The Man Without a Shadow Page 26

  She tells him nothing. She cannot summon the words. Though they are alone together. Though E.H. is happy, and has been calling her his dear wife.

  SHE IS NOT pregnant, of course. She has never been pregnant, and she will never become pregnant. Vaguely she thinks of herself as in her late forties but in fact she is fifty-three years old.

  Fifty-three! It is so astonishing to her, who believes herself to be the Chaste Daughter still, that it is a fact rarely allowed into consciousness.

  Also, Margot Sharpe is a very slender woman. Since adolescence she has been underweight, perhaps purposefully so; being underweight, she’d menstruated far less frequently than women of normal weight, for she has always instructed herself To be female is to be weak, and to squander time. To be female is a second choice. In which case, it wasn’t likely that she could have become pregnant even years ago.

  Still, Margot is distracted by thoughts of being pregnant.

  Her breasts are small, and hard. Hardly the breasts of a pregnant woman. Yet, the nipples are “sensitive”—and in the early morning, waking in a wintry dawn to rain pelting against her window, and Eli Hoopes miles away and oblivious of her, she has frequently felt nauseated.

  Margot knows of hysterical pregnancies of course. Margot knows of the delusions of the (semi)conscious mind. She knows of the extreme impressionability of human beings, how “hypnotizable” many individuals are. Her stomach is flat, in fact just slightly concave if she is lying on her back. Her pelvic bones feel to her distinct as (for instance) the wishbone on a Thanksgiving turkey carcass. And yet . . .

  At last she makes an appointment with a gynecologist at the university medical school, to determine absolutely and unequivocally if she is/is not pregnant.

  Dr. Liu is “her” gynecologist but Margot has not seen Dr. Liu in six years—an unconscionable amount of time, considering that Margot Sharpe is a scientist and should know better than to avoid physical examinations. Mammograms, Pap smears, cervical and rectal exams for cancer—how can a woman so intelligent be so negligent about her health!

  “Pregnant? You are—inquiring?”

  Dr. Liu scarcely hides her astonishment. For after all, Margot Sharpe is no longer of childbearing age—is she? (Dr. Liu knows without equivocation that her patient is fifty-three years old.) Margot feels her face heat in embarrassment, and defiance.

  “Yes, Doctor. I—I need to know, today.”

  Dr. Liu performs a very simple test and the results are, as Margot has anticipated, negative.

  But Dr. Liu is uncertain. Is this good news for Professor Sharpe, or is this not-good news for Professor Sharpe? Lying on the examination table with her slender legs spread, white tissue paper crinkling beneath her, Margot shuts her eyes to prevent tears leaking out onto her cheeks but tears leak out onto her cheeks nonetheless.

  “You are not pregnant, Professor Sharpe. I hope that this is good news.”

  Not wanting to consider for a fleeting second any possible scenario in which this news might not be good news for her supine patient Dr. Liu goes on to say hurriedly that the results of the Pap smear will be received by her office on Monday, and if that test, too, is negative, Professor Sharpe will not receive a call—“Good news is no news.”

  Margot is scarcely listening. If Dr. Liu means to be amusing by scrambling the words of the cliché, Margot hasn’t noticed. Her lips move numbly:

  “Yes. Good news. Thank you, Doctor.”

  Her heart beats sharp with scorn. Like the brass pendulum in the exquisite old grandfather clock in Amber McPherson’s gray stone house except this pendulum moves swiftly and cruelly.

  Pregnant! What a joke you are, Professor.

  DRINKS DOWN A shot. Her lanky spiky-haired companion drinks down a shot.

  Nothing to say. So they don’t speak.

  Johnnie Walker Black Label Margot has kept on a high cupboard shelf of her small utilitarian kitchen slowly disappearing from the sticky-necked bottle, how many years. Her former lover brought the bottle to her originally, to drink with her. Her lover whose name is painful to acknowledge like a tiny sharp burr in the brain. Can’t think of him now, poor Milton who has had a stroke in Boca Raton where he has gone to die and his elderly wife will survive him after all.

  Naïvely once Margot imagined that—well, she’d imagined too much.

  I am naming you executrix of my estate, dear Margot. I need you in my life.

  But that never happened of course. So much of her life has never happened.

  Another drink? Another drink.

  Searing flame, going down. Delicious!

