The Blindfold Test

by Barry Schechter

  “He probably wouldn’t have gotten there first anyway. My Subliminals guy says sociopaths are less susceptible.”

  “Well, what if Fran was over and she got punched in the face? What if he’d gotten scared when the countdown started and taken me outside? But I guess your point is that if we tried to anticipate everything that could go wrong, we’d’ve been paralyzed. And I have to admit that having the world’s ultimate security system gave me courage. Without my false hope and your false assurances, I probably wouldn’t have survived the night.”

  John chose to take these mixed thanks straight: “Glad to help out.”

  Parker said, “I’ve always thought that John’s ability to act in a crisis is tied to his short-term capacity for regret. If he’s made a mistake, he’ll apologize, he’ll do whatever it takes to make amends. But bring it up a second time and it’s, ‘John, you killed my mother.’ ‘And?’ ”

  Wine spurted out of Peg’s nose; she held her fist to her lips till she managed to swallow. “Warn me when you’re going to say stuff like that. It’s true, it’s no fun arguing with him.”

  “Come to think of it, if you’d installed a perfect system, then I’d have been the one who answered the doorbell and gotten killed in the lobby. I guess it really did save my life.”

  Bored with the subject, John held up Kathryn for his wife’s inspection. “Want me to give her her bath?”

  “I should be going,” Parker said.

  “Stick around. We have ice cream. Anybody want ice cream? So what happened to the old lady?”

  “Don’t you read the papers? She’s a hero. There’s no real proof she came over to shoot me. In fact I thanked her—over the phone!—for saving my life. It seemed rude not to. She graciously accepted my thanks. She has a court date coming up for the unregistered handgun, but I’m sure they’ll drop the charges, and everyone agrees she killed Monroe, Junior in self-defense. She’s seeing a therapist, and I have assurances from her lawyer that…what?…next time she wants to come over armed, she’ll call first.”

  “What was the damn point!” Peg demanded. “What’s the big ultimate…”

  “J. Edgar Hoover didn’t like my face.”

  “So?”

  “Exactly!”

  “I don’t like your face either,” John said. “Did you feel a little let down?”

  “I keep thinking there has to be something else. What am I still missing?”

  “Is that why you look so down-at-the-mouth?” Peg asked. “There’s something else and you don’t know what it is?”

  “People say I’m unobservant, but is that true? Don’t smirk. I know that sometimes I’ll be walking along thinking and I’ll miss some acquaintance passing on the street. And I missed the whole conspiracy because when things go wrong, sane people resist the notion that it’s a plot by enemies they’ve never heard of. But what do people mean when they say I’m unobservant? I’m a pretty good critic—could I do that if I didn’t notice details? I could close my eyes and describe the furniture, your faces, your clothes, but…I don’t know how to put this. Is there something everybody else sees?”

  John shrugged. Peg said, “What? Like a kick-me sign?”

  “I’ve always imagined it as a giant parrot perched on my head.”

  Without any noticeable cue passing between them, John and Peg focused a few inches above his hair.

  “Yeah. That’s the feeling. Okay, funny. Cut it out.”

  * * *

  —

  He hadn’t exactly been missing anything—just thinking about something else each time the thing he knew came to mind. Having shouted it down, as it were, he knew only that it had to do with Fran.

  For days he’d been waiting, studying her face, hoping, when he got caught, that she mistook his watchfulness for simple adoration. Not quite knowing how to react, she pretended not to notice or made a face like a movie star smiling for her public. Sometimes they’d be alone in her apartment or his, and she’d turn to look behind her, scanning the room for the deserving party.

  Whatever it was that he thought he knew, he told himself he had to be wrong. After all, they’d never been closer. Take the night after he got out of the hospital, when she’d bought him a late dinner at Isabella’s. Even before the drinks arrived she was referring to him as her hero. By the time dessert came he felt obliged to remind her, “All I did was ignore him.”

