The Shadow Man Page 4

  “Wow,” I said. “Where is it?”

  “On the water! Can you believe it? A little cottage on the water, made for me. It just came out of the blue.” Muriel reached for the pepper with one hand and shook my arm with the other. “Does that sound great or what?”

  “It sounds wonderful.” Muriel ran a graphic-arts business that she was very serious about, and also meant to make it someday as a painter. For the present, she was set up in her mother’s basement.

  “This is it, Leslie!” Muriel crowed. Geoff was watching her unblinkingly. “This is what it’s going to take. The right kind of place. I’ll have all my things there, I can see clients, I can paint till the wee hours, it’ll just be amazing.” She rattled my shoulder. “My life is taking off! I can feel it!”

  I took in a deep breath. She was like a geyser. “Where did you find out about the cottage?”

  “Through my mother.” Muriel turned to Geoff. “My mother’s a decorator,” she explained. Geoff nodded, still transfixed on Muriel’s animation.

  “Anyway,” continued Muriel, her eyes flashing, “it’s really cute. The loft—the real living space—is kind of small, and there’s this tricky spiral staircase, but I’m sure I can get used to that.”

  “That’s really wonderful, Muriel.” I turned to pick up my fork and once more noticed Geoff, who was sending us a steady smile. And who is this friend, Leslie? the smile inquired. Pretty roused up, huh? I poked my grape leaf nervously. Muriel was different from me: overstated, often frenzied, sometimes manic. I had met her years ago in an aerobics class. I split the grape leaf in two. “I’m really happy for you,” I said to Muriel.

  Geoff’s smile spread wider. “Sounds just great.”

  The ashramers were jabbering about reincarnation and the Bible. I listened, catching threads. Muriel quizzed Geoff about his hang gliding. I sat quietly in my corner, concentrating on my plate.

  “What’s the matter with you?” Muriel demanded as we trekked out the door.

  “Nothing, nothing,” I said. “I guess I’m a little tired.”

  Muriel squeezed my arm. “Take it easy,” she said. “Want to come with me to see the cottage?”

  I nodded. “Sure.”

  The truck was parked in an alley and as Geoff disappeared to get it, Muriel turned to me and whispered, “You and he are good together. You’re not like a new couple at all. You’re very quiet, very settled. I think that’s great.”

  I smiled a thank you, not knowing quite what to make of the assessment. Geoff had taken the money I held out for my soup and grape leaves. What was I to make of that? It was the second time, too. I decided I preferred to cook.

  The dinners I made for us were fantastic. Even so, I barely ate enough. He would knock on my door each night and I would open it on a cloud of steam from the stove. A blazing smile would be etched across his face, and sometimes he would have a rose for me. He ate my food liberally; I picked at it. The main thing is, I can’t eat a whole lot if I’m going to have sex. My stomach pops out like a football the minute I put anything in it, and if a guy lies on top of you like that, you’re history. Men, on the other hand, can eat the Titanic and not look any the worse. And it doesn’t slow them down, either. I remember I once went for a long run with a friend of Larry’s who ate an onion bagel and drank a soda the whole way.

  As sallow as my skin had turned and as thin as I got to be, I had no idea what Geoff kept seeing in me. We made love like rabbits, far into the night; I shopped, cooked dinners; every evening was the same. I felt like a hamster on an exercise wheel.

  Near the middle of the second week, Steve, my boss, stopped in mid-sentence and reached across his desk to rub my chin.

  “What are you doing?” I said.

  “What’s this?” he asked, smudging his thumb along my jaw.

  “What?”

  “This mark you have.” He let go of my face and sat back in his chair. “Must be from your boyfriend.”

  I got up to look in the little mirror on the wall above his bookcase. There was a red mark on my chin, the size of a penny, where the blood had pooled in teeny little spots under the skin. I didn’t know whether to feel happy or distressed. Steve was laughing. I looked at him crossly.

  “What’s the matter, Leslie? That’s life. You spend all night in bed with this guy—that’s what you get.”

