Shadow Traffic

by Richard Burgin

  “Of course,” I said, “I knew that.”

  “Ask me why this matters? Ask me why I’m talking about this to you now?”

  “Why?”

  “Because I just had the most fuckin’ beautiful day of my life with her and I don’t just mean sexually, bro. I mean beautiful. Yah, Maggie really touched my heart—really, truly, deep in my heart, and we’re both crazy in love man, it’s true.”

  “Wow, that’s great,” I said, trying to sound as earnest as possible and not remind him that his whole day had, of course, been completely created by drugs. I even wondered if he’d still feel any real enthusiasm for her a couple hours from now when more of his high would wear off.

  I remember talking easily with the dealer that day. We talked about the Celtics, about women, a little about politics, too, during which the dealer surprised me by saying, “I’m going to respect Obama, you know, because he’s our President and that’s what we should do.” We also talked about our families, he about his big one, me about my small.

  “I love all my brothers,” he said, “all my sisters, too. Love ’em to death.”

  There was a passion and a kind of laughter in his eyes when he said it and I knew it was true.

  “My father was a helluva guy. I only wish he were still alive.”

  I said I felt the same way about my parents and that I was lucky they were both in good health. I told him I only had one sister, who I sometimes heard from, who lived in a small country town in western Massachusetts. Sure enough the dealer had been there. “I love Massachusetts almost as much as Connecticut. I’ve traveled in Massachusetts a lot.” That remark led to a conversation about towns in Massachusetts where we’d both spent time, from Falmouth and West Harwichport in the Cape, to Lenox and Lee in the Berkshires.

  We talked about a lot of things that day and I didn’t mind not using the computer much, though it meant falling further behind at work. I remember wanting to tell him about Birdwoman and how I’d finally told her I liked her paintings and was planning maybe to try and buy one from her, but I didn’t. Just didn’t get around to talking about it, but I could have.

  Dash made a lot of calls on his cell later that day, all about his lawsuit over the gig in Missouri, but he kept his voice under control and he washed the dishes after his usual dinner of cheese ravioli. I was even going to suggest we fire one up and smoke together when he walked back into the living room and said, “I’m going to Maggie’s.”

  She has a place? I almost said.

  “I’ve been missing her real bad and I need to be there. Don’t wait up for me or anything. I’ll probably end up staying there.”

  “OK, bro,” I said.

  Dealers are probably the most vulnerable people on earth. I had trouble sleeping that night while I waited for Dash. Somewhere around 2 a.m. I realized he wasn’t coming back. Nor did he return the next two days. I tried to keep from worrying about him but I couldn’t help it, the way he threw himself at her, or at what he imagined her to be. He was like a child that way, always chasing his dream. Whether it was imagining he was a better ballplayer than he was or that Maggie was a better person than she was, a person with whom he would finally find love. It’s not like I didn’t do the same thing to a degree, but I already was thinking a lot less about my ex (who I now realized I no longer wanted back) and saw myself quitting drugs in the near future, whereas Dash was the type who would always “love” someone and never give up and so would need to take drugs forever.

  On the third day he came back in his old electric blue convertible to take his things. He was moving in with her. “I’ve never loved anyone like this,” he said.

  “How big is her place?” I asked.

  “We only need room for a bed,” he said, laughing. Then he told me a couple of dirty jokes—he never ran out of jokes. When he said goodbye, he said, “Don’t worry. I’ll see you at basketball and we’ll still take our trips together”—meaning to the electrician’s. “I’ll always be grateful, bro. Your decision that night saved my relationship with Maggie, probably our friendship too. You’re a wise man, Jeff.”

