Ordinary Daylight

by Andrew Potok

  “Haven’t you heard? I can’t see.” I pushed my fingers into her thick hair and began to massage the back of her head and neck.

  “Be serious,” she said. “Why can’t you paint even though you can’t see? You know color, you can instruct others. And if that’s impossible, why can’t you sculpt?”

  “Mmm,” I said to change the subject. There was no need to pursue this, I thought. I turned to face her. Vera got up.

  “I mean to talk to you, Andrew. We have time for everything. Now I’m going to get us a drink.” She put the book back in its place and went to the kitchen. “When I was in school, I used to turn boys off because I wanted to call the shots,” Vera said from the kitchen where she was emptying ice cubes into a bucket. “I wanted sex as much as they did, but they weren’t interested unless they initiated it. I like to choreograph, Andrew.”

  “Oh, yes,” I said to myself, “and how I will dance.”

  “Tell me why you can’t sculpt,” she asked as she returned with a tray of Chivas Regal, a glass pitcher, and goblets. “You can feel shapes and textures. You can chisel, you can whittle.”

  “All right, I’ll tell you. I probably could sculpt if I had an interest in it. . . .”

  “But what could be more marvelous?” Vera asked. “God, I love sculpture,” she said. “I love to touch it, to crawl into it, to straddle it. . . .”

  I drank a large gulp of Scotch. “The whole world is sculpture,” I said throatily. “Painting is magic, like music. You see, I like transforming the sculpted world into two dimensions. . . .”

  “So why not paint?”

  “Listen, Vera, the fucking creative urge is gone. Not to mention the fucking urge, which is going fast.”

  “What do you mean the fucking urge is going fast?” She sat up. “Tell me why.”

  “The eyes,” I said wearily. “Not seeing, I feel undesirable, unmanly. . . .”

  “It’s not true,” she said. “From the moment I met you I wanted to sleep with you. You must have sensed that. It doesn’t happen to me often. I’m very choosy. You’ve been a part of my fantasies ever since. I don’t even understand why your eyes matter. You don’t need your eyes for this. . . .”

  “I don’t need them, Vera, but I’m obsessed by the notion that only normal people are exciting.”

  “Good God, why?”

  “I’m prejudiced. . . .”

  “Normal people are everywhere,” she said.

  “Is it my abnormality that turns you on?” I was exhausted.

  “It’s you, as you are. Eyes or no eyes. You silly ass, there’s no need to see.” Something changed in her voice now. It was thicker, sexier. She was beginning to choreograph.

  “Close your eyes, Andrew, darling. Close your eyes and listen, smell, feel. . . .” Vera lifted herself to the couch, and before I closed my eyes, I saw her frictionless dress glide up to her hips. I wanted to keep straining to see. “Oh, God,” she said. “Tell me what you hear. . . .”

  I should have sought Vera, not Helga, from the beginning. I could hardly hear beyond my pounding heart. “I hear your stockings rubbing together,” I said through heavy breath.

  “Mmm.”

  “I hear the silk . . . like water . . . flowing over silk. . . .”

  I unbuttoned her dress, and all the polka dots bunched about her waist as she straddled me, like a sculpture.

  “Describe . . . the . . . smells . . . ,” she said as she slid on my belly.

  I couldn’t describe anything anymore. Vera was smooth, wet, silky. I entered her, and we moaned with relief. I opened my eyes for an instant, a blink, and I saw beyond Vera, beyond the far arm of the couch and onto a side table, bathed in a pool of light. My breath was short. We were both coming. I couldn’t help staring at the collection of objects, the small ivories, jades, precious little silver trinkets, bleached under the lamp to tints of salmon, shrimp, straw, and flax. The room glowed with crimson and pink. The velvet wine-colored couch, the ocher needlepoint of the pillows, Vera’s body—all looked like a painting by Matisse. We were heaving. My eyes watered, wide open to the splendor of Vera, to the pools of color all around. I closed my eyes, and inside them I saw radiating circles of green and blue light. Then we lay still.

  “Mmm,” Vera said. “What a beginning. . . .”

  “It was majestic,” I said. “But listen, something is happening to my eyes. . . .”

