I watched her search for the words.
“They cannot be … personal.” She turned to me abruptly. “Is this how you say it?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “Intimate, is that what you mean?”
“Ya, maybe,” said Cornelia, staring at the palm as if something in it were about to move. “Maybe.”
Later that night, I had a strange dream. I dreamed that Kevin’s ex-wife Lauren brought me a burrito. “Here, Leslie,” she purred, holding out a china plate with a plump burrito oozing juices on it, “Here’s a burrito I made for you.”
“Why, thank you, Lauren,” I said, taking the plate and setting it on the bed in front of me. We were kneeling on either side of a large double bed with brass posts, covered in a plush maroon velveteen spread. Lauren scuttled on her knees to my side. Her blond hair hung in beautiful cascades, falling on the velvet like gold-colored snow. I leaned over to her, talking animatedly. She listened, smiling, sometimes bowing her head, her creamy face lost in the sweep of golden cornsilk. I paused with my hands in mid-air, and then lowered them for a bite of the burrito. Lauren raised her head and smiled. The burrito was gone, the plate empty. She had eaten it, and all that remained on the bedspread were a couple of slivers of grated orange cheese.
A storm playing off the Baja Peninsula had turned the waves gigantic. Curving and cresting in high arcs, opalescent and green like the scales on a dragon’s back, they twisted and lunged toward the sky, cracking at the peak of their effort and rolling downward in collars of foam. Black, rubber-clad surfers, like porpoises playing life-size chess, glided on the ice-green, skaters in a Holiday on High Tide.
Digging my hands deep in my pockets, I lengthened my strides on the sand. I thought about making dinner for Muriel. I hadn’t done that for a long time. Maybe it would work. I would not bring up Cornelia. I would be discreet about Kevin. I walked on, feeling partly angry and partly sad. Why did there have to be friction? What was I to do? I felt like a hub in the middle of a wheel. Was there something I was missing? Grease? Bearings? Spokes?
Kevin spun somewhere on the rim of the wheel. I was going to see him that night. Dates with him made me unnecessarily nervous: I would bathe, dress according to hours of thinking and decision, wear the right bracelet, the right earrings, the right amount of perfume, and time the moment I left the house so that I never knocked on his door a second too late or too early. Sometimes, at the last minute, if the perfume smelled too strong, I would rush to the bathroom and wash it off, hoping agitatedly that he would have no idea how hard I had worked to put myself together. You’re an idiot, Leslie, my brain scolded, unheard by my floating semi-consciousness, you really are an amazing idiot.
He would call me—not often, but strategically—once or twice a week, and his voice always sounded so deep and so profound. It was not what he said that was profound—it was just his voice. “If you think my voice is deep,” he had once remarked, “you should hear my father’s. My father’s voice sounds like it’s coming from somewhere in the core of the earth.” Occasionally he borrowed John’s BMW—the friend that he worked for—and he would call me from the freeway on the car phone. Even then, through the static and jangle of traffic noises, the mellow richness of his voice made me panic, my heart stuffing my mouth, my ears growing hot as the crackle and sporadic words told me the call was from him.
“So, Leslie—you want to go out to dinner this week?” he would ask. Yes, my dying soul would shout, oh, yes! and I would answer very calmly, “Sure, that would be nice.” And we would go to the Carrot or a Mexican restaurant or a pizza place.
For some reason he preferred that I not make dinner at home. Once I slaved over a pea soup from fresh peas and Greek spinach squares with sliced tomatoes, and he stood in front of the oven and looked at the pots on the stove. He chuckled. “You know,” he said, “I hate peas and I hate spinach and I hate tomatoes.” I froze, embarrassment prickling my scalp as a flush of red washed to my toes. “You’re kidding,” I said. He shook his head and smiled with an odd kind of glee. “I’m not kidding.”
“You want to go to the Carrot?” I said.
“Maybe we ought to.”