  It was the first time anyone had ever called me wise, and then he left. I returned to the silence of my condominium. I watched it get dark and it started to hurt. I thought how I’d let a dangerous person stay at my home, but it turned out that after he left it felt more dangerous than before. Then I thought about going upstairs to visit Birdwoman but didn’t have the will. I was gonna take a ’lude but I didn’t want to wait thirty minutes for the high so I smoked a joint instead, put on TV, ate my food, fell asleep. My usual pattern. Only I didn’t sleep for very long. I had a crazy dream that I had a different body. It was me but I was taller and stronger and strode around the playground like a giant. I saw the dealer shooting baskets at the other end of the court and began walking toward him wanting to see if I was as tall as him, when I woke up.

  For the longest time (though it was probably only a minute or two of marijuana time) I couldn’t shake the feeling that my body really had changed. It made me sad and happy at the same time as if I’d finally found the reason for my life being the way it was. I thought about seeing Birdwoman but worried I might scare her to death if she saw me in my new body. Anyway, she wasn’t someone I could talk to about it, but Dash was. It’s strange what you end up missing about people. You could talk to Dash about almost anything. I’ll give him that.

  Memorial Day

  There’s a lot to admire about Grandfather Pool. Even though he’s close to a hundred and moves very slowly, he walks by himself—doesn’t even use a walker. And even though his skin hangs on him like paper, you can see the outline of an excellent physique underneath. It’s as if his bones were playing hide-and-seek and temporarily chose a semitransparent place to hide. Still, I admit, I’d rather not get too near him (he’s not my grandfather, after all). I don’t want to listen to him in the hot tub, where we were both headed until I saw him, if he should try to talk to me as he has before. He likes to talk a lot when he gets the chance, as old people do, and old-man talk makes me uncomfortable and sometimes sad.

  It’s odd how as men get older they slowly become more like women. The only man I know who handled his age really well was my father. He used to take me to this pool all the time, especially on weekends and holidays when I was around nine or ten (including a number of Memorial Days, which it is again today), until I thought I’d outgrown it, fool that I was.

  I was addicted to the slide then. I liked the Lazy River and the whirlpool, but I spent half my time on the water slide. I loved it when he went on the slide with me, but when he got tired he’d still stand in the water and watch me every time I slid down. He said I always arrived with a smile.

  Just as Grandfather Pool finally gets settled in the tub, I see a group of three men with walkers moving toward the kids’ pool, of all places, slowly and stealthily as if returning to the scene of their crime. I guess it makes sense because at the entrance to the kids’ pool the water’s only a few inches deep and they couldn’t handle anything much deeper. I notice they’ve got a lifeguard helping them walk and kind of sealing them off from the general public. The lifeguard is really ripped. He’s got lots of muscles, but his face is almost comically blank and completely disinterested in what he has to do. When you’re that young you live half in the present, half in the future, generally speaking. You can’t imagine the way the past invades the present when you get older any more than you can imagine a world without sex.

  My father was a monogamous man. You could say he was the product of a different era when it was easier or more expected to be a faithful husband than it is today, but he was honest in other ways as well. When my mother got sick for a number of years, he took exemplary care of her, never missed a beat. Of course such behavior meant the premature death of his sex life, but that was never a consideration for him. I doubt it was ever more than a fleeting thought. He was honest in his business, too. I worked for him, so I know. I wish I’d never left his busine
ss, but thought I’d outgrown that, too. (The song “Young and Foolish” didn’t come from nothing.) Still, of all his forms of honesty, I’m most impressed by his lifelong fidelity—especially to a woman as difficult as my mother could sometimes be. He set too high a standard for me there. I knew even as a fairly young child, or certainly by my mid-teens, that I could never live up to it. Of course, once realized, I went a bit more than I needed to in the other direction and learned to say whatever I had to say to get women to go to bed with me since that was the way of the rest of the world, as I understood it.

