Innocents and Others Page 5
“I don’t think I have heard it—”
“Oh girl! Your life is missing something truly beautiful—”
“But I can’t tonight. I’m going out with a friend. She is picking me up in a few minutes.”
Jelly turning him down did not seem to bother or discourage him at all. Oz was always comfortable, always easy, which was unnerving and oddly seductive. And the next time she was at session, he asked her out again. She wanted to say yes, to date Oz and spend time with Oz and get close to Oz, but she hesitated for what she knew were stupid reasons. She was worried his blindness would make her even more ridiculous. She was on the continuum of blindness: a meningitis infection had nearly killed her and made her blind overnight, but then, slowly, she had recovered some sight. She could see shapes and light and colors, but her blurry vision was also tunneled to 90 degrees, which made getting around without the help of a cane difficult, although she tried anyway. Imagining the way two blind people would look walking down the street wasn’t the only thing. Oz had no sight at all, never did. That was a different planet, “never sighted.” There was something unbridgeable in it. But that was such a ridiculous idea, as if any human experience couldn’t be bridged. How to build the bridge? You talk about it and find the things you understand in it. The pieces of your own experience in the other. That’s the bridge, she thought. “Yes,” she said. “I would love that.”
She went over to Oz’s apartment. They ate dinner, and Oz put on the promised John Coltrane LP, which sounded mystical and less romantic than she expected. He smoked a joint, which he assured her helped to make the Love Supreme, helped you hear the holiness in it, the God sounds in it, but she declined. “I’m nervous about getting home,” she said.
“So sleep here,” he said. She laughed. “What’s so funny? It’s cool.”
“I know,” she said. She made a loud exhale sound. “Does it get easier? I mean, I don’t like to move from place to place. I could be a shut-in, I think.”
“Girl, is this a group session?” he said, laughing. “Are there a bunch of weepy blind folks here?”
“I’m sorry,” she said.
“Just relax. You are safe. Crash on the couch and you will have all day to get home tomorrow.”
“Okay,” she said.
She slept on the couch. Oz didn’t offer his bed or even kiss her, which surprised her. She decided that although he was not handsome, he had a solidity that she wanted. He was all in one place, while she felt blurry most of the time. She was glad to sleep there and leave in the morning. The daylight was better for her—she needed contrast. For Oz it didn’t matter. The dark was as safe a place as the light.
She asked him over to her place for their second date. She realized an apartment he didn’t know would be more awkward for him, but he and the dog quickly found the chair at her little table. She brought him a glass of wine.
“Would you like to hear some music?” she asked.
“I would,” he said. She put on Blue Train, which she had bought earlier that day. The record store clerk handed it to her when she asked what Coltrane album she should buy.
Right away Oz said, “I love this record,” and she could hear the smile in his voice. They smoked some pot and drank some wine. They drank their glasses quickly and she poured more and then started to serve dinner. She realized how much she wanted to talk with Oz, to hear him talk about his life. Was blindness easier on people who never saw? How would Oz or anyone know? What were his dreams like, what were his thoughts when colors were mentioned? Could she ask him or would he just laugh her questions off? Girl, you ask too many questions. The wine made her brave.
“This is maybe too personal,” she said, and the word personal sounded funny to her. A question about your personhood, your experience as a person. “But when did you realize you were blind? I mean, what blindness is, and that most other people are not blind. Do you remember?” Jelly said this as they ate spaghetti and a slow-cooked sauce that filled the air with basil, tomato, and almost-burned garlic. She had grown the tomatoes on her porch, on scaffolds and ties. More than the tomatoes themselves, she loved the tomato leaves in the early summer. She would water the plants and put her head close. She would inhale the burst of damp leaf with the faint tomato coming off it. A promise of fruit, the green bulbs just starting. As the summer progressed the smell grew more and more pungent. Sometimes she tore a leaf from the plant and took it inside her apartment so she could hold it to her nose and inhale. It relaxed her—such a fresh and earthy smell. How can something so new seem so deep? She knew Oz would appreciate the smell and the taste.
But Oz was not as interested in the food as she expected, as she was.
He was silent, and she was about to say that he didn’t have to tell her or talk about this if he didn’t want to. She was still figuring things all out, so she thought about it a lot. But instead of saying anything, she let her question hang in the space between them. She ate a bite of the spaghetti. She waited. At last Oz leaned in a little and she heard him let out a long breath.
“My mother,” he said slowly, “my Italian mother made me the center of her world. My father was not around, and I was with her constantly. She talked to me, sang to me, and read to me all the time. That was how I learned what blindness was—from the books. We would read about what the little bear saw, and I would ask what that meant. She would try to explain. ‘Some people can get the shape of something without touching it.’ She didn’t overdo it. She didn’t tell me more than I needed. She would read a thing and then let me feel it. I didn’t mind. At a certain point, she revealed that ‘some’ people were actually ‘most’ people.”
Oz put his hand on hers. This was not an overtly sexual gesture. It was that being together and not seeing meant more touching, more body communication. The usual way Oz talked—affectedly easy, slangy, slightly stoned—seemed to fall away as he spoke. She knew that meant something. His voice was soft and low, so she had to lean in to hear him.
