Cartilage and Skin (29 page)

Back outside, the first few flakes of snow were falling. Vanessa turned her face upward, as if she could somehow gauge the weather by inspecting the sky.

The Thai restaurant was only another couple of blocks down the road. In the window, purple tubes of light spelled out the name of the place in a winding script. A bench, now coated with ice and frost, was on the sidewalk, where patrons could presumably wait for their tables, in different weather of course. I held the door open for Vanessa.

“It smells good,” she said.

Since it was a weeknight, we had no problem getting prompt service. A little girl, dressed all in black, stood patiently behind us as we hung up our coats, and then she led us to a table next to the wall.

When Vanessa sat down, I wondered if I should have pulled out her chair for her or if that form of courtesy was long dead. Even so, I knew that I ought to let her order first. As Vanessa studied the menu, another little girl came up to the table. She was dressed in the same black attire, and her straight dark hair was pulled back in a simple ponytail. Interestingly, all the staff appeared as if they actually were from Thailand or at least of that descent. I suspected that the girls probably weren't as young as they looked.

Our waitress asked which bottle of wine we would like to open first, and I said that we wanted to try both of them. The girl smiled as if I had said something witty. After she opened the two bottles, she asked Vanessa which one would she like to start off with.

“I'll have the chardonnay.”

When the girl poured, she twisted her wrist, slowly rolling the bottle, so there wouldn't be a drip.

“I'll have the same,” I said, and the girl repeated the operation with me.

Vanessa ordered a seaweed salad with pine nuts and also, from the special menu, pan-seared tilapia. I ordered some type of Mediterranean chicken that came in a brown curry sauce with chunks of avocado and onion. Even though I knew this was ethnic food, I was beginning to doubt—between the seaweed, the chicken, and the curry—if I could point to Thailand on a map.

After declaring the wine delicious and the fish perfect, Vanessa asked where I planned on staying the night.

“A friend's house, I suppose,” I said, though I had no friend. “Or maybe I'll see about renting a room.”

“You don't want to wait too long,” she said. “You might be stranded.”

“I'm not worried,” I said.

She smiled at me. Perhaps she imagined a note of confidence in my voice. Truthfully, however, I hadn't yet considered where I intended to spend the night. I realized that I might have been stalling, as if deep down I secretly wanted the time to run out, so I would've been forced to accept no other option but to go back home in a mood of insincere reluctance.

Throughout the dinner, I learned that in addition to being an only child, Vanessa Somerset was a change-of-life baby. Thus, in her adolescence, she felt isolated and detached from her parents. She always picked shitty boyfriends, ones who were older and controlling. She married at a young age, but not for love, because she was too giddy and immature to know what love was. She just wanted the comfort of a man, as well as the opportunity to allow her ego to flake away and dissolve into the presence of her husband. For the most part, he treated her well, but she began to see that he had less strength than she'd first imagined. He was unmotivated, and he believed that the interval between weekends was merely wasted time and that true life happened on his couch with a couple of stoned drinking buddies. Eventually, she began to recognize that she was shriveling up. There was no horse farm or any other kind of dream for the future. Yet she didn't bear the man any ill will; in fact, she earnestly loved his family. Her niece, the girl with the corduroy pants, often helped out in the clothing shop. According to Vanessa, the girl remained convinced that her uncle had lost the best thing he ever had going for him, namely Aunt Vanessa.

“Was he controlling too?” I asked.

“In some ways.” A slight smile turned the corner of one side of her mouth.

“He was nice, though?”

“Most of the time.” She was smiling fully now, as if guilty of something. “Here,” she then said, holding out a forkful of fish. “You've got to taste this before I eat it all.”

As the fork advanced toward my face, my first instinct was to turn away, but I checked myself, opened my mouth, and allowed her to feed me. No sooner had I swallowed the morsel than Vanessa began to laugh.

“It's not poison,” she said.

“It's good stuff,” I mumbled, curious if she'd realized that my initial reaction wasn't due to the fish itself but to the intimacy of Vanessa's utensil entering my mouth.

