by Brandon Witt
His smiled dimmed, and I immediately felt bad for asking. “No. He’s been gone eight years now.”
“Man, sorry. So tell me about you? Are you planning on having a dozen kiddies to run through this house and keep your housekeeper busy?”
“No.” His answer was short and he didn’t try to explain. I looked at him over my shoulder as I loaded the plates in the dishwasher.
“Why not? A good lookin’ fella like you ought to have a couple. You would be doing the world a favor by filling it with beautiful children instead of some of the ugly mugs I see. You know, I’ve never understood people. They go off and have plastic surgery to fix all their ugly faults, marry someone who’s had plastic surgery to fix their failings too, and then they wonder why their kids come out looking so terrible. People seem to think that somehow surgery alters their DNA and their sperm or something. You’re not thinking that your blindness is genetic, are you?”
“No. I’ve had all the tests. My eyes are perfectly formed but my retinas never attached in the womb. It’s not genetic.”
“Cool.”
“What about you? Do you have any kids?”
I laughed as I ran some water in the sink to wash up the last couple of items. “Unless you have an appalling memory, you’ll know I’m gay. How do you think I’m going to get a kid when there’s no uterus involved in my sexual conquests?”
“I don’t know. I’m sure you can buy them on eBay these days.”
I cracked up. “You probably can! But, no, serious. I’d love one but I can’t afford a kid at the moment. To me a kid is something special. I know accidents happen and all—hey, look at my sister!—but people shouldn’t be having kids unless they can afford to look after them. I can’t even afford breakfast tomorrow.”
“You can’t?”
Shit! I didn’t mean to admit to that. I’m not one to go running around telling everyone my problems. “Forget I said that.”
But Patrick stood, reaching out a hand in my direction until he found my shoulder. “What do you mean?”
“Nothing, man. Payday is tomorrow and I’ll be getting paid then. It’s cool.”
He turned me toward him. We were standing with less than a foot between us. We were approximately the same height, Patrick an inch taller, so our mouths weren’t that far apart. I focused momentarily on his sightless eyes before dropping my gaze to his lips. Man, oh man.
“You’re lying.” Mr. Stanford was back, and my easy dinner companion gone.
“So?”
“Tell me, can you afford breakfast tomorrow, Jake?”
I had read somewhere that pleading the fifth meant you actually were guilty of the crime but didn’t wish to incriminate yourself by saying it out loud. “I’ll be fine.”
Patrick’s expression didn’t change. He moved his hand up my neck and cupped my face in his palm. “You’re too thin. You will arrive here tomorrow at eight o’clock and make me breakfast again. Then you’ll sit and eat with me.” He finished his decree with a nod and stepped back to leave the room.
I shook my head at him and crossed my arms across my chest, ignoring the raging hard-on that had come from his simple touch. “Manners,” I growled.
He stopped, tilting his head to the side. “What?”
“Manners, Mr. Stanford, manners,” I said in exasperation. I hoped the Mr. Stanford title would prompt him.
It did. “Oh.” He cleared his throat. “Please come and make me breakfast at eight o’clock tomorrow.”
I rolled my eyes. He’d put please in the sentence but it had still come out as a demand. I had watched enough chick flicks with my sisters to know my Victorian manners. I put on a falsetto voice and told him, “Thank you, Mr. Stanford. I would be ever so pleased to come to your humble abode tomorrow and partake of a meal with you.”
I ARRIVED before the appointed time the following day. Patrick had shown me how to set the alarm for when someone was home as opposed to when you were leaving the house unattended. There were sensors on the windows and doors to secure the house as well as motion detectors inside. When Patrick was home alone he just activated the windows and doors. He told me he’d been robbed several times in the past, people thinking that a blind man was a soft target. This made me angry. A man shouldn’t be afraid in his own house.
Before I left the previous evening, I made sure Patrick was dosed with cold and flu tablets, had all the medicines he may’ve needed through the night, and was tucked into bed. I used a firm tone with him, telling him he wasn’t allowed to spread the Vicks cream over his chest until I was out of the house, because that was teasing.
