Who Will Hear Your Secrets?

by Robley Wilson

  “I’m really hurting,” Reece said.

  “Mmm,” Gavin said. “I want you to lean forward, rest your chin here. Can you see this contraption?”

  “Sort of.”

  “Here,” Gavin said. “A little closer—push with your forehead. That’s it.”

  Reece felt the coolness of the strap on his brow. He pressed against it. A sudden vivid light burst into his eyes.

  “Tell me again what happened,” Gavin said.

  “It must have been the saline solution,” Reece said. “A different brand from the kind I normally use. As soon as I got the contacts in, I knew something was wrong. My eyes stung like fury.”

  “Mmm.”

  The light turned to blue. It played in a slow arc across Reece’s field of vision, left eye, then right, and back again.

  “I took the lenses out, rinsed them under the tap. Then I scrounged around and located what was left of the old saline stuff. I used that to put the contacts back in.”

  “Soft contacts, you said?”

  “We went to those when I was in here before. Three years ago.”

  “Mmm. I remember.”

  “I went on to school,” Reece said. “I was halfway through my ten o’clock when things began to blur. By the end of the hour I was blind. And scared. I had a student lead me back to my office.”

  Gavin was looking at the right eye. “You’ve got damage to both corneas,” he said. “Chemical burns—”

  “Jesus,” Reece said.

  “The left is just a bit worse than the right, but I think you’ll be O.K. with a little t.l.c.”

  “That’s my job,” Jenny said. She had been sitting in the corner of the room nearest the door, quiet, almost invisible in shadow. Gavin half-turned in his chair, as if he were noticing her for the first time.

  “This can’t be Jennifer, can it?”

  “It is,” she said.

  Gavin returned his attention to Reece. “Harold? Is it possible that you fathered this lovely woman?”

  “She takes after her mother,” Reece said.

  “Ah, that explains it.” Gavin went to his desk and came back to stand over Reece. “I’m going to put some drops in,” he said. “These’ll numb you a little; ought to reduce the immediate pain somewhat.”

  The drops were cold; he tensed, and tried to close each eye as he sensed the nearness of the dropper, but Gavin held the lids open. The pain throbbed and diminished in a rhythm tuned to his heart. He relaxed.

  “And I’m going to put in a therapeutic lens—kind of a miniature contact lens—to protect the corneas while they heal. Just leave them in until I see you again.”

  “How long?”

  “Hard to say.” Gavin placed the contacts, left then right. He scanned the sharp blue light across Reece’s eyes. “If you have any problem, call right away. Otherwise, come in day after tomorrow. Phyllis will set up a time for you.”

  “All right.”

  Gavin sat at the desk and scrawled a prescription. “This is for Tylenol with codeine. I wouldn’t take it unless the pain keeps you awake. And if you take it you shouldn’t drink; it might make you sick.” He handed the slip of paper to Jenny. “Make him behave himself,” he said.

  “It’s too late for that,” she said.

  * * *

  “I HATE BANTER,” Jenny said. She gave the car too much gas, and the rear tires shrieked. The car jolted onto the highway, turning toward the lowering sun.

  “What provokes that?”

  “You know: ‘Is it possible you fathered this lovely woman?’ Stuff like that.”

  “He was just noticing how grown-up you are.” Reece put up one hand against the glare and lowered the visor with the other. “He hasn’t seen you since long before the divorce.”

  “He could have spoken to me,” she said, “instead of bantering with you.”

  “Art Gavin and I go way back,” Reece said. “He’s a Stone-Age Republican. He never passes up a chance to needle me.”

  “It must be some perverse male-bonding thing,” Jenny said. “Do you want me to take you back to campus?”

  “I’d better go home. The car’s safe in the university garage. Anyway, I’d be a menace on the highway.”

  “What will you do about your three o’clock?”

  “I’ll call the department secretary. She’ll send someone over to dismiss them.”

  “Lucky class,” Jenny said. “The gift of a free hour.”

  “I’d rather imagine them deeply disappointed.”

