Cartilage and Skin (38 page)

“I'll protect you on the stairs,” she said.

“Thank you,” I replied, though my mind was now rushing ahead of us, past the mail gathered on the floor, then into the corridor with the dust smoldering on the radiators, and farther ahead, into my apartment, where unknown men on official business had recently poked and rummaged. I was afraid not only of what we might find but also of what monster might be waiting for us.

Yet I managed my keys well enough to let us into the building, and as we moved through the hall, Vanessa was saying something about not interrupting the young lovers, and then laughing about how I'd just left my clothes in her car; I was always forgetting my things. Approaching my apartment door, I was strangely eager about hurrying inside, in fear of lingering vulnerably in the hall. But Vanessa didn't seem to notice my agitation, for she was still laughing as my door swung open, and the part of my mind that had rushed ahead and feverishly searched all the rooms to make sure everything was in order, now sped back around to greet us at the door.

When I turned on the light, nothing scurried away to hide or leaped out to bludgeon me.

In fact, despite the decades that had seemed to elapse since the previous day, everything appeared unchanged.

Even so, I remained alert with apprehension. I crept forward, slowly surveying the items in the room.

Although Vanessa continued to talk happily, her voice sounded thin and meaningless. I was aware of her stepping around me and slipping off her coat, her movements as swift and nonchalant as always, yet now like a shadow skirting past my shoulder.

She was asking me something, and I wanted to turn and give her my attention, but my eyes were still searching for some sign that my home had been investigated.

“Sure,” I responded because Vanessa wanted a bottle opener.

As I started toward the kitchen, I realized—calmly, almost as a matter-of-fact—that the little illuminated clock on the VCR was nearly three hours behind. Then, in the kitchen, I noticed that the teapot was on the front burner of the stove, rather than the back right one, and all the chairs were pushed in around the table.

When I returned to the main room, Vanessa was sitting on the couch, peeling the seal off of the bottle top.

“You have a guy's apartment,” she said.

I set two glasses on the coffee table and handed her the opener.

Looking briefly around, she added, “It could use a female's touch.”

“I've got no style,” I confessed, which made her smile, as though I were flirting with her.

“Your ex- didn't leave anything behind.”

“I cleaned out every trace of her,” I said.

As she held the bottle in her lap and twisted the corkscrew, she kept her head up and her eyes on me, her black-rimmed glasses perched midway down her nose. The cork popped free. Still without looking at her hands, she set down the bottle opener, with the cork impaled upon it, and picked up a glass.

“You going to take off your coat?” she asked.

I turned aside and began to unfasten the buttons, conscious of her gaze. Rather than hang up my overcoat, I draped it over the back of a chair, where Vanessa had deposited her things.

Just then, I noticed that although my monitor and all my computer accessories remained on the desk against the wall, the computer itself was missing.

“Are you okay?” she asked.

“Yes,” I said, my voice faltering a little. “I'm just a bit anxious about moving out of here.”

“Yeah, I remember you mentioning that. Here.” She held up a glass of wine. “You're not moving tonight. Try to relax,” she added, sliding over to make room for me.

“I'd like to go tonight,” I said, sitting down.

“Well, don't run away on me. Let me know where you go.”

“Would you come with me?” I abruptly asked.

“I might visit you as long as you don't move too far away.” She laughed and sipped her wine.

“Do you like your clothing store?”

“I like that it's mine. Besides, I've got to do something.”

She shifted slightly, moving herself closer to me.

“I think a person needs to make a major change occasionally,” I said.

“Me too.”

Even though I discerned something mildly insipid and sluggish in her smile, I felt an urge to persuade her to flee with me. I suspected that she might have been using the wine—both this night and night before—to take the edge off the awkwardness. Perhaps in the future, if she felt more comfortable with me, she would drink less.

“Sometimes, a person needs to lift herself up and head in a new direction,” I ventured. “Otherwise, you might find yourself caught in a rut or repeating the same mistakes over again.”

