Michael Rizza - Cartilage and Skin

“We were supposed to operate a horse clinic together,” she said, “but instead, we ended up in the city. All this time goes by, and I gradually started thinking. I was just sitting there, you know, and I had no idea where I was.” She turned her head and glanced around the room, as if it pained her. “Fifteen years, and I’m still sitting here.”

She laughed, and she briefly touched my hand again.

“Isn’t that funny? I actually argued for this place, and I paid some short, overweight lawyer, with hair growing in his ears, to make sure I got this place. Don’t mind me. I’m sorry. Are you okay?”

“I’m fine. Like you said, it was the right decision. I know that.”

“That’s good.” She scooped up the wizard and returned him to the shelf.

Watching her, I felt invigorated. Here was a woman who perceived me in a way that was far different from how I perceived myself. This woman actually assumed that I was someone who had been living with another person, that I had been able to stir up love in another’s heart, and, in short, that I moved in the arena of normal human relationships.

“I’m sorry,” she said as she corked the bottle and slipped it somewhere beneath the counter.

“It’s okay.”

“I didn’t know. I feel like a fool.”

“Why?” I got off the stool.

Oddly, this woman’s meaning eluded me again, and I had a sudden suspicion that it was my fault that I didn’t completely understand her. If her gestures and words had a further implication, my brain was probably too stunted and sterilized to apprehend it. Her language was part of society’s regular discourse, but I moved on a different, perhaps more subterranean, level.

She began to bustle about, preparing to close the store for the evening. Watching her made me feel guilty for some reason. I drank a large swallow of wine.

“I don’t know why you feel like I fool,” I said.

“Was it a hard breakup?”

“No. It was the easiest thing in the world.”

“What about for her?”

“It was even easier.”

She was standing by the door, stooped over her purse, in the process of putting away the novel, when she lifted her head and smiled at me.

“You’re just trying to make me feel better.”

“Well, you made me feel better,” I said, beginning to sense what was going on.

Still smiling, she straightened up and pointed to my clothes hanging on the bathroom door.

“Are you going to come back for those tomorrow?”

“Unless you think they’re worth something.”

“No,” she said, “but I’ll buy your hat.”

“I’ll have to think about that.”

“Oh,” she said, and her expression suddenly became more serious. Gesturing to my head with her eyes, she asked, “She didn’t—?”

“No,” I said. “I tripped over a bag of salt.” I touched my temple with my finger. “A sidewalk did this to me.”

“You fall down a lot, I suppose. You don’t have to rush,” she added as I took another big gulp of wine.

“No, I’m ready.” I set my glass on the counter beside hers, which she’d already emptied.

I walked past her in the doorway, while she reached down and shut off the music. Then, behind me, she clicked off the light, and the room with the used and vintage clothes fell abruptly into deeper shadows. I went and stood by the front door. The darkness outside in the street had a hint of blue, like the color of exhaust fumes. The skinny woman was attending to something behind the counter, and I had to wait for her because she had locked us in. Although the keys hung from the lock, I didn’t think it was appropriate for me to touch them. I could faintly see the woman getting herself into a long coat.

Something in the woman had an unusual effect on me. She made me feel stronger. Maybe it was her casual manner, as well as her assumption that I was a better man than I actually was, that made me sense my ego vaguely shaping itself around her image of me, conforming to her perception. Apparently, she had waited for me to return from my appointment because she had wanted to see me again. I didn’t know what I had done to provoke her interest. Perhaps when I had purchased the clothes, she had noticed the wad of cash that my landlord had given to me. Perhaps she had interpreted my request to leave my wet clothes behind as a signal of my interest in her.

“Listen,” I said, even though I couldn’t see her, for she was lost again somewhere in the shadows of the store. “I was about to get myself some dinner. Would you—?”

“Oh,” she immediately said, stepping out into the open. “I don’t know if that would be too smart. You’re just getting out of something.”

“It’s not like that. I’m already out. I’ve been out for a long time.”

“It puts me in a bad position.”

“No, it doesn’t. It’s just dinner.”

“I don’t know.” She came toward me, buttoning up the front of her coat. “Where would you want to go?”

“Wherever you want. Someplace where we can sit down.”

“My niece was just telling me about this Thai place. She said the tilapia was really good.”

“Let’s go there,” I said, even though I’d never eaten Thai food nor had any idea what tilapia was.

She opened the door, and together we stepped out into the cold.

She locked up, and then holding the keys in her gloved hand, she pointed.

“My car is over here.”

I followed her across the street, which was fouled with gray slush and ice.

She had a little black car, a two-door Volkswagen, with a top that could apparently be removed in warmer weather.

Once inside the car, she said very sincerely, “I’m a good listener.”

“Thanks,” I said, not really certain how I was supposed to respond.

Strange, tiny ceramic figurines, perhaps effigies of eastern gods, were lined up along the dashboard, and because they didn’t slide off, I suspected that they had been glued down.

At a stoplight, she glanced at me and then looked forward again with a slight smile on her face.

She began talking and asking me questions, perhaps to gloss over any awkwardness. The unmistakable fact, which we both surely understood, was not so much that we were two strangers but that we both had some visceral need that compelled us to steer our way closer toward one another. The more the woman talked, the more I began to realize, to glean from her words, that our maneuvering had certain rules. Apparently, if I was on the rebound from a recent relationship, then neither of us could expect much of our going out to dinner, nothing beyond her ability to offer me a sympathetic ear. Yet, even though this seemed to be our guidelines, there also existed a lower, more implicit set of guidelines, because the woman’s explanation of her role as listener sounded almost obligatory, a pretense that we both recognized as a pretense, but was nonetheless necessary for the woman to say, in case, at some further point in our acquaintance, things turned sour; then the woman would have the advantage to remind me that she had established our situation from the very beginning, not merely as tentative words, but as the fixed order of things. She could retreat to that higher ground and deny that there was ever a deeper impulse. The woman might not have been completely conscious of this, but I understood that she was trying to keep a balance between taking a risk on me and simultaneously protecting herself from me.

Her name was Vanessa Somerset.

VII

She was in the process of telling me that she normally wore a different pair of glasses, but she had accidentally crushed them under a pot of spaghetti sauce, so now she had to wear an older pair that not only were the wrong prescription but also left sore, red impressions on the bridge of her nose.