Ordinary Daylight

by Andrew Potok

  “The Potoks are on their way,” Barry added with good humor. But it was only one Potok, the Potok by marriage, like my mother. The light of the candle flickered in my Scotch, the only thing I saw. The darkness isolated me as I imagined a spotlight isolated performers. I was seen, stared at, yet I couldn’t see. I burned with self-consciousness. I wanted to run but couldn’t. I wanted to drive like everyone else.

  Anita and Roy joined us. “Goddard’s going to fire half the faculty,” Anita said. “It’s unbelievable, but the bastards are going to do it.”

  “You know how impossible it is to find teaching jobs,” Roy said. “Roger’s been looking for two years and he publishes regularly.”

  I listened and sympathized. “It’s really awful,” I managed to say.

  He must have looked at me then and realized, because of the last few years of our friendship, that my woes took precedence over everyone else’s, that through the years of my hysterics and depressions, I needed tending, and he said: “Well, Andrew, pretty soon you’ll have your Ph.D., which will help with jobs.”

  “Listen, Papa,” Sarah said, “you could work for the Foundation.”

  I had directed attention back to me and felt embarrassed. “Had the bees worked, I might have been their bee expert. . . .”

  “You blew it,” Barry said.

  Other friends joined us. We now occupied half the room, some five or six tables pushed together. From several tables down Bob shouted: “Oh, c’mon, Potok, lighten up! Go easy on yourself, for Christ’s sake!”

  I could hear Charlotte finally having a good time, talking softly, laughing about “other things at the Modern.” The Scotch was making me groggy, but I was stuck until everyone else was ready to go.

  Finally, in stages, people got up to leave. There were more projections into Charlotte’s future and more meaningful pats for me, more viselike grips around my shoulders, dry kisses and wet. One moment, we were all standing, and the next, I was alone except for a couple on the other side of the room. Then Charlotte came back. She must have forgotten me, and now she offered me her elbow. “Let’s go, honey,” she said. I dragged behind her, mumbling a good-bye to Neil. I stumbled down the outside steps while Charlotte held me upright. All I wanted to do was sleep.

  The beekeeper, Charles Mraz, Ben Berman’s “man in Vermont,” came to visit me, bringing a large bundle of books and articles about the therapeutic use of bee venom. “It’s amazing stuff,” he said. “I’m surprised her bees didn’t help you.” He told me stories of the extraordinary strength and longevity of most beekeepers, who get stung thousands of times a year as a matter of course. He himself had successfully treated people for joint diseases and just about everything else, including, he added in a whisper, cancer.

  Sarah and I went to visit Mraz one day, and he urged us both to take up bee treatment again. We looked at each other and shuddered. He offered us a hive to take home, then suggested we try a couple of his bees right there, and, masochists to the end, we agreed. But before touching our bodies with a bee, Mraz took some ice from the freezer and numbed the spot on our necks he intended to treat. We hardly felt the sting at all, not until the skin warmed, and by then the worst was almost over. A vengeful hatred for Helga welled up inside me. We could have been spared a lot of pain.

  Sarah and I each took a bottle of bees home with us. Sarah taught her roommates to extricate one bee at a time with tweezers and had herself stung for a week, until she felt that the whole business interfered with her sanity as well as her schoolwork. I kept my bottle on the kitchen counter for a couple of days and watched Charlotte circumnavigate the area in the mornings, giving my bees a filthy look. I waited for her offer to learn to nurse me with the bees, but the offer never came. Two days after the bees’ arrival, I stormed out of the house with the bottle and heaved it as far as I could into the field where, on landing, it hit a rock and exploded.

  I was asked to give a talk at the Boston University Medical School about my time with Helga. Posters went up the week before my presentation announcing THE BEE MAN FROM LONDON, and the offices of the Department of Socio-Medical Sciences were swamped with requests for clarification. First-year medical students were required to attend, but on the day of my lecture, the auditorium overflowed with the curious, who, I think, expected a clown in a furry bee suit and compound insect eyes.

