The Shadow Wife

He walked from the den to the bedroom, still angry, and with an added sense of having escaped from a great threat. If he yelled at Joelle, he was safe. That aching longing he had for her, the love and admiration, didn’t exist when he was chewing her out. And he thought now that he would be able to sleep tonight.

Around three in the morning, though, he woke up with a start, feeling much as he had the night after they’d made love, when he’d turned away from her with the hope of saving himself.

18

San Francisco, 1956

LISBETH WAS TERRIFIED. DR. PETERSON HAD BORROWED GABRIEL Johnson’s tennis racket the day before and now wanted her to return it to him at San Francisco General. That was why she was locked in the stall in one of the first-floor ladies’ rooms at the hospital during her lunch break. The tennis racket rested against the tiled wall while Lisbeth stared at herself in the mirror, trying to get her breathing under control.

What would she say to him? She’d never had a problem talking to him over the phone, and lately their conversations had grown even longer. But over the phone her voice did not give away her size.

She thought about Gabriel often when she was in bed at night, and she talked to him in her head all the time when she was alone. She told him everything about herself, which made it hard for her to remember that he did not actually know her as well as she felt he did.

A few weeks ago, he’d suggested she call him Gabriel instead of Mr. Johnson.

“I’d feel strange calling you by your first name,” she’d said.

“I want you to,” he’d answered in that deep voice that she loved. He had this way of making her feel like his equal, as though that was very important to him. As though the chief accountant of a big hospital and a medical secretary were on the same level.

“Okay, Gabriel.” She’d smiled, relieved, actually, since she called him that in her imagination all the time and was always afraid she’d slip while talking to him on the phone.

Her fantasies of Gabriel had become so intense, such a glorious part of her quiet existence, and she feared they would come to an end once he saw her. Touching up her makeup in the ladies’-room mirror, she pressed powder to her forehead and nose and rubbed a circle of rouge onto her cheeks. She didn’t want to look as though she’d made herself up especially for this meeting, so she skipped a fresh application of lipstick. She patted her petal curls into place. It was a stylish haircut, but what did it matter when the face that it framed was as round as a bowling ball? In her fantasies, she would meet Gabriel Johnson after losing sixty or seventy pounds. When, exactly, that would be she didn’t know. In the past six months, she’d added another ten pounds to her two hundred, and she was beginning to have difficulty finding a uniform for the doctor’s office that fit her.

She thought of simply leaving the racket with someone at the hospital’s reception desk, but as much as she didn’t want to be seen by Gabriel, she was longing to see him, to see the man who had facelessly filled her fantasies and her dreams for the past year and a half.

The woman at the information desk was an elderly volunteer, and the name tag attached to her collar read Madge.

Lisbeth smiled at her. “I’m looking for Gabriel Johnson’s office,” she said.

“Is he the bookkeeper?” the woman asked.

“The chief accountant. Yes.”

“That’s the business office.” The woman pointed a misshapen finger toward the bank of elevators in the corridor. “Second floor. Take the elevator and turn right, and his office is there on the corner.”

Lisbeth felt nauseous in the elevator, and she knew the perspiration was returning to her nose and forehead. By the time she turned the knob of the door to the business office, her hand was shaking.

There was no one sitting at the reception desk when she walked into the business office. She stood, waiting, for an uncomfortable moment, the racket at her side, before spotting an open door halfway down a narrow hallway.

“Hello?” she called, hoping the person in that office would hear her, but there was no response.

She walked down the hall and knocked on the open door, peering inside the room at the same time. A colored man sat at a desk, and he looked up at the sound of her knock.

“Excuse me,” she said. “I’m looking for Gabriel Johnson.”

The man had been writing something, but now he set down his pen.

“I’m Gabriel Johnson,” he said.

“No—” She stopped herself. She wanted to tell him that he couldn’t possibly be Gabriel. She wanted to tell him he was wrong, or to ask him if he was playing some sort of trick on her. But that voice. She recognized it, the depth and gentleness of it. She was stunned beyond speech, though. Gabriel—her Gabriel—was colored?

“Ah, I see you have my racket,” he said, standing up. “You must be Lisbeth.”