She had been running seven months, the bullet wound, once spreading like a purple bloom beneath her skin, healed to a raised white scar. That’s when she met Kurt and me in the Philly diner and came home with us that night. She said the man had been tracking her across alleys and that she hid in a church, scrunched down behind the altar, and then slipped out through the vestibule to the street where she spotted Kurt and me in the window. Maybe, she said, it was the light over the table, but from the outside Kurt and I seemed like people she could trust, and when she came in and sat with us, she looked at Kurt’s hands, hard and battered from sandblasting and painting ships, and knew he would offer sanctuary. She said they were strong hands, solid and coarse enough to keep even a gun smuggler from Marrakesh away. That’s what she thought; that’s all she wanted, a pair of steady hands to keep her safe.
She had not seen the man since she’d been with us, although driving down the Eastern Shore, she thought she glimpsed him behind us in an El Dorado that turned and vanished in the road dust. Vera stopped her story. She put her chin on her knees and looked at the ocean. She leaned on me and we sat in the sand. The waves were cold and clean, hitting the shore hard, mist rising, the way it does just before night when the tide and the air change and new creatures scatter over the sand.
I didn’t know what to think of Vera’s story. It was more mysterious than even the best Lizabeth Scott movie, and I bet Kurt, if he knew the tale, which he must, felt he was in a script, on the lam, and protecting a girl with a bullet in her past. I supposed that would intrigue Kurt, that late-night, movie-watching side of him, anyway. The mark was there on Vera’s leg. It looked like a bullet scar would look, and Vera did know about spices and desert windstorms and Marrakesh with its colors, balconies, and flowers mixing in with boats and nets and fishermen hunched over hash wisps from shisha pipes. But why does a man like the one she described spend all his time following her and doing nothing? I looked behind me and down the beach. Was a stranger with an accent and a small pistol roaming the coming night? I squinted but saw nothing. Then a figure moved under the pier and headed toward us: Kurt, cursing, sandy, his blanket drenched.
“I was sleeping and the wave hit me and washed my beer away.”
Vera laughed. I laughed, too. Kurt’s cutoffs hung damp and heavy at his waist. He grabbed Vera, threw her on his shoulders, and twirled her toward the waves. She screamed and laughed and told Kurt he had better put her down, but he kept twirling, getting dizzy, losing his knees, wobbling as the water rushed up on him and then he tumbled into a big wave with Vera, and for a moment they were gone, and then Vera popped up and then Kurt. She walked over and pushed him back into the water and another wave came and knocked them both into the shore and they popped up again, beaten and tired and Vera grabbed Kurt and held him and jumped up in his arms and he carried her out of the waves, and she seemed small, thin, her black hair matted in strands, as if the waves had washed some of her away. We walked under the pier and toward our car. Kurt carried Vera the entire way. She tried to teach us a few words of Arabic, the throaty, clipped syllables made the night exotic. Inshallah — God willing. Allahu Akbar — God is great. Hasbyallah wa ne’malwakil — I complain to God, He is my best resort. God is in the language, Vera said; he lives in Arabic more than he does in English.
“A different God,” said Kurt.
“Same God, different name,” said Vera. “He’s a desert god, ruler of a harsh place.”
Kurt opened the Impala’s trunk and tossed us towels. We drove to a hotel and the girl at the counter — she looked no older than me — said, “Do y’all need a room?” Y’all was so much softer than Vera’s Arabic; it was a word that didn’t come at you so much as rolled over and through you. The girl pinged a silver bell on the counter and a little, bent man appeared and grabbed our two suitcases. He walked toward the elevator, his right foot splayed as if unhinged, and the girl whispered to us, “He’s my uncle. He ain’t right in the head if you know what I mean. But Daddy’s gotta take care of him. Kin is kin, after all. But he’s good for carrying things and he’ll show you to your rooms.”
The elevator opened on the fifth floor and you could faintly hear the Beach Boys, tinny, every note false, from the transistor in the lobby. Kurt and Vera took 501 and the bent man led me to 503. Vera came in and gave the man two quarters and he handed me the key and disappeared. Vera kissed me on the cheek and ran off to 501. My room’s balcony overlooked the ocean. It was night. The sand was gray from up here and the ocean black. Lights glowed on the faraway horizon, floating in the air, unattached, like spirits, but I knew they were the lights of freighters and trawlers that sailed beyond. A man leaned over the boardwalk railing nearest the hotel. He looked out to sea and then turned and looked at the hotel, up its floors as if he were staring right at me, and then looked away again to the sea. I went inside and closed the curtains.