  My demise came the next day along the bay with Paul Reiter. I had agreed the week before to this ten-mile run with him on Saturday morning. He wanted to show me his favorite course along the bay. “You’ll love it, Leslie,” he had said. “Flat, water every half mile, it’s perfect. We’ll do a nice ten-mile run, huh?” He came for me at nine o’clock sharp on Saturday morning, and we cruised down the freeway, bouncing gently as the Buick rode the asphalt, the sun belting heat from a cloudless sky.

  “It’s a hot one,” Paul sang, turning the air-conditioning higher. “It’s gonna be a hot one.”

  Guilt the size of a boa constrictor squeezed my throat and insides. Geoff and I had been up long after the two-forty freight train had gone by and I had had only a cup of tea for breakfast and next to no dinner the night before. I was empty, feeling thirsty already, and the bones between my legs were sore, as though I had ridden the Pony Express for days. Well, well. I asked for this. I said nothing to Paul, who hummed, turned up the radio and pointed out the rolling vistas, unspoiled even by the spotting of condominiums that clung to the sweeping hillsides.

  “Aren’t we lucky, Leslie? Boy, are we lucky. Just think, we could be stuck in Wisconsin.”

  I would have given a lot to be in Wisconsin right then. I took a drink at a fountain when we got to the bay, and Paul yanked off his T-shirt and threw it in the car. He sank into a slow stretch, bending first one knee to the side, and then the other.

  “Got to loosen up these old joints,” he kidded, squinting from under his visor. The white hair on his arms gleamed in the sun. He was fifty-two and, today, perfectly ready to blaze.

  The first couple of miles were okay; I managed to keep up my end of conversation as we dodged toddlers, strollers, bicycles and bounding dogs. The second couple of miles were not so great. I was at the low end of empty—staggering in that blank margin where the needle swims as you try to force one more commute from your car. The fifth and sixth miles felt like blazing lights and no air in a cellophane tent. Paul slowed the pace for me.

  “Don’t worry, Leslie. We’ll take it easy.”

  We wound up taking a shortcut to lop off the last leg of the run, me praying that I would make it to the end. I plopped down on the grass as we reached the ladies’ side of the cinderblock restroom we had started from. What had Geoff said about the fire walk? Cool grass, cool moss? You were meant to clench your fist and say “cool moss” as you went over the coals. Cool moss. Here it was. I had failed.

  A little white dog, all fluff, came running up to us and yapped at Paul’s feet, dancing daintily around the sodden shoes I had thrown upon the grass. Paul bent down and wrestled with it.

  “That’s right,” he growled at the dog, lunging at its bottom as it burrowed under his leg. “I’m going to do what I do to my dog at home. I’m going to hold you down and pull your tail!”

  “Paul,” I said, “I’m sorry about the run. I was really bad, wasn’t I?”

  “Hey, no problem,” said Paul. He offered me an apple from the pack he had brought from the trunk of the car. I took it. I watched him play peekaboo with the white dog through the T-shirt he was putting on. I was going to have to explain to him that the whole reason my run was so shitty was that I had this new boyfriend. It had to be the lamest-sounding reason I could come up with. I might as well have been a sixteen-year-old. I had even bought new shoes for this event, and here I had screwed it up.

  “I’ve been with this new guy all week,” I tried.

  “Oh-h,” he gave me a sidelong look and wrestled the little dog’s nose to the ground. “That’s why.”

  “Yup,” I said, “That’s why.”

>   “Ha,” said Paul. “Well, I was young once, too. So what else do you do with this guy besides make love?”

  “Nothing,” I said dispassionately. “We’ve had some talks, but he really talks only about hang gliding. He’s a hang-gliding instructor.”

  When Paul heard this he died. “Oh, my God,” he said. “You don’t want him. He’s a hang-gliding instructor?”

  “Well, he only teaches hang gliding on the weekends,” I said. “He’s really an aviator.”

  “He’s an aviator? What does that mean?”

  “He flies. He loves flying. He’s building an airplane.”

  “Yeah, but so what?” said Paul. “Leslie, what’s the guy like? Do you like him? Leslie, is this the guy?” He straightened up, shooting the question straight at my guilty face. The little white dog wriggled out of his hands and trotted off.

  He meant, obviously, was I wasting my time. I had certainly wasted his today. “Paul,” I said, “He’s okay. He’s smart. I like him. Does he have to be the guy?”

