I do not keep a diary, but if I did, that would have been the entry. I felt a little ripped off, not badly, but in the way that you might feel, for a slight moment, if you were assigned a seat on a plane and then on boarding were given another one. I don’t know why that seems the best description of how I felt, but it is. I guessed Kevin was a little scared, and all his bolting away in the past corroborated that, and I supposed that if I gave him time he would decide to become comfortable with me or he wouldn’t. I decided I could handle either one.
It was with that sounding through my head that I came upon the Unicorn the following Saturday, at about midday and in his usual place.
“Hey, Lesleee,” he hailed me.
I shuffled up the sand to his chair.
“How’s it going, chiquita?” He raised his hand, palm outward, in a salute.
I stood in front of him, my hands in my pockets, and managed a half-smile.
He began to shake his head. “Tisk, tisk,” he said. “Don’t tell me. I know you had some kind of a date.”
I let out a mixture of a grunt and a sigh.
“Less than remarkable, was it?”
“Yes.” I sighed again. This time it really was a sigh. “He was a little uptight, I guess. Then he kind of stood up and left.”
The Unicorn tipped his chair backward and tapped the end of an unlit cigarette on his thumbnail. “Then like a pawing horse let go, he made a sudden bound—” He stopped the tapping.
“What are you reciting?”
“The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.”
“Oh,” I said. “Coleridge. I read that in the tenth grade. ’Twos an ancient mariner who stoppeth one of three … I don’t know the rest.”
“Well,” said the Unicorn. “That’s actually wrong. It goes, It is an ancient mariner, and he stoppeth one of three … You can’t say it like it’s in the past. The mariner is in the present.” He gave the cigarette another tap. “He’s timeless, see. Do you know what the poem is about?”
I felt embarrassed. “No.”
“Well,” said the Unicorn, “the mariner detained this wedding guest who was supposed to go to a wedding and he insisted on telling him this awful story, and the guest kept trying to get away and not listen to it.” He paused and narrowed his eyes. I thought he was looking at me, but then I decided I was wrong. “The mariner wouldn’t let him go. In the end, the guest came away a much wiser man, a man ruined by knowledge, you might say.”
“Ruined?” I repeated.
The Unicorn nodded. “Flattened. The mariner woke him up. That’s the reason for the word is. The mariner is like this learning wheel in all of us—he forces us to stop and listen and replay, to walk along the ocean and take a look at who we really are. Get it?”
“I think so,” I said.
“And that’s what you’re doing today, taking a walk by the ocean.”
I nodded.
“Leslie, Leslie.” He put his cigarette back in its crushed cellophane packet. “I forgot I can’t smoke in front of you. Did he bum you out, this genius, the other night?”
I shook my head. “I wouldn’t say that. Nothing’s happened yet.” I stared at a white truck passing on the highway above the line of boulders that ran the length of the beach. “See,” I explained, “I just think we need to take things slowly.” I paused. “If I take things slowly I’ll be less likely to be whammed with disappointment the way I was before. I have to be willing to go at a speed that I’m really not used to, and I think that’s what’s making me feel uncomfortable. Like I’m not in my own skin. I think I’m growing, though. I’m growing into a better Leslie, and maybe that’s why it doesn’t feel like I’m in my own skin.”
The Unicorn nodded approvingly. “You are absolutely right, Leslie. I can see it before my very eyes. But, I’ll tell you something. This is a secret, a kind of cynical secret, but it’s really a bottom-line truth.” His eyes brightened and he reached into his T-shirt pocket for the pack of cigarettes. “This truth, my dear señorita—and it runs through all poetry, literature, you name it—it’s the only thing they write about—is … that … all men are motivated by three things. Fear, lust and greed.” He tapped a cigarette on his nail. “And women, too,” he added. “I didn’t mean to leave out women.” He rocked backward in the chair.
I stared at him. “Come on,” I said. “That can’t be true.”
His head bobbed down with emphasis. “It is. As true as the day is long.”
“Well, what am I motivated by? Those things?”
