Shadow Traffic by Richard Burgin Page B

expected to be a faithful husband than it is today, but he was honest in other ways as well. When my mother got sick for a number of years, he took exemplary care of her, never missed a beat. Of course such behavior meant the premature death of his sex life, but that was never a consideration for him. I doubt it was ever more than a fleeting thought. He was honest in his business, too. I worked for him, so I know. I wish I’d never left his business, but thought I’d outgrown that, too. (The song “Young and Foolish” didn’t come from nothing.) Still, of all his forms of honesty, I’m most impressed by his lifelong fidelity—especially to a woman as difficult as my mother could sometimes be. He set too high a standard for me there. I knew even as a fairly young child, orcertainly by my mid-teens, that I could never live up to it. Of course, once realized, I went a bit more than I needed to in the other direction and learned to say whatever I had to say to get women to go to bed with me since that was the way of the rest of the world, as I understood it.
    It was a great shock when my father died nearly thirty years ago. It would have been a shock no matter how he died, even if it were from a slow-acting cancer. Still, it was a special kind of shock his having a fatal heart attack when he was only fifty-seven, not too far from the age I am now. As an orphan and only child (my mother had died six years earlier), I inherited a bit of money. I should have invested it or saved it or some ingenious combination of the two. Instead I traveled. I wanted to flee the country, especially the middle of it where I lived, in St. Louis, yet I also feared traveling (though my father had taken me to Europe as a child, then later as a teenager). I panicked at the thought of living among people whose language I couldn’t speak. As a compromise, I went to London.
    It was undoubtedly too soon after his death to travel such a great distance. A part of me knew this. Although I had no siblings or lover of any consequence at the time, I did have a friend or two, especially Phil, who warned me about my trip to London; yet I turned a deaf ear. I was determined to go there, so I made arrangements quickly, even paying in advance for the first week at my hotel in Princes Square. In an effort to divert myself, I went to the usual tourist attractions and was by no means disappointed. Not by the attractions themselves, that is, which were pretty much what they were cracked up to be. But the routine of the ubiquitous guided tours and especially the commercialization of it all began to irritate me. I remember it bothered me in particular that you had to pay to visit the so-called holy West-minsterAbbey. It also bothered me that all these places had gift or snack shops attached to them, like mosquitoes to skin.
    No doubt, my father’s recent death contributed a little to my bitter reaction. I soon stopped going to the tourist attractions and began just walking around Hyde Park in the daytime and then at night getting pretty soused at one of the local pubs on Queensway before returning to my hotel room to sleep it off. It was on one of my evening trips to a pub that a quite attractive, if slightly waifish, young woman approached me with a troubled look on her face. She was a little shorter than average, with very white skin and dark shoulder-length hair, and wore a flower print dress that hid her figure more than revealing it.
    Not really hearing what she first said to me, in part because she spoke with an accent, in part because she spoke quickly, I assumed she wanted money (everyone else did), so I fished out the change in my pocket and gave her a couple of pounds. Her troubled look quickly turned ironic.
    â€œThis man just gave me money, he thinks I want money,” she said, addressing the empty space around her, as far as I could see.
    â€œI’m sorry I misunderstood,” I said, walking toward her. But she was