In Lorrie Moore’s story, FACE TIME, the characters have a hard time connecting with each other
In Lorrie Moore’s story, FACE TIME, the characters have a hard time connecting with each other
In Lorrie Moore’s story, FACE TIME, the characters have a hard time connecting with each other, in various ways–partly due to technology but partly due to their own inadequacies. Similarly, in Carver’s story CATHEDRAL, the characters don’t connect in easy, effortless ways until the end, when the two men draw a cathedral together. Compare the two stories and explain, in 3-4 paragraphs (one intro paragraph and two or three longer body paragraphs) how the authors address the topic of connecting and say which story you think has a more positive view on the subject. Remember to show off–point out interesting details a lazy reader might miss, and organize all your thoughts into clear, and very readable paragraphs. No plagiarism.
Lorrie Moore’s story, FACE TIME:
I asked my father if he knew where he was and he said, “Kind of.”
“You are in the hospital. Your hip surgery went well. But there is a virus and you have been found to have it. You are contagious. No one can get near. It’s happening all over the world. You caught it in your assisted-living facility. The chef had it.”
His blue eyes had a light that appeared to race from the back of his brain to the front. The brightness of them seemed to direct itself, with sudden power, into the screen, then straight through and past me. “The Berrywood chef?”
“Yes.”
Now his eyes dulled again. “The food was not that good. I did have a glass of lemonade once that was delicious. Like in the war. Cold lemonade in a jam jar.” He licked his lips. There was crust in the corner of his mouth, and he picked at it with one of his long, now thin pianist’s fingers. The oxygen tubing dangled on his chest.
The author on bearing witness to suffering.
“Is there something you need now? After we finish FaceTiming, I can phone the nurses’ desk.”
“I’d like some of that lemonade.”
“I’ll ask them about that.” Why should this patient be so thirsty? Give him a lemonade, for Christ’s sake. Give him the lemonade of his memory and his dreams. “We are drying the lungs,” a doctor had said last week. “We don’t want him to aspirate.”
“Isn’t this a quality-of-life issue?” I did not say. Doctors all around the country seemed confused about whether hydration or dehydration was better. I feared that dehydration meant they were sending him off the exit ramp. A dry death. A dry death is better, someone had once told me.
“But how does anyone know?” I had protested.
“There is no death rattle. You don’t hear the death rattle.”
“So you mean it’s better for us,” I said. “The living.”
Who knew what the dying felt at the end? They didn’t return calls.
“That would be very kind of you to ask,” my father said, delicately trying to moisten his lips with his gray tongue.
He attempted to smile but his whole dry mouth seemed unsplittable and in need of sponging.
His bottom teeth were as dark as teak and twisted in his mouth.
“When the nurse comes back in, I’ll tell her.”
“Did I do something wrong?” he asked. “I feel like I did something wrong.”
“No. Not a thing. The nurse set up the iPad for you but then had to leave. She’ll be back later.”
Three times daily, visored, hazmatted nurses dressed like beekeepers popped in and out of the room, their faces indiscernible, their voices the high, chipper kind that children and the elderly are supposed to prefer. Birdlike, perhaps. Good to have the song of a bird. Even if they were frightened birds, in a rush to get out of there. Even if they were terrified of their tasks.
“Are you in any pain?” I asked.
“Oh, not really,” he said defeatedly.
An exhilarating exchange of ideas was not possible on screens or in this weird dystopia. Still, I decided to make the situation as interesting as possible. “The British Prime Minister has this virus,” I said. “So does Prince Charles. Also Tom Hanks.”
His face perked up as he searched for a reply. “So I’m in good company.”
“Yes, you are. And the poor are getting the virus, too, of course.”
“I’m the poor!” he said. “Especially after next month’s Berrywood bill.”
Later, I would accuse my quite comfortable friends of appropriating the illness from the disadvantaged, of co-opting a fear of the illness that targeted prisoners, front-line workers, meatpackers, and, of course, the elderly. “It’s all unfair.”
My father’s sight came rushing into his eyes again and brightened up the screen. “I just hope I don’t have to arm wrestle the meek and the peacemakers for a seat in Heaven. That would be awkward.”
I gave him a smile, as if everything were all good, then started in with some more about the virus. I would try to make a bad situation diverting. He would be interested. “It is all over the globe,” I told him. “No country was really prepared, except perhaps Finland. The Finns are a nation of doomsday preppers, so they were completely ready. They’ve been stockpiling for years, out of fear of Russia, so they’re in pretty good shape. Also, South Korea did well. They are wary of North Korea, so are somewhat disaster-ready. Same as Taiwan, which fears the mainland.”
I could see him considering this. “I guess we just weren’t that afraid of Canada,” he said, his eyes giving a wobbly little jump. Jokes! The very wattage of life. Performance had always been how he conversed, summoning it up from the depths. Rehearsing the recitation. Looking for the opening. There it still was, beneath the bullshit malaria drugs.
“I guess we weren’t! Even though Trudeau’s wife came down with this.”
“Is that so? Pierre Trudeau’s wife?”
“Justin Trudeau. Yup.” I could see his focus change and his chest rise with sad and effortful breathing.
“I am supposed to go to the shoe store, but if I get there before the pastor I won’t have the key.”
I knew the hydroxychloroquine gave people hallucinations. Still, all the doctors seemed to be using it. It had the endorsement of Washington, which had invented the undrained drained swamp, and of France, which had invented pasteurization and had been dining out on that ever since, while still serving small, moldy raw-milk cheeses. “It will be O.K. They are giving you medicine.” The last time he’d been on it was in 1945, during the war, when he actually had malaria.
“My mother had the Spanish flu.”
“Yes, I know.”
“She was pregnant with my older brother and they told her to lie there and not to cough or her lungs would burst.”
I wondered if lungs could really burst. I had heard this story from my dad on several occasions in my childhood and wondered about its veracity every time, though never out loud. Now to watch him sending these utterances into the light of the screen was like seeing an old man burn all his poetry in a fire.
“They were all interesting people, my family, my sister and brother and parents,” he said, seemingly forgetting about his own three children: Livvy, the eldest, me, in the middle, and Delia, the baby, who had opted out of these scheduled conversations. “No-necrophilia Delia,” she’d called herself. She adored our father but could not participate.
