by Andrew Potok
That evening Charlotte and I sat at the Audley pub, ordering in fairly quick succession cold lagers then warm dark beers and back again; light, dark, light, dark . . . until we could hardly stand. Our ability to judge anything at all had been clouded by mid-morning, and now we were doing our best to impair it altogether.
“Why does she want you to come alone?” Charlotte asked.
“I can’t even try to imagine,” I muttered. We ordered ham sandwiches, and they came with the crusts cut off. “And not one word about money,” I said.
“Cultured people undoubtedly means rich people. She’s softening you up for the kill.”
“We’ve seen the obverse side of God,” I said drunkenly, “and it’s crude and primitive. . . .”
“Listen, honey,” Charlotte said, “maybe we should go back. We can, you know. Everyone will understand.”
“She’s monstrous,” I said. “She’s also soft and vulnerable. Did you feel her hand? It’s a beautiful hand, like my mother’s. . . .”
“You won’t even miss one group meeting,” Charlotte said. “And it’s almost time to plant the garden.”
I moved very close to her and saw that she was afraid. “Listen,” I said, “we’re in England. You’ve never been here. The treatment won’t take up all our time. Wait till you see the Tate, the Wren churches, the British Museum.” She put her hand on mine. “Besides, I’m curious. My neck is throbbing, and I really want to see what happens. Just a week, maybe two.”
We stayed at the Audley till closing and stumbled back to the hotel. In bed I lay awake for a long time. I thought I was the intelligent supplicant at the feet of a vulgar, crazed deity. But if I started admitting deities into my life, it was no longer far-fetched to believe that I was being put to some kind of a test by them. I knew little about religious experience. Perhaps I should learn to have faith. How easy it would have been, I thought, if she were sweet and kind. But gods are arrogant and vengeful, I remembered. If I were to be cured, how would it happen? Could it happen in the single blink of my eye, or with the pleasurable drama of a camera focusing? Or very slowly, over months, even years. God forbid I was an actor in a cosmic parable that would prove once and for all that curing blindness is no guarantee for happiness. Over the last few years I had blamed everything on it, all my rage and depression, my thoughtlessness, irresponsibility, and growing misanthropy. I remembered a passage from Freud where he warns that the cure of neurosis leaves one no less susceptible to the horrors of life. With me, the cure from horror would undoubtedly leave the nagging residue of my neuroses. I smiled, wanting my neuroses. I was drifting into sleep. I felt it start to numb my head with each inhalation of air. How would I remember these fragments of thoughts? I tried to anchor the time. It was nearly April, a time for rebirth and awakening, and almost asleep I realized that it was April, the first of April—April Fool’s Day.
FOUR
THE MORNING FELT LANGUOROUS, sensual. Outside our windows, Hyde Park, which had budded early and showed, according to Charlotte, a patch or two of spring color, had been enriched by the night’s rain. We were rested and lolled about, stretching on the silky sheets and fluffy coverlets. Kippers and eggs and sausage were wheeled into our room on a large table covered with a heavy white cloth. We ate, then bathed in a huge old-fashioned bathtub with warm towel racks above it. All this abundance seemed to herald an end to deprivation. The air was full of promise, of imminent new beginnings.
Sta called from downstairs. “A perfect English day,” he announced. “An ideal day for moving.” We met him by the front desk, where I paid the bill. Charlotte was looking at glass cases filled with antique snuffboxes and Wedgwood china. So suddenly transplanted to this elegant space from our isolated hill, feeling foreign and somewhat out of place, she had learned to ground herself in such situations by establishing an almost religious bond with the subtle surfaces and volumes of crafted objects. She looked beautiful, like the profile of Sappho on an ancient Greek coin, a coin I had found once in a field in Lesbos. And Old World Sta was now pacing briskly back and forth, a dapper seventy-year-old figure, deep in thought, swinging his pencil-thin umbrella in a snappy ministerial arc.
