The exact details no longer mattered, for not only was the plotting out of certain points in my life an arbitrary and fantastic construction, but also no one point was definitively linked to any other point, for each was a cause ad infinitum and an effect ad infinitum, within a larger system of constant flux, a web of contingency, governed by attraction and repulsion, push and pull, a sad and pointless bumping together of parts. Of course, looking at my life in a grander, metaphysical—or perhaps macrophysical—context provided me another way of sighing and slouching over in resignation. From a more grounded perspective, I was tired and confused, and I didn’t want to bother with thinking any longer. More precisely, a naked old man—his arms covered by the dark purple splotches of long ago tattoos, his belly flabby and pasty—made a grunting noise as he reached down to towel off his inner thighs and scrotum, and while witnessing this horrible spectacle, I had no idea what I was doing or how I had managed to make the sort of choices that brought me to this particular circumstance. Another old man at least had the decency to wear a pair of thin, yellowing briefs.
“We should’ve spent ten minutes in the sauna,” he said. “It loosens you good.”
“Don’t blame me,” the naked one replied. “You do what you want to do.”
“You got the appointment, not me.”
“Drive yourself next time.”
“Who’s stuffing the barrel now?”
Although this question completely eluded me, both men laughed.
“Crazy bastard,” the naked man said.
His pale penis looked like a soggy, uncooked chicken neck drooping from a puff of gray hair.
I turned away from the men. Unfortunately, before they had emerged from the showers and stationed their slow, wet bodies beside me, I had already committed myself to a locker by hanging up my muddy green coat and shelving my shoes. Since I’d been caught in the process of disrobing, I now stalled, poking around in my locker, searching my pockets, and delaying my nudity, but the men showed no sign of urgency. The one in the yellow briefs, which at one time had probably been white, sat down on the bench, uncapped a green can, and began to spray each of his feet in turn. The other man, still nude, bent over a duffle bag and rifled through an exorbitant arsenal of beauty supplies, before finally selecting his deodorant. He eventually revealed a pair of crisp, white underwear and a tee-shirt, but rather than put them on, he set the garments on the bench and began combing his hair.
I soon realized, after inspecting all my pockets twice, that I had no choice but to strip out of my clothes.
Thankfully, the men disregarded me. The one in the yellow briefs was explaining different cuts of beef, from chuck steaks to filet mignon, which evidently intrigued the naked man.
Once all my clothes were stored in the locker and a towel was wrapped about my waist, I headed toward the showers. Even though my back was to the old men, I sensed a momentary pause in their conversation and imagined them simultaneously lifting their heads and eyeing me, as though I offered them a bit of droll amusement. My suspicion was confirmed the moment I passed through the swinging wooden door and stepped onto the cold tile floor: Both men chuckled.
Of course, this could have been a reaction to my exaggerated poking around in my pockets or my silly display of painful modesty, but I felt the deeper sting of their ridicule. Despite the pale loose flesh that was draped over their deteriorated meat, packed with clumps of pudge, and held up by their brittle, rickety frames, like an overburdened coat-rack—I became fretfully conscious of my own body, as though my shrunken chest and slumped shoulders were innately humorous, even to old men.
On my left were two doors, one glass and one wooden, that led to a steam room and a sauna. Across from them stretched a long counter with several sinks, where men customarily lathered, groomed, and preened themselves. The shower room was up ahead. Although I heard no water spewing from the showerheads, I averted my eyes in fear of seeing anyone.
I silently cursed the old men, holding against them their freedom to come to the gym at eleven o’clock in the morning, on a weekday, when ordinary people were busy with life, as though the old men were slighting the rest of society and failing to respect their own decrepitude and inevitable fate. The old fools ought to have been in bed. What was additionally offensive was that the door had not even swung closed behind me before they’d begun to chuckle because they didn’t care whether or not I heard them. Instead of being enfeebled by their old age, stricken and humbled by a constant awareness of their tenuous mortality, they were emboldened. They no longer concerned themselves with civility, not simply because they’d lived long enough to stop worrying about what other people might think, but also because they no longer had any stake in society—similar to a pair of rutting high school boys, limited by the milky flush of testosterone over their spongy brains.
But then I saw myself reflected in the mirror above the long counter. Although my body might have given the two men plenty of reasons to laugh, the true cause sat atop my head: I had forgotten to take off my hat.
Continuing forward, I saw a series of hooks mounted to the tile wall near the entrance to the shower. The floor was wet, a small pool gathered about one of the drains. There were no stalls or partitions, just one common room with all the showerheads jutting out with a fierce, cold formality, such as in a hospital ward or a torture chamber.
I placed my hat upon one of the hooks, and turning my eyes to the floor, I removed the towel and hung it up also.
Naked, I stepped across the threshold into the vacant communal shower. The tiled walls were the color of peach pulp, and the dark floor glinted like the raw side of a kiwi’s skin. I selected a spot in the corner, moving somewhat slowly and warily, as though I were afraid to make any noise—but the water exploded out of the showerhead, the sound amplified by the starkness of the room.
I showered facing the wall. Even though I dispensed a long pink coil of shampoo into my palm and lathered myself all over, I felt as though I couldn’t get completely clean. A thin film of grime coated my skin. Perhaps some contaminant lurked in the public water—or perhaps it was just in my head. After all, a long time seemed to have passed since I’d last bathed, and in the interval, random forces had evidently conspired to defile me. By a volition other than my own, I had fallen on my back in a slushy street, been chased by dogs, sweated beneath my clothes, put vintage hand-me-downs over my clammy body, suffered through a police investigation, dined in disguise with Vanessa Somerset, followed a perverted creature back to its den, and escaped only by locking it out on a cold balcony. And then I had wandered the nighttime, all the while forsaken, miserable, and homeless. Despite finally having the opportunity to run away, I had continued to linger in the city. Rather than flee to a bus station and keep on traveling until I was safe from everything that threatened me, I had roamed the streets like some lost or abandoned pet, some slush-bellied mongrel. In an all-night diner, I had taken a long time eating a potato pancake. Afterwards, brandishing my identification card, I’d entered the college library, stowed myself inside a cubicle, and fallen asleep atop a musty book. Although I’d found some relief in my dreams and allowed myself to play in the garden of my memory—where I could nurture my private flowers and pluck my weeds—I wasn’t aware at the time, or perhaps I simply lacked the comfortable distance from which to speculate, how this gesture of mental retreat was merely the precursor to a more definitive action: my final escape.
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.
Even though the social worker’s dreadful office above the wig shop was nearby Crowley’s pair of stores, I decided to visit Vanessa at that very moment, while I still had the nerve. Rather than spend more money on a new outfit, I would go as I was. Once I got there, I could put on my own clothes: the slacks, the light gray button-down shirt, the sports jacket, and the charcoal colored overcoat.
Thus, around noon on a bitter cold Wednesday in December, I took the sort of courageous action that I supposed would have been respected by the joyriding, helmet-less black man on the motorcycle. By the time I got near the bottom of my coffee, I was half-hoping to see him burst thunderously out of a side street and, with his front wheel skimming along the pavement and spewing slush in all directions, race out of sight and sound, like some indefatigable hero from Camelot to cowboy, riding ever and so long into the dustless, meridian farewell.
