The Shadow Man Read online

  “You got that right,” said Paul. Luckily, he had his toolbox in the trunk. He was handy, he said, and would see what he could do to get the car started, if it came to that. “When we were kids, my brother and I, we would take things apart and put them together. Didn’t always work,” he laughed, “but we came pretty close. In my book, things don’t have to be perfect. Just good enough to getcha there. Know what I mean, Leslie?”

  I stared at the lowlands and the mountains going by. There were skinny animal paths here and there on the scrubby hillsides, shoelaces of earth where hares or small creatures with quick little legs would run during the night. Shortcuts through the wild, decided on by instinct and followed by the group. Not necessarily perfect, sometimes too exposed, but, in the darkness, good enough to get you there.

  “My son Robbie’s the same way. I’ll tell you what happened when he was a little boy. I was filling the lawn mower with gas and he was watching me, hanging on to every move I made, his eyes wide open. I guess he was about three or four. Then Lorraine called me from the house, maybe the phone rang, who knows. Anyway, I had to go inside. And while I was gone Robbie very carefully took the hose, unwound it with his chubby little hands, and dragged it over to the lawn mower. You want to know what he did? He filled the lawn mower with water! He thought he was doing Daddy a favor.”

  “What did you do?” I asked.

  “Well, he was so small, I couldn’t yell at him. I took him by the hand and said, ‘Robbie, water doesn’t go in the lawn mower. Only gas does. Engines don’t like water, they like gas.’ And I had to take the whole thing apart and clean it out and get it set up again. And he watched everything I did, eyes wide open like saucers. ‘Gas,’ he kept saying. ‘Gas.’”

  “What’s your wife like?” I asked.

  “Lorraine? Well, you’ve talked to her on the phone. She’s a good person, a real good person.” I waited for him to continue. Instead he gazed at the interstate, his eyes in long slits that made the insides very deep and black, like the first streaks of charcoal on a white canvas. His right hand gripped the top of the steering wheel, the skin a little dry and creased, the knuckles knobby and planted with short pale hairs. “Lorraine’s not the athletic kind,” he said after a while. “She likes animals. We have a dog, Heidi. Boy, is she attached to that dog.”

  “What kind of dog?” I asked.

  “German Shepherd. Heidi’s real protective. When the kids were little, anytime we had company, Heidi would sit right between them and the kids. Right smack in between. Never let the gap close.”

  “Huh.” I thought about that while I waited for more.

  “Heidi’s a real protective dog. Smart dog, too. I guess that’s why she and Lorraine get along. They’re both smart. Don’t say much, but smart.”

  “Lorraine doesn’t say much?”

  “Well, not like me,” Paul gave a rumble of a laugh. “You know me, I talk all the time. My family gets tired of it.”

  “Do they tell you to shut up?”

  “Well, no one’s around much anymore. The kids both work after school and Lorraine does her own thing. So I run and swim and work out. You know. So that old age doesn’t sneak up behind me.” He turned his head to wink. “You be sure, Leslie, to exercise every day of your life. You promise me?”

  “Well, there are some days I can’t. Like when I’m sick or I just have too much to do.”

  “No, I’m not talking about days you’re sick. I’m talking about regularity. Lifelong regularity. You’ll know what I’m talking about when you’re my age.”

  “How long have you been exercising?”

  Paul grunted and passed a car on the right. “Thirty years. Thirty-five? When I was a teenager, I was erratic. Played all kinds of sports. I wasn’t too scientific about it.”

  “Do you have to be scientific?”

  “I would say yes. You have to make it lifestyle, if you really want the benefits. If you want the benefits that put you in a different class than the rest of the world. I don’t mean world class, like Ivan Lendl or Carl Lewis. Or that little girl Janet who swims like a windmill. I mean you begin to work like a machine. Your octane is different. You don’t get run down and depressed the way other people do. You stay up there, strong. And that becomes part of your blood, Leslie, part of you. I’ll never regret that decision.”

