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.
Three of the little dark-haired girls in their black attire were gathered by the hostess station near the front door. Most likely, they were ordinary young American women, but I imbued them with a disconcerting servility. Of course, I wouldn’t have been disturbed by them, or even have given them so much notice, if I hadn’t recently seen a picture of a goofy man astraddle a refrigerator. I imagined that with a simple plane ticket he was able to enter a region of the world where he could have all the slavish attention of these quaint creatures directed upon his lusts. The images of the two men, stupid and sloven, resurfaced in my mind, and they disgusted me.
Vanessa returned, and as we walked together, somewhere between our table and the coat rack, she momentarily took hold of my arm.
Back outside, the snow came down in a swift slant, the flakes small and quiet.
Just as I opened the car door to get in, Vanessa said to me over the snow-covered roof, “It’s not too crazy, us going out like this on the spur of the moment.” Then her head disappeared behind her side of the car.
I got in, closed the door, and said, “No.”
“It’s no crazier than Internet dating.”
“It’s not crazy at all.”
With the thin layer of snow coating the windows, we seemed to have hidden ourselves within a pale, fragile enclave.
Vanessa started the car, and the wipers cleared the front window.
“Are you okay to drive?” I asked.
“Probably not.” She smiled as the car started forward. “I’ll go slow.”
Although I didn’t know where we were heading, I didn’t bother to ask. I knew that eventually, before the night was over, I would end up back in my apartment. Perhaps in the morning, once I had collected my thoughts and calmly assessed my dilemma, I would run away. Vanessa was holding the steering wheel in both hands and staring forward. All the other windows were still covered with snow. Something in the silence prompted me to reach out cautiously toward her, but my hand only crossed half the distance and came to rest on the console. I wasn’t certain whether she noticed my gesture, even though she turned her head and glanced at me, seeming to smile not exactly at me but simply at the idea of my presence. I knew that I was getting prepared to leave behind my old life, but I didn’t know to what extent, or if at all, Vanessa Somerset would constitute any part of my new self. I wasn’t sure what I felt about her. On the one hand, she seemed so desperate that she readily allowed herself to find something strong and valuable in me, regardless if it actually existed or not; this made her somewhat transparent and flimsy. Yet, for all I knew, her openness was a natural part of every romantic relationship. There’s a fine distinction between need and neediness, and I had yet to discern which held sway over Vanessa. Nevertheless, on the other hand, I was a desperate man.
“Did you want to do anything else?” she asked. “I know it’s a weekday.”
“It’s not too late.”
“We can go someplace and talk. Get a cup of coffee.”
She drove me to a place that from the outside I never would have guessed was a coffee shop. The front door was thick, black, and wooden, with a metal hoop for a doorknob. Although books lined the walls, they apparently remained unused, for the dim light wasn’t suitable for reading. A chunky, young girl in a scarf and a brown, form-fitting sweater stood behind the dingy counter. Vanessa ordered some type of frothy, vanilla-flavored gourmet coffee with a chocolate biscotti on the side, and for the sake of convenience, I ordered the same thing.
“If you pay now, you can have a seat, and I’ll bring it to your table,” the girl said.
“Sounds like a plan,” Vanessa said, and then to me, she added, “I’ve got it this time.”
For the two cookies and the coffee, the bill was thirteen dollars and change. Vanessa gave the girl seventeen dollars: two fives and seven singles. She flashed the girl a smile, slipped her arm under mine, and directed me into the seating area, which was primarily occupied by high school or college students. I suspected that they took themselves for bohemians, radicals, and artists.
A hollow-cheeked boy with a disheveled mop of brown hair nonchalantly pointed one of his lanky fingers at my head and complimented my hat.
Vanessa thanked him on my behalf and released my arm when we came to a vacant table in the center of the room. I sat down. To my right, less than a yard away, a girl sat cross-legged on her chair. On my other side, a boy, who was apparently excited, had one knee on his seat and was leaning across the table. He accused another boy of possessing only opinions. This boy sat with his arms crossed and his shins pushing against the edge of the table. He retorted that not everything is an opinion. Strangely, the table between them, in addition to their debate, appeared to be contested ground.
“It’s my opinion that not everything is an opinion.”
“Yes.”
“So, you’re saying that it’s a fact that everything is an opinion.”
“I never said it was a fact. Don’t put words in my mouth.”
Although Vanessa looked at the pair of boys as though they were performing magic tricks, I had to turn away before their stupidity made me dizzy.