With my hat slanted across my brow, a stick of deodorant in one pocket, some new underwear in the other, and a paper coffee cup in hand, I set out to encounter a new life. I was headed toward Crowley’s, and if a pair of dogs barked at me this time, I was ready to bark back at them. Cars parked along the street were still covered in a layer of snow from the previous night, snow capped the railings and window ledges, and out of the mouths of gutters snaked tendrils of ice.
Although I ordinarily lack both pluck and resolve, I sensed that Vanessa Somerset was having a strange influence over me, as if the warm glow of last night’s kiss hadn’t faded just yet—even though, somewhere in the back of my mind, I dimly feared that it eventually would, and then the timid toad in me would reemerge and leap back into its cesspool. But meanwhile, I needed to plod on because I imagined that if I could keep plodding and allow the momentum of this newly found masculinity to carry me forward, then I might be able to break out of my prolonged moratorium in adolescence and, thus, finally mature into another stage of life, not just on a warm, cozier level, but as a full-blown adult.
Of course, this wasn’t the first time I had these thoughts; in fact, on the very day I had followed my landlord down the corridor and watched him knock two times, hard, on Claudia Jones’s door, I had told myself that all I needed was packed in my single suitcase and that my new apartment was going to be my new chance at life. I was going to set my sails toward a western exile, like some lone seaman aboard his meager skiff, and if neither a mermaid, a fish, a seabird, nor a barnacle would give me a hand, I’d man my rod alone, tend my sails, and without regrets, attempt to gaff whatever might suit my pleasure. However, before I even had enough time to plot my course, let alone push off from the dock, the boy had slimed his way into my apartment, staining my couch and spewing and slathering himself upon my bathroom floor.
Even so, I wasn’t disheartened by my awareness that the vitality that now motivated me was, in fact, closely fashioned after similar episodes in my life. I was running away and starting over, just as I had done before, but simple logic dictated that hope needed to repeat itself for at least one last time in order for the final rebirth to have a permanent existence. Seeing Crowley’s awning up ahead, I continued forward, imagining for an instant that if I were to look back, I’d behold a sidewalk strewn with a series of miscarriages and the aborted carcasses of my past.
When I came closer to the pair of side-by-side doors, with the myriad of stickers on the glass, I began to feel a greater intimacy with Vanessa, for she also seemed to be a person who had failed to progress and had been living trapped in a single moment for fifteen years. As I reached my hand out for the door, I suddenly realized that maybe part of the legal settlement of her divorce had kept her ex-husband nearby, in the other half of Crowley’s, where he could nurse his affection for popular music and watch over his ex-wife. Just as it had taken her a long time to admit that her marriage had been stifling the best parts of herself, maybe she was now prepared to have a similar revelation about the clothing store—and another drastic escape was possibly at hand.
I stepped into the store’s warmth and its odor of incense, which rescued me from the cold and seemed to welcome me as well. This time the couch was empty, and the music was turned so low that it was just a whispering sound in the background. I moved past the racks of clothes and stepped up to the counter. Yesterday’s trash was still in the wicker basket, my folded receipt still on top. I leaned across the counter and tossed in my empty coffee cup.
When I turned, Vanessa was standing in the archway to the backroom. The book I had given her was closed upon her finger. In her other hand, she held her black-rimmed glasses, and smiling, she pointed at me with the arm of her glasses.
“I was just thinking about you,” she said.
She came toward me and opened the book upon the counter.
“I read this paragraph a couple of times,” she said, pressing the book flat with the heel of her palm.
“What’s that?” I asked, looking to where her finger now guided me to the lines. She’d apparently read a good portion of the book, and thoughtfully, because many pages were earmarked.
Recognizing the passage at once, I said, “He’s watching her in the water.”
“Yeah, but what’s she doing in the water? At first, I thought she was going to bathe or swim, but she’s got her clothes on.”
“She’s going to the bathroom,” I said.
Vanessa tapped me on the shoulder with the back of her hand.
“That’s what I thought,” she said. “But he’s a stupid kid. He acts like he’s watching some type of miracle.”
“It inspires him to write a poem,” I said.
“There’s nothing inspirational about that.”
Vanessa was looking steadily at me, as though she were fully willing to absorb whatever I said.
“Remember he recently decided not to be a priest,” I explained, looking back at the book. “And he’s given up on God, so when he sees something very earthy, very bodily, he’s moved by it. It’s the sort of thing that Christianity ignores.”
“I’ve got to think about it.” She lifted the book close to her face. “But right now, I’m not buying it. If he was a gentleman, he would’ve given her some privacy. Poor girl.” Vanessa slid her finger halfway down the page and read aloud. “‘Long, long she suffered his gaze.’ What a jerk. Let her pee in peace.”
She abruptly closed the book, put it on the counter, and pushed it beside the cash register.
“To me, he doesn’t understand girls,” she added.
“I think you’re right,” I said, which made Vanessa smile.
Just then the door opened, and a young woman in a ski jacket entered the store. Her cheeks were red from the cold, and she briskly wiped her boots on the front mat.
“Hi,” she said. “Tell me you got a baby doll dress.”
“I think I might,” Vanessa replied, stepping away from me.
“From the sixties?”
“Let’s look.”
Vanessa led the young woman over to a rack of clothes where they began inspecting one garment after another. All the while, Vanessa addressed the young woman more as a friend than as a customer. Evidently, one of the woman’s co-workers was having a Christmas party, and everyone in her department was invited. But rather than have a traditional party, the co-worker wanted to throw a retro-bash. There were going to be lava lamps and mood rings and lots of Janis Joplin and Bob Dylan. The whole time the young woman spoke, Vanessa smiled, as though she were also going to the party. Occasionally, she glanced over to me, but to show her that I was comfortable waiting, I took the book and went and sat on the low brown couch, which I now realized lacked legs. I rested my shin upon my opposite knee and looked down at the book opened upon my raised thigh, yet I didn’t read anything. Vanessa herself seemed exceedingly kind. The attention she gave to the young woman—from helping her off with her ski jacket to listening to her story and showing her various articles—made Vanessa appear miraculous to me. Today, I was able to see her more clearly; the bulky Moravian sweatshirt had been replaced by more elegant clothes. A pair of gray slacks, perhaps soft cotton, elongated the length of her legs and flared slightly above her black shoes, and her simple top was also black, with its neck scooped low and its sleeves stopping short of her wrists; it clung close to her lean body, seeming to broaden her shoulders and flatten her stomach, leaving no confusion about her breasts, which were mild swells, barely more than just two conspicuous nipples. And her blonde hair, which had once been concealed by the hood of her sweatshirt, now trailed down between the points of her shoulder blades. Every time she smiled, I was gently thrilled, for her mouth appeared more sensual, glistening from a touch of lip-gloss.
Just as I had considered preparing myself for her, she’d obviously wanted to look good for me.
Eventually, the young woman took several items into the bathroom in the backroom, and Vanessa stood in the archway and waited.
“Isn’t she cute?”
“Yes,” I answered, even though the woman had round, pasty cheeks with red splotches on them.
“I bet she takes the green one. It will go with her eyes,” Vanessa said, looking off into the backroom. After a moment, she turned toward me and asked, “Don’t you have to work today?”