“Absolutely,” she said, eager to nod, her knee now bumping against my leg. “You can't live life without an occasional risk.”

“That's what I'm doing now,” I said, referring to my imminent flight from the city and all the horrors it contained. But, of course, she didn't know about my problems, so she most likely assumed that I was talking about our budding relationship, which, for her, was the occasional risk.

“That's good,” she said.

Her knee steadily touched my thigh.

“But you always make the same mistakes,” she said. “You think that you're heading in the opposite direction, but you end up in the same pile of shit that you just left behind.” As I watched her nod her head in agreement with her own observation, I imagined that she was remembering some particular occurrence in her own life.

“Not always,” I said.

“Well, you've got to hope.”

“So, risks are bad?” I asked.

“No, you've got to take them.” She slid closer and leaned against my arm.

We slipped into a moment of silence and drank our wine. While I was somewhat alarmed by Vanessa's unexpected intimacy, she simply seemed to be relaxing against me, with her head resting upon my shoulder. After a while, I thought she might fall asleep. From my seat on the couch, I began to inspect my apartment. The remote control was on top of the television, instead of beside the couch where I ordinarily kept it. Nothing else seemed disturbed, even though I suspected that all my drawers and cabinets had been opened. I wondered about the nightstand that had once carefully concealed behind its back panel, in a secret crevice, my character study and the bizarre photographs of W. McTeal exposing his hard, bare, rotund belly and his sleepy penis, in attitudes that often appeared confused or indifferent, and in pregnant postures mostly of full-frontal birth or penetrable submission, knees on the mattress and ass to the camera. But I had burned everything, so even if the investigators had discovered my hiding place, they could've scarcely guessed what it'd once housed.

Several paces from the front door, the religious poem “Footprints” was still framed upon the wall, with my father's letter safely inside.

From my seat, I quietly searched everything a second time

As Vanessa breathed, I felt her body gently press against me and then ease, press and ease, her rhythm so constant and soothing that I imagined myself—perhaps somewhere in the future, in a different city, in a different room, and on a different couch—being able to fall asleep next to her. Just as I began to wonder if she were awake, she raised her glass to her lips.

In the silence, I could hear the sounds of the building. The floor overhead creaked beneath someone's footsteps, a television played through the wall, and the wind gathering in the alley outside my window found its passage obstructed and, thus, moaned its way up the walls, into the cracks and hollows of the stonework. But these details didn't matter.

Vanessa reached forward to get the wine bottle from the coffee table and refill our glasses. She then settled against me again.

As the silence ensued, I sensed it beginning to change, so it was no longer just silence—but something like peace. And for the first time in my adult life, I had a momentary glimmer of what it meant to be ordinary. For so many years, the burden of anxiety, relentless introspection, and disengagement from the world had governed my behavior and rendered me a social cripple. But now, next to Vanessa, I saw the possibility of ease and comfort. The question, of course, was could I ever light vanilla candles on my own or take a long bath or smoke a cigar on a summer night, without feeling self-conscious, as though I were being watched and judged, with the verdict always coming back the same:
You are not permitted to enjoy simple pleasures because your solitude is your condemnation, and your own body is the source of your discomfort, and, thus, you are sentenced to loneliness and absurdity; until the day you die, your every attempt at satisfaction, never mind love, will only heap upon you further reasons for guilt and shame
.

But now, Vanessa Somerset was quietly leaning against me, without any urgency, awkwardness, or compulsion to speak. Outside, the snow could smother all the parked cars in high drifts and bury my narrow street, and the night could extend itself hour by hour. Meanwhile, Vanessa wouldn't care. She was a grown woman, comfortable with herself and responsible for her choices. Remembering her little Janis in the picture frame, I tried to imagine the trials and sorrows that Vanessa had endured. She was a strong, tender woman. Her divorce now presented itself in a new light, for the death of the child, let alone its infirmities, had surely strained the marriage. For both her and her husband, it must have been difficult to keep on loving in the wake of lost hopes and under the grim constraints of crippled life.

