A Blind Man Can See How Much I Love You

by Amy Bloom

  Buster says, “Do we have to go back down?”

  “Are you okay?”

  “Just stuffed. And I’m ready to be with just you.” Buster looks at his watch. “Lionel’s long knives ought to be coming out around now.”

  “Do you think we ought to hang around for your mother?”

  “To protect her? I know you must be kidding.” It’s all right with Jewelle if Buster thinks they’ve cleaned up enough; the plates are all in the kitchen, the leftover turkey has been wrapped and refrigerated, the candles have been blown out. It’s not her house, after all.

  Lionel washes, Julia dries. They’ve been doing it this way since he was ten, and just as he cannot imagine sleeping on the left side of a bed or wearing shoes without socks, he cannot imagine drying rather than washing. Julia looks more than tired, she looks maimed.

  “If your hand’s hurting, just leave the dishes. They’ll dry in the rack.”

  Julia doesn’t even answer. She keeps at it until clean, dry plates and silver cover the kitchen table.

  “If you leave it until tomorrow, I’ll put it all away,” Lionel says.

  Julia thinks that unless he really has become someone she does not know, everyone will have breakfast in the dining room, and afterward, sometime in the late afternoon when Buster and his family have gone and it’s just Lionel and Ari, when it would be nice to sit down with a glass of wine and watch the sun set, she will be putting away her mother’s silver platter and her mother-in-law’s pink-and-gold crystal bowls, which go with nothing but please the boys.

  Lionel and Julia talk about Buster and Jewelle’s marriage, which is better but less interesting than it was, and Buster’s weight problem, and Jewelle’s languishing career as a painter, and Odean Pope’s Saxophone Choir, and Lionel’s becoming counsel for a Greek shipping line.

  Lionel sighs over the sink, and Julia puts her hand on his back. “Are you all right? Basically?”

  “I’m fine. You don’t have to worry about me. I’m not a kid.” He was about to say that he’s not really a son, any more than he’s really a father, that these step-ties are like long-distance relationships, workable only with people whose commitment and loyalty are much greater than the average. “And you don’t have to keep worrying about … what was. It didn’t ruin me. It’s not like we would ever be lovers now.”

  Julia thinks that all that French polish is not worth much if he can’t figure out a nicer way not to say that he no longer desires her, that sex between them is unthinkable not because she raised him, taught him to dance, hemmed his pants, and put pimple cream on his back, but because she is too old now for him to see her that way.

  “We were never lovers. We had sex,” she says, but this is not what she believes. They were lovers that night as surely as ugly babies are still babies; they were lovers like any other mismatched and blundering pair. “We were heartbroken and we mistook each other for things we were not. Do you really want to have this conversation?”

  Lionel wipes down the kitchen counters. “Nope. I have never wanted to have this conversation. I don’t want anything except a little peace and quiet—and a Lexus. I’m easy, Ma.”

  Julia looks at him so long he smiles. He is such a handsome man. “You’re easy. And I’m tired. You want to leave it at that?”

  Lionel tosses the sponge into the sink. “Absolutely. Take care of your finger. Good night.”

  If it would turn him back into the boy he was, she would kiss him good night, even if she cut her lips on that fine, sharp face.

  “Okay. See you in the morning. Sleep tight.”

  Julia takes a shower. Lionel drinks on in the kitchen, the Scotch back under the sink in case someone walks in on him. Buster and Jewelle sleep spoon-style. Corinne has crawled between them, her wet thumb on her father’s bare hip, her small mouth open against her mother’s shoulder. Jordan sleeps as he always does, wrestling in his dreams whatever he has failed to soothe and calm all day. His pillow is on the floor, and the sheets twist around his waist.

  Julia reads until three a.m. Most nights she falls asleep with her arms around her pillow, remembering Peaches’ creamy breasts cupped in her hands or feeling Peaches’ soft stomach pressed against her, but tonight, spread out in her pajama top and panties, she can hardly remember that she ever shared a bed.

  Ari is snuffling in the doorway.

  “Come here, honey. Viens ici, chéri.” It is easier to be kind to him in French, somehow. Ari wears one of Buster’s old terry cloth robes, the hem trailing a good foot behind him. He has folded the sleeves back so many times they form huge baroque cuffs around his wrists.

