Love and First Sight

by Josh Sundquist

  Sigh. Will people never learn? “Still doesn’t mean much to me.”

  “Oh, right, sorry. I guess it’s like… You know what my voice sounds like, right?”

  “Yeah.” I ponder her voice for a moment. It’s controlled and pressurized, like the water flowing through a turbine in a dam. But dams don’t just generate power. They are a barricade. They hold back a flood.

  “And the sound of my voice is very clear coming through your ears?”

  The question interrupts my thoughts about hydropower. “Sure.”

  “Can you imitate it?”

  “How do you mean?”

  “Like, can you re-create the sound of my voice using your own vocal cords?”

  “Oh… I think I get it now.”

  “Right, and that’s what’s so cool about art,” she says, speaking faster. “Van Gogh was an impressionist, so he wasn’t even trying to paint scenes that look like what a person would see with their eyes. Sorry, is this weird to talk about? Like, seeing and stuff? I don’t mean—”

  “No, it’s fascinating, actually. Please continue.”

  “All right, so a realist is an artist who paints an image that looks similar to what a good photographer could capture on film. That’s, like, if you could imitate the sound of my speech with near-perfect accuracy using your own voice. But an impressionist paints not what the scene actually is, but what it feels like.”

  “It’s distorted?”

  “No, not distorted. It’s… interpreted… represented in a different way. Like a metaphor. Like an impressionistic version of my voice might not sound like me at all, at least not in a literal sense. It might be a piece of music that when you hear it makes you think of my voice. You hear it and say, ‘Yes, that captures the essence of what Cecily sounds like.’”

  I’m silent.

  “Sorry, did I lose you?” she asks. “I know I kind of geek out about—”

  “No, I just—wow, that’s a really good description. Thank you. No one has ever explained art to me like that before.”

  “You’re welcome,” she says, more softly.

  She removes the lens cap from her camera, and the shutter clicks a few times.

  Trying to keep the conversation going, I ask, “So what sort of stuff did van Gogh paint?”

  “Landscapes and plants, mostly.”

  “Not people?”

  “He painted people, but that’s not what he’s known for.”

  “How come?”

  She’s silent for a moment. “Maybe because what is considered beautiful in nature has remained constant throughout history, but the definition of human beauty changes every few years based on how the media defines the so-called perfect body.”

  Just then a set of footsteps approaches and a voice interrupts us.

  “Excuse me, sir, may I ask you a personal question?” he says.

  “Yes, I’m blind,” I say.

  “Sorry, I didn’t mean to be rude.”

  “What gave it away? Do my socks not match or something?”

  “Well, no…” he stammers.

  “I’m kidding. I’ve got a cane and sunglasses. Of course I’m blind.”

  “Listen,” he says. “I’m a security guard. The security guard, actually. I travel with this exhibit. I just wanted to say that if you’re interested, you are welcome to touch these paintings.”

  I’m stunned. It’s not unusual these days for museums to allow the visually impaired to touch some artwork. But a van Gogh?

  “For real?”

  “Yes, sir. This is the personal collection of Edward Kramer. Mr. Kramer has a son with special needs, and he wants to be sure that people of all abilities can appreciate them. But you have to be really, really gentle. The paint is a century and a half old. Touch it as lightly as possible. And wash your hands first. Gets rid of the oil on your skin that can damage the paint.”

  “Fair enough. Where’s the restroom?” I ask.

  “I’ll show you,” says Cecily. “I want to make sure you go into the right one.”

  The guard walks away.

  “Wait,” I say, taken aback. “What was that supposed to mean?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Were you making fun of blind people?”

  “No, I would never—” She stops and sighs. “Yesterday, before journalism, you…”

  “What?”

  “You went into the girls’ bathroom.”

  That hot feeling builds in my face. “Please tell me you’re joking.”

  “I wish I was,” she says.

  “At least tell me you were the only one who saw.”

  “Uh…”

  “How many more?”

  “It’s really not that big—”

  “Two? Three?”

  “Don’t worry about—”

  “Ten?”

  “Twenty. Okay, more like twenty-five,” she says. “Absolute max: thirty.”

  “THIRTY?”

  “It was basically the whole journalism class, with the exception of Mrs. Everbrook. Everyone felt really terrible about it, if that’s any consolation. And the doors are right beside each other, so you aren’t even the first person to make the mistake.”

  “Well, you were the only one who told me,” I say. “You took the hit. Thanks. That couldn’t have been easy.”

  “The truth has a price,” she says. “That’s what my mom always says.”

  Her mom is right. It stings, knowing all those students were watching me make a fool of myself.

  I go to the (correct) restroom and wash my hands. The first painting I touch is called Les Alyscamps.

  “Let’s play a game,” I suggest. “I’ll touch it and try to guess what it’s a painting of.”

  “Okay,” she says.

  I start from the bottom, running my hands softly across the canvas the way I read braille. The paint has a dry, layered texture to it. There are places where the paint is globbed on smooth and thick, and others where it has tiny canyons of texture. I spread my fingers wider to absorb the shape of the bottom half of the canvas. The object in the painting starts out covering the entire width of the canvas, and then as it moves upward, it gets smaller and smaller until it ends in a point. I think of objects I know of with this shape.