“But the big boom for me, the first fall in my life was not that I was missing this thing that most others had, but when I asked the question that she had avoided. It took me longer than you might have guessed for me to think to ask this, but it is hard to imagine your mother as really separate from you. It takes time, it takes a moment—a number of moments—of frustration when she doesn’t understand you to even imagine that she is not part of you. That she isn’t you.” Jelly listened very carefully, but he hesitated, stopped telling her the story.
She watched the white blur of Oz pick up his wineglass and take a swallow. Wine was sour and red wine made your lips pucker and feel like they had an edge to them. Red wine found rough surfaces and emphasized them. A crack or dry spot on your lips, patchiness on the surface of your tongue. It surprised her that she was thinking of his mouth and what it would be like to kiss him. She didn’t think she felt attracted to him, not yet, but she kept imagining this kiss. Their mouths would both be rough and sour from wine.
She could have said, “What happened?” or “Then what?” But her instinct told her to wait. She knew that would give him room to talk. She should not—could not—rush him.
“One day,” Oz said at last, “I sat on her lap as she read. I could feel the words vibrate in her chest, and I felt the smooth pages in front of us. I realized that she got the stories from the page, the smooth pages that gave me nothing. I guess I had known that for a while. But now it all came together. I interrupted her, ‘But Mama, can you see?’ and she had to admit that, yes, she could see. She was not like me, and I was not like her. I was blind, and she was not.”
Jelly reached out her other hand and placed it on his. Still she did not speak, but he understood her reaction to his story. He could feel it in the heat of her hand, hear it in the slight change in her breath. He leaned in so his face was next to hers, and they were breathing close, with their mouth and hair smells next to the food and room smells. H
e would kiss her, she knew, but for now they were almost motionless. She heard a murmur from one of them. Then she realized that it wouldn’t just be a kiss, that they would keep going until they were naked and their bodies entwined. They would hungrily touch every part of each other, and she felt—even before the kiss—breathless and almost faint. She tried not to talk or even think. She tried to stop. She wanted to be still.
CARRIE TAKES THE BUS
1985
Carrie Wexler stood on the lower level of Port Authority and tried not to breathe in carbon monoxide. She waited in a line that snaked from the door marked 21, and beyond the door she could see and smell the idling buses. She put her backpack on her feet and turned up the volume on her Discman. She let the sounds of Rossini’s Il turco in Italia be the soundtrack to the sightscape of Port Authority. This was the 1950 recording that she had wanted, and her father sent it to her with a note calling it one of her “odd little operas.” Her going-to-college gift from him was the state-of-the-art portable CD player. That was a thing with him, “state of the art,” and she was happy to play along even though it frequently skipped, unlike her cassette Walkman. Her father was crazy for new technology, and he liked to send his daughter extravagant electronic gifts despite the fact that her mother told her he had recently filed for bankruptcy. Carrie knew he had been broke or on the verge of broke since the divorce ten years earlier, but maybe the divorce was part of the reason he bought her things. He knew and shared her penchant for opera and musicals. Discard the cassettes, he said. He would replace them with the clear, perfect, undistorted Compact Discs. She now had a CD collection building in her dorm room, but many things were not available on CD yet, so she also kept a large collection of cassette tapes. Technological transitions are always messy. And you often have to keep multiple devices and formats. She had video as well as film cameras. In that case the video was distinctly inferior, but the film was so expensive—it limited what you shot, and you had to be so stingy about coverage. Part of the art was making blind decisions. Video is ugly but looser and more forgiving. You could experiment more. The technology would continue to change and improve. She would be drowning in overlapping gear and nothing would be perfect. She admired her father’s commitment to the new. That was a strategy for handling it. Just go forward and don’t look back.
A woman in the line ahead of her tried to get something out of her suitcase. It was overfilled and the top popped up when she unzipped it. As Carrie listened to the battling back-and-forth goofy frenzy of Rossini, she watched the poor woman trying to shove things back in so the zipper would close.
“Your eye is a camera,” Zakrevsky told them in class. “Imagine where your camera would go and where you would put it. What would be outside the frame and what would be inside the frame.” She did think of her eyes as a camera, especially when she had music flowing into her ears. It transformed the world into her soundstage. The music directed her eyes somehow. Something about that, how the music informs the looking. But of course films are scored and the music comes later, inspired by the images. The woman sat on her suitcase and her weight finally allowed the zipper a close-enough purchase to pull closed. Carrie checked for her own backpack and gear bag. She had brought a brand-new portable Betacam video camera that she had signed out from school, and she figured she could film some stuff in Meadow’s “studio.” She could edit what she shot when she got back to the city. Maybe she should have just brought the Super 8. Of course Meadow would be film-only, or whatever she was into now. Her homemade things, her projects.
A push from behind. The line moving. Carrie pulled the headphones down to her neck.