  For me, these lectures—there were several—were an opportunity to give some meaning to a lost six months, a time with few redeeming moments. In this medical school, among friends and students, I wanted to rediscover the path, like a lapsed Catholic lighting candles in the church of the true faith.

  In preparing these talks, though, I found I wasn’t nearly as repentant as I thought I’d be. As my experience began to crystallize on a series of oversized index cards, I saw that I had a message of some relevance to impart. Having returned from the unspeakable “other side,” I had to convince these budding doctors that it could have happened to them.

  I realized that I had to lay a foundation of credibility, and so I quoted the more reasonable of Charles Mraz’s bee material, being careful not to spare a single prestigious institution involved in bee research. I cited statistics comparing effectiveness and efficiency inside and outside the medical establishment. I quoted Nobel laureates, and picked the most illustrious of Illich’s sources to underscore my point: often it makes no difference where you go for help; your chances of survival are about equal to never having gone anywhere at all. In that large, windowless auditorium, where 150 blurred faces stared up at me, I urged them not to judge their future patients harshly and to understand that people’s response to life-threatening or way-of-life-threatening events is unpredictable, especially in the face of the wanton promises of miracles from science and medicine. After the first of these lectures was over, after all the students who had come to the front to talk had left and I walked to lunch, I had a glimmer of understanding of the new plateau I had reached. I had now said it all in an ordered sequence: from knowing I’d be blind to experiencing it, from denial to anger to grief, facing it on different levels, joining it, fighting it, pretending it didn’t exist or that I could make it all go away. The time for synthesis had arrived, because the sum total of the ignorance and impotence of the various systems I’d explored had finally liberated me from hope.

  In mid-April, taking a break from my nearly completed dissertation, I happily launched into some badly missed physical work. Hoeing manure into my garden, I hurt my back. The spasm caused some discomfort, but I went to Boston the next day as scheduled, to give another in a series of talks at BU. By the time I arrived on the third floor of the medical school building, I could hardly move. I gave my lecture and was rushed next door to a doctor who suspected a slipped disk. I flew back home on the tiny Air New England de Havilland, inside which even healthy lower backs snap as one inches forward in the aisle, bent and twisted, to a seat. At home, in great pain, I went to bed. The local doctor prescribed Valium and pain-killers, both of which I swallowed with rebellious glee. When I called a New York orthopedist, he suggested immobility for at least six weeks.

  A rather small intervertebral disk and two tiny retinas were scarcely a pinpoint on the total vulnerable square footage inside the body, but the possibilities for pain and deterioration were immense. When Anita came over, offering to read to me, I asked for the Book of Job. But I was not mollified. Job knew that God had made a terrible mistake in singling him out; but in spite of it all, he didn’t allow himself the bitterness and fury I was feeling. I wanted to wail and scream, to take everyone down with me if I had to go. Let others turn their goddamn cheeks and suffer with dignity. I didn’t want to spend my life blind and in bed!

  From the Library of Congress I ordered books they recorded about personal misfortune—it was one of their larger categories—like biographies of Helen Keller, Roy Campanella, Saint Anthony; anything described in the catalog as a “poignant story” about “unshakable determination” or the “refusal to accept limits”
and going on to become champions, or saints, or surgeons. I drank a lot of Scotch, smoked a lot of homegrown, took the prescribed codeine, and wondered each morning why I wasn’t either cured or dead. During one of these nights, I had a dream, as clear as total sight. It was a single image of an eyeless face pouring out coils and tendrils of color-saturated words, painted words, which whorled into complex, many-layered scrolls, like fugues. On awakening, soothed and peaceful, I postulated the transformation of my ancient creative core, the birth of the new self from the ashes of the old. And yet, after the immediate loveliness had vanished, the dream made me sad. It could be, I thought, that such a core survived, but I had long ago lost access to it and if it did exist, did I have the energy to go digging around for it, buried as it must have been behind mounds of accumulated emotional garbage?

