by Andrew Potok
During the first couple of weeks, Helga had me call her at least once, sometimes twice a day, to report on my vision, just to chat, and to make the next day’s appointment.
“Good evening, Mrs. Barnes,” it would start.
“Yes, yes, and how are we today?”
“Fine, thank you.”
“I don’t mean ‘fine, thank you.’ I mean, how are we seeing?”
“I don’t think there’s any change, Mrs. Barnes.”
“You ‘don’t think’ there’s any change? What do you mean, you ‘don’t think’ ? Is there or isn’t there?”
“There isn’t.”
“Well, that’s all right for now,” she would say. “It’s still early. Don’t worry. I have never failed yet, and I won’t fail with you.”
In fact, I was seeing very badly. I couldn’t tell whether it was as bad as usual or worse. The light of the hazy English sky, a grayness that ordinarily would have suited me well, hurt my eyes. The blind areas seemed exaggerated, more clearly defined. I tested my vision everywhere, more and more desperate to report some concrete evidence to Helga. I spent hours at night looking out the window of Eton Rise, using the light of a streetlamp for a central point and, moving my eyes up and down, left and right, along an imaginary x and y axis, I plotted my field of vision. I hung these charts on Sta ’s living-room wall. On some, I filled the blanks—the blind areas plotted and sketched to represent real shapes—with black Magic Marker; on others, the shapes I saw through—the rings and crescents— appeared in black. One large wall was soon covered with these rather crude designs, which, all together, looked like Islamic mosque decorations. They signified nothing in particular, but what I saw of them pleased me aesthetically. Perhaps I’d develop them on canvas one day, I thought.
The streets of Hampstead also served as my testing grounds at night. I took new routes, stumbling over curbs, smashing into bewildered strollers on Haverstock Hill, where the traffic obscured the sound of their footsteps.
I tested everywhere. How close could I come to reading the big clock at Victoria, or how soon before its arrival could I see the 194 on the East Croydon bus? From the top of the bus each day, I would strain to see shop signs I hadn’t been able to make out the day before. Little by little, the letters came together to spell RACING LTD. or WOOL-RICH or POST OFFICE.
The Chalk Farm underground station, straight from a Piranesi dungeon drawing, served as a dark adaptation test. It was deep underground, where powerful winds, gusting to fifty miles per hour, shot cinders into squinting eyes and forced everyone to wrap themselves around their hats, umbrellas, and papers. It was dark and ominous. It was the kind of test Helga liked, rather than Snellen eye charts or field-of-vision graphs. All her stories of improvements alluded to the sudden mysterious reappearance of objects—roses, milk bottles, the print of her dress—on the viewer’s previously useless retinas. These images were filling my mind with vivid examples of what would one day happen to me.
“You should see my Lima chappie,” she would say. “He is so wonderfully happy because just as his wife was driving through the tunnel this side of Heathrow, he saw everything perfectly, the darling boy. It was as if a giant television set had been turned on. He is so happy, I can hardly tell you.”
Helga was disdainful of patients’ extracurricular activities, which meant everything that didn’t pertain to the treatment. All of my efforts during the entire waking day were to be devoted to the pursuit of my cure. She began to tire of Charlotte’s presence, even though she never saw her after their meeting at the Grosvenor.
She asked daily: “Is your wife still in London? Isn’t it time for her to go back?”
I wanted to devote myself exclusively to my therapy. Though I didn’t look forward to Charlotte’s leaving and my imminent loneliness, I did anticipate an obsessive devotion to my cure, a new fanaticism in all my daily activities.
For Charlotte and me, these first weeks in London were like a grace period in our marriage, a marriage that too often felt hopeless. Our roles as parents, lovers, and artists had become so scrambled, and our emerging roles so unexpected and alien, that we both felt cheated, bitter, and angry. We fought about everything: the children, our lack of involvement in each other’s work, the dying heater in our tiny car, the bank overdrafts. Charlotte would demand that I continue to criticize her designs, not wanting to understand how visually vulnerable and impotent I felt.
