Shadow Traffic

by Richard Burgin

  “You went?”

  “Absolutely.”

  “It never occurred to me that you’d go.”

  “The fortieth reunion, how could I resist? You know I always suffered from terminal nostalgia.”

  More like terminal narcissism, Summers thought. Of course Pike would go. How could he resist all the adulation from his fawning classmates, especially since he was such an inconspicuous, sometimes bullied, student back in high school.

  “If I’d known you were coming I would have gone,” Summers said, averting his eyes slightly. “So what’s it like to see the old group?”

  “Surprisingly emotional. I just recovered from the reunion; well, it was five months ago, and now this. I’m very touched really.”

  “I’m glad you like it,” Summers muttered. As he feared, Pike then asked him about his writing, but in such a merely-to-be-polite, perfunctory way that it was relatively easy to exaggerate and even to tell a couple of lies. Lying was a standard, even expected, part of conversation by the group that rarely was even pointed out by anyone behind the liar’s back. It was paradoxical—“literary lying” was accepted as a normal part of discourse, but so was the chronic kvetching about literary rejection and failure from the same people who’d apparently forgotten their brazen lies and bragging from a half hour before. He himself had been guilty of this (although he did it less often than most members). Come to think of it, only Emir, old world gentleman that he was, never lied, though he was certainly guilty of complaining.

  There was little to say after the opening pleasantries. Too much time had passed and, more important, there was too big a gap in success between them. Summers felt like a drowning man vainly reaching for an illusory life preserver as he tried to think of things to talk about—a couple of mutual friends from high school, a former creative writing teacher. Pike answered him politely but with little animation. And then suddenly Summers gave up, shook Pike’s hand a final time, congratulated him yet again, and turned his back, expecting to return to the safety of Emir and his wife. But he didn’t see them. He felt an odd bit of panic, then headed for the table to refill his vodka punch cup.

  Really, it wasn’t so bad with Pike, he told himself as he quickly filled and then drank from his cup.

  “Excuse me,” a woman said, who was surprisingly attractive. “Are you Roger Summers?”

  “Guilty as charged,” he said, looking at her more closely now. She had surprisingly thick brown hair, but refined, almost elegant features. His memory, no longer as sharp as it once was, came up empty. But why wouldn’t he remember a good-looking woman who was so young—no more than thirty-five by his count? And how did she know him?

  “I’m Renee,” she said, extending her hand, which he more than gladly shook. Was it possible that she’d read one of his books? Heard him read somewhere in Philadelphia once or was she perhaps one of his former students?

  “Have we met?” he finally said.

  “Not until now,” she said with a laugh, and he found himself laughing along with her. How charming women in their thirties could be! Especially when they were so enthusiastic.

  “May I ask how you know my name?” he said, bracing himself for a tribute of some kind.

  “Oh, I asked that man over there,” she said, pointing to Lucas, who was just now giving him a pricelessly jealous dirty look, which helped mitigate his disappointment. So she hadn’t read him, but still she wanted to meet him. Was he perhaps more youthful looking tonight than he realized?

  “So I’m glad …” Roger said. “How did you happen to come here tonight?”

  “I came with the man who told me your name.”

  “With Lucas?” he said, incredulously.

  “Yes.”

  “I see.”

  “I saw you talking with Howard Pike, who’s one of my idols of music, well of criticism in general, and Luke told me you went to high school with him, with Howard Pike, so I wanted to ask you what it was like talking to him and maybe if you could introduce me. I want to interview him for a magazine but, of course, I have to meet him first.”

  “I’m sure Howie will be delighted. He loves any kind of … informed attention,” he said with more sarcasm than he intended. He felt his face might well be red now and looked away from her, at Aaron and his wife holding hands. He should have invited Judy to this, even just as a friend. These parties were now too painful to attend alone. It was yet one more thing that had changed these last few years.

  “Come with me,” he said to Renee, “I’ll introduce you to him now.”