Oddly, it seemed that his daughters, at present, were not as interesting as his childhood family. Or perhaps that had always been true. His mind seemed a little rinsed of all of us, even of our mother, who had died eighteen months before, so abruptly that her vividness for me had not been interrupted. There were still things I made mental notes to tell her. She would want to know how Dad was doing.
“Now, you were born on Staten Island, isn’t that right?” my father said.
I was slightly startled. “No, that was Mom.” I knew I sometimes looked like her.
His head leaned back against the pillow, and then he pulled it up to look again into the iPad that the nurse had set there on a kind of tray. He had grown thinner, and silvery stubble covered his chin. He was trying to be courteous. He did not ask after me, for which I was grateful. Who wanted to share the banalities of this life right now: the low buzz of dread in the head like a broken wire; the endless YouTube links; everyone frantically not socializing; the recently furloughed male friends doing their insane air-guitar concerts on Zoom; the hours of television news interspersed with highly theatrical, mind-boggling insurance ads; the early-morning senior mixer at the supermarket; the neighborhood walks with face masks hanging from one ear like dream catchers. Women created e-mail threads of their readings of the Bible. It was all ghastly, especially the singing “Happy Birthday” twice as you washed your hands, because it might never actually be your birthday again so have at it. Well-to-do white families in large suburban homes tended to their bubbles—bubbles that intersected other bubbles so were not bubbles at all—disinfecting grocery bags and ordering from Amazon and Grubhub, and in general claiming the pandemic for themselves. The shuttered theatres and museums made the gloom of cities everywhere a harrowing one. Photos of empty boulevards and squares flooded the Internet. Pierced ears filled back in, because who wore earrings anymore? Your badly painted toenails you could say were done by a neighbor girl, home from school, on her deck—a neighbor girl who was actually you. French wine had been turned into hand sanitizer. Wisconsin milk had been turned into soap.
But some things had stayed the same, like the arrival of spring and the pastel monotony of the flowering shrubs. Who could feel how large a transformation was really occurring when the earth seemed to be enjoying itself more than ever, and who could speak of such things to a man who was clutching his plastic necklace of oxygen?
“Are you comfortable, Dad? Just lie back away from the iPad if you want. Don’t make yourself uncomfortable. We can still talk.” The headboard behind him was white pleather and attached to the wall. He had a bedsore and a catheter for a prolapsed bladder. I knew that. His unrehabilitated hip would never be right now, though the surgery, we’d been told, had been a great success.
His gown was slightly open in front, revealing his pink and sunken chest. He threw his head back against the pillow again, then tipped it forward. “I have to go downstairs and get the mail.” And then, for a moment, he seemed to know where he was. “Am I going back to my apartment?”
The Berrywood facility would not readmit him until he had tested negative. So far, four positives.
“Not yet. You have to test negative before they can let you go.”
“I don’t think I got the mail today. I need to get the mail. I have to do that before I meet the pastor.”
There were a lot of things he needed to do and places he needed to be. He was always announcing this. He was supposed to meet trains and people and small groups holding meetings. Perhaps, even in normal life, every place a person believed they needed to be was a kind of hallucination, and that was its power. Berrywood had, some years ago, constructed a fake bus stop for escapees. It was a way of catching a runaway pet with the lure of food. The staff would find residents sitting there, waiting, no bus ever stopping, and talk to them sympathetically, until their plans evaporated into the mist, as so many plans did, even in good times. My father had never got that bad. Before all this, he had seemed fairly with it.
“Is that music playing?” I asked. My laptop had good speakers. It sounded like massage music, a calming electronic flute, the kind of music that played on what one of the nurses called “the classical station.” They had two hours’ worth of music on each station, she said.
“I was hoping for Brahms,” he said.
“We’ll see if we can get some Brahms.”
“You know, Beethoven had one great symphony, the ‘Eroica.’ And then there’s Mozart’s C-Minor. But then Brahms comes in third—he had four symphonies of equal quality.”
“That’s so interesting,” I said. Whenever we spoke of music, he ignored my preference for Tchaikovsky or Duke Ellington. He would sometimes allow for Harold Arlen.
“Only four symphonies, but they were all topnotch.”
I didn’t always know what to say. “Well, I’m going to call the nurses’ station and see if we can get some Brahms for you.”
“Any of the symphonies,” he added.
An aide suddenly appeared on the screen in her beekeeper’s garb. “We are here for his oxygen levels and to change his dressings,” she said.
“O.K. Well, Dad? I’ll leave you to these proceedings. But I’ll hope to reach you later tonight. Livvy’s going to call at some point today. Love you.”
“O.K., honey, good to talk to you,” he said, sounding suddenly as he always had. He would never have said “Love you” back. He had fought in the Philippines. The greatest generation did not do the fey, fake “Love you, too.” The greatest generation did not wear lip balm brought by the aide or don compression stockings—too feminine—and hearing aids were a lot like jewelry, and thus a problem, and were sometimes found lost amid the tangled sheets. The greatest generation had taken a lot of orders early in life and did not want to take any more. The aide peeked into the screen and waved with her gloved hand. “Bye-bye,” she said.
“Thank you. Is it possible to play some Brahms?” I asked her quickly.
“This isn’t Brahms?”
“No.”
“Brahms? How do you spell it?” She seemed to be typing it into the iPad.
I told her, hoping I’d put the “h” in the right spot.
“I’ll see what I can do.”
“Also, do you have lemonade?” I asked.
“Here’s this,” she said, bringing a plastic cup to my father’s lips. He sipped, then grimaced and waved it away. It looked to be a chartreuse-colored, watery drink made from powder.
“Bye-bye,” the beekeeper said again, as she grew larger in the screen, and then turned the iPad off entirely, so that on my laptop my connection became just a lit square with my own face in it.
My father was too old to grasp technology, so the nurses were the ones to place his FaceTime calls, according to a schedule that Livvy had given them. But the nurses were frazzled and Livvy could be a pain in the neck, though she didn’t know it. Her husband always called her an angel, massaging her shoulders, hoping to get laid. And Delia, of course, had refused to be a part of it. “I can’t watch Dad like this,” she’d said again that day.
The following afternoon, a FaceTime call came in from Livvy. “I thought I’d patch you in and share my time with you,” she said.
“What do you mean? I’m scheduled for a different time.” But Livvy was both bossy and retired, a bad combo. She’d retired too young.
“Watch this,” she said and spun her phone so that through my screen I saw her screen and in her screen I saw my father.
“Hi, Dad,” I said.
