Cartilage and Skin (39 page)

I sat down again and waited for Vanessa to return. Leaning my head back against the couch, I closed my eyes and listened for noises: the bathroom faucet spraying water into the sink, the toilet flushing, Vanessa's body rejecting food and alcohol in a gush of regurgitation. But I heard none of these sounds.

Gliding my tongue over my teeth, I found a tiny sprig of parsley that had once adorned the salmon. With the tip of my tongue, I worked the parsley free and swallowed it.

I remembered that maybe a present from my mother was waiting for me in my mailbox; I could've surely used the money.

My mind wandered for a moment back to Vanessa as her absence stretched itself out longer than I would have expected. But let the woman take her time, I concluded.

I then tried to remember some thought I had earlier in the day, sometime before or after I'd encountered the two old men in the gym locker room—but my memory wasn't working well, and so I was left with only an inexplicable desire for potato pancakes, though I'd eaten them earlier in the day and I wasn't hungry in the least.

I couldn't hear Vanessa, but I suspected that she was sick. I didn't want to be responsible for her, and I even started to regret spending so much time with her—unless, of course, she'd end up running away with me and, thus, make all my risky efforts and tender moments worthwhile. She was a beautiful woman who treated me like a man, but I wasn't certain how to handle her.

With my eyes closed, I saw her in the aisle of her clothing store as she stepped one foot onto the little chair and reached into the rack of hanging garments, her body long and slender and clean.

Despite her dead child, her divorce, and her fifteen-year moratorium, she remained cheerful and kind, believing that the brutish events of her own life were a general experience, and because no one was free from pain, everyone was entitled to be treated with patience. Unfortunately, I had trouble ascribing to Vanessa's view of life, for most people tend to suffer their griefs by themselves, store up in their hearts a mound of private anguishes and petty gripes, and come to believe that they are alone in the world, with only their own thoughts and emotions to serve as faithful, lifelong companions. Convinced that they could never be truly known, that the complex weavings of their past experiences could never be adequately shared, and that the tiny associations that join one thought to the next in their minds could never be fully communicated—they find themselves ever disconnected, even to those they love the most. They go through life only partially revealed. Vanessa was being naïve. If heartache does anything, it grants people a special status in their own hearts, a personal perspective on reality that is shaped by a lifetime of scarring, with many of the wounds broadened and deepened by the imagination.

But maybe this was a point that Vanessa would've willingly conceded, and to which, all the same, she would have responded: Yes, be patient with people.

Eventually, I opened my eyes and got to my feet. A little groggy but still concerned, I shuffled myself around the couch and toward the darkened hall. The bathroom door was open, and the light inside was off. I briefly expected to find Vanessa sprawled out on the white, tiled floor. But even in the gloom, I could see that the room was empty. The floor mats were missing, which meant the investigators had taken more than just my computer. At that very moment, they were probably examining one of the light blue follicles under a microscope or else shaking my crumbs out of the mat. But none of this mattered.

My discovery of Vanessa's absence was quick to awaken my mind. I abruptly turned around and looked back into the living room, thinking that she—or perhaps someone else—was now behind me. I took a cautious, creeping step to the edge of the hall, ventured my head out of the shadow, and scanned the room from left to right. Unless she was in the kitchen or crouched in some corner, she wasn't there, although her coat was still draped over the chair.

Maybe
, I thought, and as a new idea began to shape itself slowly in my mind, I found myself inching back the other way—but not to reexamine the barren bathroom floor or even the shower.
Maybe
, I thought again, but before the idea could expand any further, I saw its stark conclusion all at once. Vanessa Somerset lay face down, her body stretched to full length, upon my bed.

I stepped to the threshold, my every nerve piqued to attention, straining through the darkness and reaching the prone form of the woman, which didn't seem to move, even though her breaths were steady and deep. One of her black boots rested against a leg of the bed, and while the other wasn't anywhere in view, both heels of her black-stockinged feet pointed toward me. Her head, without the support of a pillow, was turned on its side, her face concealed by her hair. Her right arm clung close to her body, but the left stuck straight out across the mattress, the bedcovers pulled up around her fist, as though she'd been recently clawing at the bed.

