Honeydew: Stories

by Edith Pearlman

  “What? I feel fine.”

  “And a pancreas biopsy,” he said, and began to cry.

  V.

  Another year. And then, one August afternoon, Marcus emerged from the lab and found Lyle practicing hoop shots by himself.

  “I have a story to tell you,” Marcus said.

  “Okay.” When Lyle read, the black letters sometimes shuddered on the page. But when he listened, his closed eyes found a sort of repose behind the patchwork cerise of his lids.

  “It’s a Jamaican tale,” Marcus said.

  “Oh, then about Anansi.”

  “Anansi plays a part. But it’s about a young man.”

  They sat on the ground, their arms around their knees and their backs against the trunk of a beech, as if they were in a Caribbean village leaning against a guango.

  Marcus began:

  “Once upon a time there lived a youth who was never happy unless he was prying into things other people knew nothing about. Especially things that happened at night. He wanted secrets to be laid bare to him. He wandered from wizard to wizard, begging each of them in vain to open his eyes, but he found none to help him. Finally he reached Anansi. After listening to the youth, the spider warned:

  “‘My son, most discoveries bring not happiness but misery. Much is properly hidden from the eyes of men. Too much knowledge kills joy. Therefore think well what you are doing, or someday you will repent. But if you will not take my advice, I can show you the secrets you crave.’

  “‘Please!’

  “‘Tomorrow night you must go to the place where, once in seven years, the serpent-king summons his court. I will tell you where it is. But remember what I say: blindness is man’s highest good.’

  “That night the young man set out for the wide, lonely moor belonging to the serpent-king. He saw a multitude of small hillocks motionless under the moonlight. He crouched behind a bush. Suddenly a luminous glow arose in the middle of the moor. At the same moment all the hillocks began to squirm and to crawl, and from each one came thousands of serpents making straight for the glow. The youth saw a multitude of snakes, big and little and of every color, gathering together in one great cluster around a huge serpent. Light and colors sprang from its head. The young man saw brilliance usually denied to mortal eyes. He saw iridescence, bioluminescence, adularescence, opalescence. Then the scene vanished. He went home.

  “The next day he counted the minutes till night, when he might return to the forest. But when he reached the special place, he found an empty moor: gray, gray, and gray. He went back many nights but did not see the colors. He would have to wait another seven years.

  “He thought about the colors night and day. He ceased to care about anything else in the world. He sickened for what he could not have. And he died before the seven years was out, knowing at the end that Anansi had spoken truly when he said, ‘Blindness is man’s highest good.’”

  After a while Lyle said, “But, Dad, not complete blindness…”

  “No. Fables are not literal. Freedom from supervision…supravision…overvision…hypervision…”

  “Freedom from second sight,” Lyle added. “I can have that freedom?” He turned toward Marcus. His remarkable eyes, an unremarkable brown, seemed to swell a little—tears had entered from the ducts.

  Marcus put his arm around the boy’s shoulders, scraping his elbow grievously on the back of the tree. “I think so.”

  The next week, Marcus appeared at dinner with a pair of spectacles—rimless, with wire earpieces. The lenses were constructed of hundreds of miniature polyhedrons.

  “Prisms,” said Pansy, and went on dishing out lapin aux pruneaux.

  “Involuted prisms,” refined David, who now lived with the family. He had become comfortable at last with his celibacy and inwardness; he was sometimes even talkative.

  Marcus turned to Lyle. “These are for you,” he said, and he handed the eyeglasses to the boy. “Put them on whenever you like.”

  “They will give you a different kind of vision,” David said. “And, Lyle—it’s all right if you don’t like the spectacles.”

  Lyle did not put them on inside. He went out onto the lawn with its commanding beech tree and its flowering bushes. He looked around at the normal thousand-color summer scene—normal to him, at any rate, though he understood it to be his alone. Now maybe he’d know a competing normal. He put on the glasses.