I wanted to be taken care of, read to, provided for. I wanted her to arrange for new lighting, to discuss my thesis with me, to give me advice on my counseling efforts. My blindness blinded me to Charlotte’s needs: she wanted to be cared for, even by the likes of me. Everything triggered a fight, and a fight usually meant many days of glaring, passing each other without a word.
London was a respite, but when the surface was scratched, we felt driven into our old stances. For Charlotte, Helga represented the abhorrent world of magic, of intolerable egos and temperaments, of all-demanding, all-consuming wills. This other woman, this witch, this threat, wanted all my time, all my attention, and I was happy to oblige, grateful for the opportunity to deal with nothing but myself.
Afraid of losing me altogether to these demonic forces, Charlotte urged me to go with her to concerts, the theater, even museums. We explored much of the Heath, Hampstead, and Highgate, the area that would be most accessible to me after her departure. Accompanying Charlotte to the British Museum or the Victoria and Albert, I often had to slither away into a taxi, to go home quickly and dump myself into bed, exhausted from whatever the bees were doing with my body. I went to museums grudgingly anyway, finding them increasingly frustrating, but once in a while, I felt the urge to go, just to be in the presence of something exquisitely handmade, eye-made. In the manuscript room of the British Museum, just being among pages from the notebooks of Conrad or Keats or an illuminated medieval manuscript or a Mozart score made living even a damaged life easier to bear. Being human, like them, was enough.
Standing in front of a Sung-dynasty bowl, Charlotte would pick out the stingers, those small, barely visible fragments hanging from the back of my neck. Like banderillas hanging from the neck of a bull, these venom sacs, stuck there for a few hours after treatment, humbled me until they fell to the marble floor. I fantasized a sleuth investigating a theft, identifying the strange bits of carbohydrate that could only be the emptied poison sacs of apis mellifera, the honeybee.
Being in London was certainly one of the attractions of this “cure,” even though being nearly blind there was like being nearly blind anywhere. Getting around, enjoying the discovery of a new place, presented the same daily frustrations as it would have in even less exotic spots. Blooms-bury remained just another section of town with uneven sidewalks, construction barriers, fire hydrants; Charing Cross, with its marvelous bookstores, was just another street in which to lose my way, where crowds surged toward me like tidal waves. On Shaftsbury Avenue, where I would sometimes go to surprise Charlotte with theater tickets, I collided unpleasantly with pedestrians and shadowed them to cross the busy streets.
As often as possible, we went to the Royal Festival Hall, where the concert season was in full swing. We usually sat in the middle of the second balcony, where the acoustics were exquisite, listening to Barenboim, Zuckerman, the English Chamber Orchestra. But as I listened, my eyes wandered to the grid of lights overhead, and I tested fitfully, first one eye, then the other. Looking at the center of a line of lights, I strained to see any of the six or so others on either side of it. I never saw more than one and the faint glow of another. I missed whole movements as I contrived ever newer eye tests, scoring for glare, field, and acuity. Down below, on the stage, no matter who was playing or how many there were, I saw an annoying field of vibrating browns and blacks under partial eclipse.
On the occasion of a benefit concert for Vietnamese refugees, we sat very close to the piano at the Royal Albert Hall, a large dark space with the atmosphere of an immense riding school. We heard an
extraordinary playing of a late Mozart piano concerto, with the soloist teasing from the piano the most heart-rending sounds, alternately mournful, rich, and delicate. The music took me into a rare place for which I have no name; it created a completeness and a peace, an equilibrium between the weight of the world outside and the interior pressures of my heart.
But as we walked, after the performance, to the Kensington underground, I felt unsure of my responses, suddenly so unsure of everything, as a matter of fact, that I panicked. Just as the intense visual examinations had utterly confused me, so now my other judgments seemed entirely unreliable, dependent on mood, on whim, on strange interior battles over which I had no control. Everything was in flux, and I could no longer count on sight or hearing or mind. That must have been it, I thought: art was unclear. What seemed momentous inside the studio, like the presence or absence of deep space on the surface of a canvas, or the hint of a figure in the midst of apparent turmoil, wasn’t all that significant outside. How clear it would have been to demonstrate against the war again, to run along the steps of the National Archives building in Washington, with club-swinging riot police in pursuit and a phalanx of masked troops shooting tear gas from below.
