Shadow Man: A Novel (15 page)

“I gotta git,” she said. “I can’t leave my uncle alone too long.”

Alice stood; her top perfect, covering what moments ago had rubbed against me, elusive in the tide.

“I love it out there, don’t you?” she said. “My daddy used to take my brother and me out in a boat, out farther then we were, and he’d make us dive in and swim to shore. He said, ‘If you live on the water, you can’t be scared of it.’ It’s the place I go when I want quiet and peace. Like a big watery church.”

“I’m not such a good swimmer.”

“You’re a good floater.” She laughed. “Like a piece of driftwood.”

We stood looking at the waves. The air was cool.

“It must be nice here in a storm.”

“That’s the best time,” she said. “The beach turns to gray, and the water is a pretty green, like a kind of precious stone, and the white of the waves is so bright they seem lit with electricity. It’s like the ocean is cleansing itself. ‘Angry and crashing.’ That’s what my daddy says. Which means it’s time to nail up the plywood on the hotel window and drive inland to stay at my aunt’s until it all blows out.

“How many more nights you staying?” she added. “The ledger says you’re checking out day after tomorrow.”

“I don’t know. My dad hasn’t told me.”

“Maybe I’ll come by later with some towels.”

Alice winked. A shiny wink mixed with water and late sunlight. She kissed me on the forehead and walked up the beach, the wind
lifting her wet hair, loose strands of it drying and making a haze around her like a gentle snowfall. I smiled, still thinking about her breasts. I didn’t smile in the way that I had stolen something and gotten away with it; it was a smile, a feeling really, of being given something unexpectedly and not knowing if it would be given again. I imagined that’s what loving a woman must be like, at least partly, waiting to be given things you most cherished, without asking and without knowing when they would be offered. I turned and looked. Kurt was sitting next to Vera, real close, elbows touching elbows. They both had their chins on their knees. I went to the boardwalk and ordered french fries from a guy in a shack with a window counter facing the ocean. I spoke through a screen; it was like sieving sins in a confessional. I couldn’t see the man. I only heard his voice, saw his puffy hands, moving fast, flipping burgers, scooping pickle slices, spearing buns with toothpicks. I didn’t know why he was working so fast. There was no line.

“Next,” he said.

“There’s no one else here.”

“Did you order?”

“French fries.”

“What time is it?”

“Late afternoon.”

“And no one’s behind you?”

“Nope.”

“Huh.”

He slid open the screen and stuck his head out, looked left and right.

“Huh,” he said.

His face matched his hands, puffy, sweaty, and pinkish. He stepped out of the shack and came around from the side with my basket of french fries and a napkin. He wore a T-shirt, black-and-white-checkered pants, and an apron that once was white but had
turned to a color I couldn’t quite describe, maybe the color of cooling grease on a griddle, lardy, like schoolhouse paste. He was balding, but covered it with a comb-over of long black threads that curved around his forehead and whooshed back. Those threads looked miles long. His forearms were tattooed with mermaids.

“Catsup?”

“No thanks.”

“I salted ’em pretty good. Buck twenty-five.”

I pulled quarters from my damp pocket. The man studied the boardwalk.

“Maybe bad weather’s coming, but it don’t look like that. The sky’s clear. Maybe there’s a carnival. I hate ’em. Steal my business, bring in the riffraff. I’m usually busy this time of day. But it’s all a mystery isn’t it? Live here or vacation?”

“A trip.”

“A trip? I suppose a trip is different than a vacation.”

“Were you in the navy?”

“My girls give me away.”

“My dad paints navy ships in Philly.”

“I was in for twenty. Couldn’t make chief and got out. Got these luvvies in the Philippines.”

“You sailed all over the world?”

“Mostly the back side of it.”

He checked his watch; studied the boardwalk some more.

“I can’t figure this out. Been here five summers.”

“A fluke. Unfathomable.”

“Jesus, kid, cut it out. Eat your fries.”

He smoked a cigarette in quiet.

“I’m going home. You want a hamburger? I made a dozen of ’em. It’s on the house.”

He went inside and slid a burger through the screen. I heard whistling and banging and pots clattering, the scrape of a spatula. He
came back out with the apron in his hands and wearing a Hawaiian shirt with orange and blue flowers; the colors against the pants were alarming. He smelled of witch hazel.