  “Is it a slice of pie?” I guess.

  “Nope,” she says.

  “A piece of pizza?”

  “Nope.”

  “A Dorito?”

  “When was your last meal?”

  I laugh. “But am I close?”

  “No, it’s not any kind of food. And for the record, I don’t think Doritos had been invented yet.”

  “But it’s triangle-shaped, right?”

  She thinks for a moment. “Well… yeah, I guess it is,” she says, as if she hadn’t noticed this before.

  “Fine, I give up. What is it?”

  “A road.”

  “But roads are straight lines,” I say, confused. “Is it an impressionistic street or something?”

  “No, it’s just the perspective.”

  I don’t understand.

  “You know,” she adds when I say nothing. “Like, it gets smaller in the distance. Well, the street’s not actually getting smaller—it’s just how it looks when it’s far away,” she says.

  “Yeah, I just don’t understand what you’re saying,” I admit.

  “Oh, I’m sorry,” she says, a note of sensitivity entering her voice. “I just assumed… So I guess you don’t know what perspective is?”

  “I know what the word means,” I say, sounding a little more defensive than I intended. “Like people have different perspectives on issues. Or people look at things from different perspectives. But how does that make the road a triangle?”

  “Well, okay. Basically, as things get farther away, they look smaller,” she explains patiently.

  “They change size?”

  “They don’t actually change size. Just how much space they take up in your field of vision.”

  “Why
?”

  “Um, I don’t really know, actually. It just is.”

  “So why is the street in the painting pointy?”

  “Van Gogh is painting as if he’s looking along the road, so the farther away it gets from him, the smaller it looks to him, until it disappears completely at the horizon.”

  “It just disappears?”

  “Well, sure. You can’t see forever.”

  “I know that the eyes can’t see forever. But if I stand right beside this painting and touch the frame, and then step back to arm’s length and touch it again, the frame feels like the same width in my hand. So this perspective thing… wow… that kind of blows my mind, Cecily.”

  “You’re welcome, I guess?” she says, like a question. “I’m surprised you’ve never heard that before.”

  “Well, I mean, I moved away to the school for the blind when I was in kindergarten. I spent most summers at blind camps. So basically all my friends my whole life have been blind. Even many of the teachers at my school had visual impairments. So it was literally—”

  “The blind leading the blind,” she interrupts.

  I touch a few of the other paintings, and she explains each one to me. Listening to descriptions of art in this way lights up distant, rarely used corners of my brain.

  “There’s another room,” she says. “Do you want me to, um, lead you there? Like with your arm?”

  “Guide. We call it guiding. And yes, please.”

  “So how does it work?”

  “Just reach your elbow a little toward me, and I’ll hold it.”

  When I grab her arm, I feel this tingle, almost like touching something that has an electric current running through it. It’s not painful. Just sort of shocking. I jerk my hand away.

  “I’m sorry,” she says, her voice shrinking. “Did I do it wrong?”

  “No, that was fine. I just… Never mind. You did great.”

  I reach for her arm a second time, and when I touch her sweater, I feel that charge again.

  Cecily guides me into the other room.

  “You know how many paintings van Gogh created?” she asks.

  “No idea.”

  “Almost a thousand.”

  “Wow.”

  “And you know how many he sold?”

  “All of them, I guess. I mean, he was a really famous painter, right?”

  “Not till long after he died. In his entire life, he sold only one of his paintings.”

  “One?” I ask in disbelief.

  “One.”

  “That’s why I relate to him, I think,” she says thoughtfully. “He was born at the wrong time.”

  “So you’re like some kind of unrecognized genius, too?” I realize I’m still holding her arm, so I squeeze it playfully.

  She laughs, and it works its way into my brain, reminding me of what she said earlier. Her laughter is like impressionist art. Because it captures the essence of itself, the essence of laughter.

  “No, just born at the wrong time in history.”

  “A lot of blind people feel that way, too,” I say. “Hundreds of years ago, most people were doing manual labor, like working farms or pulling plows or whatever. You didn’t need extremely clear vision for stuff like that. You could go a lifetime without realizing you couldn’t see as well as everyone else.”

  “But now we are in the information age,” she fills in.

  “Exactly. Which started with the printing press, and now our society is based on communicating by words and pictures. It’s called ‘the tyranny of the visual.’ Sorry, I didn’t mean to regurgitate everything from my seventh-grade History of Visual Impairment class.”

  “No, not at all,” she says, and sounds like she means it.

  “Although in the last couple years, technology has been making things a lot easier,” I add.

  She guides me up to a painting, and we stop. Normally at this point, I would let go of a guide’s arm. But I don’t. Instead, I loop my hand through the wrist strap on my cane so I can touch the painting with that hand while my other one stays connected to Cecily.

  And then I catch myself. Why am I still holding on to this girl’s arm? I’ve already reached point B.

  So I let go as I examine the painting with my other hand.