“I set my own schedule,” I said, aware that this was the first time she’d expressed an interest in what I did to support myself. “I’m on leave from the college to do research for a book.”
“You work for a college?” she asked. “That seems like you. My exhas a lot of school, but he never went far enough.” She shrugged and smiled. “Thus, no horse clinic.”
“It’s hard,” I said, and seeing an opportunity to plant a seed in her head, I added, “But I’m not tied to the college. I can work from anywhere I want.”
“Not me,” she said and then disappeared into the backroom to answer her customer’s call for assistance.
True to Vanessa’s prediction, the young woman ended up purchasing the green dress, in addition to a pair of high white boots and a matching scarf. At the register, the young woman, apparently inspired by the paraphernalia on display in back, told an anecdote about a time in high school when someone had punctured a hole in the side of an empty beer can and created a make-shift marijuana bowl.
“Necessity is a mother,” Vanessa said.
“Lucky his pot was in plastic because he’d dropped it in the toilet along with his papers.”
“Poor kid,” Vanessa said.
“You’re about half right.” The young woman laughed. “He was my boyfriend at the time.”
“Poor girl,” Vanessa corrected and patted the young woman’s shoulder.
“I’m recovered.”
The young woman was still laughing when she finally exited the store, and Vanessa upgraded her from cute to adorable.
She leaned in the archway again.
“You came earlier than I expected,” she said. “I’d just sent my niece to the drycleaners with your clothes. I wanted to surprise you.”
“Thank you,” I said. “That’s nice of you.”
Vanessa bent down and inspected my head.
“It looks worse than yesterday.”
“It hurts less,” I said.
“I don’t know when your clothes will be ready. They said sometime today, but it’ll probably be at least a couple of hours.” She straightened up and returned to her spot in the archway. She looked at me for a moment without saying anything, which made me conscious of being in the outfit she had sold me the day before.
Lacking an adequate explanation, I rose awkwardly to my feet.
“I need to thank your niece,” I said. “I suppose I can pick up my clothes myself.”
“Sure.” Vanessa nodded. “But you need to wait for Connie to come back with your stub.”
“No problem.” I briefly looked back down at the couch, not quite certain if she intended for me to take a seat again.
With a slight smirk upon her glistening lips, Vanessa watched me, as though my momentary confusion amused her.
“Or you could come back at closing time,” she said, rescuing me.
“Sure,” I said, nodding now myself, wondering whether this was my signal to leave or if I was supposed to stay a little longer. After all, we’d hardly talked.
But she rescued me again.
“My niece and her boyfriend are having dinner at my place tonight, if you want to join us. I have a big piece of salmon in the refrigerator that I need to cook. I’d planned on cooking it last night,” she said, and her allusion to our impromptu date put a suggestive smile on her face.
“Sure,” I said again, still nodding.
Despite my earlier confidence, I felt myself growing flushed and ready to stammer, but Vanessa seemed to ease me gently out the door by placing me in charge of picking up some wine and warning me not to work too hard on my book today. Also, she advised me that Connie preferred something sweet, such as a white zinfandel or a blush.
“She’s old enough to drink?” I asked.
“If she’s old enough to have a boyfriend,” Vanessa replied, and this casual euphemism for her niece’s sexual maturity lingered in my mind as I headed back outside along the sidewalk. Although I had no precise destination, I avoided going anywhere near the social worker’s dreadful office. As long as I remained as unobserved as possible, the exact details of that afternoon didn’t matter. I ate lunch, which was two more potato pancakes and another cup of coffee, wandered briefly about the regal busts and sculptures of a Rodin exhibit, checked the timetables for my imminent departure, and, of course, purchased several bottles of wine. Meanwhile, dark clouds grew denser over the city, and big snowflakes, like the ashes of a burnt building, began to blow through the streets. As twilight gave way to evening, and the wind increased, swirling gusts of snow became visible from streetlight to streetlight. Higher up, however, above the tops of buildings, the sky was utter darkness, devoid of both snow and motion. I plunged forward, on route back to Crowley’s store. Only now did I wish for a little more time, thinking that perhaps a brief visit to a bar for just one quick drink would give me another boost of confidence. But I kept walking. Although I’d had several hours to contemplate my own motivation—let alone to prepare an explanation for where I’d spent the previous night and why I hadn’t changed clothes—I had no idea what I was doing. All I knew was that somewhere between the tilapia in a Thai restaurant and the salmon in her refrigerator, I’d decided to take a risk on Vanessa Somerset. Yet, in that interval, none of my actions appeared to be the result of careful contemplation or a full assessment of the possible consequences. In short, I was simply responding. Vanessa had asked me on a second date, and I obeyed without question, like a dog catching wind of a distant scent and trotting after it.
By the time I returned, the interior of Crowley’s music store was dark, and a metal gate obstructed its glass door. Vanessa’s side was also closed, for only the backroom was lighted. Hugging the brown bag full of wine bottles, I hurriedly entered, escaping the cold.
Connie’s boyfriend was sitting on the counter, while Connie faced him, standing between his open legs.
“You’re back,” she said happily.
“Hello,” I said, and imitating the manners of the young woman with the red cheeks, I briskly wiped my feet on the mat.
The boyfriend mutely greeted me with a nod.
“Hold on,” Connie instructed me. Then, as sprightly as a child, she sprung away from the counter and disappeared into the headshop.
Left alone with the boyfriend, I nodded back at him, flashed a brief smile, and absently began to look around.
Although I could hear Vanessa and Connie talking in the other room, I couldn’t completely discern their words above the music, the slow, aching procession of a single plaintive guitar.
I sensed that the boyfriend still had his eyes on me. When I ventured a glance at him, he finally spoke:
“So you’re the fourth wheel tonight.”
“I suppose.”
He scratched under his chin with one lazy finger. Even though he continued to look at me, he didn’t seem as if he had anything else to say.
I wiped my feet again before stepping forward between the motionless racks of shadowy clothes. I intended to poke my head into the backroom, not simply to say hello to Vanessa but also to rescue myself from the boyfriend’s discomfiting lassitude. But Connie reappeared in the archway. She now had a white knit ski-cap atop her head. She was proudly holding aloft a broad black bag that was the length of her entire body.
“What did you get me?” she asked, referring to the paper bag in my arms.
“White zinfandel and blush.”
“Two for me.” She turned toward her boyfriend and nodded her head, smiling, as though I’d just impressed her.
“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.
Connie and her boyfriend were ensconced in their corner of the couch, her forearm resting along his thigh and her head against his shoulder.
I sat upright at the other end, with my knees butting against the coffee table.
Meanwhile, the music had stopped, and Vanessa was squatting in front of the stereo system. In the momentary silence, we heard the wind blow hard against the window. Vanessa looked back over her shoulder and smiled.
“Maybe we’ll get snowbound,” she said.
Once again, my ineptitude revealed itself, for rather than welcome the suggestion of being trapped together and perhaps finding some soft nook in which to snuggle the night away, I felt the urge to leave before it got too late.
“I have to go,” I flatly stated.
“Oh,” Vanessa said, straightening up, her smile now replaced by a mixture of subdued concern and curiosity.
“Not yet,” I said quickly, bumbling. “I just—”
“Well, drink your wine.” She turned back toward the stereo, and as the music resumed, she bent down to sniff one of the candles.
