by Andrew Potok
We sat on a stone parapet in the middle of the open space. A pigeon at my feet fluttered suddenly upward as a white soccer ball whizzed by. A troop of little boys followed, careening past us to boot the ball back to the other end. It was their square, their village. A roar of laughter rose from some people who were standing in front of a pub that had just opened.
“I’m terribly thirsty myself,” I complained.
“Go get yourself a beer then,” Charlotte answered impatiently.
I tried to chart the field ahead: bicycles strewn about, kids everywhere, babies on the loose in danger of being trampled. I walked in the direction of the laughter. A soccer ball sailed by my head, a bike swerved, a kid went headlong into me, or I into him. I assumed a bemused, distracted air as I sauntered into the dread black cave of the pub.
Inside, I stood still, surrounded by words and laughter. I felt dizzy and thought I would fall. I held on and navigated through islands of conversation toward the spill and flow of liquid, the clink of glass. The soft padded edge of the bar stopped me. I felt the center of attention, as if all eyes were riveted on my clumsy walk. I gripped the railing around the bar.
“A pint of lager,” I said, hoping someone was there. I waited with a pound note held in front of me. It was soon pulled from my fingers, replaced with wet, sudsy coins. A thud indicated that my pint had arrived. My hand swept the counter for it, and slowly, carefully, I headed for the block of light framed by the doorjamb. Outside the pub, I stood still for a moment. I was exhausted.
“I should do this more often,” I told Charlotte. “It’s like Orpheus in Hades. . . .”
“Yes,” she said, “you’re right. That’s exactly what you should be doing. Like at St. Paul’s. Not waiting around for that insane bitch and her goddamn bees.”
Charlotte took sips of my lager, and soon we were finished. After Charlotte’s total support, which seemed to be eluding me, the best thing was another beer, perhaps several. I pointed in the right direction once more and cut my way through. Someone must have said to someone else: “Let’s see how the old boy makes out this time.” This time, it was a little easier. I didn’t care quite so much about upsetting other people. I spilled a little foam off someone’s pint, but a few heartfelt pardons took care of it. I emerged triumphant again, two tall lagers in my hands.
I had promised to call Helga in the late afternoon and reluctantly went to the red phone booth behind us. I dreaded her “And how are we today?” and my obsequious, “Fine, fine, what a lovely day, isn’t it, Mrs. Barnes?” She turned out to be cheerful enough, but crowded my head with more Arab chieftains, Belgian aristocrats, South African diamond merchants, all being stung by bees. “Tomorrow morning at nine,” she said, “and don’t be late, because after you I’ll be meeting the Foreign Minister of Abu Dhabi and his whole bloody cabinet!”
After my phone call, Charlotte dug into her bag for a pair of sunglasses. “I like it when you take things into your own hands, like the pub. You can do anything once you set your mind to it, once you get over your fears.”
I had conquered, it was true. I was pulling whatever I needed from the black cave. I felt invincible.
“Charlotte,” I said, “I’m staying. I’m staying not because I can’t cope but because I choose to take a chance. It’s okay if I come out the fool.” I felt quite loose now, in the middle of Pond Square. I stretched out along the parapet wall, not caring about the soccer balls, the dogs, the lowflying pigeons. Charlotte put her hand on my cheek.
We sat there sunning and drinking in the sunlight for a long time. I felt braver on each of my trips into the pub. Twice I carried on little conversations inside, slurring my words a bit, but happy. I stumbled slightly along the familiar path, two lager mugs balanced and spilling over. Pond Square became our village.
Charlotte and I walked home, drunk and exhausted. We made love, not on the bouncy foam couch or Sta’s narrow bed, but on the floor, banging into the blond oak coffee table from Heals, the two handsome chairs that Edith had picked out. I felt sure of myself and in control. We rolled into the hall where bits of dust clung to the moistness and smells of the beer, the sweat, and the sex. We bathed in Sta’s giant bathtub, soaping each other and soaking in the hot, hot water, even those parts of my neck and face that Helga had forbidden me to soak, warning me that the heat would dehydrate those fluids the bees had set in motion.
