Confessions of a Five-Chambered Heart (7 page)

Her apartment is all the way down at one end of the long hallway, on the north side of the building, next to the window that has been painted shut and so no longer actually leads out to the rickety fire escape beyond. The boy wipes at his nose while she unlocks the door, and she asks him if he has a cold, and he tells her no, that it’s just his sinuses, that he’s had bad sinuses all his life.

“Well,” she says, “you can’t be too careful with colds, not in this sort of weather, and not when someone spends as much time out of doors as you must.” Then they’re inside, and she offers him tea or coffee, and he frowns, so she offers him something strong, instead. He takes a brandy, and it hardly matters that it isn’t good brandy.

After she has handed him the glass, and after he’s taken the first hesitant sip, she asks for his damp coat, which he surrenders without a fuss. It stinks, she thinks, like some ugly little terrier sort of dog that’s gotten caught in a downpour, and she hangs it on a brass hook near the door where it’ll only drip on the avocado-colored ceramic tiles near the threshold and not on the rugs or the hardwood floors. The boy stands near a bookshelf, sipping at his brandy and, she supposes, glancing at the titles printed on the spines.

Forming the wrong impression
, she thinks, and by now he’s probably at least half convinced himself she’s some sort of serial killer. One among that slim eight percent of American mass murderers with vaginas, possibly, and here, poor thing, he’s been unlucky enough to stumble upon her. It amuses her, that he might be thinking this; flinchy or not, he isn’t likely to lose his nerve and run, not now, not one hurting as bad as this one’s obviously hurting, not one who needs his fix
that
badly. She stands just a few feet away, watching him, deciding whether to tease or maybe ask, instead, where he’s from and how he wound up turning tricks on the streets of Manhattan. She decides to tease him, because it’s been a while since she’s had one this jumpy, and if she’s wrong and worse comes to worse, if he turns rabbit, it’s not too late in the evening to find another.

“So,” she smiles, “which sort do you think I’ll be? An angel of death, perhaps, intent upon ending the suffering of my victims? Or simply a sexual predator?”

The boy turns away from the bookshelf so quickly that he almost spills his drink. “What?’” he asks and blinks at her, and she thinks that his bleary eyes are the same color as unpolished emeralds.

“Or maybe I’m something; new,” she continues, only half ashamed at his reaction “Or my motives are entirely 100 difficult to discern, so I don’t fit neatly into the categories created by FBI profilers and psychiatrist.”

“I wasn’t thinking that,” he says. “I wasn’t thinking that at all.”

“Sure you were,” the collector of bones smirks at the sniffling, skinny boy. “But that’s okay. Misconceptions are easy to come by, and I’ve long since learned to take them in stride. Water off a duck’s rump and so forth and so on.” She points to his glass. “Then again, maybe I put arsenic in the brandy,” she says.

“Yeah, and maybe you just get your kicks scaring people,” he snaps back, surprising her, and the collector of bones is impressed enough to laugh, having grown accustomed to prostitutes with considerably less pluck and more street-smart trepidation. “Maybe
that’s
your kink, lady.”

“Oh, for fuel’s sake, child. Don’t start in calling me
lady.
So, I might not be a serial killer, but I’m sure as hell no
lady.
If you’re pissed and want to insult me, just cut to the chase and tell me that I’m a dried-up old hag. At least then you’ll be half right.”

“I know you didn’t bring me here to kill me,” he says unconvincingly, and tales another sip of brandy.

“How’s that? I mean, how can you be so sure?” she asks, pressing her luck again. And there, she thinks, that’s my
true
perversity, and the collector of bones savors the uncertainty, the slightest possibility he’ll turn tail and head back to the elevator, back down to the slushy sidewalk and someone who won’t ask for anything more than a twenty-dollar blow job.

“Just a hunch,” the boy replies, trying hard to smirk back at her, but not quite pulling it off. “I get hunches. My grandmother used to tell me I was psychic like that.”

“Did she?” asks the collector of bones. “Did she, indeed?” and the boy nods his head and finishes the brandy in a single gulp, wincing slightly ;it the way the liquor burns his throat.

“Sometimes my dreams come true,” he says, handing her his empty glass, and when she offers him another, he says sure, why not.

