Shadow Man: A Novel (9 page)

The lady looks into my eyes, slips off me, and curls at my side.

“James, you were here. You know you were.”

“I felt so many known things rush through me, and then out again. When I try to fix on one it is gone, and I chase to another and it disappears, too.”

“Try to remember our story. You were back just a moment ago, try to remember what my body brought back to you.”

“I don’t know our story. Maybe bits. The only thing I remember
for sure is Kurt and Vera. That summer of thunderstorms and the Impala in the sun and my body, young and lanky, brown. Then something happens, and there is blankness, an empty canvas stretching millions of miles long. I don’t know. I hear something in me sometimes, a voice calling through deep, deep bone, but it never surfaces.”

“I will tell you about me, James.”

She is Eva Kapuscinski. She was a linguistics professor at the University of Warsaw. Her father was a partisan killed in that beguiling time of the 1950s, the beginning of the long run of communist tyranny; her mother was a poet who hanged herself from a tree when her verse turned less taut. Eva was raised in an orphanage; her skyline the ruins and smoke of a city rebuilding, years and years of rebuilding from a world war that, although ended much earlier, lingered over broken rooftops and cluttered rivers. She joined an underground Catholic church, took communion and prayed penances in back rooms and basements. She played soccer with the boys in the streets and later as a young woman at university she bought a bike with a basket, riding through the fog and drizzle to classes.

She was Eva, the girl with white roses and books on Mayan verbs and Yeats and Shakespeare. She took an assistant professorship at the university after graduation, comfortable in a cocoon of dissertations and classics, and secretly helped edit a newsletter for the resistance. The events from the outside passed under her desk lamp. It seemed that every day was capable of annihilation, the world’s fate balanced on the tips of ICBMs and silos. Billions of people suspended, she thought, between the bear and that funny, long-legged man with the white beard and top hat the Americans called Uncle Sam. Mascots of freedom and doom; the world reduced to caricature.

One day, after securing tenure, Eva was approached about spying by a professor of mathematical theory, whom she had vaguely known from late-night university vodka parties. It was cleverly done, she
thought; he spoke in equations, letters and numbers, so that he could be at once specific and obscure, and she could deduce what she wanted, accept or decline, and then each could go his or her way. She accepted, but not that night. It took a while, he with his equations, she with her texts. But they created a world of doublespeak, a place of secrets and codes right out in the open. They became lovers, but only in passing; spying Eva said was its own lover, demanding and jealous. She never knew exactly where her dispatches went, or how her syntax was parsed in a faraway office in Washington. She sent observations from the university, glimpses of life in the street, translations of articles she found interesting, and occasionally, after meeting them at a conference or university seminar, her thoughts on the communist politicians, so tight in their gray suits. Balloon men, she called them, fat and tense and tight, yet polished with the scrubbed pink skin of spas, except for the general in charge. He was pallid, a drab lanky gnome with a cigarette smile and black-circled eyes. She always had this fear that she’d be intercepted, unmasked; that men in long coats and tipped hats were watching her. It was hard to sleep and every creak and knock put a dreaded hollowness between the beats of her heart.

Then Gdansk. Such a harsh punch of a word. She could feel a change through the shipyards. It happened, gradually, at first, then broke like an ocean tide rushing out to sea. Posters and marchers and rain, the land trembling.

“That’s how we met, James. The Berlin Wall fell, and you chased the echo. We met in a bar in Gdansk. The CIA didn’t need my spying anymore. I needed a job. Remember? A guy from the Associated Press introduced us. I spoke five languages to you before you finished your beer. You looked at me, shook my hand, and said, ‘Let’s go.’ I’ll never forget that. So American. ‘Let’s go.’ We went that night and you filed a story, and night after night you wrote stories as we traipsed across Europe, me on a fake French passport.”

The lady in bed with me stops talking. She is crying on my shoulder. The room seems to have been through a storm. It is relaxed now. The lady has slipped to my chest, and I think she is sleeping, her breaths slow and long. I want to get up and step to the window, but I don’t. I like the way she feels under my arm. I feel the length of her down my body. Stray clothes and towels lie rumpled on the floor. The light against the curtains is warm. It’s the kind of light in a café in winter, enticing you to come in. I hear the waves. I study the lady’s profile. Yes, I know her. I think. But she is evaporating from me; her story, like a movie, really, is dying too. Did I have such a life? I’m confused, but there is a body, a lady, alongside me, and even though I don’t know all that I should, it feels good to feel another, to lie in a bed in a room like this.

