Then she contemplated her new customers. “Have they ever had a pedicure?”
“Nope. Ten little virgins.”
“Some men find the process effeminizing.”
“Well…no polish, please.”
“Not a drop. And some find it decadent, like your Romans. We’ll see how you feel.”
Wearing surgical gloves she examined his dreadful feet — the corns, the ragged nails, the discoloration, the beginning of a bunion, the heels that seemed made of animal horn. Then she fetched the tub of water. Cradling his ankles in one arm, she bent back the foot ledge of his chair and moved the tub a little and slid his feet into the warm liquid.
The stuff that resembled crème fraîche turned out to be a lightly foaming soap and the water glimpsed beneath it a smoky gray. He closed his eyes, imagined a future filled with princely attentions.
After a while he opened them. He saw that she was continuing to sit on her stool, a thick towel on her lap, and that his now clean but still unsightly feet were on the towel. They seemed detached from his body, from his rolled-up jeans; they were a pair of unnecessary footnotes. “Ibid and Sic,” he named them aloud.
“Exfoliation is the next task,” she told him.
“Exfoliation?” He knew what it meant, but her voice was a lyre.
“To exfoliate is to cast off or separate in scales, flakes, sheets, or layers. Flakes is what your feet will yield.”
She began to scrape his soles and heels with an elfin scalpel. He glanced at her. The dark head was bent, and she offered no small talk. So he closed his eyes again, thinking of his mother and tender bathtimes. But a different memory muscled in.
They were driving in a snowstorm. They wanted to get home. Everyone on the highway, coming and going, wanted to get home. Twelve inches were expected. The storm forbade speed. Whiter and whiter became their medium, and all the cars within it a pastier white, white spread with a knife. Suddenly, on the other side of the median strip, a bit of humped purple spun like a dancer, lifted itself like an animal, groped in the air with its four round feet, and fell back onto its roof. It lay in the highway. Other automobiles edged slowly past it.
“Did you see?” Renée gasped.
“Yes.”
“Go back.”
“No.”
“There’ll be a turnaround ahead. We must go back.”
“And do our own somersault? There are state police. There are other people traveling in the same direction as that Volkswagen.”
“Other people? Nobody is stopping. Only us.”
“Not us, darling.”
He heard the click of her seat belt and she fell onto his feet and tried to pry his boot off the accelerator.
“Stop that, Renée. I’ll have to kick you.”
“Kick me.”
He didn’t kick her; his instep sternly lifted her hands. The buckle of his boot met her face and entered it, though he didn’t know that until later. She gave up then, and hunched in her seat, crying, crying.
“Put your seat belt back on.”
Click. She stopped crying, stopped speaking. They got home after a few more perilous hours. She slept on the couch. And the next day, a Band-Aid on her cheek, and a little rosy streak making its infected way toward her chin, she went silently to work.
And then she transformed the episode into an argument about moral responsibility. It was what she did best, and so she did it — night after night, then once a week, then once a month. He argued back to show he cared about ethical behavior, though what tormented him was the vision. He saw the spin and the overturn again and again. Then he elaborated: onto a white shirred background came a splash of purple; it bounced; broken stick figures slid from the half-open door. Or he saw, within the upended machine, soft sculptures sinking into their own mashed heads. Or he saw the windows shatter and the white surround become splattered and splotched with red, ecru, gray — blood, flesh, brains. Porcelain bits landed on the canvas: bones and teeth.
When the letter came from the college inviting him to teach he presented it to her. She said no.
He wrote Yes; and shipped the etchings; and boarded a plane.
“Exfoliation completed,” said Paige’s soft voice. He opened his eyes. She held the folded towel aloft. He beheld a mountain of translucent flakes of skin with here and there a toenail poking out and, on top of the mountain, a large bit of callus she had removed without his feeling a thing. He marveled at this exuda like a small boy proud of his poop. “A second soaking now,” and she brought new, clear, warm water.
He soaked without assistance.
She sat down next to him. She sighed: a rather happy sound. Perhaps fate, working through the rental agent who showed him his place, had delivered him to her. She could learn to like paintings, even cut down on poker. He sighed too; and with his nearer hand he picked up the wine from the table between them and transferred it to his other hand. She put her palm on top of his folded socks. He fingered her fingers.
Together they watched a cab roll down Channing Street toward them, bright eyes shining. It stopped at his house. Out stepped a blonde in a belted raincoat. The April thaw was too warm for the otter. Her hair was more disheveled than he’d ever seen it outside of the bedroom. A stocky cabwoman removed a large wheeled suitcase.
“That’s Finnegan’s cab,” Paige said. “She’s a poker friend of mine.”
Finnegan received her money and drove away, though the house was dark except for the turret. Renée left the suitcase on the sidewalk and went up the steps to the door. Bobby could see her, could feel her, pushing the bell.
Renée stood in front of the door for a while, then with bowed head descended the stairs and trundled her suitcase across Channing and headed toward Main. He could see her pretty face and the expression of anxiety it never quite lost. It was the face that had approached him as she walked down the aisle. He could see, or thought he could, the scar he’d created. He could guess that she had at last forgiven him for not turning around and driving back and extracting corpses from the Volkswagen. He had long ago forgiven her those saintly reproofs. She crossed Main and stood in front of Tenderfoot, peering in.
Should he let her in? Her presence or nonpresence, her forgiveness or dismay, his occasional indulgence in exfoliation, or in psychoanalysis, meditation, religion, drugs, coffee enemas — nothing would scrub from his mind’s eye the purple machine leaping upward into the falling snow and returning head-down to asphalt. He had to live with the memory. He might as well live with Renée too.
Still he sat.
Still she peered.
With an irritated shrug Paige walked to the door, opened it, nodded at the after-hours guest, motioned her inside.
“This is Renée, my wife, former,” said Bobby. “This is Paige, my pedi…my aesthetologist.”
“Pleased.”
“Pleased.”
“Perhaps we could have some more wine,” Bobby said.
“Perhaps you could dry your feet,” Paige said, “and take the lady home.”
He was slow about foot drying, shoelace tying, looking in vain for the book on Rome, paying. He forgot not to tip; Paige took the extra money. At last they were gone, Renée still wheeling the suitcase. Paige turned to the welcome chores of throwing towels into the washing machine and boiling instruments. Then she turned out the lamps in the shop.
His turret was still bright. She knew that he spied on her from its obliging window. She had seen him plain, doing it at twilight; she had seen him at night, when the mild light from the streetlamps entered the turret and was modestly strengthened by porcelain and mirror, creating a complicated chiaroscuro background against which his seated form was an opaque cutout. Maybe the comings and goings at Tenderfoot raised his spirits; maybe he needed to transcend difficult moments on the can. She’d sympathized with his aloneness; she’d considered it promising. Now — for he had talked unaware during his reverie, people often did — she knew that he was not alone, that he lived in the crushing embrace of an unforgettable incident.