  Cecily describes the painting to me in between snaps of her camera. One of van Gogh’s many self-portraits, she explains. He looks gaunt and soulful. She says there are hints in his eyes of the depression that will eventually claim his life, when he committed suicide at age thirty-seven.

  “It has a lot of oranges and reds in it,” she says. “But I guess you don’t know what those look like, huh?”

  “Not so much.”

  “Those are considered warm colors. So they’re like the heat of the sun or the smell of the fall.”

  “Sorry,” I say. “That’s poetic, but it doesn’t help me.”

  “Can you not even… like, imagine a color?” she asks.

  I hear more visitors shuffle into the room, voices soft as they comment on the artwork.

  “Even if I could, how would I know I’m imagining a color when I’ve never seen one before?” I ask. “It’s, like, how do you know that when you see red, it’s the same red as everyone else sees? Maybe what they call red looks to them like what you call blue? There’s no way of knowing if your experience of a certain color is the same.”

  “But I can close my eyes and see a color in my mind. Can you not do that?”

  I chuckle.

  “What?” she asks.

  “Let me put it this way: Try to imagine a color you’ve never seen before. Like, a brand-new color that was just invented and has never before existed. What would it look like?”

  She is silent.

  “Well?” I ask.

  “You’re right,” she says. “It’s impossible.”

  “That’s how it is for me. Except with all colors. And all two-dimensional shapes. And everything you see in these paintings. You have to understand that my mind developed differently because, unlike most blind people, I have never seen anything with my eyes.”

  “You were completely blind from birth?”

  “Right,” I say.

  “So you’re trying to tell me you belong to a pretty exclusive club?” she says playfully.

  “I’d show you the membership card, but you wouldn’t be able to read it. It’s written in braille.”

  She laughs, but then says seriously, “I’m sorry.”

  “For what?”

  “That you have to live that way. It must be so frustrating.”

  If there’s one thing I don’t like, it’s people feeling sorry for me.

  “What do you mean?” I say, trying to limit the irritability creeping into my voice. “You think my experience of the world is less rich because I’m blind?”

  “Well, you’re missing out on so many—”

  “That’s sightist, Cecily. Assuming that blind people can’t have a full life because they don’t have eyesight. My sensory experience isn’t less than yours. It’s just different.”

  “I’m so sorry. I didn’t mean—”

  “Why don’t you take your pictures so we can get out of here? I’ll go interview the guard to get some quotes for my article.”

  “Want me to guide you back to him?”

  “No, I remember the route.”

  CHAPTER 6

  After I get home from the museum, I go to my bedroom and plop down on the bed to listen to music. It’s the bedroom I grew up in before I went to the school for the blind. Other kids, I guess, have posters on their walls with photos of stuff they like to look at. Cecily’s probably has paintings. No, forget Cecily. She was rude to me. I don’t care what her room looks like.

  When I was a kid, Mom helped me decorate my bedroom walls with scratch-and-sniff stickers. Each wall has its own category. The wall with my closet is sweet food (fruit, desserts, and the like), the wall with my desk is savory food, and the one by my bed is scents of nature.

  I
n total, I have 187 different fragrances on the walls of my room. When I was a kid, I wished I had that many fingers so I could scratch them simultaneously and find out what all the scents in the world smelled like together. (As it turns out, I’m able to experience this by simply walking into Toano High School’s cafeteria.)

  My bedspread is covered in wispy threads like the fur of a freakishly fluffy pet. Lying on my back, I rub the pine-scented sticker on the wall and inhale through my nose. I moved away soon after we put the stickers up, so they’ve just been chilling here for ten years, waiting for their fragrance to be scratched open. The softness of the bed and the whiff of the sticker, however, keep getting interrupted by the echo of Cecily’s laugh. I keep thinking about how much I liked being with her at that gallery. Which is annoying, because I’m still mad about what she said. I claw at a grass-scented sticker in an attempt to drown her out with olfactory overload.

  Seeking a different distraction, I open my laptop to write my article about the van Gogh exhibit. I don’t include anything about what it felt like to touch Cecily’s arm or how it felt to be insulted by her at the end, of course, because that’s not anyone’s business, but I do write about how the owner has a special-needs child, which meant I was allowed to touch the paintings. I describe the feel of the crackled paint under my fingertips. As for the museum itself, I note the way our footsteps reverberated through the museum’s reverent silence as we walked through its heavily air-conditioned and dehumidified climate.

  The garage-door opener downstairs cranks to life. Mom and Dad must be back from their errands. I used to hear the car engine before the garage opened. Now it just starts to lift with no warning. Stupid Tesla.

  A minute later, I hear Mom climbing the stairs and then there’s a knock at my door.

  “Will, come down to the family room!” she says. “We have a surprise for you!”

  “I’m doing homework.”

  “Just finish it later.”

  This is quite possibly the first time my mother has ever encouraged me to procrastinate on my homework. (Even at boarding school, the long arm of the mom-law followed my studies and grades with the utmost care.) So I leave my laptop and walk downstairs.

  In a voice more appropriate for giving a speech to hundreds, she announces, “Your father and I wanted to be able to start going on family bike rides. So after your dad got home from the operating room today, we purchased a tandem bike for you and me to share!”