He’d laughed, “And what will you do if I don’t wait?”
It felt curiously close to provocation. I rumbled deep in my chest and told him, “You may find yourself tackled on that bed and kissed senseless.”
He’d pulled the quilt up, snuggling down, and grinned. “Promises, promises.”
I left the house aroused and confused. Was stuffy Mr. Stanford flirting with his housekeeper? My dreams that night were broken and disjointed. Flashes of skin and sexual acts rolled into images of me broke and homeless, and then inexplicably a crying baby that I couldn’t reach, no matter how many times I tried to pick it up to comfort it.
Turning up early to work to make the guy breakfast and then eating his food was outside of my job description. It fell somewhere in between friendship and insanity. I turned the key in the lock and opened Patrick’s front door, turning the alarm off with trepidation. Gregor came running to say hello, and I gave him a big pat. He leaned against my legs and sat on my foot, his tongue hanging out in ecstasy.
“Hello, my big boy. Are you glad to see me? You are? Oh, I’m glad to see you too. I betcha you want to go out and play? Yeah? You’re a gorgeous boy, aren’t you? You’re a big one and a gorgeous one.”
“I’m sure you say that to all the boys.”
I looked up at the sound of Patrick’s voice to find him standing in the doorway of his room, and immediately my brain short-circuited. Didn’t the man ever wear any clothes? I had deliberately put him to bed last night with a shirt on so I wasn’t stuck with the image of his naked chest as the last thing I saw, but here he was just wearing his cotton boxer shorts again.
Today I was much more confident in checking him out. Yesterday I had known he was blind, but it hadn’t really registered. After spending hours in his company, I knew he couldn’t see where I was looking and now I stared at his package, trying to discover his size and particulars. I suddenly realized an awkward silence had fallen. Did he say something?
“Huh?”
He smirked as if he could read my mind, and I desperately hoped he couldn’t. “Never mind.”
“Oh. Umm….” Idiot! “How are you feeling today?”
“Better. Thank you.” He paused for a second and then continued. “Did you notice I said ‘thank you’? See? I’m learning.”
I chuckled. “Good boy. Now keep practicing. Did I wake you?”
“Yes.”
“Sorry.”
“It’s alright. I need to get up and besides, I’m starving. Did you say something about bacon and eggs for breakfast?”
I laughed at his unsubtle hint. “No problem, man. I’ll just let Gregor out for a bit and I’ll get on to that. How many eggs do you want?”
He scratched idly at his chest. Shit! Was he deliberately trying to turn me on? “Two? And bacon and toast? Is that okay? I’ll go and jump in the shower so as to not offend you with my odor.”
My tongue was hanging out further than Gregor’s, and I almost told him that the smell didn’t offend me at all. In fact, just the opposite.
When he emerged from the shower ten minutes later, I had breakfast ready. It was a pleasant meal. Not only was the food delicious, but the company was too. He took his cold medication without complaint and even managed to say thank you for the meal.
I popped a piece of crispy bacon in my mouth and questioned him, “So do you need to go to work today?”
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He shook his head and picked up his own piece of bacon using his fingers. “No. I’m no use to them with a cold.”
“What do you mean? What do you do?”
He grinned and told me, “I’m a Nez.”
“A what?”
“A Nez. Well, only some of the time. Nez comes from the French word for ‘nose.’ I work for a perfumery and I smell things all day. I have a great nose on me, so they tell me. I do quality control and a bit of reverse engineering by smelling perfumes all day and telling them what they’re made of.”
“Oh. That sounds… complicated.”
“Nah. It’s easy as pie for me. As they whip up their next batch of perfume, I just smell it and tell them if it’s the same as the smell they’re aiming for. Making perfume is really complicated and very scientific, but in the end it’s the smell that matters. No scientific machine can tell you if it smells the same. It can tell you that its chemical composition is identical, or if its viscosity is the same, but not the smell. So after everything else has been tested, then I come in and give them the final tick of approval on their product.”
