Cartilage and Skin (2 page)

The rest of the summer was a difficult period for me. Through a series of small misfortunes and an instance of bad timing, my social life began a slow decay, with every cherished piece turning color and falling off like a leprous appendage. As a result, my manuscript suffered. My home, however—where the boy would run up and down the street with a few other kids; my landlord would barely give me a passing nod in the hallway; my bloated-tongued neighbor, with or without laundry on the line, would sit on the milkcrate in the alley and hum; and the mystery man, though now with a unexpected welt on his ass cheek, would still look confusedly though his spread legs—entered into a holding period, a welcomed block of banality.

Sometime in late August, on a muggy evening when the sewers smelled a little more pungent than usual, I decided to take action, to force the moment to its crisis, to shake off a kind of prufrockian paralysis. I had just finished a long distance call to my mother, who had encouraged me to try to regain my social standing. I splashed water on my face and then looked at myself for a long time in the bathroom mirror. My face seemed so waxen that I thought if I pressed my thumbs into my flesh, they'd leave imprints. A recent bout with insomnia was rending my nerves. Although I was resolved to phone a man named Morris, I procrastinated by practicing what I would say, needing to get my tone, as well as my words, correct. But the actual sound of his voice asking, “What can I do for you?” with a flat, distant calmness, as if he were talking to a lamppost or a chew-toy for a dog, made me start to babble. I needed someone to understand my perspective, and Morris—with his thoughtful nod and his lazy gaze like a dream-struck lover—hadn't completely turned on me. He was an empathetic man, well-respected in my circle of friends and colleagues. In fact, it was the sage Morris who had recommended that I get my own apartment, so I'd have the time and peace not only to devote to my manuscript but also to give the sore spots in my life a chance to heal. But mine was a chronic and leprous condition. I'm certain that as I talked to him on the phone, he smelled the festering rot; he knew that I needed him. I was pathetic; I pleaded, agreeing with him at every turn. He had helped me once before, yes, found me an apartment, yes, stuck by me when I was ousted, yes, my only friend, yes. In the end, he conceded to meet me for coffee, perhaps just to see what I had become or if anything left in me was worth saving. Before he hung up the phone, almost as an afterthought, he told me to bring the manuscript. He knew that a man's labor was an unbearable burden if it had no purpose and no one even cared to glance at it. Such a simple comment made my heart swell with hope.

Even so, on this muggy night, in sewer reek and subway steam rising though grates to the sidewalk, I abruptly stopped walking and disregarded Morris. Suddenly, I didn't care that he was waiting for me in a coffee shop. I couldn't care. I was willing to lose my last connection to society. Perhaps my soul swooned, my poordjeli jouissanced, all at the sight of a young woman bending over to tie her sneaker. The elegance of her spine, the curve of her haunches, the liquid ease of her fingers among the laces, and the smooth outline, in the lamplight, of crease and crevice beneath her khaki shorts, was its own promise of life, of regeneration, of a hope that didn't depend upon my degradation and another's grace.

My Lord, may Morris rot in pieces.

Although I knew the street was otherwise empty, I gave a quick look around to make sure no one saw me staring so conspicuously at the woman. For my pleasure, when she made her nice little bow, she shifted her weight, put her other foot forward, untied and then re-tied that sneaker. Because I am more of a tactilian than a voyeur, I found myself stepping closer, wanting to get on my knees, on a dog's level, and breathe her in. She straightened up and looked back at me. I nodded and walked past her, as if I had been walking all along and had just approached her at that moment.

I listened to her footfalls behind me, thinking that even her face was pretty, though in truth it looked haggard, with hollow cheeks and bleary eyes. I slowed my pace, until she was walking closer. Then, when it sounded as if she were right on my heels, ready to pass by me, I stopped. Her fingers brushed my back, her form slipped around me, and she continued on. Her words were gritty, as if her voice were scarred and scratched: “Excuse me.”

I dropped my manuscript.

“Watch it,” I snapped.