  She looked at him, then looked back at the highway. He could make out the pale bloom of her face, and then it vanished, like a dim light going out.

  At the pharmacy, Jenny trotted in to fill his prescription while Reece waited. His isolation felt complete; the one or two people who passed the window of the car were as blind to him as he was to them. Then they were at the house, the windows of its twin gables a dazzle in the afternoon sunlight. Jenny stopped in front of the garage on his side of the duplex, shifted into park.

  “I’m grateful for the taxi service,” Reece said. “I know you have a life of your own.”

  “Don’t mention it. Think of it as me paying you back for all the times you chauffeured me when I was a little kid.”

  “Your mother did most of that.”

  “But you were the one who always drove me to piano lessons.”

  “You remember that, do you?” In the instant, in his mind’s eye, he was behind the wheel of the old Rambler station wagon, turning onto Ash Street, stopping at Lisa’s white ranch house.

  “Every Tuesday at four,” Jenny said. “What was that woman’s name?”

  “Howard,” Reece said. Memorable. “Lisa Howard.”

  “Of course you’d remember that,” she said.

  “But I’d forgot all those tedious lessons of yours.”

  “Me too. The only pieces I can play now are ‘I Love Coffee, I Love Tea’ and ‘Für Elise.’”

  “You can’t blame me,” he said. “You ought at least to know ‘Chopsticks.’”

  He folded back the sun visor and cracked open the car door.

  “I talked to Ma yesterday,” Jennifer said. Out of the blue. “She wondered if you remembered that last Tuesday would have been your twenty-fifth anniversary.”

  “It crossed my mind.”

  “But you didn’t do anything about it?”

  “That was a long time ago,” he said. “Jesus H. Your mother and I have been divorced nearly ten years.”

  “I told her about your eye problem. She said at least you wouldn’t be looking at other women for a while.”

  “Sweet,” he said, “and very funny.” He pushed the door all the way open and slid out.

  “Wait a sec.” She caught his hand, holding him half in and half out of the car. Her voice softened. “Are you O.K. alone? Should I stay?”

  “I’m fine,” he said. “Really.”

  “I don’t want you falling downstairs.”

  “I think I can see enough to survive,” he said.

  “At least let me walk you to your door.”

  * * *

  AFTER HIS SUPPER—A FROZEN PIZZA, its cooking time guessed at because he couldn’t read the back of the package, and a glass of white wine, warm, because he’d forgotten to chill a new bottle—he sat in the leather chair in his empty living room. There wasn’t much to do. He couldn’t read or grade papers, didn’t want to watch a television of blurry shadows. He couldn’t even make out the headlines of the newspaper he’d brought in that morning, before he started to put in his contacts.

  He closed his useless eyes. Lisa Howard. The name was a nudge, a perverse encouragement. He couldn’t blame his daughter for bringing it up; she hadn’t known until long after the weekly lessons— after the inevitable divorce. Weighing the name now in his painful dark, he thought he could see again the swirls of snow sliding across the hood of the old Rambler, melting and vanishing and revivifying in the tug between the cold wind and the heat radiating from the hood
. He saw himself adjusting the heater and defroster levers to keep the windshield from fogging, and out that windshield the outlines of the piano teacher’s house with its picture window that overlooked the front yard’s winter-smothered yews.

  And he could see on one magic occasion the unexpected vision of the piano teacher herself, a pale image in the picture window, waving, beckoning. At first he had thought it was a trick of the storm, a snow figure shaped by wind. Then he realized Lisa Howard was no mirage, but a real person inviting him out of his car. But for what? Something about little Jenny, surely. Was the girl ill? Or, no, had she so distinguished herself in the day’s lesson that her father was being called to witness, to join in the praise?

  He had shut off the engine and gone to the house, head down against the wind-driven snow, the tiny flakes stinging his face as he picked his way—no haste-making on that slippery driveway— to the front door, which opened to him the moment he arrived at its threshold. The piano teacher held the door while he came into a front hallway that held a hat rack, an umbrella stand, a bronze-framed wall mirror.

