The Shape of Desire (19 page)

A
s always, it takes me a couple of days to get past my systemic shock at Dante’s absence. Ellen eyes me with a knowing look on Tuesday and says, “I suppose he’s run off again?” but she doesn’t press it further. No one else notices or, at any rate, says anything.

Relations with Kathleen remain tentative and awkward, though Ellen is doing her best to mend
that
situation as well. She makes sure both of us are included in some group lunch outings, so we can appear to be interacting without actually having to speak to each other. I drop by Kathleen’s desk a couple of times a day with flimsy excuses, and she always responds with a polite smile; but it’s clear that the walls she maintains with everyone else are back in place when I’m around. I had been far from certain I wanted to be Kathleen’s best friend, so it’s ironic I miss her now that she’s pulled away. I chalk it up to just more proof of the contrariness of the human heart.

But there are other people who are plenty happy to spend time with me. The day after Dante leaves, I call my cousin Beth.

“Hey—do you still want to go to Chicago?” I ask.

“Do I ever!” she exclaims. “Can we go now? Tonight? I’ll pick you up at seven.”

I laugh. “Well—I wasn’t thinking
quite
so soon. But I could go this weekend, if you can be that spontaneous. Or next weekend. Probably not the weekend after that.”
Because Dante might be back.

“Let me check with Mom and Sydney to see if one of them can keep Clara. Can you take Friday off? Or Monday?”

I’ve been hoarding my last remaining vacation days, but suddenly I feel reckless. I’ll call in sick later in the year if I need more time off. “Sure.”

“Great! I’ll get back to you by tomorrow.”

It seems all the stars have aligned, because Aunt Andrea can keep Clara, Beth’s friend with a condo on Michigan Avenue will let us stay at her place for free, and I have more vacation days than I had thought. As office manager, Ellen is the one who monitors these things, so it’s possible she’s tweaked something in my favor, but it turns out I’ve been given credit for a Saturday that I came into the office to straighten out an accounting mess.

“So have fun on the Magnificent Mile,” she tells me.

And we do.

I
t’s cold in Chicago, of course—probably twenty degrees colder than in St. Louis, which means the temperature hovers around the freezing mark—and everyone is bundled up in winter accessories. We don’t see sunshine the entire time we’re there; the sky just frowns down at us, a face full of puffy gray cheeks surrounding the bleary white eye of the sun. Between the skyscrapers, we occasionally glimpse the dark bruise of Lake Michigan, a flat expanse of water that looks as limitless as an ocean. Twice in three days—during this last weekend in October—it snows, but
it’s only a halfhearted effort. Nothing sticks to the dirty pavement or the marvelously varied architecture. This is a city that shakes off all hindrances and just plows forward.

We fill the days shopping and eating, the evenings in the condo sipping margaritas and watching video on demand. We agree it’s been the best vacation ever.

“Let’s call our offices and say we won’t be back for a week,” Beth suggests on Saturday night.

She’s probably not serious, but I think about it anyway. Dante won’t be home for at least another week, and if he finds himself in human form for an hour or two in the next few days, he knows to call my cell phone. But I make a face. “Not enough vacation days.”

Beth sighs. “And surely Clara will have driven Mom crazy by tomorrow night, let alone
next
Monday. I suppose we have to go back.”

Still, we stretch out the visit as long as we can, not starting our return trip until about four in the afternoon on Sunday. We’re not even halfway home before dark gathers around us and turns Highway 55 into a long, snaking tunnel intermittently illuminated by headlights. Beth has brought her
Honeymoon in Vegas
soundtrack, while I’ve contributed my old New Kids on the Block CDs, and we sing all the way home. I can’t help thinking that it was a more successful weekend than the one before.

It’s past ten before Beth drops me off, and I bang a few of my shopping bags against the door frame as I enter the house. Once I’ve checked to make sure no murderers are hiding in the closets, I turn on the computer to read e-mail and then play back the messages on the answering machine. All of them are junk calls except the one from my mother asking me to let her know when I get back.