  “Just close them, darling,” Vera said, running the tips of her painted fingernails over my eyelids and down my face. “Don’t worry. . . .”

  “No, I mean I’m seeing.” Her heavy lashes opened wide. I felt her body tense a little under me.

  “Seeing?” she asked.

  “I see the colors, even in the dark corners of the room.” I had to lift myself on an elbow as Vera squirmed off the couch.

  “Are we witnessing the miracle of the bees?” she asked.

  “Maybe.” I finally understood that she didn’t want to hear about it. “It’s either that or you.”

  “Me? Why me?” She looked at me coolly. “That’s all it takes? Christ, I’ll go into business. I’m a hell of a lot easier to take than that crazy old lady.”

  The room began to vibrate familiarly again, to crumble into pieces. I felt stupid and sad, having forced this trivial mirage into the middle of awakened passion, intense, magnificent pleasure.

  “I made the whole thing up,” I said. I covered my eyes with my hands. The irony seemed too complex for the moment. I heard Vera slide into her dress again. Barefoot, she started to walk into the hall. She stopped and turned.

  “You know what I think, Andrew?” she said, her voice dry and cool. “I think that all you’re ever really concerned about is your goddamn eyes.”

  FOURTEEN

  AT FIRST, Helga mixed the old bees with the new. “We have to change slowly,” she said, “lest we bust your liver.”

  “We certainly don’t want that,” I said, and she stopped rearranging the bees on the plate for a moment to permit herself a resigned sigh. The time ahead would not be easy for either of us. We weren’t overjoyed to be together again. She swore she mixed the bees, but she seemed to suffer from momentary, though not infrequent, lapses of memory, and when I asked her how many old bees, how many new on a particular day, she said, “New? The new ones won’t be ready for another week. What you think? It takes time to digest all those new herbs.”

  During the time I was supposedly being taken off the old bees, the lease on her Beckenham house ran out and she prepared to move to another suburb, Sidcup, about the same distance from London. Sidcup trains departed from Charing Cross station, meaning a whole new routine for me, but I was thrilled with never having to see East Croydon or Beckenham again. In the three months I had traveled the route daily, I had grown to hate the ugliness around the East Croydon railroad station, the bus ride through the insipid suburban streets, the long waits for the off-hour transportation. Helga now asked me to come in the afternoons, so I would board the Sidcup train about four o’clock, just as the first wave of office workers was beginning to crowd the platforms. The trains going were always full; I rode the half-hour trip back to London in an isolated car, arriving in an almost-deserted Charing Cross station already being swept of its rush-hour debris.

  Helga asked me to bring her the Evening Standard on my way. She usually found some little item buried inside the paper about the latest outrage perpetrated by a doctor or hospital. “Listen to this,” she would say, picking up the Standard or Express of the day before, and she would read, slowly, often stumbling over words, about some hapless creature mutilated during surgery or plugged into the wrong tank of gas. “Killers!” she would rage suddenly, though her Sidcup rages were more often than not short-lived and subdued, probably because of the tiring summer heat and the lateness of the time of day.

  I began receiving answers from the entomologists I had written to, and all of them doubted the possibility of bees eating preplanned menus. Most volunteered the word “quack” in r
eference to the person who had made such claims.

  Helga’s stories about patients had blurred over all this time into one or two archetypal examples, and the names of patients were beginning to be used almost interchangeably. She might inexplicably turn on one while elevating another to realms of perfect bliss. From the time I arrived in London, I had heard her talk, off and on, about another “American chappie,” this one more special than most of the rest of us, on the level of the Arabs. He was a businessman who resided in London. “He has several flats, all of them luxurious. Oh yes, oh yes. He is so happy with the way his eyes are improving that he offered me a flat, gratis!” His name was Nulty, but she called him “Nutty” which mispronunciation had mistakenly led me to assign him a mythical existence with “Dopey” and “Grumpy.”

  When I tracked him down late in the summer, Nulty brought his Helga experience into proper perspective. He was approaching the end of his fourth month with her and planned to quit in a week. “Lemme tell you right now, she’s done shit for me, absolutely nothing. Sure I humored her for a while, but lately I’ve been telling her the truth. Zero! A row of goose eggs!”