“Go!” the woman behind her hissed. Carrie lifted her bags and tried not to trip as she yanked her ticket out of her pocket while holding everything and moving forward. What is the damn rush? Wait to board after they take the tickets. Then wait three hours on the bus. Then off in Albany and wait for the next bus, which would probably stop in every empty town along the Mohawk River until it finally reached the stop in Fonda where Meadow would pick her up. All day was waiting.
The ride westward on I-90 turned out to be interesting. The highway ran along the rail line and the river, and Carrie could see the Adirondacks to the north and the Catskills to the south. She listened to Maria Callas singing “Vissi d’arte” in 1958. Her eye camera ran along the river in the foreground but then looked up to quilted farmland in the near distance and beyond that the long view of the cloud-dotted Adirondack peaks. The movement was glorious. You could see for miles, and no camera or lens she had ever used was very good at capturing the simultaneous long and short view. Nothing like her eyes.
She got off the bus in Fonda. Like most of the towns along the river, it looked quaint and pretty until you saw it up close. She took off her headphones and looked around. It wasn’t just the empty storefronts and the peeling paint. It was the plastic signage glaring from a service station, which also appeared to be the only viable business in town. After the bus pulled away, she could hear the music from the speakers at each corner of the convenience store behind the rows of pumps. The two people who got off the bus with her headed straight inside as if lured in by the sound of the Eagles singing “Hotel California.” Carrie followed them. What a strange overlaid place. Meadow had explained to her who lived here.
“Iroquois Nation people, fat white trash people, some leftover rural hippies, and sunburnt farmer people.”
“Farmer people?” Carrie laughed into the phone. “You mean farmers?”
“Yes. Weird Germanic farmers. Palatinates, Moravians, some Amish. How and why did they get here?” Meadow said.
“How and why did you get there?” Carrie said. “I’m serious.”
“The place I found is amazing. Wait until you see the Volta Cinematograph!” She spread the syllables out so it sounded very European: vol-ta cin-e-ma-to-graph.
“I can’t wait.”
Volta Cinematograph was James Joyce’s failed cinema in Dublin. Meadow had a penchant for failures, a soft spot for them. And there were so many failures to chose from, weren’t there? The Mohawk Valley was a collection of failures, or at least of the conspicuous obsolete. All of upstate New York was filled with cities that came to be for a reason, and still had to be even though the reason had long moved on. Syracuse, Buffalo, Albany, Troy, all slowly shrinking. New York City on the other hand was a collection of wins: crack vials and rats aside, make no mistake, the city story was a long march of win. No wonder Meadow liked it up here.
Meadow was late to pick her up, so Carrie wandered around the convenience store contemplating possible beverages. By the cash register was a rack with laminated prayer cards for Kateri Tekakwitha, the “Lily of the Mohawks.” Carrie bought one and read the back as she sipped her pale coffee. Kateri was a Mohawk girl who converted to Catholicism. Later as they drove out of Fonda, Meadow explained that not only was there a shrine to Kateri, but also a huge shrine to two martyred seventeenth-century Jesuit priests who became the first American saints. The priests’ shrine was on a hill on the south side of the Mohawk River, and Catholic pilgrims came from all over the world to visit it. But nothing beat the growing popularity of Kateri among supplicants. She was depicted as an Indian beauty, like Pocahontas in that kitschy Chapman painting, despite the fact that she was described as “disfigured by smallpox scars.” Kateri was recently beatified, which put her on the short list for canonization.
“Is that really what they call it? A short list, like the Oscars?” Carrie said. Meadow drove an old Subaru station wagon. The back was filled with lights, microphones, gels, lens cases, and other shooting gear.
“Sure,” Meadow said. “But the Iroquois have their own ideas about who was martyred. The Jesuits cut a swath through here, and there are competing histories standing right next to each other. When you buy a prayer card, you are picking a side, you know.”
“Really? Is it offensive?” Carrie held up the card.
“But I must admit what most intrigues me is that her devotion manifested itself with—naturally—lifelong chastity and mortification rituals. They draw her as so pretty on that card, call her ‘Lily.’ But she must have been something in person, disfigured and then continually rending her flesh. This zealous scarred woman hurting herself with hot coals and cat-o’-nine-tails to feel closer to God. Now there’s a woman you could build an interesting film around, right? Like Falconetti’s screen-filling, deep-suffering eyes in Dreyer’s Joan of Arc.”
“You like it up here,” Carrie said.
“Not Ingrid Bergman’s glam little nun.”
“Never! That hussy.”
“Yes, I do like it,” Meadow said. “Do you remember Drums Along the Mohawk?”
“No,” Carrie said. “I haven’t seen it.”
“It’s John Ford, 1939. Starring Henry Fonda and Claudette Colbert. So Fonda plays a settler constantly under attack from the Mohawks and the Tories.” Farther up Meadow turned again, and they approached the town of Johnstown. Here farmland gave way to towns with no warning except a wooden sign. The sign said welcome, and then the farms stopped and houses appeared right by the road: a few sadly columned old behemoths, a prefab double-wide, a set-back stone mansion, and a stingy version of a gingerbread Victorian painted all white. The paint was peeling, especially on the sides.