She then stuck her fork into my bowl of brown sauce and came out with a chunk of chicken. She ate it in two bites and said matter-of-factly, “Mine's better,” as if declaring herself the winner of some contest.

“That fish is horrible,” I rebutted.

“That fall must have really damaged your head.”

Apparently amused by herself, she sat up straight in her chair, looked down at her plate, and continued to eat.

I merely watched her.

When she reached for her wine, she lifted her eyes and looked at me. Her simple gesture awoke in me a singular sensation: I felt myself pulled toward her, as if she had just somehow made herself prettier and this glance of hers, silent and suggestive, was merely a brief glimpse at possible pleasures, an indication that she possessed the ability to become, at will, even more alluring. Looking at her, I realized that her expression of happy contentment, which almost bordered on smugness, had less to do with her witticism about my head than with her own sense of charming me. If there were a competition, Vanessa Somerset was winning.

“Tell me about your broken heart,” she said.

“There's nothing to say.”

“Now, that's not fair; I told you about my marriage. Besides, you've been kicked out of your home. There's got to be a story there.”

“I can go back,” I said. “She's not even there anymore. But, by now, it's just a matter of principle.”

As I spoke, she studied my face. Her eyes suggested to me that she accepted my explanation, even though I had no idea what principle I could possibly be invoking. The trite phrase simply sounded appropriate for the moment.

“Are any of her things still there?” Vanessa asked.

“She took some stuff, most stuff actually. But that's part of the reason I think it's better to stay away for now.”

“I guess when you're just dating, even if it lasts several years, you can't really call in a lawyer or judge to say whose things are whose.”

“Exactly,” I said. “Still, I'm not one to quibble over material things. She can have it all.”

“There's nothing you want?”

I thought about the question, considering it as though I were actually placed in such a situation. The only thing I seemed to have a vague attachment to, which I might have wanted to take with me on my flight, was my marble-covered notebook full of bad poems. Of course, its rightful place was in the garbage can, but I didn't spend any time trying to figure out my irrational affection for the book. But then again, the poem “Footprints” was displayed in a gilded frame in my living room, and my father's final letter to me was folded in thirds and concealed behind the back panel. And maybe, I just remembered, my mother had sent me a Christmas card, which never failed to contain money. I needed to check the mail.

“Just some stuff from work,” I answered.

Rather than take the opportunity to ask me what I did for a living, Vanessa continued with the topic of my phantom lover.

“How did you meet her?”

“Our paths crossed,” I said obliquely, wishing that I could somehow avoid lying to this woman.

Vanessa refilled both of our wine glasses, and then she crossed her utensils on her plate, evidently to indicate to the little, dark-haired waitress that the place setting could be cleared away.

“That's not a good answer,” Vanessa said.

“She's an artist,” I responded, conjuring up one of the fantasies I had woven around Celeste Wilcox, my urban nymph. “I liked her artwork, so I contacted her, thinking that I might commission her to do a piece.”

I had several versions of this story in my head because back when I had discovered the gallery and still clung to the prospect of meeting the artist, my brain had sputtered out a collection of possible encounters with the woman. I usually played the model, patiently posed, while she inspected me over the top of her canvas. Yet something in my posture wasn't quite right, so she had to come out from behind her easel to adjust my limbs and turn my head slightly. Wanting my inner thigh to catch the light better, she touched me, stepped back to assess the alteration, and came forward to fine-tune the position of my leg. Again she squatted and put her hands on my leg. Then she found the need to take hold of my hips like a steering wheel. With a slight hint of annoyance in her voice, she said, “I can't paint you if you're going to be aroused like this,” and for the sake of her artwork, she had “to take care” of the situation for me.

“What kind of art?” Vanessa asked.

“Pretty sophisticated stuff,” I answered, and when I saw Vanessa's face imperceptibly sag, I knew that she was comparing herself to Celeste Wilcox. While my ex-lover was talented and smart, Vanessa lacked formal education and had wasted years of her life trying to melt into a man.