  He came to a kind of rest stop by a window that was open a few inches. For ten or fifteen minutes he’d been walking in a circular pattern around the loft thinking of Pike and his new female admirer, among other thoughts. He looked out the window and felt the cool air. Often in his own apartment when he was pacing late at night he’d look out at the street and watch a man walking quickly (was he anxious about who he might encounter on the streets?) or see a car screeching to a halt, or a hooker smoking a cigarette while she waited for a client, and once a woman chasing a man down the sidewalk yelling at him. Had he stolen something from her or just broken her heart? Tonight he saw nothing but an occasional car, silently rolling by as if on felt. It occurred to him then that while he felt so interested and even drawn to them, he’d never written about the people he saw on the street at night, or during the day either, for that matter. Would it have made a difference? Was his whole approach to writing, like his whole approach to the rest of life, seriously off course? He’d been such a dutiful postmodernist, Summers suddenly thought, but had he ignored people in the process? He’d certainly drifted from his wife, who was now assiduously pursuing a divorce from him. Was it time to admit he was wrong about some things, certainly about the way he’d treated Judy? Perhaps it was too late to construct a new literary identity at this point, but was it too late to speak to his wife from his heart? Hadn’t Emir said love is more important than writing, or at least words to that effect?

  Where was Emir? He suddenly wanted to talk to him with an urgency that surprised him, but when he scanned the room he didn’t see him. Instead, he saw Hanah standing fifteen feet from him smoking a cigarette by another window. She looked oddly upset, almost forlorn (he hadn’t ever thought of her as a woman who thought dark thoughts), but he approached her anyway.

  “Greetings!” he said, hoisting his empty cup in a mock celebratory gesture. Hanah looked at him, as if puzzled in her grief, and nodded.

  “Where is that elusive husband of yours?”

  “In the bathroom for the last ten minutes.”

  How typical of Emir! He himself could never go in someone else’s home, certainly not at a party, but Emir had the gift of being uninhibited.

  “He’s not feeling well,” Hanah added.

  Summers looked at her, surprised that she was smoking a cigarette, something so frowned upon by the group.

  “Oh, I’m sorry.”

  “It’s been like that for awhile now, because of the treatments. I told him to expect this. I urged him not to come tonight but he insisted. He loves the group so much.”

  “Excuse me, Hanah, for asking, but what treatments? For what?”

  “Oh, you don’t know? The radiation treatments—Emir has stomach cancer.”

  Summers put his hand to his mouth.

  “Oh my God, I’m sorry, I didn’t know.”

  “I thought you did. I thought he told his friends a couple months ago.”

  “No, I didn’t know,” Summers mumbled.

  She continued to tell him how they found out and then decided to tell their friends right away, but Summers could scarcely focus on what she was saying. He was remembering, with unfortunate clarity, a number of calls Emir made to him—probably three calls—about a couple of months ago that he let go to voicemail. In his depression—it was shortly after Judy moved out—he hadn’t bothered to check Emir’s messages.

  “I’m so sorry,” Summers heard himself saying again, and th
en when there was a brief silence he said it once more. He wanted to say something else, perhaps explain about the calls he didn’t answer. In his own depression then, he couldn’t bear to hear anymore group trivia. It was always the same, those phone calls, but now, of course, it was different.

  “Is this party over now or is there some event coming?” Hanah asked.

  “I think someone is going to introduce Pike, you know, the Pulitzer Prize winner, and then he’s going to make a speech.”

  “Yes, the speech. That’s what Emir wanted to hear. He’s so proud of Howard. I hope, if he still refuses to go home, that he at least comes back in time to hear it.”

  Emir only missed the opening minute of Aaron’s embarrassingly long and overly florid introduction. Pike at least kept it short and sweet and came off as one of the group, which, Summers concluded, was at least a substantial part of what he probably was.

