“Are you seeing someone, Leslie?” she approached me one morning, resting her hand on my arm for an intimate second.
I jumped. She lifted her cherry-tipped fingers. “Um, no. Well, um, yes. Well, actually, I’m not sure.” I hated making more of things than I truthfully could. It was the best way to ensure their disappearance.
Hilda’s painted mouth spread confidentially. “Sometimes that’s just the way it is. Give it time. I’m sure you’ll have him in a week or two.” The red heart widened again and Hilda’s patent leather carried her among the shelves.
I stared at her departing skirt. The good thing about work was that most people left me alone. Hilda’s brand of cliché was shared by a lot of the secretaries, and the attorneys for the most part downed oceans of coffee and made jokes about their growing girths. Why was it that people threw out these makeshift walls? What did they want to keep from being found? And I, while posing this question, kept to myself except for my flitting friendship with Steve.
“Are you happy now, Leslie?” Steve badgered me from time to time. I knew that if I answered him and other people weren’t around, he would listen, I mean really listen, but it was safer for him to joke. I felt bad. These were spitballs, fifth-grade fallbacks, more in the architecture of walls. I let him kid with me again one day and then I pitched the spitball back.
“Do you really want to know?”
“Sure.” Steve was leafing through a file. “Where’s that partnership agreement I thought was in here?”
I crossed over to him and shut the file. “Do you really want to know if I’m happy?”
Steve looked puzzled. “What’s the matter with you, Leslie? Is this a pantomime? Is there something I’m supposed to figure out?”
“No!” I shouted. “This isn’t a pantomime! I’m talking!”
“Well, what are you trying to say? Here, let me have that file. I need to look for something.”
“No.” I held the file behind my back. “I’m sick of you asking me questions and then not listening. Is this what you do to Nancy?”
Steve put his hand to his head. “Leslie, come on. Sit down.” He motioned to his red plush chair. I sat on the edge of the upholstery, the file in my lap. I wasn’t going to give it up.
Steve half-leaned, half-sat on the edge of the desk. He looked at me very seriously. “I worked for Edouardo, Leslie. You know about Edouardo. I was a young kid, right out of law school, and my first job was with him. Knowing a little about Edouardo, you can imagine what that was like. Everybody, everybody, Leslie, without exception, said don’t do it. You’ll kill yourself. Or he’ll kill you first. I’ll tell you this, Leslie. Working with that guy was a study in an art. I don’t even know what art. All I know is that I eventually got good at it.
“Edouardo, see, was in the Marines. And when he left, at about forty, he decided to cram in a few years of law school and start a sweatshop doing divorces for the Marines. He had a ready-made fishpond. The Marines were always divorcing. And to be divorced by an ex-Marine? Hey, nothing in the world could be better.
“Edouardo had had people snapping at him for years. So, as your dog-eat-dog lawyer, Edouardo snapped back. He prefers, as you know, to represent men. It allows him the range of his vocabulary. And Edouardo sees to it, at least once in every case he takes, that the wife breaks into sobs in the courtroom.” Steve fell silent for a second. “His genius is intimidation. And the Marines, being Marines, are all for it.” He banged his fist at the palm of his other hand. “Stick it to the wives!”
I didn’t blink.
“Imagine being on a desert island with Edouardo. Well, what I had to do as his associate wasn’t that far removed. Edouardo was like a two-ton weight on the end of a pendulum. You could feel him coming for miles. If you could get out of his way, you were fine. But the problem was, there was no room to move.
“I spent years, Leslie, learning to slide myself over, slide myself into the fraction of space he left me, to survive his onslaughts and to learn from his style. Not that his style was brilliant. But it was relentless. And as a lawyer, it was the best education I could have had. So I studied. I studied the universe there was left to me in that little space. And I worked so hard at that universe—I worked so hard—that I came home one Friday to find Katrina, my first wife, gone. Gone. Out of the blue.”
