Before Page 4

  Tika holds Jiri’s hand in both of her own. Closes her eyes. Breathes this connection. It is a hand with fine fingers and you can feel that it once had power. A large vein runs across the back of it to the smallest knuckle.

  “You will see your boyfriend tonight?” Jiri says.

  Tika opens her eyes. “He has a show in Central Square,” she says.

  “Well, I like him. But I am jealous.”

  “Jiri, you’re funny.”

  “You are working on the project?”

  “Maybe I’ll get a few shots. You’re lucky if you get one or two out of a whole roll of film.”

  “How is it with the CD?” Jiri asks.

  “They’ve almost finished it,” Tika says. She told Jiri this the other day at the Arboretum, how the band is finishing up recording at a digital studio in Brookline, but he has forgotten. “I brought the first single to WECR and some other college stations last week, and it is already getting a lot of rotation.”

  “Rotation?”

  “They’re getting a lot of requests for it. Since they’ve been on the radio they’re already recognized a lot more. Tonight’s in this kind of funky place a few blocks off Mass Ave. I think they’ll have a pretty good crowd there.”

  “You have to watch yourself around these places. The alleys around them are not always so safe. You have to stay around the boys.”

  “Jiri, I know. You don’t have to worry about me.”

  “They’re talking about this girl, this intern. It is a very dangerous world.”

  “People are saying the congressman had somebody do it,” Tika says.

  “I wouldn’t doubt it,” Jiri says. “There are people walking around who would tear down the sun if it would serve them.”

  “I’ll be all right, Jiri,” Tika says. “No worries. In these things I’m always with Jesse.”

  “Well, he’s a good kid,” Jiri says.

  “Mohu Vás pozvat na veei?” Anna is calling, from the dining room.

  “That is my other girlfriend,” Jiri says. “She is asking if she can invite us to dinner.”

  The dining room is small and formal and simple. Two windows look through leaves onto Trowbridge Street. A mahogany table with long-backed chairs stands on a deep Oriental rug, and there are no paintings on the cream-colored walls; the large chandelier over the dining table is dimmed and Anna has lit slender white candles. Tika walks with Jiri slowly, her hand on his arm, until he slides her chair out for her and seats her, and he stands at his place until Anna has everything on the table, plates of fettuccine topped with sauced steak and peppers and with Tika’s salad to the side (Tika notices that the Posselts never put salad in a separate dish) and wine. Tika reads the label—an Italian red—and she imagines her father walking with her in Rome, when she was thirteen, his face turning to smile at her, gentle and happy, the sky pink behind him.

  Then they are all eating, and Tika has to check herself, the dinner is so good, and remind herself not to eat the way she does in the Emerson Café, so fast.

  “Z eho je to?” Jiri says.

  “With arrowroot,” Anna says.

  “It’s good,” Jiri says, his eyebrows up. And then to Tika: “I’m asking how she makes the sauce.”

  Since the strokes, Anna has been trying to cut down on the fat content of their meals. Sometimes, when Tika comes over, Anna is making fastidious notes from low-fat cookbooks she has taken from the library.

  “It’s great, Anna,” Tika says. “Amazing that it’s healthy, too.”

  “We must have Jesse to dinner soon again,” Jiri says.

  “He would like that,” Tika says, looking down. “He really likes you guys.” For a moment, she feels she might weep at the parental gesture. Her mind is filled with many things: The woman in Australia is brushing hair away from her forehead, and there is the sound of a television from the next room. In New Hampshire Susan’s feet are curled around the back of the husband; Stuart Livesy’s descending shoulders are valleys and shadows of light. She hears Susan’s voice saying, He fucks like a rabbit.

  “Tika?” Anna says. “You don’t seem entirely yourself. Are you all right?”

  “I’m sorry,” Tika says, watching the old woman. She pauses. “It’s Susan. She’s seeing this married man. From Australia. I met him last night. At the apartment.”

  There is silence a moment from her hosts. Outside a series of cars goes by on Kirkland, wheels whispering. The protective bird is sounding its repeating, whistling pattern, rising and dropping again.