  She is laughing, hiding her eyes. Badly wanting to tell her younger companion Can you believe it, at my age imagining I might be pregnant. And the father an amnesiac who would not remember me let alone any child borne by us.

  Not the first time that “Hai-ku”—(as Margot Sharpe mispronounces the Korean name)—has brought the senior scientist home from her lab at the university working late and alone and dazed about the eyes as if drugged. He’d found her slumped on the floor in a corner of the fluorescent-lit room mistaking her for a pile of discarded clothes, or rags—Margot Sharpe, one of the most distinguished professors at the university!

  Professor? Hey let me help you up.

  OK—no need to call 911.

  Probably, she’d forgotten to eat that day. Dehydrated, having forgotten to drink. Hai-ku supposes that Professor Sharpe is anorexic—has been anorexic much of her life—without being aware of her condition and if it were pointed out to her, by the most concerned of colleagues, she’d have angrily denied it.

  As unaware of her condition, Hai-ku thinks, as the amnesiac subject E.H. is unaware of his.

  Tonight is not the first night that Professor Sharpe has insisted that “Hai-ku” stay for a drink or two—or three—and whatever they can find to eat ravenously out of her refrigerator: plain low-fat yogurt, hard chunks of multigrain bread, discolored cheese rinds, bruised remains of a cantaloupe, covered bowls of stale rice, stuck-together pasta.

  “Hai-ku” will remain with Margot Sharpe until he’s reasonably certain that she is all right. Poor distraught woman won’t accidentally or otherwise harm herself.

  Hai-ku does not speculate what has upset the professor so much for it isn’t in Hai-Ku’s interests to know too much. He was aware—of course—of the professor’s desperate attachment to Milton Ferris and knows that this ended long ago; he has been aware of the professor’s desperate attachment to Elihu Hoopes and does not care to think how this must end sometime soon.

  For sedative reasons. That alone is why Margot Sharpe drinks.

  (Is this an open secret in the department? Margot Sharpe’s solitary drinking? Hai-ku knows that everyone knows and yet no one would mention the fact to Hai-ku any more than Hai-ku who is Margot Sharpe’s disciple would mention it to one of her colleagues.)

  “Hai-ku” is no longer a young man. No longer a presence in the department, one of the promising young graduate students who’d come to the university to work with Milton Ferris.

  Not the first time “Hai-ku” will remain with Margot Sharpe into the early hours of the morning.

  Hai-ku will not remove his university hoodie worn over dirt-stiffened jeans, sweatshirt. Hai-ku will remove just Margot Sharpe’s shoes, he will not dare to loosen her clothing, or to tug her messy sweat-dampened hair away from the nape of her neck, that her head might rest more comfortably against a gnarled-looking pillow.

  The single, narrow braid trailing down the left side of Margot Sharpe’s head. It has become a bizarre feature of the woman’s appearance, inexplicable and beyond even caricature by her departmental associates.

  Poor Margot Sharpe! Yet, why feel sorry for Margot Sharpe who has lived the life she has wished to live. So one would think.

  Neither has spoken more than a few mumbled monosyllables to the other this evening.

  Hai-ku has a boy’s wizened face. He is shockingly old—(that is, Hai-ku is shocked)—forty-three. He is skinny wi
th a ring of slack flesh around his waist. Shock-black hair spiky as a punk musician’s, metal-rimmed glasses. Both his skin and his teeth are tea-colored. Milton Ferris’s most trusted lab technician whom Margot Sharpe inherited grateful for the young Korean’s knowledge and trustworthiness.

  Another drink? No? But—why not?

  Hai-ku tells the professor it is not a good idea, he thinks. This he tells the professor with gestures rather than words. Behind the metal-rimmed glasses, a fierce concerned gaze.

  Everyone knows of brilliant young scientists-in-the-making who unaccountably fail to thrive. Fail to leave the department that has nurtured them. Failed to leave the home, the lab family.

  Hai-ku the most reliable of lab techs has no instinct for ideas of his own. Leave him in a room with nothing, a notepad and pencil, at the end of the hour you will see that the notepad is still blank, the pencil unused if not untouched—so Milton Ferris complained of him, years before.