She paused and looked back at the manuscript at my feet. Then she lifted her gaze to my face. She appeared as if she were looking at some grotesque deformity, a glistening knot of cartilage and skin.

“You watch it,” she said.

I was hoping that she would have apologized and maybe even have picked up the manuscript, but she gave me one last snarl and briskly started walking away.

“Bitch,” I called.

The word stopped her. She turned back around and pointed one of her lovely fingers at me.

“What did you say?” she asked. “What did you say to me?”

I stood dumbstruck for an instant, fearing this delicate girl with her raspy voice and gaunt face.

“Bitch,” I said, a little more sheepishly than I would have liked.

When she leapt at me like a lunatic feline with lithe limbs and a pair of claws, I flinched, covering my head with my arms. She hit me in the chest with both hands, pushing me off the curb and into the street. After an instant of cowering, I realized the assault was over, and watched the woman walk away. A car with a rash of rust came sickly down the street; one of its back wheels was in miniature, like an atrophied limb. The woman glanced at the car when it passed her, heading toward Walnut Street, only a few blocks away. I felt a little defeated, not because the woman had struck me, but because she was leaving. I was about to call out “Bitch!” sort of as a final effort to make contact again, but an unexpected sight buoyed my spirit; the woman had my manuscript tucked under her arm. Of course, I chased after her.

Given my long legs and lanky stride, I assumed I could have caught the woman easily and resumed our little struggle. But she glanced back at me and began to run as if overtaken by frantic and dire urgency, her elegant form completely abandoned to spastic motion. I ran, shouting out “Whore!” and “Bitch!” thinking that I would catch her soon, and then what? Wrestle her to the sidewalk? Grapple in the street? Yet the distance between us grew. The little thing was out-running me. Panting, I lost sight of her somewhere around Walnut and Broad Street. I sat on the curb to relax for a moment. The sultry August air coated my skin.

That night I wandered around the city for a couple of hours in hope of seeing the young woman again. I played our entire encounter over in my head, and I realized that her bizarre behavior made sense if she had known that I had been gawking at her from behind. Only when I walked past the coffee shop, did I remember that I had ignored Morris. I was amused by the idea that he had waited for me and gotten more frustrated by the moment. Most likely, he'd suspected that I had intentionally snubbed him, given one last insult, some spit in the eye. I happily accepted the role of bastard and artificer. There were more groups of people in the world than the one that had rejected me. Let them rot. My new feeling of liberation, of unconcern, of I-will-no-longer-be-fixed-sprawling-on-a-pin-like-a-lifeless-bug, was mildly subdued by the fact that the woman had stolen my manuscript: two years of work tucked irreverently under her arm.

At home, in bed, I lay on my stomach, my forearms on my pillow, and read a freshly printed copy of my manuscript. The thing was so recondite, each page laden with erudite jargon and convoluted with tortuous syntax, that I doubted the woman with her wasted countenance that hinted at mental anguish or physical addiction, did anything more than glance at the first page, find it abstruse, flip to the center, find that frustrating, and then in a final vindication of her self-esteem against my leering eyes that had reduced her to mindless meat, to the juice in my jouissance, she closed my manuscript, and with too much indifference to take the time to set it aflame or tear it to confetti, she simply dropped it into a garbage can or pushed it off into some corner to collect dust.

By September, the young woman had fully seeped into my fantasies. She was the skirt-clad student in the front row, who crossed and re-crossed her spindle-legs, with a flash of auburn floss. She caught my eye and gave me an insidious smile that unraveled my thoughts. Then after class, when everyone else had filed out the door, she was leaning across my desk, pointing to a page in the book she needed explained. No sooner had I begun to talk than her little hand with its chewed back fingernails made a furtive disappearance under the desk.
You like that, Professor?
She was also the neighbor bending over her laundry basket. When she had all her sheets hanging from the line, forming a thin curtain, I glanced back at the busy street, before stepping through the sheets. I approached her from behind and cupped my hands over her small, nubile breasts. She rubbed up against me as she squirmed to free herself. Then yielding to lust, she was bending over her basket, and I was getting onto my knees. She was also the miscreant spread out in a heap of rags on a doorstep. I gathered her into my arms and carried her tired body home, where I bathed her, kissed her bruises, and nursed her soul. One evening I found her framed in my bedroom doorway. She was backlit and dressed in nothing but a white button-down shirt that she'd borrowed from my closet. Without a word, she took a hesitant step forward as I propped myself up on one elbow to squint at her. Then, like a scared child, she scrambled into my bed, to be held throughout the purple hours of the evening.

