Cartilage and Skin (32 page)

Now that I knew where the man lived, there was no reason to follow him any further, merely to spy on him sitting on a bench and separating his whites from his colored clothes.

One day, from a safe distance, perhaps when McTeal was just beginning to forget about taking his revenge on a man who had inadvertently intercepted his love letters, I might send him a brief note in the post or maybe even slip it under his door. I could rewrite our whole conflict, making myself the victor:

Dear Fruitcake:

Consider this: The whole time I knew who you were and where you lived. Now has come the moment for me to alleviate your fears and disabuse you of your misconceptions. I never spoiled your campaign to woo my bloated neighbor; she disliked you of her own accord. I never burned your insipid little photos, nor considered them anything but loathsome. But I did make copies of them. As you read this note, everyone dear in your life—from your employer to your mother—is opening up a manila envelope, marked “Photos. Do Not Bend.”

I walked over to the door to McTeal's apartment, to get the room number: twenty-two, which was easy to remember: the second door on the second floor. Although I had a pen, I didn't have anything to write on; otherwise, I might have crafted him a little note on the spot. However, it was probably better to wait a while. The surprise of hearing from me would be more disarming once he'd stopped thinking about me. I had a vague idea that I could pull a similar kind of joke on my landlord.

Standing before the door, I looked down the hallway to make sure no one was watching, and then I leaned my head closer to the door, still curious if McTeal was a family man or if he at least had a roommate. Yet, before my ear reached the surface, the brim of my hat knocked against it, causing my hat to tumble to the floor behind me. I instantly looked around again, but nobody was there. Moving slowly, more like a thief than a trespasser, I pressed my ear to the door. Everything was silent.

An impulse seized me, but before I acted on it, I put the hat back on my head, walked to the top of the stairs, and looked down to make sure that I was alone.

Back in front of McTeal's apartment, I took hold of the doorknob, and to my horror, it turned. As the door inched inward, I peeped around the edge and saw the lighted interior of the man's home. Before I fully registered the spartan décor of the place, I looked around for any signs of life. The main living area was apparently vacant, and although someone could have been in another room, I had a sense that McTeal lived alone. The walls contained no pictures or bookshelves. The few pieces of furniture were mismatched, undoubtedly acquired at various times, at different locations, from department stores and garage sales to the attics of relatives and the basements of friends. Even though there was wall-to-wall beige carpeting, between the couch and the television was an area rug with a maroon and black floral design. Here was another clue that he was a lonely bachelor, for I imagined that the sensibility necessary to place that rug on the carpet seemed to obliterate the likelihood of a woman's touch. The room felt colder than the hallway because a sliding glass door on the far wall was slightly open. If the man were in any way vile or obscene, nobody would have been able to discern it from the room.

Interestingly, I didn't see a computer station, which meant that one of the darkened rooms to the right was where he squandered his time and called up the lurid images of Claudia Jones, where he pined and lusted, where he slobbered, ached, and groaned. Perhaps, if guests ever visited him, he closed the door to that particular room, and as they sat on his couch, placed their drinks on his coffee table, and made their usual polite talk, they had no idea that they were sitting in the middle of a façade. In the main living area, everything looked nondescript and normal, if not almost barren.

McTeal was doing his laundry, and by the size of the sack, he probably had about two loads.

Glancing back into the empty hallway, I stepped into the apartment and closed the door.

My heart began to race like mad, but I was only going to take a quick look around and then run off, perhaps leave a note magnetted to his refrigerator, something to indicate that I had won our little battle, something unsigned and unsettling:

Dear Fruitcake: I have peed in select corners of your home
.

On his coffee table were several blank postcards, all featuring the Grand Canyon, as well as a glass ashtray with one snuffed cigarette butt. Once I saw the ashtray, I became aware of the odor of smoke. And when I saw a cat box that contained dark clumps of litter and a tiny, disgusting plastic shovel, such as might belong in a sandbox or on the beach, I detected an acrid fecal smell too. The sliding door must have been open to let in some fresh air or perhaps to allow the cat free passage in and out.