I was impressed. It sounded really swanky and upmarket, and I had visions of him surrounded by supermodels all day, modeling and trying on the perfumes. “How do you apply for a job like that? Do you have to be tested or something?”
“I’m actually a chemist by trade. Most of my work is theoretical because of my blindness—I can’t do the practical bits—but then I fell into this smelling business in my early twenties. I was doing a course of organic chemistry and I became interested in why the same perfume could be applied to two different subjects—in other words two different women—and they would smell different. So I started doing research on it, hanging out at the perfume house and asking a whole bunch of questions. They realized I had a skill and put me on their payroll.”
“So why does it smell different on two different women?” I was really interested.
He just laughed at me. “It took me two years to write my thesis on the subject and you think I can sum it up for you in two sentences?”
“You have a doctorate?”
“Yes. You may call me Doctor Stanford if you want.”
“Nah. The mister one is bossy enough as it is.” We laughed together. I was getting hooked on that sound.
We lingered over breakfast until it was nearly nine o’clock. I found him easy to talk to and I could’ve chatted all morning. Finally I said, “Okay. I’ve got to get to work now. What are you planning on doing today? Bed? TV?”
He seemed unsure. “Umm…. You don’t mind me in the house while you work?”
“Of course not. It’s your house. As long as you don’t tramp mud through the house just after I’ve mopped the floor, it’ll be fine. And you watch out too. I’ll be vacuuming and I have to move the furniture around to vacuum under it. Just remember to keep an eye open if you hear me vacuuming in a room you need to go in.”
It was a poor joke, but his lips twisted anyway. “I’ll keep two eyes open.”
He disappeared into his study, and I whistled while I worked. The hands of the clock flew around and before I knew it he was back. He coughed discreetly to get my attention while I was polishing the sideboard. “Coffee?”
I jumped up. “Hey. No problem. Tell me how you want it and I’ll bring it to you. You should’ve said something earlier, mate. Do you need some honey and lemon tea instead?”
He waved me back. “No. I’ll make it. I meant do you want a coffee while I’m making mine?”
“No, man. I couldn’t do that. It’s your coffee and you’re paying me to work, not to sit around and sip beverages.”
Patrick unhappily narrowed his eyes in my direction. His gaze was slightly off-center, but I was getting used to that. His hands went to his hips and drew my attention to that gorgeous part of his body. I swallowed and tried to keep my erection from growing. He huffed and said, “Fine. I’ll put it another way. Your employer, Dr. Patrick Stanford, requires you to sit with him on the front veranda and keep him company while he drinks his coffee. Whether you drink coffee or water while you’re completing this task is completely irrelevant to him, but he requires your presence and your conversation. Now are you going to complete this task with accuracy, or do I need to ring Mrs. West?”
I pretended to think about it. “Will Dr. Stanford write it on one of his bossy notes so I can put it through the scan-and-read machine?”
His lips twisted as he half frowned and half smiled. “You do that with my notes?”
“Oh, absolutely. It’s the way I get the most joy out of them.”
A full blown smile stole across his features and I lost any hope of keeping my erection under control. “Funny. You are very funny. Now how do you take your coffee?”
We sat together on the veranda in gentle companionship. Patrick had wonderful white wicker chairs with deep cushions that you just sank into when you sat down. The spring sunshine was filtering through the trees and there was nary a breeze, just a beautiful calm to the world. I sighed and looked at the view across the road from his home. “Mate, you’re missing out on a wonderful view from your house.”
Patrick cocked his head slightly and asked, “How so?”
I stuttered, trying to explain myself without offending. “I mean that you have a great view and it’s a pity you’re blind and can’t see it. It doesn’t matter to you whether you’re looking over at a river view or the arse-end of an ugly house.”
