Shadow Traffic (17 page)

Back at the beach you force yourself to bodysurf for as long as you can—about twenty minutes—until you begin shivering again. Then you tell Andy that you just can't do it anymore, because you're too cold.

“You should have gotten a wetsuit like me, you have to admit that.”

“You're right. I definitely should have. I just couldn't believe it wouldn't be warmer than this in San Diego in July.”

You then promise to stay in the water and watch him jump waves for as long as he wants.

“Aren't you going to jump them with me, Face Wad?” he says, his blue eyes opening up wide behind his goggles.

“Maybe in a little while,” you say, and then assume your standing position, and block out the skimpily clad, frolicking women while fixing your eyes exclusively on Andy, who looks back at you for your invariable thumbs up after each wave he jumps or dives under.

But you can't control what happens in your mind as easily. You start thinking of Anna, who you used to take to the beach a lot, too. Odd that with a twelve-year-old son who, despite his prodigious intellect, is in certain ways socially much younger, you should have hooked up with a middle-aged German woman who didn't speak English very well and who was emotionally around twelve. Though, if you are really honest with yourself, you know you've done this before, that it's your own needs that
make you pursue childlike people, especially women, perhaps because you are childish yourself.

You remember the first time Andy and Anna met in your apartment in Philadelphia. He was deeply into making train setups then, with his Thomas the Tank Engine toys. You advised Anna to compliment his setup and, in general, to let him take the lead. Instead she started giving him unasked-for advice and then building a setup of her own, as if in direct competition with him. It set the tone for a lot of what followed for the next five years.

You remember trying to explain to her about Andy's shyness with other kids and the skeptical way she received the news, as if you were somehow trying to pull the wool over her eyes. She always felt you were too sympathetic and protective of him and not enough toward her. Meanwhile, when you talked to Andy about her, he said, “the only thing I don't like about Anna is you pay too much attention to her instead of me.”

You were caught in the middle but, of course, you put him first, which in turn ate away at Anna. She had her own daughter who she lived with and was very close to (though her daughter was a fully grown woman), but she still couldn't accept your feelings toward Andy and, like a couple of your other former girlfriends, resented the amount of money you gave to his mother and your friendly, albeit strictly platonic, relations with her.

For years Anna would bring up marriage with you, but she was spending less and less time with Andy. She always seemed to have a reason not to see him, though you made it clear you couldn't live with someone until they got along well enough with Andy to make him feel relaxed with them. You didn't expect her to love him, you said, but you did expect her to be his friend.

In spite of this, your feelings toward Anna somehow continued
to grow. Since you thought that if Anna really wanted to get married she'd start spending more time with Andy (and you didn't really care about marriage, yourself), you decided to accept the status quo and just let things ride. But Anna had other ideas and one day, while you were in bed, in her typically blunt style she told you that she'd met another man she was attracted to. A month later she told you that she'd slept with him. “You did not make me yours,” she said by way of explanation. “Instead, you do everything for your son.” And that ended that.

“Andy, Andy,” you yell into the wind as yet one more dinosaur-sized wave crashes over him, seems to swallow him, and then a few vertiginous seconds later releases him to the world again.

“Are you OK?”

“Face Wad, did you see me bodysurf that wave?”

You give him a thumbs up. You are shivering even more now but a half hour passes before you leave the beach.

“Pretty big waves today, huh?”

It's the woman from the hotel, the same one you were looking at in the water when you should have been watching Andy. You are both getting food at the dinner buffet table. She's wearing fairly tight black pants and a low-cut turquoise blouse.

“Bigger than I knew what to do with,” you say, turning to face her.

“I don't know about that. You looked like you really knew how to ride them. You seemed pretty fearless to me.”

You can't think of anything to say (it somehow doesn't seem appropriate to say thank you) and you actually feel yourself blushing. She compliments you again and you feel like you're
regressing to adolescence at a rapid rate. You check her face and see that she's smiling in what appears to be a genuine way, and also notice that despite her fairly extensive makeup she's a little older than you thought, which only makes her more obtainable and so more appealing to you.

“Was that your son I saw you with today?”

“Yes,” you say, looking at your empty table. “He's using the bathroom right now,” you add by way of explanation for his absence, which you realize is apt to be ten or even twenty minutes because whenever he has to go he takes a long time, “to make sure I get every little part of it out.”

“He's really adorable,” she says.

“He keeps me laughing.”

“I'll bet.”

You two continue moving along in the line, chatting a little more easily now as you tell her a bit about Andy. You each take salad, chicken, and fruit. She passes on the rolls and dessert; you don't. You can't help thinking of Anna, who was always trying to get you to eat healthy foods and to work out, neither of which you ever really did.

You wonder if you should make some kind of parting remark and then remember that she's sitting at the table next to you. You both arrive at your tables at about the same time, look up at each other and smile again. The two of you are only five feet apart.

“How long are you here for?” she says. She has a slender but attractive face framed by dark brown hair that falls to her shoulders. You realize she's being pretty aggressive but she's doing it in what you consider an understated way.