  “That’s a problem,” Anna says, as Jiri breathes out heavily. “Nothing good comes from these kinds of things, from lying.”

  “That’s what bothers me. I’m part of the lie,” Tika says.

  In the kitchen last night, Susan kissed Stuart’s hand: an expensive Rolex watch there on that wrist, a present, perhaps, from the wife. Tika had tried to strike a nonchalant pose, to smile and converse easily with her roommate’s new lover in a way that didn’t show her judgment, her concern. She knows that she didn’t pull it off. She has met, since last winter when she moved in with Susan, four of Susan’s lovers, some of whom Susan was seeing simultaneously. That was Susan’s business. But Stuart Livesy is married, and there a wife in Australia, and this is in Tika’s home now.

  “And your feelings about your friend have changed,” Jiri says.

  “Yes,” Tika says. “I feel badly about that, too. I’m mad I didn’t say anything when they were planning it because I knew I would feel this way, and I didn’t listen to myself.”

  “Susan is thinking only of herself in this,” Anna says, her voice lowered again, as if the three of them are joined in conspiracy. “Maybe she thinks she can’t help it. But she should have thought of how bringing him home would affect you. Perhaps she did. Perhaps she wanted to feel less guilty herself and bringing you into it makes it less of a personal burden.”

  Jiri, his face set firmly, looks at his wife, weighing this pronouncement of hers with concern. It is dark outside now. Tika feels as if somehow she is rising above herself, rising to look down on this discussion, something rushing in her ears. The candles throw their shadows onto the walls, and the great protective shapes of Anna and Jiri hover over her own image in the deepening hues of night.

  THREE

  Below on Trowbridge Street, Ghost-Man looks up and sees the quarter moon shining brightly through leaves and a black explosion of clouds. The run of old brownstones, of dark gardens and blue-lit windows, is alive with sounds you will never hear in winter: dishes being put away after dinners, female voices reestablishing the normalcy of their households with gossip, insects, dogs barking, televisions playing sports and evening detective shows. The greater commotion that was here at the end of the afternoon, when Ghost-Man made a brief pass through in his car—the early evening business when Trowbridge Street was a bottleneck of other cars and pedestrians returning from the day—is completely gone now. The street itself is a tunnel, punctuated by circles from streetlamps, waiting for him.

  He hears a cat yowl in the next neighborhood over, on Irving, and a truck rumbles somewhere in the vicinity of Kirkland, where Ghost-Man parked his Mazda. Somewhere, now, there are the shouts of children. These sounds seem so close it is as if they are those of other ghosts on this quiet thoroughfare, amplified in the night like the simmering, last quarter moon.

  Ghost-Man starts walking very quickly and methodically and with a package held tight to his body. It is a ten-by-thirteen-inch mailer tied with twine and addressed to him from the Williams, Iannucci, Traupman and Hoyt law firm of Portland, Maine, and the cardboard edges of it are worn from the working of his hand. He steps over the sidewalk as if he quite certainly has somewhere to go. Past this house painted slate blue, number 18, with the white balcony fence that has ivy crawling over it; by this beech tree where the sidewalk is cracked. Many times, standing by this tree as if waiting for a ride, he has glanced in at Monica Wood in 18A doing her yoga. He has watched her shadowed figure, slightly overwe
ight, her arms arched above her, her brown ponytail dipping as she goes from side to side, disappearing, then coming up again as the female voice says, Up, and now all the way down and to the side, and when Ghost-Man feels the plausibility of his presence exhausted he will quickly step away, his insides singing with that curve of flesh, the outstretched hand through underside of arm to hip, his heart wanting to stay, to fly into that window.

  Monica Wood’s apartment is dark now; she is not home. Her place is one of crowded furniture and many cookbooks and incense candles. She has consistently vacuumed rugs and a wall in the kitchen laden with Post-it memos that will sometimes stay there for two weeks before being crumpled and tossed into the white designer pail. When she is gone he will slip her lock with a credit card and read the mail that she leaves opened by the refrigerator (gourmet and yoga and gossip magazines, myriad bills from banks). Once, very late at night, he came in and she was asleep and he sat on her corduroy-covered living room couch; he’d closed his eyes in that darkness and listened to the breathing of the woman in her bedroom, thrilling at his proximity to her, at what she didn’t know.