I don’t think I live here. I hear waves and footsteps down the hall, distant voices, the sound of metal, a sliding key, a door opening, closing, more footsteps, but softer, solitary, cross through the light beneath our door. The painting over the desk is of a schooner in a swelling sea, the crew is bracing against the wind, clinging to ropes in black slickers. A huge wave rises above the schooner. The men don’t see it. They are facing the stern, battling other water. The scene is permanent, frozen in precise pencil and ink. The artist has left the crew’s fate to the viewer. I think the captain will see the wave at the last minute, and the schooner will turn and plow head-on into it and come out the other side. Maybe.

What does Gdansk look like? If I was there I should know. If I wrote about a place, shouldn’t something of it be stored in me? I slide farther down in the bed. The lady’s face is next to mine on the pillow. Our noses touch. She sleeps pretty. I study her, but I do not know the things she wants me to know. I lift the covers a bit. Cool air rushes between our bodies. The lady doesn’t stir. I peek into the tunnel cover and see us facing each other in our nakedness. I trace her breast with my finger. It is like another world, the light of the
room, barely penetrating the covers. It is a still life, only we are not posed or arranged. I smooth the covers flat and close my eyes. I hear the waves, the same sound as all those years ago when Kurt and Vera and I took that road trip to the beach and Vera hid from the man from Marrakesh.

The man from Marrakesh. Yes, I know that story, too, or so it seems. But that phantom does not concern me now. I think of my half brother and Eva. James must be sleeping. Eva beside him. She loves James so much, the way we all want to be loved. But she is losing him. Losing means what is lost was once possessed. She’s had that with James: the intimate rituals, the absences, the joy of reunion, the way a lover’s face, a husband’s face, is unexpectedly spotted on a sidewalk and for an instant he is a stranger bobbing in a crowd. But then the image claims itself and all is restored to what was. That is how the world should be, atoms and molecules, even if temporarily disrupted, falling into place, into patterns we mark, we remember. Into patterns we love.

When James tells me about Kurt and Vera, I tape him on a recorder hidden in my uniform. Not that I need to do it secretly; James wouldn’t know or remember anyway. I feel like a spy, though. The thing is so small. I have hours of stories of Kurt and Vera. An oral history, I suppose. I listen to them on the bus on my way to work, although it’s not really work to be with James. I listen to them in the bath and when I cook. I imagine I am in those stories, gliding in the Impala with them toward the beach, playing miniature golf with Kurt, rubbing lotion on Vera and trying on sunglasses and bathing suits with her while Kurt and my half brother Jim swim in the ocean. It was so grand in the time that it was good, in those days when the sun was bright and before the clouds rolled in, the way they do so unexpectedly, suddenly, over the beach.

I, too, went to the beach as a child, dove into the chilled waters and
collected hermit crabs along the hard New England coast. I ate ice cream and felt sand between my toes and kissed my first boy behind a clam shack on the last day of August. We all have a summer love. But I didn’t know I had another mother. I didn’t know so much; yet despite this ignorance I grew. I became a voice in the universe, with sins and prayers, joys and redemptions, tuitions and leases, credit cards and memories. The scent of popcorn on sea air, cards clicking in bicycle spokes, a car alone on a highway in the snow, a drop of blood in underpants; scared, hurrying to the school nurse, who smiled, “You are a woman now.” We change in years, days, hours, and seconds, but at some point invention stops and we become what we will die of. It is the in-betweens we seek: those thrilling moments when we stand apart and see the imprints that bear our name. I wonder about the first boy I kissed. Tyler Smart. Did he turn into a good man? Does he have a wife? Children? Does he remember me and my sunburned nose and the way I closed my eyes when he touched me?

I am dancing now, slow-dancing alone in James’s room. I do this sometimes when the other night nurse goes on break. My mind wanders to music, my body drifts. I find it relaxing in the way I imagine people find repose in yoga or Valium or God. My brother’s bed is made with clean linen, his pillow seems a new, white balloon. I dance around the bed and to the window. What must I look like from the street? The city is sleeping and no one sees, not even the moon hiding in clouds. I catch myself in the mirror, dark and white.

