Michael Rizza - Cartilage and Skin

“Claudia,” I whispered.

What would I do, I thought, if trying the handle, I found that it turned and that the door, moving inward, opened without impediment, so that I was at last standing upon the threshold of her dark apartment, which except for a different arrangement of furniture, replicated mine, room for room and wall for wall? As the thrill of this prospect took hold of me, I gently seized the door handle, but it didn’t turn.

I stood outside her door for a long time, feeling the mild ebbing, the cozy somnambulism, and the haze of my swooning soul. I whispered her name: “Claudia.”

Finally forlorn, I turned to leave. Yet, as I headed back toward my room, having taken no more than three or four steps, I was stopped by a sound behind me. I looked back to see Claudia Jones emerge from her apartment. The woman wore beige sweatpants, hiked up high and stretched over her bloated stomach; a thin white tee-shirt loose at the collar, as though she habitually pulled on it; and a long flannel shirt, which would have been more effective in concealing her bulk had it been buttoned up. Her face was weathered, and her mouth partly open, as though her bottom lip had been anesthetized. To my dismay, here stood the woman from the alley, but now only worse, because she was up close.

“Why don’t you leave me alone?” she asked.

“I’m sorry.”

She inspected me with slow, dull eyes, yet I sensed that beneath the drooping stupidity lived something that calculated and devoured.

“I’m sorry,” I said again.

“Fuck it all, yes.” She took a step forward. Her tongue poked itself out briefly, like the head of a turtle. “Don’t apologize to me. I’m not interested. So, you’re a fan of mine. Is that it?”

She looked at me, waiting for an answer, but I didn’t know what to say. My prepared excuse came out.

“I just thought it would be nice to say hi.”

She nodded her head.

“Because we’re neighbors,” I added.

“So, how’s your little friend?” Her tone seemed insinuating. The fading traces of my warm and softly pattering feelings, which had moved me only a moment earlier, lead me to imagine that her words were suggestively sexual.

“My little friend?” I asked.

“Is he still sick?”

“No,” I said. “He’s never been sick.”

She looked at me, and the ensuing silence seemed to indicate that she was measuring me in her mind.

“You’re crazy through and through,” she said at last.

“Maybe.”

She scratched her chest with one of her long red fingernails.

“You’re stealing my mail,” she said.

“No.”

“Of course, you are.”

“No,” I repeated. I’d never really regarded it as stealing because her mail had been as neglected as trash and I’d been under the impression that she was no smarter than a cow.

“Another crazy fan. Fuck it all. One is enough.” Her tongue poked out of her mouth. She tilted her head, and her eyes, still focused on me, appeared to be settling sleepily in their sockets.

“Are you jerking off to my mail?” she asked.

“No,” I blurted. “I didn’t even mean to take it.”

She inspected me with disbelief.

“Keep it all,” she said. “Have fun. But he’s more crazy than you. He loves me.”

“McTeal?”

“Jerk off all you want. I’m not interested. But watch out for him. It’s like you’re stealing his love letters to me. At first, he didn’t know, but now he does.”

“I burned them,” I exclaimed.

She continued to scratch her chest. Ignoring my assertion, she turned toward her open door, as if I were too absurd to warrant further conversation. I sensed that as soon as she shut herself back in her apartment, she would never allow herself to be drawn out by me again.

“I’m not a fan,” I said quickly, desperately, not even certain what this meant.

“Well, he is,” she said. Then, as if to herself, she added, “But I don’t think he’d hurt me.”

With that, she disappeared, leaving me standing alone in the hallway and listening to her bolt her door and slide the little chain in the slot. But I didn’t hear her walk away. She most likely stationed herself at the peephole, to make sure I left.

“Claudia,” I said, but I knew she wouldn’t respond.

Her departing comment disturbed me. Did she mean that, unlike McTeal, I was someone whom she feared might hurt her? If this were the case, I had no idea how to proceed with my seduction. Of course, by now, I was less attracted to her than I was to a mound of peat moss. Even so, by some peculiar spark of the brain, the momentum of my first intention still carried me forward. Rather than relinquish all I’d invested in her, I was absurdly curious how to salvage the refuse. I continued to stand in the hallway and to listen for her footsteps retreating into her shadowy home, as she undoubtedly waited to hear me move away, my lingering presence causing her additional fear. When I started back toward my apartment, crossed the threshold, and turned around to lock my door, I considered another possible meaning of her words. Maybe they were a warning. Although her crazy fan might not hurt her, this didn’t preclude him from hurting me. As I stood in the dark, looking at the tiny blue glow of the VCR clock, I began to realize the dimensions of my terrible situation. Somewhere in the city, a freaky man not only obsessed over my bovine neighbor but also believed that I had intercepted his pictures, “his love letters,” as she called them. From his perspective, I was a wild absurdity, something unexpected, a random annoyance that appeared one day out of a cloudy gray sky. How would he react if he realized, though incorrectly, that all this time I’d been masturbating to pictures of him; or worse yet, what would he think if he’d ever learned the truth? For reasons unfathomable to him, I’d shredded his professions of love, held each burning sliver with salad tongs, and then rinsed the ashes into the sewer. I dreaded the possible conclusions he might concoct in his malformed brain. Perhaps he would see me as a contender for Claudia’s love, and now, with all the strange weapons that lunacy could devise, the time for battle was at hand.

I desperately reasoned that I was deluding myself, and I happily welcomed my original interpretation of Claudia’s words: She was afraid of me. This was a pleasant idea compared to the threatening alternative. But what if, I thought with new alarm, McTeal took it upon himself to defend the helpless damsel from her deranged, onanistic neighbor?

No matter how I played the situation in my mind, I found myself in the losing position. A monster was at large.

IX

The following morning I woke up early. Unrested and with a headache, I took a long, cold shower, which failed to revive me. A sense of dread pervaded my bones. Undoubtedly, from then on, I was going to avoid Claudia Jones, even if I had to climb over a pile of mail every time I came in and out of my apartment building, even if she lost a hundred and forty-four pounds and personally sought me out for a casual, sweaty tryst. I couldn’t shrug off the urgency of my situation. I needed to respond to the threat of McTeal, but it was difficult to imagine what I could do, save run away.

It snowed again, piling up on my window ledge, clinging to the roughly parged wall opposite me, and coating the floor of the alley. The tracks of a small animal, perhaps a cat or a sewer rat, made several circuitous routes that all vanished or began at a window-well to the basement across the way. Claudia Jones’s milkcrate was an indistinguishable shape beneath the white blanket. Not long ago, my neighbor had been a regular feature of the scene, along with the boy, whose countenance became increasingly vague to me. Normally, I had a precise memory, but after my recent bout of languor and lethargy, my mind felt as though it had been steeping a long time in milky water. The alley seemed vacant and desolate. It made me dimly remorseful because at one point — when I’d first moved into my apartment, back when Claudia Jones hummed carols and the boy ran my errands — the alley had been my primary access to a larger world. But these were stupid, idle memories. I didn’t really understand what I was feeling. Perhaps my home had simply lost the freshness of its original appeal; the more accustomed I became to my surroundings, the drabber they appeared.