On the way to the Kensington station, I had to crouch down against a building. I felt weak and nauseated. People walked by toward the trains and taxis.
“I don’t know if it was good or bad,” I said to Charlotte. “I don’t know if anything is good or bad. I’m going to be sick.”
“Just stay like that a moment,” she said. “Don’t worry. It’ll pass.”
It passed, and we walked through a long tunnel, leading to the station. Along the way, a hippie guitarist strummed a Beatles song. It sounded awful, yet people gathered around him, dropping coins into his guitar case.
“Let’s listen,” I said to Charlotte.
“It’s pretty bad,” she said. And her words could not have been more comforting at the moment.
Toward the end of April, about three weeks after starting treatment, Charlotte and I walked up Haverstock Hill to buy a ready-made dinner in one of those rank take-home chicken places. We bought plenty of beer and looked forward to a dopey evening in front of the TV. It started to rain, and clutching the greasy box and the loose cans of export lager, we ran back down the hill.
The sky was charcoal gray, and the sidewalk gleamed like a mirror. We ran a block before I realized that I wasn’t holding Charlotte’s arm. I looked up and saw her occupied with keeping dry, her raincoat draped over her head, running as I rarely see her run. I ran also and saw all the curbs, the imperfections in the cement, the overhanging trees.
It was pouring now. Umbrellas rushed past me. The space between us was visible space, safe space, not a prickly blackness full of spikes and elbows, collisions and curses. In the street, the hum and splash of tires had three-dimensional entities called cars riding on them. I saw them behind the glare of headlights.
“Here’s my arm,” Charlotte said.
“Charlotte!” I roared. “Do you see what’s happening? I’m doing it all alone!” Charlotte stopped and turned.
“What did you say? What do you mean?”
I bent my head back to let the rain wash my face. The gray sky was restful to look at. I bathed my eyes in soft, warm grayness.
“Andy,” Charlotte said, tugging my sleeve. “Tell me what’s happening. I mean exactly.”
I jumped and yelped some insane cheer. We hugged and kissed, climbing over each other, the chicken grease trickling down my coat, the beer hissing, ready to explode. I ran ahead, crossing the street easily and down the darkest section of Eton College Road.
Charlotte was behind me, yelling, “Wait, wait! Andy, what’s happening?”
A clangorous din erupted in sleepy Eton Rise as we charged up the marble stairs. The door across the way opened, and I smiled at a neighbor who seemed ready to do battle. I lifted Charlotte out of the corridor onto Sta’s gray shag rug.
“Is it real?” Charlotte asked. “Tell me everything.”
“Oh, God, I don’t know. I think so. Yes. Everything’s clearer, the curtain in front of me is gone.”
Charlotte took the New Statesman off the coffee table. “What can you read?” she asked. And, with the print about a foot from my face, looking long and hard, I read a few words, that’s all.
“I should call Helga,” I said. “She’ll be so happy. Finally . . .”
“Maybe you should wait. It’s late. Wait till morning,” Charlotte said.
“I’ll call Sta and Edith,” I said, but as I picked up the receiver, I thought that maybe I had become especially sensitive to normal fluctuations I’d never noticed before. Maybe it was my mood or the slow osmosis of suggestion. What about the level of pollution or the barometric pressure? Or the bees? I put the phone down and decided to wait.
The next day we got up very early and took a bus to Pimlico, then walked back through Chelsea to King’s Road, where we looked for gifts for friends back home. In an antique mall, I saw my way through a labyrinth of old furniture, china, silver, and gold. Objects sparkled with pinpoints of light, their rich textures soothing and clear. Nothing vibrated, and my eyes felt stroked by a gentle clarity. The surfaces of things seemed soft and absorbent, brilliance giving way to a plushness of matte reds and blues and yellows. It was like The Night Watch before and after cleaning, where the old, dark Rembrandt suddenly lost the soot of ages, revealing colors and details beneath the deep shadows unseen for centuries.
