Cartilage and Skin (7 page)

Now as my mind swarmed with thoughts, with urgency, and with a single drop of borrowed potency, I found myself walking faster. A strange compulsion drove me forward, though I didn't exactly know what I was running toward or away from. The black man reminded me that I was supposed to be on the playing field of men, which meant that I was no longer going to bother erecting a world of massive monuments with vaulted ceilings and endless corridors and chambers stretching as deep as my tiny, gray brain could imagine. I was going to assert myself using my body. With a little spasm, a momentary shudder, and a drop of potency, if a person was not quite born into manhood, then he was at least allowed into the arena and given a chance to test his mettle.

As I hurried forward, I became aware of the buildings looming up around me, of every bit of earth covered up with concrete and tar, and of the air saturated less with the natural elements than with waves and signals and blathering voices too numerous to fathom. It all seemed significant and portentous, as though the grimy fingerprints of man could not only be seen on everything but also were intimately and mysteriously connected to the secret places of my own heart. I wasn't quite certain what this meant for me or what I actually needed to do.

Before I had the time to contemplate these ideas further and drift into a new reverie, I found myself beneath the muddy green awning of a pub, which I promptly entered. The interior was deep and narrow. The bar was on the left; every stool was taken, and behind the seated patrons, more were standing. Along the opposite wall ran a thin counter that people used to abandon their empty glasses and bottles, or, by reaching backwards, to retrieve a drink, tap ashes, or snuff a cigarette. Nobody turned to look at me as I stood by the front door, wet with sweat and mist. I took off my overcoat and folded it over my forearm. I was surprised to find the place so busy at this hour. Beyond the bar area, elevated a single step, were two rows of tables. I made my way through the crowd of mostly young men and headed toward the dining area. Even though I squeezed between people, fixed my eyes upon their faces, and uttered, “Excuse me,” no one seemed to acknowledge my presence. A space cleared, providing me a sudden opportunity to belly up to the bar and order a drink. Hugging my overcoat and umbrella against my body, I was about to step forward. Yet I felt someone move behind me. In fact, just beneath the hem of my jacket, gliding across one cheek and then the other cheek of my ass, might have been either the back of a hand or the soft corner of a woman's handbag, but I feared that this casual, accidental touch was something worse. My body tensed, and I squirmed away, not turning around to see which body and face belonged to that sausage and sack. I reached the end of the bar, where a large speaker bracketed to the wall emitted a lot of noise. Several tables were vacant. When I ascended the single stair, I turned and faced the bar again, and looking across the tops of their heads, I was intrigued that people preferred to pack together, rather than step back into the empty floor space.

“You eating?” someone asked me, shouting above the music.

“Yes,” I said.

He was a wiry young man with raven black hair, which seemed to be greased or wet. He raised his arm toward the tables and limply waved two fingers, as if to shoo me away. A squiggly black line twisted down his forearm. He said something I couldn't hear, but I knew he was telling me to take a seat.

I found a table that had been robbed of all its chairs but one. I set my umbrella on the floor beside the chair and sat down with my overcoat in my lap. Some laminated menus were propped between the salt and pepper shakers and a napkin dispenser. I read a menu, though I already knew what I wanted. When the waiter finally came over and took my order, a look of annoyance came over his face.

“What kind of beer?” he asked.

“Oh, what do you have on tap?”

He drew a breath and began to rattle off a list of words, a jumble of sounds. I cocked my head, as if I were interested.

“What was that last one?” I asked, but before he even got out the name, I said, “That sounds good.”

He disregarded me at once and walked away.