  I tried to write, but with every weakness of thought and language, every overwrought locution, every vagueness and generality, I felt hopelessly transparent in my ineptitude. At first, everything I attempted was crude. I imitated other styles, but seductive as they were in anticipation, once they were regurgitated as mine, they glowed with phoniness. Heavily, heavily, I wrote about such matters as manipulation, exploitation, alienation, lumbering through my experiences in search of granitelike examples, full of rhetoric and moist exclamations of perfect joy or abysmal sorrow.

  The process itself was slow and cumbersome, especially in bed, without the use of my Visualtek. With a portable lectern sitting on my belly, and an oversized sketch pad propped on it, I scratched large letters with Magic Markers. Charlotte or Liz or Anita would read a few paragraphs aloud, and I would listen over and over, to catch a uniform thread, force, and direction, until a voice emerged and locked into my consciousness, indisputably, for better or worse, as my own.

  In the past, when I didn’t have a clear idea about what to do with an empty canvas, I could squeeze out a dab of buttery ocher, push it around with a knife or a rag soaked in turpentine; I could brush in haphazard lines, crossing, spiraling, circling, until forms appeared with a life of their own, demanding their own organic exploration. Something always happened. At times rich ideas were born, though those fortuitous beginnings were exercises, like scales, like the flexing of muscles. The real business of painting, like the business of words, began after.

  During most of the day, the four windows of my bedroom crackled with the glare of the spring sky, while in the late afternoon, the sun deposited fiery squares of white-hot light on the carpet and the quilt on my bed. If I squinted at the southwest windows, I could see the celery tops of a tree line near the woodshed. The windows facing the bed directly were scratched, as if by the illegible scribbles of a child, with the branches of a maple in the lower driveway and the budding ends of lilacs a few feet from the house. The volume of the room was thick with debris, the clutter of fragmented vision. There wasn’t only a gauzy screen between me and everything else, but all the interstices and crevices of space were crammed with the dappled smudges of things, like stacks of dirty ice cubes, wall to wall, floor to ceiling. I felt that looking into it, driving my eyes to try to see through this unrelenting mess, justified my need for order. My body ached for the cleanness, the knifelike precision of light. By obsessively arranging things, by cleaning and clearing away, I felt that someday I would get to the great garbagey space in front of me.

  My London journals, which I had transcribed at Eton Rise from tapes to handwritten notebooks, I now gave to a typist. When she returned two days before schedule to pick up the next installment because, she said, “I couldn’t wait to see what happened,” I suspected I had something of general interest on my hands. “It’s powerful stuff,” she said, standing by my bed, looking down on my immobile body.

  I sent a piece of the journals plus a few typed pages of my new narrative to Mary, who had sent me the Observer article about Helga in the first place. Within a week she called.

  “It’s good, Andy,” she said. “I’d like to show it to Ellyn. . . .”

  “Really? It’s hardly ready for that. . . .”

  “That’s okay,” Mary said. “You don’t have to wait for a polished manuscript to show an editor. Let her have a look. Ellyn will tell you what can be done with it. And Andy,” she added, “I cried when I read the part about your sight fantasies. . . .”

  Prematurely, yet automatically, I began to take myself more seriously. Making an application for a bank loan, Charlotte sat on the edge of the bed and read: “Profession?” I didn’t answer for a frantic moment; then, flushing a little, “Writer,” I said.

  It felt powerful to be able to make people weep, though weeping was easy: all I needed to lubricate my own tear ducts was a mention of refugees or missed opportunities. But I was bored with the pathos of my story. I didn’t really want to make anyone weep. I wanted to make an artful order of the chaos of my experience. As I stared blindly into the Marimekko fabric Charlotte had tacked over the glary windows, I thought I could foresee the day when I would be in touch with the uniqueness of my vision and temperament. In this organizing process, the process of writing, I began to make ever more sense of my experience, of St. Paul’s, the work with blind people, the graduate work, and Helga. The more I wrote, the less I had to continue to define myself by my eyes.

