Cast Of Shadows

– 44 -

Folks had called Sam Coyne many cruel names as a child, but none had stung him more than “mama’s boy.” Perhaps it was the insinuation that he was weak, or maybe he simply didn’t want to be identified so closely with his gregarious and eccentric parents, but all these years later he was still reluctant to ride with his mother to the store when she asked. Running errands with his mom around town, around Northwood, where he grew up, made him self-conscious.

“Heck, Ma,” he said, trying not to whine. “Why don’t you make me a list? I’ll go get it myself. Save you the trip.”

“Jesus, Sam,” she said. “You’re thirty years old. The other boys won’t make fun of you when they see you with your mom.”

“It’s not that,” he muttered. But of course it was, and when he thought about it again, he realized how ridiculous he was being. Maybe it was his thirtieth birthday (for which his buddies from the law firm had surprised him with an expensive hooker at the Drake) or maybe it was just being home for the weekend, but Sam was having a tough time accepting himself as an adult. He looked at people in their early twenties and was convinced they were older than he. He always assumed certain kinds of celebrities – athletes, for instance – were older, and he suffered tiny spasms of panic when he read that this shortstop or that seven-foot center had a birth date ten years later than his.

“Anyone new in your life?” Mrs. Coyne asked from the passenger’s seat as he backed out of the driveway, where, in an earlier family car, Sam had accepted a blow job from a cheerleader named Alex who also had a twin brother named Alex, a fact that Sam couldn’t put out of his mind through the duration of the act.

“No,” Sam said. In truth there were many new anyones – Samantha, Joanne, Tammy, the hooker at the Drake – and he knew them all about equally well. When he called a girl for a date it had more to do with matching her preferences to his mood – this one’s a baseball fan, that one likes to be bent over a leather chair – than it did with any desire to advance a relationship. Unless a woman was especially good at scratching that month’s sexual itch, he usually let pass just enough time between dates so that she and he were starting over each time. It kept complications at bay.

Sal Faludi had been butcher to Northwood for all of Sam’s life and longer. He was in the shop every day, commanding about fifteen employees in a downtown space that over the years had expanded across four storefronts. Rare were the times when you didn’t have to wait your turn at Faludi’s. On summer Saturday mornings like this one, you took a number. Sam’s was seventy-four.

When Sam was in high school, he and the others would sometimes leave campus for lunch and they would usually end up here. When the weather was nice, Sal set up tables made from black steel mesh on the sidewalk, and the kids would each grab a sandwich from the deli and race for one of the al fresco seats.

“Sixty!” Sal called out.

A pretty young woman, about Sam’s age or a little older, pushed open the glass door with her rear end and her shoulders. Sam noticed the appealing shape of her right away, even before she turned around to reveal her white teeth and giant eyes. She had a brown grocery bag in her left arm and was holding the hand of a boy – seven, eight, nine, ten years old, somewhere in there, Sam thought – with her right. The woman smiled curiously at Sam, who was staring, and said hello to Sam’s mother before looking away and taking a number from the big snail-shaped dispenser.

“Oh, good!” Sam’s mother said, pinching his arm. “Sam, look!” She took two long steps and a graceful skip to the woman’s side and she pulled the woman and the boy back in Sam’s direction. “Martha!” Mrs. Coyne said. “This is my son, Sam. The one I’ve been telling you about all these months.”

“You know, I was wondering.” Martha laughed. “I see what you mean. Hello, Sam.” She let go of the boy’s hand long enough to shake Sam’s. The boy looked into each of their faces and sighed politely. This turn of events wouldn’t get him out of the store any sooner.

Sam was gracious and puzzled, quietly assuming his mother was matchmaking again. If that were the case she had done better than usual, except for the presence of a child, which triggered an automatic preemptory challenge for him as far as dating was concerned. This Martha was extremely pretty. She had short, reddish blond hair with fashionable bangs that transcended the common suburban bob. Her lips were full and her neck was long. Her eyes were so large and green they reminded Sam of sexy girls in comic books. She wore a green sleeveless top with narrow openings for her thin and angular gym-toned arms. Under a long abstract leaf-patterned skirt he could make out shapely athletic legs. He liked the way her head tilted when she said hello. The shy but confident way she shook hands. The silent manner in which she respected (and received respect from) her little boy. She must have been young when she had him, he thought.

“Sam, I’ve mentioned Martha to you a hundred times,” his mother said. “We’re always running into each other downtown. Little Justin here looks exactly like you did when you were his age.”

