Cartilage and Skin (36 page)

“What about me?” he asked.

“I got pinot grigio for your aunt, a chardonnay, and a riesling. The clerk said that's sweet.”

Feigning disappointment, the boyfriend said, “Nothing for a man.”

Connie slapped his knee.

“There'll be nothing for you,” she told him, and her tone seemed to imply a threat, as though she were coercing him to be respectful.

He apparently understood what was at stake because he sat up straight and grinned at her.

“You'd crack first,” he responded. “You're worse than me.”

Laughing, she smacked his knee again and said, “Shut-up.”

Unmoved, he continued to look at her. “I know you,” he said. “You'll crack before the cock crows.”

“We'll see about that.”

Shaking her head and smiling, she approached me with the long dry-cleaning bag.

“I'll trade you,” she said, and as she made the exchange with me, gathering the bag of wine into her arms, I noticed that she had a dry warm scent that reminded me of slow-smoldering pine cones.

Just then, Vanessa emerged from the backroom. She was dressed in the same coat and gloves from the day before.

Depositing the wine onto her boyfriend's lap, Connie told Vanessa, “He's being horrible.”

“What did he do?” Vanessa asked, looking at me.

“I don't know,” I answered.

“See,” the boyfriend said and grinned at me approvingly.

“Don't take his side,” Connie said.

“I was—” I began to say, but Vanessa came toward me and in one quick motion, gave me a peck on the lips and grabbed the awkward dry-cleaning bag out of my hands.

“You came back,” she said, echoing Connie's initial greeting to me.

“Sure,” I said, confused not only about the young lovers' happy quarrel but also about the general amazement over my return.

In the process of bundling themselves up and getting prepared to close down the store, they conversed about various topics that had nothing to do with me. However, Vanessa did briefly suggest that Connie's boyfriend could learn how to behave himself properly by my example.

In the car, the young couple shared the small backseat, sitting close together in order to make room for my dry-cleaning and the wine. Meanwhile, for the entirety of the ride, Connie's head, rounded in the white knit hat, continually poked itself up between Vanessa and me, while the two of them talked about the shop. Vanessa expressed concern over a boxful of beige capris that were all brand new but defective: The buttons were too small for their holes. She thought it would be worth the effort to replace all the buttons, so she could get a better value.

“What do you think?” she asked me.

“It makes sense,” I responded, even though I didn't know exactly how much work would be involved because I had only a dim idea what a capri was.

Up ahead, in the beams of the headlights, the white dots of snow appeared spontaneously out of the darkness and rushed toward our vehicle. Vanessa's row of odd statuettes was still mounted to the dashboard.

Connie expressed her giddy astonishment over how many adult women have never learned how to dress: They squeeze into outfits that are too small, hide in baggy clothes, and generally have no sense of what best flatters their body type.

She happily blathered on for a few minutes without interruption, seemingly in possession of copious examples, if necessary.

“Why walk around with your ass looking like mashed potatoes?” she asked rhetorically, just as Vanessa pulled the car up beside the curb.

When I got out of the car and followed them hurriedly across the street, where the falling snow was swept along in gusts, I realized that we weren't too far from my apartment. I was about to remark this to Vanessa, but she was no doubt already acquainted with the fact.

She took my arm as we mounted the snow covered steps. Then, upon the landing, she released me in order to unlock the front door. Connie was hugging my dry-cleaning, the bag folded over her forearms. Her boyfriend was carrying four loose bottles of wine.

“You're missing one,” I said.

“The bag ripped in the car.”

Inside the building, we ascended to the second floor, to a small platform with two doors. The staircase was dimly lit by one weak fixture, which housed dead insects, drying up under its glass plate. The walls were plaster, cracked here and there along the edges of the lath. Nevertheless, despite the dreariness immediately outside of Vanessa's apartment, once she opened the door, I was greeted by the cozy warmth and the vanilla incense that pervaded her home.