The phone rang. “How y’all doing? Rooms okay? Can I gitcha anything?” I said thank you and no. I took a shower, the warm water tasted like salt. I dressed and watched TV. A knock on the door.
“Hey, I came to check on you. Need towels. Soap?” said the girl from the desk.
“No. Well, maybe an extra towel if you have any.”
She laughed. “You wanna make out? I’m a good kisser. But only kissing. Some of you boys want more but I only kiss.”
She was blond and wore white shorts and a forest-green halter top. She stepped in and wrapped her arms around me and started kissing me; her lips were shiny and smelled of cinnamon. She pressed hard and her teeth clinked my teeth but then she eased and kissed some more and it was strange and nice, and I don’t know why, but I closed my eyes and kissed her back and we fell on the bed and she landed on top of me. She had a short, hard tongue, and she was light upon me. She sat up and straightened her hair. “I better git down to the desk. My uncle’s down there; he gets confused after a while. Maybe I’ll come back later and we’ll kiss some more. But only kissing. Some guy from Massachusetts the other week wanted more and I said, ‘No sir, buddy.’ I’m a Baptist and I don’t need that on my soul. Kissing’s okay, though. Mr. Jones, our Bible group leader, says kissing teaches, what’s that word, uh, moderation, that’s it, moderation and maturity. If you’re here next week — I can’t tell how long you’ll be here because your daddy, he is your daddy, right? ’Cuz one time we had a kidnapped boy here with a terrible man. The police came. — Anyway, there’s this special preacher coming all the way up from Charlotte to give a sermon on young people and love. My daddy says he’s a mighty fine preacher. Are you a Baptist? You’re not a Jew, are you? My daddy says stay away from Jews. I better git.”
She left.
That was the second time I made out with a girl. It was nice to have it happen unexpected. My first make-out was with Carmen Pasquele at night in an alley beyond a summer stickball game. I was batting fifth and Carmen, whom I had held hands with two days earlier, came along and whispered for me to follow her. I knew what was coming and I got a little knotted as I walked past Stan’s Deli and the truck repair shop and into the alley, where Carmen leaned back on the wall and pulled me to her and kissed me so soft that I barely felt it, but I did and it went right through me like a sip of hot chocolate slipping down your throat and spreading through your chest. She kissed me again and I heard the thwack of our fourth batter, Billy Holmes, and Carmen knew and she said, “Go back to your game, Jim.” She kissed me on the cheek and went the other way down the alley, her sandals scraping the road and her dress so short you had to wonder what Carmen was actually hiding up there.
The phone rang. I thought it might be the girl from the front desk, but it was Kurt.
“We eat in five minutes.”
I shut off the light and went out on the balcony. The man on the boardwalk was gone and the thrum of the waves hypnotized me, washing in a thought and carrying it away, then washing in another one. I looked over and saw Vera sitting on the balcony of 501. She was in the dark, too, her cigarette ember moving
like a lazy firefly. She wore a white dress that made her incandescent against the night and the moon, like those jellyfish that glow in the cold, cold deep of the ocean. She was crying, her body a ripple of slow shakes, swallowing her sound so Kurt wouldn’t hear.
She didn’t see me on the balcony of 503. I blended in with the night. The break of the waves hid my breathing. Kurt came up behind her. He kissed her neck and rubbed her shoulders. Vera turned into him, and it seemed like a scene from our kitchen back in Philly years ago when Kurt held my mom in the darkness after dinner, when they thought I was asleep, but I was awake on the stairs watching their shadows dance on the wall from headlights passing in the alley. Kurt held Vera like a lover, but also like he was holding himself and, to me, he was newborn in the darkness.
The trip had already changed him. The scent of paint and turpentine no longer trailed him, the bay and the ocean healed the cuts and nicks on his hands; fresh skin grew over the scrapes on his forearms. He walked less like a workingman and more like a man indifferent to the world. The order he had once known, which had kept the bills in his wallet layered in sequential order and the Impala buffed and shined, no longer mattered, or at least seemed less immediate, less pervasive. He was half shaven and uncombed, this new creature, my father. His tennis clothes were rumpled, but his game stayed sharp, and if you wanted to see the old Kurt you sat near the baseline and watched the squeak and slide of his feet, the butterfly stroke of his backhand. He kept his tenderness, the way he dipped his head and whispered a word when he wanted you to glimpse what was in his heart; Vera drew that out in him the way a hot pin gives rise to a splinter wedged deep.
