Cartilage and Skin (25 page)

“Sounds fair,” I said.

She told me the sum, which was more than I expected, but I paid it without hesitation. When she tore off the receipt, I waved it away, so she folded it in half and dropped it in a wicker pail.

“Are you Crowley?” I asked.

“No, my ex- was a whacky Zeppelin fan.”

In response, I smiled, although her comment made no sense to me.

“He first wanted to call it the Boleskin House, but everyone would have thought we were a bar or something.” She laughed.

“Crowley's is a good name,” I said.

“A dabbler in sex, drugs, and magic,” she said, which sounded like a bizarre way for her to describe her ex-, but I continued to smile.

I thanked her again, buttoning up the muddy green coat.

She came out from behind the counter to escort me to the door.

The girl on the couch said something to the young man, who answered by saying, “Not until Thursday.” Then they both got up and disappeared into the backroom.

“What is that?” I asked, referring to the back store.

“Oh, just a little extra cash. There's a solid demand.”

“What is it?”

Pausing before the front door, she looked at me, amused by my naïveté.

“A head shop.”

Seeing that I made no reaction, she clarified: “Paraphernalia, you know, bongs, bowls, dug-outs, for smoking pot.”

“Really?”

“Really,” she mimicked, nodding her head. She pushed up her glasses and then made a gesture that led me to imagine for an instant that she was reaching out her hand to touch me, but instead she pushed open the door.

“Try to stay dry.”

“Thanks.”

I stepped out onto the sidewalk, glancing back at her briefly, before lowering my head and plunging into the cold. In the sudden absence of the incense, jazz, and warmth, and, of course, the soothing presence of the woman, the outside world seemed to be imbued with a starker kind of desolation. In the afterglow of Crowley's, I felt whatever concern I had for my appointment or for McTeal vanish. I was now about to go through the empty motions of a meaningless charade. I would enact my pantomime, nod where I was obliged to nod, and then—very soon—try to reemerge into life on a warmer, drowsier, more comfortable level.

Although the muddy green coat was bulky, it offered little protection from the cold, so I strode at a rapid pace, not bothering to turn my attention toward anything, until I came at last to the glass door, pushed it open, and stepped into the stale mustiness of the stairwell. The social worker's name wasn't listed on the wall, but I assumed she was one of the “Associates” of the family counselors on the second floor.

When I reached the top of the stairs, a corridor with a series of closed doors greeted me. The first few were unmarked, and I was slightly disturbed by the thought of having to knock on random doors. Then I saw one labeled as a restroom, with a symbol for handicapped people, although anyone in a wheelchair wasn't too likely ever to come up those steps. Near the end of the hall was the door I sought. I lightly knocked, perhaps just to signal my entrance, and opened the door.

An elderly woman, who had been concealed behind a formica counter, stood up and asked if she could help me.

“I'm Dr. Parker.”

“Good. Good. Have a seat.” With a pen, she pointed to a pair of black chairs in the corner. There was a small tree growing out of a wicker basket, and a coffee table with several magazines on top of it.

“It's going to be a few minutes,” she said. “I'm sorry, but I'll let them know you're here.”

As I started to remove my coat, the woman left through a doorway beside the counter. I placed the coat on one of the seats and sat down on the other. I attempted to act relaxed. Although I picked up a magazine and looked down at it, I didn't read a single word because I was thinking:
them, them
. Who else was I going to see in addition to the weary, tree-shaped social worker? The setting didn't seem right at all. I seriously doubted that somewhere in this building was a room with a boy who was wasting away on a bed. This wasn't the white ward of my imagination.
Them?

Yet what did it matter if just the social worker and I were to play the game or if twenty other people had parts to perform and noises to mouth? Let them stuff themselves with a sense of their own importance at my expense. Because I was resolved to leave town, everything seemed harmless.

The old woman returned.

“A few minutes,” she said and reclaimed her seat behind the counter, so we couldn't see one another. She began typing at a furious rate.

After a moment, I returned the magazine to the table and stood up.

“I'll be right back,” I told the woman, whose typing didn't cease.

I left the room and headed down the corridor, toward the bathroom. Since it was apparently for both sexes, I knocked and waited for a reply, before opening the door. When I turned on the light, a fan clicked on. A single toilet was surrounded by metal rails bolted to the walls. As I urinated, I read a sign requesting that nothing but toilet paper was to be flushed—a message presumably directed at menstruating women. For some reason, it struck me as a symbol of something, perhaps the last vestige of the infamous female curse, out of which—I imagined—had sprung a whole alternative history of civilization: All the institutions and customs of man positioned their foundations around the bloody scene, which was at once loathsome and mysterious, in need of constant regulation and subversion, particularly during a time when wombs supposedly floated free and when dark, viscous humors, like transmission fluid or oils in a hydraulic pump, governed the functions of the body. Of course, maybe the sign actually symbolized nothing.

