Cartilage and Skin (28 page)

“People use this to smoke?” I asked.

“Only serious people.” She smiled. “Or maybe people with friends. He's been on the shelf for a while. I sell a lot more bats.”

“Bats?”

I partly imagined that she was going to pull down some leathery winged creature to accompany the wizard on the counter.

However, she pointed through the top of the glass case to a row of little metal cigarettes displayed on a green felt mat.

“A bat,” she said. “A one-hitter. A dug-out.”

“Those are bats?” I asked.

She smiled at me, as if I were a young, unworldly boy. “They don't write about stuff like that in your books?”

“None that I've read.”

“Everyone buys them, which is kind of sad. If you're going to smoke, I think you should do it with a group, you know. These are made for people to smoke by themselves.”

“And that's sad?”

“Yeah. Smoking is supposed to bring people together. But these here.” She tapped on the glass. “They remind me that people are lonely and they want to get high alone. Isn't that sad?”

“I suppose. Why do you sell them then?”

She shrugged, looking at me, smiling slightly.

“Don't mind me; that's just the way I am,” she said for a second time, and I still had no idea what she meant by this expression. I suspected that it was simply meaningless padding to her conversation.

“You look better,” she said. “More calm.”

“I'm fine.”

“A glass of wine is good for the nerves. I hope it wasn't serious, whatever was bothering you before.”

“Nothing really.” I looked away from her, down the length of the glass counter. “I like the smell in here; it makes the place feel warmer.”

I knew she was still looking at me.

“You don't have to tell me,” she said after a moment.

“It's nothing,” I said. “I just lost my home, that's all. I have to move.”

“Not out of the city, right?”

“I don't know. At least, out of my apartment.”

“You have no place to stay?”

“I'm not officially out. All my things are there, but I can't really go back anymore.”

“I'm sorry,” she said, her voice filled with sympathy. She leaned nearer and patted the back of my hand. “I understand.”

Her fingertips left a trace of warmth upon my skin.

“It's a rough situation,” she said. “When I divorced my ex-, it was hard. I didn't realize how much I'd grown with him until afterwards, but then, you know, I knew I made the right decision. Deep down, it didn't feel right staying with him.”

Her gaze settled on my eyes, reading me. My countenance must have been so pathetic that it evidently confirmed for her whatever suspicions she had about me, and to some extent, she had guessed correctly: I was a man with a broken heart.

“We were supposed to operate a horse clinic together,” she said, “but instead, we ended up in the city. All this time goes by, and I gradually started thinking. I was just sitting there, you know, and I had no idea where I was.” She turned her head and glanced around the room, as if it pained her. “Fifteen years, and I'm still sitting here.”

She laughed, and she briefly touched my hand again.

“Isn't that funny? I actually argued for this place, and I paid some short, overweight lawyer, with hair growing in his ears, to make sure I got this place. Don't mind me. I'm sorry. Are you okay?”

“I'm fine. Like you said, it was the right decision. I know that.”

“That's good.” She scooped up the wizard and returned him to the shelf.

Watching her, I felt invigorated. Here was a woman who perceived me in a way that was far different from how I perceived myself. This woman actually assumed that I was someone who had been living with another person, that I had been able to stir up love in another's heart, and, in short, that I moved in the arena of normal human relationships.

“I'm sorry,” she said as she corked the bottle and slipped it somewhere beneath the counter.

“It's okay.”

“I didn't know. I feel like a fool.”

“Why?” I got off the stool.

Oddly, this woman's meaning eluded me again, and I had a sudden suspicion that it was my fault that I didn't completely understand her. If her gestures and words had a further implication, my brain was probably too stunted and sterilized to apprehend it. Her language was part of society's regular discourse, but I moved on a different, perhaps more subterranean, level.

She began to bustle about, preparing to close the store for the evening. Watching her made me feel guilty for some reason. I drank a large swallow of wine.

“I don't know why you feel like I fool,” I said.

“Was it a hard breakup?”

“No. It was the easiest thing in the world.”

“What about for her?”

“It was even easier.”

She was standing by the door, stooped over her purse, in the process of putting away the novel, when she lifted her head and smiled at me.

“You're just trying to make me feel better.”

“Well, you made me feel better,” I said, beginning to sense what was going on.

Still smiling, she straightened up and pointed to my clothes hanging on the bathroom door.

“Are you going to come back for those tomorrow?”

“Unless you think they're worth something.”

“No,” she said, “but I'll buy your hat.”

“I'll have to think about that.”

“Oh,” she said, and her expression suddenly became more serious. Gesturing to my head with her eyes, she asked, “She didn't—?”

“No,” I said. “I tripped over a bag of salt.” I touched my temple with my finger. “A sidewalk did this to me.”

“You fall down a lot, I suppose. You don't have to rush,” she added as I took another big gulp of wine.

“No, I'm ready.” I set my glass on the counter beside hers, which she'd already emptied.

I walked past her in the doorway, while she reached down and shut off the music. Then, behind me, she clicked off the light, and the room with the used and vintage clothes fell abruptly into deeper shadows. I went and stood by the front door. The darkness outside in the street had a hint of blue, like the color of exhaust fumes. The skinny woman was attending to something behind the counter, and I had to wait for her because she had locked us in. Although the keys hung from the lock, I didn't think it was appropriate for me to touch them. I could faintly see the woman getting herself into a long coat.

Something in the woman had an unusual effect on me. She made me feel stronger. Maybe it was her casual manner, as well as her assumption that I was a better man than I actually was, that made me sense my ego vaguely shaping itself around her image of me, conforming to her perception. Apparently, she had waited for me to return from my appointment because she had wanted to see me again. I didn't know what I had done to provoke her interest. Perhaps when I had purchased the clothes, she had noticed the wad of cash that my landlord had given to me. Perhaps she had interpreted my request to leave my wet clothes behind as a signal of my interest in her.

