Voice of Our Shadow (8 page)

“That’s when, India? Was I going to Morocco?”

“I don’t remember. Great shot though. I forgot all about that picture, Paul. You look good. Very
Foreign Correspondent
-y.” She reached back and caressed his knee. I saw him touch her hand in the dark and hold it. How I envied them their love.

The next slide came on, and I blinked in amazement. India and I were standing very close together, her arm through mine, and we were looking intently up at the Ferris wheel at the Prater.

“Me and my spy camera!” Paul reached over and took a handful of popcorn. “I bet neither of you knew I’d taken that one!”

“No, no, you only showed it to me twelve times after you got it back! Next slide.”

“Could I have a print of it, Paul?”

“Sure, Joey, no problem.”

The painful thought crossed my mind that someday, somewhere far away, the Tates would be showing these same slides to someone else and that someone would ask in an uninterested voice who the guy standing with India was. I know the Buddhists say all transient things suffer, and there were times when that didn’t bother me at all. But when it came to Paul and India I wondered, truly, what I would do without them in my life. I knew it would all go on as usual, but I was reminded of people with bad hearts who are told to stop using salt in their diet. Inevitably after a while they come boasting to you that they’ve given it up completely and don’t miss it. So what? Anyone can survive; the purpose of life, however, is not only to survive but to get a little enjoyment out of it while you’re at it. I could “live” without salt too, but I wouldn’t be happy. Every time I looked at a steak I’d know how much better it would taste if I could only shake a little salt on. The same held with the Tates: life would toodle on okay, but they traveled so easily and joyously through the days, you couldn’t help being swept up along with them. It made everything much richer and fuller.

After what had happened in my life, I was torn between being highly suspicious of love and longing for it at the same time. In the short time I had known them, the Tates had unknowingly stormed the walls of my heart and made me run the red flag of love up as high as it would go. When I asked myself if I loved them singly or only as Paul and India/India and Paul, I didn’t know. I didn’t care, because it wasn’t important. I loved them, and that was enough for me.

One day out of the blue Paul called and said he was going on a business trip to Hungary and Poland for two weeks. He hated the whole idea but it was necessary, so that was that.

“Joey, the point is that I try to avoid these damned trips because sometimes India gets nervous and down when I’m gone for more than a few days at a shot. You know what I mean? It doesn’t always happen, but once in a while she gets, well, skittery …” His voice trailed back down into the phone, and there was no sound for several seconds.

“Paul, it’s no problem. We’ll hang around a lot together. Don’t even think about it. What did you think I was going to do, abandon her?”

He sighed, and his voice leaped back up to full strength again — tough and sturdy. “Joey, that’s great. You’re the kid. I don’t even know why I was worried in the first place. I knew you’d take care of her for me.”

“Hey,
vuoi un pugno
?”

“What?”

“That’s Italian for ‘Do you want a punch in the nose?’ What kind of friend did you think I was?”

“I know, I know, I’m a dope. But take
really
good care of her, Joey. She’s my jewel.”

When I hung up, I kept my hand on the back of the receiver. He was off that afternoon, and suddenly I had me a dinner date. I wondered what I should wear. My brand spanking new, hideously expensive Gianni Versace pants. Only the best for India Tate.

The thought crossed my mind while I was dressing that wherever we went for the next two weeks people would think we were a couple. India and Joe. She wore a wedding ring, and if someone saw it they would naturally assume I had given it to her. India and Joseph Lennox. I smiled and looked at myself in the mirror. I began to warble an old James Taylor tune.

India wore cavalry tweed slacks the color of golden fall leaves and a maroon turtleneck sweater. She held my arm wherever we went, and was funny and elegant and better than ever. From the beginning she almost never mentioned Paul, and after a while neither did I.

We ended the first night in a snack bar near Grinzing, where a bunch of punky motorcyle riders kept shooting us murderous looks because we were laughing and having a great time. We made no attempt to conceal our delight. One boy with a shaved head and a dark safety pin through his earlobe looked at me with a thousand pounds of either disgust or envy — I couldn’t decipher which. How could anyone as square as me be having so much fun? It was wrong, unfair. After a while the gang strutted out. On the way, the girls all combed their hair and the boys slid gigantic fish-tank helmets over their heads with careful, loving slowness.