Connie nestled more fully into her boyfriend, so her elbow slipped from his thigh, down onto the couch cushion between his legs, and her arm rested along his crotch.
I looked away. On the end table beside me leaned a solitary picture frame, in which a plump toddler, dressed in pink, was sitting upright on a white carpet. She had a round head, and her small, dark eyes were pinched into slits between her fleshy brow and her round, dimpled cheeks. Despite the child’s giddy expression, she seemed to possess an underlying vacancy, as if at any moment her eyes could become unmoored and drift about in their sockets.
“That’s my angel,” Vanessa said, sitting beside me on the couch.
“She looks happy,” I said.
“Yeah,” Vanessa said, the word seeming to slide out of her, as though she were easing herself into a place as comfortable as a warm bath. “She always knew how to cheer me up. She was a happy baby.”
Rather than respond, I looked at the picture again and attempted to smile at it, as if I could appreciate Vanessa’s memory of the child. Vanessa’s use of the past tense explained to me what I didn’t need to ask.
After a moment, she rescued me again from awkwardness by breaking the silence with a simple explanation: “She had Down’s.”
“What’s her name?” I asked.
“Janis.”
“That’s a pretty name.”
“That was your mom’s name too,” Connie said.
Vanessa nodded. She lifted my drink from the coffee table and handed it to me.
“Let’s put in a movie,” the boyfriend then suggested, which was the first thing he’d said that I actually liked, for talking about the dead child made me uncomfortable. He added, “We still got that rental from the other night.”
Vanessa was looking at me, trying to read my expression. Without turning toward the happy couple, she said, “You guys watch it.” She stood up, and holding my hand, she led me up from the couch.
“We don’t have to watch it,” Connie quickly stated.
“Don’t be silly,” Vanessa said.
The boyfriend leaned forward, forcing Connie to lift herself off of him, as he refilled their two wineglasses.
“You’re spending the night?” Vanessa asked him.
“I’m already snowbound.”
Escorting me toward the dining area, Vanessa spoke directly into my ear: “More like fogbound.”
“I heard that,” he said, and his tone suggested that he was neither offended nor amused, but, as always, simply unmoved.
Vanessa’s mouth was at my ear again, her words rolling velvety and warm from her glistening lips: “The next time I’ll whisper.”
While we sat at the dining room table, with our own bottle of wine between us, the movie sounded in the background and the happy couple stretched themselves out together on the couch, washed in the soft blue light from the television screen, their bodies concealed beneath an afghan. Vanessa began telling me a story about how when she was a little girl her father had taken her to see the birth of a pony. Despite the gore, she had been giddy with excitement and thrilled by the beauty of the event. I nodded, watching her as she spoke, her lips shaping the words, her jaw moving, and the ligaments of her bare throat, ever so easy, stretching and relaxing with the sound of her voice. I listened somewhat dreamily—amid the shifting radiance cast by the television screen and the candlelight swaying in the undulant gloom—to some sensuous strand of Vanessa’s vitality lolling me to a lower rhythm of life.
Even after her voice ceased and her mouth settled into a mildly coquettish grin, I continued to watch her.
“Tell me something personal,” she said. “I just told you about my father.”
“He seems like a good man,” I said.
Vanessa smiled at my comment. “Now you,” she persisted.
“My father ruined himself with discontent,” I said. “So I don’t really have any good stories about him.”
“Then tell me a bad one,” she said sincerely, almost as if she were asking permission to collect me in her arms and protect me.
“From his phone bill,” I began, looking briefly at the wineglass, then back up to her waiting gaze, “I learned that out of the blue he called a few people he’d gone to school with or worked with, and even a couple of his old girl friends, and he just told them all that he was sorry. For what, I don’t know exactly. He apologized for things most of these people had forgotten about. Also, he sold all the tools and equipment in the garage in order to pay off his credit card debt. Sometime around dawn, because he’d set his alarm clock to get up really early, he spread a bunch of cardboard on the kitchen floor, so he wouldn’t make a mess, and he lay down and shot himself in the head—but it took him quite a few days to die. In the meantime, he was a crippled madman, always at the heightened pitch of terror. That’s my worst story.”
Vanessa reached across the table to hold my hand.
“I’m sorry I made you tell me that,” she said.
“It’s okay.”
“You don’t think I’m rude?”
“No.”
“I’ve never met anyone without at least one sad story to tell. It’s good to remember that. It keeps you more patient and kind, I think.”
“You’re very kind,” I said.
Vanessa’s fingers tightened upon my hand.
“Finish your wine, and I’ll take you home.” She turned in her seat to glance back into the living room. “Besides, I think they’d be happy to get some privacy.”
“I feel bad about having you drive me. I can walk. It’s not far,” I said because I had no intention of going back to my apartment, despite my father’s letter and the possibility that my mother had sent me a present in the mail. I had already checked the train schedule and planned my escape route, figuring that I could sleep throughout the night as I traveled.
“You can’t walk in this weather,” Vanessa said.
“I feel bad about you driving,” I said again, not to mention that my apartment was in the wrong direction.
“I can’t blame you for the snow. It’s been a bad season.”
I nodded, deciding not to refuse her offer a third time. I’d just have a longer walk. As we drank our wine, I knew that there was no way I could ask this woman to come with me. After all, we had just met, and she was still trying to get to know me. Nevertheless, for two consecutive nights, in the middle of the week in a cold December, Vanessa Somerset was the closest I’d ever come to a real relationship. That’s my best story.
“We talked about too many sad things tonight,” she said. “Next time, we’ll focus on the positive stuff.”
“Sounds like a good plan.”
She swallowed the last of her wine and got to her feet. Together, we put on our shoes and coats and then bid the happy couple goodbye. Seeing Connie sprawled atop her boyfriend, I now understood that he had been right: She would crack before the cock crowed.
So Vanessa and I left her apartment, abandoning the warm gurgle of her radiators; the crisp delicacy of glass and polished wood; the thin, gray-black streams of smoke twisting out of the gutted hulls of vanilla candles; the lingering smell of garlic slices over the baked pink fish; the recumbent lovers on the couch; the senseless, exuberant chatter emitted from the television speakers; and further on, in a darker room, the high, plump mattress, the clean, white linen, and the nighttime promise of comfort and sleep.
But none of these details mattered: our descent down the dingy staircase; the rush of wintry weather at the opening of the front door; the brisk, lighthearted sound that burred from Vanessa’s lips; her arm slipping through mine, upon the first snowy step; her shoulder leaning against me as we crossed the street; and her separation from me in order to clear the back window with a swipe of her forearm, before she scrambled into the car.
And then, as the engine turned and the windshield wipers arced through the snow, she spoke again: “Next time, I’ll make you tell me a good story, so get prepared. Start planning ahead.”
“Okay,” I said.
Slowly rolling forward, the car’s tires crunched over the fresh snow, while the falling flakes eased silently through the beams of the headlights.
“But you know what they say,” Vanessa said. “Whatever doesn’t kill us only makes us stronger.”
“And the opposite?” I asked.
“What’s the opposite?” She glanced at me, smiling, as though she anticipated a joke.
“Whatever doesn’t sustain us only makes us weaker.”
