Cartilage and Skin (13 page)

I began to fear that if I were going to make progress with Morris the sister, I would have to pay back her brother. I needed to be tactful; I would have to feel her out, and only if I received a clear indication of hope, would I then give up the money. If I dangled the money to lure her near me, then I might have to pay up, in order to “close the deal,” as Stephen would say. My prospects seemed dim, but I knew that I ought to explore them.

Throughout the evening, I periodically, though fruitlessly, checked my email for her reply.

In bed, reading the paperback novel that I'd been regularly carrying around in the pocket of my overcoat, I was struck by a sudden realization: The letter from Teresa Morris had made me so anxious that I'd rushed into my apartment without sorting out the mail that belonged to Claudia Jones. Using the pink slip with fred's number on it as a bookmark, I closed the novel and got out of bed. In my slippers and with my blue robe cinched about my waist, I first went into the kitchen, and not finding the mail on the table or counter, I then shuffled into the living room, which was dimly lit, blue, and chilly. According to the small VCR clock, it was just past midnight. The mail sat on the corner of my computer desk. I clicked on the desk lamp, so I could read. A flyer for replacement windows—a $75 coupon and a picture of an extremely happy woman standing in front of glinting windows—was the only mail addressed to Claudia Jones. I doubted that my neighbor needed new windows and, given that she rented, even had the right to change one. Yet I carried the flyer out of my apartment and down the hallway. In front of Claudia's apartment, I squatted with my knees together, like a woman in an evening gown, and slipped her mail under the door. My senses were attuned to something both mildly enticing and foreboding. Perhaps because I had stood there before—as an odd disheveled man at a strange hour and with no apparent intent, trying to peer into the peephole—I felt more accustomed to the situation. The lights overhead filled the hallway with a pale, shadowless stillness. I was cold and at least partly aware that the most sensible thing was to go quietly back to my bedroom and curl up beneath my blanket. Instead, I lightly tapped on the door. I imagined that I was possibly on the cusp of some great, romantic intrigue, displaying the passion of a chivalric hero, and not simply violating the rules of etiquette and normalcy.

“Claudia,” I whispered, as though gently rousing her from sleep. “Claudia.”

I tapped again, feeling a faint, tremulous connection between myself and the unknown woman beyond the door. I sensed that the show that was being played out on the surface of our daily lives—comprised of my warm entreaties and her continual coquettish refusals—now exposed itself as a façade, blown softly away; and our true passions, which we'd both tacitly understood from the beginning, were finally being embraced, with no more game playing.

“Claudia,” I whispered.

What would I do, I thought, if trying the handle, I found that it turned and that the door, moving inward, opened without impediment, so that I was at last standing upon the threshold of her dark apartment, which except for a different arrangement of furniture, replicated mine, room for room and wall for wall? As the thrill of this prospect took hold of me, I gently seized the door handle, but it didn't turn.

I stood outside her door for a long time, feeling the mild ebbing, the cozy somnambulism, and the haze of my swooning soul. I whispered her name: “Claudia.”

Finally forlorn, I turned to leave. Yet, as I headed back toward my room, having taken no more than three or four steps, I was stopped by a sound behind me. I looked back to see Claudia Jones emerge from her apartment. The woman wore beige sweatpants, hiked up high and stretched over her bloated stomach; a thin white tee-shirt loose at the collar, as though she habitually pulled on it; and a long flannel shirt, which would have been more effective in concealing her bulk had it been buttoned up. Her face was weathered, and her mouth partly open, as though her bottom lip had been anesthetized. To my dismay, here stood the woman from the alley, but now only worse, because she was up close.

“Why don't you leave me alone?” she asked.

“I'm sorry.”

She inspected me with slow, dull eyes, yet I sensed that beneath the drooping stupidity lived something that calculated and devoured.

“I'm sorry,” I said again.

“Fuck it all, yes.” She took a step forward. Her tongue poked itself out briefly, like the head of a turtle. “Don't apologize to me. I'm not interested. So, you're a fan of mine. Is that it?”

She looked at me, waiting for an answer, but I didn't know what to say. My prepared excuse came out.

“I just thought it would be nice to say hi.”

She nodded her head.