In late September, this last fantasy somehow coincided with—either slightly prior to or after—my discovery of the boy, my little hazel-eyed errand-runner, hugging his knees on the front steps of my building. It was dusk and rush hour. Because of road construction somewhere in the tight city grid, every car with wheels was rerouted down my narrow road. They crept along, windows open, each playing its own song on the radio. I felt as though I were on display and that everyone was driving past my building to watch me act out the scene with the boy. Both of his knees were a tender red, and his eyes, usually alert and agile, now looked as if they'd been smudged by grimy thumbs. The pallor of his face told me that he hadn't slept for days or that he was very sick.

“What's the matter?” I asked.

“What?” He lifted his head and looked at me.

“Are you sick?”

“My stomach. I got to throw-up.”

“Are you faking it?”

“I got to throw-up.”

I glanced back at the busy road as I mounted the steps and opened the front door.

“You better not be faking it,” I said.

The boy watched me holding the door open for a moment, before he realized what I intended, and got to his feet. He walked before me in the corridor. It was a lumbering shuffle, which saddened me a little. He moved as if all his bones were soft and bending beneath the weight of his flesh. Then he did something that disconcerted me: When I let him into my apartment, he walked directly to the bathroom with his head down, apparently already familiar with the inside of my home. I leaned against the wall beside the bathroom door, with my arms crossed, and listened to him vomit. Evening was settling down, filling my home with dark pools and shadows, but still I listened and waited. The toilet flushed once; then after a while, it flushed again. There was silence for a long time. I left my post and went into the kitchen to make myself a cup of hot tea. I drank it at the table as I looked at my mail. Although W. McTeal had sent nothing, between my phone bill and a coupon for a health club was a little envelope with tight, neat script, a letter from Teresa Morris. She was a clean, polished woman, who orchestrated her days around the Sunday church service and other holy functions. Her letter read something like this:

Dear Dr. Parker:

My brother is a kind man, perhaps too kind. I'm aware that he went out of his way to help you, and that you have made no effort to repay him. He says that it was an investment in a brilliant mind. Knowing him, I'm sure that the sum he confesses to, is only a fraction of what you truly owe him. I appeal to your heart. Say nothing of my intervention into your affairs, and please make some kind of effort, no matter how small, to repay my brother. He has a family of his own to support
.

I responded promptly, not with a check to Morris the man, but with a little note to Morris the sister. I enjoyed adopting her method of corresponding by mail because I imagined that this petite, religious woman felt it was more sly and secretive than a phone call. Perhaps she believed she was letting herself get involved in an intrigue that was unseemly but darkly pleasurable. Perhaps, between the lines, she had written,
Burn this letter when you've finished reading it. Burn it now
. Yet I wrote very formally, explaining that Morris and I were no longer on speaking terms and that he was probably too proud to accept my money. If sister would like to accept the money on his behalf, then meet me at such and such a coffee shop at a particular time and date.
I look forward to meeting you, so I can finally have this matter resolved. I appreciate your tact and understanding
. I set the meeting for the first Friday in October, hinting that I hoped that sister could repair the rift between Morris and myself.
Your brother is a generous man
.

“What are you doing?” the boy asked, standing beside my chair.

“Are you done being sick?”

“I'm okay.”

Biting his bottom lip, he leaned forward to look at the letter on the table. Then he pulled out a chair and sat at the table. I was hoping to see him look around, but he sat as if he had been used to sitting there his entire life.

“Do you want me to mail your stuff?” he asked.

“No,” I said. “I want you to go home. It's getting late.”