“That sounds reasonable.” She laughed, perhaps because she had been ready to laugh.
As she slowed the car to a stop at a traffic light, the loose wine bottle rolled along the back floorboard, bumping against the bottom of Vanessa’s seat.
“What’s that?” she asked, so I reached between our seats and found the bottle, which made her as happy as if I’d just pulled a rabbit out of a hat.
“Imagine that,” she said. “That’s yours. You take it home.”
“You can have it. I bought it for you. It’s the Santa Margherita.”
Looking at me, Vanessa pushed up her glasses with her thumb.
“And gnomes and elves steal her eggs,” she said. “What made her believe that?”
“Superstition.”
“I think you drank too much wine.” She turned her head back toward the road as the car started forward again. Then nodding, she added, “Me too.”
When she approached my narrow street, she announced the turn, by saying, “Left turn.”
I looked out the window at the sidewalk that I’d traversed numerous times and had hoped never to traverse again, at the faces of buildings—some of their windows lighted, some dark, some decorated in the holiday spirit with Christmas trees blinking behind the panes—then at a street light reaching its arm above the road, at the falling snow passing through its dim yellow glow, and finally, at last, at the alley beside my building into which the snow coated strip faded from silver to blue into the dark.
“We’re here,” Vanessa said.
“Yes,” I nodded, feeling a portion of my vitality shrivel up a little, just at the sight of my old home. I wanted her to drive us away.
As promptly as always, my landlord had already cleared off the sidewalk and steps.
“Guess what I just realized,” Vanessa said, killing the headlights and leaning her left forearm on the steering wheel. “I’ve got your hat at my place.”
But I was distracted by the world outside my window as a tinge of apprehension tightened my nerves.
“I’ll keep it for you,” she added. “I won’t sell it.”
Her expression became more serious, and her gloved hand slowly rose and arrested itself in the air, as if she’d intended to touch my face.
“I hate that bruise,” she said. “I bet I could make it look better with a little makeup.”
I tapped one finger on the glass. “It was those steps.”
“Enough falling down. That’s my new rule for you.” She smiled at me, her raised hand now lowering to my arm. “I hope you enjoyed coming over. I’m sorry if Connie is such a chatterbox.”
“She was fine.”
“I’m not much of a fan of her boyfriend sleeping over all of the time. I know her mother wouldn’t like it. Besides, the walls are pretty thin.”
I nodded, remembering the bawdy pun of Connie cracking before the cock crowed.
Vanessa removed her hand from my arm. She turned her eyes away from my face and for a moment fixed them on the dashboard.
“Sometimes I feel like I’m intruding in my own home. I got to start making some rules. For one, nothing in the bathroom or on the couch.”
“That’s not too bad,” I said. “I always feel like an intruder.”
She brightened a little and looked at me again, as though I’d intended my comment to amuse her.
“I thought you were going to tell me that they’re young and I ought to expect it,” she said.
“No,” I said.
“Well, you’re not an intruder,” she said. “You seem very connected.”
Even though I nodded, I felt an urge to disabuse her of her misconception. Yet we fell silent for an instant, suspended and paused, with her eyes searching my face. She touched my arm again.
“It’s kind of stupid to talk in the car,” she said. “We’ll freeze. It’s too cold to sit here.”
“I agree with you,” I responded, mildly surprised by Vanessa’s gentle but abrupt turn in the conversation. However, I wasn’t offended. Perhaps parting with her now would have been for the best. I had a long walk ahead of me. But her next action revealed to me that what she’d implied was far different from what I’d heard: Rather than bid me goodbye for the evening, she turned off the engine and opened her door. Evidently, I’d just invited her into my apartment.
“Don’t forget your wine,” she said.
And while my brain suddenly scrambled in a panic to reclaim and correct the previous moment, I found myself getting out into the snow and watching Vanessa walk around the front of the car and step up onto the sidewalk, where I was standing and, as she undoubtedly assumed, waiting for her. Once again, she slipped her arm under mine, so I could escort her. I can’t say which one of us shut my car door, but it shook loose a gray, slushy clump from the wheel-well, and as a sheet of snow began to creep from the roof onto the windshield, I felt Vanessa tug me gently into motion by the forearm.
“I’ll protect you on the stairs,” she said.
“Thank you,” I replied, though my mind was now rushing ahead of us, past the mail gathered on the floor, then into the corridor with the dust smoldering on the radiators, and farther ahead, into my apartment, where unknown men on official business had recently poked and rummaged. I was afraid not only of what we might find but also of what monster might be waiting for us.
Yet I managed my keys well enough to let us into the building, and as we moved through the hall, Vanessa was saying something about not interrupting the young lovers, and then laughing about how I’d just left my clothes in her car; I was always forgetting my things. Approaching my apartment door, I was strangely eager about hurrying inside, in fear of lingering vulnerably in the hall. But Vanessa didn’t seem to notice my agitation, for she was still laughing as my door swung open, and the part of my mind that had rushed ahead and feverishly searched all the rooms to make sure everything was in order, now sped back around to greet us at the door.
When I turned on the light, nothing scurried away to hide or leaped out to bludgeon me.
In fact, despite the decades that had seemed to elapse since the previous day, everything appeared unchanged.
Even so, I remained alert with apprehension. I crept forward, slowly surveying the items in the room.
Although Vanessa continued to talk happily, her voice sounded thin and meaningless. I was aware of her stepping around me and slipping off her coat, her movements as swift and nonchalant as always, yet now like a shadow skirting past my shoulder.
She was asking me something, and I wanted to turn and give her my attention, but my eyes were still searching for some sign that my home had been investigated.
“Sure,” I responded because Vanessa wanted a bottle opener.
As I started toward the kitchen, I realized—calmly, almost as a matter-of-fact—that the little illuminated clock on the VCR was nearly three hours behind. Then, in the kitchen, I noticed that the teapot was on the front burner of the stove, rather than the back right one, and all the chairs were pushed in around the table.
When I returned to the main room, Vanessa was sitting on the couch, peeling the seal off of the bottle top.
“You have a guy’s apartment,” she said.
I set two glasses on the coffee table and handed her the opener.
Looking briefly around, she added, “It could use a female’s touch.”
“I’ve got no style,” I confessed, which made her smile, as though I were flirting with her.
“Your ex- didn’t leave anything behind.”
“I cleaned out every trace of her,” I said.
As she held the bottle in her lap and twisted the corkscrew, she kept her head up and her eyes on me, her black-rimmed glasses perched midway down her nose. The cork popped free. Still without looking at her hands, she set down the bottle opener, with the cork impaled upon it, and picked up a glass.
“You going to take off your coat?” she asked.
I turned aside and began to unfasten the buttons, conscious of her gaze. Rather than hang up my overcoat, I draped it over the back of a chair, where Vanessa had deposited her things.
Just then, I noticed that although my monitor and all my computer accessories remained on the desk against the wall, the computer itself was missing.
“Are you okay?” she asked.
“Yes,” I said, my voice faltering a little. “I’m just a bit anxious about moving out of here.”
“Yeah, I remember you mentioning that. Here.” She held up a glass of wine. “You’re not moving tonight. Try to relax,” she added, sliding over to make room for me.
“I’d like to go tonight,” I said, sitting down.
“Well, don’t run away on me. Let me know where you go.”