  He’d begun an ambitious Ph.D. project in cognitive psychology in 1977, with Ferris. But years passed, and no dissertation emerged. The department would have dismissed him when Professor Ferris retired but Margot Sharpe cannily intervened and secured for the capable young man a succession of three-year contracts in effect making him her slave as he’d been Milton Ferris’s slave for a decade, or more.

  They will be a team, Margot Sharpe and Hai-ku, for a long time to come. Graduate students, postdocs, departmental colleagues will come and go in the now-famous “memory” lab but Hai-ku will remain faithful for Hai-ku has no life outside Professor Sharpe’s lab.

  As Margot Sharpe protects him, so he protects Margot Sharpe. No more willing slave than the senior tech of the neuropsychologist whose career he has helped advance, in a sense, from beneath.

  The Ph.D. in cognitive psychology has long since been abandoned. Hope of a full-time job in psychology at a respected or even a second- or third-rate university has long since been abandoned.

  (Is Hai-ku in love with Professor Sharpe?—some wonder.)

  (Is Professor Sharpe in love with Hai-ku?—this is more doubtful.)

  Hai-ku does not acknowledge that he is Margot Sharpe’s “slave”—or anyone else’s slave. Hai-ku is proud that his salary as a lab technician is the highest tech salary in the department, and that many of the professorial staff call upon him regularly for advice and assistance.

  Hai-ku will be happy to serve as Margot Sharpe’s assistant for as long as Margot Sharpe remains at the university, and Margot Sharpe is determined never to retire.

  Hai-ku will never speak disrespectfully of his mistress. He will never speak of his mistress at all except admiringly, reverentially. And briefly.

  In fact, Hai-ku rarely speaks. He has long learned to hide behind his “foreign-ness”—he has become a master of reticence.

  Still, Hai-ku knows that, like Milton Ferris before her, Margot Sharpe could destroy him with a single telephone call to the departmental chair, a single stroke of a computer key. She is utterly dependent upon him until such time as she decides she doesn’t need him, she will train someone else. Their understanding is that there is no (evident) understanding. Their bond is that there is no (evident) bond.

  In the dim-lighted untidy bedroom heaped with books, journals, papers. In the narrow bed that looks as if it has not been changed in some time Margot Sharpe sobs and hiccups and lapses into an abrupt and dreamless sleep like a plug yanked from a wall socket.

  At 2:10 A.M. of this very long day—(unknown to Hai-ku, this has been the day that Margot Sharpe learns without any qualification that she is not pregnant)—Hai-ku perceives that Margot Sharpe has dropped off to sleep at last. He removes the near-empty shot glass from her fingers, and sets it on the bedside table. He sees, without internal comment, that the inexpensive maple wood of the bedside table is stained with the pale rings of glasses and cups, like the pale rings of Jupiter.

  It has been years—(since Milton Ferris, in fact)—since anyone but Hai-ku has seen the interior of the professor’s two-storey brownstone on N. Reading Street, a half-mile from the Psychology Building. Years since anyone but Hai-ku has seen the interior of the professor’s bedroom in which a single bed takes up most of the space.

  On the walls are a half-dozen pencil and charcoal drawings on large sheets of stiff white paper. In the dimly lighted room the subjects of these drawings are obscured in shadow.

  Hai-ku recognizes these drawings of course. But Hai-ku would never comment on them, still less ask Margot Sharpe what they are doing on the walls of her house.

  “Professor? Excuse me . . .”

  Hai-ku hesitates to take hold of the professor’s limp chill hand to check the pulse at the thin wrist. He can see, and he can hear, the professor’s damp rasping erratic breath. He sees the closed eyelids quiver.

  In a matter-of-fact voice Hai-ku announces that he is leaving now—“I will say good night, Professor.”

  Hai-ku switches off lights in the rear of the house. In the kitchen Hai-ku puts the sticky-necked bottle of expensive whiskey away on a high shelf and carefully shuts the cupboard door.

  Rinses glasses in the sink. Hai-ku is a very methodical person wishing that no fingerprints, no DNA samples should remain to incriminate him if something happens to Professor Sharpe in the night.

  Hai-ku will leave the professor’s house by stealth. Darkened windows, and the outside light above the door seems to have burnt out.

  Hearing, as he prepares to shut and secure the door at 2:18 A.M., a faint but forceful voice lifting in the dark—“Hai-ku? Seven forty-five at the lab tomorrow—don’t be late. The car will be here. We’re due at Darven Park by eight-thirty.”