  I told him about Sarah and my continuing saga, none of which surprised him.

  “I would have told her to fuck off long ago except, what are people like you and me supposed to do?” he asked.

  Until now, I was unaware of a single patient who had dared face her with the truth of not improving, except for the poor goats in her books whose rectitude was dealt with summarily, peremptorily, biblically. Compliance and obsequiousness ran rampant among the desperate. We were all ready to kill for Helga, to lie, to cheat, to steal—but singly. We would have stood, like Laetrile patients, before the houses of Parliament to bring about Helga’s recognition, if we felt any solidarity. But Helga atomized us. No one dared to stir up trouble, at least not the patients I had met. Perhaps there were others, somewhere, willing to take a stand against her, to criticize her, to accuse her of exploitation. But how to find them? It would, I thought, be as successful an organizing effort as trying to talk people out of heart transplants by arguing cost effectiveness. We were desperate and Helga knew it. She knew and we quickly learned that desperate people live by different rules and standards.

  “Listen,” Nulty said, “I’m quitting next week. I think it should make an interesting scene. Why don’t I call you to tell you about it?”

  He called at the end of the week to say that Helga had not taken his initiative lightly. After trying to yell him into continuing with the treatment, screaming the familiar “You’ll be blind in two years” as a last resort, she left his place, defeated and silent. “I had paid her a lot of money over the four months,” he said.

  “How much?” I asked. “If you don’t mind . . .”

  “Two thousand pounds.”

  When, a little while later, I asked Helga: “Whatever happened to that American chappie you talk about? You know, the one in Knightsbridge?”

  “That rotten drunkard!” Helga growled. “Can you imagine? I arrived there one morning to give him his bees and found no one awake but the maid. I waited and saw two women, in their underwear, leave his room, that whoring alcoholic! When he came out, he reeked of whiskey. I told him right there that I would never treat him again. Imagine wasting my bees on a Teddy boy like that.”

  She had told me that Dr. Ryder was doing everything possible to entice her to stay in London. She said that he was writing an article about her for a popular magazine. “I am seriously thinking of opening a clinic with him.”

  “What about the Arabs?” I asked.

  “They’re still begging me to come, but I think I won’t. . . .”

  “Why?” I asked.

  “Because,” she said, “I can’t be sure that they’ll allow my Jewish patients to come to Abu Dhabi.” It was a stunning explanation, entirely out of character.

  One afternoon I arrived to find Dr. Ryder inside, in shirt sleeves with a cup of tea in front of him. “Dr. Ryder is writing an article and he wants to examine all my patients,” Helga explained.

  Ryder looked inside my eyes with his ophthalmoscope. “Ah, yes,” he said, “heavy black pigment,” which evoked a coughing fit from Helga, who had told me several times that the pigment was thinning, disappearing. “How is your daughter doing?” Ryder asked me as he put the ophthalmoscope back in its case.

  “She’s having a very nice summer in Greece,” I said. “But if you mean her eyes, they’re unchanged.”

  “What do you mean ‘unchanged’?” Helga blurted. “I got a letter from her saying that she was so very happy. . . .”

  “She’s happy,” I said, “but she isn’t seeing better. . . .”

  “That’s a lie!” Helga yelped. “I will find the letter.” In fact, Helga had read me the letter when it arrived. It strained to hint at a clearly nonexistent improvement, which Sarah had manufactured for my sake.

  “I know what she’s doing,” Helga spat out. “She’s drinking, staying up late, and thinking about boys. That will ruin my cure every time!”

  Ryder wiggled his fingers in front of my eyes to test my field of vision, but couldn’t determine much of anything. He took out a notebook in which he scribbled his impressions of my vision. As I was leaving, Ryder stepped outside with me and I asked him about their proposed clinic.

  “What clinic?” he asked in amazement.

  “She says she wants to start one with you and to let you in on her secrets.”

  “We’ve never even discussed it,” he said. “As a matter of fact, I’ve been urging her to move to Abu Dhabi.”