I had told Muriel about the incident. “Don’t cook for him, Leslie,” she commanded. “Don’t waste your time cooking for him again.” Her intensity was fierce. I was much less provoked. If he didn’t want me to cook, then I wouldn’t. Yet his choice struck me as strange. Most men loved to have women make food for them. I thought of Geoff sitting down to dinner and spooning the beans I made into his dainty mouth with the corners of toasted tortillas, Larry wolfing muffins, soup and vegetable pies, my brother Greg with mountains of pasta, and my father and the leg of lamb my mother made on Sundays. There were no exceptions. Only Kevin.
The Amtrak raced past as I scanned the boulders for the Unicorn. I watched it slice through the sunlight like a corrugated eel, silver and trembling as the metal wheels screamed above the rolling of the highway and the ocean. I remembered the freight cars, the rumbling chorus sung by the night during the dazed weeks I spent with Geoff, and I wondered why I never heard them anymore. Funny how certain constants—people, places, noises that were always there—surged and faded as they played their roles as backdrops for the shifting scenes through which we passed.
The Unicorn sat at the south end of the beach, the point at which the boulders stopped and a large rock jutted out, and beyond the rock the beach rolled southward, flanked by the cliffs. He had moved. I walked to his chair. He was happy to see me, I could tell. He tilted backward more rakishly and waved his pack of cigarettes as I climbed through the low, soft mounds of sand.
“Yo, Leslita,” he called.
“Hi.” I smiled. “You’re in a different spot.” I loved to smile at him. His face would light up and the brown in his eyes would soften, and I knew that whoever his other clients were, the other people that he “love-doctored,” I was special. I had tried to ask him a couple of times who else there might be, and he would reply that right now there was only a nurse and a woman electrician, but that only a few months back up in Santa Cruz he had had at least a dozen regulars. “I guess we go through fat times and thin times and this is one of my thin years,” he had said, with a mixture of a laugh and a frown.
And now, as I approached, he winked broadly. “I shall wear white flannel trousers, and walk upon the beach.”
I looked down at my corduroys. They were billowy and pegged at the ankles and, once the palest of lilacs, they had pretty much faded to white.
He grinned. “Eliot. The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock. The next line goes, I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each.”
“Mermaids?” I repeated.
“Mermaids.” He nodded, gesturing to the frothing water. Rippling waves tumbled at the lip of jutting rock. “Long, golden hair. They swim around beyond the kelp bed in the day and sit by the tidepools in the dusk at night.”
“There are no mermaids,” I said.
He clicked his tongue in disapproval. “I have seen them riding seaward on the waves … when the wind blows the water white and black.”
“You have not,” I insisted. “There are no mermaids.”
He raised his eyebrows. “Is that right?”
“It should be. Mermaids are for dreamers.” I was surprised at myself. I wasn’t sure where that came from.
The Unicorn showed surprise, too. “Whoa,” he said, raising his hand. “Time out.” He fixed his brown eyes on me. “There are lots of ways to dream, Leslita.”
It was a challenge. I fell into it. This was, after all, our little game. “Okay,” I said, folding my arms. “Tell me.”
I caught a flicker in his eyes, deep behind the brown. The look was a new one, strangely layered, as though he were part of the scene as well as a spectator. I knew it had to do with me. He was intent and reserved, impassioned and watchful. I pretended distraction, turning briefly to the water. He waited.
“Well,” I prodded, “what are the ways to dream?”
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He flicked a bit of ash on the paleness of the sand. “There are two ways, to start,” he said slowly. “There’s dreaming with a C … and dreaming with a Y. Dreaming with a C—” his words were slow and measured, “is creative—and one of the most divine things you could do. You take long bubble baths in fantasy. Your mind relaxes. You have fun. You put things together in new and crazy ways.” He paused, staring at the wisp of smoke crawling along the tip of his cigarette. “Then there’s dreaming with a Y. Dreaming with a Y—” he looked up at me, “is yearning. Greener pastures. You want a bigger house. You want a better car.” He waited, his brown eyes still and golden. I felt he was testing, giving me a cue. Something made me very sad.
