Cartilage and Skin (12 page)

“Claudia,” I said through the crack. “I've got your mail,” I added, though I'd already slipped her mail under the door.

“Claudia. I just want to say hi.”

I obviously had no good excuse for opening her door, and even less of one for lingering there.

“All right then. I'll talk to you later.”

Pulling the door closed, I stepped to the side, out of range of the peephole, and waited, hoping that Claudia Jones might think I'd walked away. I listened for a long while, but I didn't hear anything stir within her apartment.

Now that I was returning home with nothing but my own mail, the phone numbers of two men, fred and Lyle Tartles, and the same articles I'd left with originally, I began to regret giving away the letter from W. McTeal. I'd spent so much mental energy trying to piece together a character study of the freaky man that I now appeared to have squandered a substantial clue. For the first time, I'd had his own words in my hand, and a possible explanation of his connection to Claudia Jones. The central question still remained: Why did he send pictures of himself to my neighbor?

Back in my apartment, I stripped out of my wet clothes, took a hot shower, and dressed myself in my robe. It was a light blue cotton garment that I'd purchased on a whim. Though a simple and common piece of clothing, it allowed me to imagine myself as luxuriating with the extravagance of a great poet. However, lacking a sweet-smelling pipe, laurels, and talent, not to mention an innate sense of ease, I probably more closely resembled a lonely housewife. After all, the robe had come from the women's department of the Macy's in Center City.

I made myself a cup of hot tea and sat at the kitchen table with my manuscript. As I was reading, my own words felt alien to me, both insincere and inane. I didn't like that they were supposed to represent me and that, through them, Celeste Wilcox had formed judgments about me. My ideas had passed through her mind, which had sifted and measured me out. Even so, I couldn't bring myself to destroy my work. It was enough for me simply to abandon my project and leave my computer files indefinitely closed. Anyway, my boring, pedantic exercise seemed to be no more than a formality at the college. Certain officious types were unquestionably bent on seeing me go through the customary motions. They had granted me leave, under the auspices of personal academic development and with the expectation of a final product—but, in return, I intended to give them nothing. I couldn't have found a more effective way to jeopardize my position. Whenever I picked up my tea to take a sip, I absently set it back down upon the title page of my book, but always on a different spot, until the whole sheet was covered with rings from the cup. I figured I had several options open to me. The least likely was to confess that I didn't satisfy my end of the agreement: There would be no book. Also, I could have stalled everyone, Morris included, and gone on pretending to be hard at work. Another possibility was to write something entirely different, although I doubted this would have appeased anyone, especially considering the rough ideas I had in mind. Discomfited by my situation, I started to feel a bit rash and vindictive. On the backside of a sheet from my manuscript, I briefly sketched the outline of a new book. Either the third or fourth chapter would focus on the power structures within a liberal arts education. Once again, as in my previous book, I would use a Hegelian model, arguing that power proper is empty of all meaning save for the sound of its own senseless fiat. Obviously, all the vacuous jibberings of the collective mass of supremely esoteric and distended specialists ultimately amounted to nothing, and the real position is not the ideas espoused by any particular modern day “-ism,” but the position of power. Of course, some people, professors in particular, think they've got something to say, and so they delude themselves and never quite realize (or confess) that they are merely props in a much larger play. Meanwhile, fresh “-isms” splinter off of older splinters, and a new specialist is created out of the very emptiness of his thinking because he has merely decided to become more specific and his investigation is not an expansion, but a fraction of a regress that is potentially infinite. He bounds himself in smaller and smaller shells and then counts himself a king of infinite space by virtue of the continual division and redivision of his domain. Thus, the entire schema—descending from Deans and theorists, to earnest teachers and students, and finally down to the un(formally)educated—would have four positions in relation to power: pure command without meaning; the delusion of having meaning; the quest for that meaning; and the ignorance, indifference, or resentment toward being outside the institution. Knowing all of this, I nonetheless remained an ostensible part of the institution—while, in actuality, I hovered outside the total schema, paring my fingernails.