  I thought about the decisions he had regretted. What were they? Should I ask? He was always up, as the expression went, one that he had only just used himself. On the run that morning, he had egged me on like a militant gym coach, “Come on, Leslie. Hup, hup!” His fist jabbed the air as he ran ahead of me. I was never a good morning runner, as we both knew. I slogged behind him, staring to the end of the road at the estate he wanted me to see. We reached the wrought-metal gate in time, and Paul solicitously let me take a breather. But he hadn’t stopped talking himself. “Take a look at this, will ya, Leslie? How’d ya like to live here? Huh? How about it? Let’s you and me conquer the world and live here like kings!”

  I peered through the decorated gate at the gentle lawns and the domed bushes along the driveway, green thimbles in a hundred-acre sewing basket, never to be used. The house rose silently in the distance, columns holding up a roof that spanned a spread of empty marble rooms, the air ringing with ghost-echoes of hammers, saws and busy voices. All was still now. Birds twittered and the wind occasionally blew. I breathed, listening to the thudding of my heartbeat as it slowed, smelling the metal of the gate. Who lived there? What did they do?

  “Is this the exit?” Paul moved the car into the right lane.

  “Valley Road going north is all I know. I have no idea where the towing place is.”

  “We’ll find it,” said Paul. The off-ramp curved around a wide, grassy range, terraced in places where an excavator had clawed into it. The land was raw and red and dried, like a bandage taken from a wound and left to disintegrate. “Look at this,” said Paul, gesturing at the open earth. “These developers.”

  We reached the tow yard a little after ten. The sullen men who ran it made me pay for the whole weekend, claiming that the place was officially closed and my effort to collect my car warranted a special opening of the lot, and thereby extra work on their part. They charged me a hundred dollars, refusing to take my check, settling instead for the credit card I stuck through the grimy window of the sloppy cement job that was meant to pass as an office.

  The hatchback was a mess, broken glass strewn on the floor with screws, pens, chunks of broken plastic from the dashboard and the contents of my glove compartment discarded like fast-food garbage all over the seats. The stockier of the sullen men laughed at me through the side of his mouth that didn’t show his missing teeth.

  “You’re a lucky one,” he said, jerking his chin toward the car. “That’s hardly nothin’. You should see some of the wrecks we get. Wheels gone, seats gone, everythin’ but the paint. They’d take that too if they could figure out how.” He laughed again.

  His amusement turned to belligerent scrutiny and suspicion as Paul hauled the toolbox from the trunk of the Buick and with a screwdriver and a socket popped the ignition. The engine kicked to life with a surging roar.

  “A seasoned car thief,” I said to the man. Paul winked at me.

  We left the hatchback at the inland dealership, which was only a couple of miles up the road. My European salesman was there, leaning forward and gesturing gallantly with his hands as he soaked up the attention of a man and a woman near the doorway. I caught sight of him through the glass.

  “There’s Adam!” I yelled excitedly, and hopped away from Paul. Everything was going to work out. Adam would fix up the hatchback. I would sell it. Eden afresh, my new start was already under way. I took my seat next to Paul in the Buick as we drove home along the back roads. It was nearing high noon. We skirted intersections clogged with the stop-and-go of weekend shoppers, nosing onto byways between the groves of citrus and the sweeping sun-baked hills.

  Dust roused by the tires of the cars in f
ront of us billowed over the road. The sun beat on the hard, cracking land, its brightness thrown back into the glittering air by the smooth, brittle gloss of the citrus leaves. The Buick swerved around a bend and I reeled toward Paul.

  “Thinking?” he asked.

  “In a way.”

  I stared through the windshield at the license plate of the car ahead. I have this habit of pretending that the letters on license plates mean things. It takes stretching your imagination to force the game to work, but once in a while the letters make phrases that are so obvious they blow me away. My first California license plate, on the little hatchback we had just dropped off, had always made me a little nervous. 2EGR391. 2EGR. Too Eager. I thought it could be true.

  “What are you thinking about?” asked Paul.

  “Nothing.” I grabbed the handle on the inside of the door and pulled myself upright.

  “You’re thinking about whatshisname. The hang glider.”

  I shook my head.

  “Come on,” said Paul. “You are.”

  I shook my head again. “He’s part of it,” I said. “But I’ve done this before. I’ve gotten—I guess you would say—sucked in. And it hurts.”