  “No,” said Paul. “If you like him, that’s enough. But don’t get sucked in. I know these hang-gliding instructors. Does he have a mustache?”

  I shook my head. “What does that have to do with anything?”

  “He’s not real,” said Paul. “I know these hang-gliding types. They go for all the girls. He’s good-looking, huh? I’m surprised he doesn’t have a mustache.”

  “Paul, he doesn’t ‘go for all the girls,’” I returned. “And what’s all this with the mustache?”

  “Ask him if he ever had a mustache. I bet he did. I bet he just shaved it.”

  Paul clocked my freestyle at the pool the following week. I was a little better rested, but the day-long growling of my stomach reminded me that the food treaty had yet to be signed. Simply and plainly, Geoff the virile aviator wasn’t letting me eat. I know how senseless it sounds, but our long hours of sex continued to put the reins on how much I could permit myself at dinner. As bed partners, we knew each other pretty well by now. He was wonderfully considerate, very artful and exceedingly precise, loving me until he had me waiting, trembling, pivoting on this fulcrum of control, and then he would pull out and talk to me soothingly as he put on a rubber. I could hear the crinkle of the wrapper and smell the latex as I waited out the endless and horrible seconds without him. Then he would pick me up again, closing in on me, timing my convulsions as he bored deep within me, honing his response exactly to mine, so that we were yin and yang, black and white, day and night, meeting in synchrony at a moment that would bring us together cell to cell and at the same time blow us forever apart. The faithful freight train would drive us back to consciousness, splintering the remnants of our passion as its coarse whistle hooted over the grinding of its ancient wheels. It was one of those boxcar relics, brown and rusted in the light of day, Santa Fe stamped in mustard letters on its sides. Clattering insanely, threatening breakdown, it trundled on a tempo that made me wonder who had turned it loose in the twentieth century. And sometimes it sounded like the longest, oldest, most tired train in the world.

  In spite of my physical state, I was doing forty-five-second laps. Paul seemed to think that was excellent. It meant very little to me. He had brought along a heavy textbook and a large plastic digital clock which he propped at the shallow end of the pool. I was better, he said as he looked at a chart in the book, than eighty-five percent of college-age swimmers. So what? I said. Any college-age swimmers? Or competing college-age swimmers?

  “College-age swimmers, Leslie. It says college-age swimmers. Eighty-five percent! That’s pretty good.”

  At the very least, I thought with relief, the laps today were making up for that awful run. Paul wanted me to try to slow down. I wouldn’t build endurance by swimming so fast. He had me use the kickboard. The first few times I did this, I thought I would die. I could barely make it across the pool. The burning in my thighs was terrific. Unlike ballet, there was no music you could focus on to carry you through the pain. Only the plod, plod, plod of your kicking. I pretended I was the two-forty freight train. The longest train in the world. And I was only in a twenty-five-meter swimming pool. This was a breeze. Plod, plod, plod. Gasping, I reached feebly with my fingers for the edge of the pool.

  “That’s it, Mr. Reiter. I’m done.” I heaved myself out of the water, collapsing with my towel on the warm concrete.

  “You did great,” Paul said. “You put me to shame. How’s whatshisname, the guy?”

  “The same,” I said. “He still talks only about hang gliding. He wants me to try it. I told him I have no interest. I don’t want this hang gliding to become an issue. I’ve told him over and over I don’t want to go. I don’t ski and I don’t hang glide.”

  Paul shook his head. “I told you,” he said.

  “Told me what?”

  He shrugged and took a deep breath of the quickly cooling late-afternoon air. “What I said before. He’s not real.” Then he shrugged again. “It’s hard to explain.”

  “What is?” He was annoying me.

  Paul reached for my kickboard. “I guess it’s not up to me to explain.”

  I gathered my towel and gave it a vigorous shake. It smelled strongly of hot concrete. “What’s there to explain?” I demanded.

  Paul tapped my kickboard against the ground. He looked at me and opened his mouth. Then he closed it and gave the kickboard another tap. “Aw, come on,” he said. “I’m gonna get you home.”

