I dropped the pictures into the purse and pulled out a letter. It was written by Vera and mailed to the same Cleveland address it was sent from. I opened the envelope:
To whom it may concern. As I’m writing this, I can see him through the white curtains on the corner. He’s smoking a cigarette, reading the paper at the bus stop. Why does he keep following me? Never to rest. When night comes, I’ll mail this letter. If I escape him, you will never read it. I have sent it to my apartment, and if I receive it here in a few days, it means I have survived. If not, it will come into your hands when in days, weeks, or maybe months someone discovers I am missing. My plan is to leave here next week. I am already packed. I am looking for safety. Is there such a thing? Look at him out there. Can’t they see he is different, this man from Marrakesh? His skin, his mood, his shoes, all different and dangerous. But people don’t see the danger he is. Look at the man standing next to him. Smiling and talking to him over their newspapers. He fools everyone so well. His accent. So smooth. It lures you in, a trick, a ploy, and then it’s too late. He’s even fooled the police. I bought a gun. I loaded it. Don’t know how to use it, but I feel better, the weight of it makes me feel better. I’m doing something. Not a victim. I must mail this. I hope you don’t receive this letter. If you do, on the next page is a drawing and the name of the man who murdered me. Sincerely, Vera.
I turned the page and looked at the pencil-and-ink man Vera had drawn: hair tapered close to his head, eyes far apart, a nose, not broad, but not angular, either, his chin hiding in the scarf wrapped around his neck. I didn’t know if I’d recognize him if I passed him on the boardwalk, although there was a scar shaped like a diamond on his cheek. Mounir. No last name. I put the letter and drawing back and closed the purse. I didn’t want to know more.
I looked at Vera, sleeping. I sat on the floor by the bed and studied her. She was big in waking life, a force pulling you into her, like the way in Philly when she slid into the diner booth and started chattering to Kurt and me. You had to listen; the words whirled, came at you with stories of all the things you didn’t know, and the things you wanted to know, the things you knew were out there half sketched, but Vera filled them in, gave them the feel of steel. The souks, Cairo, trinkets in Bedouin hands, desert treks to the sea. But sleeping, Vera was small, thin, her hair mussed and dull, all her energy vanished.
I wished there was a record player in the room. I felt like listening to the Beatles’ White Album, real soft, especially “Dear Prudence” and “Julia.” I missed my music. Kurt and Vera and I shared what was on the radio, but to me music was private; it was as personal as secrets, even more part of you than the sins you whispered at confession. I wanted to put the needle on the groove, to hear the crackle and scratch and then John Lennon singing about the mother he had lost. I went to the window. I wanted to see the man from Marrakesh on the boardwalk. I wanted him to wave to me. I wanted to know he was there, that he was more than pencil and ink. You can’t have demons scratching at the edges all the time; they have to climb aboard and show themselves just like the monster in the Creature from the Black Lagoon did. Maybe the man from Marrakesh was a killer, was all the things Vera was so spooked about, but I needed to see him. Every time Kurt and I looked he was gone. He could have been clever, real clever, like Vera said, a jinn possessed of special powers from the Maghreb. Not science-fiction weirdo powers, but powers and auras people have from living in deserts and mountains. I looked down. Nothing, except two joggers, a man and a woman, talking and looking at each other as they panted down the boardwalk.
I left Vera sleeping and went to Room 501. I checked the door. It was open and through the white curtain I saw Kurt sitting on the balcony, his shirt off, his hair slicked back from a shower, the scents of talcum and Right Guard in the room. He had his eyes closed and face toward the sun.
“Vera’s next door,” I said.
“I know.”
“She’s got a gun.”
“I know. I took the bullets out back in Maryland.”
The morning breeze was cool, but you could feel threads of heat in it like when you jumped into the ocean and a warm current snaked past you.
“What should we do?”