  It was as if someone had turned out the lights or a thick cloud had passed in front of the sun. Most creatures see things less brilliantly in the dark, he knew that. He was seeing things less brilliantly. The house, made of flat stones, was gray. Perhaps the gray contained some gold. On the laboratory’s green siding, each slat cast a slightly darker green on the one beneath it. The beech tree was a combination of brown and red. The geraniums were a shade of magenta—one shade of magenta. He looked at his skin. Plain tan. He looked at the sky. Blue, slowly deepening—it was dusk now. Dark blue.

  He went inside. “I like the glasses.”

  “And the colors?” Marcus asked.

  “Duller. Many fewer. Motionless. Perspective is less noticeable. Things seem to have only a touch of a third dimension. I’m glad for the…diminishment. Now I have two ways to see. Thank you, Dad. Thank you, David. You’ve given me a wonderful present.”

  “We have given you a choice,” Marcus said. “Always an ambiguous gift.”

  Lyle said suddenly, “Spiders—what’s their vision like?”

  David said, “Spiders usually have eight eyes placed in two rows on the front of the carapace. The eyes have a silvery appearance. The retinas have relatively coarse-grained mosaics of receptor cells, and their resolution of images is…”

  “Poor,” said Marcus, finishing David’s lecture and answering Lyle’s question at the same time.

  Lyle wore his gift every day, all day, until he went to bed—and even then he took the new glasses off only after he’d turned out the light. His classmates were incurious about the glasses—they were teenagers, after all, not interested in much outside themselves. But Lyle’s new and commonplace vision gave him new and commonplace manners. He no longer stared into space, his conversation became less effortful. Girls phoned him. He got included in more activities. Marcus and David made sunglasses for him, and swimming goggles, biking goggles, wraparounds for chemistry lab. They made him a pair of pince-nez, which he wore to a Halloween party, along with a stiff collar and a frock coat and a false beard. “Chekhov,” he explained. He joined the chess club. The club met Sunday mornings. His Sunday mornings were free. Ms. Lapidus had recently died.

  In the lab Marcus and David were now constructing wide-angle micro-optical lenses. The lenses could be implanted—and were, after the proper trials—in a sufferer’s eye. They made new tools for photography and tomography. They made corneal inlays. Pansy was running the business aspect of the enterprise, and managing the staff of five. Having learned so much about the tricks of the eye-brain double play, she became expert at standard optical illusions, and then invented some of her own, with which she beguiled the twin sons who had been born to her and Marcus. (“Their complexion is Unglazed Bisque,” Lyle said of his brothers, remembering the old paint wheel.) Pansy began a side venture selling games of her own design. Some elaborate inventions she used at the twins’ birthday parties, held in a newly built room off the lab. The kids’ friends entered an illusory universe for half an hour, then gobbled up Pansy’s sweet-potato ice cream, which was real.

  VI.

  At eighteen Lyle was accepted at St. John’s. He was looking forward to reading the Greats. The day before he was to leave for Annapolis, a thick autumn mist enveloped Godolphin and Godolphin alone—the sun was out in Boston. A graduation gift from Anansi, Lyle thought. He walked down to the river. There the mist rested, soft and colorless. Slowly, deliberately, he took off his glasses.

  Mist. Still mist. Then, gradually, colors returned, filled the scattered bits of moisture. According to the laws of physics, each drop sh
ould have contained a rainbow—but no, on this eve of departure, the drops, directed by the spider, were breaking the laws, each producing a singular shade for his pleasure, all together producing a universe of colors. Purple deeper than iris, laced with yolky lines. Bronze striped with brass. He saw the indigo of infected flesh, he saw the glistening fuchsia of attacking bacteria, he saw the orange of old-age crinkles that wait invisibly on every smooth young arm. Yes, all colors, in all their headachy variations, colors as they had once been.