“Would you come with me?” I abruptly asked.
“I might visit you as long as you don’t move too far away.” She laughed and sipped her wine.
“Do you like your clothing store?”
“I like that it’s mine. Besides, I’ve got to do something.”
She shifted slightly, moving herself closer to me.
“I think a person needs to make a major change occasionally,” I said.
“Me too.”
Even though I discerned something mildly insipid and sluggish in her smile, I felt an urge to persuade her to flee with me. I suspected that she might have been using the wine—both this night and night before—to take the edge off the awkwardness. Perhaps in the future, if she felt more comfortable with me, she would drink less.
“Sometimes, a person needs to lift herself up and head in a new direction,” I ventured. “Otherwise, you might find yourself caught in a rut or repeating the same mistakes over again.”
“Absolutely,” she said, eager to nod, her knee now bumping against my leg. “You can’t live life without an occasional risk.”
“That’s what I’m doing now,” I said, referring to my imminent flight from the city and all the horrors it contained. But, of course, she didn’t know about my problems, so she most likely assumed that I was talking about our budding relationship, which, for her, was the occasional risk.
“That’s good,” she said.
Her knee steadily touched my thigh.
“But you always make the same mistakes,” she said. “You think that you’re heading in the opposite direction, but you end up in the same pile of shit that you just left behind.” As I watched her nod her head in agreement with her own observation, I imagined that she was remembering some particular occurrence in her own life.
“Not always,” I said.
“Well, you’ve got to hope.”
“So, risks are bad?” I asked.
“No, you’ve got to take them.” She slid closer and leaned against my arm.
We slipped into a moment of silence and drank our wine. While I was somewhat alarmed by Vanessa’s unexpected intimacy, she simply seemed to be relaxing against me, with her head resting upon my shoulder. After a while, I thought she might fall asleep. From my seat on the couch, I began to inspect my apartment. The remote control was on top of the television, instead of beside the couch where I ordinarily kept it. Nothing else seemed disturbed, even though I suspected that all my drawers and cabinets had been opened. I wondered about the nightstand that had once carefully concealed behind its back panel, in a secret crevice, my character study and the bizarre photographs of W. McTeal exposing his hard, bare, rotund belly and his sleepy penis, in attitudes that often appeared confused or indifferent, and in pregnant postures mostly of full-frontal birth or penetrable submission, knees on the mattress and ass to the camera. But I had burned everything, so even if the investigators had discovered my hiding place, they could’ve scarcely guessed what it’d once housed.
Several paces from the front door, the religious poem “Footprints” was still framed upon the wall, with my father’s letter safely inside.
From my seat, I quietly searched everything a second time
As Vanessa breathed, I felt her body gently press against me and then ease, press and ease, her rhythm so constant and soothing that I imagined myself—perhaps somewhere in the future, in a different city, in a different room, and on a different couch—being able to fall asleep next to her. Just as I began to wonder if she were awake, she raised her glass to her lips.
In the silence, I could hear the sounds of the building. The floor overhead creaked beneath someone’s footsteps, a television played through the wall, and the wind gathering in the alley outside my window found its passage obstructed and, thus, moaned its way up the walls, into the cracks and hollows of the stonework. But these details didn’t matter.
Vanessa reached forward to get the wine bottle from the coffee table and refill our glasses. She then settled against me again.
As the silence ensued, I sensed it beginning to change, so it was no longer just silence—but something like peace. And for the first time in my adult life, I had a momentary glimmer of what it meant to be ordinary. For so many years, the burden of anxiety, relentless introspection, and disengagement from the world had governed my behavior and rendered me a social cripple. But now, next to Vanessa, I saw the possibility of ease and comfort. The question, of course, was could I ever light vanilla candles on my own or take a long bath or smoke a cigar on a summer night, without feeling self-conscious, as though I were being watched and judged, with the verdict always coming back the same: You are not permitted to enjoy simple pleasures because your solitude is your condemnation, and your own body is the source of your discomfort, and, thus, you are sentenced to loneliness and absurdity; until the day you die, your every attempt at satisfaction, never mind love, will only heap upon you further reasons for guilt and shame.
But now, Vanessa Somerset was quietly leaning against me, without any urgency, awkwardness, or compulsion to speak. Outside, the snow could smother all the parked cars in high drifts and bury my narrow street, and the night could extend itself hour by hour. Meanwhile, Vanessa wouldn’t care. She was a grown woman, comfortable with herself and responsible for her choices. Remembering her little Janis in the picture frame, I tried to imagine the trials and sorrows that Vanessa had endured. She was a strong, tender woman. Her divorce now presented itself in a new light, for the death of the child, let alone its infirmities, had surely strained the marriage. For both her and her husband, it must have been difficult to keep on loving in the wake of lost hopes and under the grim constraints of crippled life.
Sip by sip, we drank our wine, and now that my attention was no longer diverted by looking for signs of the investigation, I grew more conscious of the living creature beside me. The top of her head touched my neck, and her blonde hair gave off a faint trace of coconut. Her right arm was caught between our bodies; the fingertips of her trapped hand played gently, though almost immobile, upon my thigh. In her other hand, she held the wineglass near her chest. Her slender forearm, lightly downed, appeared out of the black sleeve; a blue vein forked upon the back of her hand and faded at the ridge of her knuckles. Below the hollow of her throat, where the low collar of her top bordered her flesh, was a thin white line, slightly sunken, in her skin, apparently an old scar.
“What’s this?” I asked, and I saw my hand rising above the swell of her breast and my index finger extending toward the mark.
Vanessa briefly rubbed the spot with her thumb.
“I was canoeing with my brother in a lake. When we came back to the dock, he got out first. He took both of the oars, and for a joke, he gave the canoe a shove. I remember his foot coming up and pushing the side of the canoe. I got scared. I don’t know why. I guess I thought it was a mean thing to do, because he was standing there and laughing when I started to drift away from the dock. So I jumped out.”
Vanessa rubbed her chest again.
“Or I fell out. The metal point of the canoe got me here.”
“Was it bad?” I asked.
“He wouldn’t sit with me on the school bus either,” she added, and it took me a moment to see the connection between her thoughts.
Vanessa pulled her legs up onto the couch, her bent knees hanging over the edge, the weight of her body resting more fully against me, and the fingers of her trapped hand now holding onto my thigh.
While her body appeared to shed every hint of tension and to dissolve itself further into comfort, I felt my muscles tighten, so I was sitting bolt upright and rigid, with my blood—heated by her soft proximity—starting to rush and pulse in my every extremity. Even though she must have noticed my excitement, she remained unfazed, as though she were already long acquainted with the wild palpitations of my heart.
After she finished her wine, she held the glass beneath her chin.
Looking down over her forehead, I could see her dark lashes flick once and then rest for a while. Yet, from my position above her, I wasn’t certain if her eyes were shut, although I imagined that I saw a thin glimmer of one of her pupils reflected in the inner lens of her glasses.
While we sat wordlessly together, each passing moment did nothing to ease my nerves. Rather than become accustomed to her touch, rather than let go of my mind and allow myself to enjoy the intimacy, I felt my body grow more knotted and hard, as though the tenderness of this woman was causing a mass of calcified nubs to sprout up under my skin. And the more conscious I became, the less likely seemed the possibility of yielding.
