“I’m sorry, darling,” he said, early on, in bed, feeling futile. She held him, kissed him, and he wanted to weep with gratitude.
Months of bliss. He sometimes became alarmed when she was out of his sight. Setting eyes on her, he blessed his luck. She was a light to him. “I thought I knew what happiness was.” He was reminded that in the early, active part of his life he had been deluded.
This clarity of vision — his life now — was figurative and philosophical, but a paradox, for he found that in fact his eyesight was failing. He had trouble reading, even with glasses. He could not drive at night without being dazzled by the headlights of oncoming cars.
He had his eyes tested. He failed the exam. “It’s to be expected at your age,” the doctor said. “But new glasses won’t help. You have cataracts.”
He regarded this as good news, the promise that after his operation he would see better and be bathed in the glow of his lovely wife. But why was he asked to sign the waiver?
The doctor said, “There’s less than a one percent chance of the procedure going wrong.”
After the operation, still bleary-eyed and groping, he was given drops for his eyes. Melanie helped him apply the drops, and his eyes became scorched and infected. He lost his corneas, he got a transplant, and then more drops. The transplant failed. He howled.
As though rehearsing his defense in a malpractice suit, the doctor sternly reminded him of the odds: “Someone had to be in that one percent.”
Because he had signed the waiver, he could not sue and was not compensated. He did not need money anyway. He wanted his eyesight back, even the feeblest sort, as on the days when he had said, “I can see your face, sort of dark, but not your features.” He would have settled for that. He was the blind man now.
And, blind, he could not bear to be away from Melanie. Yet even when she was with him he was not consoled. He spoke to her, but she did not seem to hear him. Something wintry in her manner — why? He had never sensed it before, perhaps because her adoring eyes, her face, and her luminous skin had always overwhelmed him. Now he was aware of her as a different presence — her thumping clumsy footsteps, the sharp odor of her body, her harsh voice.
When she touched him her hands chilled him; her fingers felt reptilian. He was appalled even as she said, “Of course I love you.”
He was now confined to his house. He was bewildered in it, in rooms like obstacles. He tripped over his own furniture. He could not go anywhere without her, yet more and more she was absent.
“I need to shop. Everything takes longer when you come along.”
Shop for what? She had never shopped before. He began to ask her where she had been.
“Getting my nails done,” or “Having my hair colored,” or “At the dressmaker’s.”
But why? — since he could not see the nails, or the hair color, or her clothes.
“It’s for me,” she said.
He was confused by the mingled smells of her perfume, her nail polish, her shampoo, her new clothes. His blindness had wakened his other senses — he was hyperalert, sensitive to all stimuli. “I smell onions,” or “Smoke — tobacco smoke — in your hair.”
He smelled a man, he smelled sex, something humid and dog-like, and a roughness like razor burn on her chin. He was too sad to kill her. Instead I’ll kill myself.
What kept him from it was that she was sadder, and tense, as if she had received some bad news.
“What’s wrong?”
“Please, leave me alone.”
“You’re never home.”
“I was sick! You don’t care!”
After all that time, their first argument. She insisted that she loved him but was like someone else, someone cruel, a stranger. She returned with a new smell on her. These odors overwhelmed all other impressions and became like colors and shapes, some of them as layered and complex as unanswered questions.
Was he missing something because he was blind, or was he seeing her as she really was? There was that voice. Sometimes, speaking to him, she seemed a little formal and overinformative, as though she were also addressing someone else, as though she had a listener she was teasing with irrelevant detail and a sort of mocking pomposity.
“I certainly would not expect someone like you to understand the priorities of a woman whose primary goal is to find some sort of focus to give balance to her life.”
“What’s that noise?”
He was stifled by unfamiliar creaks in distant parts of the house.
“I didn’t hear anything.”
One evening at a party he felt awkward and lost in the host’s house, so he stood to the side, out of the way of guests, waiting for Melanie to bring him a drink. Brushed by a stranger, he inhaled a familiar odor.
“You’ve been sleeping with my wife,” he said without thinking.
He was surprised when a woman snorted and pinched his arm and said, “You’re imagining things!”
Guilty people in farces often used that platitude, but farce was so near to tragedy. He saw that he was becoming shrewder; he had a clear vision of that woman’s drunken face, purple, putty-like, with weepy reddened eyes.
He was nimbler in his own house. Melanie stumbled in the dark, banged doors, fuddled with simple things like the telephone and the bath plug, and faltered in corridors where now, to his astonishment, he was completely at home.
There was someone else lurking, he knew it clearly one night, in the big cluttered front room that looked out on the Sound. He had become accustomed to the dark. The other person was lost in it and made an uncertain canine shimmy, a backing up: someone making way for him.
“Who’s there?”
“Who do you think?” And she laughed in a rehearsed way, as though she had an audience and was laughing on someone else’s behalf.
“A man.”
She jeered much too loudly, attempting a convincing denial, a bit of theater.
Using his fingertips, he traced his way through the room, surprised by how well he knew the route, and went upstairs, where he paused and heard the front door click shut. Then he heard his wife unsteadily on the stairs.
“It was a woman. That’s why you laughed that way.”
Memory helped, desperation helped, blindness did the rest. He could see with his teeth, his tongue, his lips, his face, his whole body. He knew later that the two must have been making love — an unmistakable vibrato, the specific sounds irregular, like a lapse from ordinary life. Not like sex between a man and a woman, a pattern of slaps he knew, a familiar rhythm, a top and bottom, an act writhingly echoic, but instead a tussle of equals, the percussive kisses, the whappity-whap of two women: a sudden sapphic sandwich with no filling.
From believing that he was always alone, he began to understand that he was never alone. Even when there was no conversation he was aware of another presence, a muffled physicality that filled a space in the room and blunted the sounds he made, something molecular and cloth-like. No darkness at all, only light that was loosely or tightly woven, always revealing a coarse or helpful light. What people called darkness, and feared, for him had a face and features: he now knew the whir of human atoms.
Smells, too, perfumes that pierced his eyes, duskier aromas in his nostrils, a further fleshier suggestion that he tasted on his tongue, the distinct earthiness of swallowed food. Another person — had to be a woman; a man would have been less circumspect.