He had been tender with Mom, but Mom didn’t need a protector, except on that day the Fleetwood slid on ice, skipped the sidewalk, and flew toward her. I was in school. Kurt was at work, breaking frost off a freighter. Mom died in a snow pile, surrounded by the faces of neighbors and strangers that hung like lanterns in the late-morning winter light. I went with him to O’Malley’s Funeral Home the night they delivered Mom from the morgue. We sat in two big chairs, both of us stone-still, every creak and sound in that old house striking through us. O’Malley called us in to see Mom. A white sheet pulled to her chin, lilies in a clear vase on a table. I waited, and I think Kurt did, too, for her to wake so we could carry her home and she could finish the cake she was baking, but she didn’t stir, and O’Malley rubbed his small, speckled hand over Kurt’s back and Kurt put his arm around me and I felt the snow in my boot treads melt into the gold carpet. Kurt bent over and kissed Mom. I kissed her, too, on the forehead, and as I pulled back my eyes caught the tunnel of a lily, white and winter-cold, tiny crisscrosses of veins alive with water from O’Malley’s tap.
We walked home. Snow fell, yet the sky was clear, and the moon was a fuzzy light and the footprints of the day were gone and streets and alleys lay before us like uncharted territory. Kurt reached down and held my hand. It was warm and wide as a mitten. We walked to the church and stood outside beneath the stained glass, peering through snowfall to amber, red, blue, burgundy, and the palest white, the bone-white of Christ un-nailed from the cross, His body draped like linen, His wounds, dried red slits, marking hands and feet and the place where the lance drew water and blood from His side. Kurt said he was confused. He said being a father and a husband were a singular thing to him, and he didn’t know if he could be one without the other, but he would try. He wanted to stay out in the snow all night. He didn’t want to return to the house because it would be like coming home from a late shift and Mom’s apron would be on the table and the scent of her would be there and there’d be a plate of something in the oven and the TV would be murmuring, or maybe she’d be in the bath or maybe out of the bath and reading in the backroom, her feet in those thick gray hunting socks she wore, or maybe she’d have fallen asleep and he’d have to tiptoe and stay quiet like a ghost, like he did on so many nights when she fell asleep, and he’d slip under the blanket feeling the trapped warmth of her burn through him like whiskey. Kurt didn’t want to go home and not find that.
We left the church and walked past Veterans Stadium and all the way to the docks, where the ships floated like gray, rusted mountains on black water streaked with a few lights. Kurt told me about each ship, where it had been, the seas it had sailed, the repairs it needed, the clunk and steam of its engine and how he swung from ropes, painting its sides, his feet tap-dancing over the water. He spoke until dawn, never letting go of my hand. The sky that brought the moon was gone; the sun broke clear on the horizon, and the ships in the new day were less majestic than at night. We walked home.
Vera stopped crying and laughed into Kurt’s chest. He pushed her hair back and wiped her eyes. They left the balcony. The muslin white curtain floated out of the sliding glass door and blew in the breeze. I didn’t ask Kurt why he chose to sleep in Vera’s room. I knew. Vera didn’t remind Kurt of Mom or the house or our alley or his job; she was magic in the lamplight, with clothes and scents and stories from other places that allowed Kurt, and me, to leave behind, at least for a moment, the inklings of who we were. I stepped off my balcony and sat in the dark of the bed in Room 503, tasting cinnamon and bubble gum and waiting for Kurt’s knock to go get something to eat.
eight
Eva Ryan.
She signs the ledger as Eva Ryan. The penmanship is clear, precise; the E and the R ornate as if they had been written by a breeze blowing through ink.
“Hello, Mr. Ryan.”
I don’t know this man behind the counter smiling at me, but like so much else, it seems as if I should, so I nod to him and smile back. My clothes are wet. I am cold. My shoes are sandy. The man hands the lady a key and a bellboy takes our small bags, leading us to a flight of stairs and down a half-lit corridor to a room that opens to the ocean, the sliding glass door filled with dimming light and white-limned waves in the distance. The bellboy leaves the bags and closes the door. The lady goes into the bathroom and I sit on the bed, wet, the taste of wine on my lips. It is dusk. The room is almost dark and the ocean slips away, a retreating lull spooling back to a faraway time zone. The woman comes out wrapped only in a towel and the bathroom light behind her makes her a silhouette, a shadow.