“I’m off, kid. Clock-punched. Taking these ladies on the town.” He lifted his arms. “Happiness on this one. Despair here. They look alike — twins, even —but they’re different. See the faces?”

They were the same, except for their lips; curled up in one, curled down in the other.

“Isn’t is amazing?” he said. “Just that slight difference changes everything. It’s art. Like those masks of the ancient Greeks.”

He walked away, apron string tailing behind, gulls flocking in the air around him.

That night I sat in Room 503. I waited for Alice to bring me towels. I watched the late news. High pressure hovered south and far away, no hurricane on the horizon, but possibly an eye was forming below Cuba. The weatherman would keep watch. I carved my name in a tiny bar of hotel soap; I turned the TV channels, sat on the bed, hummed “Helter Skelter,” made muscles in the mirror, checked my tan face, so brown it made my teeth white as poured milk. I opened the dictionary to boredom and followed where it led. I threw the book aside; thought about Nut Johnson; thought about Kurt’s forehand; thought about things that flashed in my mind for a second and disappeared, too brief to be cataloged; thought about Alice and cool, wet kisses in the sea, and it felt good to be expecting something, a knock on the door, a girl with towels, a Baptist with beautiful breasts I hadn’t seen but had felt against me in the water’s chill. I thought about the maps in Vera’s purse; thought about votive candles in vestibules in winter, snow falling outside, cold, stained glass, purple, magenta, brightening amber; thought about the night, the black night beyond the waves, beyond the trawlers and freighters to continents in sunlight; thought about the world spinning, Galileo, the bones of saints, Black Sabbath, cartoons,
Leave It to Beaver
(what
a dork); thought about Kurt hanging on a rope, the paint dripping in the water, coloring the fish; thought about tomorrow and how long it was going to take to get here.

A knock.

I swallowed, looked through the peephole. The bellboy uncle.

“Girl at the desk said you needed these.”

He handed me two towels, turned, and walked down the hall, stutter-stepping, his shoulders slumped. The elevator opened. I heard a bit of the Beach Boys, then the elevator doors closed and the gimpy uncle descended to other tasks. I smiled. Girls were funny. I put the towels on the dresser and tiptoed to Room 501. I turned the doorknob and peeked in. Kurt and Vera were sleeping, a white sheet tangled between them. The hall light came through the crack in the door and shone on Vera’s face. Her eyes opened, staring at me and then at the gun on the nightstand.

“I don’t suppose you remember the lemons of Sorrento, James.”

“No.”

“Bigger than a man’s fist. They grow along the cliffs on the sea beneath Vesuvius.”

“I don’t recall seeing them, but I think Vera may have mentioned them once.”

“The lemons there grow huge. Centuries of volcanic ash have made the soil strangely fertile. You loved them.”

“I was there?”

“Yes, we ate salted meat and drank limoncello. Limoncello was your favorite. The taste is strong — can you remember the taste? The lemon scent fills your nose and the alcohol warms your tongue and seeps to your chest.”

“Where are we?”

“The Jersey Shore.”

“How long has it been dark?”

“It’s just after sunset.”

“The tide is moving.”

“Like a carpet reeled out to sea. But you don’t remember that, either?”

“No.”

“A Turk told us that many years ago in Cyprus.”

“I don’t recall.”

“We’ll stay one more night?”

“Yes. I like it here. I like the ocean.”

“We need more wine, James. We’ve drunk our Vranac.”

A heavyset man wearing a ball cap and carrying two fishing poles and a tin bucket walks up the steps from the beach to the boardwalk. A woman follows, hauling two folding chairs. The man leans the poles on the railing and sets the bucket down. He squats and reaches into the bucket, pulling up a fish, a black ripple flapping in moonlight. It is fighting, but the tail fin wearies and the slap, slap grows fainter against the railing wood. The couple speaks, but I can’t make out the words, only snatches of syllables when the wind shifts. They lay the fish on the railing and the man takes out a knife and guts it, the head falling into the sand, the belly slit. He cuts a piece and hands it to the woman, then one for himself. I smell garlic and other scents mixing in with the sand and salt. Gulls skim through the cone of boardwalk light, dipping toward the man and the woman, but then slicing into the black sky.