  After the applause died down and the toasts ended, Hanah drew Emir a few feet away from him and began talking animatedly. She was trying to persuade him to leave, Summers thought, but apparently didn’t succeed. When they returned she said, “He loves to torture me with his stubbornness. But since he won’t leave, I’m going to stay out of it and let you two talk,” she said, looking meaningfully at Summers. Then lighting another cigarette, she walked across the loft, apparently toward the punch bowl.

  Summers looked uneasily away from Emir, wondering if Hannah had told him about their recent conversation.

  “It never occurs to her that she’s stubborn too,” Emir said. “Still, I go on with her.”

  “You’ve been married a long time. She’s your soul mate.”

  “Over forty years,” Emir said, nodding. “At this point I think of her more as my tomb mate … in the future, of course. I can’t explain why I love her so much but I do know that I want to die next to her. I even hope we share the same worms, if it comes to that,” he said with a little laugh.

  Summers watched him closely while he sipped from his new glass of wine.

  “I didn’t know about your …”

  “Cancer? My cancer?”

  “Yes, Hanah told me tonight. I’m so sorry. It must be hell.”

  Emir shrugged and smiled ironically.

  “It’s not a hopeless situation. It’s not impossible. But I’ll tell you, having done both, having cancer is even harder than writing an uncompromising novel!” Emir said with a laugh, and this time Summers forced a laugh himself.

  “You know it’s funny,” Emir said. “When I was younger I thought that books could capture life, the sense of time passing, much better than films, because films are too short. Now that I have so little time left, whether I beat cancer or not, when I think of my past now it seems much more like a movie than a book, because it all seems so fast-moving and so short. Do you know what I mean?”

  “Yes, I do know what you mean. I’ve felt it myself. I’ve been feeling it all the time lately.”

  “Anyway, I shouldn’t be talking about such heavy things at a festive occasion like this.”

  “No, no, you should,” Summers said, surprised for a moment by the passion in his voice. “It’s the most interesting thing I’ve heard tonight by far, believe me.”

  “It’s just that, well for example, when you’ve been reading a long book, Don Quixote or Remembrance of Things Past, and you’re getting near the end of it you want to talk about the experience of reading it, don’t you?”

  “Of course.”

  “It’s like that with my life now. Not that I want to talk about the particular things that happened to me, it’s that I want to talk, at times about how time is passing differently, as my memory of it is. I want to talk at times about how that’s all changed.”

  “It’s changed for me too.”

  “Really? Then we can talk about it even at this party?”

  “We just did,” Summers said and both men laughed.

  “We should talk more often, my dear Roger,” Emir said with a smile. “You shouldn’t steal yourself away and make yourself such a hermit.”

  “Well, I came to this event. It wasn’t easy to make myself come but I did …”

  He noticed that sad expression in Emir’s eyes again, his eyebrows dropping like flags at half-mast.

  “Of course, I wanted to see you,” Summers added.

  “And the others?” Emir said, gesturing with his arm. “They are your friends too, aren’t they?”

  “Some of them, yes, I suppose. You must admit things get repetitious here, I mean all the complaining and defensive bragging.”

  “Yes, of course, that is what people do. But they are your brothers also.”

  “My brothers?”

  “You share a common fate. They all want to give something to the world, to express something, and they’re all thwarted because their work has cancer and is going to die. They’re just a group of patients whose writing has cancer. But we still come together to celebrate, right? We’re still alive.”

  He didn’t ask anyone for a ride, in part because he left early (a few minutes after talking with Emir) but mainly because he wanted to walk. He passed by the subway station without much of an internal debate and ignored a couple of cabs he could have taken. He was walking through Rittenhouse Square now, through the elegant lamplit park from which a strange half-purplish light seemed to emanate. Walking through the park late at night generally made him a little uneasy and he’d normally walk on the sidewalk by the clothes stores and restaurants, but with his head full of Emir’s words he somehow wanted to be among trees and flowers. Although it wasn’t always the case, he still believed he thought more clearly when he was close to nature.

