The Shadow Man Page 6

  Geoff returned for dinner. He had passed me on his racing bike as I took a walk along the ocean later that afternoon. He squeaked his brakes behind me and gave me a brilliant smile.

  “I’d like to help you,” he said when he heard about my car. “Should we talk later tonight?”

  He arrived after paperwork, as usual, well after sunset. I sat opposite him in my underwear and another of my long T-shirts. I popped some Advils for my cramps. He offered me his Karmann Ghia.

  “Cornelia’s in Germany and nobody’s driving it. So why don’t you drive it for a while?”

  “You’ve got to be insane,” I said. “I do not want to drive Cornelia’s car.”

  He was silent, except for a long sigh that escaped through his nose. He said slowly, “I had a long talk with Cornelia today.”

  “And?” I said.

  “I told her I didn’t think she should come back.”

  “And what did she say?”

  He was silent again. Then he lifted his eyes to level with mine. “She was very upset.” He watched my face. “In fact, she cried for quite a while. It was a two-and-a-half-hour conversation.” He laughed ruefully. “My phone bill to West Germany is going to be pret-ty high.”

  I watched him drop his eyes to the wick of the unlighted candle between us. “Did you tell her about me?” I asked.

  “No.”

  “Well, great,” I said. “That certainly keeps it good and messy.”

  “I tried to tell her we were finished on the basis of our relationship. Hers and mine. I think it’s more fair that way.”

  “And it’s very fair for you to suggest I drive her car for the next few days, too, isn’t it?” I demanded. “Man, you’re crazy. You’re mean and crazy.”

  He sighed patiently and shook his head. “Let me tell you a little about our relationship.”

  I waited silently.

  “This person—you don’t know her—is young, impatient, has a problem with alcohol and smokes. I told her today on the telephone that I didn’t want her to come back. She was very upset. She said she had changed. She said there were many things about her that had changed in the time she’s been back in Germany.”

  “Oh, God,” I said. “And you’re going to have her come back to see how she’s changed.”

  “Well, it’s the least I can do.” He raised his eyes to mine again. “I can’t say we’ll definitely stay together once she comes back, but it’s the least I can do.”

  I stood up in disgust. “Geoff, don’t you know that everyone always says they’ve changed? Kids say they’ll be good when Christmas comes around because it’s one way to make sure they’ll get presents. People always say they’ve changed when they think it’ll get them something.” I started to move the dishes to the sink. “I don’t know why I’m even bothering to explain this to you.”

  “I want to give her the chance,” he said quietly. “I’ve spent a lot of hours on the phone with her in the last couple of days. She’s very, very upset.”

  I stared at him, a mug in my hand. “Is that who you were talking to all day yesterday?”

  “For a good part of the day, yes.”

  “And you told me it was your sister?”

  “I talked to my sister yesterday, too.”

  “Yes, but who was coming through on the call-interrupts? Your sister or Cornelia?”

  He was silent. “For the most part it was Cornelia.”

  “Oh, my God,” I said. “You’re a fucking liar.”

  He left for good that night. We went to bed again, but we lay there in the dark, both of us focusing on the black air space around us, and this time we argued.

  “I don’t know if I’ll be able to keep seeing you this often,” he began. “What I mean is, I don’t know if I should try to spend a few nights with her and then a few nights with you.”

  I flipped around toward him in a frenzy. “What are you—nuts? She’s coming back to live with you and you’re going to spend a few nights with her and then a few nights with me? You think that’s going to work? You think this is some kind of harem?”

  “Well, I didn’t say it would work,” he replied. “I just said it might be a possibility.”

  “You’re an idiot,” I said. “I can’t believe you would even suggest such a thing!”

  “Well, then, I probably won’t be able to see you at all. I hope you understand that.”

  “I understand it thoroughly,” I said. “But that doesn’t mean I’m not furious about it.”

  “That’s why I’m giving you your chance to bail out now.” He was using his smooth, careful voice on me. It drove me over the edge.

