Cartilage and Skin (10 page)

“I have no idea what you're talking about,” I said, with a sudden desire to destroy the silly look of glee on his round face.

Disregarding my comment, he kept talking.

“These girls seem to like us,” he said. “They're partiers. They're looking to have fun. They were sitting at the table, off by themselves, all dolled up, drinking vodka drinks. You can't pass that up, Walter. You've got to make a move. But remember, my friend, always wait until the girl is on her second or third drink. That's a good rule. These girls were primed for us. All the other guys in here left them disenchanted. Sometimes that makes them more desperate to have fun.”

“They're as primed as goats,” I said sarcastically.

But Stephen eagerly started to look around.

“As hot as monkeys,” I said.

“Where's that fucking bastard?” He suddenly stood up. With a jiggle of his ass, he strode toward the bar and left me sitting alone.

Adorning the girls' table hung a picture of a calm, aquamarine sea and a crystal sky, but in the upper right-hand corner, a dark ominous cloud threatened to creep upon the peaceful scene with violence and devastation. Apparently, either Ann or Bruni didn't like the green olives because a small collection of them soaked a square bar napkin on the table. They had been dissected, possibly out of boredom, “disenchantment,” or even “desperation”: On one side of the napkin were pitted olives and, on the other, a red, glistening pile of pimento. I briefly imagined that it was for the sake of this very operation that the girl had not requested her drink without olives—everyone has quirks.

Stephen came back right away, stood beside table, and pointed at me. He appeared to be standing with his feet wide apart, but that, again, was just his thighs.

“Wake up, monkey-boy,” he said. “You can't leave just yet; you've got another drink coming.”

“Monkey-boy?” I asked.

“Talk a little. I hyped you up. Just don't blow anything out of your nose again.”

“I was going to leave.”

“I don't see a ring on your finger.” He sat down and started gathering together the empty glasses. “You've got no place to go. You'd rather go home and jerk off? Relax a little. Just don't blow your nose on these girls.”

“My name's not Walter.”

“They don't know that.” He smiled again, as though we were in cahoots.

“I'm too old—” I started to say.

“That's your advantage,” he blurted. “Everyone else here was popping pimples a few years ago. They don't know how to talk or even think yet, except what they've learned from stupid sitcoms and MTV. What's more,” he paused for effect, propping his elbow on the table and pointing his finger straight at my chin, “you're established.”

“I'm established?”

“Yeah. No one else here has a pot to piss in, let alone any W2 worth bragging about, unless their daddy is helping them out. I hate those trust-fund babies. Fucking twits.”

“I don't have any money,” I said, and before I could explain that I'd spent a decade as a bookworm, acquiring debt and student loans, he waved his hand in my face.

“They don't know that either. Right now, shy guy, they're in the bathroom, sizing us up. They're saying that I'm a tad dumpy and you're a tad dull. But every girl will take dumpy over dull any day. Wake up, Walter. Here come our drinks.”

Stephen studied the waiter intently as he set down our order and cleared away the empty glasses. He seemed too occupied or uninterested to notice Stephen.

Silent now, Stephen began to tap his finger against the side of his beer.

After a while, I began to think that the girls had run away from us.

“Maybe they had to shit,” Stephen said so calmly, so matter-of-factly, that I couldn't help but smile.

Seeing my amusement, he warned me again: “Watch that nose of yours.”

Eventually, the girls returned. Ann had her arm over Bruni's shoulders and was speaking into her ear. Ann detached herself to pat the top of my head.

“You apologized.” She picked up the martini and took a sip. Apparently, she didn't care about toasting.

I then learned a few things about Bruni: It was she who disliked and dissected olives, and her hand had been wet because she'd used her fingers to fish the olives out of her glass. She gave me a brief, sweet smile that seemed to confess that her petty eccentricity, along with whatever else she might do, was hopelessly cute. However, when she casually put a wet finger into her mouth, to clean the drink off, I had a sudden realization that Stephen was right: I needed to wake up.