  “Take off your coat,” the teacher said. “We still have a half-hour to go, but it seemed cruel to leave you sitting out there in the storm.”

  “It’s kind of you, Ms. Howard.”

  “Lisa, please.” She took his overcoat and hung it alongside the mirror. “Can I get you something? There’s coffee. There’s even whiskey, but you mustn’t tell the other parents.”

  “I’ll be fine,” Reece said.

  By this time she had led him into the front room whose windows he had so often watched from his car. At the end of the room was a closed door; he could hear his daughter’s clumsy music behind it.

  “I have to get back to Jenny,” the teacher said. “Why don’t you make yourself comfortable. The whiskey is in the kitchen—through there—in the cupboard above the sink. Glasses to the left. Ice—” She stopped. “Well, you know where to find ice.”

  She left the room. For a few minutes Reece sat on a sofa under the windows. He looked through magazines piled on a coffee table in front of him, listened to Jenny’s playing, checked his watch. Finally he went out to the kitchen. He found a bottle of Jack Daniel’s, half-filled a tumbler with ice cubes and poured whiskey over them. Then he went back to the front room to drink and wait for the end of the lesson.

  That was the beginning of the end of the marriage: a Jack-rocks in the front parlor, sitting under the picture window, watching the wind-driven snow outside while his daughter’s music played in muffled fits and starts behind a closed door.

  * * *

  HE SLEPT BADLY, dozing and starting awake when light from passing cars washed across the bedroom ceiling. The pain persisted, pulsing behind his eyes, and for the first time he wondered if Gavin might be wrong, that the damage wouldn’t repair itself, that he would be forever—what was it they called it?—“vision impaired” or, worse, “legally blind.” Nonsense, he told himself. Nonsense. I should only have taken the painkillers.

  But the fear stayed with him, until finally he crawled out of bed to escape it. He put on the clothes he had worn the day before— easier than fumbling through his closet and dresser drawers—and came carefully downstairs. The world was still dark, the fan light over the stove a pale porcelain reflection that showed no detail.

  He was used to living alone. It was nearly eight years since Lisa had left him to go back to conservatory, and over that time he had perfected the ritual of his mornings. Coffee from the pot that brewed two cups only. Orange juice. A multi-vitamin augmented by a vitamin-E capsule. On the days he taught—usually Tuesdays and Thursdays—he toasted an English muffin, drenched the two halves in butter and ate them with his coffee, sitting in front of Local on the 8s.

  Today he simplified his routine, omitting the coffee and moving directly to the orange juice, which he managed by resting the spout of the juice carton against the rim of the glass before he poured. He left the orange juice on the counter while he took down the vitamins from their jars in the cupboard, but when he turned to reach for the glass he knocked it over. While he held the glass upright and refilled it, he could hear the spilled juice dripping onto the kitchen floor. If he truly went blind, would every day begin like this one?

  After he had swallowed his vitamins and managed to find the weather channel—twenty percent chance of showers, temperature in the low seventies—he phoned Gavin’s office. “Arthur said if I had problems, I should come in today,” he told Phyllis. “I hope he can work me in.”

  Reece heard the hollowness of a hand placed over a telephone mouthpiece, muffled words, then Gavin was on the line.

  “Hal? What’s the difficulty?”

  “The pain’s been pretty bad,” Reece said. “I wasn’t able to get much sleep.”

  “Did you take that high-octane Tylenol I wrote up for you?”

  “I’d had a couple of glasses of wine. I didn’t want to make myself sick.”

  There was a pause, and the faint sound of pages turning. “You’ll have to come in after regular hours,” Gavin said. “I can’t manage it any sooner. Say five-thirty—six, to be safe.”

  “Six is fine,” Reece said. “Thanks.”

  He broke the connection, then dialed Jenny’s cell phone. The call went directly to her voice mail.

  “I’m afraid I need you today after all,” he said. “I had kind of a bad night. Can you take me to see Gavin around a quarter to six today? It’s O.K. if you can’t. Just call me and I’ll get a cab.”