He shook his head. “Now you’re wrong, Jake. Across from my house is a large park. It’s filled with trees and during the daylight hours there are birds in the trees that make a wonderful sound. At the moment I can hear the caw of a crow and the faint call of a baby magpie asking for food. There are honeyeaters and nectar birds feeding from a tree that’s in bloom over to the left. To the right there are swings and most days after school I can hear the shouts and screams of children playing. Across the back of the park is a basketball hoop and behind the swings there are at least two gaslit barbeques that people frequently use during the summer months. There are no flowers, but there’s a huge variety of trees that flower and bring bees and birds to the park at different times of the year. And once a fortnight, the Council sends a lawn-mowing team to cut the grass, which makes a lovely smell.
“Today there’s a group of women in the park, at least four. I can’t quite hear what they’re saying, but they’re young, not old. Can you tell me what they’re doing? There’s a sound I can’t quite identify.”
I was reasonably sure my mouth was hanging open in amazement. “You can tell all of that?”
“Sure. I’m blind but there’s nothing wrong with my other senses. So what are the women doing?”
I looked across the park. “There are six women. It’s some sort of mothers group or something. They all have prams. They’ve spread a couple of blankets out on the grass and their babies are rolling around while they chat.”
“Ahh. Of course. I can hear the sound of babies’ toys. There’s a rattle and tinkle of a bell.” He sat back and breathed in the fresh air. “Tell me about your father, Jake. You mentioned your mother and sisters, but nothing about your dad.”
I was a bit startled by the sudden change in subject, but he had commanded my presence and my conversation, hadn’t he? I was happy enough to go along. “Which one?”
“Which one what?”
I took a sip of coffee and feasted my eyes on his profile. “Which dad do you want to know about? The loser who was responsible for my conception, or the loser who raised me for four years and then left?”
His eyebrows went up and I noticed absentmindedly that his brows were a shade of light brown whereas his hair was blonder. He was really rather majestic looking, as if he were a prince in some foreign country. He should’ve been a model. “Both.”
I wondered where I should start. Didn’t some chick once dance on the mountain and sing about starting at the very beginning? “My real dad’s name is Troy. He and Mum we
re dating in high school. He didn’t stick around after Mum told him she was pregnant. They were both in year 12.”
“Wow. How old was your mum when you were born, then?”
“Mum was eighteen. By a fluke, my dad was still seventeen. His birthday is two days after mine. He lives in Sydney now. He rings me on my birthday and I ring him at Christmas. That’s about all the contact we have. I don’t think badly of him. He wasn’t in any position to be a father. It was probably better that he didn’t come in and out of my life all the time.”
“Still, it’s sad,” Patrick said thoughtfully. “I never knew my biological father. Sometimes I wish we could at least meet so I can ask him if I look like him, and whether there are any genetic diseases in my family and all that. But I loved Max with all my heart. He was my true father. So what happened to you after that? You said another man raised you?”
“So when I was a couple of months old, Mum let Alex move in with her.”
“Alex?”
“Yeah. I call him ‘Dad’ most of the time, but he isn’t really my father. For a while they did really good together. Alex was working and things looked good. Then they decided to have a baby. Eleanor—or Ellie as we call her. I was two when she was born. Things were good. I remember it.” I nodded and took a mouthful of my hot coffee as I looked over the peaceful park and watched the mothers and babies.
“What happened?” Patrick asked.
I sighed. “I was four when it went to the dogs. Alex stopped taking his meds. I don’t know why. Maybe he ran out and was too busy to get some more. Maybe he thought he could do without them. I just don’t….” I licked my lips and thought about how to explain the next part. No matter what, it sounded ugly. “He… he went crazy one night. Smashed the house up, broke windows, put Mum in hospital….”
I heard Patrick draw a deep breath. I could imagine such things were far from his existence. “So Dad had a bit of a stay at the big mental hospital, Mum had a stay at the public hospital and me an’ Ellie stayed with Grandma. Then a week after Mum got out of hospital, the stick turned blue.”