“Hey, Mom, sorry to call so late, but we didn’t want to leave Chicago until we absolutely had to,” I say when she answers the phone. I can tell by her sleepy voice that I’ve woken her up.

A yawn breaks her next words. “Did you have a good time?”

“It was great. We have to do that more often. How was
your
weekend?”

We chat for about ten minutes, catching up. While she talks, I scroll through the last three weeks’ worth of data on the Caller ID, mostly deleting numbers. But just as we hang up, I get to one that catches my attention. It’s a 636 area code, just like mine, which means the call was made from somewhere in the St. Louis area, outside the boundary of Highway 270. The number’s unfamiliar, which it would be since in place of the name of the caller, the unit just spells out the word
PAY PHONE
.

Who would be calling me from a pay phone in the western suburbs?

I check the date then calculate when the call came in. Two and a half weeks ago…at 1:47 in the morning.

Oh. That was when Dante phoned during the one hour he was human.

At first I smile, remembering the conversation, but then my brows draw together. I had asked him—I think I remember asking him—where he was calling from, and he’d said, “Sedalia, I think.” I drop onto my desk chair, flick the computer to life, and do a quick Google search on Sedalia’s area code. It turns out to be 660.

He had not called from Sedalia, after all.

I sit there for a few more minutes, still frowning, still turning the matter over in my head. It doesn’t mean much, of course. He has always told me—he said it again during this most recent visit, in fact—that it is difficult to keep track of geography and distances when he is in another shape.
Sometimes I think I’ve traveled for miles, and I’m just a county away. Other times I don’t think I’ve gone too far, but when I turn human and find a highway sign, it turns out I’m in Colorado.
He could honestly have thought he was in Sedalia—he might even have
been
in Sedalia earlier in the week—he might simply have been confused.

Or he might have been lying. If he’d been calling from a 636 number, he’d have been nearby, close enough to come to my door. He might
have thought that’s what I would have begged for, if he’d told the truth. He didn’t want to argue.

Maria, it would take me an hour to get there and by then I’d be ready to transform again. It wouldn’t be worth it.

But it would be worth it to me! Tell me where you are! I’ll come get you!

He knew he only had time for the call, not the physical connection. The lie was to spare us both.

Still, it makes me unhappy. It brings some of the old bitterness to the surface, the worry that he does not love me as much as I love him, does not so breathlessly treasure our hours together.

It also makes me suspicious. If he lied about this, what else does he lie about? What else have I believed because I have been unable to disprove it? How stupid have I been?

I
am exhausted Monday morning, since I wasn’t able to sleep Sunday night. I was both too keyed up from the trip to be able to relax and too fixated on the question of Dante’s phone call from not-Sedalia.

Ellen takes one look at me and says, “Boy-howdy, somebody had too much fun over the weekend.”

I am grateful that she instantly ascribes my peaked condition to overindulgence instead of romantic moping. “Remind me never to travel with my cousin again,” I mumble.

“Nah, it’s good for you to be hungover a few times once you’re past thirty,” she says. “Reminds you not to mourn your lost youth.”

I get more sleep as the week goes on, but I don’t feel much more cheerful, and the fact that the weather has gotten sharply colder doesn’t help my mood. I keep thinking about Dante and then trying to think about something else. It’s almost a relief to be at work all day because at least I’m forced to focus my mind on something productive.

Through some misunderstanding about times and dates, I end up
having lunch alone with Grant Vance on Wednesday. I can tell he’s not thrilled by the arrangement. “I could see if Turtle wants to come with us,” he offers.

“Turtle?”

He grins. “New guy. His name is Tuttle, but he’s bald and he always wears turtleneck shirts that he hunches into like he’s trying to make his head disappear.” Grant demonstrates by scrunching up his shoulders, shortening his neck, and then peering around with big, blinking eyes. He does not look remotely like a turtle—more like an Ewok—but I get the general idea.

“Sure, if you want to.”

But Turtle can’t join us, and I’m too apathetic to care if Grant is uncomfortable dining alone with me, so off we go to Pizzeria Plus. He’s willing to split a large veggie pizza, extra olives, and the gesture makes me put a little more effort into being companionable.