“Hey, hi!” my dad croaked uncertainly. Then the screen switched so that I was looking into the black of Livvy’s fireplace.
“Why am I looking into your fireplace?” I asked.
“It’s so he can see you. The way it’s patched in you can’t both see each other at the same time. When he sees you, you don’t see him—”
“I see the fireplace? This is too strange.”
She toggled back and forth between the black hearth and my bewildered father. I didn’t want to be patched in in this manner.
“Well, I thought we could sing to him,” she said. I knew that one afternoon she had used the iPad as a nanny cam, watching him while she folded her laundry. She had Ferberized her children—a method that was also known as “graduated extinction”—letting them wail themselves to sleep as she watched, and I wondered if there wasn’t something similar in what she was doing now.
“I suppose we could sing ‘Danny Boy,’ ” I suggested. “It’s a beautiful song and it matches his name.”
“Oh, I don’t think Dad likes that song. He says they’re not the original words.”
“What do you mean? It’s a beautiful song.”
“Yes, but he objects to it somehow. He says the Irish took it from the English.”
“The Irish stole ‘Danny Boy’? That’s the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever heard.” Now I had questioned her authority. There was always a crisis of expertise with Livvy.
“How about this?” Livvy said. She sang into the phone, “If you’ll be M-I-N-E mine, I’ll be T-H-I-N-E thine, and I’ll L-O-V-E love you all the T-I-M-E time. You are the B-E-S-T best of all the R-E-S-T rest—”
“What the heck are you singing?”
“Dad used to sing me all his old Army songs.” She laughed.
“That’s an Army song? And we still won the war? I think I’m going to go and just wait for my own call with him.”
Now my father, on the screen, let out a howl of anguish and I could see him grimace with agony and sorrow. He tore at his cannula and his gown.
“Whoa,” Livvy said. “What’s going on here? I think he doesn’t want you to go.”
“That’s not it. He hardly knows I’m here.”
My father’s face became a gash of pain. “Bitte, bitte,” he cried hoarsely. With one hand, he fiercely sliced the signal for “cut” at his throat.
“Speaking German. Still sharp,” Livvy said.
“I don’t think speaking one’s college German right now is a sign of being sharp.”
He was clearly hallucinating, agitated, imagining he was a prisoner of war; that was what it must have felt like to him—the cruel isolation, the medicine, the lights, the strange machines all around. Of course, during the war he had been in the Pacific theatre. But hallucinations were not fussy about details like that.
He tugged at the tubes in his arms.
A cowboy on his horse looks up at two Earths in the night sky.
Cartoon by Glen Baxter
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Terror flew from him in a kind of guttural howl like a whale song. “Nein, nein, nein. Bitte. Nein.” He thrashed around in the bed.
I texted Livvy: I can’t watch this. It’s unbearable. Did she no longer know what was bearable and what was unbearable? Well, no one knew anymore. I will speak to him tomorrow. I’m going to give him his privacy.
I got into bed. I turned off the phone ringer and just watched television. Every now and then, the numbers of telemarketers and scammers appeared in white on the screen. At night, my dreams often featured such alerts, scrolling like ticker tape across them, and I would spend much of the dream trying to figure out whose numbers they were.
The next evening—evening was better, Livvy said—I waited hours for the call from the hospital to come. I sat before my computer, waiting for the FaceTime icon to enliven itself. Livvy sent e-mails and texts: Tell them to turn the lights down. They are too bright. I keep telling them to turn them down but they don’t. Ask for Eileen or Carmen. One of them is usually on duty. Ask them if they got the pizza we ordered for them. Livvy’s patient advocacy, I feared, would get him killed. The overrun hospital would triage him, and the hospice staff would move in and put him down like a dog, thanks to his annoying daughters.
The call came in late. The face that filled the screen was a beekeeper’s. Was it Eileen? Was it Carmen? I did not know. She seemed new. “Your very nice father is here, but he is asleep.” She stepped away from the screen, and I saw him with his eyes closed, his head hanging off his neck in a tilted fashion, the oxygen cannula taped in place, his mouth a dark crescent. They had shaved him, so his face was now cleared of the patches of miniature birch forest that had sprung up there. His skin had a butterscotch tinge, and his neck was ropy against the blue cotton of his gown. The nurse stroked his forehead with a latex-covered finger. Gingerly, but several times. “He’s asleep but he’s hanging in there. He’s a sweet man.”
“Thank you for calling me. I’ll try to connect with him tomorrow.”
“Yes,” she said. “I’ll send you some pictures of him sleeping,” she added, and began tapping the iPad. Then she looked up. “Good night!” she said brightly, performing the role of saintly nurse, her head filling the screen as she moved in to shut it off. Surely her loving-kindness would vanish as soon as the iPad went dark, and her demeanor would reveal an eagerness to be rid of this covid-ic old guy with his bedsore and immobile hip, his catheter and oxygen tubing.
Icalled Delia of the camellias, lying on her chaise longue. “He’s stranded there, like someone fallen on a battlefield,” I said. “Everyone is just stepping around him. He’s in the way.” How could I speak the lonely, frantic improvisation of my inadequate self-reliance? She was well versed in her own.
“I told you. I did my crying last week. We had a good long talk just before his surgery. It contained dignity and charity for all. You’ll have to call me when it’s over.” Her voice broke a little.
“Maybe he’ll get out. Maybe he’ll finally test negative and be released to rehab to get his hip working again.” I could not imagine it. Not really. Even that would be hellish. Then I added, sounding still more insane, “Falconers return their old birds to the wild.”
“That would be interesting, if Dad could test negative two times in a row,” she said. “Perhaps he will take a long time to die, like a courteous Rasputin. That would be Dad’s way. Don’t get me wrong. Dad’s a nice person. Just maybe a little on the spectrum.”
“Not the Rasputin spectrum.”
“Is that a spectrum?”
“I’m sure the hospital’s hospice nurses think so.”
“Is that who’s tending to him now?”
“I suspect so. I’m not really sure.”
“Well, you and I are a thousand miles away. All this is up to Livvy. She’s always the boss, anyway.”
“She doesn’t complain.”
“No, she instructs. Which creates rage.”
“She’s already antagonizing the nurses. I fear she’s going to get him killed.”
Delia, the baby, was beloved. Much more than Livvy or me. I was probably too mysterious to my father—no husband! no child!—for him to love me in more than an average way: a feeling he had in common with all the men I’d ever known. Still, like them, he seemed to enjoy talking to me. “What do you think of Biden?” he often asked. He was hoping to live until November, to cast his vote for the Democrats, and this was what he enjoyed talking about the most. As well as Brahms.