Sta and I waited for Charlotte on a long couch near the windows. Across from us I could vaguely make out a woman’s form, a patch of auburn hair, a splash of cherry red on a pale face, her features shifting like a Picasso head. I saw a long expanse of stockinged leg, and shadows emphasized her breasts. I wanted to see her better, to make eye contact, to elicit a response. Once, I might have received a glance of recognition and playfulness, an acknowledgment of interest, a quick and pleasing reinforcement of sexuality. But it had gone, the contact that takes stock, measures capacity for engaging, takes directions, assumes modifications. It had gone, and its loss was one of the more difficult ones to bear.
Sta’s face was very near me, and I could see it flush with pleasure. The woman crossed her legs, and the pale flesh tone of her skin sent a shock wave through us both. I couldn’t bear being denied. I looked long and hard, trying to piece her lovely parts together. And then I felt her annoyed gaze. My looks were gross, brutishly explicit, indelicate. The subtlety of the game was gone; it had lost its erotic quickness.
My occasional ability to decipher detail—newly applied mascara, a wrinkle, the sparkle of an earring—depends on the momentary coming together of several ideal conditions: the intensity of light, the relationship of figure to ground, my distance and angle of sight. These momentary flashes of accurate vision combine incongruously with my inability to cross a street safely or avoid colliding with a tree on a simple country walk. The unevenness of sight confuses me and those close to me: at times I can perceive and report minutiae, at other times I see nothing.
Sta nervously lit his pipe. He puffed and tamped but couldn’t get it going. “Do you remember,” he asked me, “when I used to take you out on Sundays in Warsaw?” He puffed at his pipe and looked at the woman again, now turned sideways from us. She wanted nothing more to do with us. “Do you remember the Europejska where we’d sit outside together?”
“How old was I?”
“Right up to the war,” he said. “From the time you could walk until you were . . .” He puffed at the unlit pipe, and we both looked across the glass coffee table. She was standing now, talking with a man.
“I was eight when the war started.”
“You were so pretty, and your governess dressed you so nicely,” Sta said. “For me it was a pleasure to be with you. We would have ices and chocolates, as much as you liked. . . .”
“It’s a wonderful picture, Sta,” I said, “but you were a bachelor and didn’t come to Warsaw all that often, did you? So why did you want to spend your Sundays with a little boy?”
“Well,” he said, his pipe finally making a halo of smoke, “well, I really was proud to be with you, like a father.” He seemed lost in a pleasant reverie. “Well,” he started to say again, “the Europejska was very elegant. We seemed to attract women, you and I. . . .”
Charlotte had returned, and Sta blushed a little. He sat up abruptly and coughed to clear his throat. “Yes, we must go now,” he said. “Let us get a taxi and go to Eton Rise.”
We moved from the Grosvenor to Hampstead, “an artistic and thoughtful little suburb of London,” according to E. M. Forster. Sta had insisted on moving out for however long we stayed in London. “The longer the better,” he said. The night before, he had already moved in with his friend Edith, just a few stops farther on the Underground line. “I am so happy that you are both here,” he said.
Eton Rise sounded fancier than it actually was. One of three identical red-brick structures, it stood, its undecorated façade as monotonous as a file cabinet, behind a large plane tree on Eton College Road, a short quiet street snuggled in among noisy thoroughfares. Sta had chosen to buy this three-room flat because it was equidistant from Hampstead Heath and Regent’s Park, in both of which he met his friends, read the Observer on long Sunday mornings, and strolled after work amon
g the ponds and chestnut trees.
“You will see how convenient it is to most things,” he said while we waited a moment inside the lobby for me to adjust a little to the darkness. “You walk in one direction, toward Primrose Hill, and you will find the health-food store, near the house where Engels once lived; in another direction, you will come upon Keats’s house, not far from very nice shops, a block from the Heath.”
The Eton Rise lobby looked simple. It was faced all around with white marble, happily uncluttered by posts or furniture. Sta’s flat was one flight up; the stairs were easier to negotiate than the two tiny slow-moving elevators on the farthest wall from the entrance, lost to me in darkness. Upstairs, Sta quickly familiarized us with everything: where to sprinkle cockroach poison, where to leave the garbage, which drawers he had emptied. The whole place was small, comfortable, and sparsely furnished. We dumped our suitcases and went down to walk Sta to the Underground.
Just outside the door, dwarf tulips had broken ground under various sorts of budding bushes. “That,” said Sta, pointing to one of them, “is a special variety of English lilac. It is odorless.”