The floors were dark, polished wood, with an area rug beneath the dining room table and another under the coffee table in the living room. These two rooms were distinguished by a simple change in décor. On the left was the clean delicacy of a liquor cabinet with bottles, stacked tumblers, and long-stemmed glasses; the china hutch with bone-white plates and teacups displayed behind glass doors; the oval, wooden tabletop with a glass bowl, filled with cashews, in the center. On the right side of the apartment, everything seemed deep, dark, and lush—from the couch rounding the far corner, the single easy chair with an end table beside it, the folded afghans, and the portly pillows to the wooden coffee table and a set of matching floor cabinets that were topped with black lace, an arrangement of picture frames, and various knickknacks, some of which were similar to the effigies on her dashboard. But none of these details mattered as much as the general mood of comforting relief that their totality conveyed.

We all hung up our coats in a closet beside the front door and took off our wet shoes. Connie was apparently such a regular guest that she, along with Vanessa, had her own pair of slippers keeping warm beside the radiator.

Vanessa immediately began to delegate chores to everyone. The boyfriend was in charge of setting the table, while Connie was assigned to kitchen duty, beginning with the washing of lettuce. My task was simple: Vanessa pointed me down the hall, saying, “The bathroom is that way, if you want to get changed.”

On my way to the open door at the end of the hall, I glanced into another room, attracted by the darkened shape of Vanessa's bed centered against the wall. The rest of the furniture faded into shadows.

Inside the bathroom, I was once again reminded of the delicacy and care that females devote to their own bodies, for the back ledge of the bathtub contained a variety of bottles, and from a shelf suction-cupped to the glass wall of the shower door dangled a selection of brushes. A small basket of fanned and folded wash clothes and a glass bowl of colored marbles adorned the top of the toilet tank. Also, although the broad, shiny counter around the basin was mostly clear, displaying nothing more than a bar of soap and several toothbrushes brass-ringed around a plastic cup, both the vanity and the lower cabinet were packed inside with a multitude of beauty supplies. I had difficulty imagining that Vanessa used or needed so many lotions, creams, powders, and perfumes, especially since I could recall only two items stored beneath the sink in my own apartment: black shoe polish and bug spray.

With my dry-cleaning bag hooked on the shower door, I began to disrobe, and then, with the gabardine pants and rayon shirt rolled up on the counter, I leaned closer to the mirror to inspect my head wound, which bloomed stark and grotesque from my temple, disappearing beneath a swath of black hair and the inner band of my hat. I started to step back in order to get a fuller view of my body, but the sound of music from the other room startled me into motion.

I shortly left the bathroom, once again glancing beyond the threshold of Vanessa's room to the square, thick bed sitting immobile and plump, beyond the reach of the hall light, in the quiet gloom.

The table was set, and the salmon, garnished with parsley and garlic, was already in the oven. Connie and her boyfriend had absconded into the corner of the couch. A long-stemmed wineglass was upon the coffee table, while Connie, sitting with her legs crossed, balanced a second glass upon her knee. About the living room candles burned vanilla and warm.

Vanessa inspected me from the kitchen doorway. Her whole face, from her glasses to her mouth, appeared to twinkle with amusement.

“You're more daring than I first thought,” she said.

“Why's that?” I asked.

“You're standing in my dining room. I don't know.” She shrugged her shoulders and smiled. “It's a nice surprise.” She turned back into the kitchen, saying, “I poured you some chardonnay.” When she faced me again, she extended the glass toward me.

“Thank you,” I said. “I like your apartment.”

Looking briefly around, she quaintly shrugged again. “I keep it cozy.”

She directed me to take a seat at the dining room table and then called for the happy couple to join us, saying that we could get started on the salad and corn; the fish would be done in a minute.

I sat alone for a moment with my back toward the liquor cabinet.

When Vanessa excused herself down the hall, I turned to watch her walk away, her dark clothing shaping the length of her trim and elegant body.

“Look at you,” Connie said as she and her boyfriend sat down across from me. “You dress up nice.”

“Thank you,” I said, although I was beginning to find it strange that my smallest gestures—from standing in the dining room to wearing my own clothes—somehow provoked mild astonishment.