Now wasn't the time for such inane ideas.

Zippering up my gabardine pants, I began to think about Claudia Jones. All my previous notions about her had assumed a new shape after my discovery of “choice bits.” She was no longer simply my bloated-tongued, idiotic neighbor who neglected her mail and hummed Christmas carols on a milkcrate in the alley outside my window. Neither was she any kind of sexual prospect for me—not the listless cow and certainly not the woman wrapped in the purple gauze of ennui, who moved in velvet shadows and waited to surround me with her touch. The real Claudia Jones was something more unsettling and uncanny.

Even though I had feigned indifference when my landlord gave me the title of Claudia's Internet site, the first thing I did when I entered my apartment was to boot up my computer and try to find the site. The quest was not as straightforward as I'd expected because my initial search mainly called up companies that manufactured or sold power drills, and also a Midwestern butcher who claimed to have not only the finest cuts of meat but also specialty items, such as tripe, polenta, and baccalà. I then added a single word to my search, which, obviously, was the word “porn.” And this brought up pages and pages of web addresses. Uncertain where to begin, I clicked on the first one; red letters appeared on a black screen, asking if I knew the laws of my state and if I freely consented to visit the site and all the nasty things within. I agreed, scrolled down through a bunch of young women doing things that really, in essence, only the act of photography itself made perverted, and then exited the site, returning to my search page rather than following the links deeper into the world wide web. I entered a few more sites, only to find nothing regarding Claudia Jones. After a while, I narrowed my search even further, by including Claudia Jones's name. This merely directed me to more pornography sites, none of which seemed to have any relation to “choice bits,” even though this was part of the search. I discovered that a certain starlet who had pioneered the adult industry, only to later repudiate it, was in one of her “classic” films either possessed or fucked by the devil, depending on how the preposition “in” was being used in the title. Another one of her groundbreaking films, called
Deep Throat
, made an apparent reference to the Watergate scandal, though in what manner I remained unsure because the site merely provided enough information to elicit a sale of the vintage movie. I didn't buy anything and proceeded with my quest. Eventually, I began to get a headache, and I went to bed, thinking that my landlord was lying or deluded. The search seemed impossible. I turned over and shut my eyes. Falling asleep was difficult, for the innumerable images of nameless people floated back up to the surface of my mind, taunting and exposed, yet remaining at an uncrossable, electronic distance. At last, I sank into sleep, and perhaps somewhere in my dreams, I was able to bridge the chasm because suddenly I was aroused out of my slumber. I lay in bed for a while, staring at the slashes of moonlight shining through my window blinds. I had no idea what time it was. I was alone and tired. I felt like a child of missed opportunity. Deceased hopes began to stir within me; old desires presented themselves like specters in the night. I wasn't longing for the past exactly, but rather for the feeling of possibility that had once motivated me. At one time in my life, I had tacitly believed that I'd find love and completion, and now here I was, a man grown gangly, quiet, and alone, with no one to call him back to a world of innocence and promises. I was steeped in a sense of my own repugnance, polluted by my own ineptitude, crushed by something I couldn't quite locate or define. I wanted a different life, where satisfaction wasn't so hard to come by. I wondered if this yearning was mine alone or if it belonged to the normal human heart. But other people always reminded me of mules with carrots dangling an inch before their mouths, so they would keep plodding on through life, never quite content, always thinking that the final reward was just one step in front of them. Yet, even if they somehow managed to get the carrot, they'd soon want another one because, in the end, nothing ever provided satisfaction. All the workings of man were products of his discontent. Perhaps this truth could be better understood once a person has spent hours before a computer screen, wasting his time, looking at images of anonymous people whom he could never touch or truly know. Of course, this was just one of many vacuous moments; and further still, in the chilly gloom of my bedroom, I was aware that I had to keep plodding on, looking toward a coveted carrot that I knew was just a mirage. Maybe it was this knowledge that separated me from other people—or at least from W. McTeal. He actually seemed to believe that Claudia Jones was a real thing that could be obtained. The only reason he had sent her pictures of himself, his “love letters,” was that he wanted, if not exactly love, then at least some sort of connection to her. It was this that I had obstructed for him: the possession of Miss Jones.