  His man-made glasses, his trickster specs, had made life less sorrowful, but at a cost. They had deprived him of this sheen of blue blue blue violet seeping into blue blue violet violet pressing itself into blue violet violet violet that yearns to become shadow. Vanilla hectored its neighbor papyrus. There was moss concealing like a mother its multigreened offspring. There were squirming nacreous snakes, slightly nauseating. Much is properly hidden from the eyes of men, Anansi had said…Chartreuse slashed like lightning across his vision from upper left to lower right and also from upper right to lower left, both slants remaining on his retinas that were so cursed, so blessed. Where one diagonal intersected the other in this chartreuse chiasma rested an oval, deep within the intersection, for of course the mist in which these shapes and colors shudderingly resided was three-dimensional or maybe three-and-a-half, and it was in motion too, the color drops assaulting one another in a chromatic orgy. The oval within the chartreuse X was scaled with overlapping hexagons of nearly transparent turquoise—there must have been hundreds of turquoises, each different from the other by so little, so little, yet, by that little, different. What’s your favorite color? people used to ask, as they always ask children. Red, he would answer, divining even then that they had no idea how many reds there were: a cloud at sunset, a cloud at sunrise, blood from a scratch, blood from a nose, a run-over cat; the dappled skin of a tomato, with all reds swimming upon it…He wondered, not for the first time, who his original father was.

  He put his glasses back on. Mist returned to mist, ordinary mist, mist in whose every drop curved what people called the spectrum, such a paltry number of colors. This sight was no truer a reality than the glory of a few minutes ago; no less true either. Truth had nothing to do with the witness of the eyes. What he saw now was simply what other people saw. He chose their limited vision; he meant to live in this world as an ordinary man. He would not remove his glasses again.

  Flowers

  On a bright Monday morning in February, Lois and Daniel were reading in their monochromatic living room—gray walls, gray carpet, gray furniture. It was the kind of room that could soothe a panic attack, or cause one. From the stereo Scriabin flung a cat’s cradle of notes.

  The doorbell interrupted the Russian madman. Daniel was still in bathrobe and slippers—this was his day without seminars to conduct or office hours to show up at. Lois answered the summons. She was already dressed: stovepipe pants, tee, jacket, all black. Iterations of this uniform in various dark colors hung in her closet like a line of patient men. She had not yet put on her shoes. But even barefoot she was six inches taller than the lanky teenage boy in the doorway, though the offering of gladioli he thrust into her hands rose above them both. “‘Mrs. Daniel Bevington,’” the kid read from a yellow slip. Lois nodded. “There’s a note,” the boy said, and raced to a curbside van that bore the name of a local florist.

  Daniel, noiseless as always, had followed Lois to the door. “Have we a vase long enough for those?”

  “No.” You can’t really bury your nose in a gladiolus, but she tried. Meanwhile, boots pulled on because of the snow, he headed for the garage. She followed him, still barefoot, the purple shafts in her arms. He scanned the garage’s tidy innards, chose a tall rubber basket the color of earth, picked it up and rinsed it under the outside tap. Then he filled the thing halfway with water. He put it down and returned to the living room, Lois still behind him, her feet turning blue. He spread the automotive section of the newspaper on the floor in front of a bookcase. He went back out for the rubber basket. Lois went into the kitchen.

  She laid the flowers on the kitchen table and loosened their wrapping. She slipped the note from between the stalks. Happy Valentine’s Day, it said. Love, Daniel.

  She returned to the living room, the gladioli now horizontal in her arms. “Daniel! How sweet of you. So sweet.” She put the flowers in the rubber basket.

  “I’m glad you like them,” he said, looking up, sounding briefly young, younger than their twin college-age sons, younger even than the delivery boy, who had probably thought he was fleeing a house of mourning.

  “Like them? I love them,” Lois said. Especially since I’m not really dead, she added silently. She walked to Daniel’s chair and kissed him. This was the first time he’d sent her flowers since her lying-in.

  He noticed that her eyes were unnaturally bright.

  The doorbell rang again.

  This time the truck was from a florist in a neighboring town. Another teenager said, “Lois Bevington?” He handed her twelve tall bloodred roses in their own vase.

  She placed this gift on the low coffee table. Daniel was suddenly at her side. “Heavens,” he said.

  “Heavens,” she echoed. She fingered the little pink envelope before opening it. He took the delay as an invitation to move still closer. Finally she slid out the card. From one who loves, it said. No signature. The words had been printed by a computer.

  “Century Gothic,” he identified. “I too was offered the use of the keyboard. I could have selected that font or any other. But I used my own pen.”

  “I prefer handwriting,” Lois said in an earnest tone.

  They returned to their chairs, though not to their reading.