“Dad arranged to donate his body to the medical school,” I said now, changing the subject only slightly, “but they can’t possibly take it at this point. He would be like Typhoid Murray.”
“Now you have made me laugh,” Delia said, not laughing.
The next day, at Livvy’s instructions, I waited the entire afternoon. When not watching for the FaceTime icon to jump up off the dashboard of my computer screen, I stared out the window at the haphazard latticework of trees against the sky, intersected with transformers and wires that had squirrels running along them like cursors. A satiny blue-black cowbird sat atop a phone pole, a cut-rate omen. The call was supposed to come in at three in the afternoon, but by 9 p.m. nothing had come through except Livvy’s texts: Don’t forget about the lights! Please ask about the music again! They keep playing that Sounds of the Seasons loop. Remind them that that pizza came from us!
I called the nurses’ station. “This is Dan Fordham’s daughter—he’s a patient on your wing? And I was supposed to get a call this afternoon but I’ve been waiting for hours and nothing has come through. I just want to make sure you have the right number?”
“Dan Fordham. Yes. Let me get back to you,” the nurse said.
“I hope you got our pizza,” I mumbled pathetically; she had already put me on hold.
And then we were disconnected and a dial tone buzzed in my ear, like a message from the universe. I called back and got the voice mail and so left my number and my e-mail. I waited several more hours. Even Livvy and her husband went to bed—We’re going to bed—without waiting any longer for a report from me. And then it was midnight, and shortly thereafter the phone rang and I knew the message it contained. The pipes, the pipes. . . . From glen to glen. I could not touch the phone. I would let the voice mail pick it up. My actual ear had not been readied. But then I grabbed the phone and said hello and received the news. I thanked the nurse. I added, “He wanted to make it until November so he could vote. Perhaps that was too much to hope for.”
“I am very sorry,” came the voice.
I went to bed. I wondered whether in the final moments a dying person said, “So this is death,” or did they say, “So that was life”? Or did a nice man who had not planned to die so alone and isolated but in his own bed with family gathered around think anything at all? Perhaps at the end he was simply tired, in a condition of holy yet unenlightened bewilderment, all consciousness as fake as a skit. I missed him already and without comprehension.
Ispent the next morning sending e-mails to those who needed them. By the afternoon, the sky had the slurry look it could have before a storm. Outside, things were starting to move and fly, with a heavy hand, a flat foot, and a hard rain: a derecho, four minutes of straight winds at hurricane strength. It tore up jungle gyms, knocked down power lines, uprooted trees.
Even this set was being struck. A transformer blew in the alley, and I cried out in fright.
The ensuing power outage darkened and enfeebled the town for almost a week. Traffic lights went dead in their various eyes. Neighbors in masks and nitrile gloves hauled thawed frozen food to the curb in black trash bags. Every evening, no phone or Wi-Fi, no communication of any sort, my cell uncharged, I ate a few apples with some peanut butter and went to bed at seven, when the sky lost all sun. With a flashlight, I read essays of zigzaggy piety and po-mo chic until I fell asleep. Could a thought become an idea without instruction? Could an emptiness of thought eradicate ideas? With my father gone, his body chilling in a Thermo King truck far away—did the workers, stacking him up in plastic wrap, talk to him, saying, “There you go, sir, there is nothing to worry about now. You are on your way, my man”?—I had lost all interest in myself and all conviction or belief in forms generally.
In the mornings, outside, chainsaws dissected old red oaks, freeing them from tangled wire. After six days, unannounced, the lights came slyly, silently back on, as if a large cloud had discreetly shifted. Motors kicked in. Clocks flashed their incorrect times. All the little mice of my mind returned, found their corners, and began to set up shop
Carver’s story CATHEDRAL:
Cathedral
By Raymond Carver (1981)
This blind man, an old friend of my wife’s, he was on his way to spend the night. His wife had died. So he was visiting the dead wife’s relatives in Connecticut. He called my wife from his in-law’s. Arrangements were made. He would come by train, a five-hour trip, and my wife would meet him at the station. She hadn’t seen him since she worked for him one summer in Seattle ten years ago. But she and the blind man had kept in touch. They made tapes and mailed them back and forth. I wasn’t enthusiastic about his visit. He was no one I knew. And his being blind bothered me. My idea of blindness came from the movies. In the movies, the blind moved slowly and never laughed. Sometimes they were led by seeing- eye dogs. A blind man in my house was not something I looked forward to.
That summer in Seattle she had needed a job. She didn’t have any money. The man she was going to marry at the end of the summer was in officers’ training school. He didn’t have any money, either. But she was in love with the guy, and he was in love with her, etc. She’d seen something in the paper: HELP WANTED—Reading to Blind Man, and a telephone number. She phoned and went over, was hired on the spot. She worked with this blind man all summer. She read stuff to him, case studies, reports, that sort of thing. She helped him organize his little office in the county social- service department. They’d become good friends, my wife and the blind man. On her last day in the office, the blind man asked if he could touch her face. She agreed to this. She told me he touched his fingers to every part of her face, her nose—even her neck! She never forgot it. She even tried to write a poem about it. She was always trying to write a poem. She wrote a poem or two every year, usually after something really important had happened to her.
When we first started going out together, she showed me the poem. In the poem, she recalled his fingers and the way they had moved around over her face. In the poem, she talked about what she had felt at the time, about what went through her mind when the blind man touched her nose and lips. I can remember I didn’t think much of the poem. Of course, I didn’t tell her that. Maybe I just don’t understand poetry. I admit it’s not the first thing I reach for when I pick up something to read.
Anyway, this man who’d first enjoyed her favors, this officer-to-be, he’d been her childhood sweetheart. So okay. I’m saying that at the end of the summer she let the blind man run his hands over her face, said good-bye
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to him, married her childhood etc., who was now a commissioned officer, and she moved away from Seattle. But they’d keep in touch, she and the blind man. She made the first contact after a year or so. She called him up one night from an Air Force base in Alabama. She wanted to talk. They talked. He asked her to send him a tape and tell him about her life. She did this. She sent the tape. On the tape, she told the blind man she loved her husband but she didn’t like it where they lived and she didn’t like it that he was a part of the military-industrial thing. She told the blind man she’d written a poem and he was in it. She told him that she was writing a poem about what it was like to be an Air Force officer’s wife. The poem wasn’t finished yet. She was still writing it. The blind man made a tape. He sent her the tape. She made a tape. This went on for years. My wife’s officer was posted to one base and then another. She sent tapes from Moody AFB, McGuire, McConnell, and finally Travis, near Sacramento, where one night she got to feeling lonely and cut off from people she kept losing in that moving-around life. She got to feeling she couldn’t go it another step. She went in and swallowed all the pills and capsules in the medicine chest and washed them down with a bottle of gin. Then she got into a hot bath and passed out.