“I never could eat raw fish, James. But you like sushi.”

“I smell garlic.”

“Yes, and I think they’re drinking vodka. They’re speaking Russian. Can you hear?”

“What are they saying?”

“I’ll whisper to you. I can’t catch everything, but they’re talking about fishing back home; it must be Russia, but I don’t know where, and how much bigger the fish are, how much more they fight. The man says drink more vodka. The woman says she misses their son.”

The woman kisses the man.

“He’s in the army. Chechnya. The man says it’s what the boy wanted, to stay in Russia and not move here with them. The woman says she wants to go back. It’s not working here. The man says it takes time. The woman says there is never enough. The man says they’ll get used to scrawny, timid fish.”

The woman laughs. She puts her hand up to the man’s cheek; her hand is white, fluttery in the moonlight. The man leans down and kisses her on the forehead. They sip vodka until the man grabs the
bucket and poles and the couple walks away. The gulls descend on the railing, picking at the cut-open fish, flying away and eating bits of flesh atop the boardwalk lights.

“It’s cold, James. Let’s go.”

The lady stands and takes my hand. My left foot is numb, but the tingle goes away as we walk. I don’t know where we’re going; I know this is the ocean and that the lady has a warm hand. I know my language. The lady tells me she is my wife. Eva. Have I heard this before? It seems I have, but I stop and look at her, a breeze blowing her dark hair across her face, the moon hardening, its light distinct. The lady is a white face aglow in the night. I look into her eyes and she puts a hand to my face and rubs my cheek as if I am an ancient lamp holding a genie. Why do I know about genies and not this woman? I can see in her eyes that she wants me to know. There’s desperation in her eyes, not frantic, but worn.

“James?”

“Yes.”

“I am Eva.”

It’s like a line from the Bible. Declarative, unadorned. But it registers nothing, except that she is here and, perhaps, I should believe her.

“I know only one part of my life,” I say.

“I know of that summer, James. But your life is more, decades more. I don’t want to talk about Kurt and Vera. There is so much more, James. You need to find it.”

She takes her hand from my face. We turn and walk.

“I keep telling you stories. I am your memory. Your book. I have collected all of you so you’re not forgotten. So
we’re
not forgotten. There are two people involved; that’s what the doctors don’t understand. They’re fascinated by you. How a young mind, a relatively young mind has become defective — they use the words defective and depleted as if you’re a part in an engine or an isotope of
uranium — twenty years earlier than it should be. Atrophies, thinning vessels, they describe your mind this way. They chart this. You are their experiment. I am just a lady at the edge of the couch. They bring me coffee and ask me questions, but it’s only to humor me. They remind me of the bureaucrats in communist Poland.”

“Poland?”

“Yes, James. My long-ago home.”

“Where do you live now?”

“New York. In our apartment on the river.”

“Do I live there?”

“No. You live somewhere else.”

“A hospital?”

“A kind of hospital. Let me tell you another story. About us. We have so many stories, James.”

The lady slows her step. She takes my hand again. We are alone on the boardwalk. There’s a light in a diner, and past there, down an alley, a streetlight changes from red to green. Cars move, but not many; a man reads in a hotel lobby; the stained glass in a church glows in purple and deep red; a curtain in a home is drawn; nobody is on the boardwalk but the lady and me, walking in lights that seem bright puddles in the darkness. The lady’s hand is warm.

“A story, a story, let me tell James a story.”

She laughs. I am not a child.

“Don’t be mad, James. I’m just kidding.”

We stop at the edge of the light and lean on the boardwalk railing, the sea nearly invisible in the night.

“Budapest, James. A bar on the hill, just across the river from the Parliament. You know the one, like a pop-up in a story book. It was cold. A little snow that night as I remember. We had finished our interview. I think we were working on a story about what happened to old Soviet scientists. Those slippery creatures. We found a bar. It was hot inside. The windows were filled with steam and the place
reeked of communist tobacco. Sweaters and coats strewn about and crowded with sweaty faces and arms, and then we heard it, the saxophone. Not playing Hungarian folk music, but jazz. Remember? You said, ‘Who is that?’ We pushed to the front. There was no stage, just a man with a saxophone playing near an upright piano.