The peace Charlotte and I had made with each other seemed genuine. It felt strong enough to tide us over our imminent separation. We didn’t know how long it would be—a couple of weeks, perhaps months—but at least we had made enough of a connection to sustain us.
NINE
A FEW DAYS LATER, Charlotte and I took the bus to Heathrow. There, at the bookstore, she bought a thriller for the flight, a book she would read in peace, without my constant bitching. We stood and hugged and cried.
I love airports and piers and train stations. I love boarding and being en route, the risqué lawlessness of duty-free shops, the carefree meetings, the danger and coincidence stirred up by movement.
Charlotte disappeared into the departure doorway, as inaccessible as if she had already crossed the ocean, and I was alone. I looked down from the balcony into the teeming confusion of ticket counters, baggage carts, and lines everywhere. I had to thread my way through this massive chaos and begin my solitary life in London.
From the bus, everything looked dreary and gray. Everything suddenly translated into loneliness. I wanted to share my thoughts, which seemed fascinating, even brilliant, but there was no one to talk to. I craved Charlotte’s company. I felt the full weight of my aloneness and recognized its special character. I had been there before.
On a bright August afternoon, not quite three years before, Charlotte deposited me at St. Paul’s Rehabilitation Center in Newton, Massachusetts. I had become incapable of dealing with my approaching blindness, and I signed up for a four-month residency with others also going blind. We all wanted to learn, with varying degrees of desperation, how to survive. It was my first contact with blind people and with the extensive blindness empire.
St. Paul’s Rehabilitation Center for Newly Blinded Adults had in its name the most revolting connotations. I imagined Spencer Tracy in Boys’ Town, silent busy nuns in barebulbed corridors, forlorn clinics with nailed-down furniture, fluorescent green offices stacked with caseloads. But as difficult as the word rehabilitation was to handle, the word blind was worse. It was fraught with archetypal nightmares: beggars with tin cups, the useless, helpless, hopeless dregs of humanity. It was a word I still couldn’t say, not to my friends or my family, and when Dr. Lubkin first said it to me, speaking of me, I wanted to scream.
Our old orange VW was crammed with my reel-to-reel tape recorder, the cassette player, tapes of books and music, the bulky, knobby glasses and lenses that for a brief period of time had helped me paint. As Charlotte and I turned off Centre Street at the sign that said Catholic Guild for All the Blind, we were surprised by the elegant estate with splendidly manicured lawns, enormous trees, and flowering shrubs. Within the complex of stately old buildings, the parking lot was already filling with candidates for rehabilitation. Family groups with little girls in taffeta, boys in their Sunday best, dogs, parents, old people, clustered around each vehicle. The focus of all this activity, standing in the center of each family constellation, was a slow-moving, clumsy blind person. Self-consciously, almost furtively, Charlotte and I joined the flow.
The Center’s staff stood around the entrance to the St. Paul’s building, a richly gabled, arched, stone structure, greeting and directing us. They looked perfectly normal, in print dresses or shirt-sleeves, smiling, cheerfully shaking hands. There seemed to be no nuns or priests among them, no missionaries or wardens, no life-renouncing shut-ins or ruddy-cheeked fund-raisers. There was, rather, a garden-party atmosphere in which the dejected clients-to-be looked strangely out of place, like Hasidic Jews at a DAR convention. As for me, I felt as though I were the strangest of all,
in my Vermont Levi’s and boots, a three-week stubble of beard sprouting on my face.
I deposited my bags just inside the entrance. Three or four blind people sat there in isolation. They looked broken. Charlotte and I left quickly, managing to avoid the welcoming committees.
“It’s pretty here,” I said.
“Yes,” she agreed, casting frightened glances, her eyes darting, her arms pulling me away from St. Paul’s. We walked with short nervous steps over the fancy estate, and all the while, Charlotte eyed her watch and our car in the parking lot.
“Well, Andy,” she finally said, “it’s time for me to go. I hope this is good for you. It’s certainly strange.” She left, waving and throwing kisses from the car. Terrified but curious, I was alone, as alone as I’d ever felt in my life.