“Okay,” I said, playing the game. “The mermaids are dreaming with a C.”
He nodded. “Right. We have lingered in the chambers of the sea, by sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown, till human voices wake us, and we drown.”
“That’s definitely fantasy,” I said.
He smiled. It was a strangely sad and distant smile. I couldn’t figure it out. The game kept slipping into sadness. “You’re right, Leslita,” he said, sending the smile to me. “The mermaids aren’t real. But they have a place in reality. That’s the difference.”
“So I was right the first time?”
“There’s more than one way to be right,” he said, the smile turning into a grin. We were back to the game. He leaned back, his hand raised to shield his eyes. The water churned relentlessly: foaming, smacking, tumbling forward, and then spilling back in the sea. The water was our apex, sifting through our feelings, finding us our words. When there was something I couldn’t say, I stared out to the ocean; when he pulled at thoughts that gave language a tussle, his words would come out of the sea. It was like pouring a mess through a filter, and after only a minute of giving yourself over to this blue crystal endlessness, the little fragments you were probing for inside you began to form a shape.
“Nereus,” mused the Unicorn, “was the god of the sea. He had fifty daughters, all of them mermaids. They rode the waves on dolphins and any sailor who caught one could make her tell the future in return for letting her go.”
“So mermaids tell the future?” I repeated.
“That’s what they say. Women of the glinting golden locks.”
I thought suddenly of Lauren in my dream. Her golden hair and the way it fell between us, and the way she slid, low to the ground, around to my side of the bed. “What kind of dreaming is the kind you do at night?” I asked.
The Unicorn winked. “What letter do you want to give it?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “Who makes up the letters?”
“Try one,” said the Unicorn.
“Fine. S. Dreaming with an S. For ‘sleep.’”
“Wonderful,” said the Unicorn.
“Well,” I said. “I think I dreamed with an S about a mermaid.”
“Oh?” inquired the Unicorn.
I told him about the dream. He grinned. “Nice,” he said, grinding the cigarette into the sand. “Nice dream.” He lined the butt up next to a little clump of others. He would put the ends back in the cigarette packet when it was empty and throw everything neatly away.
“Do you think she was a mermaid?” I pressed. “I didn’t see her legs. She could have easily had a fishtail. Do you think she was telling me the future?”
He pressed the tip of an unlit cigarette on his thumbnail. “Could well be.”
“She ate my burrito,” I reminded him. “Every last bit of it.”
He smiled. “So she wasn’t a mermaid, she was a pig.”
“Oh, no,” I said. “She wasn’t in any way like a pig.”
“Well,” remarked the Unicorn, the cigarette wobbling between his lips, “you never know.”
“How do you live?” I asked suddenly.
“Live?” he repeated. His eyes narrowed the tiniest bit.
“Yes. How do you buy food?”
He raised an eyebrow. “With money, same as you.”
“And where do you get money?”
The Unicorn raised the second eyebrow and took the cigarette out of his mouth. “I have my ways.”
I looked at him for a minute. “I want you to stop playing with me,” I said. “I want you to tell me the truth. Do you use credit cards?”
The first eyebrow climbed again. “What for?”
“Stop it,” I said. “Answer me honestly.” I paused. “I want to know if you use credit cards. To live on.”
The eyebrow went down and the Unicorn grinned. “Leslita. Don’t you know me better than that?”
“No,” I said sharply. “I don’t really know you at all. And, if I’m supposed to consider you my friend, there are certain things I need to know about you. Like if you’re living on credit cards right now.”
The Unicorn put the cigarette in his shirt pocket and leaned back again in the chair. “And why is that so important?”
“Well, maybe you think it’s prying,” I said. “But it’s important because … well, because … I want you to be okay,” I finished lamely.
He frowned. “Well, gee, that’s really sweet, Leslita. But it also puzzles me. Now why would you want me to be okay, as you call it?”
“Because I care about you.” I didn’t see why I shouldn’t tell him.
“I see.” His brown eyes flickered and he turned his face to the sea.