Later we stood on a street corner across from the café and waited in the fall cold for a tram to take us back downtown. I was freezing in no time at all. Bad circulation. Seeing me shake, India rubbed my arms through my coat. It was a familiar, intimate gesture, and I wondered if she would have done it if Paul had been there. What a ridiculous, small thing to think. It was insulting both to India and to Paul. I was ashamed.

Luckily she started singing, and after a while I got over my guilt and cautiously joined her. We sang “Love Is a Simple Thing” and “Summertime” and “Penny Candy.” Feeling pretty sure of myself, I piped up with “Under the Boardwalk,” but she said she didn’t know that one. Didn’t know “Under the Boardwalk”? She looked at me, smiled, and shrugged. I told her it was one of the all-time greats, but she only shrugged again and tried to blow a smoke ring with her warm breath. I told her she had to have it in her repertoire, and that tomorrow night I would cook us dinner and play all my old Drifters records for her. She said that sounded good. In my enthusiasm I didn’t realize what I’d done. I had invited her to my apartment alone. Alone. As soon as it hit me, the night suddenly seemed ten degrees colder. When she looked down the track for the tram, I let my teeth chatter.
Alone
. I stuck my hands deep into my pockets and felt as stretched as a rubber band wrapped around a thousand fat playing cards.

Why was I so scared to have her over alone? Nothing happened the next night. We ate spaghetti carbonara and drank Chianti and listened to the Joseph Lennox Golden Oldies Hit Parade of records. Everything was very honorable and aboveboard, and I ended up feeling a bit blue afterward. Since my relationship with the two of them had deepened, my initial desire for India had dwindled, but after she left my apartment that night, I looked at my hands and knew that I would have made love to her in a second if the right situation had come up. I felt like a shit and an A-prime betrayer for thinking that, but, Christ, who says no to an India Tate? Eunuchs, madmen, or saints. None of the above being me.

I didn’t see her the next day, although we talked for a long time over the phone. She was going to the opera with some friends and kept telling me how much she liked Mahler’s
The Three Pintos
. I wanted to tell her before we hung up how disappointed I was that I wouldn’t be seeing her that day, but I didn’t.

Something very strange and almost more intimate than sex happened the next day.
How
it happened is so utterly ludicrous I’m embarrassed to explain. India later said it was a great scene out of a bad movie, but I still felt it was the worst kind of corn.

It was Saturday night; she was cooking dinner for us at their apartment. While she moved around her kitchen cutting and chopping and stirring, I started singing. She joined in, and we went through “Camelot.” “Yesterday,” and “Guess Who I Saw Today, My Dear?” So far, so good. She was still cutting and chopping; I had my arms behind my head, looking at the ceiling and feeling warm and content. When we finished “He Loves and She Loves,” I waited a few seconds to see if she was going to volunteer one. When she didn’t, I sang the first few bars of “Once Upon a Time.” Why that song I still don’t know, because it usually surfaces only when I’m depressed or sad. She had a nice high voice that reminded me of light blue. She could also move it around mine and do some lovely harmonizing. It made me feel about a hundred times more musical than I was, so long as I stayed on my notes.

We got three quarters of the way through the song, but then the end loomed up. If you don’t know the tune, I should tell you that the end is very sad; I always stop singing before I get there. This time I’d arrived, but because she was there with me, I decided to mumble my way through to the finish. It did no good, because she dropped off too, and we were stuck out there in space with nowhere to go. All of a sudden I felt sad and full of tired echoes, and my eyes filled with tears. I knew I would start crying if I didn’t think of something fast. Here I was in my friends’ warm kitchen, the man of her house for a few hours. Something I had wanted for years but had never been able to find. There had been women before — deer and mice and lions. There had been moments when I was sure — but they weren’t. Or they’d been convinced, but I wasn’t … and it was never simple or good. What it boiled down to was being alone — particularly alone — in Vienna in the middle of my twenties and, worst of all, growing used to it.