Inside, a tall, blond man offered to help me bring my belongings upstairs. “I’m a mobility instructor,” he said. I recognized him from a St. Paul’s brochure.
“Take my arm,” he said, and led me upstairs. Seven of us were to live in two converted closets and part of a narrow hallway. He seemed to find nothing extraordinary about these accommodations. “A bit cramped,” was all he said, thinking perhaps that the blind are liberated from aesthetic concerns.
“I’ll show you how to get to the bathroom,” he said, taking my arm firmly. “As you get out of bed,” he said, “turn right and take three steps.” We did it. “You’re now in the hall,” he said. Of course I was. I saw the cracked and peeling linoleum, the big old radiator under a large sooty window, the pipes running along the ceilings. “Be careful here,” he warned. “You must turn left immediately because of the open staircase. Take three more steps and right again.”
“But look,” I said apologetically, “I can see the bathroom,” pointing to it.
“Well,” he said, “you’d better remember anyway,” and frowning, he took my hand to place it on the door of the toilet stalls. “Four steps to the left is the shower,” he said, and bringing my hand along to the sinks: “four wash-stands.”
I felt out of place. I wondered if they had ever dealt with people who could see as much as I could see. Perhaps they had made a mistake accepting me. Again, I was the refugee boy, sent away too early, too scared, too confused. As for blindness, I qualified on paper. And, anyway, I would soon be as blind as they expected.
My sight had been going downhill fast. Print looked as if it had been soaked in a bathtub. On my bad days, it looked eaten by acid. Sometimes, I could see headlines, but even they swam in and out of blind spots. Everything else appeared as in a dazzling snowstorm—gauzy and colorless. Already the blind areas, the scotomas, were widening considerably, like puddles in a heavy rain. I was frightened by the blanks, the no sight, which registered only by the notable absence of things I knew were there. Still, there was so much I could see and do compared with people I considered blind. I could get around in decent light, I could go most anywhere without too much help, and because I was adept at hiding my impairment, I appeared ridiculously normal, especially at St. Paul’s.
I hung a few things on wire hangers behind an old paisley cloth that was unhemmed and coming apart on the sides. I slid my listening equipment under the bed and went downstairs. The lobby had been cleared of visitors. It was depressing, this checkered linoleum floor with four rows of chrome and vinyl chairs, a standing ashtray at the end of each row. It had become the domain of the blind.
No one was talking. Three women sat in one row, one or two empty chairs between each of them, and several men, equally separated, slumped sadly two rows away. I thought of a desolate Hopper painting of a waiting room in some Greyhound station at three in the morning.
The place was so strange that I was at a loss as to how to start a conversation. “Have you been here before?” or “Nice day, isn’t it?” Would they even know how nice the day was? I mean, really know.
I saw a long-legged young woman. “My name is Andy Potok,” I said. I had wanted to say: “What’s a pretty girl like you doing in a place like this?”
She turned to face me, almost in my direction, eager to engage, smiling. I saw darkness around her eyes. “Margie Dawson’s mine,” she said.
“Are you blind?” I heard myself asking. I felt really stupid.
“Yes, I am,” Margie said.
“But you’re . . . you’re . . .” I stopped myself from blurting that she was too lovely. “You’re so young,” I said.
She had an apple-pie prettiness, spoiled only by the puffiness around her eyes. She had a pert button nose, a heart-shaped mouth, an oval face with cascading blond locks.
“I can just see light with one eye, a little movement with the other,” she said.
“Jesus,” I said. “How did it happen?”
“I’m a diabetic,” Margie said. Her eyes were half closed, sometimes opening wide, though with effort; sometimes closing gently, like a bird folding its wings. The flesh under her eyes was blue or purple or gray. “What about you?” she asked.
“I have retinitis pigmentosa,” I said. I think she hadn’t heard of it. She waited politely for an explanation, and her eyes fluttered, as if to say, “How nice . . . how nice to meet you. . . .”
She was her disease and I was mine. Diabetic retinopathy meets retinitis pigmentosa.