  “I do not sleep.”

  “That’s understandable. Je comprends.” Julia pats the empty side of the bed, and Ari sits down. His doleful, cross face is handsome in profile, the bedside light limning his Roman nose and straight black brows.

  “Jordan hate me. You all hate me.”

  “We don’t hate you, honey. Non, ce n’est pas vrai. Nous t’aimons.” Julia hopes that she is saying what she means. “It’s just hard. We all have to get used to each other. Il faut que nous….” If she ever had the French vocabulary to discuss the vicissitudes of divorce and future happiness and loving new people, she doesn’t anymore. She puts her hand on Ari’s flat curls. “Il faut que nous faisons ton connaissance.”

  She hears him laugh for the first time. “That is ‘how do you do.’ Not what we say en famille.”

  Laughing is an improvement, and Julia keeps on with her French—perhaps feeling superior will do him more good than obvious kindness—and tries to tell Ari about the day she has planned for them tomorrow, with a trip to the playground and a trip to the hardware store so Lionel can fix the kitchen steps.

  Ari laughs again and yawns. “I am tired,” he says, and lies down, putting his head on one of Julia’s lace pillows. “Dors bien,” the little boy says.

  “All right. You too. You dors bien.”

  Julia pulls the blankets up over Ari.

  “At night my mother sing,” he says.

  The only French song Julia knows is the “Marseillaise.” She sings the folk songs and hymns she sang to the boys, and by the time she has failed to hit that sweet, impossible note in “Amazing Grace,” Ari’s breathing is already moist and deep. Julia gets under the covers as Ari rolls over, his damp forehead and elbows and knees pressing into her side. She counts the books on her shelves, then sheep, then turns out the bedside lamp and counts every lover she ever had and everything she can remember about them, from the raven-shaped birthmark on the Harvard boy’s ass to the unexpected dark brown of Peter’s eyes, leaving out Peaches and Lionel Senior, who are on their own, quite different list. She remembers the birthday parties she gave for Lionel and Buster, including the famous Cookie Monster cake that turned her hands blue for three days, and the eighth-grade soccer party that ended with Lionel and another boy needing stitches. Already six feet tall, he sat in her lap, arms and legs flowing over her, while his father held his head for the doctor.

  Ari sighs and shifts, holding tight to Julia’s pajama top, her lapel twisted in his hands like rope. She feels the wide shape of his five knuckles on her chest, bone pressing flesh against bone, and she is not sorry at all to be old and awake so late at night.

  Stars at Elbow and Foot

  I feel my baby’s arms around my neck. Hidden wrists, flesh the color and feel of white tea roses, the rising scent of warm cornbread. I wake up and find the pillow twisted beneath my chin, a few strands of my hair caught in the pillowcase zipper. Marc hears me or feels me beginning to cry and wards it off as best he can.

  “Gotta piss,” he says, and he smooths the covers down as if to soothe his side of the bed.

  I rock the pillow and reach for a Prozac and the glass of water on the nightstand. My whole house is decorated by an invalid: boxes of tissues, half-drawn curtains, sweaty nightgowns, aspirin, marjoram shower gel (guaranteed by Marcs New Age secretary to “lift your spirits”), fading plants. I do not under
stand why death inspires people to give greenery.

  Marc comes back to bed, and I am kind enough to pretend that I’m asleep. If I were awake, he would have to comfort me. The circles under his eyes darken and crease the skin down to his cheekbones. Why should either of us have to endure his comforting me? He puts his hand on my hip, as if to balance himself, but I know he’s checking. Am I twitching, am I sweating, are my shoulders heaving? He’s a good man; he will avoid me only once. Having got off the hook earlier, he is compelled to be attentive. I sound like I hate him, which I don’t.

  I do fantasize about his death, however. I strangle him with the umbilical cord, the blue-pink twist they took off Saul’s little no-neck. The doctor, my own obstetrician—a perfectly pleasant, competent woman, a Democrat who sits with me on the boards of two good causes—is perforated by the smallest, sharpest scalpels, as in an old-fashioned knife-throwing show, until she is pinned to the wall of the operating room in pieces, her lips still moving, apologizing, but not so profusely that I might think she was at fault and sue her for malpractice or wrongful death or whatever it is that my brother-in-law told us we could sue for. My wrongful life, my dying marriage, how about the house plants and the students I don’t give a damn about? For the nurses and the intern who assisted Mary Lou, I use dull scalpels, and I stick them with horse-size epidural needles when they try to escape.