“You too,” I added, which made Connie laugh.

Her boyfriend began scooping corn into his plate, but rather than commence eating, he rested his chin in his palm and stared blankly at the table.

Connie snapped out her napkin and laid it across her lap. She started to talk, and I couldn't determine if she were at the beginning or middle of a story, but she was saying something about a handicap ramp at the entrance to her college and how some boy had accidentally thrown his cell phone into the garbage.

Vanessa briskly passed the table, carrying a yellow plastic shopping bag and the sports jacket and overcoat, which I had left hanging in the bathroom.

“I'll put these things in the closet,” she said.

“You can have your clothes back,” I said.

“No way.” She laughed. “It took me almost a year to sell that ugly jacket. It's yours now.” Passing again, heading toward the kitchen, she said, “Eat, eat.”

“I'm trying to teach him some manners,” Connie said, to which her boyfriend made no response at all.

As the three of us waited at the table, I remembered my hat, and suspecting that politeness called for me to remove it, I set it upon my lap.

In Connie's story, the boy with the lost cell phone was trying to prevent a chunky, little girl from discarding a purple, slushy drink into the trash. Then the girl's mother appeared, lumbering up the handicap ramp, with a diapered infant saddled upon her broad hip.

While I was listening to Connie, trying to look interested, though her tale sounded like the pointless rambling of an excited child—Vanessa brought the steamy loaf of salmon to the table. Using a spatula, she served me the first slice and then wordlessly divvied up the rest of it. Before she took her seat beside me, she casually reached into my lap and relieved me of my hat, placing it upon a bottleneck on the cabinet behind me.

I hoped that her presence would rescue me from Connie's story; however, her boyfriend stirred himself out of his daze, just long enough to ask her, “Well, what happened?”

Apparently, the trashcan was enclosed in a metal bin, and when the cell phone was at last retrieved with the help of a custodian, it was half-submerged in a container of coleslaw. Strangely, the mother cheered in joyful vindication and demanded that the hapless boy apologize to her chunky daughter, who still held the cup of purple slush. Just as I began to suspect that this story was being told for my sake—as though I needed to be entertained—the boy's fouled cell phone began to ring, and Connie laughed at her own telling of the tale.

As the dinner progressed, I learned that Connie was a freshman taking nine credits at a junior college where I had once taught a single course many years ago at an adjunct's rate. I was familiar with the name of one of Connie's hoary professors, whose wife—long before I'd actually met the man—had begun a slow emotional deterioration, ending up in a bed-bound depression. According to the hushed and clipped gossip around the department photocopier and in the lounge, my former colleague—baffled, frustrated, and sad—had seemed to melt away in commiseration for his wife, never fully understanding the putrefaction of her nerves, that is, not until long after she'd finally hanged herself in the basement with a wire clothes hanger. Prior to her problems, she had undergone an innocent hysterectomy, and the doctors back then had failed to recognize how this surgery was connected to her psychological collapse. I always suspected that it was the old man's personal tragedy that made him a brilliant teacher, for by the time I'd met him, he was already accustomed to living without his wife, avoiding all forms of sociability, and burying his face into book after book.

“He knows everything under the sun,” Connie said.

“Yes,” I said, deciding to keep the details of his history to myself.

“What are you studying?” I then asked Connie.

“Physical therapy,” she answered enthusiastically, but then added, “I think.”

Her boyfriend worked part-time in a factory with large spools of very fine wire, but he wasn't exactly certain what the wire was used for—perhaps in medical equipment, aviation, or telecommunication. Regardless, the boyfriend's ignorance didn't seem to bother him.

Later, under the lowered lights, as we moved from the chardonnay to the zinfandel, and from the dining room table to the couch, none of the particular points of our conversation was significant to me, for I was growing more and more preoccupied by the idea of my departure, and the longer the evening stretched out, the less likely seemed the possibility of Vanessa accompanying me. I had trouble finding the appropriate moment to even hint at the subject.