  They’d both paused to admire the elegance with which Fran dispatched her martini olive. “Maybe not noticing is what bravery is all about,” she observed. “ ‘All I did was not look down,’ hmmm?”

  “Then I guess a knockout blow to the head would improve us all,” he teased, still feeling the heat of her praises on his face. He figured she’d see through this hero stuff any day, and at least he’d be able to say I told you so. “How are the interviews going?”

  “Oh, you know.” She watched herself rub a wet spot on the table with her napkin. Recalling the moment days later, he thought he’d had his first twinge right there.

  “What, not going well?” Not likely!

  “You’re so deft at changing the subject,” she said deflecting the conversation back to him. “All I was saying was, you don’t give yourself enough credit.” He watched her slide the wadded napkin back and forth with her finger.

  But as they started up Rush Street to her car she locked her arm around his, her hip bumping against him. They were passing a row of singles bars when a voice behind them proclaimed her glories. “Ignore it,” she whispered. Soon other voices joined in, rhapsodizing the joys that would be hers if she lay down right there, on the sidewalk in front of Halliday’s. A man named Dick proclaimed that in honor of his erotic mastery, the dick had been renamed after him. Soon even that modicum of wit deserted the band of drunks following them.

  “I think I’ll have a word with the boys about their figures of speech.” This was still the hold-me-back stage, but a return trip to the emergency ward was beginning to look unavoidable.

  “Keep walking, Parker. If you get beat up ‘defending my honor,’ I’ll beat you up, too.”

  She squeezed his arm and pulled him forward. “Ignore them,” she whispered, “ignore them out of existence! Come on,” she grabbed his chin to keep him from turning his head, “you can do it. Unobserve them.” They walked double-time at Fran’s urging, stepping onto the street to get around the line for the midnight set at Mallorin’s. She leaned close; he smelled herbal shampoo and her martini. It was easy to believe that the fierce orange pinpoint at the center of each green eye was Fran, not just the sodium vapor lights. The air fizzed and it began to snow, inebriated mothlike flakes crowding the headlights and streetlamps. “Do it, Parker!” She was trying to keep him out of the emergency room and doing her best to make it all seem a lark, crossing her eyes now at a flake sparkling on the tip of her nose.

  “All right,” he said, getting into the spirit, “I’ll do it. One two…three!”

  They couldn’t help stopping and turning around. They were alone on a block full of buzzing Christmas lights, the wet empty sidewalk radiant as an electric oven.

  “Voilà!” he said.

  “You zapped ’em!” She tucked the glittered streamers of her hair into her collar. “You know, we should make a list.”

  “In the interest of full disclosure I don’t—boompf!” She’d mashed her wet face against his and plugged his mouth with her tongue.

  So what was he missing, and why couldn’t he go on missing it?

  * * *

  —

  The evening she came over to make her announcement, he realized what he dreaded. That Tolerance Management had it right—“You’ll forgive her, she’ll never want to look at you again.” Seeing him as her hero probably just made her feel guiltier. Knowing Fran, she’d avoid having it out. What she’d do was accept a job with an out-of-town firm. There are airplanes, she’d r
emind him, there are telephones. She needn’t even admit to herself that she’d made a decision about anything but her job.

  True, his suspicions were contradicted by every single thing—for example, here she was.

  She sat facing him on his couch, curled up in her little black dress while he filled their champagne glasses from the bottle she’d brought over. The out-of-town-job theory had nothing going for it, really, except the usually sufficient reason that it was the worst he could imagine.

  She’d brought candles, too, and when she held her head at a certain angle her face threatened to spiral down the darkness of her cheekbones. Preparatory to her announcement she adjusted the thrust of her chin, the hauteur of her eyebrow, and the sardonic tilt of her smile. He’d miss the private joke they shared in her glamour—as if she were simultaneously giving a performance and nudging him in the ribs backstage.