  “Thanks a lot!” I sat up and glared at his shape in the bed through the dark. “You really gave me the choice to be in this, too, didn’t you?”

  He was lying very stiffly, like a log. “You’re a worm,” I said. “An absolute worm.”

  He got up. “Look,” he said. “I won’t have you calling me names.”

  “A worm” I said, “is hardly a name. I should be saying much worse things about you. I should be saying what I really think about you. A worm is the kindest, mildest thing I’m allowing myself to call you.”

  “Fine,” he said. “I think I’d better leave.”

  I listened to the jingle of change in the pockets of his jeans as he pulled them on in the dark. He turned on the light in the living room to unhook his CD player. I stood up and wrapped the blanket around me, dragging it into the living room, where I stood squinting in the lamplight. He turned around. I watched him wrap the hookup wires around the CD player and tuck it under his arm.

  “I’m going to put this in the truck,” he said quietly. “I’ll be back in a minute. I have a present for you.”

  I waited, wrapped in the stripes of my blanket while I heard the truck door open and then slam. His sneakers padded lightly on the steps as he took them two at a time up to the house. He crossed back to the stereo and opened the cassette deck.

  “What are you doing?” I said.

  “I want to leave this with you.” He shut the door of the cassette deck and pressed the play button.

  “Don’t turn anything on,” I said. “I don’t want to listen to any music.”

  “Are you sure?” The look on his face was concerned and caring. Anger, like a gust of air blown into a balloon, swelled inside me.

  “I am absolutely positive,” I said. “Don’t turn the stereo on.”

  “Okay.” He laced his fingers together and stood in front of me.

  “Just go away,” I said stonily. “Have a nice life.”

  “I’m sorry you feel this way,” he said.

  “I don’t want to hear any more,” I said. “Just go. Go now.”

  I listened to the truck engine turn over twice, and saw the red taillights as he pulled away. I went to the tape deck and pulled out the tape. It was a cassette of our nighttime piano music.

  I had to rent a car the next day to get to work. Paul Reiter gave me a ride. He picked me up at my front door, the house blanketed by the early-morning fog that had rolled in from the ocean. I thought it was really nice of him. He didn’t have to get up and give rides to a nitwit single woman to help her patch up her life. He patted my hand as we rode on the freeway.

  “Boy, Leslie,” he said. “I guess no one needs this.”

  “Right,” I said. And he didn’t even know about Geoff. I told him.

  He whistled, shaking his head. “Told ya.” He reached to adjust the rearview mirror. “These guys. I don’t know how they get away with it.”

  “Well, they don’t,” I said. “They don’t get away with anything. Unless women let them. I guess that’s the problem.”

  “Now don’t you be giving him any chances,” said Paul darkly.

  The rental car was a little Chevette with rust marks on the paint and a drab red velour interior. I caught a whiff of strong b.o. as I climbed behind the steering wheel. Great, I thought. This is going to be wonderful.

  Paul’s Buick
sailed ahead of me onto the freeway and was lost in traffic immediately. The rental car groaned as I pressed hard on the accelerator. I was holding up a stream of work-bound commuters as I struggled to gain speed on the ramp.

  Don’t be giving him a chance, Paul had said.

  My period was a bad one. Between timing tampon changes, telephone conversations with my insurance agent and reminders from my brain that I had just been jilted by Geoff, I passed the days in something of a dither. I was lucky that so much was going on. When I thought about one thing, I blanked on the other. It was as though all the things were too big for me to think about together. I was probably better off that way. I would have been crushed, a smashed blackberry on the pavement, if one of the crises was all that had happened and all that took over my brain. And the period gave the week that touch of nightmarishness, the bucket of blood that slops on this character or that one in a horror movie. I was scared I would stain the seat of the rental car. I sat on a plastic bag.

