Cartilage and Skin

by Michael James Rizza

  But the pitiful irony, of course, was that I hadn’t done anything wrong; I had nothing for which to reproach myself: not the ruined boy on my bathroom floor, the lurid pictures on my computer, the frothing madman behind the sliding glass door, and especially not Vanessa Somerset. On one level, perhaps my sense of innocence accounted for my delayed getaway, but surely the main cause—if I could be honest with myself—was my loneliness. Throughout the night, a heavy smothering feeling had gradually crept upon me, transforming by degrees the desperate and divorced Vanessa Somerset into a viable option for love. How could I forget that she’d treated me like a man or how she’d softly, willingly, kissed me? She seemed to be the reward at the end of a long series of blunders. Not long ago, I had committed myself to pursuing risky choices, to venturing not just out of my apartment but also beyond the imaginary barriers I’d erected around myself, and to making a concerted effort upon the playing field of men. I’d vowed that I was no longer going to repeat all the mistakes that, regardless of my intentions, always led me back to solitude. After I had tried to step out into the world, and after all my stumbling and abortive advances, in bookstores, bars, and art galleries, which had left me stewing in my own lethargy and funk, Vanessa Somerset had emerged by luck. Dogs had chased me toward her, and she’d received me. Now she was expecting to see me again, and no excuse but my own cowardice could have explained avoiding her.

  I lathered and rinsed myself a second time. Despite the fierceness of the water, I still felt the residue on my skin. Perhaps I was unaccustomed to something in the gym’s water, such as calcium or salt, or the lack thereof. When I began to consider seeing Vanessa again, and how I would be in the same clothes from the day before, and that I had no deodorant for my body or comb for my hair, I felt a compulsion to prepare myself for her as best as I could—so if my first ablution was to cleanse my body, the second one seemed to have Vanessa as its goal.

  When I left the shower, my feet smacking on the tile, I discovered that the two old men hadn’t left the locker room. Fortunately, they were both dressed now, one in gray trousers and a button-down shirt, and the other in a red sweat-suit. They were still bickering about quitting the gym early and skipping their customary sauna because one of them had an appointment with his lawyer. The details weren’t important, something about an escrow account and a contractor’s lien. Feeling less self-conscious about my public nudity, I dropped my towel in front of the two men and got dressed. After slipping on my coat, I ran my fingers through my hair, and holding my hat in my hand, I started away from the men. They seemed as though they would go on talking long after I was gone, even though they were supposedly hurrying away on business.

  In the weight room, the metal plates struck and clattered as several men occupied themselves either with grunting and huffing upon the benches or else strutting about the machines, tottering forward with their broad chests, one shoulder and then the other, rocking themselves into slow mobility.

  Further on was the dull murmuring of motors as the belts of a pair of dueling treadmills whisked round and round, thumped upon by the thumping footfalls of two lumbering, middle-aged women, bent over and supported by the rails.

  A row of bikes sat unused, their plastic stirrups looped beneath their pedals.

  One wall was all mirrors, and another was windows, offering a view of a drab parking deck that seemed to be rendered heavier and more compact by the gray weather.

  On my way to the exit, I had to pass a counter, behind which a boy was folding towels. When he had admitted me earlier, he had been overfriendly, and not only his alacrity but also his sculpted black hair and the rolled-up sleeves of his tee-shirt had bothered me a little.

  He wasn’t going to let me walk past him unmolested.

  “Done already?” he asked, smiling.

  “I only used the shower,” I said, deciding to be honest.

  His smile waned, as though he were disappointed.

  “Use the rest of the gym. Enjoy yourself,” he said.

  “No, thank you.”

  “You need to try the facilities. Did you see the nautilus machines?”

  “I saw them.”

  “Did you try them?”

  “I saw them,” I repeated. “Thank you.” I started moving toward the exit.

  “Hopefully, you’ll spend more time with us next time. Remember that your trial membership only lasts for—”

  “Okay,” I said and cut him off by stepping outside.