Right, Sam thought. The little boy. The bastard child his father was always kidding him about. Nope, it wasn’t his. Sam couldn’t remember every woman he’d slept with, but he would have remembered Martha. Now imagining her, flesh against flesh, he chuckled and looked at the boy’s face for the first time. Yeah, he supposed he had once looked like that. A little. Not so much that his mother should have been going on and on about it for the last year. But then, one never sees himself, or remembers himself, exactly the way others do. Self-recognition is a sign of intelligence, his freshman psychology professor had claimed. Only advanced mammals are capable of looking in a mirror and acknowledging the image there is their own. But the mirror also distorts. How many times have you heard people say, That’s a terrible picture of me, when the photo, in fact, is quite accurate? We disavow the correct images of ourselves because they don’t match against the idealized snapshots we all carry in our heads.

“Well, I’ll be,” Sam said.

Mrs. Coyne opened her purse. “A month ago I started carrying this old picture around so I could show it to you when we ran into each other, and then I haven’t seen you since. Isn’t that always the way?” She made paddling motions inside the huge bag, pushing aside innumerable contingency items like lip balm and pens and tissues and the keys to her sister’s house in Rockford.

“Here,” Mrs. Coyne said, her fingers on something. “Oh, yes. This.”

Sam and Martha huddled close for a better look while Justin stared out onto the sidewalk. The photo of Sam was taken when he was about eight years old. It was winter and Sam was dressed in snow pants and a parka and he was holding a sled. He wasn’t wearing a cap, but Sam wondered why his mother chose this photo to demonstrate his youthful resemblance to Martha’s son when she could have picked from dozens of others, in which he was not so obscured by nylon and fleece. He guessed it was because the house in the background showed off the Christmas lights his parents were so famous for in their neighborhood. Looking at it, however, he had to admit the resemblance to Justin was startling. They had the same blond hair (although young Sam’s had been shorter), similar cheekbones, the same chin.

“Wow!” Martha grinned, pulling away from the photo and then bending back down for a better assessment. “Justin, take a look,” she said. “Look at Mr. Coyne when he was your age. He looks just like you.”

“Wow,” Justin said flatly, blinking at the photograph. There was a moment of curiosity, when his eyebrows curled, indicating to Sam that the boy saw the resemblance, but it also was apparent that Justin wanted no part of a conversation that would keep him out shopping with his mother longer than necessary. Sam sympathized.

Martha handed the photograph back to Mrs. Coyne and looked Sam in the eyes. “Well, he has a lot to look forward to if he grows up as handsome as you.”

Flirtatious, Sam thought.

“Seventy-four!” Sal cried out.

Sam held out his ticket. “Here,” he said to Martha. “I’ll trade you. It looks like Justin would like to get this over with.”

Martha raised her eyebrows. “That’s kind, but you don’t have to.”

Mrs. Coyne stopped Martha’s hand as she tried to give the ticket back. “Take it. Really. We’re in no hurry.”

“Gosh,” Martha said. “Thank you so much.”

“Divorced,” Sam’s mother whispered to him, in answer to an unasked question, after Martha had waved good-bye and disappeared toward the checkout.

Sam returned to the city following an early supper on Sunday, and on the way home he called innocent-looking-but-uninhibited Tina, whom he had met and balled at a client’s holiday party last December. Tonight, their second night together, he lay on his back and Tina straddled him, facing away. The television news was on, with the sound turned down.

“Oh, Looord,” Tina purred. “This guy on the TV looks a little bit like you.”

Sam had forgotten how chatty Tina was. Even when they were coupled in her boss’s office the night of the party she was telling him stories about the weird guy in accounts payable who came by her desk every morning when she was in the ladies’ room and tongued the lipstick off her coffee mug.

“I’ve been getting that a lot lately,” Sam said, hands firmly on her hips, keeping her in proper time. “Who is he?”

“A football player. Jimmy Spears, it says.” She giggled and dug into his thigh with her red nails. “He’s hot.”

“He sucks,” Sam said. “What’s he doing on TV in the middle of July?”

“Don’t know,” Tina said. “Don’t care.” She arched backward and Sam snarled one hand in her auburn hair and slipped the other around her neck, just under her jawline, and when a finger got close to her mouth, she bit it hard enough to draw blood.

Later, as his hands caressed the faint but exquisite bruises, both his and hers, left by the scratching and teething and open-handed slapping, he tried to imagine Martha’s contours in place of Tina’s, tried to conceive of the sort of clandestine, muffled, normal sex they would have with the little boy who looked just like him asleep in the next room.

To his surprise, he almost could.