Michael Rizza - Cartilage and Skin

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.