“Odorless?” I repeated. “Odorless lilacs?” Who else but the English would do a thing like that? Tasteless food, odorless flowers. “To a blind man that’s a bit of a joke,” I said. Sta turned away and began talking with Charlotte about something entirely different. He couldn’t stand any references to me as blind.
We walked him to the Chalk Farm station and then turned up the long hill toward Hampstead Heath, a vast tract of land, partly open and partly wooded, all of it sprawling and wild. We strolled through old narrow streets whose elaborate Victorian houses were being slowly crowded out by modern studios with large billboards advertising their one- and two-room apartments.
As we approached the pond at the top of Heath Road, from which, on a clear day, they say you can see all of London, a black cloud appeared on the horizon and made its way toward us. The darkness moved quickly, suddenly bringing with it a bitter wind and thick snow. In a moment, the landscape was transformed into gloom and turbulence. It seemed like an omen, and it brought me back to an image of early childhood when, in the country south of Warsaw, the mid-afternoon sky turned crimson. It was awesome and majestic. My governess said in brooding tones that this was a sign and blood would soon flow. It was the summer of 1939, and war was on everyone’s mind. I thought about her words a few weeks later as I lay in ditches at the sides of roads while planes dropped bombs and strafed.
The cold and melancholy spectacle of the Heath penetrated our bones and spirits. Shoulders hunched and bodies rigid, Charlotte and I clutched each other as we moved quickly down the hill and, with a common unspoken purpose, ducked into a bookstore.
We stomped our snow-covered city shoes, hung our thin raincoats on a large wooden coat tree, and peered at this haven, three rooms of books, with anticipation. For a moment, I remembered only what it used to be like: a half day at the Paris Brentano’s, looking for bargains up and down Fourth Avenue, finding some little shop with ancient leather-bound volumes tucked away in a back street of Barcelona.
Charlotte disappeared immediately, and I, feeling like a diabetic in a pastry shop, gaped at whole walls full of seductively displayed Penguins and Pelicans. I was suddenly overcome with a burning need to know what was inside those books. The place seemed nightmarishly opaque, as if under a coat of hardened plastic. But everyone else was browsing and skimming, getting smarter as I watched. “Read aloud!” I wanted to shout. “Share! We, the handicapped, demand it!”
Sundays at home are terrible. Charlotte goes down the hill to the store to pick up The New York Times and the members of my family sit around the kitchen counter or in front of the fireplace in the living room, reading, a section for each of them: Sarah’s “Arts and Leisure,” Mark’s front section, Jed’s “Sports,” Charlotte’s magazine, while Maya, who isn’t interested yet, and I sit staring at the walls. They read while I listen. I listen, I pace, I get angry. I make noise puttering, I slam doors. Still, it is Sunday and they are reading, silently, lazily, yawning, stopping for a nap in front of the fire, resuming effortlessly. None of them know how to listen. They make Muzak out of all noise, even music. It is all accompaniment to something else. As for me, I am left listening to the electric meter whirring outside, the crickets, the goddamn refrigerator. I hear the typewriter hum in C major, the freezer in a low B-flat. Under ideal conditions, I hear the difference between hot and cold running water. I hear every new car noise, I hear who’s coming to visit, I hear the kids turning over in bed. I hear apples falling from the trees, June bugs romping in the cellar. . . .
In the bookstore, I could barely decipher the titles. Still, I went over to them and, from habit and pride, began to leaf through books as if I were a normal reader. The miserable weather outside, these warm, inviting rooms, nothing special to do for a couple of hours all contributed to the most perfect atmosphere for skimming, loading up on trivia, butt ends of thoughts, ideas taken from some fragment, from pieces of chapters, back covers, jacket flaps— the kind of information that used to feed me, inspire me, tell me what was happening. I could have once found out something about Poincaré’s mathematics, the NHL standings, or Jaime Segundo of Mallorca. I could have caught the sense of a novel I really didn’t want to read, a biographical sketch, some troubadour poetry. I could have learned something on a day like this or sitting on the toilet or in the dentist’s office. Here, there were newspapers, a bulletin board full of community announcements, new books and old, art books, and postcards. I could have studied the Underground map; I could have had a quick introduction to the recent acquisitions at the Tate, the Victoria and Albert. I could have considered theater in the West End, music on the South Bank, notices of readings. Instead, these holes punched in the centers of my eyes left enough vision to titillate me with a thing called Bookstore, but nothing to read with. I walked around the many tables piled high with books, touching with my fingers. Tears of rage formed in my eyes. I felt around for my coat and went outside.
