Shadow Traffic (8 page)

I shrugged reflexively.

“Don't bother to respond, I already know the answer.”

At last my new drink came, which I made short work of. I noticed she was making progress on hers, too, and I felt a flicker of hope.

“Are you wondering what you're doing taking this crazy British bird to a restaurant and listening to her adolescent prattle all night?”

I laughed, then said, “You're way too hard on yourself.”

“Am I?”

“You've been through a lot lately. So have I.”

“You mean with your father?”

I nodded.

She asked me to talk about him and for a while I did. The same few friends, especially Phil, who'd told me not to go to London so soon after my father died, also advised me to talk to a therapist about him, but I didn't listen to that advice either, so this was the first time I'd really talked about him to anyone. When I stopped, Paulette's face was flushed with emotion. It's strange how something that would have embarrassed me was so appealing when it happened to her. Our eyes locked, and she slid her arm across the table and held my free hand. I don't know if my face flushed too, but other, unseen parts of me definitely did.

I don't remember what we said during the rest of our dinner, only that she continued to hold my hand for several minutes. On the street after dinner, we stopped touching and talking as well. My inhibition frustrated me. What was the point of drinking if it ultimately kept me shy and silent? I realized vaguely, while I was walking her home, that I was behaving a bit like my father or how I imagined he'd behave. It was almost as if he were living through me, like a kind of ghost.

When we reached her block, she turned to me and said, “Are you feeling sad now?”

I shrugged. “I'll miss you again, a lot.”

“Would you like to come up to my flat and talk a bit more? I don't have much to offer you. Just tea and some chocolates,” she said, as if my decision would be based on the quality of the food she had. I said yes, I'd like that and followed her up the stairs, feeling my true self already returning.

Her place was small and had a somewhat disheveled look that reminded me of my own apartment in St. Louis. It had the look of a place whose occupant stopped caring about it several days before, which fit her story.

“Of course I'm horribly embarrassed by my flat.”

“Shouldn't be. It's much neater than mine.”

“Do you mean your place in London or St. Louis?”

“Both,” I said, lying fairly convincingly, I thought. “Every place I live in starts to look like every other place I've been in after a week or so.”

“Well, you're a man, and that's to be expected, but I have no excuse.”

I let that remark pass as I followed her into her kitchen, not wanting to risk her focusing on her recent romantic tragedy again. She opened her tiny refrigerator to remove some candy, and I thought I saw the top of a bottle of beer.

“Shall I fix you some tea?”

“Was that beer I spotted in your fridge?” I said.

“Oh, is that what you want, then?”

“If it's all right.”

“You have a way of asking for things that makes it hard to refuse,” she said, removing the bottle and pouring it into two glasses.

I took a generous swallow, unable to think of a toast (one more thing my father was good at that I wasn't) or even to look her in the eye. Instead, I said, “You say that as if it makes you sad.”

“The last one was like that, too. I gave in to him and look what happened.”

We both drank a little more. I was trying to deal with a flash of jealousy, which startled me.

“Let's agree not to concentrate on what hurt us in the past, OK?” I said.

“How do we do that?”

I moved closer to her and gently stroked the left side of her face. Then we kissed.

“That shouldn't have happened,” she said.

“Why not?”

“I'm making myself too easily available to you.”

“I don't think so,” I said, and we kissed again. Several more times, in fact.

“Now I'm doomed,” she half muttered.

I was too excited to know who was doomed and who wasn't. I rose from the table and sort of pulled her up with me so we could fully embrace while we continued kissing. Finally, we started moving toward her tiny bedroom. An image of my father's disapproving face suddenly popped into my head, as if he were saying, “You're taking her under false pretenses,” so I reached back and took the bottle of beer from the table and drank some more of it while we undressed in her room.

Afterward, I felt her vibrating softly against me, and I realized how oddly beautiful everything with her had been. Then I realized she was crying, albeit very softly.

“I'm going straight to hell for this,” she said between half-muted sobs.

“It's OK,” I said.

“No, it's not.”

“What we did is happening millions of times all over the earth this very moment.”

“So is murdering.”

“I hope you see a distinction between the two.”

I thought I heard her chuckle a little. At any rate the sobbing soon stopped, and feeling encouraged I continued talking. “I thought you weren't a Catholic any longer. I thought you'd joined the Spiritual Church, which doesn't believe in an afterlife.”

“I don't know what I am anymore, other than confused.”

I put my arm around her and held her against me. Eventually she closed her eyes and began breathing more easily. Outside it had begun raining. I could hear it through her thin, dark windows.

“I love the rain, don't you?” she suddenly said.

“Sometimes.”

I wondered how long it would last, then if it were raining back in St. Louis on my father's grave. I remember one day we drove to the lake in Creve Coeur. He always loved to be in any kind of water, while my mother usually considered it too much of a fuss. I was somewhere around eighteen, and he was walking with me along the water's edge in bare feet. My first girlfriend of any consequence had recently left me, and I'd confided in him about it.

“Did you love her, Gerry? Did you feel that you did?”

It was the first time I'd really considered that question. “I don't know,” I said.

“You want to feel that you do before you have sex with a woman. I know you can't always tell, but you should try to know if you can,” he said, looking straight at me, “and then be sure to tell her you do. It works out best that way for everyone.”

