A Blind Man Can See How Much I Love You (6 page)

“What, Charley?”

“How much does it hurt?”

“Now, or then?”

“Then.” Charley hopes, of course, that it doesn’t still hurt, but his concern is with Mai. Ellie is clearly fine.

Ellie sighs. “You mean, what’s it like for Mai now? How much pain is she in now?”

Charley nods.

“Lots of aching. Numb feet. Mai has that. Stiff arm. Itchy. You know, everyone’s different. You could ask her.” Ellie says this to be encouraging, but it seems unlikely to her, and to Charley, that he will ask, and if he does they both expect that Mai will say, “Not too bad,” like a true Minnesotan, or else, in the manner of her father-in-law, “Not worth discussing.”

“But right where … where the breast was, how is that?
How is that now? How does it look?” Charley keeps his eyes on the coffee table.

“Didn’t Mai show you?” Charley and Mai are the only couple Ellie knows well. Surely not all heterosexual couples are so reticent, so determinedly unobservant. Ellie knows another straight couple who taped not only the birth of their baby but the burying of the placenta and the subsequent bris. Certainly she prefers Charley and Mai’s approach, even with its obvious pitfalls. When you can share panties and Tampax and earrings with the person you have sex with, a little blurring is to be expected, a certain rapid slippage of romantic illusion, and that is not a plus as far as Ellie is concerned. On the other hand, no one except Mai and Ellie’s mother has seen her scar, and Mai’s mother is dead, so she and Ellie are actually even in the boldly-show-your-scar department.

Charley shakes his head.

“It hardly hurts now. And my arm is fine. Almost fine.” Ellie makes a circle with her left arm, and it is a pretty good circle if you don’t know how she was able to move it before.

“Good. I’m really glad it’s better.”

“What?”

“Nothing.”

“Charley, what?”

“Forget it.”

Charley finishes his wine; Ellie does too.

“If you say no, I’ll understand. If this makes you really angry, I apologize in advance. Could I see it?”

Ellie unbuttons her shirt, one of Charley’s old shirts that she and Mai wear around the house. On Ellie, it saves the trouble of shorts. She is not wearing a bra and wishes there were some way to show only the clinically useful part of her body.

“Ah.” Charley gets on his knees in front of Ellie, his eyes almost level with hers. Ellie keeps her eyes on the fireplace.

On the left side of Ellie’s narrow chest, a hand’s length below her small, pretty collarbone, a few inches from the edge of her suntan, there is a smooth ivory square of skin bisected by a red-blue braid of scar tissue. In the middle of the scar is a dimple.

“That?” says Charley, pointing without touching.

“Where the nipple was.”

“Ah.” Charley wipes his eyes with the back of his hand. He cups Ellie’s breast in his palm and leans forward, his other arm around her waist. He lays his cheek against the scar.

“Can you feel this?”

“I can feel pressure. That’s all I feel right there.”

“Not hot or cold?” Charley can feel the water between his rough and Ellie’s smooth skin, and the tiny bumps of her scar coming up lightly against his cheek.

“I don’t think so. I feel your hair higher up.”

Ellie puts both hands in Charley’s wet hair, the silver-blond waves coming up between her fingers. He smells of salt.

“Shut your eyes, Ellie.” Her elbows rest on his shoulders. She smells like fresh corn, of course, and underneath that, peonies.

Charley traces the tiny red rope rising from Ellie’s pale marble blankness, in and out, its tight twists and shrugs crisscrossing each other under his tongue, growing bigger in his mouth. He circles the indentation in the middle, over and over, as if it will open to him, as if underneath the scar is the whole breast, not gone, but concealed.

Ellie knows it is Charley’s lips and tongue, and she feels them with the muffled longing of a woman watching rain fall.

F
or or fifteen years, I saw her only in my dreams.