The Beach Boys grew louder as the elevator dropped toward the lobby. Kurt hated the Beach Boys, said if that’s what California was like he had no interest in ever going, and he’d never want to meet a girl like Barbara Ann; no, he was partial to the women who tormented Walter Jackson. The elevator doors opened and the girl at the front desk, the one whose cinnamon lip gloss I could still taste, winked at me and said: “Y’all have a nice evening, now.”

“They’re sure friendly down here,” said Kurt. We stepped onto the boardwalk, the night breeze lifting Vera’s dress. There was witch hazel and salt in the air, and a little bit of Kurt’s Right Guard, but mostly the breeze was pure and refreshing. Vera ran a little ahead of us and twirled on the boardwalk, staring up at the moon and laughing and then running back to Kurt and hugging him, the two of them spinning, and people watching, not with angry or bemused stares, but with smiles that said,
Yes, on a night like this, with the moon big and white, that’s what you do on Virginia Beach
.

“I want Howard Johnson’s fried clams,” said Kurt.

“No, Kurt. Not Howard Johnson’s. Let’s find a little hole-in-the-wall place with a one-eyed cook and fresh fish and …”

“We’ll do the hole-in-the-wall place for breakfast, but right now I want some clams.”

“They’re not fresh, Kurt. They’re frozen. It’s not very exotic.”

“I don’t want exotic clams.”

Vera looked at me and rolled her eyes. Kurt loved Howard Johnson’s clams. When I was little, he’d throw me into the car and he and Mom and I would drive out of Philly and onto the Jersey Turnpike, up two
exits to a rest stop with a big Howard Johnson’s. Kurt would order a clam roll and a milk shake and sit there smiling, and my mom would ask, “Kurt, why are you so content with those clams?” Kurt said he didn’t know. Maybe it was the booths and the low-hanging lights, and waitresses in custard-colored uniforms; maybe it was the ambience (an early dictionary word) of plates sliding under hot orange lights and chefs in tall hats; maybe it was the hiss and the steam and the coffee guys at the counter talking like they knew the world’s secrets; maybe it was all that, but mostly he said the clams reminded him of being a boy, of getting dressed up and going out with his parents for that one special night a month. “You a boy now, Kurt?” Mom would tease.

“I am.” He’d reach out and hold Mom’s hand on the tabletop, his forearms cut and scraped from the shipyard, his hair damp from a shower.

“I don’t see a HoJo’s, Kurt.”

“Right up here to the left at the bottom of this hotel. I asked that girl at the front desk.”

“I’m not getting clams. I’ll have a salad. But I’m sure the lettuce won’t be fresh.”

Kurt was not deterred by Vera’s lack of enthusiasm. A hostess whose name tag said
TINA
led us to a booth by the window with a view of the ocean, breaking waves glowing in the distance and farther out silhouettes of fisherman casting in the pier lights. It was a great seat; it made you feel rich, not the money kind of rich, but the rich of being alive on a clear night in a window seat hovering over the boardwalk and watching the people below as if they’re your own creations, and having a waitress named Debbie hand you a menu and lay out silverware.

“I don’t need a menu,” said Kurt.

Vera smiled. Kurt had won her over. HoJo’s wasn’t the Maghreb, but it was nice, Vera had to admit. She ordered a fruit bowl and a coffee. I chose a Monte Cristo sandwich. Kurt told the waitress he
wanted not one but two little paper cups of tartar sauce for his clams; sometimes, he told Debbie, there’s not enough. She agreed, made a note, and hurried off. Vera slid away from Kurt and moved closer to the window.

“Look at them all down there, walking and laughing, jumping to the sand and running to the water’s edge. You ever wonder about all those people, all the people in the world you’ll never meet? Could be a best friend down there you’ll never have, a lover like no other. Just people and faces, really, but they make me wonder. You ever wonder about all those faces, Kurt?”

“I do. But right now I’m looking for Debbie’s face and my clams.”

“What about you, Jim?”

“Sometimes you think you know them.”

Vera pushed her face closer to the window. She spoke to it, low and steady.