“Because we're neighbors,” I added.

“So, how's your little friend?” Her tone seemed insinuating. The fading traces of my warm and softly pattering feelings, which had moved me only a moment earlier, lead me to imagine that her words were suggestively sexual.

“My little friend?” I asked.

“Is he still sick?”

“No,” I said. “He's never been sick.”

She looked at me, and the ensuing silence seemed to indicate that she was measuring me in her mind.

“You're crazy through and through,” she said at last.

“Maybe.”

She scratched her chest with one of her long red fingernails.

“You're stealing my mail,” she said.

“No.”

“Of course, you are.”

“No,” I repeated. I'd never really regarded it as stealing because her mail had been as neglected as trash and I'd been under the impression that she was no smarter than a cow.

“Another crazy fan. Fuck it all. One is enough.” Her tongue poked out of her mouth. She tilted her head, and her eyes, still focused on me, appeared to be settling sleepily in their sockets.

“Are you jerking off to my mail?” she asked.

“No,” I blurted. “I didn't even mean to take it.”

She inspected me with disbelief.

“Keep it all,” she said. “Have fun. But he's more crazy than you. He loves me.”

“McTeal?”

“Jerk off all you want. I'm not interested. But watch out for him. It's like you're stealing his love letters to me. At first, he didn't know, but now he does.”

“I burned them,” I exclaimed.

She continued to scratch her chest. Ignoring my assertion, she turned toward her open door, as if I were too absurd to warrant further conversation. I sensed that as soon as she shut herself back in her apartment, she would never allow herself to be drawn out by me again.

“I'm not a fan,” I said quickly, desperately, not even certain what this meant.

“Well, he is,” she said. Then, as if to herself, she added, “But I don't think he'd hurt me.”

With that, she disappeared, leaving me standing alone in the hallway and listening to her bolt her door and slide the little chain in the slot. But I didn't hear her walk away. She most likely stationed herself at the peephole, to make sure I left.

“Claudia,” I said, but I knew she wouldn't respond.

Her departing comment disturbed me. Did she mean that, unlike McTeal, I was someone whom she feared might hurt her? If this were the case, I had no idea how to proceed with my seduction. Of course, by now, I was less attracted to her than I was to a mound of peat moss. Even so, by some peculiar spark of the brain, the momentum of my first intention still carried me forward. Rather than relinquish all I'd invested in her, I was absurdly curious how to salvage the refuse. I continued to stand in the hallway and to listen for her footsteps retreating into her shadowy home, as she undoubtedly waited to hear me move away, my lingering presence causing her additional fear. When I started back toward my apartment, crossed the threshold, and turned around to lock my door, I considered another possible meaning of her words. Maybe they were a warning. Although her crazy fan might not hurt her, this didn't preclude him from hurting me. As I stood in the dark, looking at the tiny blue glow of the VCR clock, I began to realize the dimensions of my terrible situation. Somewhere in the city, a freaky man not only obsessed over my bovine neighbor but also believed that I had intercepted his pictures, “his love letters,” as she called them. From his perspective, I was a wild absurdity, something unexpected, a random annoyance that appeared one day out of a cloudy gray sky. How would he react if he realized, though incorrectly, that all this time I'd been masturbating to pictures of him; or worse yet, what would he think if he'd ever learned the truth? For reasons unfathomable to him, I'd shredded his professions of love, held each burning sliver with salad tongs, and then rinsed the ashes into the sewer. I dreaded the possible conclusions he might concoct in his malformed brain. Perhaps he would see me as a contender for Claudia's love, and now, with all the strange weapons that lunacy could devise, the time for battle was at hand.

I desperately reasoned that I was deluding myself, and I happily welcomed my original interpretation of Claudia's words: She was afraid of me. This was a pleasant idea compared to the threatening alternative. But what if, I thought with new alarm, McTeal took it upon himself to defend the helpless damsel from her deranged, onanistic neighbor?

No matter how I played the situation in my mind, I found myself in the losing position. A monster was at large.