  He has imagined, in his nights, Monica Wood and her flesh and woman-smell beside him. But hers is one of the many female homes he visits here on Trowbridge Street, and it is never wise to become fixed on any one woman. In other neighborhoods, at other times, his fixations have led to a loss of control, and he has had some narrow escapes. One must always abandon specific desire to survive as a man, and one must always have another story to go to. This is true for all men, all the world over, Ghost-Man knows.

  A burst of traffic hisses by behind him on Kirkland, and he thinks of the long parade of men, the long parade of hopeful sperm, making up their stories, their lies, just to be in the vicinity of the egg. And what happens to those men who don’t get an egg? His shadow scallops beneath a streetlight, blends with dark tar again, that quick, purposeful silhouette with the package beneath the arm.

  The cicadas are quite loud in the hedges by 24, and there he stops, for a light is on in the second-floor apartment and the shadow of an elm tree and a streetlight that is out give him ample cover. There Dr. Heather Stolz is reading a book, her head bowed in great concentration. The arc lamp above her couch illuminates her hair; her face is dark. Eight years ago, she published an award-winning thesis on gravity modification; she is thirty-four years old and teaches physics at Harvard. Her Ph.D. is from Rensselaer and she has done work for NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center. Her book is still available on Amazon.com, but Ghost-Man has not ordered it. He has never seen her close up; from the pictures in her apartment and on her book in the Amazon.com ad she appears pretty, with small features and brown eyes. She is a runner, and in her mail are always magazines and other literature devoted to the sport. She keeps a neat place, and has something of a fetish about oiling her wooden furniture. She has a cat that tilts its ears back and growls and goes under the couch when Ghost-Man comes through the door. Her apartment is the only one on that hallway, a landing, really, and the stairs to her place are mercifully covered in deep brown carpet. He has watched her comb her hair in the bathroom at night (the bathroom, if illuminated, would be just there to the right); he has imagined being within her, in her bed, her head whipping into the pillow in a frenzy.

  He looks up at the fall of hair over her brow. He is still in the elm-deepened shadow, but he feels, for a moment, danger here; his is a face with high cheekbones and thinning hair that is swept back tightly to his skull. He is dressed as if having just left a job with a casual dress code: neat black pants, loafers, a blue short-sleeved cotton shirt. He has powerful, large hands, and the right one works on the package tightly. Then the hand is still, as he senses something; someone has glanced out their window as they’ve come into a TV room, before turning on a light, and they have seen a man alone on a sidewalk, looking up at an apartment. Silly to ignore this smell in the air, this thing that could make him prey! He begins, with some deliberation, to walk again. The physics teacher dissolves in him; her flesh becomes this street, this danger that has just whispered by him like a breath of wind. He hopes it was a man looking out whichever of these hundreds of windows the look came from. A man would glance and shrug and turn on lights and the Monday Night Football game. But women are highly developed in sensing things. You can fool them about your personality, for a time, your intentions, because so many of them want to believe first in the human heart, but about things like this—a displaced soul in the world—women have an instinct, women are sharp. They can see things a man never will. Ghost-Man has fought in combat with men; he remembers sand on streets, sand everywhere, bright sun, the controlled kick of his M-16 at the press of trigger, chit chit chit. An Iraqi man still in motion before him, dead as he fell, a loop of red behind in the dusty road. The Iraqi still moving a moment in the sand, then the quiet of that white street. It is easy, fighting with men: You are killed or you kill. Men are just brutal, just straight on, but women feel things, they fucking analyze. You get over here, in Cambridge, where the women are always busy, it seems, with self-improvement, doing their meditation in candlelit rooms (Ghost-Man has watched a number of such demonstrations back in 18A—he has seen, from the sumac-protected rise at the side of the building, Monica Wood and five other women gather on Wednesday nights, sitting cross-legged on the floor, candles burning in the center of their circle), and unless you engage them romantically (you can lead a woman literally anywhere then), you are always suspect, especially with the older ones, aged forty, fifty, who have had their share of hard knocks for believing too fervently in the male heart.