Between the drabness of the walls, the water-stained panels in the ceiling, and the faint, stale mustiness permeating the air, I had a sense that the general attitude of the clientele emitted a palpable influence, like a contagion. This grunge appeared symptomatic of their belief that in order to be intelligent and deep, a person needed to look beyond appearances and refuse to be held captive by the sensibilities of the larger society. Surely, mental freedom might entail a spirit of repudiation, but such a spirit in itself wasn’t a guarantee of any poignancy, save for their own funk.
Vanessa leaned across the table, as if to tell me a secret, so I bent down nearer to her.
“As soon as they’re old enough to drink, none of them will be here. They’ll go to bars instead.”
“Probably,” I said.
In the intimacy of leaning in toward one another over the table, Vanessa looked steadily at me, searching me. Because she gave me no indication that she would turn away, I felt somewhat obliged to keep my eyes on her—so both of us became fixed—and even though we appeared to be in an interlude of keen, probing consideration, I felt a little silly and uncomfortable. Perhaps normal people felt inclined to break the awkwardness of such moments with a kiss. Our spell, however, was broken by the chunky girl setting a tray on our table.
The gourmet coffee was as sweet as a milkshake, the long cookie as hard as bone. In fact, the only way to eat the biscotti was to let it soften in the creamy froth.
Vanessa began telling me anecdotes from her life. When she was a young girl, during an Easter egg hunt, she found a dead cat in a window well. Before this tale properly concluded, it segued into another story in which she and her “then-husband-at-the-time,” as she called him, were vacationing in Kentucky, to attend a horse show. They set up their tent in the far corner of a campsite, away from all the trailers. Every morning, an emaciated dog came up to the metal fence, and she fed it hotdogs through the diamond-shaped links. Without the fence, the animal probably would have starved because it was too savage to approach otherwise. Vanessa suspected that other campers complained about the dog because one morning it stopped showing up.
“Maybe it died,” I said.
Vanessa shook her head. “My ex- heard people talking about it. It was put down.”
I nodded thoughtfully, although I had no idea what the point of the story was. Perhaps Vanessa believed that conversation of any sort, regardless of the subject, was what united two people. After all, communication was the mantra of all the relationship gurus on the daytime talk shows. This might have been true, but still I had trouble keeping an interest in Vanessa’s stories. She started telling me about hoof and mouth disease, the West Nile virus, or some other kind of equine pestilence. A veterinarian walked through contaminated feces and carried the disease on the soles of his boots to healthy horses in a different stable fifty miles away.
Beside me, the two boys were working themselves to the idea that if opinions are a form of knowledge, then—following the same route as certainty and truth—opinions also didn’t exist.
“Then what’s in my head?” one boy asked.
“I don’t know. Reactions, maybe.”
“Reactions to what?”
“Impressions.”
“But then, who, or what, is doing the reacting?”
Although their topic was slightly more interesting than Vanessa’s, they often seemed baffled by their own reasoning. Whatever ground they gained on one point, they lost on another. Leaping vast stretches of time and excluding many thinkers and whole schools of thought, they traveled from Plato to Hume at the speed of language, and the combined acumen of both boys afforded them at best a cursory understanding of these two philosophers. One of the boys not only continually misquoted the author of The Book of Hebrews as saying, “Knowledge is the certainty of things unseen,” but also wrongly attributed the phrase to Peter.
I had a desire to write down the titles of a few books that might have helped them, or maybe to turn to them and explain some rudimentary ideas, giving them a stable starting point, such as that the line analogy and the allegory of the cave, when taken together, reveal the inverted correspondence between Platonic epistemology and ontology, thereby elevating opinions above a multitude of raw actions and the formless, mute shadows cast by effigies on a stone wall. These were the obvious and basic terms that I believed the boys woefully lacked, the most banal and traditional kind of topological imagination, against which our more contemporary, rhizomatically-inclined sophists rail. I felt I could quickly sketch the whole schema on a napkin for them. As Vanessa spoke, I continued to look at her and nod; meanwhile, I casually fished in my pocket for a pen and something to write on. When my hand touched the folded papers—the official dictum that granted men I didn’t know the authority to root through my belongings and my home—I felt anew the urge to run away. All the while I had been eating Mediterranean chicken and drinking chardonnay, strange men were dissecting my computer, following my virtual path over hills and valleys, and descending below the conspicuous level of playmates and pornstars, into the carnal pulp of the world’s subterrain. These men were not exactly thinking my thoughts after me or even pursuing the course of my mouse clicks, but sterilely uncovering the slow, cheerless delineation of my darkening descent.