When my father got sick in the spring of my junior year, dying fast and ugly in the middle of June, I went to Paris to recover, to become someone else,
un homme du monde,
an expert in international maritime law, nothing like the college boy who slept with his stepmother the day after his fathers funeral. We grieved apart, after that night, and I left her to raise my little brother, Buster, and pay all the bills, including mine. Buster shuttled back and forth for holidays, even as a grown man, calm and affectionate with us both, bringing me Deaf Smith County peanut butter from my mother for Christmas morning, carrying home jars of Fauchon jam from me, packed in three of his sweat socks. My mother’s letters came on the first of every month for fifteen years, news of home, of my soccer coach’s retirement, newspaper clippings about maritime law and French
shipping lines, her new address in Massachusetts, a collection of her essays on jazz. I turned the book over and learned that her hair had turned gray.

“You gotta come home, Lionel,” my brother said last time, his wife sprawled beside him on my couch, her long, pretty feet resting on his crotch.

“I don’t think so.”

“She misses you. You know that. You should go see her.”

Jewelle nodded, digging her feet a little further, and Buster grinned hugely and closed his eyes.

“You guys,” I said.

My brother married someone more beautiful and wild than I would have chosen. They had terrible, flying-dishes fights and passionate reconciliations every few months, and they managed to divorce and remarry in one year, without even embarrassing themselves. Jewelle loved Buster to death and told me she only left when he needed leaving, and my brother would say in her defense that it was nothing more than the truth. He never said what he had done that would deserve leaving, and I can’t think that it was anything very bad. There is no bad even in the depths of Buster’s soul, and when I am sick of him, his undaunted, fat-and-sassy younger-brotherness, I think that there are no depths.

When Buster and Jewelle were together (usually Columbus Day through July Fourth weekend), happiness poured out of them. Buster showed slides of Jewelle’s artwork,
thickly layered slashes of dark paint, and Jewelle cooked platters of fried chicken and bragged on his latest legal victories. When they were apart, they both lost weight and shine and acted like people in the final stage of terminal heartbreak. Since Jewelle’s arrival in Buster’s life, I had had a whole secondhand love affair and passionate marriage, and in return Buster got use of my apartment in New York and six consecutive Labor Days in Paris.

“Ma misses you,” he said again. He held Jewelle’s feet in one hand. “You know she does. She’s getting old.”

“I definitely don’t believe that. She’s fifty, maybe fifty-five. That’s not old. We’ll be there ourselves in no time.”

My mother, my stepmother, my only mother, is fifty-four and I am thirty-three and it has comforted me over the years to picture myself in what I expect to be a pretty vigorous middle age and to contemplate poor Julia tottering along, nylon knee-highs sloshing around her ankles, chin hairs and dewlap flapping in the breeze.

“Fine. She’s practically a spring chicken.” Buster cut four inches of Brie and chewed on it. “She’s not a real young fifty-five. What did she do so wrong, Lionel? Tell me. I know she loves you, I know she loves me. She loved Pop, she saved his life as far as I can tell. Jesus, she took care of Grammy Ruth for three years when anyone else would’ve put a pillow over the woman’s face. Ma is really a good person, and whatever has pissed you off, you could let it go now. You know, she can’t help being white.”

Jewelle, of whom we could say the same thing, pulled
her feet out of his hand and curled her toes over his waistband, under his round belly.

“If she died tomorrow, how sorry would you be?” she said.

Buster and I stared at her, brothers again, because in our family you did not say things like that, not even with good intentions.

I poured wine for us all and put out the fat green olives Jewelle liked.

“Well. Color is not the issue. You can tell her I’ll come in June.”

Buster went into my bedroom. “I’m calling Ma,” he said. “I’m telling her June.”

Jewelle gently spat olive pits into her hand and shaped them into a neat pyramid on the coffee table.

I
flew home with a new girlfriend, Claudine, and her little girl, Mirabelle. Claudine had business and a father in New York, and a small hotel and me in Paris. She was lean as a boy and treated me with wry Parisian affection, as if all kisses were mildly amusing if one gave it any thought. Claudine’s consistent, insouciant aridity was easy on me; I’d come to prefer my lack of intimacy straight up. Mirabelle was my true sweetheart. I loved her orange cartoon curls, her red glasses, and her welterweight swagger. She was Ma Poupée and I was her Bel Homme.