  I was awakened in the night by a dream of a hot river. I lay in bed, groping to place the image. Geoff? The swimming pool? Then suddenly it was real, pouring and wet, and I shot like a madman to the bathroom, one hand pressed to my sodden underwear. By the time I found the light switch, the wall was streaked with blood. I watched two huge blood clots follow the tampon into the toilet. I grabbed a towel and sank my face in my hands. I cried, long, loud and openly. At two in the morning, I was stuck on a toilet, ripped off, cheated and bleeding to death. At last I stood up and looked in the mirror. I had lost more weight. My face, the tears smeared across it, was the face of a skinny E.T.—ugly, wretched, and lost.

  “Oh, Leslie.” I said it aloud. It was time for me to play computer: to do a split-screen and start up the little adult self that would step in and take care of me. Everything was under control. I was covered by a tampon and two pads. I hadn’t stained the sheets. I crawled back into bed to think.

  “Call me at my hotel,” Larry used to say when he took a business trip. “Call Marianne and she’ll tell you where I’ll be.” And I would call, late at night, the Peachtree Plaza in Atlanta, the West Shore Marriott in Tampa, the Biltmore in L.A., holding in front of me the scrap of paper on which I had written the hotel name his office had given me. The phone would ring and ring. Sometimes the switchboard picked up again. “Sorry, ma’am, there’s no answer. Would you care to leave a message?”

  And I would call back in half an hour and in half an hour again, until the barren ring of the telephone coiled together with the heavy feeling in my stomach and the hotel operators knew I was a fool. I would set my alarm for six and start again. This time it was a different operator but it took only one call at that hour to tell them I had to be a fool. My own voice echoed emptily in my head like the electronic toll of the phone against the blank hotel room walls: “Leslie, if a person isn’t in their room at midnight or at six the next morning, they were not in their room that night.”

  And still I put up with it. He threw me excuses—plausible only if you adjusted your blinders and swigged another shot of your drink of delusion. “Boy, you wouldn’t believe the meeting we had. Lasted till midnight. What do you mean you called at six a.m.? I was out running. Boy, am I beat.”

  He gave himself away in one of our usual diner hangouts. He had on his white jeans jacket and red corduroy shirt. All men want to play cowboy, I thought, hoss and rider. The hosses change for the cowboy rider.

  “You know,” he began, examining as usual with his faraway grin something other than my face, “I’ve met two women with the most unusual names. I have never in my life heard such unusual names. Gia Gutierrez and Oonagh Dodsen. Oonagh—O-O-N-A-G-H. Gia? I mean—can you believe it? And one of them is five-and-a-half months pregnant.” He grinned at me. “Huh, Leslie? What do you think of those names? Weird, aren’t they?”

  It took me a few weeks to figure out in fragments, each chip fitting with the smooth click that marries the interlocking pieces of a jigsaw, that he was traveling with two account reps from an ad agency and one of them, the source of the grin and shake of his head that accompanied his every mention of the “weird names,” Oonagh, was married to an investment banker and was five-and-a-half months pregnant. I knew she was the one he was sleeping with.

  CHAPTER SIX

  Eden

  The spiral stairway wasn’t the only tricky problem at Muriel’s cottage. She had scouted the place out, measuring the windows for drapes, buying track lights for the ceiling and a white sofa to go under them, and when she was ready to sign the lease and close the deal, her landlord-to-be, a Brazilian pediatrician, put the moves on her. Muriel called me, swearing and freaking out. “You won’t believe this!” she yelled over the phone. “No sooner do I hand him my checks for the first month and the security deposit—he leans over and proposes an affair! It was disgusting! He told me his wife was six months pregnant and he needed to go elsewhere! Can you believe it?”

  “Wow,” I said. The pediatrician had even been a client of Muriel’s mother.

  “And he met me in his pajamas! He came down to the house in his pajamas. With two martini glasses.”

  “So what are you going to do?” I asked.

  “Well, I’m sure as hell not going to move in!” Muriel stormed. “I told him to give me back my checks. I told him it was disgusting that he was doing this to his wife! I told him there was no way I could live on his property.”

  “And what did he say?”

  “He grinned at me. He said maybe I wanted to think about it.”

  “So what did you do?”

  “Obviously, I left! I said, give me my checks now or you’ll be sorry. So he gave them to me. He was still grinning. He had these silk pajamas and this paisley robe and he reeked of after-shave.”