Steve stared at me, hard. I gulped. We faced the space between us for a few minutes, Steve thinking and staring and me sitting in wonder on my chair. He reached out his hand. “Are we friends again, Leslie? I care about what happens to you. Now give me the file.”
I drove home the long way, on the dusk-shrouded coast road. In the distance glowed the lighted sign of the Volvo dealership where I sometimes gave Steve a ride on the nights he had to pick up Nancy’s car. I thought sadly of Katrina in the Edouardo story. What happened to people that suddenly wham! out of nowhere, they had to give up forever a massive chunk of their life?
I put clothespins on my swimming towel and tugged it flat on the line. Behind the fence, evening bled into a wash of ultramarine. I closed the French doors on the jewel color outside in time to pick up the ringing phone.
The voice was tight, female, and wary. “Hello, Leslie,” it said. “This is Cornelia.”
“Hi.” I hardly knew what else to say.
“Ya—” she stopped to cough. “I should have called you much earlier.”
I was silent.
“I just want to call to tell you that I am very sorry for this night. I do not even remember what happened.”
“That’s okay,” I said.
“No, it is really not okay. I should have called you much sooner. You know, every time I thought that I should call you, my face was becoming red—completely red—and I thought I cannot do this now, this is terrible. And so finally—I do not know why—but I can call you.”
“Well, that’s good,” I said.
“I hope you will forgive me for this night.”
“Of course,” I said. I thought of Muriel, Paul. They were never going to let me get away with this.
“I really cannot remember what happened,” Cornelia went on. “I was at his house, this I know. I was kind of—no, very—drunk. I cannot remember what I said or what I did.”
“Don’t worry,” I said. “It doesn’t matter.”
“Ya, well, I just had to make this call.”
“Good. I’m glad.”
I heard her pause, and then the silence was followed by a faint rustling, as though she were searching through a carpetbag of memory to come up with the next spur. Suddenly she backtracked.
“I hope you are not thinking I am with Geoff.”
I hesitated. I had forgotten. I had stopped thinking about her, where she was, what she was doing. But she had found the ice-breaker. “My God!” she cried. “I hope you were not thinking this! I could not be with this idjut for five more minutes!”
“But—” I hesitated, “didn’t you go back to him?”
“When I was drunk that night and didn’t know what I was doing. It was just these three days. I was sleeping on the couch and then I moved immediately to this house with Erich.” Erich was the German microbiologist.
“Well.” I let out a breath. I was going to have to think about all this. “Good for you. I don’t think it would have been good for you to start that stuff all over again.”
“No.” She paused. “I am not crazy. But he thought, even for this three days, that I came back to start from the beginning again. He is really not normal. Of this I am sure.” She pronounced it shoe-er. “Are you still working in the same place?”
“Yup. For Steve.”
“Great,” said Cornelia.
I lifted an ice pick. I still had this strange liking for Cornelia. “Would you like to come over for dinner?” I asked.
To hell with Paul and Muriel, I thought as I churned a bowl of stuffing for my special peppers. Unlike the oily, meaty peppers people normally made, mine would turn a crisp and radiant green. And when yo
u cut them with a pointed knife, out tumbled brown rice strung with melted cheese and dots of brightly colored vegetables.
Cornelia knocked on the door as I was piling spoonfuls of filling into the peppers.
She wore the same stilletto jeans and metal-studded denim jacket, but she looked much, much more relaxed. The cast from the thumb incident was gone. Her face was softer, not hard and piqued like I remembered it, and she smiled more readily and naturally, as though the world were made less of granite and boulders and ice than it had been two months ago. Still, there was an angularity to her being that was more than just fine wrists and long legs—a quickness of movement that suggested that she was still the littlest bit wary, still watchful and alert, as though at any minute she might have to grind out her cigarette and spring, ponytail tossing, to her own defense.
“You can see I am smoking again,” she said.
“I don’t mind.” I lined up the peppers in their baking dish.