My eyes were stuck on the ceiling while the black silence honked its horn, but I knew I would have to look at her soon. Steeling myself, I blinked three or four times against the tears and slowly brought my scared eyes down. She was leaning against a counter and had both hands in her pants pockets. She’d held nothing back, and although she was crying, she looked at me with a grave, loving stare.

She walked over and sat down on my knee. Putting her long arms around my neck, she hugged me tightly. When I returned the embrace — tentatively and light with fear — she spoke into my neck.

“Sometimes in the middle of everything I get so
sad
.”

I nodded and began rocking us back and forth in the chair. A father and his scared child.

“Oh, Joe, I just get so spooked.”

“Of what? You want to talk?”

“Of nothing. Everything. Getting old, knowing nothing. Never being on the cover of
Time
magazine.”

I laughed and squeezed her harder. I knew exactly what she meant.

“The beans are burning.”

“I know. I don’t care. Keep hugging me. It’s better than beans.”

“You wanna go out for hamburgers?”

She pulled back and smiled at me. Her face was all tears. She sniffled and rubbed her nose. “Can we?”

“Yes, honey, and you can have a milkshake too, if you want.”

“Joey, you’re breaking my heart. You’re a good fellow.”

“You did that to me once, so we’re even now.”

“Did what?” She let go and started to get up.

“Broke my heart.” I kissed her on the top of the head and smelled that fine clean India smell again.

The next morning we had breakfast at a brass and marble
Konditorei
on Porzellangasse, near their apartment. Then, because the day was bright and clear, we decided to drive up along the Danube and stop when we saw a nice place. Both of us felt full of life and were definitely in the mood for a long walk. We found a spot near Tulln, a dirt path that ran parallel to the river and wound in and out of the forest. She held my hand the whole way, and we walked and ran and waved at the crew of a Rumanian barge that was slowly working its way upstream. When someone on board saw us and tooted the horn, we looked at each other wonderingly, as if we had accomplished something magical. It was the kind of day that, in retrospect, is almost cheapened by its cliches, but that, when you’re experiencing it, has an innocence and clarity that can’t ever be matched in your more rational times.

We drove back to town under a plum and orange sunset and had an early dinner at a Greek restaurant near the university. The food was terrible, but the company was something special.

The two weeks Paul was gone went by like that. I didn’t do a lick of work because we were constantly together. We cooked, went for walks in remote districts of town where no one ever went, much less sightseers. The fact that we were probably the only people who had ever gone there
to
sightsee pleased us no end. We went to a couple of movies in German, and on the spur of the moment to hear Alfred Brendel playing Brahms at the Konzerthaus.

One night we decided to see what Vienna offered in the way of night life. We must have gone to twenty places and had thirty cups of coffee, ten glasses of wine, and a Coke here and there. At two in the morning we were in the Café Hawelka looking at all the phonies when India turned to me and said, “Joey, you’re the most fun man I’ve been with since Paul. Why can’t I marry both of you?”

Paul was due in on Saturday night; the two of us planned to go down to the train station to meet him. I didn’t want to tell her, but for the first time since I had known him, I wasn’t looking forward to seeing Paul all that much. Call it greed or possessiveness or whatever, I had grown used to squiring India around town on my arm, and it was going to be damned hard and sad to have to give it up.

“Hi ya, kids!”

We watched him zoom down the platform toward us, arms full of bags and packages, a great beaming smile on his face. He hugged India and then me. He had a thousand stories to tell about “the Commies” and insisted we go to a café so he could have a real cup of coffee for the first time in two weeks. He let me carry one of his suitcases, which seemed to be light as air. I didn’t know if it was empty or because adrenaline was pumping through my body a mile a minute. I didn’t know how I felt anymore. India walked between us, holding us each by the arm. She looked completely happy.

“That crumb.”

“India, take it easy.”

“No! That dirty crumb. How do you like that? He actually asked.”

“What exactly did he say?”

“He
asked
me if we’d slept together.”

Big Ben tolled in the middle of my stomach. Half because of indignation, half because with one question Paul had put his finger right on the button. Had I wanted to sleep with India? Yes. Did I still want to sleep with India, my one best friend who was married to my other best friend? Yes.