But instead of dying, she got sick. She threw up. Her officer—why should he have a name? he was the childhood sweetheart, and what more does he want?—came home from somewhere, found her, and called the ambulance. In time, she put it all on tape and sent the tape to the blind man. Over the years, she put all kinds of stuff on tapes and sent the tapes off lickety-split. Next to writing a poem every year, I think it was her chief means of recreation. On one tape, she told the blind man she’d decided to live away from her officer for a time. On another tape, she told him about her divorce. She and I began going out, and of course she told her blind man about it. She told him everything, or so it seemed to me. Once she asked me if I’d like to hear the latest tape from the blind man. This was a year ago. I was on the tape, she said. So I said okay, I’d listen to it. I got us drinks and we settled down in the living room. We made ready to listen. First she inserted the tape into the player and adjusted a couple of dials. Then she pushed a lever. The tape squeaked and someone began to talk in this loud voice. She lowered the volume. After a few minutes of harmless chitchat, I heard my own name in the mouth of this stranger, this blind man I didn’t even know! And then this: “From all you’ve said about him, I can only conclude—“ But we were interrupted, a knock at the door, something, and we didn’t ever get back to the tape. Maybe it was just as well. I’d heard all I wanted to.
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Now this same blind man was coming over to sleep in my house.
“Maybe I could take him bowling,” I said to my wife. She was at the draining board doing scalloped potatoes. She put down the knife she was using and turned around.
“If you love me,” she said, “you can do this for me. If you don’t love me, okay. But if you had a friend, any friend, and the friend came to visit, I’d make him feel comfortable.” She wiped her hands with the dish towel.
“I don’t have any blind friends,” I said.
“You don’t have any friends,” she said. “Period. Besides,” she said, “goddamn it, his wife’s just died! Don’t you understand that? The man’s lost his wife!”
I didn’t answer. She’d told me a little about the blind man’s wife. Her name was Beulah. Beulah! That’s a name for a colored woman.
“Was his wife a Negro?” I asked.
“Are you crazy?” my wife said. “Have you just flipped or something?” She picked up a potato. I saw it hit the floor, then roll under the stove. “What’s wrong with you?” she said. “Are you drunk?”
“I’m just asking,” I said.
Right then my wife filled me in with more detail than I cared to know. I made a drink and sat at the kitchen table to listen. Pieces of the story began to fall into place.
Beulah had gone to work for the blind man the summer after my wife had stopped working for him. Pretty soon Beulah and the blind man had themselves a church wedding. It was a little wedding—who’d want to go to such a wedding in the first place?—just the two of them, plus the minister and the minister’s wife. But it was a church wedding just the same. It was what Beulah had wanted, he’d said. But even then Beulah must have been carrying the cancer in her glands. After they had been inseparable for eight years—my wife’s word, inseparable—Beulah’s health went into a rapid decline. She died in a Seattle hospital room, the blind man sitting beside the bed and holding on to her hand. They’d married, lived and worked together, slept together—had sex, sure—and then the blind man had to bury her. All this without his having ever seen what the goddamned woman looked like. It was beyond my understanding. Hearing this, I felt sorry for the blind man for a little bit. And then I found myself thinking what a pitiful life this woman must have led. Imagine a woman who could never see herself as she was seen in the eyes of her loved one. A woman who could go on day after day and never receive the smallest compliment from her beloved. A woman whose husband could never read the expression on her face, be it misery or something better. Someone who could wear makeup or not—what difference
3
to him? She could if she wanted, wear green eye-shadow around one eye, a straight pin in her nostril, yellow slacks, and purple shoes, no matter. And then to slip off into death, the blind man’s hand on her hand, his blind eyes streaming tears—I’m imagining now—her last thought maybe this: that he never even knew what she looked like, and she on an express to the grave. Robert was left with a small insurance policy and half of a twenty-peso Mexican coin. The other half of the coin went into the box with her. Pathetic.
So when the time rolled around, my wife went to the depot to pick him up. With nothing to do but wait—sure, I blamed him for that—I was having a drink and watching the TV when I heard the car pull into the drive. I got up from the sofa with my drink and went to the window to have a look.
I saw my wife laughing as she parked the car. I saw her get out of the car and shut the door. She was still wearing a smile. Just amazing. She went around to the other side of the car to where the blind man was already starting to get out. This blind man, feature this, he was wearing a full beard! A beard on a blind man! Too much, I say. The blind man reached into the backseat and dragged out a suitcase. My wife took his arm, shut the car door, and, talking all the way, moved him down the drive and then up the steps to the front porch. I turned off the TV. I finished my drink, rinsed the glass, dried my hands. Then I went to the door.
My wife said, “I want you to meet Robert. Robert, this is my husband. I’ve told you all about him.” She was beaming. She had this blind man by his coat sleeve.
The blind man let go of his suitcase and up came his hand.
I took it. He squeezed hard, held my hand, and then he let it go. “I feel like we’ve already met,” he boomed.
“Likewise,” I said. I didn’t know what else to say. Then I said,
“Welcome. I’ve heard a lot about you.” We began to move then, a little group, from the porch into the living room, my wife guiding him by the arm. The blind man was carrying his suitcase in his other hand. My wife said things like, “To your left here, Robert. That’s right. Now watch it, there’s a chair. That’s it. Sit down right here. This is the sofa. We just bought this sofa two weeks ago.”
I started to say something about the old sofa. I’d liked that old sofa. But I didn’t say anything. Then I wanted to say something else, small-talk, about the scenic ride along the Hudson. How going to New York, you should sit on the right-hand side of the train, and coming from New York, the left-hand side.
“Did you have a good train ride?” I said. “Which side of the train did
4
you sit on, by the way?”
“What a question, which side!” my wife said. “What’s it matter which
side?” she said.
“I just asked,” I said.