  Things were looking up; he couldn’t imagine her dumping him with quite this much ceremony. And she wouldn’t be babbling, now, at this torrential cadence and aria pitch, nearly smacking him with an expansive gesture, champagne sloshing over the rim of her glass, candlelight amassed in her eyes and teeth. He’d been so busy analyzing portents that he’d missed the announcement itself; he tried to catch up, it wasn’t hard.

  “…Shakespeare in the Park! ‘Meet me for lunch at the Guggenheim’—don’t you love the sound of that? And you can stop being self-conscious about your dancing—spaz attacks are in out there. You can fly out weekends, or I’ll fly here, money’s no problem. Oh, and did I mention that Merlon and Cameron represent some of the big publishing houses? Finish that manuscript because someday you could be wearing that air of distant abstraction on public television. Goddamnit, Parker!” She grabbed his shirtfront with her free hand. “You’d better be happy for me!”

  She was taking a job with Merlon & Cameron in New York. A long time ago she’d mentioned entertainment law as something she might want to pursue, and they were one of the best in the field. He needed a moment to get his breath back and another to recall whether he was one of those boyfriends who put themselves in the way of the girlfriend’s career. He was not.

  Her chin was crinkling as it did when she was about to cry.

  He tried to head it off. “I’m happy, I’m just trying to take it all in. If this is what makes you happy I’m happy. No ‘if’—just happy! Ow! Don’t hit, I’m happy! I’ll miss you, that’s all, but it’s great that—”

  “If we see each other weekends, that’s more than we could sometimes when I was in law school.”

  “Absolutely. We can make it there, we’ll it make anywhere.”

  He was about to bravely propose a toast when it hit him. Here she was in her little black dress celebrating. If she was trying to get away from him, she didn’t know it. And that led to the following hopeful thought. She didn’t know what she wanted, if she wanted anything; he didn’t want to think about what he knew, if he really knew it. It seemed within the realm of possibility that they could stay together out of sheer obtuseness.

  “There are airplanes,” he added, “there are telephones.”

  She was wearing her cartoon-cow earrings; he gave one a tap, watching it swing and turn.

  “Look.” She put her palm under his chin and squeezed his cheeks with her thumb and fingers. “If I was planning to dump you, would I do it this way?”

  She was still squeezing, but he got out an approximation of “Absolutely not!”

  “I have a year and a half more of law school. I won’t be leaving Chicago for longer than that. Not the most efficient plan for getting away from you, if that’s what I wanted. Do you think I’m leaving you in slow motion?”

  It brought him up short. What if this was real happiness, and he was too busy feigning happiness to notice? “No,” he conceded, “I don’t” (“buy dough”).

  “Don’t you see what they’ve done to you? They can leave you alone now because they’ve taught you to believe that everything’s a trick. What did William James say—there’s dupery through hope and dupery through fear, and they win if—”

  He removed her hand from his face, kissing and nibbling her fingers. “You and I,” she was saying, “never walk out of a movie. Why is that?”

  He tilted her chin up. “Because,” he replied, her good pupil, “we have to see how it ends.”

  “And do you think I’d walk out before—”

  As he kissed her he wished this movie would end by freezing on the love scene. Freeze frame on the love scene before his next doubt came to mind.

  He was unzipping her little black dress; she was running her nails up his back as she pulled up his shirt. “Jeff, do me a favor.”

  “Anything!”

  “Starting tomorrow go out and look at things. Things that have nothing to do with you. My poor dear baby, if you just pay attention to what’s actually out there—out here!—you’ll be less scared.”

  “You—”

  “Something besides me. You more or less notice me.”

  “Deal.”

  “Not now!” she laughed, pulling him back into the kiss. An earring clanked on the floorboards. They stood up sloughing off dangling, unzipped, and unbuttoned clothing.

  He made it to the bedroom, entwingled with her tongue, thinking, freeze frame on the love scene.

  She grabbed his face again, wrestling him into an eyelock: “Here!”

  Yes. Freeze it here. Before the next thing occurred to him.