  Even as I wrote though, I felt touchy and irritable. I felt envious of anyone who could count on old skills. And just as other losses had hurt me once, my inability to get information now loomed larger and larger. I had accepted not driving or painting, not making sense of movies or parties; but, wanting to write, I couldn’t bear the slow and random ooze of information, the weeks required to read a single book, the inability to skim or skip. When a new Updike, a Christopher Lasch, another biography of Beethoven appeared, I’d have to wait for years until it was recorded—if it was recorded at all.

  Probably it would always be one thing or another. If only this, if only that. If only I had been able to see at the party up the hill, I wouldn’t have felt like such a wimp. If I could have moved about from room to room, I wouldn’t have stood uncomfortably alone or been prey to people I didn’t want to talk to. If I only hadn’t thought she was someone else and called her by the wrong name, perhaps a lovely spell would not have been broken. But it did begin to penetrate: I couldn’t see. I couldn’t move easily from room to room. I would call people by the wrong names. I would have to settle for small bits of information, carefully selected.

  My back wasn’t improving. Charlotte came up the stairs a few times a day with trays of food we would share, quietly and alone. The unspoken etiquette of our embattled marriage called for a truce when one of us was really down. The peace allowed some love back in. Friends came to read aloud and share their own problems. Maya came up after school for help with her math, and I found that I was less irritated by the silly mistakes she made when I was flat on my back than when fully wound up, pacing, blaming, storming around. It became a pleasure to help her. My poker group, which had been a man short for six months, did not take my bad back as much of an obstacle, and we arranged to play at my bedside. I was placed at the foot of the bed while the others sat on pillows around a tabletop. When my pain became unendurable, someone would turn me to one side or the other, or deal me out of a few hands. Full of drugs, stiff and in pain, I parted with a lot of money; it took months to recoup.

  After three weeks of this regimen, I felt that I could not stand another day. Like the friends of Job, my friends Roy and Richie and Tom carried me on a flush door into a borrowed VW van and drove me to Montpelier to see a chiropractor. Where drugs and orthodox ministrations had failed, this elderly Vermonter, using his strong hands and arms, crunched and realigned my vertebrae so that that very day I walked out of his office, not seeing exactly where I was walking, but feeling nimble and spry. I sent off a letter to the first-year medical students at BU informing them that I had again heard the call of alternative medicine, but that this time it had worked.

  In Boston, Freda and I arranged a reunion of our grou
p, which had continued to meet without me for a couple of months after I had gone to London. As I sat in her kitchen before the others arrived, and Freda puttered, wiping counters that were already spotless, she confessed that she had felt betrayed by my leaving. “I came to terms with it eventually,” she said, “but I was angry, very angry at the time.”

  “I can’t believe I was that important,” I said.

  “Well, you damn well better believe it. You were the center of the group.” Even though Freda called me in London regularly, worried about me, wished me well, I had put an irremediable distance between us, because of my selfishness and my refusal to accept responsibility. Dagmar had given me hell on the phone before I left, then wrote me a long forgiving letter in London. Freda had given me her blessing, like everyone else, but she resented my leaving.

  After lunch, we went out to sit on the porch and watch the others arrive. Sheldon, as usual, was escorted inside by one of his sons. Craig and George walked, heads cocked to one side or the other, listening and pointing a cluster of good retinal cells at traffic. Kevin came by taxi. Frank, Jenny, and Moira shared another. It took no time at all to feel the warmth of this company, the security of shared experience. Sheldon and Moira were the only ones with canes; the rest of us stood in a tight group, moving about a little, and like fish in a crowded tank, jostling, recoiling, nuzzling, we touched one another hesitantly, more to orient ourselves than to show affection. Finally, the canes folded, and like beached whales prodded out to sea again, we were settled into tall dark chairs around Freda’s long dining table. In our element, we relaxed into animated conversation, as if six months had not stood between our meetings.

  “Well, are you seeing better?” Kevin asked peevishly. He was chairman of the board of a small chain of newspapers. He was all business, with great faith in authority.