“Here I pay for a common streetwalker, and I get a bona-fide clairvoyant. That’s got to be some sort of bargain. Maybe I should start playing the lottery.”

The boy sniffs and wipes his nose again, glancing around the apartment while she pours him more of the cheap brandy. “Doesn’t much look like you’re the sort who needs to,” he says. do all right,” she tells him, handing the glass back to the boy. “But you won’t ask at what, because that’s none of your business, and I wouldn’t tell you, anyway.”

“I’d guess you married well, and the fucker died and left you everything. If I
were
to guess, but since it’s none of my business, I won’t.”

The collector of bones screws the cap back onto the brandy bottle and sets it aside. “Don’t go and get so drunk you’ll be useless,” she warns him.

The boy shrugs his shoulders, and he says, “Oh, I can hold my own.” So she laughs at him again, and this time he makes a face like she really
has
hurt his feelings. “Never mind,” the collector of bones tells the boy, and then she asks him to get undressed, and she slips out of her skirt and blouse and stockings while he watches. She gives him a condom, and then they spend half an hour fucking on the sofa, and she comes twice, which is better than usual. Most times,she doesn’t come at all, though she’s never yet blamed any of the whores for her own limitations. Afterwards, he asks for another drink, and this time she gives him the bottle, what’s left of the bottle, and tells him to finish it.

They sit naked together on the sofa, him drinking brandy and her watching him getting drunk, and it isn’t long before he asks why she offered him three times what he usually gets just to fuck.

“You’re not done quite yet,” she replies, and then she stands and walks across the room to the bookshelf, and she pretends that he’s watching her because he likes what he sees and not because he’s wondering what comes next. She opens a small box carved from sandalwood—something she bought on a business trip to Indonesia half a lifetime ago. Inside is a key strung on a faded length of silk ribbon the color of cranberries. She takes it out and closes the box again, and then the collector of bones turns back to the boy and holds the key up so it catches the dim light and she’s certain that he can see it.

“What’s that?” he asks, slurring just a little now, “It’s a key,” she says unhelpfully.

“I can
see
it’s a goddamn key,” he mutters and starts picking at the foil label on the brandy bottle. “What I’m asking is what it’s a key
to?
”

“The key to the reason I’m paying you so 11111(11,” and then she says for him to follow her, not to bother with his clothes, just follow her. The boy sighs and shakes his head, but he does as he’s told. Money talks, and the flesh listens. She leads him down a short hall to a door that looks in no way different from any of the other doors in the apartment, except, of course, that she’s made sure he knows that it’s the door that fits the key from the little box, And that makes it the sort of door to be regarded with caution, the sort of door, for example, from a Charles Perrault fairytale about a man with a blue beard and a young wife too curious for her own good.

“Have you ever heard of an ossuary?” she asks the boy as she unlocks the door, as the door swings slowly open, and he says no, he’s never heard of an ossuary. The room is dark, but there’s a switch on the wall by the door, and she flips it, winch saves her the trouble of explaining to the whore what an ossuary is and isn’t. All he has to do is look at the thousands of bones covering nearly every inch of the room, the walls and the ceiling and the floor, all of it clearly illuminated now by tasteful incandescent tracklighting to reveal shades of tortoiseshell and ivory, cream and ginger, innumerable greys and browns.

“Fuck,” he whispers.

“No, we did that already,” she says, because she’s tired and it’s too easy and she can’t help herself. She watches the boy’s eyes as he studies the intricate arrangements of ribs and femora, humeri and countless vertebrae.

“You did this?” he asks.

“Yes,” she replies. “I did this. Well, technically, I still am doing this. A work in progress, as they are wont to say. Truthfully, I’m not sure that it will ever be finished. Or that I’ll know if it is. Finished, I mean.”

The boy steps into the room without being told to do so, and his unpolished-emerald eyes are wide, and his mouth is hanging open just a bit.

“It is really somewhat amateurish, I’m afraid,” she says, because false modesty is one of those things that has never particularly bothered the collector of bones. “Now, if you want to be impressed, you should see the Sedlec Ossuary in Czechoslovakia. Well, it was still called Czechoslovakia when I was there in 1987. Anyway, there’s an enormous chandelier hanging in the vault, and they say it contains at least one of every bone in the human body.”