Claudine’s father left a new black Crown Victoria for us
at JFK, with chocolates and a Tintin comic on the back seat and Joan Sutherland in the tape player. Claudine folded up her black travel sweater and hung a white linen jacket on the back hook. There was five hundred dollars in the glove compartment, and I was apparently the only one who thought that if you were lucky enough to have a father, you might reasonably expect him to meet you at the airport after a two-year separation. My father would have been at that gate, drunk or sober. Mirabelle kicked the back of the driver’s seat all the way from the airport, singing what the little boy from Dallas had taught her on the flight over:
“I’m
gonna kick you. I’m
gonna
kick you. I’m gonna
kick
you. I’m gonna kick
you,
right in your big old heinie.” Claudine watched out the window until I pulled onto the turnpike, and then she closed her eyes. Anything in English was my department.

I recognized the new house right away. My mother had dreamed and sketched its front porch and its swing a hundred times during my childhood, on every telephone-book cover and notepad we ever had. For years my father talked big about a glass-and-steel house on the water, recording studio overlooking the ocean, wraparound deck for major partying and jam sessions, and for years I sat next to him on the couch while he read the paper and I read the funnies and we listened to my mother tuck my brother in: “Once upon a time, there were two handsome princes, Prince Fric, who was a little older, and Prince Frac, who was a little younger. They lived with their parents, the King and
Queen, in a beautiful little cottage with a beautiful front porch looking out over the River Wilde. They lived in the little cottage because a big old castle with a wraparound deck and a million windows is simply more trouble than it’s worth.”

Julia stood before us, both arms upraised, her body pale and square in front of an old willow, its branches pooling on the lawn. Claudine pulled off her sunglasses and said, “You don’t resemble her,” and I explained, as I thought I had explained several times between rue de Birague and the Massachusetts border, that this was my stepmother, that my real mother had died when I was nine and Julia had married my father and adopted me. “Ah,” said Claudine, “not your real mother.”

Mirabelle said,
“Qu’est-ce que c’est, ça?”

“Tire swing,” I said.

Claudine said, “May I smoke?”

“I don’t know. She used to smoke.”

“Did she stop?”

“I don’t know. I don’t know if she smokes or not, Claudine.”

She reached for her jacket. “Does your mother know I’m coming?”

“Here we are, Poupée,” I said to Mirabelle.

I stood by the car and watched my mother make a fuss over Mirabelle’s red hair (speaking pretty good French, which I had never heard) and turn Claudine around to admire the crispness of her jacket. She shepherded us up
the steps, thanking us for the gigantic and unimaginative bottle of toilet water. Claudine went into the bathroom; Mirabelle went out to the swing. My mother and I stood in her big white kitchen. She hadn’t touched me.

“Bourbon?” she said.

“It’s midnight in Paris, too late for me.”

“Right,” my mother said. “Gin-and-tonic?”

We were just clinking our glasses when Claudine came out and asked for water and an ashtray.

“No smoking in the house, Claudine. I’m sorry.”

Claudine shrugged, in that contemptuous way Parisians do, so wildly disdainful you have to laugh or hit them. She went outside, lighting up before she was through the door. We touched glasses again.

“Maybe you didn’t know I was bringing a friend?” I said.

My mother smiled. “Buster didn’t mention it.”

“Do you mind?”

“I don’t mind. You might have been bringing her to meet me. I don’t think you did, but you might have. And a very cute kid. Really adorable.”

“And Claudine?”

“Very pretty.
Chien.
That’s the word I remember, I don’t know if they still say that.”

Chien
is a bitchy, stylish appeal. They do still say that, and my own landlady has said it of Claudine.

Julia dug her hands into a bowl of tarragon and cream cheese and pushed it, one little white gob at a time, under
the skin of the big chicken sitting on the counter. “Do you cook?”

“I do. I’m a good cook. Like Pop.”

My mother put the chicken in the oven and laughed. “Honey, what did your father ever cook?”

“He was a good cook. He made those big breakfasts on Sunday, he barbecued great short ribs, I remember those.”

“Oh, Abyssinian ribs. I remember them too. Those were some great parties in those bad old days. Even after he stopped drinking, your father was really fun at a party.” She smiled as if he were still in the room.

My father was a madly friendly, kissy unreliable drunk when I was a little boy, and a successful, dependable musician and father after he met Julia. Once she became my mother, I never worried about him, I never hid again from that red-eyed, wet-lipped stranger, but I did occasionally miss the old drunk.