Before I even finished my outline, I discarded the whole thing; it was too derivative and uninspired. I needed to think of another book, maybe even something creative. I could dig up my youthful passions and try to write a collection of poems, which was so far from what people expected of me that I would have been accused of full-blown lunacy. Regardless, I no longer cherished my obligations or my connections to the people who supposedly made up my professional and social circle. I was on my own. If I failed as a poet, then I would simply reweigh my options. Besides, other opportunities surely existed outside of my field. Considering my recent experiences with the boy, I imagined that there might have been a public interest in an exposé of the underground world of pedophilia. A man's descent into that world was undoubtedly marked by a complete range of troubling emotions—as well as a series of risks and encounters, of fits and starts—that lowered him deeper and deeper. After all, how does a person go about finding partners in that particular crime? I suspected that most pedophilia rings weren't a secret society; they were formed impromptu as the coveted object got passed from one man to another. What would be the code of conduct among such men? In all likelihood, the group would be organic, protean, perhaps centered upon a ringleader, perhaps raising up leaders out of chance, compromise, and the fluid travails of shifting circumstance. The difficulty in writing such a book would've been collecting information; the fullest report would've required the author himself to become a shade of the underground, a chronicler of his own descent. With this thought in mind, I gathered up the pages of my manuscript and dropped them in the trashcan. I washed my teacup in the sink and decided to try my hand at poetry.

As the days grew colder with the onset of the winter months, I found myself frequenting coffee shops and bookstores. Squirreled away at a corner table, hunched over a marble-covered notebook, and drinking cup after cup of coffee, I went through various stages of self-revelation. My heart was more encrusted with pretense and guile than I ever expected. As I scraped away layers of calcified knots and nubs, I began to fear that beneath it all, there might not have been any core of purity to discover, any underground truth to express. But even if I didn't doubt its existence, I knew that it would always resist exposure, for in the very act of trying to unearth it and drag it into the open, I would mar the delicate thing and smear it with my grimy fingers; all the while, in a process of its own, it would react to the violation by secreting cloudy juices, coating itself over again, adopting new, false labels. I had to settle for pretense and guile because there was nothing else. As I scribbled lines of doggerel in my notebook, I was mildly thrilled by my petty plunge into the realm of art, precisely because it came at the cost of defiance and spite. By rebelling against my peers and fellow pedants, I began to nurture a secret pleasure, such as a poacher must feel, squatting at the edge of his campfire light, chewing on stolen meat. Like him, I had for my tools silence, exile, and cunning. Unfortunately, I lacked talent.

I spent so much time in one particular bookstore that I started to suspect that the staff of high school students—who put more energy into flirting with one another than into making sure the tables were clean—began to regard me as a serious writer. I overheard a squat, happy girl say, “J. C. is in his corner again.”

Keeping my head down, I pretended to disregard the comment. I was curious how I'd acquired the nickname and when had they started calling me J. C. It seemed to be an implicit compliment; whether they regarded me as inspired and prophetic as Jesus Christ or perhaps as deranged and solipsistic as a false messiah, the students nonetheless saw that I possessed a glimmer of poetic lucidity—sacred or insane. From then on, every time I visited the counter for a free refill, I gave a slight smile to the girl or to whomever else was working. I felt a bit lofty. Despite never really talking to anyone, I felt a connection to the staff. I was friendly. One day when I got up to use the bathroom, I asked the squat girl if she could watch my books and my coat at the table.

“No problem,” she said. Her round head swiveled forward as she nodded.

As I headed toward the restroom, I heard her whisper to her co-worker. They both giggled. Of course, it was at my expense, but they were just silly girls. I remained patronly.

