The Shadow Man Read online

  “Really? When?”

  “I’m not sure. Maybe a month or two.”

  “For how long?”

  “I really don’t know. Maybe six months.”

  “That’s quite a while.” I cut a piece of bread and offered him half.

  “No, thanks.” He took a bite of the piece he held in his hand. He still ate with his dainty bites, measured and careful, sometimes watching the food as though he expected it to come alive on his plate. “Tell me,” he said, “Would you want to come with me to Puerto Rico?”

  “Me? Come with you? Why?” I folded a leg and put it up underneath me on the chair.

  “Wouldn’t you miss me?” Geoff asked.

  “I’ve known you three weeks. Not even three weeks,” I said. “I might miss you in the beginning, but I’m sure I could live.” I took a sip of my water.

  Geoff speared a slice of banana and put it on his bread. “Would you like to come to Puerto Rico with me?”

  “What for? What would I do in Puerto Rico? Why should I leave this place?” I was staring at him, shaking my head.

  “Well, you would be with me.” His blue eyes were the faintest bit surprised as he took another careful bite of his bread.

  We screwed again that night, as usual. We were trying to get to sleep a little earlier. We had developed a system for making love: he knew exactly how high and how fast he needed to get me to peak and keep me there while I spent the next stretch working on him. Hard as it was to talk to him over meals, I gave him everything I had in bed. It was an exchange that worked, a trading of art. We were engineers—testing each other in turn, fine-tuning, refining, peaking and waning. The momentum would build like a climber hauling altitude on a rope, and when the peaking curve was somewhere up in the Andes, Geoff would reach to the dark floor for the packages of condoms by the bed. We had it down to an hour instead of the former two or three. Afterwards, I would make us a scalding mug of tea which I took back to bed and drank in big gulps and he sipped occasionally. He would nibble on the amaranth cookies he brought over in their red-and-white boxes every couple of days, feeding me the second half of each little rectangle after he took the first bite.

  Sometimes he lingered for a few minutes in the morning, grinding against me, propping his weight on his arms as he lay above me, whispering to me how wonderful I was and how much he wanted to spend the winter getting to know me. “You’re the person I’ve been looking for,” he would say. “Funny how that happens. I told myself I wasn’t going to look for anyone—and there you were.”

  On the fourth Saturday that I had known him I went for a perm. It was the usual ordeal—tilting your head backwards into a sink until you thought your neck would snap, suffocating under plastic with the fumes of ammonia riding you into the first stages of panic, and, finally, glowing under the oohs and aahs of everyone under the roof as the rollers are thrown into their bin and your wispy ringlets are talked and picked into shape, glistening under the long white bulbs set in the ceiling overhead. I learned later, when Geoff called me, that he had gone for a haircut, too.

  “What do you look like with a perm?” he asked.

  “Much better,” I said. “You’ll see.”

  “Is it a frizz?”

  “No. You’ll see. I really needed it, even though it hurt like hell. But really, my hair looks much better. And I don’t have to go through this for another five months.”

  We met at the Carrot for dinner. He had called me three times that afternoon; his call-waiting kept interrupting us as we talked, and he would switch lines at the beep, coming back to me with, “Mind if I call you back?” I had spent the whole day sitting on my cedar chest, letting my wet curls dry as Geoff and I got to know each other a little better—over the telephone. It seemed odd to be making the acquaintance—over a wire and alone in my room—of a man who had fucked me for the past four weeks. The call-waiting cutting in was his sister; I waited deferentially while he had a couple of long conversations with her and then picked my receiver up when he rang me back. “Aloha,” he would say as I answered, lowering the smooth beauty of his voice half an octave. He was doing paperwork. He had stacks of it, he told me—piled on every surface, all the way down the wall opposite his bed.

  I got to the Carrot before he did. I walked, the ammonia of my perm sailing before me under the buzzing of the streetlights. Grit on the sidewalk crunched under my shoes. The door of the Carrot was sticky as I pushed it open. I wiped my palm on my jacket and crossed over to a booth, one down from the one we sat at on our first night.