  I thought about what Paul said as I stood under the hot shower at home. “He’s not real.” Who wasn’t real? Geoff? I couldn’t see how. He hadn’t pretended to be anything. I didn’t even know that much about him. I went to bed with him every night. Did I expect more? No. I didn’t want to hang glide. I didn’t have time to hang glide. I didn’t have the desire to hang glide. Jump off a cliff into the air? For thrills?

  What were my thrills? I thought about that for a while. I could stand under hot water forever. I loved the steam, the steady mini-torrent of hot cleanness. I wrung out the facecloth, holding it over my face, smelling soap and steam as the water beat down on my back.

  What were my thrills? I didn’t know.

  Sex?

  Maybe.

  Hang gliding is to Geoff as Geoff is to Leslie. Could be. I would have to think about that one.

  Larry would always say to me in his deep, loving voice: “When you sleep with someone, Leslie, be sure you love him. Be sure you love him.” That was before Larry slept with me. I remember us talking about it before we made the decision. It was Larry’s decision, anyway, as all decisions seemed to be. “If I sleep with you, Leslie, I’ll never give you up.” I watched him as he said it. He was not looking at me. He was looking at the calico place mat in front of him. We were at a country restaurant. He said it again: “If I sleep with you—” and he tapped the tines of a fork against the salt shaker, “I’ll never give you up.”

  CHAPTER FOUR

  La Misura

  I drained the spaghetti just as I heard Geoff open the front door. Cookbooks always want you to make your guests wait for the pasta: don’t ever make your pasta wait for the guests. But he had called first and I knew he was coming, so I cheated on the cookbooks, crossed my fingers, and hoped for the best. He was wearing a faded yellow T-shirt. I turned him properly toward me so I could read what it said.

  L’uomo e la misura del universo. I looked up at him, puzzled. “What is it, Italian?”

  He grinned, nodding.

  “Man is the … misery?… of the universe,” I tried. “Man is what? The misery? It can’t be.” I looked to him for the answer.

  He put his hands on my hips and put his mouth on mine. I fell into his kiss, letting myself drown, letting him hold me up as I opened my mouth wider and allowed him inside. His hands moved over my butt, squeezing. His mouth roved down my neck and onto my T-shirt. He found my left nipple through the cloth and bit it tenderly. “I love your beautiful ass,” he said.

  The phone rang. He stood up. �
�You want to get that?”

  I crossed over to the bookcase where the telephone sat. It was Greg, my brother. I closed my hand over the receiver and mouthed silently to Geoff, “My brother.” He nodded, and opened one of the kitchen cabinets. I heard him pouring seltzer.

  “What?” I said to Greg, “You got a new job? Good! What kind of job?” Geoff had left a wet spot on my T-shirt. It was cold. I held the shirt out from me and tried to swivel it around.

  Geoff set down his glass and moved up behind me. I leaned against him as he closed his arms around me, pressing us together. His tongue licked the back of my neck. I talked to Greg about his interviews. Geoff was very warm. He pulled up on my T-shirt—it was one of those long ones, more like a dress—and slid his hand into my underwear. My rear end was cold. It always is. He squeezed my bare skin. I tried to turn my head to look at him. He had my earlobe in his mouth. “I don’t see why you should,” I said to Greg, pressing myself against Geoff. His finger was creeping inside me. I was wet, weightless, and my legs were weak. I moved my feet apart as Geoff stroked beautiful little circles between my legs, stopping only to sink two fingers into me, his warm breath melting my neck. “Greg, my pasta’s done. I’ve got to go,” I said. “Can you call me tomorrow at work?”

  I put the phone down. I was getting kissed again. The wet spot on the T-shirt was again plastered on my nipple, but Geoff was behind it and it felt lukewarm. He took his hand out of my underwear, sliding a wet finger across my stomach. He wrapped his arms around me, grabbing my ass.

  “Ummmm!” he said. “You have the greatest ass. Shall we eat?”

  “We can’t,” I said. “I ruined the pasta.”

  We had my favorite omelet instead. Jarlsberg cheese and banana. I know it sounds terrible, but it’s a combination that really works. I lit a candle. Geoff took his usual seat.

  “You know,” he began, “I might be going to Puerto Rico.”

  “Really?” I asked. “Why?”

  “A bunch of us at work might be going to Puerto Rico to work at the plant we have there.”