Shadow Traffic

by Richard Burgin

  “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.

  The problem is he’s highly ritualistic about sleep, and the earliest you could expect him to sleep would be an hour from now. Could you be an hour late for a woman like Janice and still expect her to be there? Maybe Andy could let you go for ten minutes, during which you would explain to her that you’d be free later, when you’d either meet her in the pool or else buy her a drink at one of the hotel bars? Still another possibility would be to bring Andy with you, ignore the look of disappointment on Janice’s face, a look you’d seen before from Anna and some of her predecessors, and tell her at the first opportunity that you’ll be back alone later after he goes to sleep. Of course that would involve talking Andy into going to the pool when he’d be ecstatically in the middle of one of his stories.

  “Which do you think will be a more successful spin-off from Fi Do Do, the Wonder Dog?” Andy suddenly asks with great earnestness, “Aqua-Dog or London Mutt?”

  “Aqua-Dog is aimed more at the six-to-eleven demographic,” you say, “London Mutt at a slightly older audience, with the hope that it can jump from the Saturday morning super-dog shows to an early prime time show.”

  “But which will be more successful within its demographic, Face Wad?”

  You smile. He wants his answers precise. “London Mutt,” you answer.

  “Yuh, I think so too,” he says, before beginning another series of runs up and down the room.

  You know now that there will be many more questions before he’ll let the story go for the night and ask you to read to him. Still, in spite of all this, you can’t help looking out the window at the pool every thirty seconds or so, where Janice is still swimming.

  “What are you looking at, Dad?” Andy says during one of your viewings, which you try to sneak in whenever he starts jumping or running.

  “The pool. It’s still open and people are swimming in it. It looks really cool. Wanna see?”

  “Sure,” he says, standing in front of you now to get a better view. “Cool” is his one-word verdict.

  “Hey, you wanna go swimming there now?” you say enthusiastically. “It might be really fun.”

  “No, I’m OK.”

  “Oh, OK,” you say, trying not to show your disappointment and finally getting up from your window seat and sitting on his bed. You know your fate is sea
led now. You know that he will ask you one question after another until his reading time, and for a while he does. But then something you didn’t foresee happens. A half-hour before his normal reading time, he “hits the wall,” as it were, and lies down on his bed. Then, within five minutes of reading to him, he’s deeply asleep. Miraculously it’s only 10:30. You tiptoe to the window and see that Janice is still in the pool, sitting in the Jacuzzi. You could leave Andy a note (for months he’s been begging you to leave him alone more anyway, and you’d be within his view the whole time) and join Janice in the hot tub. You look at her once more and get the feeling that she’s perfectly built for you and you start to get erect again. Your bathing suit is on top of a chair about five feet from you and you can’t help imagining swimming with her. First, laughing with her in the water, then buying her a drink at the poolside bar and sipping it after you dry off at one of the candlelit tables by the pool. She tells you more of her story then. You listen to it effortlessly and give her sympathy and support. It was terrible how her friend abandoned her, you say, terrible also how her husband treated her. You feel her loneliness as you feel your own. She sees that, and doesn’t want to be apart from you now. She takes your forty-five-year-old high school English teacher’s face in her hands and kisses it for a long time.

  Back in the present, you get up and take your bathing suit from the chair. It’s a little damp but it will do. Andy will never know any of this, and you can leave notes all over the room for him if he wakes up. You can even lay his bathing suit and goggles out for him so he could join you. It’s now merely a question of finding a shirt that you won’t be too cold in and start to shiver while you have your drink with her but also one that won’t make you too warm, either. You certainly don’t want to start perspiring at a table while you sit at the pool bar waiting to make your move.

  Suddenly you remember a night when you were six or seven years old and you couldn’t get to sleep because you were either too hot with the blankets pulled up to the base of your neck, or too cold when you took them off. You must have told your father about your trouble sleeping after he said goodnight to you, or else he came in to check on you on his own. “Let’s try this,” he said, as he first lowered the blankets and then raised them up to your shoulders, stopping to rest for a few seconds at each place where the blankets landed before resuming the process, back and forth, back and forth, like the rhythm of a gentle ocean, until you finally fell asleep.

  You look at Andy and wonder again how the jumble of adult and childish things inside him will turn out. You hope he will find friends, you hope for many things. Yet his face looks so composed it almost hypnotizes you. Then you drop your bathing suit on the floor (where you know it will stay) and move closer to his bed to see him more clearly.

  What a private and paradoxical thing sleep is. So private that everyone does it in their own way, yet while you do it alone you also want company or at least some potential company nearby because you don’t know what your dreams will bring or whether you’ll be cold or too hot later on, you think with a smile. You feel a great clearing in your head then while you watch him.

  It’s strange how you learn things so slowly, but you love it anyway.

  The Dolphin

  It was really just a smile he saw for a split second, but it made Parker stop walking and go back to her. She was a young black woman in a cheap but pretty purple dress. When he stood in front of her, she smiled again.

  It didn’t take much after that. In less than a minute they were walking together—money hadn’t even been discussed. Then he looked at her more closely and noticed that one of her front teeth was chipped, but she was still beautiful, he thought. They walked another block together, talking easily while he kept looking for a cab because he wanted to get out of this part of Boston called the Combat Zone as soon as possible. He couldn’t wait to get her to his apartment, couldn’t remember ever feeling this eager in a situation like this, and his eagerness made him talk more than usual.