“Just three more days. What about yourself?”

“I'm kind of playing it by ear.”

“Oh?”

“Yah, my plans sort of got disrupted.”

“How so?”

“The gal I was traveling with met a guy here and sayonara— she just took off with him.”

“Really?”

“Yah, really. She said she was sorry but she knew that it was the real thing this time and had to do it. Love at first sight and all that. So I had to try to understand, you know? The thing is, she's already been divorced three times.”

The two of you share a short laugh while you check the hallway where the bathroom is, but there's no sign of Andy.

“That's really a shame, for you.”

“Hey,” she said, finishing her glass of wine. “All I can do is wish her the best, right? And just try to be philosophical about it.”

Immediately, a waitress springs up next to her to ask if she wants another drink. You're not surprised when she says she does. If you weren't with Andy this would be the ideal time to buy her and yourself a drink. Instead you look, again, at the hallway near the bathroom, waiting to see him, and turn down the waitress because you don't like to drink in front of Andy. It was something else Anna disapproved of because she loved getting high.

“My name's Janice,” she says, extending her hand.

“I'm Eric,” you say, shaking it slowly. You get the feeling that both of you are instinctively checking out the other's hands for wedding rings. At any rate, you don't see any on her.

“Is Andy your only child?”

“He's my one and only.”

“Is his mother here with you two?”

“No, his mother and I are divorced.”

“Oh, I'm sorry.”

“Don't be. It was long ago, before he was even born,” you say, wondering why you've revealed this hard-for-others-to-understand detail.

“So you've been a single parent his whole life?”

“Yes, I guess I have, and his mother has too. We split our time with him so he's always very well taken care of and very well loved.”

“I'm sure,” she says.

A strange look passes over her, more regretful than anything else.

“You're an unusual man,” she finally says. “I mean that in a good way.”

Her compliment gets to you (you always were a compliment junkie) and you feel yourself start to get excited. This would definitely be the moment when (if you were alone) you'd not only finish your own drink but also touch her some place that wasn't too tasteless, considering you're in public, but that definitely showed intent. Maybe briefly on her shoulder and possibly for a few seconds on her knee. Instead, you say thank you. You want to ask her if she has any children but think it too invasive a question. Besides, something tells you that she has an even sadder story to tell than the one she already has.

“I had a chance to have a child once,” she eventually says, “but my ex was a selfish man. He wanted all the attention for himself, so …”

“It never happened?”

“No, it never did.”

You two become quiet, she looks to be uncomfortably close to tears, and you think that once again, though you sensed it coming, you didn't act quickly enough to prevent a woman you
desire from becoming unhappy and instead uttered an ill-considered remark. It happened less often with Anna, who in some ways was pretty thick-skinned and laughed as a first reaction to almost everything, but it happened quite a bit with her predecessors. Typically you now can think of nothing to say to make things better. Instead, Janice changes the subject by asking if you've used the hotel pool yet.

“I saw it, yes. I love all the trees and flowers around it, but I didn't swim in it yet.”

“Oh, you have to! Of course it doesn't have any waves,” she says. “It might not be exciting enough for you.”

“Oh, no, Andy and I both love pools.”

“It's heated, too.”

“Sounds really nice.”

“It stays open till eleven at night, and it's lit up with these colored lights that really make it look kind of magical.”

“So obviously you've been swimming there?”

“Yeah, it's a nice way to end the day—gets rid of my stress, for a while.”

“I'll bet,” you say, turning toward her, and remembering how she looked in her bathing suit again.

“I was planning to go there tonight around nine thirty or ten. If you want to come, I'll be there.”

“Very tempting. If I can, I will,” you say, gesturing toward the bathroom as if to explain that because of Andy you're on a very short leash.

It's odd to pursue someone as you were pursuing Janice, in your mind at least, and then to retreat from them, as you did to a degree in the restaurant. You suppose that's a typical experience
of single parents of a certain age (and you are definitely of a “certain age”), but then it's odd to discover that you are typical in as many ways as you are. A number of years ago, after your divorce, when you were on four different online dating clubs and dating one woman after another and getting high and feeling sorry for yourself every night, you finally began to realize that there are people who can only love their family in a relatively selfless way, and then still others who can only love their children. These people “fall in love” all the time and go through all kinds of contortions to get it and keep it and all kinds of self-flagellation when it ends, but it's usually more lust and self-delusion than love. What was even more surprising was to learn that you are probably one of them. Though you don't want to be, your past record certainly seems to indicate it.

You are telling the story with Andy and he's running across the room or jumping up and down every minute or so from excitement. As fate would have it, the picture window in your room overlooks the pool, and after nine you get up from bed and sit in the chair, where you can see the swimmers because the pool lights are on, as Janice promised, and there is still light from the sun-streaked sky. Also, as promised, she appears in the same skimpy white suit she wore on Mission Beach. You even get to see her dive neatly into the pool, as if she's demonstrating how dexterous her body is. Once again you have trouble not watching her and begin to wonder if it would really be so wrong to leave Andy in the room for a half hour or so after you read to him and he falls asleep.