According to Stephen, although the actual details of my occupation were unclear, I was an expert in suicide. Somehow, I worked for the police department, but not quite officially as a detective, a doctor, or even a forensic scientist: I simply specialized in suicide. I would have liked to have been involved in the psychological end of this particular field, to have worked with troubled individuals in a preventative and recuperative way, and to have expounded for the girls a theory of mental anguish that leads to self-annihilation—but Stephen deftly foreclosed this option for me and placed me straight down within the gritty physical aspect of my clients' last farewell.

The girls seemed to become intrigued by my expertise, but they couldn't possibly be enticed by it. Rather than visit clinics in Yalta or upon the Swiss Alps, I squatted beside corpses in garages, basements, and lonely apartments. With this current invention, though creative, Stephen seemed to have faltered a little—unless, of course, his machinations surpassed any concern for me in order to work somehow solely in favor of his own penis. For the sake of entertainment, he had committed me to telling a story, and he'd apparently assumed that if I were left on my own, without his assistance, I would flounder.

Bruni asked what was the worst way to kill yourself.

“It's hard to choose,” I found myself saying; the alcohol was making me more adventurous. Despite my desire to see her smile or laugh, I adopted a false, serious tone. “Do you mean in terms of mess or in terms of pain?”

“I don't know.”

“In terms of mess, people are very innovative. I don't like to talk about it.”

She had light brown eyes, which now looked at me with a tinge of pity, searching my face. I felt obliged to keep talking, though I didn't like this charade at all.

“I suppose the worst I've ever seen, in terms of pain, was with a small caliber gun. Before people shoot themselves, they often have a wrong idea about what is going to happen.”

At this point, Stephen chimed in, and the heavy sluggishness of his tongue made me realize that he was noticeably drunk. “Sometimes, if they get the angle wrong, when they put the barrel in their mouth, they blow off their cheek or the back of the neck.” As he spoke, he tapped his finger against his cheek and then the back of his neck. “But most often, it's the roof of the mouth and the nose.”

“Oh, God,” Ann said.

“And they have to keep on living with that wound. Tell 'em, Walter.”

“No,” I said. “They don't want to hear the gory stuff. Within a year, I'm going to be working more on the psychological end. This now is just a sort of internship. There is a position opening up in a clinic in Yalta, a very prestigious place, but they demand several years of fieldwork before they even consider you.” I sipped my beer, self conscious of being the center of attention. “You can actually learn a lot about a person by the way he kills, or tries to kill, himself. The act correlates intimately to his self-image.”

Bruni briefly touched the back of my hand with her finger. She seemed very sad. She moved her head and eyes slowly, in a mixture of drunkenness, sorrow, and sensuality.

“What about the small caliber gun?” she asked, the tone of her voice convincing me for a moment that I was, indeed, a suicide specialist.

“In the terms of anguish, it's the worst I'd ever seen. People think it will make a clean hole through the other side of the head or maybe even burst out. What happens sometimes, however, when the caliber is too small, is that the bullet has enough power to enter through the bone but not enough to exit. The bullet ricochets around inside the skull, like a bean rattling in a jar. This one man had a wife and a kid, but he left them because they made him miserable. They were a yoke he could not bear. Yet, after a week or so of living on his own, he sliced up his brain pretty good. He stayed alive in his apartment for at least a day or two, walking around, shitting and pissing himself. We found him dead in the hall closet. He had chewed his fingernails down until they'd bled horribly.”

