The Shape of Desire

by Sharon Shinn

  “But I watched the news last night on Channel 5,” says a woman from the marketing department, speaking in a meaningful tone of voice. “And one of the reporters—that good-looking guy, you know, Brody something—he was saying that all sorts of questions were being raised by the media. Is there a dangerous animal on the loose? Can all these deaths be tied together? He said the police will have no choice but to close the parks down until this thing is caught. And if the police won’t do it, maybe the governor will.”

  “Well, it’s about time,” says a girl from the mailroom. “I’m afraid to leave my house these days! I mean, don’t they care about public safety? I can’t believe the families of the dead folks haven’t sued the state over this.”

  On Wednesday, I run into Grant in the lunchroom. I haven’t seen him since he was wearing his snow leopard costume on Halloween. He greets me with a quiet “hey” as I head to the hot water dispenser to make a cup of tea.

  “Have you talked to Kathleen?” he asks.

  “Not since Sunday. Ellen’s going over there this afternoon, though.”

  He nods and then just stands there, stirring creamer into his coffee. This is the first time I can ever remember seeing Grant without a smile on his face. “I just can’t stop thinking about her,” he says. “She was so happy at the party. She was wearing this kitten outfit, you know, with these paper ears and whiskers painted on her face. She was saying how much she loves Halloween, that Ritchie would dress up like a mummy and hide behind one of the bushes, and when kids would come up and ring the doorbell, he’d walk out with his arms in front of him, stiff, like he was dead—” He shakes his head, not able to finish the sentence.

  “Yeah,” I say heavily. “The whole thing just sucks.”

  “It makes you think,” he replies. “You never know. You think you have all the time in the world and then—” He snaps his fingers. “Gone.”

  I feel certain Marquez and Ellen would want me to take this opportunity to do a little spy work, so I force myself to make the monumental effort of an inquiry. “You mean, like, chase the dreams you’ve put off? Or tell people you love them? Or stop living a lie?”

  He nods. “All those things.”

  I find that even knowing how ephemeral life is does not make me any more inclined to start sharing certain truths about myself. I’m already pretty good at telling people I love them—some people, at least. So Ritchie’s death, while it is having a profound impact on my existence, doesn’t make me want to modify my behavior.

  I know I should ask, “Who do you love?” but instead I go with, “You’ve been living a lie? Do tell.”

  Now his face takes on its more accustomed contours as he grins. “I’m really a white man,” he says.

  It’s so unexpected that I choke on my tea. And then I laugh. I had thought laughter was a thing of the past. “God, I never would have suspected,” I gasp.

  “I’ve been meaning to confess for a long time now.”

  “I won’t tell anybody,” I promise him.

  “I know you won’t. Everybody knows they can trust Maria.”

  Right before the day ends, my mom calls. She and Aunt Andrea drove down from Springfield this morning to go shopping, and they’ve decided to spend the night in St. Louis. Would I like to have dinner with them?

  “I’d love to,” I say. God, yes, undemanding and affectionate company to fill the nightmare hours. “Do you want to stay at my house? One of you can have the spare room and one of you can sleep on the couch, unless you’d rather share a bed.”

  “No, Andrea has some AARP discount at a hotel in Clayton and she wants to use it. And she has some frequent-flier miles she wants to apply before they expire. I couldn’t follow it all, to tell you the truth, but anyway, that’s where we’re staying.”

  “I’ll meet you at six.”

  I pick them up at their hotel and we head to the Delmar Loop, a funky little area close to Washington University, crammed with shops and restaurants. Delmar Avenue is impassable on weekend nights, but since it’s Wednesday, we don’t have much trouble finding a parking spot or a table. As we stroll by Iron Age, my mom and Aunt Andrea dare each other to go in for tattoos, and then start giggling like teenagers.