“I don’t know, Jim. It was like an adventure back in Philly. This woman comes out of the night and changes things for us, telling us about places, bringing us colors and sounds and smells, hitting tennis balls in the alley. It was different and that’s what I wanted for a while. No gray paint in the shipyard. No wife and mother buried in the earth. I miss her, Jim. I had to get away from all the things, the tiniest damn things that brought her back into that house making me think she was in the kitchen or running a bath upstairs. You know what I mean? Did you feel it, too? She was there but we couldn’t have her.”
“I thought sometimes I heard her in the backroom listening to the radio and painting her watercolors. Remember what she said after taking that painting class at the Y?”
“Seep and bleed.”
“Yeah, let the colors ‘seep and bleed across the canvas.’”
“I think she only finished one.”
“The rowers on the river.”
Kurt kept his eyes on the waves and the empty beach. He was done talking about Mom. I saw it in the way his jaw tightened. He was tan and built hard, his muscles sturdy and long like dock rope, but they fit his lean frame. He didn’t seem a father. He was a man on a balcony, sun and breeze on his face, all his logic and the things he knew, all those traits a son sees in his father from a distance, were loosened, and up close Kurt was a man wanting to be rearranged back to what he was before. I thought it must be hard for a father to be caught between the two sides of himself. I felt split, too. But it was different; my history was brief, too young to be a record, grooved and set with rhythms.
“Is there a guy from Marrakesh? I did see a man under the boardwalk light last night, but he didn’t look like someone to be scared of.”
“I’m not certain about any of this, Jim. Should we go to the cops? And say what? I don’t know if I believe Vera or not, but I wouldn’t feel right abandoning her. I can’t get into that Impala and leave. I guess in this short time she’s become part of us. Not like Mom, but somebody who has filled in some of the blank spaces. It’s only right to protect her from whatever scares her. But what if this man is really out there? Am I putting us in too much danger?”
I didn’t know, either, so I sat with Kurt on the balcony, saying nothing, listening to the morning waves.
eleven
The lady sleeps. I am in a white robe. It feels more like a warm towel than a robe. I sit in a high-back chair and look through the curtain and over the gray morning beach. How long have I been here? I feel something is supposed to happen, but what? Maybe I’m in the wrong place. Perhaps something changed or was switched during the night. I’ll sit here and watch the waves. The lady sleeps; her bare shoulder, a pale fin, rises from a sea of covers. Who is she? I will not wake her. I hear seagulls; I step to the window, watch them circle, the tips of their wings cutting the aluminum sky. A knock. I will not answer. A knock I will not answer. A knock. I go to the door and peek through the hole. A short man in a green suit with gold buttons stands there blurry, wide, out of proportion. I open the door.
“Good morning, sir. Here’s your paper.”
He smiles, pivots like a military officer, and retreats over the thick carpet and down the hall. I close the door and go to the chair. The headlines: The “surge” in Iraq is working; Palestinians from Gaza are flooding Egypt; Al-Qaeda has moved to Pakistan; the US housing market is in trouble; a black man named Obama is running for president; whales are more intelligent than we originally thought.
“James?”
The lady in the bed wakes.
“James?”
I turn. I don’t know her. I don’t know why I’m here. I am confused. She stretches over the pillow like a cat.
“Your name is James,” she says through a yawn. “I am your wife, Eva. Yo
u don’t know who I am or where you are. Your mind is going. Your memory is fading on you. But I am Eva and I love you. Don’t be frightened. We are on the Jersey Shore; you’ve been coming here for years. You’re safe here.”
She slips out of bed, walks across the room, naked, and kisses me on the forehead, then turns and goes into the bathroom. The door is open a crack and there is shadow and light and I hear water running, the slide of the shower curtain, and then mist coils through the door crack and vanishes in the cold room; the room where I am sitting, holding a newspaper and looking at the waves. The lady is singing in a language I do not understand. Am I in a different country? The newspaper is in English. The water goes off; the shower curtain slides again. The lady comes out wrapped in a towel.
“Oooh, it’s freezing in here.”
She turns a dial on the wall.
“What’s in the news, James?”
She points to the paper.