She stirred, as if just to take one deeper breath, and when she resettled, with a soft exhale—I was able to feel, through the fabric of my shirt, the emerald stud of her earring pressed against my shoulder.
At last, I broke away by reaching for the wine bottle and pouring the remainder into our glasses.
“We’ve kicked it,” she said somewhat dreamily.
“That’s the last bottle.”
“Perhaps that’s for the best.” A contented, happy tone played through her words, even when she straightened up and added, “I’ve got to pee.”
At the moment, little did I know that these would be the last words I’d ever hear from Vanessa Somerset.
She set her glass on the coffee table, pushed herself up from the couch, and ran her hands down her thighs to smooth out her gray slacks.
I gestured to the short hall that led to the bathroom, and then I watched her as she walked away. She wobbled a little, not so much as if she were intoxicated, but as if she hadn’t used her legs for a very long time. In the darkened archway, she placed her palm on the wall and glanced into my bedroom, pausing for an instant, before stepping into the bathroom. The light suddenly exposed the hall, but then the door shut.
When I stood up, I felt wobbly myself. Looking vaguely at the VCR clock that was three hours behind, I tried to calculate how many glasses of wine I’d drunk. I carried our refuse to the kitchen sink, once again noting all the minor details that were out of place, from the teapot and the chairs to the remote control. But regardless of what the investigators found and how they wanted to use it against me, nothing really mattered now.
I sat down again and waited for Vanessa to return. Leaning my head back against the couch, I closed my eyes and listened for noises: the bathroom faucet spraying water into the sink, the toilet flushing, Vanessa’s body rejecting food and alcohol in a gush of regurgitation. But I heard none of these sounds.
Gliding my tongue over my teeth, I found a tiny sprig of parsley that had once adorned the salmon. With the tip of my tongue, I worked the parsley free and swallowed it.
I remembered that maybe a present from my mother was waiting for me in my mailbox; I could’ve surely used the money.
My mind wandered for a moment back to Vanessa as her absence stretched itself out longer than I would have expected. But let the woman take her time, I concluded.
I then tried to remember some thought I had earlier in the day, sometime before or after I’d encountered the two old men in the gym locker room—but my memory wasn’t working well, and so I was left with only an inexplicable desire for potato pancakes, though I’d eaten them earlier in the day and I wasn’t hungry in the least.
I couldn’t hear Vanessa, but I suspected that she was sick. I didn’t want to be responsible for her, and I even started to regret spending so much time with her—unless, of course, she’d end up running away with me and, thus, make all my risky efforts and tender moments worthwhile. She was a beautiful woman who treated me like a man, but I wasn’t certain how to handle her.
With my eyes closed, I saw her in the aisle of her clothing store as she stepped one foot onto the little chair and reached into the rack of hanging garments, her body long and slender and clean.
Despite her dead child, her divorce, and her fifteen-year moratorium, she remained cheerful and kind, believing that the brutish events of her own life were a general experience, and because no one was free from pain, everyone was entitled to be treated with patience. Unfortunately, I had trouble ascribing to Vanessa’s view of life, for most people tend to suffer their griefs by themselves, store up in their hearts a mound of private anguishes and petty gripes, and come to believe that they are alone in the world, with only their own thoughts and emotions to serve as faithful, lifelong companions. Convinced that they could never be truly known, that the complex weavings of their past experiences could never be adequately shared, and that the tiny associations that join one thought to the next in their minds could never be fully communicated—they find themselves ever disconnected, even to those they love the most. They go through life only partially revealed. Vanessa was being naïve. If heartache does anything, it grants people a special status in their own hearts, a personal perspective on reality that is shaped by a lifetime of scarring, with many of the wounds broadened and deepened by the imagination.
But maybe this was a point that Vanessa would’ve willingly conceded, and to which, all the same, she would have responded: Yes, be patient with people.
Eventually, I opened my eyes and got to my feet. A little groggy but still concerned, I shuffled myself around the couch and toward the darkened hall. The bathroom door was open, and the light inside was off. I briefly expected to find Vanessa sprawled out on the white, tiled floor. But even in the gloom, I could see that the room was empty. The floor mats were missing, which meant the investigators had taken more than just my computer. At that very moment, they were probably examining one of the light blue follicles under a microscope or else shaking my crumbs out of the mat. But none of this mattered.
My discovery of Vanessa’s absence was quick to awaken my mind. I abruptly turned around and looked back into the living room, thinking that she—or perhaps someone else—was now behind me. I took a cautious, creeping step to the edge of the hall, ventured my head out of the shadow, and scanned the room from left to right. Unless she was in the kitchen or crouched in some corner, she wasn’t there, although her coat was still draped over the chair.
Maybe, I thought, and as a new idea began to shape itself slowly in my mind, I found myself inching back the other way—but not to reexamine the barren bathroom floor or even the shower. Maybe, I thought again, but before the idea could expand any further, I saw its stark conclusion all at once. Vanessa Somerset lay face down, her body stretched to full length, upon my bed.
I stepped to the threshold, my every nerve piqued to attention, straining through the darkness and reaching the prone form of the woman, which didn’t seem to move, even though her breaths were steady and deep. One of her black boots rested against a leg of the bed, and while the other wasn’t anywhere in view, both heels of her black-stockinged feet pointed toward me. Her head, without the support of a pillow, was turned on its side, her face concealed by her hair. Her right arm clung close to her body, but the left stuck straight out across the mattress, the bedcovers pulled up around her fist, as though she’d been recently clawing at the bed.
“Vanessa,” I said, and finding her unresponsive, I said it several more times, the volume of my voice gradually rising from a whisper to the clear level of speech.
Fixed in the doorway, my body riveted by a mixture of alarm and bewilderment, I stood for several moments as my eyes, perhaps the only things in motion, probed the pale darkness.
At last, as if my words had just then reached Vanessa, she stirred, and with a sigh of deep comfort, she rolled onto her back, yanking half the bedcovers over top of herself, so nothing but a solitary hand remained exposed.
“Vanessa,” I said more loudly, hoping to penetrate her drunken slumber.
The mound, folded up in the covers, didn’t move. On the other side of the bed, the white sheet appeared smooth and undisturbed, as though the empty space was reserved for me.
But I remained paralyzed on the spot, even though I could have easily crawled into bed beside the woman, who might have expected, or even wanted, me to join her. She had kept her clothes on, so perhaps all she was looking for was a good night’s rest, and in her current condition, she lacked any reservation about sharing the bed.
However, I didn’t want to presume anything, so I retreated a step, thinking that I could sleep on the couch. In a gesture that I would like to believe was an act of courtesy, I took hold of the doorknob and carefully drew the door toward myself, without a single creak or squeal from the hinges. I left it slightly ajar, so that a person’s hand could hardly pass through the gap.
When I returned to the living room, my tension started to subside.
I looked down at the couch. On the bottom side of one of the cushions remained a dark-rimmed stain that no amount of scrubbing could fully remove. Remembering the boy again and all the horrors he’d suffered, I knew that the investigators wouldn’t cease until they’d satisfied their hunger for justice. The morning, I suspected, would bring them to my door, unless, of course, the bits and pieces of Claudia Jones—along with all the female flesh that was strewn across my virtual path on route to the gross woman, cached together in lurid heaps in the recesses of my computer—would instantly inflame the suspicions of the authorities and bring them pounding on my door at any moment, before the cock had a chance to crow.