  “You ought to do it,” I say a few minutes later as we study our menus at Blueberry Hill. It’s a restaurant/bar/live-music venue where Chuck Berry still performs from time to time. Mostly college students hang out here, but my mother likes hamburgers, which the place is famous for, and Aunt Andrea likes any place with a lot of color and noise. “Get tattoos. I think it would be cool.”

  “Yeah, mine would say, ‘Older than dirt,’” Andrea replies with a snort.

  “I could get a dinosaur,” my mom says. “Low on my back, where all the girls have them. What do they call that?”

  I am dissolving with merriment. “A tramp stamp.”

  “Right. I want a dinosaur tramp stamp. A triceratops.”

  “Bet they’d do it,” I say.

  “I think I’ll get a nipple ring instead,” Andrea says, which sets me off again. “I think their sign said they do body piercing, too.”

  My mom frowns in my direction. “You don’t have any tattoos, do you?”

  “No, and no nipple rings, either.”

  Beth has a tattoo, though I don’t say so, of course. Clara’s name, in a small heart, inked over her left breast just low enough that a reasonably cut neckline or swimsuit will cover it. I went with her when she had it done—here at Iron Age, as a matter of fact—and I seriously considered getting one of my own. I would have, if I’d been able to settle on something that I wanted to be branded onto my skin forever. I’ve never been able to come up with a slogan I wanted for a vanity license plate, which could be easily discarded; it’s even harder to decide on a permanent ornament for my body.

  Well, Dante’s name, of course. That has occurred to me. But do I put it over my heart, where it would make him laugh every time he made love to me? On my butt, which seems somehow disrespectful and a little offensive? Around my wrist like a lacy bracelet, where anyone could ask me what it meant?

  If he had some definitive alter ego. If he were always a fox, always a bear. I could have opted to have a small stylized creature etched into my flesh, would have come up with some explanation that would satisfy Beth and Ellen and anyone else who noticed. But Dante changes too much to be captured by any kind of indelible medium.

  And now. Now he may have morphed into a murderer.

  Determined to shut off that line of thinking, at least for the evening, I glare at my menu. Blueberry Hill has a decent selection of vegetarian items, and I settle on red beans and rice, along with a salad. My mom and aunt order burgers and beers, which for some reason amuses me.

  “So what did you buy, since you came to town to shop?” I ask.

  This elicits a rather long story about the stores they visited at the Galleria and the West County mall. Andrea has a niece on her husband’s side who’s getting married next month, and she’s searching for a dress to wear to the wedding.

  “The bridesmaids are wearing a color called mermaid,” she says, looking mystified. “What do you suppose that means?”

  “Mmm, something kind of watery-looking, I suppose,” I reply. “You know, blue or green or a mix of the two. Sea foam.”

  “In my day, we called it aqua,” my mother says.

  “So did you find something to wear when you swim out to the wedding?” I ask.

  “I did,” Andrea answers. “It was on sale, too.”

  Our conversation continues along much the same lines for the rest of the meal, which is very good. Neither of them likes to stay out late, even when they’re not far from home, so I return them to their hotel by eight thirty. Andrea climbs out of the backseat as soon as the car comes to a halt. She’s already on her cell phone, since Sydney called just as we arrived in Clayton. My mother pauses with a hand on the door.

  “You look tired,” she says.

  I smile. “It’s nighttime.
You can’t even see my face.”

  “I was noticing as we sat in the restaurant. Is everything all right?”

  Everything is as far from all right as it could be, but I do not want to burden her with that information. “It’s been a rough week,” I admit. “I told you about Kathleen.” I had phoned her Saturday night, shortly after I’d gotten Ellen’s initial call but before I had learned the cause of death. Back when I could still be rational about the whole thing. “It’s had this horrible effect on everyone in the office. No one can concentrate on work, but no one knows what to do for her and—well, it’s been sort of awful.”