“Remember this room, James?”
I do not.
“We lived in this room for three months after Europe changed. You wrote your first book here. You hurried it. You made me read over your shoulder as you typed. The publisher wanted it quickly and this room was scattered with papers and pens and notes and room service trays and you wrote and wrote and the night you finished we ran to the beach with towels and a bottle of wine.”
I do not. I do not. I do not. Remember.
“I am Eva, James.”
She steps toward me, takes off her towel, and pats my face with it. She bends and slips off my shoes and peels off my clothes and dries me. Slowly. My skin is damp and cold, like the chill off a marble floor, and the woman and I slip under the covers, and the sheets are cool and she pulls me to her, my marble skin on her warmth and we are still, and I think I must know this; there is a shred of memory somewhere, perhaps in a capillary, or a vein buried deep. I have known this before. I feel it in me, but it is like a possession stolen, lost, left on a windowsill.
She takes my hand and then a finger and puts the finger on her forehead and moves it down her nose and over her lips and down her chin to her throat. I am tracing her, to her breasts and across her nipples. I feel her heartbeat and down I move; she’s guiding me, over her belly and across her hips. She whispers that I must know this. I must know the shape of her, yes, she says, her body has changed with time, but still I must know, the bones and her spirit, the same, unchanged. She pulls the covers back. She lies in the last light of the day and what I have traced is a painting in a museum, the pale white of her body, a filament, a mirror before me; she wants me to see myself in the flesh and bone of her love. That’s what she says. Love, in this bed, down a bellboy’s corridor along the sea. She kisses me,
and I know her, maybe not all of her, not every line of history she tells me we have, but of all the words she has spoken, and I guess there must have been many, it is this kiss that makes me see the forgotten places. I kiss her back.
“James?”
“Yes.”
“Are you here?”
“I think.”
“Hang on to it. Don’t get lost again.”
She kisses me and pulls me to her tight.
“Eva, where have I been?”
She doesn’t answer. She squeezes me, presses me against her. What’s real, her hair on the pillow, her lips on mine, is permanent, constant, as if I had gone to the bathroom in the night and returned to find things set right, her slumber, clothes draped over chairs, blankets and sheets riffled like the waves of the sea. This moment I know. Eva is Eva, but older. Perhaps I am writing a story, but where are we? All I know is this room and Eva. My notes, scribbled, disheveled, what do they say? I must go to the window, but Eva says no; the streets and alleys are quiet, there will be news tomorrow, but for now the news sleeps, the Havels and Walesas have returned to their vodkas and whispered asides. The revolution slumbers in damp coats and cigarette smoke; the pope is in the Vatican; Reagan and Gorbachev are toe-to-polished-toe; the world hangs on sound-bites and secret meetings. What comes tomorrow, we will see. I hear the roll of waves. Maybe, we are in Danzig, or as the Poles call it Gdansk, waiting for a protest amid blowtorch light and broken ships. Eva opens her arms. “You want to chase it, don’t you? Chase what’s out there in the dark and bring it back and put words to it.” I don’t feel like writing tonight. I fall into her and she laughs, Eva, older Eva, the imprint of her youth just below my fingers. Let me trace. Her face tighter, beauty stretched, and lines, just a few, as if drawn with a needle, float around mouth and eyes. The lips are full and the shoulders, oh the shoulders, the muscle beneath taut as the strings of a mandolin; all her power is there, imperceptibly bowed like a fighter stepping into his jab; the breasts and down to the hips, white as if rolled from flour, always so white she was, glowing in darkened rooms, and sometimes the black hair of her head and the black between her legs were one with the night as if a white figure was being pulled and formed from a sea of ink, and the wet warmth between those legs, that was Eva, and she is here, beneath me, in the trace and the touch, but when I move across her … suddenly, things shift and flash the way house lights flicker before a storm. I see Eva. I see a woman. I see Eva. I see … It goes. She sits up, pushes me back, turns on the nightstand light. She holds my face in her hands like a vase, her eyes looking through mine.
Shadow Man: A Novel Page 6