“Listen,” I said, even though I couldn't see her, for she was lost again somewhere in the shadows of the store. “I was about to get myself some dinner. Would you—?”

“Oh,” she immediately said, stepping out into the open. “I don't know if that would be too smart. You're just getting out of something.”

“It's not like that. I'm already out. I've been out for a long time.”

“It puts me in a bad position.”

“No, it doesn't. It's just dinner.”

“I don't know.” She came toward me, buttoning up the front of her coat. “Where would you want to go?”

“Wherever you want. Someplace where we can sit down.”

“My niece was just telling me about this Thai place. She said the tilapia was really good.”

“Let's go there,” I said, even though I'd never eaten Thai food nor had any idea what tilapia was.

She opened the door, and together we stepped out into the cold.

She locked up, and then holding the keys in her gloved hand, she pointed.

“My car is over here.”

I followed her across the street, which was fouled with gray slush and ice.

She had a little black car, a two-door Volkswagen, with a top that could apparently be removed in warmer weather.

Once inside the car, she said very sincerely, “I'm a good listener.”

“Thanks,” I said, not really certain how I was supposed to respond.

Strange, tiny ceramic figurines, perhaps effigies of eastern gods, were lined up along the dashboard, and because they didn't slide off, I suspected that they had been glued down.

At a stoplight, she glanced at me and then looked forward again with a slight smile on her face.

She began talking and asking me questions, perhaps to gloss over any awkwardness. The unmistakable fact, which we both surely understood, was not so much that we were two strangers but that we both had some visceral need that compelled us to steer our way closer toward one another. The more the woman talked, the more I began to realize, to glean from her words, that our maneuvering had certain rules. Apparently, if I was on the rebound from a recent relationship, then neither of us could expect much of our going out to dinner, nothing beyond her ability to offer me a sympathetic ear. Yet, even though this seemed to be our guidelines, there also existed a lower, more implicit set of guidelines, because the woman's explanation of her role as listener sounded almost obligatory, a pretense that we both recognized as a pretense, but was nonetheless necessary for the woman to say, in case, at some further point in our acquaintance, things turned sour; then the woman would have the advantage to remind me that she had established our situation from the very beginning, not merely as tentative words, but as the fixed order of things. She could retreat to that higher ground and deny that there was ever a deeper impulse. The woman might not have been completely conscious of this, but I understood that she was trying to keep a balance between taking a risk on me and simultaneously protecting herself from me.

Her name was Vanessa Somerset.

She was in the process of telling me that she normally wore a different pair of glasses, but she had accidentally crushed them under a pot of spaghetti sauce, so now she had to wear an older pair that not only were the wrong prescription but also left sore, red impressions on the bridge of her nose.

Suddenly, she pulled the car over to the curb. She opened the door and got out, so I got out too, stood on the sidewalk, and waited for her to walk around.

“And I can't wear contacts,” she said. “They bother my eyes.”

“Really,” I said, borrowing her word.

We entered a liquor store, which greeted us at the door with a blast of hot air and the twangy-voiced noise of a woman singing “Silent Night.”

I followed Vanessa briskly down one aisle that shelved wine both in the gallon and in the box, and then down another aisle in which bottles were displayed in reclining crates.

“I think the restaurant is BYOB,” she said. “How about a chardonnay?” She plucked a bottle out of a crate and showed it to me.

“That's fine,” I said.

At first, I simply looked at it, but because she continued to hold it out, I took the bottle out of her hand. I understood that I was supposed to pay.

In line before us at the counter was an insufferable, globular animal with a tuft of hair growing out of the back of her thick neck. She was buying lottery tickets, and she apparently had such a precise regimen that the young clerk behind the counter was following her dictate with a bit of anxiety over messing up and setting the woman into a angry frenzy. After the woman bought the lottery tickets, she asked for three packs of slim menthol cigarettes, and when the clerk pulled out a different kind—perhaps ultra thin or menthol green instead of menthol blue—the squat, crotchety animal turned around and gave me a look that expressed her frustration in having to deal with people as stupid as this one. When she and the clerk settled the dilemma of the cigarettes, she asked for her bottle of cognac to be rung up separately from the beer and cigarettes because her boyfriend had only given her a twenty-dollar bill, as if this somehow explained why she needed two receipts.

While my disgust mounted—for I was unfortunately imagining the man who would act as this creature's boyfriend, wallow in her squalor, and no doubt top her sweaty body—Vanessa had a placid smile on her face as she read the label of a discounted bottle of wine displayed by the counter.

“This looks good,” she said. “BYOB is actually cheaper; you don't have to pay by the glass.”

“Is that good wine?”

“I've never had it.”

“We might as well try it.”

She set the second bottle on the counter, just as the creature moved away and a new song began to play. Hearing “What Child Is This?” and watching the slow, waddling woman, I had a sudden remembrance of Claudia Jones. Yet all I could recall of her were the categorized parts of her body, which were regrettably cached and filed on my confiscated computer. I had so many things to worry about that I knew going out to dinner was a mistake, but I had no idea what else I was supposed to be doing. Right now, I was with Vanessa Somerset, and perhaps now that I was with her, I could efface every moment that preceded her entry into my life. Perhaps I was already beginning to reinvent myself on a warmer, cozier level. This, of course, meant that I needed to kill my past by severing all my connections to the previous drudgery of my life. I could start afresh with just the money in my pocket.

When the clerk rang up my order, and I reached into my pocket to pull out my cash, I noticed that Vanessa was occupied reading the labels on discounted bottles of wine; she didn't appear curious about my little stash of money nor the total on the register.