“Right side,” the blind man said. “I hadn’t been on a train in nearly forty years. Not since I was a kid. With my folks. That’s been a long time. I’d nearly forgotten the sensation. I have winter in my beard now, “ he said. “So I’ve been told, anyway. Do I look distinguished, my dear?” the blind man said to my wife.
“You look distinguished, Robert,” she said. “Robert,” she said. “Robert, it’s just so good to see you.”
My wife finally took her eyes off the blind man and looked at me. I had the feeling she didn’t like what she saw. I shrugged.
I’ve never met, or personally known, anyone who was blind. This blind man was late forties, a heavy-set, balding man with stooped shoulders, as if he carried a great weight there. He wore brown slacks, brown shoes, a light-brown shirt, a tie, a sports coat. Spiffy. He also had this full beard. But he didn’t use a cane and he didn’t wear dark glasses. I’d always thought dark glasses were a must for the blind. Fact was, I wish he had a pair. At first glance, his eyes looked like anyone else’s eyes. But if you looked close, there was something different about them. Too much white in the iris, for one thing, and the pupils seemed to move around in the sockets without his knowing it or being able to stop it. Creepy. As I stared at his face, I saw the left pupil turn in toward his nose while the other made an effort to keep in one place. But it was only an effort, for that one eye was on the roam without his knowing it or wanting it to be.
I said, “Let me get you a drink. What’s your pleasure? We have a little bit of everything. It’s one of our pastimes.”
“Bub, I’m a Scotch man myself,” he said fast enough in this big voice. “Right,” I said. Bub! “Sure you are. I knew it.”
He let his fingers touch his suitcase, which was sitting alongside the
sofa. He was taking his bearings. I didn’t blame him for that.
“I’ll move that up to your room,” my wife said.
“No, that’s fine,” the blind man said loudly. “It can go up when I go
up.”
“A little water with the Scotch?” I said. “Very little,” he said.
“I knew it, “ I said.
He said, “Just a tad. The Irish actor, Barry Fitzgerald? I’m like that
fellow. When I drink water, Fitzgerald said, I drink water. When I drink
5
whiskey, I drink whiskey.” My wife laughed. The blind man brought his hand up under his beard. He lifted his beard slowly and let it drop.
I did the drinks, three big glasses of Scotch with a splash of water in each. Then we made ourselves comfortable and talked about Robert’s travels. First the long flight from the West Coast to Connecticut, we covered that. Then from Connecticut up here by train. We had another drink concerning that leg of the trip.
I remembered having read somewhere that the blind didn’t smoke because, as speculation had it, they couldn’t see the smoke they exhaled. I though I knew that much and that much only about blind people. But this blind man smoked his cigarette down to the nubbin and then lit another one. This blind man filled his ashtray and my wife emptied it.
When we sat down at the table for dinner, we had another drink. M wife heaped Robert’s plate with cube steak, scalloped potatoes, green beans. I buttered him up two slices of bread. I said, “Here’s bread and butter for you.” I swallowed some of my drink. “Now let us pray,” I said, and the blind man lowered his head. My wife looked at me, her mouth agape. “Pray the phone won’t ring and the food doesn’t get cold,” I said.
We dug in. We ate everything there was to eat on the table. We ate like there was no tomorrow. We didn’t talk. We ate. We scarfed. We grazed the table. We were into serious eating. The blind man had right away located his foods, he knew just where everything was on his plate. I watched with admiration as he used his knife and fork on the meat. He’d cut two pieces of the meat, fork the meat into his mouth, and then go all out for the scalloped potatoes, the beans next, and then he’d tear off a hunk of buttered bread and eat that. He’d follow this up with a big drink of milk. It didn’t seem to bother him to use his fingers once in a while, either.
We finished everything, including half a strawberry pie. For a few moments, we sat as if stunned. Swear beaded on our faces. Finally, we got up from the table and left the dirty plates. We didn’t look back. We took ourselves into the living room and sank into our places again. Robert and my wife sat on the sofa. I took the big chair. We had us two or three more drinks while they talked about the major things that had come to pass for them in the past ten years. For the most part, I just listened. Now and then I joined in. I didn’t want him to think I’d left the room, and I didn’t want her to think I was feeling left out. They talked of things that had happened to them—to them!—these past ten years. I waited in vain to hear my name on my wife’s sweet lips: “And then my dear husband came into my life”—something like that. But I heard nothing of the sort. More talk of Robert. Robert had done a little of everything, it seemed, a regular blind jack-of-all-trades. But most
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recently he and his wife had had an Amway distributorship, from which, I gathered, they’d earned a living, such as it was. The blind man was also a ham radio operator. He talked in his loud voice about conversations he’d had with fellow operators in Guam, in the Philippines, in Alaska, and even in Tahiti. He said he’d have a lot of friends there if her ever wanted to go visit those places. From time to time, he’d turn his blind face toward me, put his hand under his beard, ask me something. How long had I been in my present position? (Three years.) Did I like my work? (I didn’t.) Was I going to stay with it? (What were the options?) Finally, when I thought he was beginning to run down, I got up and turned on the TV.
My wife looked at me with irritation. She was heading toward a boil. Then she looked at the blind man and said, “Robert, do you have a TV?”
The blind man said, “My dear, I have two TVs. I have a color set and a black-and-white thing, an old relic. It’s funny, but if I turn the TV on, and I’m always turning it on, I turn on the color set. It’s funny, don’t you think?”
I didn’t know what to say to that. I had absolutely nothing to say to that. No opinion. So I watched the news program and tried to listen to what the announcer was saying.
“This is a color TV,” the blind man said. “Don’t ask me how, but I can tell.”
“We traded up a while ago,” I said.
The blind man had another taste of his drink. He lifted his beard, sniffed it, and let it fall. He leaned forward on the sofa. He positioned his ashtray on the coffee table, then put the lighter to his cigarette. He leaned back on the sofa and crossed his legs at the ankles.
My wife covered her mouth, and then she yawned. She stretched. She said, “I think I’ll go upstairs and put on my robe. I think I’ll change into something else. Robert, you make yourself comfortable,” she said.
“I’m comfortable,” the blind man said.
“I want you to feel comfortable in this house,” she said. “I am comfortable,” the blind man said.
After she’d left the room, he and I listened to the weather report and then to the sports roundup. By that time, she’d been gone so long I didn’t know if she was going to come back. I thought she might have gone to bed. I wished she’d come back downstairs. I didn’t want to be left alone with a blind man. I asked him if he wanted another drink, and he said sure. Then I asked if he wanted to smoke some dope with me. I said I’d just rolled a number. I hadn’t, but I planned to do so in about two shakes.