Standing before the urinal, I began to think about Claudia Jones. I had fallen into the habit of knocking on her door at least once a day. I would slip her mail under, knock, and call out in a pleasant, neighborly voice, “Claudia, your mail's in.” It had been several weeks since I'd opened her door and scanned the dark contents of her home. In that time, I had also received a short message on my answering machine; the gallery owner wanted to inform me that Celeste Wilcox lived “some distance away” and only came to the city about once a month. However, she was “represented,” and Mr. Tartles had passed my request along. I suspected that Mr. Tartles was dismissing me with a lie, which was a nice courtesy, given that he could have kept me waiting indefinitely. Feeling somewhat defeated at least put me in the mood to generate one or two of my poems.

On my return from the bathroom, I heard the girls giggle again. I became a little self-conscious, and once seated at the table, I slyly checked my zipper. I then inspected my shoes to make sure no toilet paper was attached to my heel.

Every Tuesday and Thursday afternoon, a young boy with a scrappy goatee worked the counter. He seemed to derive a peculiar joy whenever someone ordered a latte; it excited him, at least by all appearances, to froth milk and listen to the machine whir. Many teenagers had this kind of innocuous, giddy quirk when they were among their peers and away from the haven of their home. I supposed it substituted for an actual personality, at a time when the character of the boy was still undefined. Whenever milk needed to be frothed or coffee beans needed to be ground, the boy's co-workers would happily call him over for the task—and his ego was thus shaped around this artificial eccentricity. Also, he would remove his apron with great theatrics and flare, toss it beneath the counter, and announce that he needed to make “a head call.” It was his signature gesture for going to the bathroom. During one of these performances, the squat, giggly girl mockingly said, “Have fun, J. C.”

He pretended to be offended, and she giggled.

Later, as I walked home in the gloom of a cold twilight, I found myself replaying in my mind the little scene in the bookstore. Initially, I'd disregarded it, thinking that the girl must have called everyone J.C.—but this idea didn't feel right because I was J. C. A slow, lingering snowfall throughout the day had polluted the sidewalks and streets with gray slush. I tried to walk in the footsteps of other people. I was hurrying home because I felt the coffee straining my bladder to the bursting point. Every store I passed along the way was closed. If a public restroom didn't appear shortly, or if the internal pressure didn't subside, I was prepared to huddle up to a building, find some sort of crevice or enclosure, and relieve myself. At least, the gray slush would conceal the evidence. I cursed myself for drinking too much coffee. How and where I eventually resolved the small problem of my bladder isn't as important as the sudden realization it disclosed to me: The nickname J. C. had nothing to do with divine inspiration or the lucidity of the mad. It somehow referred to going to the bathroom. All my coffee drinking had me running to the men's room an inordinate number of times, and apparently the young staff had noticed. My mystique of being a serious writer evaporated under this new image of myself: I was the strange man who peed a lot. By the time I arrived home and mounted the stairs of my apartment building, I was convinced that I'd correctly guessed what the initials stood for: John Crapper, the erroneously famed inventor of the toilet.

All these thoughts, however, abruptly fled my mind the instant I discovered in my mailbox the long-awaited response from Morris the sister. Excitedly, I opened the letter in the hallway. She understood the “miscommunication” regarding the date on which we had arranged to meet each other in the coffee shop. Her point, however, was that she didn't see why any of that was necessary. I'd written her several letters, and in none of them did I enclose a check for her brother. She didn't understand why we needed any other interchange beyond a monetary one. Despite her evident, though polite, dismissal of me, the quiet inclusion of her email address seemed very suggestive to me.

The moment I entered my apartment, I booted up my computer, signed onto the Internet, and responded to the woman. I began by saying how much I appreciated having her as an intermediary. I indicated my sincere affection for Morris the man as well as my bewilderment over how this rift arose between us silly boys. We were both obstinate and proud, and left to our own devices, neither of us would ever take a step toward reconciliation. I needed to meet her in the same coffee shop as before, but no mistakes this time. I set the date for the third Tuesday in December and signed the email “your devoted friend.”