I might have been imagining the worst, but then again, even if I could swear my innocence with relentless fervor and constancy, the law was in the hands of fallible men and women, who in their eagerness to settle a terrible crime might contort reason and pervert evidence in order to satisfy their outraged morality, at the expense of my name and freedom. I saw that a crisis was gathering itself around me, and if the woman in my bed wasn’t going to accompany me, then I was forced to leave her.
I would like to say that I simply slipped on my sports jacket and overcoat, knotted the strings of my shoes, and headed out into the wintry night—a fugitive at large but hopefully, in time, forgotten, a name blotted from the annals of humanity. I would like to say that the sleeping woman had a peaceful evening, and though mildly confused by my unexplained disappearance, she was able to resume her life and enjoy all the pleasures of friendship, fortune, and health. In fact, I would like to have never written a word, with no actions to vindicate and no conscience to relieve. But I have been honest thus far, and in the end, maybe none of this matters.
One last look around strengthened my impression that I was trespassing in another man’s home, and if its appearance revealed something of the nature of the man, then his existence was probably as stark, random, and drab as were his mismatched furnishings.
Buttoning my coat up to my chin, and wary of making any sound that would disturb the sleeping woman, I crossed the room toward my desk. The top drawer—which, despite living alone, I kept ritually locked—didn’t yield to my pull as I’d at first feared it would. I felt a moment of relief as I sought in my pocket for the small key on my keyring. Yet, after I opened the drawer, I dropped all of my keys inside, having no further need of them. Suddenly dazed and unthinking, I shut the drawer again. My dread was immediate because in addition to a few items I didn’t care about, the marble-covered notebook was missing; my thoughts in choppy verse had been discovered. The image of the black man’s bloated body pulled up before a large desk, a coffee mug near his meaty hand, and the notebook opened beneath a lamplight, made me cringe—not so much because I could see him angling me into the corners of some standard profile, fitting the pieces of me into his readymade portrait of a madman or pervert, but more so because I felt embarrassed, as though the blunt reality of his body and the humorless severity of his mind would brook no nonsense and deem my literary labors silly.
“Goodbye,” I whispered, barely above a breath, as I threw a final glance toward the short darkened hall that led to spoiled possibilities. “Goodbye.”
I lifted “Footprints” from the wall and found that it fit best in one of the inner pockets of my overcoat. Clicking off the light, I entered the hall and pulled closed the locked door. I passed the gross woman’s apartment, where ages ago I’d stood pining in my dishevelment and discontent, but now I didn’t even raise my head. I had read her online journal, a mess of fragments and compound sentences, and I knew that she was a curt, disgruntled creature—whose father, before she was even born, had vanished in Europe or Canada to escape enlistment in a war he didn’t believe in and a family he didn’t want—and whose mother had wrecked herself on other men, the best of which couldn’t keep his dirty boots off the coffee table nor learn to shut the bathroom door. But these sparse details in her journal appeared as fleeting moments in an otherwise bawdy fantasy world, which her fans, one in particular, adored.
Before I made it to the end of the corridor, I realized I’d made a mistake: The key to my mailbox was now in my desk drawer, so if my mother had sent me money, it was irretrievable.
Wishing I had my hat, I stepped into the cold, and pausing for a moment on the landing, I heard the heavy door latch itself closed behind me. The snow hadn’t eased up at all. As I remembered something in the news, a report about the aged and the homeless freezing to death, I started down the steps. I had a long walk ahead of me, and I hoped that other people were as diligent as my landlord in shoveling the sidewalk.
And I wasn’t even thinking about W. McTeal, when I thought, No, it couldn’t be.
But a fresh set of footprints on the sidewalk ascended the stairs, loitered about the door, and since it was locked, came back down, pausing for an indeterminable moment to gaze up at the building, in the very spot where I presently stood.
No, I thought again as I peered up and down the length of the quiet street, as far as the darkness would permit me. But all was motionless beneath a layer of snow.
And looking down at my feet, I wasn’t even thinking about following the tracks because I was cold and I needed to move and I had no way of telling if my intuition was correct. But from the clear impressions in the snow, I was able to conjure up the waddling figure of the strange man—and the tracks, even though I had no intention of pursuing their course, turned sharply to the left and bid my eyes to follow them into the alley beside my building.
And there he was, in all his absurdity, in the same baseball cap and in the same corduroy jacket that came down to his knees. He was directly beneath the window where the boy had used to receive petty errands from me.
Alarmed, I ducked out of view behind the corner of the building and waited a moment, feeling my heart racing in my chest. But I knew he hadn’t seen me because his back was turned. I wondered if I should circle around the building or simply lower my head and walk in casual strides across the entrance of the alley.
But first, I needed to peek at him again.
Apparently, he had taken the milkcrate—upon which the gross woman had used to sit and hum and watch her clothes drying on a pair of lines—and he had placed it beneath my window.
Still with his back to me, the shadowy figure was fidgeting with something near his waist, and then pulling his hand out from the interior of his jacket, he revealed what appeared to be a hammer. Although the darkness prevented me from descrying the crooked nails driven into the top of it, I suspected it was the very tool I’d seen on his kitchen table. He almost seemed to brandish it for an instant above his head, as though it were some glorious and primitive weapon.
Then, in a gesture that was much sprightlier than I’d imagined the man capable of, he stepped up onto the milkcrate and scrambled the upper part of his body through the window. And before I could fully register what was happening, I watched his legs kick out once, with a tiny jerk, and then slither themselves through the opening. He was gone.
I stood for a second, aghast and terror-stricken.
The cold air bit at my face.
And not yet, not until I plunged my hands into my pockets and started across the opening to the alley, did I envision him walking silently through my living room. I had no idea if my apartment was new to him or if he had frequented it a thousand times before. Perhaps it was just as much his as mine. And I wasn’t even thinking yet, not until I increased my pace and reached the end of the block, that a woman was sleeping in my bed. In my surprise, I had forgotten about Vanessa Somerset. I abruptly stopped in the slushy crosswalk and looked in the direction I’d just come. But there was no going back now. There was nothing I could do.
As my brain played out the various scenarios that were possibly being enacted in my old home, I continued forward. I had to gaze down at the fouled sidewalk. In some scenes, the madman realized his mistake and crept away without making a sound, but in others, the hammer fell before he knew what was beneath the covers, and still more, in other scenes, he peeled back the covers first—and since these were the worst, I tried not to allow myself to imagine them.
I walked for a long time, but eventually, not far from the bright early hours of the morning, I approached the subway that would take me to the train station. Fretful over the weather, I hoped that everything was still on schedule. I stepped off the sidewalk and began to descend the staircase. Halfway down, a crumpled pile of rags was heaped against the wall, and if not for the solitary hand that reached out of the mound and held onto the metal railing, I wouldn’t have known that I was passing at least one, if not two, human beings. Yellow bulbs glowed against the wet walls, but even so, it looked darker at the bottom. Shortly, commuters would be crowding along the passage in their morning rush. My God, I thought, but I went down nonetheless, aching with every step.
THE END