  He was trying to account for why he felt so energized that he was actually contemplating walking all the way home to West Philly. Why did he suddenly feel so awake instead of his usual nocturnal exhaustion? Almost everything at the party had been the way he’d anticipated—the awkward pain of seeing Pike, the fawning behavior of the group—which only thinly disguised their collective bitterness—his failure, despite three or four drinks, to call Judy. He’d met no new women, made no publishing contacts. It was his conversation with Emir, of course, that made the difference, though he had trouble acknowledging it in part because he’d learned tonight about Emir’s cancer. Was it right that he should feel so inexplicably alive from a man who was probably fairly well along in the process of dying? He didn’t know the answer, he would never know what was right or wrong about many things, he realized, but he did sense that Emir wanted his words to have impact. So then this would have pleased Emir too, he hoped.

  Up ahead, at the edge of the park by a street lamp, Summers saw a woman in a short skirt. At first he thought she was unusually pretty, like a younger version of Judy, but as he got closer he saw the years on her heavily made up face. For an aging hooker, Rittenhouse Square was usually off limits. She’s not only too old to hook, Summers thought, she’s in the wrong place, too, almost as if she’s an alien.

  “Hey mister,” she hissed at him as he walked past her, “You want a date?”

  “No, thank you,” Summers said, reaching into his pockets and withdrawing a fifty-dollar bill. “But I have something for you.” The woman looked scared as if he were about to point a gun at her.

  “Here,” he said. “Enjoy it.”

  She looked startled but she took the money quickly.

  “God bless you,” she said as he moved past her. Summers waved in response and blew her a kiss before finally leaving the park.

  The House

  The only three forces on earth capable of conquering, and captivating and making weak willed, rebellious man happy are miracle, mystery and authority. Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov

  He wouldn’t do that to himself again. He wouldn’t think of his dream last night where Melissa had been first a little girl and then a woman. Where he’d held her hand while they’d jumped the waves and she’d laughed a sound high and bell-like that he’d heard as clearly as if he’d s
een her. Painful enough to have dreamt it, he needn’t torture himself by repeating it, too, especially on his way to meet Serena for the first time. Instead, he’d think of something both stimulating and unthreatening by reviewing once again the rudimentary information he planned for the introduction to his book in progress on the hidden function of towns.

  There must be a government building within the town limits, Tyler thought, as he drove to the restaurant, although only a small percentage of citizens would ever require any in-person services. Still, if they did, there would have to be offices filled with people who could perform them. And, of course, the town would also require a court well equipped enough so that judges, lawyers, and juries could function smoothly in it. On the other hand, there didn’t need to be a jail inside the town limits as long as there was one within an hour of it. In fact, it might be preferable to not have a prison in the town since its mere presence would create a measure of anxiety.

  Of course, there must be a good-sized food market with a drugstore nearby and at least two restaurants, the larger one where one could go for dates or special occasions. The town must also have a bar, a doctor who was a general practitioner, a K–8 school, and a high school that, if not in the town limits itself, was within a few miles of it. Every town needs to demonstrate its belief in the future and so must have a school with a library and some kind of playground since one wants to develop sound bodies as well as minds—the little time that both will last—Tyler thought, with a bitter little laugh. He would only deal with the archetypes, with the deep structure that lies beneath virtually every town, including Stockbridge, which he was walking through now on his way to meet Serena Hansborough for lunch at the Red Lion Inn, Stockbridge’s place for special occasions.

  Strange thoughts he was having today. Lately he’d noticed that any disruption in his routine (which having lunch with Serena definitely was) greatly increased the rate of his unsettling thoughts, especially about his daughter, Melissa, whom he longed to see but who was in California (where she’d essentially written him off) futilely trying to become an actress. He forced his thoughts to turn to his date again, his first one in years. He was glad that he’d seen what Serena looked like already (one had to provide a recent photograph for the dating service). Hers was a kindly face, though a small part of him was disappointed. In years past he wouldn’t have chosen to meet her, but now it didn’t seem to matter much since he thought that at his age a romantic relationship was no longer possible.