A minute or so later I whispered the words that would have pleased my father, if they were true. But I decided they were close enough to “truth,” given the wide latitude he allowed for individual confusion. Paulette said nothing after my short speech that ended with the “l” word. When I checked, I couldn't tell if she'd fallen asleep or not. A little later I rolled over on my side and fell asleep myself.

In the morning when I woke up, I was alone. It was the kind of thing I'd done myself more than a few times after a one-night stand, right down to the letter that she'd left for me on the
kitchen table, where we'd gotten high. I remember that I didn't pick the letter up right away. I was still excited by her passion from last night and didn't want that to end. Then I realized that it could say anything, that it might even be a torrid love letter praising my sexual performance to the skies.

Dear Gerry (it began conventionally enough),

Last night some time after we made love you mentioned, in a barely audible voice, that you loved me. You said it very softly, but you said it, and, dumbfounded, I didn't respond and actually pretended I was asleep, for which I apologize. Your real sleep soon followed but, because of your words, I couldn't sleep a wink. Instead I wrote you this letter and now plan to take a long walk in Hyde Park, from where I'll eventually leave for work. By the way, you are free to feed yourself from whatever edible crumbs you can find in my kitchen (I do have a bag of crisps that I think might appeal to you) before letting yourself out. Had I any inkling before our evening started that you'd end up being my guest I would have provided more food. At any rate, eat whatever you want and just let yourself out. The door will lock automatically.

Obviously, I'm not much of a writer and this letter is especially hard to write, so I'll just get to the point of it. You know from listening to me as patiently as you did how vulnerable I am right now and why. And you also know that when people are vulnerable they often make poor decisions that they shouldn't have made. I, for instance, would not have done what I did with you last night were I not so vulnerable myself. I won't deny that I'm attracted to you and that you struck a deep chord in my heart, but even so, it would not have happened so quickly. But it did and now you've said you love me—a poor, lost girl who couldn't even find the church she wanted to go to for comfort. Yet, somehow, for
some reason, you said those words to me. Of course sometimes people say things they don't really mean and wish they hadn't. By pretending to be asleep I deprived you of the chance to take your words back.

Now I find that I need to know if you meant them or not. If you did mean what you said, please call me tonight so we can plan our next meeting. I'd also like to know, straight up, what the odds really are that you're staying in London permanently and if not, just how long you are staying—a year, six months, two months?

If, on the other hand, you didn't mean your words, do me the favor of not seeing or calling me again as I cannot tolerate another great disappointment right now. I will be home tonight hoping for your call.

Paulette

I read the letter a number of times before I dressed and left without eating—looking around myself several times while heading for my hotel. Once there, I thought I could finally relax, only to continue reading the letter in my hotel room as well. I'd never received a letter that demanded an answer by a set time. That kind of pressure was anathema to me. Why was she acting this way, I wondered, even though part of me knew.

I went to the Victoria and Albert Museum to try to distract myself, and then took a cruise on the Thames but found little relief. I was excruciatingly aware of time. Soon Paulette would be waiting by the phone with only one answer she could accept. She was proud and demanded to be taken with the utmost seriousness, or not at all. I was in awe of her strength of soul even as it tormented me. I didn't know a woman could take such a stand or believe in principles so fiercely. God knows I wanted to keep seeing
her and sleep with her again, but to do it I'd have to lie much worse than I already had. Even if I told her that I loved her or knew I could, the mere admission that I was leaving London in four days would shatter the little trust she might still have in me.

And so the hours ticked on, and predictably I went to a pub quite a distance from Queensway and tried to drink away the picture of her by her phone that I was convinced was now planted in my mind forever.

It's odd what our brains choose to remember. I recall vividly the day when I had to make my decision, but not the next four. (The letter I remember verbatim because I took it with me back to the States, where I read it many more times over the years.) Those days all ran together in a blur of anxious tourism and alcohol, until eventually I was back in St. Louis, probably back in this pool again, too.

I thought it would be easier to stop thinking about her once I was home. I thought I'd go back to mourning my father until that slowly lessened, while Paulette would vanish in a matter of weeks if not days. Instead, my memory of her (aided by her letter) made her more vivid, as if I were seeing her on a daily basis. Paradoxically, the main relief I got from Paulette was thinking about my father. It was as if he was still helping me out once again from his grave.

My thoughts are interrupted by a splashing fight that's broken out near me between two ten-year-old boys. They look somewhat alike—maybe they're brothers—and splash each other with equal ferocity. To get out of their range, I walk over to the kids'
pool, where the old men with their walkers sit dangling their toes in the water, their lifeguard hovering behind them. I sit on the ledge looking at them, at Grandfather Pool in his hot tub, then at the giant clock on the wall, where I'm surprised it's as late as it is in the afternoon.

After a few months it got much better about Paulette, and she might have become one of those occasional twinges of guilt we all learn to put up with but for another letter she suddenly sent me.

Dear Gerry,

Are you surprised to hear from me? It was much easier than I expected to get your address, but I did wrestle with the decision of whether to write to you or not and though a lot of me didn't want to, because of my conscience, I ultimately decided to write.

Your one-night stand with me had more consequences than you might imagine, at least for me. A few weeks after our time together I found out I was pregnant and then had to decide what to do about it. I thought of writing or calling you then, but since you'd already chosen not to contact me it seemed rather futile.