He inspected this new toy. He knew what he had before him — paint samples. He guessed that these two thousand colors were about as many as human beings could create — in their labs, their paint factories, their electronics workshops. He had endured years of feeling different, of possessing something that was a secret to others and also to him. Now the color wheel enlightened him…People gave hues such hopeful names. There was a square called Orange Froth and next to it Orange Blossom and next to that Florida Orange. Lyle could see the Froth globules deepen to a color that almost matched Orange Blossom but didn’t, and the Orange Blossom itself acquire a gloss as it approached but did not attain Florida Orange. “Mom,” he called.
“Yes, darling?” from the other room.
“I have…” he said, and paused. In the Anansi tales, secrets were meant to be stuffed into the heart and never pulled out; there could be unforeseen results if they were.
She walked in. “…Something to tell me?”
“Well…”
And then came the visit to Dr. Marcus Paul; and then came the tentative diagnosis of a condition, though not an ailment, unknown to most scientists probably because of its weak grant potential. And then came romance. Love at first sight? It can happen. There’s often a lot of palaver.
“I love you not only because you’re beautiful,” Marcus told Pansy a few weeks after they met. “I love you because of your admirable politics, your wish that the world’s population become one color. Because you mop floors in a soup kitchen. Because you cook like a four-star chef.”
She kissed him then, and she caressed his hip with her knee, a gesture that cannot be achieved unless both parties are lying on their sides facing each other. They happened to be lying on their sides facing each other — Lyle was at school — and so the caress impossible under other circumstances was now possible, probable, necessary, unavoidable, though who would want to avoid the deep shudder each felt as joint saluted joint. Then Marcus entered his lovely woman.
Afterward she took over the colloquy. “I love you because of your single-mindedness,” she said. “Your voice. Your dreadlocks. I love you because our coupling feels like destiny.”
“Arranged by Anansi.”
“Anansi? Lyle reads stories about him…”
“He’s a powerful spider who used to make his home in Africa and now lives in Jamaica. But he gets around.”
“Please thank him if you see him…And I love you because together we belong to Lyle.”
“And Lyle belongs to us,” Marcus said. In a state of postcoital clarity he realized that he had found his life’s love and his life’s work in a single ophthalmologic interview. “We are Lyle’s caretakers, guardians, keepers of his secret.”
“It’s like the housemaid marrying the butler,” Pansy said.
“If you say so.” He felt like the stable boy marrying the princess.
There was a brief three-person honeymoon. They visited Italy, where plump lemons offered even more yellows than the ones Lyle knew. They went to Iberia, where the tiles of Lisbon and the airport in Madrid presented a chromatic joy, many colors new and glorious to Marcus and Pansy and about twelve times that many to Lyle.
Marcus’s clinical practice was easy to transfer to a colleague. He’d been mostly engaged in research anyway. After returning from the colorful honeymoon, he built a lab behind Pansy’s spacious house and invited his cousin David to join him. The reclusive David, an optician, was interested in the changes to vision that curved or beveled glass, glass within glass, prismatic lenses, all those things, could make when placed in front of the eye. The two cousins had already designed a number of spectacles that helped people with eye diseases see better.
Their little optical laboratory — incorporated, after a while — produced many improved devices. Telescopic eyeglasses for everyday use. Microscope lenses, and surgical snakes with tiny cameras in their heads, and smoky instruments for astronomers. These tools became much in demand.
The company flourished, and Pansy’s return on her investment was substantial. She was proud of the men’s success. Still, when Marcus and David entered their laboratory day after day, she liked to imagine that, in addition to their other products, they were working on a superinvention that would grant Lyle’s vision to everyone. Performance-enhancing, you might say. When perfected, it would encounter regulations; when produced, it would inspire inferior imitations. Even so, it would be a vehicle for public good.
But after four years it had not yet appeared. So one day the patient Pansy inquired.
“I don’t think we can do it,” Marcus admitted. “We’ve tried; it was one of our original purposes. But we cannot duplicate work that nature took millions of years to accomplish. We cannot invent an external instrument which will produce an internal variant. The butterfly has a genome, the pigeon too. But where does the pentachromatic gene lurk? We cannot tell. And if we could tell, and could extract it, and could transfer it to a human cell, would the cell survive? And if yes, yes, yes, yes…for what purpose? To give people headaches?”
“It would be only a carnival attraction,” Pansy slowly acknowledged. “A rich man’s plaything. But oh, Marcus. No one else can ever become like Lyle. He’s stuck being unique.”
IV.
And what of the unique Lyle during these years? Well, he had things to occupy him: school, cello, baseball, walks at night with Marcus or David or Pansy. Music was blessedly colorless. When he stood in center field, the sky showed him its myriad blues and the field its hundreds of greens, but none of that distracted him from the flight of the sphere, a headless wingless bird, a ball white and off-white and off-off-white. Nothing distracted him from the task of predicting the bird’s destination and putting himself beneath it, mitt at the ready.
He played in the school orchestra. Once in a while he went to a party and talked to whoever seemed left out — talked awkwardly but soothingly, or maybe soothingly because awkwardly.
He thought about someday becoming a doctor. He liked looking at anatomy plates, vivid to begin with, garish under his inspection. He wondered whether his vision, trained, might develop an X-ray component. Marcus doubted it. They discussed diseases of organs other than the eye — diagnosis, treatment, treatment failure.
But despite the error-free fielding record and despite the mild friendships with his peers and despite the comfort of nocturnal darkness in the company of one of the three people he loved, Lyle, heavy with his secret, often felt sorrowfully alone.
When he was sixteen, he began to spend Sunday mornings with last year’s biology teacher. They drove to a nature preserve and then hiked its trails. And then one Sunday, during a forbidding rainstorm, she invited him to forget nature for a day. She was forty, the ideal age to relieve a sensitive boy of his virginity and satisfy his curiosity too. He noted that her areolae were not sepia, as novels said, but pulsing pink rose mauve…This dear woman would be fired without a hearing if her generosity became known — he knew that, and he realized how uncalibrated were the rules that claim to protect us from one another. But Lyle was used to keeping things to himself, and anyway he would never betray Ms. Lapidus. Their Sunday-morning explorations continued — in the nature preserve if the day was bright, in bed if otherwise.