Read Online The Man Without a Shadow by Joyce Carol Oates - Free Book Online Page B

week. You’ve been inspired.”
    Inspired is not the right word. Haunted, more likely.
    As Margot shifts the drawings slowly along the table from left to right, E.H. peers at them with a kind of perplexed pride. She understands that he doesn’t remember most of what he has done even as he tries to give no sign of surprise.
    The charcoal drawings depict a marshland beneath a low, ominous sky. There are misshapen trees, fallen limbs, tall grasses and a shallow stream with a rippling surface. In one of the drawings you can see what appears to be a figure in the stream—a pale, naked figure, a child perhaps, with long flowing hair and opened and sightless eyes. (Margot feels her mouth go dry, seeing this.) E.H. makes a sound of impatience or disdain—he fumbles to take hold of the drawing, and jerks it along, replacing it with another. Margot can see that the charcoal is smearing, E.H. hasn’t sprayed fixative on it. As if nothing is wrong Margot continues as she’d been doing, shifting the drawings along the table . . . (E.H. is breathing quickly and shallowly. Margot is not sure what she has seen. The figure on its back in the stream was very impressionistic.) The last drawings in the group resemble the first drawings almost identically—more marshland scenes, and the stream; insects on the water’s surface casting small soft shadows below. And finally there is a vast lake or inland sea ringed with pine trees. The sky here is massive, like a canyon. The water’s surface here is rippling, tremulous. There is an atmosphere of tranquility that, the more closely you look, becomes an atmosphere of dread.
    â€œEli? Is this Lake George?”
    â€œMaybe.”
    â€œSuch a beautiful lake, I know! I’ve never seen it.”
    Margot always speaks brightly to E.H. It is her professional manner, worn like a shield.
    â€œI’ve only seen pictures of Lake George—photographs. Some of these, Eli, you’d taken yourself, years ago . . .” Margot speaks carefully, but Eli does not respond.
    â€œEli, what has happened here at the lake? Has something happened here?”
    E.H. stoops over the drawings, to stare at them. As if trying to recall them. He seems to be feeling pain, behind his eyes. Impulsively he says, “It did not happen yet.”
    â€œWhat ‘did not happen yet’?”
    E.H. shakes his head. How can he know, he seems to be pleading, when it hasn’t happened yet?
    Margot has come to the end of the drawings. She’d like very much to turn back, to examine the (pale, naked?) figure in the stream. She isn’t even sure that this is what she saw—she is feeling uneasy, for E.H. is standing very close to her, his breath on the side of her face.
    Apart from his firm and caressing handshake each time they meet, E.H. has never touched Margot Sharpe. He does not—(she has noticed)—touch anyone except to shake hands, and he is sensitive to being touched by medical staff. Yet, Margot has imagined that E.H. would often like to touch her.
    She seems to recall that he has. He has touched her.
    In a dream, possibly. One of her many dreams of Darven Park, that grip her intensely by night but fade upon waking, like pale smoke streaming upward.
    It is déjà vu she feels, at such times. The most mysterious of quasi-memories.
    E.H. is saying, “It did not happen—yet. It is the ‘safe time’—before.”
    â€œBefore what, Eli?”
    E.H.’s face is shutting up. Like a grating being pulled down over a store window. Rudely abrupt, and Margot Sharpe is being excluded.
    â€œEli? Before—what?”
    E.H. snatches up the drawings and sketches—shuffles them crudely together—returns them to their folder. He is hurried, harried—doesn’t seem to care if some of the pages are torn. Margot cries, “Oh! Eli. Let me help . . .” She would like to take the folder from him, to reassemble his art more