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“I’ll try some with you,” he said.
“Damn right,” I said. “That’s the stuff.”
I got our drinks and sat down on the sofa with him. Then I rolled us
two fat numbers. I lit one and passed it. I brought it to his fingers. He took it and inhaled.
“Hold it as long as you can,” I said. I could tell he didn’t know the first thing.
My wife came back downstairs wearing her pink robe and her pink slippers.
“What do I smell?” she said.
“We thought we’d have us some cannabis,” I said.
My wife gave me a savage look. Then she looked at the blind man and
said, “Robert, I didn’t know you smoked.”
He said, “I do now, my dear. There’s a first time for everything. But I
don’t feel anything yet.”
“This stuff is pretty mellow,” I said. “This stuff is mild. It’s dope you
can reason with,” I said. “It doesn’t mess you up.”
“Not much it doesn’t, bub,” he said, and laughed.
My wife sat on the sofa between the blind man and me. I passed her
the number. She took it and toked and then passed it back to me. “Which way is this going?” she said. Then she said, “I shouldn’t be smoking this. I can hardly keep my eyes open as it is. That dinner did me in. I shouldn’t have eaten so much.”
“It was the strawberry pie,” the blind man said. “That’s what did it,” he said, and he laughed his big laugh. Then he shook his head.
“There’s more strawberry pie,” I said.
“Do you want some more, Robert?” my wife said.
“Maybe in a little while,” he said.
We gave our attention to the TV. My wife yawned again. She said,
“Your bed is made up when you feel like going to bed, Robert. I know you must have had a long day. When you’re ready to go to bed, say so.”
She pulled his arm. “Robert?”
He came to and said, “I’ve had a real nice time. This beats tapes, doesn’t it?”
I said, “Coming at you,” and I put the number between his fingers. He inhaled, held the smoke, and then let it go. It was like he’d been doing this since he was nine years old.
“Thanks, bub,” he said. “But I think this is all for me. I think I’m beginning to feel it,” he said. He held the burning roach out for my wife.
“Same here,” she said. “Ditto. Me, too.” She took the roach and
8
passed it to me. “I may just sit here for a while between you two guys with my eyes closed. But don’t let me bother you, okay? Either one of you. If it bothers you, say so. Otherwise, I may just sit here with my eyes closed until you’re ready to go to bed,” she said. “Your bed’s made up, Robert, when you’re ready. It’s right next to our room at the top of the stairs. We’ll show you up when you’re ready. You wake me up now, you guys, if I fall asleep.” She said that and then she closed her eyes and went to sleep.
The news program ended. I got up and changed the channel. I sat back down on the sofa. I wished my wife hadn’t pooped out. Her head lay across the back of the sofa, her mouth open. She’d turned so that he robe had slipped away from her legs, exposing a juicy thigh. I reached to draw her robe back over her, and it was then that I glanced at the blind man. What the hell! I flipped the robe open again.
“You say you when you want some strawberry pie,” I said.
“I will,” he said.
I said, “Are you tired? Do you want me to take you up to your bed?
Are you ready to hit the hay?”
“Not yet,” he said. “No, I’ll stay up with you, bub. If that’s all right.
I’ll stay up until you’re ready to turn in. We haven’t had a chance to talk. Know what I mean? I feel like me and her monopolized the evening. “ He lifted his beard and he let it fall. He picked up his cigarettes and his lighter.
“That’s all right,” I said. Then I said, “I’m glad for the company.”
And I guess I was. Every night I smoked dope and stayed up as long as I could before I fell asleep. My wife and I hardly ever went to bed at the same time. When I did go to sleep, I had these dreams. Sometimes I’d wake up from one of them, my heart going crazy.
Something about the church and the Middle Ages was on the TV. Not your run-of-the-mill TV fare. I wanted to watch something else. I turned to the other channels. But there was nothing on them, either. So I turned back to the first channel and apologized.
“Bub, it’s all right,” the blind man said. “It’s fine with me. Whatever you want to watch is okay. I’m always learning something. Learning never ends. It won’t hurt me to learn something tonight. I got ears,” he said.
We didn’t say anything for a time. He was leaning forward with his head turned at me, his right ear aimed in the direction of the set. Very disconcerting. Now and then his eyelids drooped and then they snapped open again. Now and then he put his fingers into his beard and tugged, like he was thinking about something he was hearing on the television.
9
On the screen, a group of men wearing cowls was being set upon and tormented by men dressed in skeleton costumes and men dressed as devils. The men dressed as devils wore devil masks, horns, and long tails. This pageant was part of a procession. The Englishman who was narrating the thing said it took place in Spain once a year. I tried to explain to the blind man what was happening.
“Skeletons,” he said. “I know about skeletons,” he said, and he nodded.
The TV showed this one cathedral. Then there was a long, slow look at another one. Finally, the picture switched to the famous one in Paris, with its flying buttresses and its spires reaching up to the clouds. The camera pulled away to show the whole of the cathedral rising above the skyline.
There were times when the Englishman who was telling the thing would shut up, would simply let the camera move around over the cathedrals. Or else the camera would tour the countryside, men in fields walking behind oxen. I waited as long as I could. Then I felt I had to say something. I said, “They’re showing the outside of this cathedral now. Gargoyles. Little statues carved to look like monsters. Now I guess they’re in Italy. Yeah, they’re in Italy. There’s paintings on the walls of this one church.”
“Are those fresco painting, bub?” he asked, and he sipped from his drink.
I reached for my glass. But it was empty. I tried to remember what I could remember. “You’re asking me are those frescoes?” I said. “That’s a good question. I don’t know.”
The camera moved to a cathedral outside Lisbon. The difference in the Portugese cathedral compared with the French and Italian were not that great. But they were there. Mostly the interior stuff. Then something occurred to me, and I said, “Something has occurred to me. Do you have any idea what a cathedral is? What they look like, that is? Do you follow me? If somebody says cathedral to you, do you have any notion what they’re talking about? Do you the difference between that and a Baptist church, say?”