  It was a great shock when my father died nearly thirty years ago. It would have been a shock no matter how he died, even if it were from a slow-acting cancer. Still, it was a special kind of shock his having a fatal heart attack when he was only fifty-seven, not too far from the age I am now. As an orphan and only child (my mother had died six years earlier), I inherited a bit of money. I should have invested it or saved it or some ingenious combination of the two. Instead I traveled. I wanted to flee the country, especially the middle of it where I lived, in St. Louis, yet I also feared traveling (though my father had taken me to Europe as a child, then later as a teenager). I panicked at the thought of living among people whose language I couldn’t speak. As a compromise, I went to London.

  It was undoubtedly too soon after his death to travel such a great distance. A part of me knew this. Although I had no siblings or lover of any consequence at the time, I did have a friend or two, especially Phil, who warned me about my trip to London; yet I turned a deaf ear. I was determined to go there, so I made arrangements quickly, even paying in advance for the first week at my hotel in Princes Square. In an effort to divert myself, I went to the usual tourist attractions and was by no means disappointed. Not by the attractions themselves, that is, which were pretty much what they were cracked up to be. But the routine of the ubiquitous guided tours and especially the commercialization of it all began to irritate me. I remember it bothered me in particular that you had to pay to visit the so-called holy West-minster Abbey. It also bothered me that all these places had gift or snack shops attached to them, like mosquitoes to skin.

  No doubt, my father’s recent death contributed a little to my bitter reaction. I soon stopped going to the tourist attractions and began just walking around Hyde Park in the daytime and then at night getting pretty soused at one of the local pubs on Queensway before returning to my hotel room to sleep it off. It was on one of my evening trips to a pub that a quite attractive, if slightly waifish, young woman approached me with a troubled look on her face. She was a little shorter than average, with very white skin and dark shoulder-length hair, and wore a flower print dress that hid her figure more than revealing it.

  Not really hearing what she first said to me, in part because she spoke with an accent, in part because she spoke quickly, I assumed she wanted money (everyone else did), so I fished out the change in my pocket and gave her a couple of pounds. Her troubled look quickly turned ironic.

  “This man just gave me money, he thinks I want money,” she said, addressing the empty space around her, as far as I could see.

  “I’m sorry I misunderstood,” I said, walking toward her. But she was walking away from me now with my money in her hand.

  “Oh, I guess you do need the money, after all,” I said, laughing a little now myself.

  “No, I don’t want your money,” she said, turning and walking after me and soon giving me a different combination of coins of her own.

  “I’m sorry. I guess I didn’t hear you before. What did you want?”

  “I asked you if you knew where the Spiritual Church is?”

  “No, I’m sorry, I’m not from around here,” I said, once more walking slowly away.

  “I probably gave you more money back than you gave me,” she noted.

  That stopped me in my tracks, made me turn and walk back to her again.

  “Obviously neither of us works in a bank. Why don’t you let me buy you something to eat or at least a drink,” I said, surprised by my sudden invitation as I pointed to the pub across the street. “My name’s Gerry.”

  She uttered some pleasantry in return, but I could see she was nervous. She had one of those transparent faces that clearly revealed when she was thinking something over, as she was then, registering all the pros and cons of accepting my invitation.

  “I was trying to get to the church, but I’ve only been there once before and now I’ve lost my way and no one seems to know where it is. I suppose I’ll miss the service anyway by now. My name’s Paulette,” she said, extending her delicate white hand to shake.

  “If I go to a pub with you, will you expect me to have an alcoholic drink?” she asked a moment later.

  “I won’t have any expectations one way or another. It’s just a place where we could talk,” I said, rather smoothly, I thought, again to my surprise. A car approached us then, which finally convinced her to get off the street, fortunately on the same sidewalk that I’d chosen.

  “Is this something you do quite often?” she said.

  “What?”

  “Ask women you’ve just met to go to pubs with you?”

  “No, I don’t have a pattern. Why do women always assume that men have a pattern?”

  “They do, you know, behave in patterns. It’s merely a question of when the woman is able to unearth it.”

  “You make it sound like women are all archaeologists. Is there some kind of school where they get their training, I hope?”

  Finally she laughed.