By the time I finished speaking, a silent sobriety crept over my audience. Even Stephen, the inventor of my occupation, now seemed struck by my story; he'd apparently forgotten himself and become caught up in my words, as though I possessed the bewitching capacity to speak my new identity into the existence. Feeling Bruni's fingers on my hand and her soul reaching out to me in sympathy, I had an urge to abandon my vocation, but I couldn't; I felt trapped in the moment. It was too late to unweave my words. Beyond my bleak theme, what had truly disturbed everyone must have been my delivery, for my voice had gradually become strained and quivery, as if I were struggling against a terrible burden within myself, which had grown heavier and heavier with each word, until I'd wrapped the whole table in the gloom of a funeral. If I wanted to take back the entire episode, it wasn't because I'd lied, but because I had revealed too much of the truth. When my father had put a bullet in his brain, it might not have ricocheted around in the way that I'd described, but it had certainly reduced a perfectly fine man into a state of retarded infancy, but not one marked by silly giggles or the senseless gaze of the lobotomized. Rather, his curled body had seemed to shrivel and twitch in response to some secret and paralyzing terror, as if the bullet had increased the very torment it'd been intended to relieve. Strangely, when I had started explaining my expertise to the girls, I had no idea that I was going to incorporate any personal information, let alone this. If not the alcohol, then surely Bruni's hand and eyes had unsettled my dormant demons.

“Excuse me,” I said. It was my turn to use the bathroom.

When I started walking away from the table, I had a feeling that I wasn't going to return. Although it would cost me my umbrella, overcoat, and sports jacket, not to mention a paperback, fred's number, and Lyle Tartles's card—I would be free. I edged my way through the mass of people in the bar area and followed a yellow arrow pointing into a narrow corridor. The bathroom doors were marked “Lads” and “Lasses,” and seemed to offer little privacy, not simply because they were louvered doors on spring hinges, but also because they were too small to fill their doorframes, stopping far too short of the floor and also the top of the frame. When I swung the lad's door open, a girl was pulling up the zipper of her jeans, which were apparently a little tight on her. She glanced up at me, and before I could apologize for the intrusion, she informed me that the toilet for the lasses was clogged. I stepped back into the hallway and waited. Somebody came up behind me and asked if I was in line. I half-turned, nodded, and mumbled something. When the girl finally came out, possibly after many adjustments before the mirror or another bout upon the bowl, the young man playfully asked her if she'd remembered to “strike a match in there.” She told him to “fuck off,” which he seemed to interpret as flirtation because, smiling, he told her that she was “cuter than a button hole.” As soon as I entered the bathroom again, I heard the young man start talking to someone else who had just joined the line. I had my choice between a toilet and a urinal that were barely separated by a low partition bracketed to the wall. I chose the toilet. Before I even began to urinate, I recognized that the conversation behind me was about the accommodations in the restroom; then, as if to satisfy their curiosity, the young men crowded into the room. While one lingered directly behind me at the sink, the other hobbled forward and leaned over the urinal. He sighed the moment he began to relieve himself. I stood there with nothing happening. He flushed the urinal before he finished peeing, and when he at last finished, he flushed a second time. Laughing, he advised me not to try so hard. I continued to stand over the toilet, and in the reflection of the water I could see both my face and my genitals. I listened to the second young man urinate and then spend an agonizing amount of time primping himself in front of the mirror, before finally leaving. When I was alone, a few drops squeezed out of me and disrupted my reflection; then relief came in a steady flow. With the thought of returning home, my neighbor Claudia Jones entered my mind. I imagined she was a perverse woman who was somehow dispassionately associated with the ambiguous and naked W. McTeal. She appeared veiled in a dark mist of sensuality. Behind the door of her apartment—indifferently clothed in thin, delicate garments—she moved with gaudy ennui, from shadow to purple shadow. Somebody then burst into the bathroom. As the door clapped back and forth on its spring hinges, the person released in fits and starts a series of farts that he'd most likely been holding in; he grumbled, as if angry or annoyed, and then quickly departed, setting the door into furious motion again. The disturbance halted both of my streams: that of urine and fantasy. By the time I washed my hands and reentered the hallway, I began to think how foolish it would be to abandon two pretty, drunken girls sitting at a table. Thus far, my life was a collection of botched moments and missed opportunities, and rather than alter this pattern, I was ready to perform another act of stupidity that I would one day probably regret. The image of Bruni's wet finger gliding into her mouth and then, licked clean, glistening with her saliva—enticed me back to the table. As I approached, however, I saw that the table was vacant, save for Stephen, who was holding up a slip of paper, apparently calculating his tab. He looked at me and smiled, but he wagged his finger at me, as though reprimanding a child.