Vanessa was in mid-sentence when I pulled out the folded sheets of paper and set them on the table. She appeared curious for a moment, as if she expected me to do something amusing or at least explain the papers.
“Okay,” she said, smiling at me.
Suddenly, I wanted to tell her about the boy, my bovine neighbor, and all the other reasons why I was afraid to return home, which had nothing at all to do with an ex-lover. I was a charlatan. I felt uneasy cultivating any further Vanessa’s false impression that I knew how to conduct myself, not just on the normal level of human affairs, but also as a lover.
“What’s that?” she asked about the papers.
“Just cleaning out my pockets,” I said. “Are you ready to go? I feel misplaced in here.”
“Sure.” She stood up from the table and began re-buttoning her coat.
“That’s sad about the dog,” I said, just to show her that I’d been listening.
She didn’t say anything as she took her gloves out of her pocket and put them back on.
“Do you want to hear a funny story about dogs?” I asked.
“Sure,” she said, and as she came around the table, I offered her my arm, which she casually accepted.
I began the story in the coffee shop, and outside on the sidewalk, as the snow lighted upon her shoulders and hair, I described for her the scrappy little mutt that incessantly yapped at everything. We slowed our pace, as if to prolong the moment, but eventually we reached the car. The snow had coated the windshield again, and now when we sealed ourselves inside, Vanessa turned the engine but left the car idling and the wipers off. I made the story vivid and even imitated the deep, solitary bark of the Husky. All the while I spoke, Vanessa looked at me and smiled. The wine seemed to have slowed her down a little and put a touch of giddiness in her voice. Whenever something amused her, she grabbed my wrist, and she especially liked how the little dog’s legs fluttered rapidly beneath its dirty belly as it ran. I skipped the part about the social worker’s dreadful office. Getting a bit caught up in the tale, I concluded by saying, “They led me right up to the door of your store. The hounds of destiny.”
“You’re a liar,” she said.
“No.”
<
br /> “Then, at least, you’re an idiot.”
“Maybe.”
She looked at me with a mixture of happiness and feigned disapproval, and then her expression dissolved into something else as her smile faded and the luster of her eyes deepened beneath a more somber mood.
“You’re an idiot,” she repeated, and she turned away from me, but I knew she wasn’t actually insulting me because a low and sensuous note played within the sound of her voice.
The wipers came on, and the car started forward. We sat in silence. The pale darkness within the car seemed to be rendered fragile by the crisp air. I was uncertain where we were heading, but after a few moments, Vanessa asked where I lived, so she could take me home. I told her the address, and she continued in silence, making no reference to my renting a room or staying with a friend. Occasionally, I looked over at her as she kept her eyes on the fouled road. Without a word, she took one of her gloved hands from the steering wheel and calmly, without even a glance in my direction, placed her hand gently over the back of my hand, so our forearms rested side-by-side along the console.
She turned down my narrow street and drove slowly between the lanes of snow-covered cars. I had her pull over in front of the alley beside my building. I noticed that although the snow hadn’t accumulated too much, my landlord had recently cleared off the steps. The car idled, and the wipers came on intermittently. Vanessa continued to hold my hand.
“You’re a good guy,” she told me. “Thanks for the book and everything.”
“I’m glad you went out with me.”
“I’m going to read that book, you know. And then we can talk about it.”
“Good.”
“Don’t forget I still have your clothes.”
With her eyes fixed on me, she slipped back into silence for a moment, waiting, as if she wanted to tell me something or to hear me speak. But I had nothing to say. Her fingers tightened slightly around my hand, and again I sensed that she was offering me permission, not merely to look at her, but to accept her yielding. Despite our privacy within the car, the simple distance between our seats, and her face turned toward me with a subtle mixture of pleading and surrender—I remained frozen, unable to lean close to her and give her the hug or kiss that she wanted. The moment seemed to be straining to the breaking point. I was about to say something, anything to offer us a release from one another, when Vanessa moved toward me, simultaneously raising my hand to the hollow of her throat and placing her lips, softly and slowly, on the side of my mouth. Afterwards, her face briefly lingered near to me, her breath trembling warmly upon my cheek, my fingers pressing lightly against her neck. But then she reclined back into her seat and released my hand.
Cartilage and Skin Page 24