  He came in through the back door, sliding quietly next to me on the seat and covering my eyes from behind with his hands. He was laughing as I took his hands away. His hair was very short and very, very even.

  “Miss Frizz,” he said to me.

  “Kovalsky,” I corrected. “You look like you’ve signed up for the Marines.”

  “Only if I get a co-ed deal.” He leaned over and kissed my cheekbone. “Your hair smells wonderful.” He kissed the corner of my mouth.

  We ordered, sharing a plate of nachos, sitting side by side, thigh by thigh, as we ate. People who do this are suspect, I have often thought, either sickeningly (and probably falsely) in love, or else just plain ostentatious. Yet, as I did it, I was oblivious to everyone around me, seeing only Geoff’s face, six inches away. His leg was warm against mine, and he would kiss me between bites, feeding me sometimes from his fork. “Your hair smells wonderful,” he said several times, laughing. “What do you think of mine?”

  “Short,” I replied. “The back is really short.” I touched the fuzz just above his neck, feeling his scalp underneath. “There’s almost nothing there.”

  “Very little indeed,” he agreed. “It almost joined my mustache.”

  “What?” I frowned. “Your mustache?”

  “Not too long ago I had a mustache,” he grinned.

  “You’re kidding,” I stared at him.

  “I’m not kidding.” He brought an olive to my lips on the tip of his fork.

  “So when did you get rid of it?” I took the olive off his fork and put it on the edge of my plate.

  “Oh, a week or so before I met you. Why? Would you like me better if I had a mustache?”

  “I don’t think I would have gone out with you. I don’t like men with mustaches. I don’t know why.”

  “Well, I’m lucky, then, aren’t I?” Laughing, he pulled a wisp of perm away from my eye. “I did the right thing.”

  This time he paid for my dinner, setting a ten and a five on top of the little red tray that held our check.

  “Shall we?” he asked, rising and extending a hand to me.

  I climbed into his truck and settled on the cold seat. We rounded the corner to my house, cruising through one light and two stop signs. He pulled up to the curb, flipped the switch for the headlights, and then leaned across me, shuffling for something on the floor. I moved my legs for him. He straightened up with three white envelopes, thick and slightly wrinkled.

  “Pictures,” he smiled. “I have something to share with you tonight.”

  I unlocked the front door and switched on the lamp. “You want some tea?” I asked.

  We sat on the floor, in front of the couch. I brought out a blanket to cover my legs. He placed a corner of it over his white-socked feet.

  “You’ve told me quite a bit about yourself,” he said, lifting the flap of one of the envelopes. “And now I’d like to share some things with you.” He flipped through the first few pictures, and tucked them back into their sleeve. “I’ll show you these later.” He flashed me a smile.

  “Now. You’ve asked me about the relationships I’ve had this year.” He put the envelopes on the rug and readjusted the blanket on his feet. “I haven’t told you much because it takes me awhile to get comfortable sharing that kind of thing. But tonight I want to tell you about some of the people I’ve known this year.” He paused. “You, by the way, are the fourth one.”

  I sat back with my tea, t
hankful for the soft cushion behind me, not knowing quite what to expect. I was a little bit nervous—that niggling feeling you get when all seems well but a smarter part of you knows it’s not. He began a long dissertation about the women he had “been with”—first, a beauty from Rio that he had met hang gliding; then a Ph.D. who worked in a lab; then a German woman who moved in with him; and then me. It took him forty minutes to wade through the history to get to me. I listened abstractedly, holding my hot mug, not knowing whether it was his soothingly monotonous way of talking or the lack of something else in his account that made me miss such huge pieces of it. I found myself trying hard to throw off my wandering attention, almost the way a wet dog shakes water. I wondered if it was obvious to him that I wasn’t listening. I tried harder to pick up and follow. He sat in front of me with his legs crossed, leaning forward, most of the time addressing his folded hands, which he examined for cracks as he spoke. He had spent months building this new airplane at work, and the solvents and chemicals he used every day had roughened and callused his hands. I watched him run his thumb over a split on his knuckle. Suddenly it dawned on me that the German girl he had been telling me about was still living with him. That she had been on a vacation for the past four weeks and was coming back.

