The Cloud of Unknowing (21 page)

After a while, she decided not to give out her real e-mail address to anyone until she'd met him in person. To simplify things and cut back on all the pre-screening—which had not proved to be particularly effective in any case—she began suggesting a get-together with anyone she hadn't ruled out after a few exchanges on
cupid.com
. And so it was that, within a few months, the ironic distance was obliterated, and her romantic prospects had been downgraded to a string of unpromising afternoon coffee dates.

Kitty sat down at her desk with the day's mail: a letter from her mother, a postcard from the dentist, and something addressed to Isaac from the DMV. She put them aside and checked her e-mail and, out of habit, logged onto
cupid.com
. There was a new message from someone calling himself “the_lettuce.”

“Hi, foam_core. That is a funny name. Why did you choose it, I wonder? My real name is Eric. I guess my picture is kind of small. I don't know if I am any of those things you mentioned, charismatic and genius and all those. I don't think I'm vulgar either, but I couldn't tell if you were joking about that one. Anyhow I wanted to say hi and that you seem like a very unique person.”

His picture
was
small. It only expanded on her screen to the size of a business card. He appeared to be hiking in the mountains, wearing a floppy outdoorsman-type hat that suggested baldness. He was shading his eyes with his left hand and squinting in a way that distorted his whole face. She clicked through to his profile and saw nothing that stood out.

“Hi, Eric. Kitty here. I don't know why I called myself foam_core. It just popped into my head. What about you? Why are you the_lettuce? I live pretty close to Center City. Where are you?”

She turned back to the letter from the DMV. It looked bad. It was from the Office of Finance. When they were together, Kitty had opened all Isaac's official-looking mail—not because she was a snoop, but because he expected it of her. “You're like an extra lobe of my brain,” he'd said to her once. For her part, she'd have loved to spare herself knowing about his missed credit card payments and unpaid parking tickets, but she'd learned that if she didn't open his mail it would keep piling up until some disaster occurred. He would miss an important payment or a filing date or a court appearance. His checking account would be closed or his health insurance would be canceled or some massive fine would accrue. In the end, dealing with his self-pity and rage took more out of her than just staying top of his mail. But it was not her job anymore. She put the envelope down, and then picked it up again. The words “FINAL NOTICE” were stamped in red across the front.

“Fuck me,” she said, tearing it open.

The letter, covered in official seals, said that the registration for his work van had been suspended for six months: a penalty for letting his insurance lapse. When she looked up, there was already a response from the_lettuce.

“Hi, Kitty. Thanks for writing back. I chose that name, the_lettuce, two years ago when I signed up. Back then I was the produce manager at a natural food store in Ardmore, which is where I live.”

Kitty was a few minutes late for her coffee date with the_lettuce. In her mind he was still the_lettuce, not Eric. She had a hard
time thinking of her Internet dates by their real names, even after she'd met them. She'd been running around all morning dealing with Isaac's van; she'd spent several hours at the DMV putting the registration in her own name and then taken it for a safety-and-smog inspection. She disliked driving the van, especially here on the Main Line, because of all Isaac's horrible homemade bumper stickers. “Killing Arabs = Jobs,” “We Bomb Because We Care,” “God Hates You and Your Family,” half a dozen others—many of them frayed around the edges where people had tried to tear them off. How, she wondered, did he manage to drive around without getting pulled over for every rolling stop and illegal right on red—or for that matter, without being punched out by a Marine for his upside-down American flag decal? She backed into a spot in the Starbucks parking lot.

the_lettuce was already there, sitting at a corner table, wearing a short-sleeved tropical print shirt, as he'd told her he would be. He was bent forward, scribbling on a pad of paper, and didn't see Kitty approach.

“Eric?”

He looked up, momentarily startled. He was indeed bald but for an almost-invisible crescent of gingery hair. His eyes were pale and lashless behind wire-rimmed glasses, and his neck, arms, and what showed of his chest were covered with a bright rash.

“Kitty?” He stood up. He was wearing shorts—khakis with pleats across the front. She felt an immediate and desperate need to put him at ease.

“I'm going to get myself something to drink,” she said. “Don't go anywhere, okay?”

When she sat down with her tea, she saw that he was working on a pad of graph paper. He'd been filling in the quarter-inch squares with a rapidograph pen. “What's that?” she asked.

“Oh.” He flushed, so that his cheeks matched his inflamed neck. “It's just this thing I do. Kind of—it's like drawing, I guess. I have an algorithm. See?” He opened his left hand and showed her a pair of dice. “I roll them, and depending on what numbers come up, I fill in the square, or half the square, or I just draw a dot in it, or I leave it blank. Then I move to the next square and roll the dice again.” He pulled a loose sheet out of his pad and presented it to her. It was covered from edge to edge with markings, so densely inked that it felt a little heavy. She stared for a minute, as though it were one of those magic eye paintings, hoping to find some kind of pattern, but none emerged.

“Well, I've never seen anything like it,” she said, handing it back. “How long have you been making these?”

“I don't know. I guess since I was a kid.”

“Do you make any other kind of art? Painting? Or . . . regular drawings?”

“No, just this. This is it.” He massaged the dice in his left hand.

Kitty searched for a follow-up question. How had they managed to find their way into this conversational cul-de-sac so quickly? “So,” she said, “you said you worked at a health food store?”

“No. I mean, yes, but not anymore. I worked at the Nature Mart for almost twenty years, but they changed management last year and I lost my job.”

“Oh, I
am
sorry.”

“Well, at first they offered to let me stay, but I would have been back to cashier. And then they changed their mind anyhow. I probably would have stayed if they hadn't changed their mind.”

“Gee.”