  She found new reasons each day for not going to Abu Dhabi. She said she had talked to some Iranians who told her that seven out of ten Arabs in the little desert paradise were drunkards. She checked this with an English engineer who had spent time in Abu Dhabi, and he raised the ratio to nine out of ten.

  “What good will it do if I cure those filthy blacks?” she asked. “They would drink it all away. And God only knows,” she added, “what else they do in that ridiculous little place!”

  She worried about being mistreated with no recourse to British justice. And she worried about “throwing away my wonderful reputation in Europe.” But she was as unable to resist Arab flattery as ever, and when, one September afternoon, I arrived at her house, I saw a gorgeous silver Jaguar parked in the driveway. She ran outside to tell me that “those sheikhs gave it to me.” It was indeed a stupendous car, with red leather seats, a uniformed chauffeur, “and a whole year’s worth of insurance.” To this day I don’t know whether it was paid for by petrodollars or whether my dollars contributed to its purchase.

  Still, as withdrawn and uninvolved as I tried to be now, I spent a lot of time actively hating Helga. I found myself walking the fifteen-minute trek from Sidcup station to her house fantasizing her demise. I imagined turning the final curve on Greenwood Avenue to find her driveway filled with ambulances and fire trucks, with colorful lights flashing as figures scurried in and out of the charred remains, dodging escaped bees. This image, in several versions, appeared quite frequently in my journal during August and September, and at times I worried, just a little, that some furious ex-patient would do her in and Scotland Yard, checking all clues, would subpoena my self-incriminating journals.

  As a rule, during those late, lingering hot afternoons, Helga was hardly the Helga of old. Sometimes I had to wait outside for a long time before the door opened, as Helga had fallen asleep inside, deep in her chair, smothered with newspapers. She was tamer and so exhausted as to barely have the energy to put the bees on the back of my neck. Or, as I sat in the middle of that torrid room, with a square of five-o’clock sun burning my back, and as I fidgeted and wiped my face and arms with a limp handkerchief, Helga would fall asleep in front of me. She would begin to snore a little until a fly tickled her nose and she would spring up mumbling and disoriented. I would peel myself off the leather seat, suggesting that she put the bees on me before I fainted dead away, and she, po
king around the remaining plates, offered up tag ends of thoughts or tales of the day’s events. In the intense heat, the bees stung terribly, and I often wanted to lash out at her, to scream, to destroy her house with my bare hands.

  As I walked down the street, passing the curve that brought me out of sight of Helga’s house, tears would often stream down my cheeks, behind my sunglasses. Clicking over the endless slabs of flagstone sidewalk, walking by the little rose gardens and the ticky-tacky houses, I passed all the young men with attaché cases, coming the other way and vanishing inside one house after another. In every way I could imagine, I was a long way from home. I spent hours at Foyle’s, sometimes in the cellar with the Penguins and Pelicans, asking a bystander to read me a blurb from the back cover. I poked around the third floor where the new International Edition of Marx was beginning to appear, volume by volume. I could read none of it but the accumulating set looked luscious. At times I would send some innocently crouching figure in the stacks sprawling on the wooden floor, or inadvertently knock a book out of someone’s hands. But I made myself go back often, and one day, on the ground floor, I saw a half-dozen inviting bright-red paperbacks. Ivan Illich’s Medical Nemesis had just appeared in London.

  I bought a copy and took it to Victoria Embankment Gardens near Charing Cross station where, on some afternoons, I listened to a band play. I sat in a rented park chair and, with my magnifying lenses an inch from the page, began slowly reading the first sentence of the introduction. “The m-ed-c . . .” No. Again. “. . . med-ic-al es-tab-lishment has be-co-m-e a m-aj-or th-r-ca . . .” No! “. . . th-re-at to heal-th.” I read with my left eye only. The right one barely picked up a suggestion of light gray lines splotched all over the page. On the train to Sidcup, I couldn’t get my face out of the book, and when Helga noticed it in my hand, she asked to have a look. As I sat squirming in the heat, she looked through it, her lips moving rhythmically, and asked if she could keep it overnight. Reluctantly I said yes, and the next morning, at six, she called.