Charlotte eventually came out with an armful of Margaret Drabble paperbacks and a book on Athenian black figure vases. “It was reduced for clearance,” she told me with a shade of guilt.
I didn’t even grunt a response.
“Oh, Jesus, the bookstore got you,” she said.
I said nothing.
“I’m sorry. I thought you wanted to go in. . . .”
“Why did you take so long?” I snarled. “Couldn’t you see how I hated it?”
“I looked at you,” Charlotte said. “You seemed to be doing all right.”
“I hated it!” I yelled, holding Charlotte’s arm to cross a street.
“Well, I wanted to buy some books. Everything doesn’t have to revolve around you. Even on this trip,” she added.
We walked home in silence. A few times I almost slipped in the newly fallen snow. Wet sidewalks or dry, I needed her arm. I gripped it tightly, squeezed it harder than I needed to.
When we were in a decent mood, using Charlotte as a sighted guide was pleasant for both of us. When we were feuding, we both resented the inequality of the arrangement. I had to walk slightly behind her, thus being forewarned of approaching obstacles. I disliked being dependent on her pace, her choice of routes. When Charlotte stopped to look in a shop window, I, like a child without similar interests, had to stand patiently until she finished. At those times, she resented having to be my eyes, which made me somewhat fearful of where I was being led—into the crack between train and platform, an open manhole, under a bus?
At Eton Rise, we had tea and scones we picked up on the way. We were on the verge of a week-long silence, a retreat into private bitterness and resentment. We both knew, though, that we couldn’t spare a week for such a painful indulgence—not this week. Even this day still held Helga and the bees in store.
“No wonder you’re nervous,” Charlotte said. It was a concession that under normal battle conditions would have taken a l
ong time coming, from either of us.
“You know what I’ll do when I start seeing better?” I asked, offering my fantasies as reparation. “I’ll get into the car . . . no, it’ll happen here . . . I’ll hire a car and explore England. . . .”
“You’ll probably kill yourself driving on the left side,” she said.
“Aha, so you’re beginning to believe it too.”
“I didn’t say that.”
“I’ll drive you to Leach’s pottery in Cornwall. We’ll visit Oxford, Glyndebourne, the lake district. . . .” I couldn’t stop. “Back home, I’ll go down to New York, check out the galleries, the third floor of the Whitney.” I paused a moment to taste the meaty part of my fantasy. “I’ll sit in the garden of the Modern looking at the fat bronzes, the people, the book in my pocket. I’ll go inside, without crashing into the glass doors, browse through the current exhibits, catch the afternoon movie, buy a pretzel, wander home stopping at Rizzoli’s. . . .”
“Stop!” she cried. “You’re being foolish. You’re going to get hurt if you go on like this. Please, Andy, don’t leave yourself wide open. Stop torturing yourself.”
We were both fairly solid inhabitants of reason and order, Charlotte and I. Neither of us jumped to save our lives by primal screaming, rebirthing, or mind control. Instant solutions sometimes nagged at me just a little, especially when it seemed that my life was totally worthless. But I never succumbed. Charlotte was never even tempted. Scornful of shortcuts, she needed to persevere through the vagaries and hardships of existence—her migraines, her artistic doubts, her horror of getting old—and pick up the rewards she believed were given to survivors. Yet now, here, working on my own salvation, I wanted a fellow conspirator, loose, vulnerable, fully open to change.
Sta phoned and made us write down every detail of the directions to Beckenham. Twenty minutes later he appeared at the door accompanied by a woman with a winsome, toothy smile and a fine figure. He cleared his throat. “This is Edith, my friend and roommate,” he said. After everyone kissed everyone else, he added: “I have decided to go with you to Beckenham.”
