they had nothing better to do than to time the best moment to ruin the little bit of peace they were required by law to give you. I would take a cup of hot coffee into the back room with me and go over the remains of a daily tabloid as a fluorescent bulb buzzed overhead and my thighs stuck to the yellow vinyl cushion you were forced to sit on. The female manager who gave me my uniform on the first day told me that all the girls had to wear nylons unless their legs were “very tan and very well shaved.” I always finished my coffee nine minutes and fifty-something seconds into my break and got away without nylons for the entire three months I worked there.

  He told me, as he sipped his tea, about the fire walk. There was this local workshop you could take to learn to cross a bed of coals without burning your feet. Anyone could buy tickets to go and watch. It wasn’t staged or fake; it was simply a workshop of ordinary people walking on red-hot coals like they were nothing but pebbles. If you did it the right way, like the leader showed you, there was no way you could get burned.

  But I was only half listening. I missed the name of the leader—guru—whatever he was, and I didn’t react the way I should have to the part about the people not getting burned by the coals. I was holding my hot cup, now empty, in my hands, and my mind was traveling—some of it with the notes of the wistful jazz on the tape player. I dimly remember getting up to turn the cassette over and asking, “Do you like Billie Holiday?” and I think he said, “Who’s Billie Holiday?”

  I snapped back to attention when he looked over at the clock on the wall and said, “It’s getting late.”

  The clock said five to midnight. He stood up and moved forward to give me a hug. I reached up to him. We let the hug last for many minutes. I could feel his breathing. I tried not to move. I waited to see what he would do. He was waiting to see what I would do. I thought, this could go on for a long time. Still I waited, shifting ever so slightly, letting out a little and very tight breath.

  He put his lips on my forehead. It wasn’t a kiss. I wondered what he would do next. He moved his mouth down the side of my face. I turned towards him. When you first kiss someone, you register all this information in a wave, very fast; you find yourself answering all kinds of questions that had whirred in your brain without answers, and at the same time, you can find yourself becoming disappointed. Inevitably, you find yourself a hair disappointed about everyone, even though your insides may be melting. Their tongue is too soft or they jam it too deep in your mouth, or they keep it to themselves and won’t do anything with it at all. Or they bear down too hard and force your head back and within seconds your neck is hurting wildly. This guy Geoff was liquidizing me; his body was warm and he wrapped around me wonderfully, holding me the way I loved to be held, but he started to do something really weird with his tongue—he started to move it very stiffly in these tiny little darting movements just barely inside my mouth, and it went on for quite some time and I wondered what the hell was going on. Did he think this was romantic? All I could think of was an insect beating its wings. Then suddenly it stopped. His mouth was clean and strong, and his hands on my stomach and chest were giving me goose bumps. Men will always avoid your breasts when they first grope to get under your clothes as though they have no real intention of violating your privacy. Some of them will tease you forever, exploiting their newly earned lease on your mouth, eating your lips and swallowing your tongue while another part of you burns with curiosity, begging to be known, intruded on, touched and claimed. And still they play on. Most times I’m the one to get the snowball on its way: undo the first button, pull at a zipper notch by notch. Taking heavy denim off someone’s legs with one hand is not, by the way, that easy. And all of a sudden the burning, melting you changes into a soldier with a job to perform. And then you look at him and he looks at you and you laugh nervously and grin, shaking your heads as both of you agree to what you knew was coming all along.

  So this scene with Geoff and the quivering tongue turned into a normal male-female sex foray at midnight. We moved into my bed and began a love marathon that lasted four hours. Four hours. He lifted me, turned me, folded me up in ways I had never made love before, and in that whole time he never once came out of me or took his now slow and wonderful mouth off my lips. We heard the two-forty freight train thunder past. At three-thirty or so I pulled my mouth away from him and asked, “Do you always make love for this long? Is this usual for you?”

  I saw the half smile in the dark. “No,” he said. “This is outstanding.”

  CHAPTER THREE

  Steam

  I invited him to come back the next night. He was jamming his shirt into his pants at daybreak, trying to strap his watch on his wrist at the same time, and when I asked the question he stopped his dressing and flashed me this very quick, penetrating look. It was so fast and I was so tired that I almost missed it.

  “Oh, yeah?” he said. “Tonight? Are you sure you’ll be up for it?”

  “Absolutely.” I lay under the covers on my back, looking at him. He had pulled his pants and underwear on together—I assumed he had also taken them off that way—a move that for some strange reason I distrusted. I watched him button his shirt, the blue yuppie shirt with the soft nap, as he kept his eyes on me.

  “What time would you like me to come?” he asked. His voice was very soft and quiet.

  “Any time,” I said. “I’ll be here.”

  And thereafter he was with me every night. We made love until the two-forty freight train reminded us that we had sleep to attend to, and we would laugh quietly as it pealed by, rolling and booming in the silence of the California night. We slept folded against one another, like two children worn out from a long day in the sandbox. He would set his silver watch to beep him awake at dawn; I listened to the little beeps it gave off at night as he checked it, his back to me as he set it on the floor. I still couldn’t bring myself to accept his watch. Then he would walk out to the living room to the CD player he had hooked up for us a
nd start his favorite CD for us to fall asleep to—this half happy, half haunting piano music that made me move very close to him for warmth. He would steal out in the early morning, kissing me sweetly on the cheek, saying as I stirred, “No, no, don’t wake up. I want you to try to get some sleep.”

  Needless to say, we weren’t sleeping much. I don’t know how I got through the days. My skin went sallow, my hair limp, and I lost more weight. People at the office noticed my droopiness. “What’s the matter? Aren’t you eating?” they asked warningly. Muriel noticed too, the night we all met up for dinner. Muriel was big-boned, wide and flat at the center like a paddle, and had never known my worry of dropping weight.

  “Order something generous,” she hissed, poking me in the side. We were at the Carrot. A friend of Muriel’s who lived in an ashram up north was visiting her and the two of them had joined some other friends at the Carrot. Muriel had asked me if I might like to show up too, with Geoff.

  The tables pushed together were of different heights and somehow created a division in the group. I was jammed in a corner next to a spindly vase of pale carnations, Muriel’s solidity hemming me in on the left. Janice, the ashram friend, sat on Muriel’s other side and three or four dark-haired people whose names I forgot peppered the rest of the seats. Geoff sat opposite me, grinning collectedly at his menu.

  I ordered a bean soup and stuffed grape leaves. Geoff had a salad. There was barely space on the table for more. The nameless people talked about restaurants in San Francisco and the food at the ashram. The clatter drowned most of what they said. Muriel caught enough of it to join in now and then and saved the rest of her attention for Geoff and me.

  “Guess what!” She poked me again. “I’m going to get a cottage!”

  “A cottage?” I repeated. Geoff was looking at Muriel with a raised eyebrow.

  “A studio!” said Muriel. “A little cottage, exactly what I’ve been waiting for! It’s going to be my studio; I’m going to set up all my stuff—paintings and everything!”