The long blinds were pulled to the right, and leaning against the glass was a hollow metal rod, as if McTeal had taken a hacksaw and cut a mop handle. Holding the battered rod in my hand, I looked out through door and saw the falling snow gathering on the railing of a small balcony. A single lawn chair was covered with snow, and beside it was a five-gallon bucket, which might at one time have contained plaster or paint, but now probably functioned as a table. Beyond the balcony, a small courtyard was surrounded on three sides by the backs of buildings, and by a low brick wall on the other. Some of the balconies and windows were decorated with Christmas lights. In the courtyard, the snow-topped trees, shrubbery, and a pair of benches were visible in the arcs of light cast by lamps that lined the blanketed walkways. McTeal apparently had a healthier and more peaceful view from his balcony than I had into the gritty alley outside my window.

Still holding the piece of handle, I walked toward the dining area. Newspapers were spread over a tabletop. McTeal must have recently built, repaired, or dismantled something because several hand tools remained on the table. The hammer had a smooth wooden handle, with two nails driven into the top of it and bent over to keep the head from coming off. I looked around to see what McTeal was working on, when I noticed the cat watching me from beneath the couch. I put the hammer down, picked up a pair of needle-nose pliers, and then returned that too. The cat, with only its fluffy orange head sticking out, continued to study me. Its eyes were two pieces of black glass set into a puff of fur. I didn't know if I had spooked the animal to hide beneath the couch or if that was its normal refuge.

Less than a minute, I told myself. I kept time in my head.

As I started toward the two darkened doorways, I imagined that another living and cowering creature might also be present in the room, alert and tense and suspicious. Once again, I was seized by the sudden awareness that I had no idea what I was doing, and this knowledge seemed to come from outside of myself, as if I were watching a lanky man in a muddy green coat and a silly hat as he stepped cautiously across a span of carpet in a strange room, wielding a section of mop handle like a weapon, approaching the private rooms of a man he didn't know. And before I began to comprehend my motive, let alone judge what kind of person I was, I found myself standing beside one of the doorways, first peeking around the edge of the doorframe, and then reaching my hand inside and sliding it up the cool wall. And before I even knew that I felt the light switch, an abrupt glare exposed the room; the tiled walls and floor glinted, white and blue. And even though I was looking at a completely vacant bathroom with nobody in the tub and nobody on the toilet, I hadn't fully reckoned with the possibility of finding a person, not just with what I would do but also with how the person would react to me suddenly flipping on the light—and this was probably because I never really believed in the first place that anyone was in the apartment. No one could have been there, not because reason or evidence demanded that this was the case, but rather because I implicitly understood that McTeal was alone in the world, with no friends or relatives to give him furniture or to talk politely in his living room over a cup of coffee: He was too inept or twisted to have made any sustainable human connection. Still, I raised the cut handle as I approached the second doorway, which I already knew—before I even reached my hand into the gloom and turned on the light—was going to be an empty bedroom. The bed sat square and tight without a single crease in the covers, without a headboard, as though it belonged in a barracks or a hospital. The nightstands on either side of it were polished, clear, and seemingly unused. Just as in McTeal's photographs, in his “love letters,” the wall above the bed was barren. In fact, all the walls were barren. I expected to find a tripod set up and directed toward the familiar scene; however, what I discovered was a coffee can on the edge of a dresser directly across from the foot of the bed. The only thing on the dresser was the can, upside down, as though the plastic lid served as a coaster protecting the wooden surface from scratches. Atop the can was perched a tiny gold-colored camera.

Maybe two minutes now, I told myself.

Although I didn't think of it at the time, the ultimate thing—the thing that would have unnerved and baffled McTeal more than any note slipped under his door or posted on his refrigerator—would have been to take a picture, one which would have revealed myself not explicitly, such as a full body shot or a portrait of my grinning face, but rather tangentially, from an angle that would somehow simultaneously provoke his fear and his curiosity. He would realize that I figured him out and defeated him. No matter what the photograph depicted—a close-up of my head-wound, the brim of my hat, one glimmering cat eye, the hooked claw of his hammer—the image would've indicated far less than it would've suggested, provoking McTeal's soggy mind to work out the details.

Yet I wasn't thinking any of this as I looked at the bare walls and the sparse furniture, which could have belonged to any man who hadn't taken the time or the opportunity to live among his own things, in his own home, and thus leave an impression of himself or a trace of his personality. McTeal's apartment wasn't a pigpen of debauchery, a home for a loving family, or even a façade to mask his private perversion. It was simply devoid of character.

Because I didn't see a computer station, I suspected that either he had a portable laptop or else he visited libraries or computer labs at some college.