  The third truck belonged to a notable Boston florist. Its delivery person was a middle-aged woman. “Bevington?” she said.

  Into the kitchen again, both of them. These flowers erupted from a shallow bowl. The elaborate ribbon and cellophane bright as tears at first prevented their identification, but when she cut the ribbon and removed the cellophane a rush of glory met their two gazes. The flowers were mostly white lilacs, with occasional sprays of heather and spikes of something very blue. She carried the bowl into the living room and placed it on the piano. An envelope fell to the floor. Daniel picked it up, as if the gift were for him. But it was meant for Lois, the four letters rounded, perhaps to disguise the penmanship, perhaps to make it legible.

  “Open it,” Daniel said in an unlikely bark. “Please,” he amended. She extracted the card.

  Love consists in this: that two solitudes protect and touch and greet each other.

  Neither could identify the quote. Side by side on the gray couch they consulted their Bartlett’s. The source was a letter written by Rilke.

  “I don’t believe those lilacs were sent to you by Rilke,” said Daniel. “Not the tulips either.”

  “Roses,” she murmured.

  “Roses. They didn’t come from a dead poet.”

  “No,” Lois said, but whether she meant accord or disagreement or let’s not speculate…that was anybody’s guess.

  In order to understand the sudden beflowering of an unadorned room, one must go back a month in time and half a mile in space—back to the evening McCauley Bell selected the menu for the fiftieth birthday party he was throwing for his wife, Andrea. Lois had been hired to cater the event. She waited in her outsize kitchen, dreading the interview. McCauley Bell was a cardiologist, and so of course he’d forbid meat, soft cheeses, pâté. He’d turn thumbs-down on her signature tiramisu, any mouthful of which could kill you if you were genetically inclined. He’d probably demand fruit salad and hardtack.

  But he turned out to be a paunchy man of sixty with a voice as rich as Lois’s seven-layer frivolity. She offered him a slice of frivolity, and then another. He indicated that he wanted to serve his guests exactly what his caterer liked best to make. He took all her lethal suggestions except Brie en croûte; he explained that he had a rel
ationship with a cheesemonger who supplied him every so often with very special wheels of Camembert.

  “And every so often you scrape out his arteries?” Lois asked.

  He smiled at her. “That’s the surgeon’s work.” He felt a curious sympathy for this bony woman. She seemed to find smiling difficult—was it the slight malocclusion; had no one ever told her that buckteeth were sexy? He knew she was married, but he suspected that she was insufficiently attended to.

  “Yes,” Andy said later, at home. She had taken an adult-education cooking course taught by Lois—Sweet Soups and Saucy Pies—and she had formed one of her shallow friendships with the tall teacher. They’d gone to Pirates of Penzance together. “The husband is out to sea and she doesn’t know how to haul him in—that’s my guess. He teaches algebra or something.” In fact Daniel Bevington was a world-class mathematician, but McCauley didn’t trouble Andy with that information. “Lois does know how to monkey with ingredients, combines things you’d never think of. Chilies and melon, say.”

  The night before the party, the Bevingtons carried hors d’oeuvres and pastries into the Bells’ permanently disordered kitchen. Lois opened the refrigerator that McCauley and Andy had emptied that afternoon. The Bevingtons stacked trays inside the fridge, taking turns, never bumping into each other. Then Lois and Andy walked through the downstairs discussing the placement of the bar, the various routes from kitchen to the other rooms, the fact that the piano player could play just about anything if he was kept drunk enough.

  McCauley watched the two women confer, Andy’s soft freckled beauty facing Lois’s profile. The sweet awning of the caterer’s upper lip did not quite cover the uncorrected teeth. Her husband was still in the kitchen, looking out the window. There were probably rabbits in the backyard; there might also be coyotes. Rabbits with their rapid hearts, 335 beats a minute in some breeds, can go into shock when a coyote comes close: convenient for the predator. But McCauley saw as he too neared the window that there were no rabbits just now. The mathematician was staring at something else, maybe the birches, white as the snow.…The man’s pulse was seventy to eighty if his heartbeats were normal. McCauley estimated them to be on the slow side.