  Paul nodded. “Men do that. Women do that, too. I’ve had my share of it.”

  “With Lorraine?”

  “Oh, no. Someone else. It was a very hard decision for me to make. But she was different from this guy that you knew—what’s his name, Gene? Jed?”

  “Geoff.”

  “Geoff,” agreed Paul. “She was very different. The sucking in was something I did myself. I played with an illusion. And much later I decided it wouldn’t work.”

  “Huh.” I waited, like I always did, to see if he would say more.

  “I was married, see, and she worked in the company. She was much younger, and very alive, very real. I worked with her. She had a lot of spunk, did everything—skiing, tennis, cycling, the whole bit. She was spunky at work, too. I liked her. She would stand up to people, not swallow what they said and hang her head. We did things together. Once we went camping—not by ourselves, of course—but with other people from the company. I spent a lot of time with her on that trip. She taught me about mushrooms. Not the kind you people take. Real mushrooms. I was always amazed at what she knew.”

  “Did Lorraine know you were with her?”

  “Well, it was a company trip, see, so it was okay. But I felt guilty anyway.”

  “How old was she?”

  “Oh, twenty-six, twenty-seven. I forget. She was young, though, and it would never have worked.”

  “You mean you thought about leaving Lorraine?”

  Paul was very uncomfortable. He kept hitching his shoulder in a way I had never seen, almost as though he were casting glances behind him. “Sure I thought about leaving her. Every man does. Everybody has fantasies, Leslie. Show me one person who doesn’t.”

  My mother, I thought. My mother had no fantasies. She just seemed like a person who was content, with whatever. She accepted my father like he was God’s gift, even when he did things that my brother and I couldn’t stand. If nothing else, it set a good example.

  “Anyway,” said Paul. “I stayed where I was. And then we moved here. Which changed everything around.”

  “How?”

  “Well, in little ways. The kids have their thing, Lorraine has her thing, and I have mine. I go to the beach after I run and just lie there, in the sun, and look at all the women.”

  I stared at him. “What?”

  “Yeah,” repeated Paul. “I look at the girls. Real pretty ones, too. It’s like a stage for me. I can act out the possibilities, but I’ll never go through with them. Know what I mean?”

  I shook my head. “No. I think that’s very weird.”

  “Men are like that, Leslie,” said Paul. “We play around. If we don’t play around in real life, we do it in our minds. Show me one guy who doesn’t.”

  I said nothing, staring for a long time through the window.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  The Principle of the Beast

  I kept the hatchback parked in the driveway and thumb-tacked a No Parking sign to the back gate. The driveway formed part of the yard at the back of the house, accessing an alley behind a strip of three-story condos overlooking the sea. Oceanliners, I call them. Kind of like some people—massive, unbudging, sort of forcing you to take a back seat. My driveway was steep, quaint and short—not exactly designed with driving in mind. The top was blocked from the alley by a splintering wooden gate; the bottom died next to three tenuous and crumbling wide brick steps. These were the reason I feared it so much: I tortured myself with fantasies of backing off the steps, the car scraping and banging along the brick.

  I heard a scuffle one night in the alley and woke the next morning to the shreddings of my No Parking sign on the asphalt and a Volkswagen bug squatting securely in the alley in front of my gate. Great, I thought. Now what. The new car was at the shop getting wired for an alarm. I called Muriel. There was no answer. I pressed Kevin’s doorbell. I needed a ride to work.

  The smell of coffee billowed warmly as he opened the door. He looked surprised to see me. He had just shaved, the skin on his face giving off that sheen that follows the sweep of a razor. He was glad to give me a ride. I waited while he glanced around his living room as though he might have missed a last-minute pen or sheet of paper he would need that day. He made room for me in the front seat of his car, moving the sports section of yesterday’s newspaper and an empty mug. I got in, my bare legs splayed strangely against the gray interior, as though they and their owner did not belong.

  “So, how’ve you been?” he asked.

  “Pretty crazy.” I told him about the Geoff affair and asked if he had any friends who might want to buy a car. He grunted sympathetically. It was also a diplomatic type of grunt—attentive, to show that he was listening; kind, to show that anyone might have been as dumb as I was with regard to Geoff, and marvelling, to show that the world was indeed full of people very different from himself and me.