“Does that mean anything?” I asked.
He rocked his head up and down, very slowly, focusing on the mad, rhythmic capering of the current.
“What did you do when you got to California? After driving across the country, I mean.”
He turned his head to me.
“You sold drugs,” I said.
His expression did not change.
“I know you did,” I said. “So then what happened?”
His eyes did not change. They held mine.
“Are you some sort of fugitive? Did you kill a man?”
His smile was sad. He shook his head. “No,” he said. “I didn’t kill anyone. Would you have liked that?”
“Of course not,” I said. “I’m just trying to help.”
“Why?” asked the Unicorn, smiling sadly. “Why are you trying to help?”
I wanted to stamp my foot, but it would have had no effect in the piles of sand. Instead I sighed. “Because I care about you, I care about your welfare, and I’m frightened you’re going to waste away somehow. You’re too smart to waste away!”
The Unicorn shook his head. “Leslita,” he said. “You are too much.” He knotted his fingers together against his stomach, his elbows on the wooden arms of the chair. “Leslita, when I got out here I did a lot of wild things. I sold some drugs, I hustled, I beaded necklaces and sold them off a tray. Believe it or not, the necklaces made me a lot of money. I sold them for five dollars apiece, and they just about melted away. The beach communities got tough on me, chasing me off, so in the beginning selling drugs was easier than selling necklaces without a permit.” He glanced at me. “Hard to believe, isn’t it? I would have much preferred the necklaces. Anyway, I wrote off to Sacramento to get around the bureaucracies of the strings of village dolts. It worked. I got my permits, but not before I got something else.” He found my eyes again. I had not taken them off him, even though his had travelled down, around and out to the sea. “Remember the golf ball in my throat? Well, it turned into something worse. It turned out I had an occlusion. Here.” He dug a finger in the region of his solar plexus. “So I had to have surgery.”
“What was it from? The occlusion?”
He shrugged. “Who knows. Stress, they tried to say. Huh!” he laughed sardonically.
“And then?” I prodded. “Who paid for your operation?”
“Boy oh boy,” he marvelled. “You don’t miss a trick. The county did.”
“And then what? Did you sell necklaces?”
He nodded. “For a long time. I met a woman. She was fascinated with me. And I
was with her. We would go to libraries together and find poetry, analyze the human race in terms of written verse. She was almost done with a Ph.D. in psychology.” He unknotted his fingers and touched the tips together lightly. It was almost a gesture of prayer. I didn’t want to lose the story, so I prodded gently. “And?”
He locked his gaze into mine. “Where is that woman now? Well, Leslita. It was the old bottom line. I was a necklace peddler with a van. She was going to be a doctor. Therapist. Whatever. ‘Ken,’ she said.” He smiled apologetically. “My name at the time was Ken. Anyway, ‘Ken,’ she said, ‘here’s where you make a jump. I have certain concrete things I can’t give up. Can’t try to compromise. Swim or sink, sweetheart, it’s swim or sink.’”
“That’s what she said?”
He shook his head. “Not exactly like that. But that’s what she meant.”
“And?”
“And,” he looked up at me, “I sank.”
“Why?”
He let out a slow, unhappy breath. “I couldn’t go back to the cage. The life of the healthy white mouse. Fed at predictable intervals. Exercised on a wheel. Whose view of the world is always through the straight lines of his cage. There was no way I could do it.” He raised his head. “So I sank.”
“Is that it?” I asked. “Is that where you are now?”
He smiled wearily. “Depends on how you want to see it.”
“What was her name?”
He smiled again. He loved me for asking, I was sure. “Julia.”
I let him be for a while. I sat on the sand next to his chair. The wave shelves roared across the water to the rock. They banged repeatedly and deliberately, spilling soap suds, meeting in a chaos that, crashing time and time again, began to look like a pattern of order. Rush, meet, spill; rush, meet, spill. The rest of the ocean rippled long, steady and horizontal—skinny marathon ruffles sweeping rhythmically against the shore.
The Shadow Man Page 24