  CHAPTER NINE

  The ritual. The knife. Why he grips the railing of the plank bridge. Why he must brace himself against the wind.

  Recalling how rifles and shotguns are forbidden to children at Lake George, locked away in a cabinet. But there is another cabinet that is rarely locked—in this, knives are kept.

  Hunting knives, fishing knives.

  Waiting until the adults have gone to bed. Through the house the prevailing smell of woodsmoke, cigarette smoke.

  Downstairs, a prevailing smell of whiskey.

  The hunting knife is heavy in his hand. A child’s hand, but an adult knife.

  He raises it. Heavy sharp-bladed hunting knife.

  Stabs and stabs and stabs at the figure on its back in the bed, drunk-dazed waking instantly, desperate to escape but tangled in bedclothes.

  Hate you! You need to die.

  No one knows but me how you need to die.

  The father’s face, contorted with horror, astonishment. Seeing that it is his own son who has come to him in the night, in stealth. His own son who must murder him.

  In the small dank bedroom at the rear of the house behind the fireplace. Where Daddy sometimes slept, too drunk to make his way upstairs.

  Bled to death, it will be determined. Dozens of stab wounds to the chest, neck. Belly, groin. Stabbing stabbing in an ecstasy of hatred.

  No child of five could be suspected.

  And afterward carefully washes the hunting knife. In the little bathroom beside the kitchen.

  Heavy knife that belongs in the cabinet on a shelf with other knives carefully washed and dried and put away where he found it.

  AGAIN, REPEATED: BAREFOOT and shivering descending the darkened stairs with childish care counting fifteen steps. As making his way upstairs he must count fifteen steps.

  Opening the cabinet door—it isn’t locked.

  The knife he selects is not the largest or the heaviest knife. It is not a deer-gutting knife. It is not a fish-gutting knife. Yet, it is heavier than he expects, there is the worry it might slip through his fingers slick with blood.

  No matter which of his father’s knives he lifts it is heavier than he expects.

  Barefoot and shivering through the darkened rooms. He is wearing flannel pajamas, the bottoms tug downward he’s so skinny. Always a smell of woodsmoke
in the house of logs.

  The figure in the bedclothes is trapped, astonished. Too surprised to scream for help. Too deftly, rapidly stabbed to scream for help. The throat is stabbed, blood bubbles from the mouth and not screams. It is futile for the father to try to defend himself against the murderous son, his hands are slashed at once.

  Sharp-bladed heavy knife lifted and brought down hard multiple times stabbing stabbing stabbing.

  AND THEN, IN the morning nothing has changed.

  The drunken man is not drunk now. The drunken man is Daddy, winking at him.

  Today we’re taking out the big canoe, Eli. Time you learned to paddle properly.

  “MR. HOOPES?—ELI? Excuse me . . .”

  Opens his eyes startled and wary. Very surprised to see that he isn’t where he’d have believed he is but too canny to show it.

  Young caramel-skinned girl, very black glossy hair in cornrows, beautiful eyes, beautiful body in dull-green smock, trousers. White nurse’s shoes on her size-three feet. Tugging at his arm with laughter when he’s slow to respond.

  In a kind of terror he has been gripping the plank bridge railing. Heartbeat rapid and erratic though there seems to be nothing—no danger.

  Not sure where he is but quickly realizes it isn’t the lake. Not the Adirondacks.

  He is disappointed. He is not frightened.

  This is a wooded place, marshland. Wood chip trails, nothing that seems familiar. No hiking trail he knows. No white pines that he can see. A marshy soil, humid air. In the distance no mountains are visible.

  “Mr. Hoopes?—we goin back now, OK?”

  “Yes! Good.”

  “Don’t want to be forgettin your nice drawings . . .”

  “Yes, Eva. Thank you.”

  Smiling to disguise his confusion he has seen the girl’s ID—EVA.

  Exotic name. From the Caribbean he guesses.

  She’s a nurse, or a nurse’s aide. He loves to hear her voice—doesn’t matter what she says.

  It is comforting, Eva is so short. Hardly five feet one or two.

  Yet, her body is the body of a mature woman. Shapely hips, shapely breasts even in the dull-green loose-fitting uniform.