Even though I knew I was overdressed, too old, and solitary, I resisted the urge to feel displaced. I tried to act at ease, so I took my damp overcoat from my lap, bundled it up, and put it on the table. Then I wiggled out of my jacket, hung it from the back of the chair, and unbuttoned the cuffs of my shirt. Years ago, in my silly and benumbing baccalaureate days, I used to attempt to give myself a dab of charm and grace by pretending to be a dashing ivy-league man. I often wanted to impersonate F. Scott Fitzgerald, but because I knew very little about the writer himself, I had to settle for such characters as Jay Gatsby and Dick Diver. Now, sitting at the table, waiting for my order, this old desire to emulate someone else returned to me. I remembered the scene when Dick Diver was sitting in a bar surrounded by his cronies. He had just secretly performed a handstand in his room, to give a little color to his face, and now he was leaning back with a drink in his hand, while his company paid him homage; they were scanning the establishment, looking to see if anyone in the whole room had as much repose as Dick, but no one there could match his elegance. As I looked about the bar, at all the goofy, eager, boisterous young men, I realized that not one of them had the romantic equanimity of a cultured lover, and furthermore, none of them cared to have it. They didn't bother with refined manners and tastes, and perhaps most young men never did, even in Fitzgerald's time. Why make such an elaborate show when they could expose their desires as plainly as a pack of rutting dogs slobber and howl?

The waiter brought me a plastic basket of french fries and a glass of something thick and black. When I looked up at him, to question what was in the glass, I noticed that the tattoo that wound up his arm and disappeared under his shirtsleeve, apparently spread over the rest of his body in some mysterious fashion and peeped up around the edges of his shirt collar. Not saying a word, I simply looked at his shiny, black eyes, but still he seemed to become very annoyed with me. He waited a second and then stepped away. Whether he acted like a bitter, ugly thing to all the patrons or just to me didn't matter; I decided not to leave a tip unless he showed a glimmer of warmth the next time he came to my table.

I sipped my beer and found it tolerable. The french fries were thick-cut, salty, and soggy. Even so, I ate and drank and watched the people seated in the dining area, since my back was toward the bar. The couple sitting in front of me appeared to have only recently met because the young man was interrogating the girl, who looked like a delicate creature, with soft bare shoulders and auburn hair. His words were abrupt and quick, swarming all over the girl. Unfortunately, rather than a frontal view of her, I had one of his cherubic face, which was round, pink-cheeked, and coated with a closely trimmed beard.

Through his questioning, I learned that she was the youngest of three girls and, because of the decade or so separating her from her sisters, she was a “change of life baby” or, as her dopey date interjected, “an accident.” I couldn't see her expression, but a slight, telling pause in her voice preceded her correction: she was “definitely planned.” In fact, she was lucky to have been born later because by then, her parents were already established in life. While her sisters had “to play with pots and pans and to make toys out of sticks and mud,” she got everything she wanted. Just as I was beginning to appreciate the young woman's wit, the bearded boy felt compelled to interrupt.

“A spoiled little girl.”

He grinned stupidly and babbled on. He used his fork to punctuate his sentences in the air, and although she started to say that even in childhood she'd “never really cared for material things,” he began another line of questioning. He wanted to know what she intended to do with a degree in English. He asked this in a roundabout way, not only implying her impracticality but also alluding to the spoiled little girl theme. Beneath the flourish of his words and the humor in his tone, he in essence accused her of having the comfort of getting a useless degree because she planned on being supported by a happy husband. It took him a while to get to the point because he somehow connected it to, or rather veiled it within, an anecdote about his cousin's ex-fiancé. She let him finish, before simply calling her education “a pleasant stepping stone” to law school. She had wanted to be a lawyer ever since she'd read about Atticus Finch and Sol Stein's magician in ninth grade.

The inflection in her voice suggested that this subject thrilled her. She clearly wanted to continue talking about her plans, such as what law schools interested her and also what branch of law. Yet the buffoon swallowed whatever was in his mouth, set down his fork, and looked seriously at the girl.

“Promise me this,” he said. “As soon as you finish all this schooling and you start raking in the cash, if you're still looking for a husband, well—” He broke off with a smile.

“You'll be the first guy I call.”

“It's a deal.”

He held up his glass of beer, and they toasted.

By now, my own beer, as well as the fries, was finished. I looked around for the waiter, and seeing him going from table to table, I wondered if he was intentionally avoiding me. At the same moment that I was trying to get the waiter's attention, the young man held up his hand, as though hailing a taxi, and called to the waiter as he skirted past our tables.