“Vanessa,” I said, and finding her unresponsive, I said it several more times, the volume of my voice gradually rising from a whisper to the clear level of speech.

Fixed in the doorway, my body riveted by a mixture of alarm and bewilderment, I stood for several moments as my eyes, perhaps the only things in motion, probed the pale darkness.

At last, as if my words had just then reached Vanessa, she stirred, and with a sigh of deep comfort, she rolled onto her back, yanking half the bedcovers over top of herself, so nothing but a solitary hand remained exposed.

“Vanessa,” I said more loudly, hoping to penetrate her drunken slumber.

The mound, folded up in the covers, didn't move. On the other side of the bed, the white sheet appeared smooth and undisturbed, as though the empty space was reserved for me.

But I remained paralyzed on the spot, even though I could have easily crawled into bed beside the woman, who might have expected, or even wanted, me to join her. She had kept her clothes on, so perhaps all she was looking for was a good night's rest, and in her current condition, she lacked any reservation about sharing the bed.

However, I didn't want to presume anything, so I retreated a step, thinking that I could sleep on the couch. In a gesture that I would like to believe was an act of courtesy, I took hold of the doorknob and carefully drew the door toward myself, without a single creak or squeal from the hinges. I left it slightly ajar, so that a person's hand could hardly pass through the gap.

When I returned to the living room, my tension started to subside.

I looked down at the couch. On the bottom side of one of the cushions remained a dark-rimmed stain that no amount of scrubbing could fully remove. Remembering the boy again and all the horrors he'd suffered, I knew that the investigators wouldn't cease until they'd satisfied their hunger for justice. The morning, I suspected, would bring them to my door, unless, of course, the bits and pieces of Claudia Jones—along with all the female flesh that was strewn across my virtual path on route to the gross woman, cached together in lurid heaps in the recesses of my computer—would instantly inflame the suspicions of the authorities and bring them pounding on my door at any moment, before the cock had a chance to crow.

I might have been imagining the worst, but then again, even if I could swear my innocence with relentless fervor and constancy, the law was in the hands of fallible men and women, who in their eagerness to settle a terrible crime might contort reason and pervert evidence in order to satisfy their outraged morality, at the expense of my name and freedom. I saw that a crisis was gathering itself around me, and if the woman in my bed wasn't going to accompany me, then I was forced to leave her.

I would like to say that I simply slipped on my sports jacket and overcoat, knotted the strings of my shoes, and headed out into the wintry night—a fugitive at large but hopefully, in time, forgotten, a name blotted from the annals of humanity. I would like to say that the sleeping woman had a peaceful evening, and though mildly confused by my unexplained disappearance, she was able to resume her life and enjoy all the pleasures of friendship, fortune, and health. In fact, I would like to have never written a word, with no actions to vindicate and no conscience to relieve. But I have been honest thus far, and in the end, maybe none of this matters.

One last look around strengthened my impression that I was trespassing in another man's home, and if its appearance revealed something of the nature of the man, then his existence was probably as stark, random, and drab as were his mismatched furnishings.

Buttoning my coat up to my chin, and wary of making any sound that would disturb the sleeping woman, I crossed the room toward my desk. The top drawer—which, despite living alone, I kept ritually locked—didn't yield to my pull as I'd at first feared it would. I felt a moment of relief as I sought in my pocket for the small key on my keyring. Yet, after I opened the drawer, I dropped all of my keys inside, having no further need of them. Suddenly dazed and unthinking, I shut the drawer again. My dread was immediate because in addition to a few items I didn't care about, the marble-covered notebook was missing; my thoughts in choppy verse had been discovered. The image of the black man's bloated body pulled up before a large desk, a coffee mug near his meaty hand, and the notebook opened beneath a lamplight, made me cringe—not so much because I could see him angling me into the corners of some standard profile, fitting the pieces of me into his readymade portrait of a madman or pervert, but more so because I felt embarrassed, as though the blunt reality of his body and the humorless severity of his mind would brook no nonsense and deem my literary labors silly.