  Windless and unmoving, the cold issued itself all about me and blanketed everything in sight with a gloomy silence, such as might have pervaded the gutted interior of an abandoned cathedral. The vaulted sky was as gray and unadorned as flat, gray stone, and the dark, damp sides of the buildings were tall, drab walls. No echo could have sounded here, and no puny voice could have survived the suffocation, and even now, it is difficult for me to say whether I was coloring the urban landscape with my mood or whether I had been the one who had suffered a long, general smearing of my consciousness from the world without.

  Compelled by my solitude, I headed down the sidewalk, trying to settle on my reasonable options. I didn’t want to be swayed in the wrong direction by my emotions. If I simply disappeared, then the social worker, Dr. Ferguson, and the black man, who reminded me of a blood-bloated tick, would have assumed that I’d fled the continent and joined up with two perverts to play in the Orient, where parents and other beloved family members sold the favors of their children for food. But I wasn’t one of these perverted men. I was just a reclusive scholar who possessed neither a strong allegiance to what he studied nor the literary ability to assemble and convey a lifetime of random gleanings. Nothing in my character would have prompted me to behave like those two men in the photographs, not to sit victoriously astraddle a discarded refrigerator and certainly not to prey upon the children of a ruined country. Even so, as much as I didn’t want to do anything that would have further incriminated me, the authorities already regarded me as a suspect; otherwise, they wouldn’t have searched my apartment. Now they had my computer with its cache of Claudia Jones’s choice bits. What everyone thought of me was beyond repair, so perhaps I shouldn’t have cared if my sudden disappearance caused them any further disturbance or alarm. In fact, it was their false suspicions that gave me the best reasons to leave at once. But then again, I couldn’t forget W. McTeal. He was an excellent reason in himself. Even though I had locked him out on his balcony and thus beaten him at the game of ambush, I knew that I couldn’t preen down the street as a proud champion. I doubted that I was responsible for the frozen corpse of that strange, solitary man because if his fury hadn’t smashed the glass door, then his screams had surely startled his neighbors, and if neither his fury nor his screams had rescued him, then the snow covered ground, just a story beneath his balcony, had broken his fall. I half-wished that he’d contorted his ankle, popped his knee, or shattered both of his thighbones. Any of these injuries was better than a soft, harmless landing, which would have allowed him to hunt me again, but with additional rage and revenge to add to his usual state of lunacy. I was convinced that he was planning something devious and that I—not Claudia Jones or somebody else—was his primary object. While I had been out with Vanessa, he’d lain in wait at my apartment building. Moreover, from the look of his home, he was evidently in the process of moving, as though he’d already plotted his escape route. Although I remembered his table with newspapers spread atop it, the pair of pliers, and the hammer with the bent nails that kept the head from flying off, I had no way of guessing what was being constructed or destroyed.

  Perhaps it was no use even to bother guessing.

  Now that I was showered, I needed deodorant and maybe a fresh set of clothes, so I could present myself to Vanessa. Walking forward with my head lowered against the cold and my hands thrust into the pockets of the muddy-green jacket, I began to make mental calculations, trying to figure out how much money I had spent, how much I had left, and how much would be required
in order to set myself up anew. Not only did I have to eat, but I also needed a ticket out of the city and at least a month’s worth of rent. Once I was situated in a new apartment, in another place, I would have to find a job. Because I could no longer rely on Morris the man, I needed to sustain myself until my next paycheck from a job I had yet to procure. Thankfully, the cost of living was exorbitant in the city, which meant my returned security deposit would go further elsewhere, particularly in the outskirts of a rural town. A part of me had a secret wish that Vanessa Somerset would accompany me and we could pool together our resources and start our lives afresh in a warm, cozy room, scented by candles.

  An old man with a crooked spine was on the sidewalk, sprinkling salt on a patch of ice. He cocked his head to look at me and then smiled, stretching his mouth into a long slit, his lips the same ashen color as his flesh.

  “Watch your step,” he said.

  “Thanks,” I responded, lowering my eyes from his bulbous, carbuncled nose to the slick sidewalk.

  “The weather’s a bitch.”

  “Yes,” I said.

  He threw a handful of salt before my feet.

  “Thanks,” I said again, still with my eyes averted. “Is there a pharmacy or supermarket around here?”

  “Two blocks that way, make a right. Then three more down.”

  I sensed him pointing as he spoke, so I stole a glance at him, hesitant about getting another glimpse of his ugly nose.