  I made an attempt to go back to my office three weeks ago. I picked up my mail and was doing fine, ignoring the silences and the sotto voce inquiries, which practically screamed “Better you than me.” Martha, our department secretary—old, frightened, useless since we all got computers—handed me my messages and a stack of departmental memos. Her ancient poodle was wheezing on his little bed beneath her desk.

  “Your shirt…” she said, and I looked down at the wet blue circles and left.

  I sat in the ladies’ room, pressing my breasts, kneading my shirt and my bra until tiny white tears dripped onto my fingers. I left my mail on the floor, and someone sent it to me anonymously, with kind intentions, two days later.

  I go back again, braced with a Percodan-Prozac cocktail, which you will not find in the Physician’s Desk Reference. Information about an MLA conference I seem to have organized in Edinburgh is coming through on the department fax. The man faxing me is very excited, and his words leap about on the cheap, oily paper. He is expecting a draft of my presentation in two weeks and me in four. I don’t think so. I tell Martha to fax him back that I will not attend and that I will not send the notes for my talk.

  She is concerned. I treat Martha the way my mother taught me to treat our domestic servants. I am gracious and reasonable and accommodating. She adores me (and appreciates her annual Westminster dog show tickets), and the faculty Marxists (former Marxists—I don’t know what they do with themselves now) gnash their teeth over us. Martha hesitates. It cannot be good for me professionally to cancel at this late date. Perhaps I will not be asked to chair a panel again soon. Perhaps my reputation at the university will diminish and Martha’s office status will go from endangered to extinct. I fax the message myself: “Cannot come. Baby dead. Maybe next year. Onora O’Connor.”

  A girl is waiting for me in the hall. I don’t mind girls too much, and I can even feel sorry for them, since I know what’s in store for them and they don’t. When I was her age, I’d look at women like me with just that same disgusted disbelief. Their stomachs billowed out, their asses dragged, their hair hung in limp strands or was sprayed up into alien shapes. Why did they do that to themselves? They must all have been ugly girls and never recovered. But I was not an ugly girl, I put this young thing in the shade when I was her age. I did art modeling for tuition money—servants were a phase, not a lifestyle—and loved it. My body defied gravity, defined lush perfection. Peach juice would run out if I was bitten. I was fucking perfect for three years of my life, and not too shabby until the recent past.

  I signed her forms, promised her she could be in my Auden seminar come fall, and escaped, feeling like a check bouncer in a mom-and-pop grocery. Sure, here’s my address, watch me record the amount, like it matters. There’s nothing in the bank. I am no more going to teach in the fall than play third base for the Yankees.

  I leave the building, passing clusters of women. I hate them all; I don’t even see the men. When I hear or smell babies coming, I leave the room. These women, all these women, are pregnant, or will be, or have been, or don’t want to be, or have suffered some made-for-TV disaster like mine. It doesn’t matter; whether they are like me or lucky, I hate them, and I seem to make it pretty clear, because they turn just a little, feet unmoving while their hips shift, and I cannot join them without barging in.

  I find a woman sitting in my kitchen, not obviously pregnant but she might be—she could let it drop in the middle of our conversation or else make a huge effort and say nothing at all so Marc can struggle with telling me privately. I wonder if he’s sleeping with her, but I can’t imagine it. He looks as bad as I do. Every time he shaves he nicks another spot; his whole face is lightly gouged, as if he’d been rather listlessly assaulted. There are four deep-green rows of wine bottles on our kitchen counter. Marc has been steadily working through cases of California Merlot and Zinfandel.

  “I’m Jessica? From the Neonate Program at the hospital? Memorial Unit Three?” She goes on talking, but I’m stuck. Doesn’t she know who she is? Is she asking me? Does she think I’ve forgotten the floor name? Does she think I remember her? Marc is nodding, with tears in his eyes. She must be talking about Saul.

  “… that you might be interested in …”

  “What?”