  * * *

  —

  One evening in January it occurred to Parker that nothing had been settled. He was still too uneasy to bring up marriage or even the possibility of his moving to New York, preferring, for now, to let the egg stay miraculously balanced on its tip.

  He was walking home hugging his groceries (for some vaguely ecological bonehead reason he’d asked for one big paper bag), watching the sidewalk for patches of ice. Of course his living arrangements would depend on the results of the job search; nothing had panned out yet, but he’d only been looking since December. Anyway, he thought they’d never been more in love. Still, he never found the right moment to bring up Fletcher’s prediction (“you’ll forgive her, she’ll never want to look at you again”) and share a good laugh at how wrong it had been.

  If things seemed a bit unsettled and indeterminate, he told himself this was ordinary life. Of course it seemed indistinct compared to the shrieking gaudiness of the conspiracy; it required some readjustment, that was all. He imagined how Steve Dobbs might put it. Ordinary life: you’re not used to it. It’ll eat you alive!

  He paused under the El tracks to admire the broken glass. There was always more glass trimming the sidewalks of the neighborhood than his theories could account for. It twinkled back at the streetlamps like a remnant of the holidays, clear, red, green, and brown fragments shivering with flame-shaped glints. Its tiny scraping broken bells resounded in the lull of a passing train.

  He knew that a man standing and staring at the pavement on that nearly deserted sidewalk would be a dear sight to muggers, plus his ears ached, he was blinking away wind-blear, and soon his arms would go numb around the bag. Nonetheless he kept looking. He’d promised Fran that each day he’d pick out something to observe and really really pay attention.

  “ ‘The glass is falling hour by hour,’ ” a lugubrious voice recited.

  Tom Grand, Parker’s “ally” on the “search committee”—perhaps he was exactly what he claimed to be—must have sidled up while he was contemplating the shards. Again Tom conveyed a deadpan mirth whose signs remained elusive. It had something to do with the quaver in his gravelly voice and the bright moist lights in his doleful eyes; it might have been doodled on his face and camouflaged among the solemn lines. Giving Parker a moment to collect himself, he removed his steel-rimmed glasses and wiped them with a handkerchief.

  “Louis MacNeice,” said Parke
r, chagrined that he still felt the need to impress Tom Grand. He thought he made out other faces from the search committee in the black Cadillac idling at the curb.

  He hadn’t run, first because of the groceries, and then, as seconds passed, out of the untested assumption that if they were here to do something violent they’d have already done it.

  Half the businesses around here were boarded up and most of the others closed early. There was no one else out but a couple leaving Standee’s a half-block up Granville and heading in the opposite direction. In the bright liquor store across the street the clerk was razoring open a box while he talked on the phone, the receiver gripped between his shoulder and his splotched bald head.

  Tom Grand had replaced his glasses. “Don’t panic.,” he said gently, his breath unraveling on the wind. “This isn’t your orals.”

  Parker laughed and started walking away, raising and lowering the bag to keep the blood circulating in his arms. He nearly lost his footing on the icy incline where the pavement sloped for handicapped access; Tom Grand righted him by the elbow.

  He was crossing the street at Parker’s side. “You know how it is with academic committees. Unspoken agreements, private jokes, ancient resentments, fragile detentes. It never makes sense to an outsider.” They halted to let a car pass. “We don’t usually have guests at those Wednesday-night meetings, and we must have seemed bewildering…maybe even threatening.”

  “So your trying to kill me—that was just a committee thing.”

  “You can understand how your friend bursting in and waving a gun might have given us pause. Let’s call it a series of interpretive gaffes.” The Caddy made a left off Granville and cruised alongside as they started up Winthrop.

  Stereos thumped among the dingy apartment courts like a cardiac upheaval. Parker had forgotten how dark it was here; he thought of turning back to Granville, maybe ducking into Standee’s. Instead he kept walking home, hoping to preserve for as long as possible the illusion of his free will. Toward that end, he decided to play his role to the hilt—a man living an ordinary life. The groceries, he thought, made a nice prop.