“So! How’s the trip planning going?”

“Great! I’ve got my tickets and my friend is looking for places to stay.”

“And I assume you have your passport already.”

He grins. “Got it last December. I knew I was getting to Italy one way or another this year—even if I had to go by myself.”

I take a second piece of pizza. “I’ve never been to Italy,” I say. “I’ve hardly been anywhere.”

This is my own fault, of course. Travel is expensive and overseas travel can really tax the budget, but even a middle-income wage earner like me should be able to save her pennies and find a great deal to make it to Europe once in her life. But I haven’t wanted to go without Dante. And how can you take a shape-shifter across the ocean?

Well, I suppose you could. It wasn’t like we’d be traveling by boat and he’d be changing shapes a couple of times before we got to the opposite shore. Assuming no unfortunate weather or mechanical delays, you
could travel from Lambert Field to Heathrow in nine or ten hours, even allowing for plane changes at O’Hare or JFK. Human Dante could fly with me in both directions, and Animal Dante could explore a new continent if he got the urge.

I even proposed this once, back when his stays in human form were much longer. Back when we had a two-week window or better.
Plenty of time to get there and back
, I’d said.
We’ll make it a short trip. I just want to see London.

He wouldn’t risk it.
I don’t always know what’s going to trigger the change. What if it’s air pressure? What if it’s the chemical composition of the water? What if it’s stress? I don’t want to be stuck in England because I’ve changed and I can’t change back.

I had tried to respond lightheartedly.
That’s okay. If you’re a dog, I’ll bring you back with me. I’ll buy you an expensive carrier and pay whatever they charge to transport a pet.

And what if I change in the belly of the plane? What if they quarantine me and I change back to human shape while I’m in some kind of cage?

I wasn’t used to thinking of Dante as fearful. Usually he was the one who shrugged off any notion of risk and made fun of me when I worried. But clearly the thought of being out of his environment, away from familiar haunts, out of control, left him nervous and cold. We would never be traveling to Europe together, that was certain.

And I just didn’t want to be that far from Dante.

While I’ve been musing, Grant has been talking. “I’ve been to Mexico a few times, and Canada—Does that count as a foreign country?—but never across the ocean.”

“Are you worried about speaking the language?” I ask. “Or does your buddy know Italian?”

“No and no,” he says. “But I’ve been practicing. I can order stuff off the menu and say things like ‘I want another beer, please.’”

Our waitress has come by to see if we’d like refills on soda. She’s got
curly dark hair and deep olive skin; I imagine she’d be right at home stomping grapes in the old country. “You’re studying Italian?” she says cheerfully. “I learned from my grandpa. Say something to me.”

Flashing his easy smile, Grant complies. The only word I catch and think I can translate is
amore
. Is he telling this stranger that he’s going to Italy with his true love?

“Buon!”
she replies and rattles off some complicated sentence that has Grant laughing and waving his hands.

“I didn’t get a word of that,” he says.

“I was telling you to make sure you eat gelato every day,” she says. “I like lemon best.”

They talk Italian food for a few more minutes while I consume another slice of pizza. When I have Grant’s attention again, I quiz him for additional details on his trip just to have something to talk about. We then debate ideas for the office costume party Ellen has decreed we will hold on Halloween, which is just a couple of days from now. Everyone has to come as some kind of animal.

“So here’s the question,” I say. “Do you come in a costume that reflects who you
are
or who you’re
not
? If we’re coming as who we are, you could be a big teddy bear.”

He looks affronted. “You think I’m a teddy bear?”

“Is that an insult to the masculine ego? I thought it was a compliment.”

“Well, I’d rather be a grizzly bear. Something a little more powerful.”

“I think I’ll come as a
hibernating
bear,” I say. “That way I can sleep all day and no one will bother me.”

“Ellen should be a Jack Russell terrier or something that never sits still,” Grant says. “That woman has more energy than anyone I’ve ever met.”

We toss out more ideas.
Bob in accounting would make a great snake. Louise in creative should be a cat.

“Caroline could be a hawk,” I say, as if inspired. I’m watching him covertly. “Elegant and dangerous.”