“Another round,” the young man said.

The waiter nodded once and continued walking. His little black eyes met mine, but he kept going without a word.

My interest in the prospective lawyer and her suitor was momentarily diverted because two young women sitting across the aisle had just rejected their first round of libidinal advances. They were both pretty blonde-haired girls dressed in black. When the set of guys approached them, sat down at the table, and exuded a profusion of arrogance and idiocy, I at first assumed that they were the girls' dates, boyfriends, or lovers. Defeated, they eventually got up and headed back to the bar. The girls set their empty martini glasses at the edge of the table, and the wiry waiter exchanged them for fresh drinks. Shortly afterwards, a second round of rutting young men advanced. They stood above the table, drinks in hand, and talked to the girls, who gazed up thoughtfully. This pair of young men was less bold, or perhaps more sensible, than the first one because they didn't plop themselves down uninvited. The girls nodded and responded, apparently willing to give the rutting boys a chance to make their appeal, put on their show, or do whatever kind of trick needed to woo the girls. Because of the music, I could only discern random fragments of their conversation. These two weren't actually rejected because the spokesman had the foresight to take his leave before he ran out of things to say or was unequivocally dismissed.

“I tell you what,” he said. “I'm going to have your waiter bring you your next drinks on me, and while you are—”

“Don't bother,” one of the girls said and slid two empty, turned-over shot glasses to the edge of the table.

“Better yet,” he said, smiling.

“I think they're from that guy.” The girl pointed toward the crowded bar area.

“Better yet. While you're drinking that guy's drinks, let us know if we can join you, just for the drink.”

“We'll let you know,” the girl said.

His eyes lingered on her face as he first turned his body and then his gaze, in slow motion, away from her. Suavely, he started away, his sidekick following.

The waiter dropped off the drinks that the young man with the beard had ordered, and although I held up my hand and said, “Excuse me,” the waiter turned his back to me and faced the blonde-haired girls. He said something that made them laugh.

“Excuse me,” I repeated, but to no avail. He was gone.

The bearded boy was watching me, but I looked down at the empty plastic basket and then pushed it and the glass to the edge of the table, as I'd seen the girls do. The waiter was so obviously snubbing me that I wondered what I had done to him, if not recently, then perhaps long ago—but I couldn't recall ever seeing him before; I'd have remembered his tattoo, let alone his effeminate cheekbones and his fierce little eyes. I absently scanned the room, which was decorated with pictures of lighthouses and seascapes and craggy shores, as though I couldn't hear the bearded boy softly explaining to the girl that the “waiter was being a prick.” Out of the corner of my eye, I noticed that the girl with the lovely smooth shoulders turned in her chair to steal a glance at me. She then said something in a hushed tone, at which her cherubic companion chuckled, saying, “Poor bastard.” If the girl returned his laugh, I would have felt wounded and pathetic. Instead, the girl got up from her seat and walked past me toward the bar. I followed her with my eyes and, from behind, saw that the lower part of her was also sweetly shaped. When I turned back around, her date had his eyes fixed on me. He apparently didn't notice or care that I had just been ogling her.

“What'd you do to him?” he asked.

“I didn't do anything.”

“Well, Miriam, that girl, went to get you a drink.” The slight smirk on his face suggested that he found the situation entertaining.

“I'm okay,” I said quickly.

“Well, she's got it in her head now. No stopping her.”

“I wish she didn't.”

He shrugged, and I shifted my attention back to the waves crashing against jagged rocks in the picture above my table.

When the waiter returned, he wordlessly set down a fresh glass of the thick, black brew and cleared away the things I'd dirtied. Of course, I had planned on ordering a different kind of beer, but I didn't say anything. I was curious on whose tab was this drink and thus to what extent I was obligated to thank Miriam. I started to lower my mouth down to the glass, but then suddenly conscious that this movement lacked elegance, I sat back, lifted the glass in my hand, and took a sip. Watching me, the bearded boy grinned.