  “Wait a minute. Wait a minute,” I said. “This woman is living with you still?”

  He nodded, his head at a tilt as he looked at me with his smooth blue eyes. The pupils were very small and very black—pinholes in a crystalline sea.

  “You mean—all this time you’ve known me, you’ve actually been living with somebody?”

  He nodded.

  “But she’s not here now. She’s on vacation.”

  He nodded again.

  “When is she coming back?”

  “Two weeks.”

  “When did you put her on the plane?”

  “September thirtieth.”

  “And when did you meet me?”

  “October third.” Pinholes in a crystalline sea. His eyes had narrowed in a slight, tense squint as he continued to watch me.

  “And you’ve been here every night since.”

  He nodded.

  “Every night for four weeks. And you’ve been telling me I’m the person you’ve been waiting for—I’m the person you want to get to know all winter.”

  He was silent, watching me.

  “Does she know about me?”

  “No.” He mouthed the word as his thumb smoothed the split skin of his knuckle.

  “So what are you going to do?”

  He shook his head. He spoke very quietly. “I don’t know.”

  “What am I going to do?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me this before?”

  He shook his head.

  “Why didn’t you tell me this on the first night? The night I told you everything about me? Why didn’t you tell me you were in a relationship?”

  The words came without sound. “I don’t know.”

  “Geoff—‘I don’t know’ is not good enough!” I cried out. “So now what are we going to do?”

  He raised the crystalline pinholes to meet mine. “Look,” he said. “When you’re in a bad relationship with someone you’ve been living with, it’s not easy to end it. Has that happened to you?”

  “Of course,” I said, “but I wouldn’t double up the way you have! Do you realize how dishonest you’ve been with me?”

  He nodded.

  “Why? You could have told me anytime.”

  He shook his head. “It got harder and harder to tell you.”

  I stared at him. My mug had gone cold. “I can see why,” I said. “When you’re fucking someone for three hours a night, it would get harder to tell them you were living with someone else.” I put the cold mug down. “Do you see what’s happened?” I yelled at him. “Because you’ve fucked me and slept with me for four weeks, you have this piece of me. Really and truly I shouldn’t care—because this dishonesty of yours proves what a creep you are. But because you’ve been fucking me—and so much—I’m mad, I’m upset.” I stood up and walked to the kitchen. “I can’t believe it,” I said. The mug clattered in the sink.

  I returned to the living room. My blanket was in a pile on the floor. He had risen. He was wincing.

  “I really just can’t believe this.” I stood in front of him.

  He was silent. I could see his chest lifting as he breathed. He was wearing the Italian T-shirt. L’uomo e la misura del universo. Misura. It hit me. Measure. Man is the measure of all. He looked down at the envelopes in his hand. “Would you like to see any of the pictures?” he asked.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  The Rider

  He stayed with me that night, turned away from me, both of us like white lumps, shapeless sacks under the sheets. I lay next to him in the dark, feeling sick. In many ways, I should have known this was coming. I should have known from the fact that we couldn’t ever have any decent conversations that he was going to treat me like this. Should have. Should of. So many people say should of instead of should have. I wondered if Geoff was one of them. Should of? I should of decided more carefully about him. I should of done a little emotional homework. I laughed to myself, the bitterness cranking tighter inside me, grabbing like a screw on wood when the threads begin to take their hold. I didn’t even like him. If he weren’t good-looking and he didn’t know how to fuck, I wouldn’t have given him the time of day. But I had given him the time of day. I had given him my body. I had let him manhandle a piece of my soul. By letting him into me naked every night, by wrapping myself around him as we latched onto each other in this very selective, very specific way, I had given him the ring of keys to something very precious, something very sacred, a room which even I hadn’t understood the sanctity of. Me. And he had mauled the contents of that room. He shouldn’t have had those keys. I should have saved them for someone better. I was a fool. I had been careless. I had given myself away.