“I'm sorry. I don't know why I'm telling you this.”

“It's okay.”

Kitty drank her tea, and then another tea. She learned that, since losing his job at Nature Mart, the_lettuce been working at Dover Pneumatics, a company that manufactured and distributed door closure units. His younger brother had hired him, reluctantly and under family pressure, and had from the beginning been submitting him to subtle forms of humiliation—like ignoring his request for a bathroom key and not telling him about sales meetings and, just last week, having his desk moved into a hallway. Other than the graph paper drawings, his only hobby was playing Go. He'd participated in some children's tournaments and done badly. He lived in an apartment with his best friend from high school, who was on disability and spent weeks at a time on the couch in his bathrobe and slippers. They had nothing in common anymore. It had at least been convenient when the_lettuce still worked at the health food store, but he didn't drive, and now he had to get up while it was still dark to take SEPTA into town, and then another train to Delaware. His brother had already written him up several times for being late to work, and he'd been docked some vacation days. He massaged the dice in his left hand while he told her all this. It seemed to calm him.

“Have you thought about moving?” Kitty asked.

“I'm waiting until my cat dies.” His cat had feline leukemia and wasn't expected to live much longer but was, he said, very attached to the roommate.

A sunbeam that had been inching along the wall reached their corner, and the_lettuce held his left hand over his eyes and squinted: a tableau vivant of his tiny profile picture. Kitty noticed that his rash had faded to a light pink. When she looked at her watch, she saw that he had been talking for over an hour, but the effect, somehow, was not alienating. She'd made suggestions here and there, but mainly, she sensed, he needed her to bear witness. This was something she could do.

“Thank you,” he said. “I mean, thank you for suggesting this.”

“Thank you for coming.”

“I mean it. I've been on
cupid.com
for two years, and you're the first person who ever asked me on a . . .” He trailed off, unable to say the word.

“Did
you
ever ask anyone? On a date? On the site, I mean.”

He shook his head.

“Eric, are you lonely?”

“Aren't you?”

“Well, yes, I suppose.” She thought of Isaac, though, and realized that it wasn't true. “Can I ask you something else?”

“Please.”

“When was the last time you had a girlfriend?”

“It's been a long time. A long time.”

“What about sex?” The words came out before she considered them, but he didn't seem embarrassed.

“It's been over ten years,” he said.

“Ten years?”

“
Over
ten years.” His expression was frank and his tone affectless, as though he were describing a chronic pain to which he'd grown accustomed.

“This is going to sound weird,” she said, “and I really hope you don't take it the wrong way, and you don't have to answer if you don't want to.”

“No, go ahead.”

“Did you ever think about paying someone?”

“I did think of that, yes, many times. But I couldn't go through with it.”

Kitty imagined the_lettuce turning to the ads in the back of the
City Paper
, picking up his phone and then putting it down again. She needed a moment to get her bearings. “Eric,” she said, “will you excuse me?

The bathroom smelled of dried eucalyptus and Glade air freshener. The walls were stippled with peach-colored sponge paint. Kitty splashed her face in the sink and looked at herself in the mirror. There had never been a labyrinth of erotic possibilities for the_lettuce—not ten years ago, not even twenty. She was certain of that. She dug around in her pocketbook. In a zippered pocket hidden in the lining, she found it: a blue foil packet she'd been carrying around since that first hopeful date with expunk63.

Only when the_lettuce was sitting in the passenger seat of Isaac's van did it occur to Kitty that she would have to seduce him. At first, he'd declined her offer of a ride. But she'd insisted, and now here he was, nervously toggling the switch for the electric window.

“Turn here,” he said. “Right.” They descended a hill that went past the Ardmore SEPTA station.

“Are you in a hurry to get home? I'd like to pull over for a bit.”

“You want to pull over?”

She turned into the station and parked at the far end of the lot, where there were no other cars. They sat silently for a moment, looking out the windshield at a row of dusty sumac bushes.

“I kind of figured I wouldn't see you again,” he said.

“Can I be honest? I don't think you will.”

“I didn't expect it. You don't have to explain.”

“No, that's not what I mean. That's not why I wanted to stop here.” She turned in her seat to look at him. A delicate nimbus of late afternoon light surrounded his large head and narrow shoulders. She unbuckled her seatbelt, moving slowly and carefully, as she would around a skittish animal. “I'm going to come
over there,” she said. “Okay? I'm coming over to you now.”

He took off his glasses and looked at her with large, grave eyes while she undid his seatbelt and lowered herself onto his lap, resting her knees on the seat on either side of him. She saw now that he wasn't lashless: his eyelashes were almost translucent, but they were long and gently curled. She kissed him, and he kissed her back tentatively. His breath tasted of the coffee he'd nursed for the entire hour they had spent at Starbucks. She could feel his heart beating beneath his tropical shirt. Pressing into his lap, she felt a slight movement in response, but his arms stayed at his sides.

“These angles won't work,” she said. “Let me make some space in back.”

He stayed up front while she moved Isaac's shop vac to one side, and his tool cases, and the milk crates full of sanding disks, and the boxes of nail cartridges. She found a heavy furniture pad and shook the sawdust out the side door, then spread it out in the space she'd cleared. “Okay,” she said, peeling her T-shirt off. “Do you want to come back?”

She kneeled in her bra and panties and looked up at him while he undressed. He was very thin, covered everywhere with fine, reddish-blond hair. She reached for his hand and pulled him down next to her, and they lay side by side kissing. Sucking his lower lip to stop his hard little tongue from darting around in her mouth, she felt him relax. She guided his hand inside her panties, willing herself to think of him, the_lettuce, Eric, and no one else as the light dimmed, softening the outlines of the tool cases and crates around them.