  She reaches up to pat me on the cheek. For a moment I lean my face into her hand, deriving more comfort than I would have expected from that simple touch, so familiar, so reassuring. This is the woman who saw me through the first unbearable calamities of my life, whether she was required to kiss away bruises or stay up till midnight as I sobbed about the breakup with my latest boyfriend. This is the woman who taught me that grief can be endured, faced down, and left behind, sometimes with grace, sometimes with scars, always with stubbornness. The potential disaster looming before me is greater than any of those that have come before, but her touch reminds me that the same skills and strategies must come into play.

  “You’ll be fine,” she says.

  I lean over to give her a hug. “I know I will,” I say. “I’m glad you guys called. Have a good day tomorrow.”

  “We will,” she says as she gets out of the car. “You, too.”

  I think that is far less likely.

  In fact, at first it seems as if Thursday will be indistinguishable from the rest of the week, just as dreary and unproductive, though I do my dogged best to churn out the most essential reports. Ellen calls around eleven.

  “I have to drive down toward St. Clair and drop some stuff off this afternoon. You want to ride with me and have lunch somewhere?” she asks.

  “Sure. Anything for a distraction,” I say.

  “Let’s leave around one. See you later.”

  It feels good to get out of the office, good to be in motion. Activity always makes you feel like you’re making forward progress, even if the activity itself is circular and meaningless. I watch the scenery as Ellen goes west for about ten miles on I-44. This far from the city proper, we’re practically in farmland; there are great tracts of open fields, visible humps of forested foothills, hunched up along either side of the highway. Here in early November, most of the autumn color has given way to flat brown and sandy beige, but now and then a lone tree flames against the sere countryside as if it’s bearing a message from God.

  Ellen pulls off the highway, swears under her breath as she makes two wrong turns before finding the office she wants, some featureless one-story clapboard building with six cars in its rutted parking lot. She leaves the motor running as she goes in and drops off an envelope. She’s back in less than a minute.

  “I’m starving,” she says.

  I glance around. We’re in some small town that squats alongside the highway, but I can’t imagine it offers too many opportunities for fine cuisine. “Do you think they even have restaurants around here?”

  “Oh, yeah, I’ve been here a dozen times. There’s a place down the street that has pretty decent food.”

  Five minutes later, Ellen pulls up in front of a hole-in-the-wall pub in a strip mall that also features a hair salon, a used bookstore, and a pizza parlor. It’s high noon, so we’re not surprised when our skimpily clad hostess, who barely looks old enough to work in an establishment that serves liquor, tells us the only seating left is in the bar.

  “Works for me,” Ellen says, and we follow her to a small table crammed against a wall. From where I sit, I can see five neon signs advertising different beer products and three high-def television sets broadcasting sporting events. None of the patrons are paying much attention to the games, so I assume they’re reruns of the past weekend’s matchups.

  I know St. Louis County has been debating ordinances that forbid smoking in public areas, but either the rule doesn’t hold in bars or the folks in this corner of the world have decided the law doesn’t apply to them. At any rate, the bar half of the restaurant is foggy and pungent with cigarette smoke. Ellen takes a deep breath as if inhaling a bouquet of lilies.

  “Love that smell,” she says and flips open her menu.

  It turns out the pub doesn’t have much in the way of vegetarian selections, but I manage to put together a meal of French fries, an iceberg lettuce salad, and fried mozzarella sticks. Ellen orders a Bud Lite, so I do, too. What the hell. It’s not like I’m getting much work done at the office anyway.

  Our conversation is pretty desultory until the meal comes, and we only talk about Kathleen for ten minutes, which has to be a speed record for the week. Over the meal itself, Ellen relays an anecdote about her most recent visit to the vet with her ancient and ornery Maine coon cat. Between the easy conversation and the beer, I find myself smiling and relaxing as I have not done in days.

  So I am caught completely unprepared when Ellen shoves away her empty plate and says, “So what’s been bugging you?”

  For a moment, I think it’s generic. Enough about me—what’s up with you? But I can tell, by the narrowed intensity of her eyes, that she’s being far more specific. Why the fuck are you moping around these days? It’s not like your husband is the one who died.

