Cartilage and Skin

by Michael James Rizza

  “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.

  VII

  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.

  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 looke
d.

  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.

&n
bsp; “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.