He put the cigarette in his mouth and spoke through tightened lips as he fumbled in his jeans pocket for a match. “Think about it, Leslita. Why are you out pounding sand on the beach? It’s simple. You’re fearful. You’re worried you won’t get the relationship you want out of this new dude. And right there are the rest of the components. The relationship is the lust, and wanting it is the greed. You’re doing real good—you hit all three in one try. Not everyone can claim that.”
I was quiet as I digested his analysis. “And what about him—Kevin?”
“Him?” He took the cigarette out of his mouth. “Look at me, I’m always trying to light up when you’re around.” He put the cigarette in the packet and put the packet under the chair. “He’s the same,” he said, straightening up. “Lust—he asked you out, right? And fear—he got up and walked away. The greed I don’t know about. I would say he’s too tied up in himself right now, and that’s a kind of greed—not wanting to give yourself to anybody else—but that’s a secondary kind of greed, so I would dismiss it, I think. He’s hitting two out of three at the moment. One—any one—by the way, is good enough.”
I let out a long breath, watching the fog bank over the kelp beds. The sun burned strangely bright above it. “Well,” I said. “I don’t know if I should believe you. There’s got to be more to live for.”
The Unicorn stretched out his arms. “It is better to die on your feet than to live on your knees.”
I focused back on his face. He was grinning. “What’s that?”
“Dolores Ibarruri. La Pasionaria. She said it in a speech.”
“Who was she?”
The Unicorn shrugged. “God only knows.”
We sat in silence. I found a little rock to lean against, tilted my head back, and shut my eyes. The fog bank would not reach us for a while. I felt the Unicorn near me, tapping the arm of his canvas chair, biding his time. The light from the sun was constant and sharp, but through it came a flatness, as though, for today, a portion of the radiance had been tied off, the wires twisted and left to dangle in an empty room.
I looked up and down the kelp-strewn stretch of beach. “What was that you said about living on your feet?” I demanded of the Unicorn.
“Living on your feet,” he repeated. He faced the ocean, chewing on the stem of a rosewood pipe. “Did I say that?”
“Yes. You said it was better to live on your feet than your knees.”
“Oh, that,” said the Unicorn, removing the pipe. “I didn’t say it, for starters. Dolores did. And it’s actually a little bit different.”
I stood up and rubbed my arms. The fog was thicker, like a bedroll, gray and lumpy and moving in. “Well, who’s this Dolores and what did she say?”
The Unicorn put a leg out to steady the tilting of his chair. He still hadn’t sewn the rip and I wondered vaguely if someday he might fall. “You know what Dolores means?” he asked, staring musingly to sea. A fat ship sat on the sheen of water between the kelp beds and the horizon. “It means pain.”
I waited.
“What she said was, It is better to die on your feet than to live on your knees.”
I looked at the fat ship with the Unicorn. “Well, that’s me,” I announced.
The Unicorn put the pipe back between his teeth. “Is that right?”
I nodded. I watched him carefully. He appeared detached and desultory, but I knew he was involved. He would throw me, any second, a line of verse. And he did.
“
To assert: Your mansion, long and richly inhabited, its porches and bowers suiting the children of men, will not be forever thus, O man, exhibited, and one had best hurry to enter it if one can.”
“I knew it!” I crowed with relief and excitement. “I knew you would figure it out.”
The Unicorn was unmoved. “It’s a Ransom poem. Old Mansion.” His gaze remained on the ship.
“What does it mean?”
He turned from the water, raising his eyebrows. He took the pipe out of his mouth. “So how come you got so excited if you have to ask me what it means?”
I felt suddenly silly. “Well, it sounded so right to me, but I wanted to know what the real meaning was, and if that was the way I felt, then I would be right, too.”
The Unicorn looked at me, his brows still high. “You mean to tell me, Leslie, that a poem has to tell you how you feel?” He was almost glaring. I cringed, afraid.
“Well—” I stuttered. “The poem does say how I feel.”
“But what about you? Can’t you be the first authority? Aren’t you the owner and operator of how and what you feel?”
I felt myself stepping back. “Yes,” I said. “Yes, of course. I am the owner of how I feel. Why wouldn’t I be?”