“What do you do?” Margie asked. “I mean what did you do? You are blind, aren’t you?”
“I was a painter . . . a picture painter. . . .”
“Really?” Margie said. “I illustrated greeting cards.”
Her smile kept vanishing, too suddenly, draining her face of expression; then just as suddenly it reappeared, her eyes darting left, right, up, down. The effort to look interested and attractive seemed too much for her. It seemed to unlink her features, like a puppet with tangled strings.
Margie told me how diabetes had made her blind, hemorrhages exploding inside her retinas, eventually leaving little but scar tissue. Margie had had a series of operations attempting to seal, weld, sew, scorch, and freeze the tiny delicate webs in the back of her eyes. The operations didn’t work, but the surgeons kept trying. She would have another while we were at St. Paul’s and a final one after.
More than half of our group was diabetic, and the scope of their problems dwarfed mine. I felt lucky to be only going blind. The diabetics had their terrible frailty to deal with, replacing twice daily the insulin their bodies had stopped producing, watching over their fragile limbs and eyes and vital organs, their constantly threatened lives.
I moved around in the row with the women. It was apparent that I was physically better off than anyone there. Many eyes here were disfigured, with eyeballs bulging, puffed with swelling, darkened and lined by surgery, eyes turned in opposite directions, or fixed in benign, lifeless stares, some open, some closed, some covered with a milky film, some gone altogether. I felt healthy. My eyes were bothersome, irritated, somewhat disturbed, but they were the eyes, suddenly, of a sighted, not a blind, man.
I began to move from row to row, speaking with the men and the women. I felt so slow-moving at home and so speedy here. Soon everyone was drawn in. We couldn’t contain all we had stored for so long. We were finally with people who understood.
“I could see perfectly well until a month ago,” Rosemary said. “I was so afraid to come here.”
“Kee-rist,” said Ray. “I sure didn’t want to leave my wife and baby for four goddamn months, but I’ve got to get myself ready for a new job.”
“It’s been hell at home,” Tommy said. He had an enormous bull neck, and his eyes looked barely attached to his skull. They bulged in opposite directions. He said he was disfigured because of steroid injections meant to help his eyes. “I can’t stand just sitting around doing nothing,” he said in a lovely Irish tenor. “Boy, am I ever ready to go back to work. That’s why I’m here too.”
Our voices rose in pitch and loudness. Most of the people who had already gone to bed, swearing that they would never come down, never join in, swearing they would leave thi
s weird place first thing in the morning, now started to straggle down the stairs in bathrobes or T-shirts. Soon we were emptying our clogged hearts of the terrible burdens we hadn’t been able to share with anyone.
Margie couldn’t stop smiling. “We’re all going to be part of things again,” she said.
“My mother didn’t want to let me out of the goddamn house,” Hank said. He had a fancy little tape recorder playing Mantovani into his ear. “She’d want me to just sit there. ‘You’ll hurt yourself, Hank’—that’s all she ever said. Christ.”
Betty and Norma, Fred and Hank were all twenty or younger. They seemed to wear their sexuality on the surface, swaggering, boasting, provoking, wrapped tightly in their double-knits, doused with skin bracers and colognes and pimple creams, suffering the pain of an exploded adolescence. Had it not been for their blindness, they probably would have been revving up their twin carburetors at that very moment, leaving black rubber tire tracks in the streets of Providence or Arlington or Fall River.
“Yeah,” Betty said. “Just because we can’t see doesn’t mean we’re not normal. You know what I mean?” She turned and muffled a laugh with her arm.
A very large, older man, also named Fred—we dubbed him Big Fred, the other, Little Fred—told us pathetic stories of his family. “They don’t know how to say nothin’ to me no more. They don’t know what to say to a blind man.” Herman and Norma recognized the problem and nodded. “And the kids on the block call me ‘the blind Greek.’ Jesus, I don’t like that.”
Dot roared with laughter as we told stories of our clumsiness, of banging into everything, feeling one another’s newest bruises, shattered calves, scarred foreheads. “Open doors get me,” Dot said. “They just come right out of nowhere.”