  Two poodles bark at him from the windows of 26, startling him. Their tiny eyes stare furiously out at his movement; their paws scratch the glass. He crosses the street quickly, threading between a Saab and a Volvo, to 37. He feels the sweat of his hands on the cardboard. Those fucking things just about made him jump out of his skin. If Ghost-Man needs an escape he can follow the walkways here back into the weeds, sliding behind the garages of the two buildings (they are nearly joined) and a high stand of grass and sumacs and one more, broken shed and then a dash for a break in the fence leading to Irving; a quick right onto Irving Terrace, which spills out onto Summer Street, and he can walk the streets calmly to his car. But no one comes out a door to see what the dogs were barking at.

  It is extremely dark on this sidewalk, for another streetlight above is out, and a zelkova tree over Ghost-Man is a solid ceiling of leaves. He stops before a garden, sunflowers brushing the lower sill of a window. He breathes, hears his expectant heart hammering. The garden belongs to a fortyish painter named Alison Tiner who lives on this lower floor; she is apparently quite famous. Her living room is a studio—her paintings are pretty wild stuff: vibrant, dark stretches of canvas. Sometimes Ghost-Man sits in the middle of her floor, looking at these creations, these fragments of Alison Tiner: A female figure—Alison—masturbates on a bed, her head turned away on the pillow; in her doorway is a silhouette of a man with a cocked fist. In another painting a standing, naked man and three women, one of whom is Alison, their hands all joined, lean back their heads in some bedroom darkness as if howling, and you can see white horseshoes of their teeth, their white eyes looking up in anguish.

  The painter draws her curtains over opened windows at night, but when her lights are on Ghost-Man can see her form, and some nights, during the last two months that he has been occupying the Trowbridge Street neighborhood, another form there has been that of a man, both of these often extraordinarily exaggerated by their proximity to a low-lying lamp. Tonight at first he sees nothing, and then the shadow of Alison Tiner suddenly walks across the slow-moving curtains. He steps back a little into shadows. The woman’s strange silhouette head is nodding into the phone, her hand holding the phone cord.

  “Wait a minute honey, let me get a pen,” she says.

  Isn’t that funny? That lightness in her voice? It isn’t there when she talks to her family from the West Coast—those conversations ar
e usually conducted in a monotone or at best with very slight enthusiasm—but here, in this shadow play across the window, her voice is staged. And of course it is so, for she is auditioning; that is how it goes, always, a woman auditions, a man judges how comfortable he is with the woman, but he never gets the real story. If the woman passes the audition and draws him in with her sex, he will think then that he is in love, and she will run the universe, he will walk and breathe according to her agenda. He will go to work and break his back on the wheel of commerce, but he will never really be successful enough to prove that he is worthy. He will revolve with all other men around that bright, miraculous sun, that blinding light. She and she and she and she, there on a sunny day, your beautiful wife talking with neighbors on the sidewalk, mothers joggling their infant strollers; light filters down through leaves onto her face. She walks in town, runs into a man who is handsome, tall, with old wealth; she shades her eyes with a hand to see him. She pushes his shoulder in jest at something said, something suggested. And when the woman envelops that other flesh, you lose your sun, you lose your life, because she can say any damn thing about you to clear you away from her like debris, like detritus; it is amazing how swiftly a woman can do this. You break off from your orbit and spin into space, wildly. It drives you to your knees, woman-loss, end of woman agenda. Ghost-Man knows all about it.

  “Okay, I’m back, sweetie,” Alison Tiner says. She is leaning down now, and Ghost-Man can see her form lurching a moment across the curtains. “Flight 202C coming in from Atlanta. Two-seventeen … No, honey, it’s fine. It’s not like I have to get anywhere in the morning. I’ll even whip us up something to eat when we get in tonight.”

  Ghost-Man breathes the scent of the sunflowers in the darkness. They are nodding toward the window, whispering. She and she and she and she. Down the street a dog, a shepherd, goes into a fit of deep barking—the dog is to the right there, in the brownstone at 26. Dogs are like women, this extraordinary instinct that something is very wrong.