“You used to write for one of those. But they’re not doing so well these days, newspapers. You wrote stories, James. Thousands of stories from all over the world.”
She dries her hair with another towel.
“Let’s go get breakfast. Here’re your clothes. Get dressed. I’ll get ready in the bathroom.”
She flings the curtains open. “A new day, James.”
“What day is it?”
“Saturday. Saturday on the Jersey Shore.”
“Did you know Kurt and Vera?”
“Get dressed James, so we can eat.”
“I want coffee.”
“I know. Hurry up.”
The boardwalk is quiet and cold. A man juggles lemons on a bench; a child watches and tries to grab one but the man keeps them spinning in a jagged yellow circle just out of reach. The man reminds me of something, but I can’t think what. I feel like I’m rapping at a door that won’t open; the lady beside me has her arm around me and her head on my shoulder and we’re walking as if this is how it should be, but I don’t know how it should be.
“Here we are, James. The diner, remember? Best pancakes in the world, you say. I don’t like them.”
Bells ring over the door. We slip into a booth. A waitress with a pot flips over two cups and pours before I get out of my coat. She drops two creams in front of me and spins away. It is fast in here, crowded with smoke and people, the scent of syrup and breaking eggs, the sizzle and the sound of a whisk through batter. The cook, a man peeking from a cutout window, like a prisoner in a steamy cell, yells at the waitress and she yells back, “Hash browns, hash browns, twice. For God sakes it’s always hash browns. You think someone’s gonna order something different?”
She walks over to the lady and me.
“What’ll ya have?”
“Pancakes.”
“Short or tall?”
I cock my head.
“Stack, short or tall?”
The lady says short. With orange juice and extra butter.
“You?”
“Coffee. Toast and jam.”
The lady sitting across from me takes my hand and gets up and steps toward me, combing my hair with her fingers. “Your hair, James, always wild. A mind of its own.”
She sits back down.
“Do you want to hear more stories about yourself, about us?”
She pulls a fat envelope from her bag and lays it on the table. The pancakes and syrup come. The table is set with juice and coffee and sliced toast. It is neat, inviting, a simple thing, but it makes me feel connected, rooted in certainty. I close my eyes. All black, except this bright space, like a lone star in a night sky. Kurt and Vera. I open my eyes, stare at the lady in front of me, and quickly close my eyes, hoping to see an image of her rise in the blackness, but nothing comes, only Kurt and Vera. There must be more, but I can’t say for sure. But I do know things. I know the beach, the waves, the wind. The elements. I know what it means when a man juggles lemons and a boy watches; I know, I see all things outside of me, the real world, I guess, but I don’t know where I fit in. I am a murdered man drawn in chalk on the sidewalk, contours and emptiness. The lady whispers through the rattle of cups and sliding plates.
“We were on holiday outside Tunis,” she begins. “We needed a break from Europe and its post-Soviet commotion. It was three years after we met, 1992. We had married a year earlier, just two weeks before you went to Iraq for the first Gulf war. Not much of a war, was it, James? ‘Fires in the desert,’ you said, ‘sirens and sand in the hotels.’ But in ’92 we rented a whitewashed bungalow on the beach. We sailed in the mornings and swam and slept in the afternoons. It was how vacations should be, James. Just weather and waves on your soul, nothing else. Do you need more syrup?”
“No, thank you.”
“Tunis, near Carthage along the cliffs. You don’t remember, James, and that is such a shame, such a pity not to remember what so few people see. We had planned to go to Marrakesh.”
She looks at me.
“Ahh, I see Marrakesh sparks a memory.”
“Vera told me about Marrakesh. I was a boy. She said I had to go to Marrakesh, but there was a man …”
“Yes, James. I know, but we never made it to Marrakesh. Do you remember?”
“I don’t remember anything. You give me a strand of something that supposedly happened in another time, in another place. But what do I do with it? Do you understand? I don’t know.”
“Don’t be angry.”
The lady sips her coffee, spreads blueberry jam on toast.