  * * *

  AT TWENTY TO SIX HE HEARD the car in the driveway. He swept his keys off the kitchen counter, stood for a long moment on the back stoop coaxing his house key to find the dead-bolt lock, then followed the iron railing slowly down the steps. It wasn’t until he had opened the door to a half-forgotten perfume that he realized it was his ex-wife’s car, the blue Civic he had bought her as part of the divorce settlement. Ten years old; she ought to have traded it in long ago.

  “Margaret,” he said.

  How long since he had seen her, talked with her? Early in the divorce the three of them had reunited every June, on Jenny’s birthday, and again at Christmas—a neat bisecting of the year—but that ritual was abandoned when Jenny turned eighteen. Jenny’s idea, he remembered. Haven’t you had enough pretending?

  His wife turned her face toward him, a pale oval floating in the shadow of the car’s interior. “Well? Are you getting in?”

  He slid onto the passenger seat and shut the door. Margaret put the car in gear and drove, both hands on the wheel. The car passed through several intersections, no words spoken.

  Finally she said, “How are the eyes today? Jenny said you were blind.”

  “Practically.”

  “Do you have much pain?”

  “Some. It’s a little better this afternoon.” He ransacked his mind for conversation topics, finding none worthwhile. What had they ever found to talk about? How had they managed thirteen years of marriage? “I suppose it was Jenny’s idea,” he said, “your picking me up.”

  “What makes you say that?”

  “Yesterday she was hinting for us to get back together,” he said. “Brought up our silver anniversary. This must be phase two of the plan.”

  “Don’t flatter yourself. Jenny has an evening class.” She pulled into the empty clinic lot, parked close to the entrance and shut down the engine. “Living by yourself must be turning you into a conspiracy freak.”

  “Sorry,” he said, but as he opened the door Margaret put her hand on his sleeve.

  “Wait,” she said. “I’ll come around.”

  When he got out of the car she was ready to take his arm, closing the door behind him. She steered him up the building’s steps by pressure against his elbow. Was that necessary? The door ahead was visible, a blurred rectangle darker than its surround, and he thought about shaking off Margaret’s guidance, but then he stumbled against a step.

  “Whoops,” she said. “You really are blind.”
>
  “I’m fine,” Reece said.

  “Just don’t be a martyr.” She opened the door for him. In the waiting room she turned him over to Phyllis, whose white uniform was as dazzling as before.

  * * *

  GAVIN WAS READY FOR HIM. “I watched you pull in,” he said. “Was that Margaret driving?” He drew his chair toward Reece and swung the apparatus into place between them. “Are you two getting back together?”

  “Jenny had a class,” Reece said. “Margaret and I aren’t reconciling—if that’s what they call it.”

  “Too bad,” Gavin said. He leaned forward. “So then, what’s the matter?”

  “That throbbing kind of pain,” Reece said. “I must have lain awake till three—thinking about the missed classes, errands undone. Silly stuff.”

  “Nothing to do with a guilty conscience, I hope.” Gavin bent forward. “Keep your forehead tight against the strap. You know the drill. Don’t raise your chin.”

  “I was remembering when I was a kid,” Reece said. “We lived with my grandmother, who was already well into her seventies. She was forever complaining about her eyesight.”

  “Mmm,” said Gavin. Now he was peering into Reece’s left eye, Reece’s forehead once more pressed against the cool metal of the headrest.

  “She’d say, ‘I’m having another one of my blurs.’ I was never sure what that meant until the last year or so.”

  “How’s that?” said Gavin. He moved his light to the right eye; its pinpoint made a thin snakelike thread as it crossed Reece’s field of vision.

  “Because it’s started happening to me. The blurs. Every now and then I get this funny sort of shimmer between me and the world. You know how on those cop documentaries they hide somebody’s identity by distorting the image? It looks like their faces turn into a bunch of squares, and they flicker as they move?”

  “Migraine,” Gavin said.

  “No. There’s no headache.”

  Dr. Gavin leaned away from him. “Ocular migraine,” he said. “There needn’t be any headache. Is this a frequent thing?”