  Nonetheless, I try to look innocent and uncomprehending. “What do you mean?”

  She makes a gesture. “You’ve been—like this haunted thing for the past week. You hardly talk. You hardly eat. It’s obvious you’re not sleeping, ’cause you look like shit. I just want to know why.”

  I attempt a patronizing little smile. “I know you want to, but you can’t fix everybody’s problems. So worry about everyone else, and take me off your list.”

  “I didn’t say I could fix it, I said I wanted to hear what it is,” she replies. “And you’re my friend. You’re always gonna be on my list.”

  “That’s sweet,” I say. It seems pointless to deny that there’s something wrong, so I shrug and add, “But I don’t really want to talk about it.”

  She shrugs, too. “Well, I’ve got time.” She signals the waitress and says, “We’ll have two more Bud Lites.”

  Now my eyes widen. “What—you think we can sit here the rest of the day? You’re going to ply me with alcohol until I crack?”

  “Something like that.”

  “We both have jobs—or we did, when we left an hour ago.”

  “Yeah, I told Frank we might not be back. I said we were taking some stuff to Kathleen.” She grins. “He said fine.”

  My mouth falls open. “I can’t believe you would take advantage of somebody else’s tragedy to suit your own personal agenda.”

  “Yeah, well, I figure you’re having a tragedy, too, so it all seemed kind of karmically appropriate.”

  “It’s not a tragedy,” I said. Maybe it is.

  “So tell me.”

  I just shake my head. Ellen reaches for her purse, pulls out a pack of Kools, and lights one up. She takes a drag as if she is sucking on oxygen in the cargo hold of a compromised spaceship, and without it she will die.

  “Put that out!” I exclaim. “You quit!”

  “Bought a couple packs this weekend once we left Kathleen’s,” she says. “Went straight to Walgreens when I dropped you off.”

  “Oh, just like Grant,” I say in a scoffing voice. “Ritchie’s death has made you rethink all your priorities. ‘If I die tomorrow, what will I regret having done or not done?’ And what you regret is cigarettes?”

  “No, what I regret is not sleeping with Kurt Armstrong in high school because I thought good girls waited till college,” she says. “But it’s a little too late to go back and change that one.”

  She’s made me laugh, so when the waitress arrives a moment later with our beers, I start drinking mine, which I had initially decided not to do. “Seriously. The cigare
ttes?”

  “I bought two packs. I’m gonna finish them and then quit again.”

  “You better.”

  She smiles, takes another puff, and blows a smoke ring. She hasn’t touched her second beer. “So. What’s going on?”

  “You wouldn’t believe me if I told you.”

  “Honey, at this point if you told me you were being abducted by aliens on a regular basis, I would believe you. I know there’s something happening. I’m guessing it’s got to do with that sexy guy who shows up at your house now and then. Maybe he dumped you. But I don’t know, it seems worse than that.”

  “Though that would be bad enough,” I say.

  “So tell me. We’re not leaving until you do.” She makes a vague motion. “You’re too far away to walk back to the office. I don’t imagine they have taxis in this town. You gotta stay here till I take you back. So talk.”

  I start picking at the label painted on my beer. The waitress has brought us each a glass, but neither of us has bothered to use one. I can’t quite explain it, but I’ve always liked the sort of breezy confidence you seem to show when you guzzle booze straight from the bottle. Sipping is for nerds and people pretending to be refined. Swigging is for the cool kids.

  It’s not the alcohol. It’s not the empathy. It’s not the venue, smoky and gritty and so ground down that you know every single person sitting there has troubles too big to handle alone. It’s the terror, the worry, the great gaping uncertainty that has become my life, and presses down on me so hard I feel it squeezing out the words I thought to never say aloud. I want to tell Ellen, and I have never wanted to tell anyone before. I want someone else to know, someone to stand beside me at that dark portal into oblivion and clutch her fingers in my belt loop and haul me back when I begin to fall.