“I was pregnant. That’s why we didn’t get to Marrakesh. I was only a few months, the time when the body changes like a little science project. Blue veins and a thicker belly. We hadn’t told anyone. We wanted it, James. For some reason, despite our wandering lives, we wanted a child.”
She leans forward.
“Late one night on the beach the pain came. We took a taxi. I remember leaning back looking at the moon in the rear window. It was yellow and white. Big, like a planet that had slipped its orbit and was drifting toward us. Beautiful. The streets and alleys we drove through and all the people we passed, all going about their lives on a warm evening, all of them not knowing about us, who we were or what we were losing. Blood in the taxi and on my hands and on your clothes. I fell away.
“When I awoke I saw you at the foot of the bed, a ceiling fan spinning slowly above you. I remember that image so distinctly. The whole room. The white linen, the heavy, chipped metal bed, the IV, the nurse in her strangely folded hat. I knew that the unborn baby that left me took something with it. I could have no more children. I felt it before you said it. You held my hand through the night and I thought that my body, my insides were like the Sahara in southern Egypt with its sharp rocks and painted caves. Arid yet beguiling. You didn’t like that metaphor. You said it was too easy. Too biblical, the desert barrenness, using geography like shorthand. But you, for once, had no metaphor of your own, so I hung on to mine for a while, a long while, James.”
She sips her coffee.
“We stayed in the bungalow for a few days, until the bleeding stopped. We flew to Paris, but Paris wasn’t the same. Nothing was the same, not for a while. Days and hours. Every spoken word leading back to that night of the big moon. It eased over time. We made love again and there were new stories to write, and James, it was our love, our love that saved us. That sounds trite, I know, but that doesn’t make it any less true. But our lost baby was there, and sometimes, late at night, each of us would feel it, a slight prick that by morning would pass.”
“Did we want a boy or a girl?”
“We didn’t care. We didn’t know.”
“Was there a funeral?”
“No. I was only a few months’ pregnant, James. There was nothing.”
“There was something.”
“Yes …”
The lady who says she’s my wife is now crying over her coffee and toast. It is a slow cry, the kind that causes no disturbance. I was to be a father, like Kurt. I don’t remember Tunis, the hos
pital, the way she said she bled. How can a man have blood on his clothes, the blood of his child, and not remember? She wipes her eyes and takes my hand.
“That story is not in this big envelope of your clippings I carry. It never appeared in a newspaper. It’s our private story, James. I tell it to you each time I see you, hoping. It’s like a part of a play I have rehearsed. But it is not rote. It is never rote. It feels as if it’s new in each telling. I cry each time. Each time it’s so real to me. And all I want you to say is, Yes, Eva. I remember. Just that. A feeling that you carry it, too, that no matter what’s happening in your brain, there’s a tissue, something in you, that holds that memory, a memory deeper than thought. I’m silly and rambling, James, and it’s useless. I’m talking to a man with a blank face.”
She smears jam on her toast, puts the knife down hard. She leans toward me.
“I’m angry that this story has become mine alone. My burden, not yours. That’s not fair, James. Part of me thinks part of you is blessed not to know that story. Is that selfish?”
She leans back and picks up the knife, studies the jam on its blade; she seems to bury a word, or maybe a sentence, behind her lips. She breathes out, closes, then slowly opens, her eyes.
“My anger, you forgot my anger,” she says, smiling, but not really happy. “Did you even know I was angry two seconds ago? What an ideal marriage we have, James. You don’t hold my sins against me.”
The waitress pours coffee. The lady eats her toast. Blueberry stains her teeth, but she doesn’t care. I like her. I want to remember her. We pay the bill and stroll (a funny word) on the boardwalk; the sun turns the ocean into a bright mirror and the waves have no fury; they droop onto the beach in lazy curls. The amusement park. The clown face, the bumper cars, the Ferris wheel, the twirling teacups, the House of Horrors, the merry-go-round all quiet, cold and quiet, glazed in the salt spray of the ocean. We sit. The lady slips an arm through mine.
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