He let the smoke dribble from his mouth. “I know they took hundreds of workers fifty or a hundred years to build,” he said. “I just heard the man say that, of course. I know generations of the same families worked on a cathedral. I heard him say that, too. The men who began their life’s work on them, they never lived to see the completion of their work. In that wise, bub, they’re no different from the rest of us, right?” He laughed. Then his eyelids drooped again. His head nodded. He seemed to be snoozing. Maybe he was
10
imagining himself in Portugal. The TV was showing another cathedral now. This one was in Germany. The Englishman’s voice droned on. “Cathedrals,” the blind man said. He sat up and rolled his head back and forth. “If you want the truth, bub, that’s about all I know. What I just said. What I heard him say. But maybe you could describe one to me? I wish you’d do it. I’d like that. If you want to know, I really don’t have a good idea.”
I stared hard at the shot of the cathedral on the TV. How could I even begin to describe it? But say my life depended on it. Say my life was being threatened by an insane guy who said I had to do it or else.
I stared some more at the cathedral before the picture flipped off into the countryside. There was no use. I turned to the blind man and said, “To begin with, they’re very tall.” I was looking around the room for clues. “They reach way up. Up and up. Toward the sky. They’re so big, some of them, they have to have these supports. To help hold them up, so to speak. These supports are called buttresses. They remind of viaducts, for some reason. But maybe you don’t know viaducts, either? Sometimes the cathedrals have devils and such carved into the front. Sometimes lords and ladies. Don’t ask me why this is,” I said.
He was nodding. The whole upper part of his body seemed to be moving back and forth.
“I’m not doing so good, am I?” I said.
He stopped nodding and leaned forward on the edge of the sofa. As he listened to me, he was running his fingers through his beard. I wasn’t getting through to him, I could see that. But he waited for me to go on just the same. He nodded, like he was trying to encourage me. I tried to think what else to say. “They’re really big,” I said. They’re massive. They’re built of stone. Marble, too, sometimes. In those olden days, when they built cathedrals, men wanted to be close to God. In those olden days, God was an important part of everyone’s life. You could tell this from their cathedral-building. I’m sorry,” I said, “but it looks like that’s the best I can do for you. I’m just no good at it.”
“That’s all right, bub,” the blind man said. “Hey, listen. I hope you don’t mind my asking you. Can I ask you something? Let me ask you a simple question, yes or no. I’m just curious and there’s no offense. You’re my host. But let me ask if you are in any way religious? You don’t mind my asking?”
I shook my head. He couldn’t see that, though. A wink is the same as a nod to a blind man. “I guess I don’t believe in it. In anything. Sometimes it’s hard. You know what I’m saying?”
“Sure, I do,” he said.
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“Right,” I said.
The Englishman was still holding forth. My wife sighed in her sleep. She drew a long breath and went on with her sleeping.
“You’ll have to forgive me,” I said. “But I can’t tell you what a cathedral looks like. It just isn’t in me to do it. I can’t do any more than I’ve done.”
The blind man sat very still, his head down, as he listened to me.
I said, “The truth is, cathedrals don’t mean anything special to me. Nothing. Cathedrals. They’re something to look at on late-night TV. That’s all they are.”
It was then that the blind man cleared his throat. He brought something up. He took a handkerchief from his back pocket. Then he said, “I get it, bub. It’s okay. It happens. Don’t worry about it,” he said. “Hey, listen to me. Will you do me a favor? I got an idea. Why don’t you find us some heavy paper? And a pen. We’ll do something. We’ll draw one together. Get us a pen and some heavy paper. Go on, bub, get the stuff,” he said.
So I went upstairs. My legs felt like they didn’t have any strength in them. They felt like they did after I’d done some running. In my wife’s room, I looked around. I found some ballpoints in a little basket on her table. And then I tried to think where to look for the kind of paper he was talking about.
Downstairs, in the kitchen, I found a shopping bag with onion skins in the bottom of the bag. I emptied the bag and shook it. I brought it into the living room and sat down with it near his legs. I moved some things, smoothed the wrinkles from the bag, spread it out on the coffee table.
The blind man got down from the sofa and sat next to me on the carpet.
He ran his fingers over the paper. He went up and down the sides of the paper. The edges, even the edges. He fingered the corners.
“All right,” he said. “All right, let’s do her.”
He found my hand, the hand with the pen. He closed his hand over my hand. “Go ahead, bub, draw,” he said. “Draw. You’ll see. I’ll follow along with you. It’ll be okay. Just begin now like I’m telling you. You’ll see. Draw,” the blind man said.
So I began. First I drew a box that looked like a hose. It could have been the house I lived in. Then I put a roof on it. At either end of the roof, I drew spires. Crazy.
“Swell,” he said. “Terrific. You’re doing fine,” he said. “Never thought anything like this could happen in your lifetime, did you, bub? Well, it’s a strange life, we all know that. Go on now. Keep it up.”
12
I put in windows with arches. I drew flying buttresses. I hung great doors. I couldn’t stop. The TV station went off the air. I put down the pen and closed and opened my fingers. The blind man felt around over the paper. He moved the tips of the fingers over the paper, all over what I had drawn, and he nodded.
“Doing fine,” the blind man said.
I took up the pen again, and he found my hand. I kept at it. I’m no artist. But I kept drawing just the same.
My wife opened up her eyes and gazed at us. She sat up on the sofa, her robe hanging open. She said, “What are you doing? Tell me, I want to know.”
I didn’t answer her.
The blind man said, “We’re drawing a cathedral. Me and him are working on it. Press hard,” he said to me. “That’s right. That’s good,” he said. “Sure. You got it, bub. I can tell. You didn’t think you could. But you can, can’t you? You’re cooking with gas now. You know what I’m saying? We’re going to really have us something here in a minute. How’s the old arm?” he said. “Put some people in there now. What’s a cathedral without people?”
My wife said, “What’s going on? Robert, what are you doing? What’s going on?”
“It’s all right,” he said to her. “Close your eyes now,” the blind man said to me.
I did it. I closed them just like he said.
“Are they closed?” he said. “Don’t fudge.”
“They’re closed,” I said.
“Keep them that way,” he said. He said, “Don’t stop now. Draw.” So we kept on with it. His fingers rode my fingers as my hand went
over the paper. It was like nothing else in my life up to now.
Then he said, “I think that’s it. I think you got it,” he said. “Take a
look. What do you think?”
But I had my eyes closed. I thought I’d keep them that way for a little
longer. I thought it was something I ought to do.
“Well?” he said. “Are you looking?”
My eyes were still closed. I was in my house. I knew that. But I didn’t
feel like I was inside anything.
“It’s really something,” I said.
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