  “Wow,” I said again. I had not had a chance to go with Muriel to look at the cottage. She had been in a tizzy about the place since the day her mother first brought it up. At one time the bathhouse to the pediatrician’s estate, it was now a perfect studio—charming, clean and airy.

  Muriel spumed static on the other end of the line.

  “Take it easy,” I tried to soothe her. “There may be something else that turns up. Why don’t you try looking in the paper?”

  “Fat chance!” said Muriel. “These kinds of places are never in the paper!”

  “But you can’t assume that, Muriel,” I protested. “You never know.”

  “I do know!” retorted Muriel. “This was a one-in-a-million! Trust some creep to fuck it up!”

  “Well, he wasn’t just some creep,” I pointed out. “It was actually his house. Maybe you were never meant to live there.”

  “I was!” said Muriel. “He fucked it up!”

  I sighed. Muriel continued to sputter. “Men are moles, Leslie! Moles! Blind, disgusting little moles!”

  I sighed again. She would get over it.

  I stayed clear of Geoff. Like the snake coiled around the first apple tree, he flexed his scales and stretched with lazy cunning, calling me on the very day they found my stolen car.

  “I’ll be happy to help you get it back,” he volunteered. I said no thanks. “You sure?” The words slid toward me like sand on a sheet of glass. They were caresses, sounds that rippled into my consciousness, fitting in the niches they had carved weeks ago, nestling into the present like a familiar picture. He had been wonderful to me, wonderful and cruel, sincere on the surface and cruel at the core. I had danced those numbers before. Sometimes in ballet, you would ache and hurt, your muscles screaming to be let go, let out, but the form ruled, the dance prevailed and your cells gave in to the art. And the only way to reach the art was to dance through the pain, through the roaring, searing wave that lurched through you, deafening your senses, claiming your mind as you clung to the one thing you had left—a tiny, gossamer thread, spinning out on a line of its own, out past the blood in your toe shoes and the shaking cramps, and if you held onto it, stayed true to the end of it, suddenly you knew why you were doing this
and why you were there.

  But this was not art. There was no story, no message, no glory through pain. There was only Geoff, a clever, careful voice on the end of a wire, and a red flag that fluttered assiduously if I let the music play.

  I had rashly bought another car. The b.o. smell in the little rental had driven me wild. It hung on my clothes even while I sat at my desk at work. I consolidated my savings and checking accounts, signed stacks of colored forms passed under my pen by a slim European salesman at an inland dealership, and hoped for the best.

  “Your keys.” The salesman placed them on my papers with a hint of a bow. His name was Adam.

  “What do I do with the rental?” I asked.

  He swept his right hand like a maitre d’ to a full buffet. “You can leave it here.”

  “You’re kidding,” I said. “They won’t like that.”

  “Everybody does it. If they want this car, they will send someone.”

  My new wheels gleamed in the parking lot. Antelope, the salesman had called the color of the car. The air shimmered gently, rising in waves like slowly melting glass, an unpolluted resin shielding me from the havoc of the rest of the world.

  “Okay,” I said, picking up the keys.

  Paul Reiter wound up giving me the ride I could have taken from Geoff. “Thank you, thank you,” I breathed as I sank into the comforting plush of the Buick. “I don’t know what I’d do without you. You’re really great.”

  “Swat friends are for.” Paul sent me a broad grin. The Buick bounced comfortingly as we rolled southward and inland to the tow yard where I was to look for my stolen car. I had my driver’s license, spare registration and spare key. Paul looked at the key doubtfully. “That may not do you much good. They generally steal cars by ramming a screwdriver in the ignition. You may find out you need a tow truck.”

  I groaned. “This seems like it’s never going to end. Cars take more of your energy than anything I can think of.”

  “Except kids,” said Paul.

  “At least kids grow,” I countered. “They grow into people. They could become Einstein or Shirley MacLaine or the president. Cars only deterioriate. Depreciate, whatever you call it. From the minute you walk off the lot.”