“Goodbye,” I whispered, barely above a breath, as I threw a final glance toward the short darkened hall that led to spoiled possibilities. “Goodbye.”

I lifted “Footprints” from the wall and found that it fit best in one of the inner pockets of my overcoat. Clicking off the light, I entered the hall and pulled closed the locked door. I passed the gross woman's apartment, where ages ago I'd stood pining in my dishevelment and discontent, but now I didn't even raise my head. I had read her online journal, a mess of fragments and compound sentences, and I knew that she was a curt, disgruntled creature—whose father, before she was even born, had vanished in Europe or Canada to escape enlistment in a war he didn't believe in and a family he didn't want—and whose mother had wrecked herself on other men, the best of which couldn't keep his dirty boots off the coffee table nor learn to shut the bathroom door. But these sparse details in her journal appeared as fleeting moments in an otherwise bawdy fantasy world, which her fans, one in particular, adored.

Before I made it to the end of the corridor, I realized I'd made a mistake: The key to my mailbox was now in my desk drawer, so if my mother had sent me money, it was irretrievable.

Wishing I had my hat, I stepped into the cold, and pausing for a moment on the landing, I heard the heavy door latch itself closed behind me. The snow hadn't eased up at all. As I remembered something in the news, a report about the aged and the homeless freezing to death, I started down the steps. I had a long walk ahead of me, and I hoped that other people were as diligent as my landlord in shoveling the sidewalk.

And I wasn't even thinking about W. McTeal, when I thought,
No, it couldn't be
.

But a fresh set of footprints on the sidewalk ascended the stairs, loitered about the door, and since it was locked, came back down, pausing for an indeterminable moment to gaze up at the building, in the very spot where I presently stood.

No
, I thought again as I peered up and down the length of the quiet street, as far as the darkness would permit me. But all was motionless beneath a layer of snow.

And looking down at my feet, I wasn't even thinking about following the tracks because I was cold and I needed to move and I had no way of telling if my intuition was correct. But from the clear impressions in the snow, I was able to conjure up the waddling figure of the strange man—and the tracks, even though I had no intention of pursuing their course, turned sharply to the left and bid my eyes to follow them into the alley beside my building.

And there he was, in all his absurdity, in the same baseball cap and in the same corduroy jacket that came down to his knees. He was directly beneath the window where the boy had used to receive petty errands from me.

Alarmed, I ducked out of view behind the corner of the building and waited a moment, feeling my heart racing in my chest. But I knew he hadn't seen me because his back was turned. I wondered if I should circle around the building or simply lower my head and walk in casual strides across the entrance of the alley.

But first, I needed to peek at him again.

Apparently, he had taken the milkcrate—upon which the gross woman had used to sit and hum and watch her clothes drying on a pair of lines—and he had placed it beneath my window.

Still with his back to me, the shadowy figure was fidgeting with something near his waist, and then pulling his hand out from the interior of his jacket, he revealed what appeared to be a hammer. Although the darkness prevented me from descrying the crooked nails driven into the top of it, I suspected it was the very tool I'd seen on his kitchen table. He almost seemed to brandish it for an instant above his head, as though it were some glorious and primitive weapon.

Then, in a gesture that was much sprightlier than I'd imagined the man capable of, he stepped up onto the milkcrate and scrambled the upper part of his body through the window. And before I could fully register what was happening, I watched his legs kick out once, with a tiny jerk, and then slither themselves through the opening. He was gone.

I stood for a second, aghast and terror-stricken.

The cold air bit at my face.

And not yet, not until I plunged my hands into my pockets and started across the opening to the alley, did I envision him walking silently through my living room. I had no idea if my apartment was new to him or if he had frequented it a thousand times before. Perhaps it was just as much his as mine. And I wasn't even thinking yet, not until I increased my pace and reached the end of the block, that a woman was sleeping in my bed. In my surprise, I had forgotten about Vanessa Somerset. I abruptly stopped in the slushy crosswalk and looked in the direction I'd just come. But there was no going back now. There was nothing I could do.