  I felt his hand creep onto my hip. I froze, staring at the black space before us. There were clouds that night, and no moon. His hand stroked down my thigh. Very slowly, I took a deep, motionless breath. Counting the segments like a flight of stairs, I let the breath out. His hand ran the length of my leg, as far down under the covers as he could go. He brought it up along the inside, along the skin he had always said was so soft. Slowly, he put his finger inside me. I was wet. I waited to see what he would do.

  He left his finger inside me, moving it very slowly. I rolled over a little and spread my legs. He leaned over my face and drew in a deep breath of my hair. I remembered my perm. He buried his mouth behind my ear, inhaling, slowly kissing. He moved his face over my lips. It was very dark. I only felt him over me. His breath was warm and very slight as it washed over my chin. I opened my mouth and moved an inch toward him in the blackness. Crickets ground their legs together in the grass outside. He locked onto me, his finger moving deep inside me as he bit down on my mouth.

  I let out a huge, trapped breath as I kissed him, slowly, fully, entirely. I oozed into his warmth, feeling him slide inside me. He raised his face from mine. In the black, I knew where his eyes would be. Crystalline ice, two holes bored with a pick. Two deep holes, clean, straight and black, down and deep to I didn’t know where.

  “You are so beautiful,” he said. He held my shoulders with both his hands, mining my insides. He had me impaled, and I wanted it. He kissed me very carefully. “I love to be inside you.” He was breathing it over my lips. “Leslie.” He fucked me harder. “I love to be inside of you.”

  We slept to the strains of the piano music. He started the CD and let it play in the dark, crawling back into bed and folding himself around me like nothing had changed. He left in the morning to do paperwork. “I’ll call you later,” he said, brushing his hand down my cheek. I was still in bed. I heard the front door close after him and the chihuahua next door set up its frenzied bark as he ran down the steps. His truck started with a two-part rumb
le and he was gone.

  I looked at the polka-dotted green shirt I had worn the day before hanging limply from the door handle. The collar was saturated with perm runoff. I would have to throw it in the laundry. I got out of bed. Three of Geoff’s rubbers, attached to each other by their cellophane packets, lay on the carpet by my traveling clock which I hadn’t bothered to wind since he had stayed with me. It was an old, old clock. I had had it in my bedroom when I was little, setting it every night for school the next morning. My mother found it in a box of stuff in the basement and sent it to me. It still worked. It gained five minutes a night, and I used it when I wanted comfort, for old times’ sake.

  I stood on the bed to look out the long, high window to see what kind of day it was. I had a low, regular window in my room, that faced a wall of bougainvillea—now lifeless—and a high window that scraped the branches of a knotted pine tree. The high window gave you a longer perspective of the sky. It was Sunday, toneless and gray, and the sky was thick with clouds. I was tired of clouds.

  There was an oil spot on the asphalt where I had parked my car. I cocked my head, puzzled, staring hard.

  I stepped off my bed and went out to the sidewalk. The oil spot was an old one, irregular and dry, and the street was most definitely bare.

  A car, if you own one, is a big enough hassle. If you own one and it disappears, it’s the worst hassle of all. I got my period right on the street while the cop took down the details on my car. He had sailed up in one of those square-ended police cars with the sheriff star emblazoned on the side. He wrote in tiny letters, all capitals, black ink with a terrific slant. I was doubling up with cramps, watching him misspell my name.

  I repeated my name as though that would make him get it right. He looked at me like he was hearing tongues. “K-O-V-A-L-S-K-Y,” I spelled.

  “Isn’t that what I have?” he asked, tilting the clipboard at me.

  “No,” I said. “It’s not. You have an E and you missed the S.”

  He thought the expression on my face had to do with my stolen car. He wrote over the letters to fix them, which annoyed me, but it was unreasonable to expect him to carry white-out.