  “So where is he now?” he asked.

  “Back with her, I guess.”

  “Huh,” grunted Kevin. The hand he laid on the gearshift briefly grazed my knee.

  “Well, it’s over.” His voice rose as he flicked his gaze to the rearview mirror. “I bet you’re glad.”

  I thought about what Kevin had said as I ran along the coast road that night. “I bet you’re glad. At least it’s over.” Cool salt air hung over the ice plants beneath a sky tinted pink where the sun had dipped behind the gray slate sheet of the ocean. It had been hard to run regularly for the past couple of weeks. Anger and fatigue had made me take to my bed, huddling in the covers as immobility descended with the thickening ink of the evening sky outside. I had been mad at Geoff, really mad. He had poisoned me, made me weak, taken away my runs. This was my first good workout in three or four days. I was now the antelope. I followed the dented guardrail, my feet repeating a tap-tap on the asphalt. Maybe this was letting go—the fact that I could run again. I stood under the hot water from the shower before I went to bed, letting it wash over me, turning around and around as it pelted the shower curtain and floor of the tub. The skin on my chest squeaked as I rubbed it. I was getting clean.

  A spread of dust-engulfed horses, frozen in a gallop, had been squeegied along the lobby of the Wells Fargo Bank. I stood at a ledge beneath the silent panorama, filling out my deposit slip. As usual, none of the pens worked. I was reaching for the pen at the far end of the ledge when he covered my eyes. The touch was cool and dry and clearly male.

  “Leslie.” The chuckle and aloha-tones gave it away. I turned. Geoff’s cool blue eyes danced an invitation.

  “Hi,” I said flatly.

  “So, we meet again.”

  I nodded, looking him over, like a metronome keeping time.

  “And how are you?” The smile pierced his face with a crisscross of wrinkles that settled back to smoothness in a flash.

&nbs
p; “I’m just fine.”

  It was Geoff’s turn to nod. “Great.” He studied me, the smile dancing gently. “How’s work?”

  “Fine.”

  We eyed each other. “I’ve been meaning to call you,” said Geoff.

  I watched him.

  “Cornelia’s back, as you know.”

  “So?” I kept my voice neutral.

  Geoff tilted his head slightly, as if to think. He set his fingers on the countertop and let them slide along its toneless edge. “She’s been very tired,” he said finally.

  “So?” I said again.

  “Well—” Geoff smiled. “That’s how she is. I thought you might like to know.”

  I shrugged. “I’m sure she’ll recover.”

  Geoff’s mouth played with something that seemed to be humor. “I’d like to keep the lines open,” he said, after a pause.

  “What lines?”

  “These. Between you and me.”

  I let out a snort. “Oh, no. You made your bed, remember? Now you can lie in it.”

  Geoff eyed me for a minute. Then he leaned forward. “The reason I was going to call you—” He lowered his voice.

  “What?” I demanded suspiciously.

  “There’s something I ought to tell you. Cornelia came back with an infection. We think she’s had it for a while. A doctor in Germany gave her some cream. If you should get the same infection—” he lowered his voice some more, “I can get the cream to you.”

  My jaw had dropped wide open. “Oh-h-h.” It came out in a sizzling hiss. I grabbed the checkbook he had set on the counter and winged it across the lobby.

  “Thank you,” said Geoff.

  I put my face very close to his. “You creep,” I hissed. I grabbed my wallet and ran out of the bank.

  I was shaking. He was mean, wicked. I drove my car to the Big Bear parking lot and sat in the front seat for a while with the engine off and the heat of the sun on my arms and lap. The fire walk. We were both, she and I, on the coals. I remembered what I had once asked Larry. It was a challenge about his women, finally, after weeks of cowardice, the question rolling in my head like a jump rope turning, waiting for a fraidycat like me to hop into the loops. Slap, slap. I like coffee, I like tea, I’d like to know if … Slap, slap. Come on, Leslie. You can do it. I like coffee, I like tea, I’d like to know if—“I want to know something, Larry,” I had finally blurted anxiously, rejection and refusal puffing like twin balloons inside me.