“All these bones are
human?
” he asks, taking another couple of steps forward, and she gently pushes the door closed behind them. The latch clicks, but he doesn’t notice. “Jesus fuck, lady, where the hell does anyone get this many human bones?”

She almost reminds the boy how she requested he not call her
lady
‘, but decides to let it go, because her ego’s really not as frail as that. “Well, no,” she says, instead. “They’re not all human. When I started, I didn’t want to limit myself,” and she points to a pair of scapulae mounted nearby, wired with their glenoid cavities set end to end so that the effect is rather like the wings of an enormous ivory butterfly. “Those two came from a sort of camel called a dromedary.
This
,” and she motions towards a massive tusked jawbone set just above the scapulae, “this is the mandible of a hippopotamus. There are more than three hundred species represented here, all told, mammals, birds, fish, and reptiles.”

“And people,” he says, not quite whispering.

“Yes, child,
and
people. That was covered under mammals. Don’t be so goddamn squeamish. There are more than six and a half billion people in the world, and do you know how many of them die every day?” She doesn’t wait for him to say he doesn’t. “About one hundred and fifty million, which is something like two per second. Say roughly half the population of the United States, every day, and the adult human body has an average of two hundred and eight bones. So,that’s something like thirty-one billion bones a day that are no longer needed by their former owners. Now, is it really such a big deal if a few of them wind up in here?” The boy just stares at her for a moment or two, then shrugs again and blinks drunkenly before he goes back to examining her meticulous patterns and groupings. There’s a narrow path snaking between the heaps and jackstraw sculptures, leading farther in.

“The human bones,” she says, before he asks, “have come mostly from suppliers in China and Africa. There are a few here from India that I picked up from collectors who acquired them before India banned the export of human skeletons. And yes, I assure you it’s all perfectly legal. And none of the animal bones come from endangered species, for that matter. A few are actually fossil, some mammoth bones from Siberia and Alaska, and there’s some dinosaur material from Canada, Wyoming, Montana, and Mongolia, but these are mostly extant species.”

“Extant?”

“Still living today,” she says. “Not extinct.”

The boy nods again, squinting at a complicated roseate of weasel, skunk, and rodent skulls. “So, you paid me all that extra money to see...
this
?”

“No,” the collector of bones says, and she slips the cranberry ribbon over her head, so that the key dangles in the space between her bare breasts. “I’m afraid you’re going to have to work just a
little
harder than that to earn your bonus, kiddo.”

“What? You want me to fuck you again, in here?”

“No. That’s not what I had in mind, either. I want to photograph you, that’s all,” and then the boy starts to touch the snout of a beaver skull, but she stops him, her hand encircling his thin wrist and guiding it away. “Look, but don’t touch, unless I
say
touch.”

“You want to take my picture,” he says. “That’s all?”

“Are you disappointed?” she asks. “You’re not
afraid
of being photographed, are you?”

“No, and no,” he replies, frowning. “I was asking, that’s all. I figured it’d be more... more involved, more intimate.” And then he starts to say something more, but stops himself.

“More intimate? Don’t you think that photographs can be intimate? Especially nude photographs, when the subject is so completely...” The collector of bones pauses a moment, searching for the right word and finally settling on
accessible.

“That’s not the sort of intimate I meant. I’ve never posed for anyone before.” He’s stopped inspecting the beaver skull and has moved along to an assortment of leg bones, mostly tibiae and fibulae and most of them taken from various sorts of deer and antelope. The bones have been set into a thin layer of plaster of Paris and aligned to form a sort of spiraling sunburst formation, with the smallest bones at the center and the largest forming the perimeter.

“It won’t take long,” she says, as if she hasn’t already paid him more than he was likely to make all night.

“Lady, you’re an odd one,” the boy sighs, and she nods and agrees with him, because she hardly sees what’s to be gained by denying anything so obvious.

“So, you’re cool with this, my taking your picture?”

“Hey,” the boy says, raising the nearly empty bottle of brandy as if he means to toast her, “whatever floats your boat.”