Sip by sip, we drank our wine, and now that my attention was no longer diverted by looking for signs of the investigation, I grew more conscious of the living creature beside me. The top of her head touched my neck, and her blonde hair gave off a faint trace of coconut. Her right arm was caught between our bodies; the fingertips of her trapped hand played gently, though almost immobile, upon my thigh. In her other hand, she held the wineglass near her chest. Her slender forearm, lightly downed, appeared out of the black sleeve; a blue vein forked upon the back of her hand and faded at the ridge of her knuckles. Below the hollow of her throat, where the low collar of her top bordered her flesh, was a thin white line, slightly sunken, in her skin, apparently an old scar.

“What's this?” I asked, and I saw my hand rising above the swell of her breast and my index finger extending toward the mark.

Vanessa briefly rubbed the spot with her thumb.

“I was canoeing with my brother in a lake. When we came back to the dock, he got out first. He took both of the oars, and for a joke, he gave the canoe a shove. I remember his foot coming up and pushing the side of the canoe. I got scared. I don't know why. I guess I thought it was a mean thing to do, because he was standing there and laughing when I started to drift away from the dock. So I jumped out.”

Vanessa rubbed her chest again.

“Or I fell out. The metal point of the canoe got me here.”

“Was it bad?” I asked.

“He wouldn't sit with me on the school bus either,” she added, and it took me a moment to see the connection between her thoughts.

Vanessa pulled her legs up onto the couch, her bent knees hanging over the edge, the weight of her body resting more fully against me, and the fingers of her trapped hand now holding onto my thigh.

While her body appeared to shed every hint of tension and to dissolve itself further into comfort, I felt my muscles tighten, so I was sitting bolt upright and rigid, with my blood—heated by her soft proximity—starting to rush and pulse in my every extremity. Even though she must have noticed my excitement, she remained unfazed, as though she were already long acquainted with the wild palpitations of my heart.

After she finished her wine, she held the glass beneath her chin.

Looking down over her forehead, I could see her dark lashes flick once and then rest for a while. Yet, from my position above her, I wasn't certain if her eyes were shut, although I imagined that I saw a thin glimmer of one of her pupils reflected in the inner lens of her glasses.

While we sat wordlessly together, each passing moment did nothing to ease my nerves. Rather than become accustomed to her touch, rather than let go of my mind and allow myself to enjoy the intimacy, I felt my body grow more knotted and hard, as though the tenderness of this woman was causing a mass of calcified nubs to sprout up under my skin. And the more conscious I became, the less likely seemed the possibility of yielding.

She stirred, as if just to take one deeper breath, and when she resettled, with a soft exhale—I was able to feel, through the fabric of my shirt, the emerald stud of her earring pressed against my shoulder.

At last, I broke away by reaching for the wine bottle and pouring the remainder into our glasses.

“We've kicked it,” she said somewhat dreamily.

“That's the last bottle.”

“Perhaps that's for the best.” A contented, happy tone played through her words, even when she straightened up and added, “I've got to pee.”

At the moment, little did I know that these would be the last words I'd ever hear from Vanessa Somerset.

She set her glass on the coffee table, pushed herself up from the couch, and ran her hands down her thighs to smooth out her gray slacks.

I gestured to the short hall that led to the bathroom, and then I watched her as she walked away. She wobbled a little, not so much as if she were intoxicated, but as if she hadn't used her legs for a very long time. In the darkened archway, she placed her palm on the wall and glanced into my bedroom, pausing for an instant, before stepping into the bathroom. The light suddenly exposed the hall, but then the door shut.

When I stood up, I felt wobbly myself. Looking vaguely at the VCR clock that was three hours behind, I tried to calculate how many glasses of wine I'd drunk. I carried our refuse to the kitchen sink, once again noting all the minor details that were out of place, from the teapot and the chairs to the remote control. But regardless of what the investigators found and how they wanted to use it against me, nothing really mattered now.