  She sighs, just a little bit—I should appreciate how patient and understanding she’s being. Do I look like I give a fuck? You, do you think I can even smell you without wanting to puke? I may start puking if she doesn’t leave soon. Hormones, medication, lots of obvious explanations for my sudden vomiting. I measure the distance to the kitchen sink and figure whether I could hit her shoes on the way. She’s still talking, and Marc has put his hand on my shoulder. Saul is definitely the subject.

  “… your loss. I worked with one woman who went through this experience, and I think she found it very helpful. So I mentioned it to your husband.”

  “What?”

  “The Pediatric Volunteer Program. After orientation, you spend time with children on the unit until they go home.”

  “Or die.”

  Jessica looks at Marc, who is no longer touching my shoulder in a display of emotional support. He cradles his face in his left hand, rolling a wet cork across the table with his right index finger.

  “Oh no, you don’t spend time with terminally ill children. Our volunteers visit with the children recovering from surgery, getting fitted for prostheses, things like that. Not terminal cases.”

  I can see her thoughts through a suddenly opened window in her forehead. Jesus, she’s thinking, this woman is clearly not suitable for any kind of program, how do I leave without upsetting her? The transparent patch in Jessica’s forehead is a product of sleep deprivation, as Mary Lou has already explained to Marc and me. The moments when Saul, at various ages, comes to me and weeps in my arms, the tendency to see people’s words as they say them and sometimes when they don’t, the sensation that objects are only two-dimensional—these are typical symptoms of sleep deprivation. Not to worry.

  “I’ll think about it. Why don’t you leave your card. Thanks for coming. Good-bye.” I think this comes out pretty well, but I can see from her face that I have left out something key, like inflection. Too bad. If she wants affect, she can talk to Marc. I go upstairs and lie down with my shoes on (but my soles don’t touch the bedspread—I’m not that far gone) until I hear the front door close.

  Another agonizing evening with the O’Connor-Schwartzes begins. Marc is solicitous, then hurt, then apologetic, then furious, then guilty, then back to the beginning, then exhausted. He usually falls asleep between guilt and the third bottle of win
e.

  I cannot kill myself—we do not commit that sin, it is such bad form—but I find myself teetering at the stair landings, walking quickly on the narrow, slick marble steps of the library, seeing how long I can keep my hands off the steering wheel. Come and get me.

  This is not a hospital ward, it is the Hieronymus Bosch Pediatric Purgatory. I have been told to wait with the other child lovers shuffling along in pastel sweatsuits and massive sneakers or two-hundred-dollar cardigans thrown over jeans and posy-covered turtlenecks. Apparently, only women are in need of this kind of entertainment. As we go through the halls of gasping infants, and toddlers with metal shunts sticking out of their heads, and older children playing tag with their IVs, I notice that my little group is more varied than I thought. Two of the six look late-middle-aged, and their expressions are of pleasant concern and universal affection. Two others are quite young, very Junior League, and if they have lost babies they’ve been spending quite a bit of time in the gym ever since. The woman right next to me is black, meaning the color of strong coffee, and her expression, at least, is familiar to me. She looks enraged and terrified, and when she sees a nurse her lips curl up and back, revealing wonderfully pointed incisors. When we are seated for orientation, in a window-less room with firmly cushioned chairs and love seats, I perch on the edge of a table, and the little nurse leading the group knows enough not to encourage me to join the circle. She asks what each of us hopes to get out of this program, and the others say whatever they say, and the black woman and I snarl and look away. Even I, with my impaired judgment, cannot believe that they’re going to let people like us have contact with helpless children. Then she asks if we have preferences about the kids we spend time with. The others say prettily that it really doesn’t matter. The she-wolf says, “Not a black child,” and I say nothing at all.

  I ask for a little time to get acclimated, and the nurse lets me trespass quietly, unsupervised. All the children I see are engaged. They are being fed and held, or being sung to as their dressings are changed. They cry out briefly as their scarlet stumpy parts are washed and rewrapped. When the nurses and aides see me watching, they scowl or smile quickly; visitors are not much help. Some of the rooms are overflowing with Mylar balloons, photo-filled bulletin boards, parents, toys, comic books. I am looking for a room with nothing but a kid and a cot.