  “OK, then, since you’ve made me laugh I suppose I can go to your pub with you.”

  “Fine,” I said, wondering myself why her decision pleased me to the extent it did.

  Once in the pub my veneer of self-confidence didn’t last long. There are so many awkward things involved when you eat a meal with someone you’ve just met. I think Paulette felt the same thing. She became quiet most of the time, then laughed excessively at others. I quickly had two drinks, and before I was halfway through the first she changed her mind and had a beer herself.

  I’d been drinking almost every night since my father died and hoped I wouldn’t start in about him and end up losing it. But I needn’t have worried because Paulette soon began talking about the man who’d just left her.

  “It wasn’t just the time I lost,” she said, her earnest dark eyes tearing up, “I’m young enough to have more of that. It was what he did to my trust that I’ll never get over, I don’t think, what he did to my heart.”

  That made me think of my father, for some reason, and I struggled to keep my own emotions under control. “Do you want to tell me what happened?” I said, hoping for a variety of reasons that she wouldn’t.

  “Men don’t like to hear those things.”

  True enough, I thought, thinking I was temporarily off the hook. Of course, I pretended to want to know, realizing I was already starting to like her.

  “He betrayed me is what it amounts to. He left me for another bird. The details don’t really matter, do they?”

  I nodded quickly to acknowledge her point.

  “I’m sorry it happened to you,” I said, wondering if she’d been drinking herself through her crisis, too.

  “That’s why I’ve started going to this new church I’d heard about, I suppose, to help me get through it …”

  “The Spiritual Church,” I said, quasi-embarrassed to pronounce its absurd-sounding name.

  “It’s not as daft as it may sound. It’s a very liberal, modern church. Its members all share their different stories with each other. It was very comforting the first night I went, but somehow I got lost tonight and couldn’t find it.”

  “I’m sorry I thought you wanted money.”

  “Am I really that shabbily dressed?”

  “Not at all,” I said, before I realized she was joking.

  The rest of the dinner went more smoothly. We talked about the usual things—movies, the Beatles (who everyone still talked abo
ut then), our families, a bit about our jobs. I told her that my plans were uncertain as to how long I’d stay in London, which I rationalized could be technically true. I just didn’t add that my return ticket to St. Louis was in five days and that there was no chance I wouldn’t take it, as I had to get back to my job.

  She asked me about the States, of course, and why it was I was considering not returning. It was in that context that I told her my father had recently died and saw the same look in her liquid eyes she had when she told me the story of her lover’s betrayal.

  Shortly after that we left the restaurant. She lived only ten minutes or so from my hotel, but the last few blocks were walked in silence. Finally I said, “Is there any way I can see you tomorrow?”

  “Really?”

  “Yes, really.”

  “You think we’re well suited for each other, then?”

  “I think I’m going to miss you after you go,” I blurted, which was about as much as I’d ever said to any woman, being the cool, intentionally detached, idiotic type I was then.

  “All right, if you really think so. I feel I was such a burden to you all night going on and on about my problems.”

  I assured her she wasn’t.

  She smiled, with a trace of a blush. “Well, then, can you come by tomorrow around seven?” she asked, very softly.

  I was surprised how much I thought of her the next day. I figured it was because I hadn’t had sex since my father died but sensed I liked her, too. Either way, waiting was a part of the seduction process I had little patience for in my twenties, though not succeeding at all would be still worse, of course. With Paulette I sensed I’d have to wait to succeed, although I couldn’t wait too long since I had to fly back to the States in five days.

  Instead of a pub, we met at a Japanese restaurant on Queen-sway Road. She’d dressed up more this time, wearing a conservative navy blue dress that screamed priggishness. It looked like a flight attendant’s uniform, I thought, or something a middle-aged librarian from St. Louis would wear. Meanwhile, I was dressed all in black, which I thought was cool at the time, though I now see I must have looked like a priest or a funeral home director.