  He was looking off down the street.

  “It’s on the left. You can’t miss it,” he said, and when he started to raise his chin and turn his head back toward me, I saw a wattle of loose skin, cinched in his neck collar, begin to pull out and stretch like a deflated balloon.

  “I appreciate it,” I said, my feet crunching on the sidewalk as I stepped away.

  “Happy holidays,” the man said.

  “Thanks. You too.”

  His kind words started me thinking about my mother and how every year around this time she would mail me a present, usually a card with money in it. She had her own way of celebrating the holidays. With a few old biddies from her church—mostly widows and spinsters—she would take a tropical vacation, at sun-baked resorts or aboard Caribbean cruises. The ritual was a nice way for the ladies to stave off the loneliness of the season. My mother had decided to join the group when I had made my formal repudiation of all things religious, which included the gelatinous cranberry sauce and lumpy mashed potatoes that each year decked my wizened aunt’s dining room table, surrounded by several plump cousins and any recent additions that currently occupied their lives, from plump girlfriends and pregnant wives to wailing cherubs and small, toddling creatures plumping—plop—onto their bottoms. Any day now, my mother was going to call my apartment to inform me of the details of her imminent vacation and try to fish out of me any hopeful developments in my life. As far as she knew, I was still attempting to regain my social status by allowing Morris the man to help me reestablish myself. Although she was generally acquainted with the events that had driven me to take a new apartment in the first place, she knew nothing about the boy or what had followed his intrusion into my life, and she would have been surprised to learn that I was quitting my apartment so soon—unless, of course, Dr. Ferguson and the black man had questioned her about me. I had no reason to doubt the thoroughness of their investigation, but fretting over it now seemed pointless, not only because I was going to leave it all behind but also because the details no longer seemed to matter. I still hadn’t decided whether I was going to contact my mother after I’d moved away or whether I was going to sever myself completely from the past. After all, I believed that I understood the real reason behind my mother’s annual sojourn; it wasn’t just to fight loneliness but rather to drown out her memories. She was still haunted by her previous life, and so for her, all the festive carols, the twinkling lights, and the holiday cheer wasn’t so much the commemoration of a religious event as it was anniversary of my father’s death. My father’s letter remained hidden in the picture frame. I had carried it with me for so many years—back when the author of “Footprints” had still remained anonymous—that I now experienced an unexpected sense of remorse at the idea of leaving it behind. Moreover, the possibility of anyone else ever reading the letter was a little unsettling. If the quaint poem in the gilded frame could survive the grubby claws of my landlord, then it might eventually end up on a shelf in a novelty shop or in a cardboard box at a sidewalk sale, with a little, round sticker on the glass, pricing it at seventy-five cents. From there, it would change hands, and if fortune, chance, or the random flux of events heaved and humped in a certain way, then maybe the frame would remain intact, placed upon someone’s end table or mounted to a kitchen wall. But ages from now, the poem might fail to stir up the proper religious affections, and the owner of the frame could possibly be moved to exchange the poem for something more sentimental and personal, such as a snapshot of her dog stretched out long, supine, and white-bellied in the grass. And then, in pieces upon her coffee table, the pretty picture frame would un-house its secret, the fading letters slanting across the stiff, yellowed sheet of paper: Don’t try to understand because I don’t even understand it myself. Don’t even bother mourning. Just be as happy as you can. Of course, the picture of the dog sunning itself would still go inside the frame, but meanwhile, my father’s letter would get passed around a circle of friends, relatives, and casual acquaintances, from fellow employees in the cafeteria to neighbors in the hall. What an intriguing little note; what a mystery, they would say, but the poor child with hair as filthy as a rat’s nest, hopefully he grew up as happy as he could and died peacefully in his sleep at a ripe old age, survived by many loved ones who all smile warmly at his memory.

  Although I had a sudden desire to have the letter back in my possession, I warned myself about the possible threats lurking around my apartment. Now, to some degree, I was in hiding, and it was best to stick to my original plan.

