Shadow Man: A Novel (8 page)

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.

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.

“You’re slipping away. For a moment you were here. Do you remember?”

“The kiss. Something happened. But now I’m confused. Where are we?”

“The doctors say it comes like that. A moment of clarity. They call it ‘triggers’ and ‘mechanisms’ like the words for a machine. These clear moments will become fewer and then one day you won’t find the path back, not by a kiss, not by a scent. Remembering has been briefer, James. When you come back now, you are like a man on a doorstep peeking into a house with your car running in the street. Where do you go when you run into the street? Why can’t I follow and bring you back? Is it a fortress in there? I am Eva, James. Eva. We made love in rooms like this across the world, and now we are two bodies, separate. I feel like a beggar following you for change.”

“Tell me more.”

“I used to bring you back with a story. The time in Europe, a headline, one of your clippings, even a funny remembrance from a train or a border checkpoint, something that clicked inside you. They no longer evoke. I see your eyes; they have become the stories from a history book, not a life. You can’t place yourself. It’s as if the puzzle is done except for one piece, the piece you hold in your hand, but you can’t see that the piece fits perfectly into the picture before you. Now it’s only primal, James. I bring you back with this bed, our bodies. It’s a straight line to the core, no words, no time to think or remember. Be still James, not confused. Touch me.”

She takes my hand and moves it across her face and to her breasts and below. Warm, wet; the scent of her rising through the sheets, the scent on my fingertips to the nerve endings and into me, these
elements to remember, and now I am on my back and she is over me and I am inside this warmth, this place I know, where all of Eva’s nerves are alive; they pull me to her like a net and she is moving over me and her eyes she won’t take off me; she is using her body in place of words, this strong body, older yes, but this body is what I know, it is my map and wherever I was, I am back now; the face before me is not a ghost from a scrapbook, not a gray clip from a newspaper, it is Eva, my rhythm, my light, and I know how much she loved sex, she craved it at day’s end, even at day’s middle, and it is this Eva over me now. She is crying and I am with her, there is no distance, no fog, no gauzy memory; this is the room I know, this hotel on the Jersey Shore, ninety minutes south of Philly, through the Pinelands and the sand grit, to the boys on the jetty, and Eva and I, here, in this room with the same key handed to us for years, and the empty bottle of Vranac on the table, and the mass graves of Bosnia and the fallen, rebuilt lands of Europe, all in this bed, brought back by Eva’s will, her body, the warm, thick scent that covers me, and I reach up and feel her throat and her breath and she is at that moment when the eyes roll slightly back and the body shivers and she drops upon me, wet and her hair covers my face, and I lick the salt on her neck, and I think I will stay, but, again, the lights are flashing in the house of a coming storm and when Eva sits up, the face I see is being pulled back, as if she is slipping into the night, into the ink, her pale body the rim of memory, only to fade.