Of course, I was overlooking the most obvious reason that the apartment appeared unused. Stooping down to peek under the bed, I wasn't really thinking yet. Instead, I stood up and moved toward the closet, still holding the cut handle and still imagining that if I continued with my search, I would find something. But I never reached the closet or opened its door because I was feeling the object in my hand and dimly considering that it might be as old as the building itself, older than McTeal, when I realized that the handle didn't belong to McTeal at all. He was just renting it because it came with the apartment. When the sliding glass door was shut, the handle fitted into the track, so the door couldn't be opened from the outside. And yet I still didn't fully comprehend the significance of the things I saw. Just as I was shutting off the light and exiting the bedroom, a part of me was beginning to surmise that McTeal was merely a tenant, which meant that he had as much connection to his home as I had to mine. Crossing the span of carpet again, moving swiftly now, I wanted to leave the handle where I'd found it and to get out of the apartment. At the moment, I wasn't so much thinking it as I was sensing it, namely that McTeal was in transition. He was in the process of moving, and he was several steps ahead of me because he had already packed and taken away most of his things. His home wasn't actually bare by design or neglect, but because he was clearing it out. I was squatting down to lean the handle back up against the glass door, feeling the cold air blow in, and wondering why McTeal was preparing to take flight, when all at once I arrived at the idea. McTeal was on the brink of action. I understood that he was moving, but I didn't have the chance to ask the question:
Why? What are you about to do, fruitcake?
—when I heard an unmistakable sound behind me: The front door opened.

Without looking around, I crouched down between the back of an easy chair and the sliding door. I hadn't yet returned the handle, so it was still in my hand, being pressed into the carpet as I leaned my weight upon my palm. My hiding place was horrible; at any moment, McTeal could have casually walked around his apartment and discovered me. Afraid to move, I strained to hear the sound of his laundry bag being flung to the floor or the clear thumps of receding footsteps into the kitchen or bathroom. Yet all I could discern was the indistinct sound of McTeal shuffling his body across the carpet, as if he didn't actually walk but rather spread himself out in several directions at once, like something heavy and gelatinous. At last, when the bulk of him seemed to settle in one indeterminable spot, I could hear the internal motions of his body, which weren't quite breathing and not quite gurgling, but the sound of some viscous liquid being drawn up to the top of a hollow tube and then released back down, drawn and released. Then he was moving again. My muscles tightened in terror, and listening, I became conscious of the sound of my own breathing. Although I was afraid to risk peeking around the side of the chair, I noticed that McTeal was reflected in the black pane of the sliding glass door—not in distinct contours—but as some translucent and boundless form. He was close by, perhaps as near as the coffee table, and he was doing something, moving vaguely, almost shimmering, as his reflection, the dark pane, and even the shapes in the night beyond the glass, bled into one another. As I waited, my heart pulsing in my breast, my wound twitching and tender, I began to focus on a single idea, which kept repeating in my head, silently commanding McTeal as if by telepathy:
Go to the bathroom; go to the bathroom; go to the bathroom
. In response came the small grating rasp and the momentary hiss of a lighter being struck. The flame was a brief orange gash in the dark reflection. McTeal grunted, and he coughed one time, almost like the cough of a small child. Instantly, I smelled the cigarette smoke, and before I had a chance to anticipate the next second, to prepare myself, McTeal emerged right beside me. His feet were in beige slippers; his thigh, naked and hairy, swelled upward to a pair of white underwear that was apparently at least a size too small; and a large tee-shirt draped over his firm, rotund stomach. He held the burning cigarette up to his mouth, stepped closer to the glass door, and looked out over the balcony and into the night. Suddenly, the door slid open, and the cold air rush in around McTeal. He drew on the cigarette and then extended his arm beyond the threshold to tap his ashes onto the snowy floor of the balcony. All he had to do was slightly turn his head and look down over his left shoulder, for I was only an arm's length away. I didn't even have a moment to consider how I would react if he saw me because all at once his body began to move: a slight involuntary motion, the contraction of his chest and the tightening of his throat, in that brief instant just before a cough—but it might as well have been the explosion of a pistol—because startled and terrified, I lunged at him, pushing him out onto the balcony, where he simultaneously coughed and stumbled against the railing. As he quickly gathered himself, wheeling back around, I pulled the door closed and dropped the handle into the track. No sooner, McTeal threw himself up against the glass door, his chest smacking hard against it, almost as if he were a bird in flight that didn't see its passage was obstructed.