  Then halfway down the next block he suddenly knew. He turned to look at her once more and said, “Wait a minute, are you really a man?”

  Her smile had a tinge of sadness now.

  “Only in one place,” she said.

  “I didn’t know. I’m sorry. I’m not interested then.”

  He walked away quickly, afraid to look back. He was stunned. How could he not tell a man from a woman after all these years? Why did it take him so long to find out this time? To think that because of his illusion he’d come so close to taking her home and yet, at the last minute it was as if he’d known all along.

  Parker was sitting in a bar where they sometimes had music and strippers. It was called The Dolphin, but he couldn’t see even one image of a dolphin anywhere. He realized he was still upset and ordered a whiskey sour, which he drank moments after it arrived, then ordered another. At such times he often fell into a state of repetitious thinking—what he called a “thought loop”—which was very difficult to stop. He hoped he could head this one off by drinking but it was too late, he was already in another loop.

  He was thinking how often he’d been deceived in his life (sometimes, of course, contributing to it himself). Even as a child he was confused, far longer than he should have been, about the sun and moon. He used to think the moon was just how the sun looked at night—that they were two words for the same thing. For a long time he’d also never really believed that the earth was orbiting in space. He knew it “intellectually” but never felt it to be true. The world tricks us, Parker thought. Maybe that’s why people trick each other so much.

  A moment later a thirtyish man (around his age) sat next to him. He was wearing a black leather jacket, dark sunglasses, and was slightly unshaven, which accentuated his overall menacing appearance. Dear God, Parker said to himself, don’t let there be a conversation.

  At first there was a minute or so of silence, then the man asked him if the dancer had performed yet.

  “No,” Parker said. “I’ve only been here ten or fifteen minutes but no dancer yet.”

  He’d answered clearly while avoiding eye contact—the best of both worlds under the circumstances, he thought, though if the man really wanted to talk the window of opportunity was still there.

  “Came here to see a dancer,” the man said. “Her name’s Trudy. You know her?”

  “No, I don’t know any of the dancers. I’ve never been here before, or maybe just once years ago.”

  Parker looked at the man, noticed he seemed somewhat reassured, at any rate down a notch of intensity. The next thing he knew, the man was extending his hand.

  “My name’s Nick,” he said, as they shook. It was a strong, overbearing handshake, clearly meant to send a message about his masculinity and strength, Parker thought.

  “Why you happen to come here?” Nick said.

  “No reason. I was just walking, not feeling too great, saw this place and thought I’d try to feel better.”

  “You probably could have made a better choice, but, hell, you’re here now so drink up.”

  “I have been.”

  “Not enough, I can tell. Bartender, bring this man another on me.”

  Parker’s heart sank—there would be a price to pay for this, he knew. He would have to talk more and on a night when he was feeling both desperate and ineffectual, without a clue of what to do about it.

  “So you sure you don’t know Trudy?”

  “Yah, I’m sure.”

  “Maybe you know her under a different name. She uses as many names as the number of men she’s screwed.” Parker laughed a little. “Seriously, I think everyone who did her knows her by a different name so I’ll tell you what she looks like. Long brown hair that she wears in a lot of different styles so she can look like different people if she wants to. She thinks that makes her more interesting. But when she combs it out right after a shower it goes down to her belly button. She has brown eyes too, the same color as her hair. Nice eyes, really nice, but she thinks they s
hould be bigger. You know how all these bitches in the movies make their tits and lips bigger? Trudy has a device that makes her eyes look bigger. Didn’t even know about it or suspect a thing till she told me herself. Still don’t understand how they work. You ever know one who did that to her eyes?”

  “No, I don’t think so.”

  “Yah, she’s one of a kind. Anyway, you’ll see her body soon enough. It’s good, real good—not a pound of fat on her. She works out and diets all the time, like an athlete or something. She’s very ambitious that way. She wants to be the top stripper in Boston, then go to New York and get discovered. Thinks she can wind up in the movies that way. ‘Look at Anna Nicole,’ she’ll say. ‘Look at Tracy Lords.’ I’d say, ‘They were whores, Trudy,’ and she’ll say, ‘Oh,’ kind of tonelessly, as if to say ‘and the problem with that is?’ or else she’ll just say nothing.

  “Yah, she wants to be the city’s number one stripper, works on her dance moves all the time. Has to have the best moves too. She’ll fuck anyone—man, woman, in between—just cause they could show her something new to do with her pole, you know? Or help her get a better gig somewhere. Yah, she’s real ambitious in a twisted way, I’ll give her that. So you probably wonder why she’s dancing in a dump like this?”

  Parker shrugged. He’d been wondering why Nick was wearing his sunglasses in a dark place like The Dolphin, but it was slowly beginning to make sense, for some reason, the more he talked.

  “She’d say it’s ’cause her tits need to be bigger and she needs another operation. I say it’s ’cause she takes too many drugs and the wrong ones too, like crack. These club owners aren’t dummies. They don’t want to hire a crack addict who’s apt to cross the line with the customers or with an undercover cop. I tried to tell her all of this. I tried, but guess who won the argument, and guess who ended up paying for her new tits, which are plenty big enough now, believe me.”

  Parker made what he hoped was an empathetic sound. He wanted to say, “That’s harsh” or “That’s cold man” but was afraid it might sound too flip and only aggravate Nick. He could tell Nick had a short fuse.