  Inside the pharmacy, I found the deodorant right away, yet I roamed the brightly lit aisles, not looking for anything in particular. Rummaging through an array of candy on a table by the front counter, some type of squat creature sidled back and forth, all bundled up with the hood of its coat nearly cinched closed at its face. I walked up one aisle and then down another, and the globule remained stooped over the table, obstructing my passageway with its broad, high bottom.

  “Excuse me,” I said.

  The creature gathered its body closer to the table, but there was little room to pass. Rather than try to squeeze by and risk rubbing up against the bloated thing, I retreated back down the aisle.

  “That’s okay,” I said.

  Glancing over my shoulder, I suddenly felt vaguely uneasy about the body, as though its shape were in some way advising me to be on guard.

  On a shelf at face height was underwear, white cotton briefs and tee-shirts wrapped in clear plastic. Thinking that I ought to put on a fresh pair of briefs, I selected a three-pack, which was the smallest quantity. I could stuff the other two in my pocket.

  The bloated thing lingered at the end of the aisle, poking around boxes of candy with its gloved hand.

  And then, all at once, my unfocused suspicion turned into a distinct, palpable fear. I imagined that the black man was spying on me; although I couldn’t see his face, I trusted that he was following through with his promise to know when I ate or slept. Because he was investigating a crime with an international scope, he was certainly more than a typical policeman. Thus, I imbued him with all the wily and sophisticated techniques of a covert portion of the government. And now that I thought about it, neither he nor Dr. Ferguson had told me what agency they worked for. Somehow this lack of definiteness seemed to extend their power into a more mysterious, less ethical realm.

  With my two items, I walked around and came back down a farther aisle. As I passed a long display of cards for all occasions, from birth to death, I began to rationalize that the bloated body
was simply a fat, ordinary citizen. Even so, when I approached the cash register, I kept my purchase guarded from his view. I didn’t need him speculating about my underwear or creating a special file for all things that occurred—or didn’t occur—beneath my beltline. Despite my awareness of the corpulent creature in my periphery, I didn’t give in to the temptation to turn my head and take a fuller look. However, when I exited the store, I glanced back through the glass door and noticed that the body had moved away from the candy and was now browsing among the cosmetics, holding a little brown tube in its gloved hand. As I headed down the sidewalk, I was confident that my alarm had been raised, not by the black man, but by some white woman.

  A little later, I found myself in a fast food restaurant, in a cramped bathroom stall. Because the floor had been fouled by many wet shoes, and the rim of the toilet was flecked with urine and sprinkled with a few curly hairs, what should have been a simple operation of putting on a fresh pair of underwear was now hindered by my fear of touching anything. As I contorted and struggled in the stall, I accused myself of being an unusual man, one who lacked a proper regard for his own appearance, because most people, especially women, had regular dressing habits implicitly governed by a principle of self-respect. For some reason, I recalled, from a hundred years ago, the pretty, gimpy girl named Gerty MacDowell whose chief care, among all the dainty particulars of her attire, was her undies, and how on the summer day when she’d worn her blue pair for luck, she’d inadvertently ushered in the modern world, before limping away. Perhaps I was exaggerating a little the historical significance of her dinky set of blue panties with the pretty stitchery and ribbons, but it was difficult for me to imagine that she or any other girl, from any generation, would ever find herself leaning her shoulder against the scratched and graffiti-scrawled wall of a narrow bathroom stall, awkwardly using one arm to hold up her disrobed gabardine pants, and with the help of her other hand, trying to step into a pair of briefs without brushing them along the floor or hooking them with her foot—all the while, just on the other side of the partition, someone flatulently strained and plunked, between his groans, several small, hard balls into the toilet water. When I finally righted myself, and was holding the tab of my zipper between my thumb and forefinger, I decided to take the opportunity to relieve myself. As I urinated, I began to think about the discrete parts of Claudia Jones, wondering if even she, with all the luridness of her commodified and fragmented flesh, possessed enough control over her own life to keep herself from ever being forced to sleep, shower, and dress in public places. Vanessa Somerset probably wouldn’t have suspected that I was such a desultory man. After I left the bathroom and purchased a cup of coffee, I went back outside, vowing to myself that I would never again be so negligent of my own wellbeing. I wanted to rekindle in my breast that feeling of strength and normalcy that Vanessa had sparked the previous night.