“But she didn't have the heart,” I added. “She had the head to be an artist, but she lacked passion and other stuff, if that makes sense.”

“Sure,” Vanessa answered.

Wordlessly, the waitress came to our table, topped off our wineglasses, once again cautious of the drip, and then absconded with our dirty plates.

“Do you want to split a Crème Brulee with me?” Vanessa asked.

“Sure,” I said.

When the waitress returned, Vanessa placed her order, turned down an offer for coffee, and requested two spoons. At this, the girl smiled as if Vanessa were suggesting more than she'd actually said.

“She's cute,” Vanessa said as the girl headed away.

I agreed, though something about the girl unsettled me, if not quite her indeterminate age and origin, then perhaps the obsequiousness with which she waited on us, as though the girl weren't so much performing a job in order to make money as she were acquiescing to her prescribed station in life.

Vanessa wanted to know the details of my relationship and breakup. Although confiding in her created a level of intimacy, it also seemed to open a gap between us. Every word I spoke felt laced with significance, like evidence in a trial that had the potential to go either way. Vanessa appeared to be measuring my words, but how she arranged and assessed them in her mind was a mystery to me.

Finally, the desert came. Vanessa perked up in her chair and smiled at me.

In a little ceramic petri dish was something like warm, creamy cheesecake that was burnt on top. I watched as Vanessa cracked the charred surface, took a dab of cream on the tip of her spoon, and slipped it in her mouth. When she noticed my attention, she looked at me in a way that seemed to give my eyes permission to linger on her.

All the while, we were still talking about my ex-lover.

“Was she pretty?”

“Yes,” I said.

“What does she look like?”

“She's an Italian girl with pale skin and dark eyes. She is dainty, almost fragile, as if she could easily be crushed by anything.”

“And you love her?”

“No, not anymore. But I thought I did. I wanted to protect her, to gather her up in my arms, and keep her safe.”

“And she loves you?”

“I don't know how she feels now, but at one time, she used to say that I was the only person in the whole world who had ever loved her.”

“I'm sorry,” Vanessa said, and she reached across the table and squeezed my hand.

“Don't be,” I said. “It feels like ages ago.”

Feeling Vanessa's hand on mine somehow enabled me to see a level deeper into her expression, which was only in part sympathetic and warm, for at a lower frequency, barely perceptible, quivered something imploring, naked, and raw. I had left her dangling alone for a moment, on the cusp of my words, and I felt the urge to draw her back to me.

“I have no relationship,” I said. “I have nothing to go to, and it's a good thing.”

“What happened to you guys?”

“Fate, of course.” I tried to sound cheerful. “When love goes wrong, fate is always the culprit.”

“And when love goes right?”

“That might be fate too, but in that case, we don't like to give her any credit. We say it's all our own doing; we attribute it to our own truthfulness and trust and commitment.”

“Yeah, but some people credit destiny.” Vanessa had a slight smile on her face, which I now suspected to be a constant aspect of her countenance that had less to do with me than with habit. She removed her hand from mine, to push up her glasses and then pick up her spoon.

“That's just how they explain it to other people,” I said. “When they are together, there are no dreamy illusions; they expect, even demand, honesty and fidelity and all that stuff. They know that they are the ones giving themselves. They're the ones taking all the risks and stuff, not destiny.”

“Your cheeks are getting red,” Vanessa said.

“It's the wine,” I said, conscious that I inexplicably kept using the word “stuff.”

“Me too,” she said. “It's starting to catch up with me.”

Later, when the bill came, Vanessa once again seemed to have no interest in the cost. I over-tipped the waitress, who without bothering to count the money thanked me sweetly. I had an idea that even if I'd given her nothing at all, she would have acted in the same manner.

When we stood up from the table, Vanessa touched my shoulder, brought her face closer to me, and said that she'd be back in a minute. I watched her steer her way between the tables and chairs, which were mostly unoccupied, and disappear around a corner.