The following morning I woke up early. Unrested and with a headache, I took a long, cold shower, which failed to revive me. A sense of dread pervaded my bones. Undoubtedly, from then on, I was going to avoid Claudia Jones, even if I had to climb over a pile of mail every time I came in and out of my apartment building, even if she lost a hundred and forty-four pounds and personally sought me out for a casual, sweaty tryst. I couldn't shrug off the urgency of my situation. I needed to respond to the threat of McTeal, but it was difficult to imagine what I could do, save run away.

It snowed again, piling up on my window ledge, clinging to the roughly parged wall opposite me, and coating the floor of the alley. The tracks of a small animal, perhaps a cat or a sewer rat, made several circuitous routes that all vanished or began at a window-well to the basement across the way. Claudia Jones's milkcrate was an indistinguishable shape beneath the white blanket. Not long ago, my neighbor had been a regular feature of the scene, along with the boy, whose countenance became increasingly vague to me. Normally, I had a precise memory, but after my recent bout of languor and lethargy, my mind felt as though it had been steeping a long time in milky water. The alley seemed vacant and desolate. It made me dimly remorseful because at one point—when I'd first moved into my apartment, back when Claudia Jones hummed carols and the boy ran my errands—the alley had been my primary access to a larger world. But these were stupid, idle memories. I didn't really understand what I was feeling. Perhaps my home had simply lost the freshness of its original appeal; the more accustomed I became to my surroundings, the drabber they appeared.

Sitting in my desk chair, looking out the window, I sank into a mild, dismal reverie, the sort that usually provided me material for a new poem. However, I eventually turned on the computer and checked my email. There was nothing from Teresa Morris. I took this as a matter of course; after all, my discovery of the real Claudia Jones, not to mention the dead prospect of the supposedly distant Celeste Wilcox, seemed to thwart all my hopes. My efforts upon the playing field of men and pubescent boys alike had proved futile. The drop of potency that I had borrowed from Dr. Barnett, that joy-riding hero of urban streets, had dried up into flecks of white crud. Even though it was only morning, I wanted to drink myself into oblivion. Yet I had taken that route before, and I knew where it would lead me. Instead, I gave myself the screen name, the alias, Marduk and spent an hour in a chatroom for Jewish singles.

Later, I was once again under the delusion that I knew “noble accents and lucid, inescapable rhythms,” so I took up my marble notebook and decided to go to the bookstore, drink coffee, and write. I would be John Crapper for the afternoon. In the hallway, I hurried past Claudia's apartment as silently as I could, but before I made it to the exit, a sudden compulsion took hold of me, and I found myself ascending the staircase to the second floor. With a mixture of trepidation and stealth, I headed down the corridor, eyeing the doors and occasionally looking back at the way I'd come. I felt something similar to what a middle-class family man might've felt as he approached the side door of a whorehouse in his hometown for the first time. However, unlike him, I wasn't at the risk of losing my picturesque life, exposing myself to possible shame or expulsion, or even contracting a raw, sour-smelling disease. I merely needed to ask my landlord about Claudia Jones: Why was she gross and why did she have fans? Of course, the rodent-eyed man would meet my interest with suspicion, and if he one day mentioned my inquiry to Claudia, then she would be further confirmed in her belief that I was obsessive and crazed. I stood before apartment 2F and knocked. I waited and knocked again. Laminated signs were posted beside his door, giving instructions about smoke alarms, pets, blown fuses, lost keys, and other petty concerns, all presumably to circumvent any tedious tenant from making contact with him. After a minute outside his door, I suspected he wasn't home.

I scrawled a brief note on a clean page in my notebook, asking him to come and talk to me. I ripped out the sheet, folded it in half, and using a tack from one of the laminated signs, affixed my request to the doorframe.

A moment later, however, I found my landlord outside, in front of the apartment building, at the bottom of the steps. When I came out of the door, he looked up at me with an expression of undiluted scorn, which he surely must have been wearing prior to my appearance before him. He was hunched over, bundled against the cold in a puffy jacket, and gripping a shovel by the middle of its handle, as if he'd just recently been choking it. His hat was pulled down over his brow, giving him an added touch of savagery. Amid faintly falling snow, alone in the blue-gray, somber cold, my landlord struck me as the last figure in a wasted world, with the narrow road behind him rendered inoperable and the buried vehicles not merely abandoned but left over from a livelier civilization.