We walked, skipped, and danced through Belgravia to Hyde Park and home again. “Do I seem different?” I asked Charlotte. “If you were to write home now, how would you describe it?”
“It seems that there’s a difference, but who knows? That would be for you to say.”
“I hope it’s just the beginning,” I said. “A sneak preview. The spectacular’s still to come.”
When we got back to Eton Rise, Charlotte lay down on the couch, one knee up and her legs crossed. Her hands were behind her head feeling her new short haircut. She yawned loudly and looked at the ceiling. She stretched her legs, and as she closed her eyes, she said: “I wonder if you’ll paint again.”
I wondered if I’d paint; I wondered if I’d stay at home, with Charlotte. I’d probably leave, I thought, at least for a while. I wondered how safe Charlotte had felt with my dependence, whether she feared my leaving, whether she had feared or even seriously considered that this would happen. I ached to be whole.
I looked at her, sleeping now. Her face was chiseled and strong. She was built like a boy, without a waist, and she was quick, like a boy. A warm, comforting surge of love came over me. If I were to be unburdened of my blindness, if I were to feel uncomplicated and light again, it was Charlotte who deserved me, if she wanted me. She had put up with a lot.
I called Sta and Edith, who were overjoyed with my improvement. “I knew it would work,” they each said.
For the first time, I thought about writing. I opened a notebook and wrote down the words to see what they looked like: “Once, when I was blind . . .”
SEVEN
I CONTINUED TO WRITE IN MY JOURNAL. “Who will ever believe me,” I asked with a wide-tip Magic Marker, “though even Charlotte says it’s so?” But my language sputtered and coughed; my words weren’t equal to the miracle. I tried to write a model letter to send to everyone I knew, but I could only think of poker images: pulling to an inside straight, investing so much in the pot that I couldn’t fold, and only my poker friends would understand that the metaphors weren’t meant to trivialize my dilemma and my triumph. My heart pounded now just as it does when I squeeze the winning card into my hand. I had to go outside to breathe.
I quietly let myself out and ran down the stairs, two steps at a time. I walked down Chalk Farm Road to Cam-den Town, through swarms of shoppers, into Euston Square. I walked into quiet streets whose row houses stood behind low ocher walls and weedy little gardens. As I penetrated unfamiliar terrain, I felt confident that I would so
on possess all the advantages of the sighted, that I would soon go anywhere, read signs, recognize landmarks. My routes would again be guided by architecture. I would again be seduced by forms and colors, move along visual lines of force. I felt quite ready to take my place again among all those people who interpreted signals and symbols, who were, because they had functioning eyes, receivers of the most interesting, the most complex, stimulating, comprehensive, informative, and provocative system I could imagine: the visual.
I walked into a store called Lady Jane, where I saw racks aglow with chromatic gradations of blouses and pants. Yellows, reds, blues, and greens each occupied their own spinning carousel. I thought I could distinguish between pinks and oranges, blues and greens for the first time in years. The blues alone ran from the palest most powdery hues to deep cobalts and ultramarines. It was like being back in Josef Albers’s color classes, where our medium was a box of 220 colored papers, each one delectable to the eyes and to the touch. Holding a fresh box of those papers was like sitting at a finely tuned harpsichord. We acquired the power to manipulate color, to make nauseating greens and disgusting browns modulate and sing.
I chose two blouses—rust for Charlotte, navy for Helga—and then I called Helga from the store. I expected squeals of delight; instead, it was like reporting the day’s events to General Patton.
“Yes, yes,” she said, “that’s what I’ve been expecting. It’s about time.”
She was standing in the hallway just outside her examining room. I knew from her tone and volume that a patient was sitting in the patient’s chair, listening intently to every word, as I had done on many occasions already, grateful for the interruption and dreaming of his own cure. Perhaps she had a bee on the end of her tweezers as she stood, proud and erect, saying too loudly: “You are seeing perfectly well, are you?”