As I left the bathroom and started back down the hall toward my impending appointment, I never considered turning and fleeing down the narrow staircase and into the street, even though I sensed that something was amiss. This place wasn't a clinic, which meant that there were most likely no beds, no nurses, and no boy starving himself to death. I should have been smart enough to leave, but I continued to play out the charade, not because of some latent fascination or curiosity or any other obscure motivation, but rather because part of me felt detached from these surroundings, as if they had nothing to do with me. Moreover, another part of me was somewhere else, occupied by Claudia Jones and W. McTeal.

I went back into the office and took my seat. Although the elderly woman was no longer typing, she still busied herself with something behind the counter. As I waited, I continued thinking about how I'd lain in bed and stared at the slashes of moonlight, unable to turn over because of my wounded head. The random mess of lurid images that had appeared on my computer screen had left a residue on my mind, making me feel drained. I wondered how W. McTeal felt about himself after he signed off the Internet, still devoid of human connection. This thought made me sit upright in bed; I had suspected earlier that I ought to have left “Jones” out of my search, but now I had a jolting hunch to incorporate W. McTeal. I got out of bed and went back online. Of course, my search included choice bits, Claudia, and porn, but it was the addition of two words that seemed to focus my quest. Still convinced that W. McTeal was a pseudonym, I typed in “wet clam,” and by the thousands, web addresses appeared. Nevertheless, one of these had to be the prize. Whether or not I was wrong to assume that W. McTeal's name was an anagram didn't really matter because I felt lucky. I believed that I was onto something, and this burst of intuition was what compelled me to visit the sundry sites. I was able to gain access to so many bedrooms and intimate situations that all the normal and solid layers of the world seemed to have peeled back to reveal the dark, wet pulp of its underbelly. Here were your neighbors and friends, your aunts and cousins, your mothers and daughters—but without their social camouflage—in a carnival of bodies. Sometime during the bleary-eyed hours of the morning, I left behind my search results and followed a link deeper into the web because it promised twenty-four quality pictures of a “fat chick.” She was an Asian girl with broad shoulders like a man's and a braid of black hair that she coiled around her neck. Obviously not Claudia Jones, the Asian chick nonetheless took me even deeper into the web because she listed several “friends' sites,” all devoted to corpulent women. Even though none of these sites had anything to do with Claudia Jones, I followed a link here and another one there, until I found myself sitting in the middle of a subterranean network of perverts who were all obsessed with large women. Interestingly, the sites overlapped and borrowed from each other. In one set of pictures, a girl named Brandy crammed herself into a tiny bathroom, dressed in nothing but a white garter, and posed atop a laundry basket. On another site, the same girl wore the same garter and posed on the same basket, and the only difference was that the pictures were larger and grainier and that the girl's name was now Evelyn. There were hardcore fat chicks (both in couples and in groups), softcore fat chicks, lesbian fat chicks, fat chicks with toys, fat chicks with dicks, and all other manner of fetish—as if the fatness wasn't a fetish in itself. Through some back avenue, I came upon a collection of thumb-size pictures of a woman's breasts. A crooked, purple vein arched out from a bulbous nipple in every picture. All of them seemed to have been taken at different times. I found it bizarre that a single page would contain nothing but images of these hideous sacs; even so, on the bottom of the screen, I had the option of viewing more pages of the same or of returning to the main menu. Because I'd come to the site through some circuitous route, I decided to visit the main page. The woman had completely categorized herself according to her body parts; not only were there countless pictures of her breasts but also of everything from her legs and feet to just her broad, creased, and creamy stomach—everything, that is, below the neck. All the categories had unique and sometimes vague titles, such as
Hills and Valleys, The Cleft Peach, Red Wings
, and
The Balloon Knot
, as well as the names of several different kinds of small birds, which apparently corresponded to particular toys. Her favorite one seemed to be
The Canary
because it was featured for seventeen pages. Although the woman never showed her face, the menu also listed her personal journal, which was updated nearly every day. She posted all her private thoughts, including stories from her childhood and long, intricate fantasies. She had a whole collection of “unsent letters” to people she'd at one time loved or hated. The final item on the menu was simply miscellaneous pictures that either crossed categories or didn't quite fit anywhere; she called these her
Choice Bits
. Nonetheless, even before I noticed this section, I knew who I was looking at because something seemed familiar. Perhaps it was the gaudy fingernails; they were a recurring theme, dragging across the skin, dipping into folds and crevices, pulling things up, and spreading things apart.