“Ya, you do not mind, but I do!” She laughed, crossing to the screen door to blow out the smoke. “I will stop this soon. It has to be a time when I am ready, and now I am just not ready.”
I nodded. She folded her arms and took another long inhale of the cigarette. “Geoff was calling me every day after I moved with Erich, saying ‘How are you?’” Her imitation was deliberately syrupy. “You know that Erich is not a boyfriend, he is just a good friend of mine from Germany. And I told him—Geoff—‘I don’t want ever to talk to you again. Don’t call.’” Cornelia leaned forward with emphasis. “‘If you are calling me, I am just going to hang up.’ And now I have been living there one month and he is still calling.”
I turned to her, surprised. “And do you hang up?”
“Of course!” She held the rest of the cigarette under the faucet and then dropped it in the garbage under the sink. “I do not know what to think of these American men,” she announced, banging the cupboard door.
“What do you mean?” I looked into the microwave to check the peppers.
“They are all jerks. The ones I am meeting are all jerks. First they are all thinking you are so nice and so intelligent, and then they are suddenly mean and don’t talk anymore, and they say they cannot see you anymore. Huh!” She uttered a short laugh, paused, and thought about something. “I have to tell you this!” She leaned backwards to laugh again: a long, high, typical-Cornelia laugh, almost like a whinny. “One guy that I met—he was a complete idjut. He said to me this night that he decided he could not see me anymore … he said, ‘I think you are just an overeducated slut!’” She broke into wild laughter again. “Can you believe this?”
I laughed, watching her. “What a thing to say,” I said.
“At first I did not know what slut was …” She could not stop laughing. Her eyes were all crinkled up at the corners and she gasped for breath. “Then later I found out and I thought it was hilarious. Overeducated slut! This is so funny!”
“It’s very funny,” I said. I really thought it was pretty funny, too. In some ways it was very close to the truth—about me, as much as it was about Cornelia. Whoever said it wasn’t dumb. He had at least one of us figured out. Boy oh boy. I reached into the microwave and brought out the baking dish of bright green peppers. I set the dish on the table.
Cornelia had always picked at her food, and tonight, again, she ran her fork restlessly over her plate, prodding the pepper here and there, nibbling on a few grains of rice, and mostly talking and looking from the plate to me. “All these men, they are so weert,” she said with incredulity, again and again.
I nodded as I ate.
Cornelia tilted her head and thought for a minute. “Like a sheddo. Like you are with a sheddo.”
“What?”
“Sheddo,” repeated Cornelia, as if hearing it for the third time I was going to get it. “Schatten, we say in German. That thing which is following you.”
“Oh!” I said. “Shadow.”
“Ya,” said Cornelia. “Sheddo. They are like a sheddo.”
Suddenly I remembered Kevin. I hadn’t even told her. I wondered how she would take it. Was it even news? “Guess what,” I drew in a breath. “I forgot to tell you something. You know Kevin, of course—how could you not. Well, I’m sort of … almost having a relationship with him right now. It was really weird how it started. He called me to go out to dinner just after you left.”
I thought she watched me intently for a micro-minute, but then she was back at scraping her pepper.
“Ya, and how is it?” she asked, her words matter-of-fact and clipped.
“The relationship?”
She nodded very briefly and fixed her black pupils on me.
I hesitated, and then gave a little shrug. “It’s okay. He’s funny—it seems like I can never get that close to him. But so far it’s okay, and I guess we just need to take it kind of slowly.”
She was still watching me.
“I think you broke the ice,” I explained. “He’s known me for a year and he never made a move until that night that you went over. I guess that did it. I have you to thank.”
“So that is good,” she said. “Maybe I was crazy this night, but at least for you it worked out.” She still had trouble with Americanisms. I could tell “worked out” was not an idiom in German, or else she was forcing the words because she was still a bit uncomfortable.
I nodded. “I guess there’s a reason for everything,” I said redundantly.