The Unicorn rocked slowly and studied me. “Think about what you said just now, Leslie. Think about it.”
I heaved a long breath. Why was everybody so difficult? Why did everybody have to produce a wrench, a pet peeve, a peephole, a weird behavior, just when I felt I was getting to know them? I watched the ship until I decided I couldn’t anymore. It wasn’t even moving. I looked back at the Unicorn. He was staring at the water, his fingers and teeth on the pipe. He seemed to be humming.
I took a breath. “You’re mad at me.”
“Huh?” he turned, the legs of the chair finding home base in the sand. “Me? Mad at you? Why?”
Again he had me cornered. I shook my head. “I don’t know why. I think it’s crazy that you should be mad. I was only trying to learn from your poetry.”
The Unicorn’s thumb explored a tiny circle on the bowl of the pipe. “Leslita. I’m the farthest thing from mad at you. I think you’re a wonderful, wonderful woman. And because you’re so wonderful, you don’t need my poetry. I know you can learn from yourself.”
I smiled nervously, modesty pureeing my self-confidence to shreds. What was he trying to say? I hoped he wasn’t going to leave again. I needed him. He was a piece of my world now, a favorite cranny that I had to visit every day. Or almost every day. The weekends. I left him after a little while, his teeth still biting at the stem of his empty pipe. He was my cranny, my filter. I wanted him to stay.
Cornelia’s phone bills eventually piled into my mailbox. Her calls came to over two hundred dollars. I decided the amount was way too big to ignore. I called Geoff’s number at a time I was pretty sure they would both be out. The whole affair made me a little sick. Cornelia had whizzed through the back yard on one of her rounds and had left a bedsheet she had taken by mistake and a couple of my tapes. I had seen the sheet draped over the little wrought-iron chair that the stray cats liked to climb on. I washed the sheet and put it at the back of my linen shelf.
Luckily, they were both out. I listened to the New Age music Geoff had put on his machine and when the beep sounded, I made myself calm. With the barest of preludes, I left the sum Cornelia owed me. Less than a week later, she slid a check underneath my door.
So. It was all completely over. Paul still bugged me on and off about Cornelia, and once or twice Muriel had touched on her, too. To both of them I said I would rather not talk about it. I felt a fool for helping someone who didn’t want to be helped. Muriel knew exactly what had raised my ire. She was gracious enough not to fine-comb through it. “You’re much better off, Wesley,” was all she said. “Let people take care of their own lives. Why should you be the one that’s put out?” And she was right, although she didn’t mean the words quite the way I suddenly saw them. I had been put out, like another cigarette, extinguished and rubbed into ash. Cornelia had smoked me nonchalantly and had then thrown me away.
Paul was not so delicate. “Gee,” he marvelled, huffing and puffing beside me one morning as we ran. Though Paul was a strong runner, he was also a loud one. Some people pitter-patter like Pocahontas in moccasins, but Paul sounded more like a rhino on the charge. Had I never been aware of the heavy footfalls before? “So, you think she’s happy now, Leslie?” He answered the question himself. “I’m dead certain she’s not. He’s probably doing the same thing—tweaking her around with another girl. He found out it didn’t work with you, so he pulled her back, this Caroline, to try in a different place.”
I said nothing.
“Whaddya think, Leslie?” pressed Paul.
“I don’t know. I don’t really care.”
“Hmm. She upset you, Leslie. I can see she did. Do you think, now be honest with me, do you think you might like to have been the one to go back? To be with him, I mean?”
I stopped the run. Sweat beaded into my eyebrows and I raised a hand to wipe it off. “Paul.” I sighed. I didn’t know whether to yell at him or to talk civilly. “I want you to understand this. Geoff and Cornelia are gone. Gone. I don’t have a shred of curiosity about them. You, on the other hand, may. If you like, I’ll give you the number and you can call and ask what they’re up to. But I don’t want to know. Okay?” I waited, watching his face. He was frowning, but it might have been a squint against the sun. “They used me. Get it? They made me mad.” I turned and began to walk. Paul hesitated, and fell in step beside me.
“Boy, Leslie, I can see you’re still mad.”
I tried to forgive Paul. He was very understanding, in his own way, and a good friend. But there was something about this peephole phenomenon of his that got my fur up. I couldn’t help it. Paul was okay while we were running, swimming, or when he talked about his family. But when the subject of other people came up, particularly if the issues were tricky or complex, back slid the plate on the peephole and down crouched Paul. “Ha! She’s acting insecure. He’s controlling. That’s a bad move. That’s a putdown.” Paul had summings-up for everything. I wondered what he thought of me.
“Everything is a transaction, Leslie,” Paul told me once. “That was what we learned in sales. But, you know what—everything, it doesn’t have to be just sales—everything on this earth is a transaction. You and I are in a transaction. We mean to get something out of being here. Everyone’s in it to gain.” I listened hard to what he was saying. He went on. “What you have to do is ask yourself, ‘What am I getting out of this? Why am I here?’ Once you figure that out, you have the key to the whole picture.”
The whole picture. I thought about that as we walked. The whole picture was often much more complicated than the simple statements people wanted to make. The whole picture consisted of many incompletions: loose threads, reverses of fabric, rips and tears. There was no whole picture; there was only an entity that changed, like the weather, to dark and stormy, clear and light. And all we could work with were the cloud masses. And even those changed, floated, moved around. We could try to mark their movement; try to find their beginning, observe their middle and wait for their end. It was only an attempt.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
Pendulum
Dear Diary: I had my second date with Kevin. To tell you the truth, it wasn’t much better than the first. I had offered to cook him dinner. He sat in the same chair at the table that he had sat in when Cornelia cooked that night, and then we sat on the couch and then he kind of started kissing me, and this time he said he would like to sleep with me. We started to make love on the couch, which was really too small, and when I said something about his heels being in the air, he kind of laughed and said why don’t we go to the bedroom.
And once we were in the bedroom, he kind of pumped listlessly and then stopped. And then we went to sleep because there was nothing more to say.
Naturally, Paul wanted to know about Kevin.
“How’s it going? Is he a nice guy?”
“He’s really nice.” I thought about the deepness of Kevin’s voice.
“Well, that’s good to know. I suppose I shouldn’t ask, but I can’t resist. What does he do?”
“You mean for a living?”
“Yeah, for a living.”
“He just changed jobs. He’s a vice-president for a knitwear company.”
“Knitwear?”
“Sportswear, I guess. Some kind of cotton. They sell to department stores.”
“Huh,” said Paul. “Does he have a mustache?”
I had forgotten his pet theme. I shook my head.
“Good for you,” said Paul. “It’s about time.”
Kevin was in fact very busy. I decided not to see him more than once a week, maybe two times at the most. That way he wouldn’t feel any pressure and he could ease into knowing me, and I could do the opposite of what I had done with Geoff and take things slowly for a change. If we took things slowly, we could see what was coming down the road—and talk about it. With Geoff, I really hadn’t been able to talk about anything. He had ranted ceaselessly about the significance of being involved with me, but it was all put on. He knew it was what I wanted to hear; he knew that his showing those concerns would make me value him more—or he thought that would make me value him more. Geoff had milked me for time over those four weeks, and Kevin—if I saw him only once every seven days—would never wind up doing that. It was I who had let myself be milked. Like a cow chewing cud in a dark barn.
I drove to work, content and happy, and floated around the law library in a dream world of my own. Steve noticed it and so did Hilda, the freelance paralegal. Hilda was sweet on the surface but a little fakey; her nails were too red and her shoes too shined. I wondered if she actually polished her shoes. The last time I had tackled mine was over a year ago, and the prospect of doing them all again was nearly devastating. Yet my father had shined his shoes every morning. He had a special bag of boot polishes and brushes; he would lay his paraphernalia out, pick out his pair of shoes, and rub zeal into the leather with a purposeful hand. I was sure Hilda’s were plastic or else she had some clever synthetic trick.
The Shadow Man Page 18