She left a little after nine, lingering momentarily in the doorway. I remembered the way she had fled down the steps, white sneakers scuttling, the night Geoff showed up at the door. “I will call you.” She shook out her car keys.
CHAPTER TWENTY
The Sand Man
“I hope she doesn’t plan on moving in with you,” said Muriel.
I let out an explosive sigh. “For crying out loud, Muriel!”
“I don’t know,” said Muriel doubtfully, shaking her head. We had stopped along a rocky beach to watch the seals. Plump and limp and feckless, they basked on exactly half of a large rock jutting from a swirl of placid waves. A flock of pelicans marked time on the other half. Neither species stirred, except for the twitching of a flipper or the turning of a head and bill.
“This is all ridiculous,” I said, to nobody in particular. A pelican flapped, soaring into the air. The whole thing was incredibly ridiculous. Why were people so impossible? Why did you have to present a certain face to a certain person? “Let me tell you something,” I turned abruptly to Muriel. “Have you ever heard the story of the man and the donkey?”
Muriel shrugged. “I don’t know. If it’s a fable, I’ve heard a thousand of them.”
“Fine,” I said. I flattened myself against the railing in a long, protracted lean. “There was a man who went to market with his son and his donkey. He sat his son on the donkey and walked alongside. They walked for a while and then some people who passed them said, look at that selfish boy, riding the donkey while his father has to walk. So the man got on the donkey and let his son walk. Then some other people said, look at that terrible man, riding the donkey while his son walks. So the man and the son got on the donkey.” I waited. Muriel was staring at the seals. “Then another group of people said, look at that cruel man and that cruel boy, weighing down the poor donkey. So the man and his son got off the donkey and led it along the road. And pretty soon the people that passed them said, now why doesn’t at least one of those fools ride the donkey?”
I turned to Muriel.
She was rocking back on her heels, holding the railing. “Huh. What a story.”
“Do you get it?” I demanded.
“What’s there to get?” said Muriel.
I sighed in exasperation. “The whole point is, I’m going to do whatever I want to! I’m not the man, I’m not the donkey, and you’re not the people!”
Muriel was shaking her head. “You’re going bananas, Leslie,” she said.
The Unicorn had moved into the open, away from his
usual niche in the rocks. I found him lounging in his chair, next to a flattish mound of molded sand some thirty feet in length. I glanced at the mound as I passed it. Then I saw the second mound, more or less the same size. They were sculptures in the sand, like gingerbread people—a woman and a man. They lay flat on their backs, arms splayed wide, and they were naked. The woman had a shell necklace, two pebbles on what were meant to be her breasts, and a heap of seaweed curled like hair on her pelvis. The man had been walked upon and was now in a stage of falling apart.
“Children,” said the Unicorn. “Children made these.”
“Children?” I echoed.
“Yup. Can you believe it? Two children. They’re playing down at the other end of the beach.”
“How old?” I asked.
“Eight. Nine. Who knows. They weren’t very old.”
I gazed down at the sculptures. The seaweed had been very carefully arranged.
“It defies my theory,” said the Unicorn.
“What theory?”
He rocked a little in his chair and shook his head at the sculptures. The canvas under his rump was still holding strong. “Fear, lust and greed.” He let the chair drop onto all its legs and pointed his Reebok at the mounds of sand. “Now what do you think motivated those kids? It wasn’t fear, lust or greed.”
“Children are different,” I offered. “Children are natural until they change. They have to change. We force them to change.”
The Unicorn nodded slowly. “But who shall return us the children?” he recited.
“What’s that?”
“Kipling.”
“Does that make you sad?” I asked kindly. “That children change?”
He raised his head, the fine brown hair flicking with the movement as though he were almost annoyed. “It does. I find it very sad that children change into frightened grownups. Not wonderful grownups, but frightened grownups. Speaking of which, have you had any more dates with whatshisname?”
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