Night Blindness

by Susan Strecker

  “Are you going somewhere?” he asked.

  “I need to get home. My parents are going to wonder—”

  “I called them.”

  “You what?”

  “Why are you doing this?” He watched me.

  “Doing what?”

  “Avoiding, Jenny.”

  I gave up trying to stand and lay back on the wall. My head felt thick. “I’m not avoiding.” I thought of Luke on the piano bench. You’re afraid. If I rolled left, I’d topple to the city below. I could feel Ryder’s eyes on me.

  “It sure feels like you are,” he said. “Escaping to boarding school, eloping to Greece.” I’d hardly ever heard Ryder angry; he’d always been laid-back, rarely in a bad mood. Now his voice sounded stilted, wrong, not rising, but getting lower. “Coming home in your flowy skirts and your long hair and calling me only when you’re drunk.”

  The back of my throat tasted acidic. I remembered rolling down the window in his Audi on the way to East Rock, leaning my head out for fresh air. “And you’re trying to save people who can’t be saved,” I said. “It doesn’t take a brain surgeon to figure out why you chose that career.” This struck me as so funny or so terrifying, I started laughing. But underneath was a sliver of desperation; something inside me was screaming.

  “How come you never wrote to me?” I heard him ask.

  I quit laughing and opened my eyes. I felt light-headed, like I might blow away. The sky was deep purple and charcoal gray, and it kept moving. “It’s not like you wrote to me,” I said. “And all those years coming to see my parents, you never asked them for my phone number?”

  “Your dad told me about Nic.” He said it evenly, like he was trying to keep something out of his voice. “I wasn’t about to fuck that up for you. And you made it crystal clear you didn’t want to talk to me.”

  I thought of Ryder, standing at my bedroom door a few nights before I left for Andover, his face pale, his eyes dark. “If I promise we’ll never tell your parents, will you stay?” His voice had been shaking.

  “Who let you in?” It was a ridiculous question; he’d been coming to the house forever. In the corner was a box of photographs and notes from him. Will’s football jerseys, clothes, and posters were stacked neatly in the garage. My parents had stripped our house of Will. And I had removed all evidence of Ryder from my room.

  He came in and closed the door. “Why are you running away?” He was wearing a sweatshirt I’d brought back for him from Florida. “We need each other.”

  I picked up a Doors CD he had given me and winged it against the wall like a Frisbee. The plastic case cracked in two. “You need another girlfriend,” I told him. “That’s what you need.”

  I remembered the quick, sharp pain when he’d grabbed my wrist. “We didn’t do anything wrong.” His voice was low, vicious. “Will overreacted.”

  “You’re hurting me.” I tugged my arm free. I could feel tears coming, hot and ready. I turned back to straighten the rest of the CDs so they all faced the same way. It was suddenly very important to me that they were lined up right.

  “Jenny.” I didn’t answer. “Jenny, talk to me.” But I couldn’t. “Jenny, goddamn it, I love you.” I kept stacking the discs in perfect order until he left.

  A plane passing overhead startled me out of the memory. Ryder was watching me. “I just want to know.” He’d nicked himself shaving, and in the moonlight, he looked so fresh-faced. He’d always had a little scruff before. “What do you think about when you lie awake at night under that big Santa Fe sky?”

  The question surprised me and my answer slipped out without my wanting it to. “I never stop thinking about what we did.”

  He quit blinking. Quit moving altogether. “It was an accident.” He said it as if I were a child, like he was telling me not to go in the road, not to touch a hot stove.

  “Accident or not”—I studied the tassels on his loafers—“it was our fault.”

  We stayed that way for a long time, Ryder looking at the city he’d never left and me lying on the stone wall, watching his back. I thought maybe we’d stay there until the sun came up, but after a while he said, “Let’s go.”

  We didn’t talk the whole way home.

  7

  When I made my way up the attic stairs to paint the next morning, my head felt stuffed with cotton, and my limbs were sandbags. My father had renovated it when we were kids and made a play space for Will and me. But since I’d been up there last, the front of the room had filled with Christmas decorations. I had to step around garlands and wreaths to reach the back, where there was a bathroom and sink.

  Nic thought holidays were pedestrian. Instead of celebrating with a tree and presents, we went up to Angel Fire for Christmas, where Hadley and a bunch of friends shared a house. Nic hosted a Greek dinner that lasted till the New Year. People skied and ate and screwed, lounging around the house, playing ukuleles, talking about art, drinking mushroom tea and smoking herb. As I threaded my way past homemade clay angels and the ancient pinecone ornaments I’d made in elementary school, I pictured my parents—my dad in a wool hat, Jamie in her cashmere gloves—venturing to the Christmas tree farm in Chester to cut down their evergreen, just the two of them. It made my heart feel like lead.

  The sun had risen bright and swollen and was shining through the attic windows, throwing short shadows across the wood floor. The slanted eaves and hidden corners made me think of Will. We used to play up here for hours. Across from the tiny bathroom, the wooden easel was where I remembered it, an old-fashioned kind with a double-masted H frame and a child’s crayon marks across it. I touched its smooth ash wood and bent down to slide open the little drawer. A few stiff watercolor brushes were still in there. It wasn’t the steel Italian easel Nic had bought me for my birthday, but it would do.

  I put my art bag on the floor and pulled out my new sabeline brush kit and some charcoal. Nic had wrapped up five of my self-portraits, the ones he said were best, and packed them in my bag before I left, telling me it was time to finish something. Every time I worked on one of these pieces, it felt like my hands were rebelling. I knew what they really wanted to do was play piano. I wanted to remind Nic that before I’d dropped out of UCB for him, I’d finished everything. I’d gotten perfect grades and was on the student council and taught piano lessons to kids in the New Haven projects for free.

  I used steel clamps to fasten an unfinished canvas to the easel and got out the paints. My phone rang as I was mixing up the blues. “Hey there,” I said.

  “Why didn’t you call me back last night?” Nic asked.

  “Sorry. I was out with Mandy. I haven’t seen her since I’ve been home.” I stared at that fleck of light in the portrait’s eyes.

  “Didn’t you get my messages?”

  “I got home late.” I thought maybe if I painted over that piece of light, they might become my eyes. They were so close, but not quite right.

  “Hadley said he tried to get you, too.” A strange alliance seemed to have formed between my husband and my friend since I’d been gone.

  “Hadley texts so much, his thumbs are going to fall off,” I said.

  “That doesn’t explain where you were.”

  “Jesus, Nico, I’m sorry. I’ve been doing a lot of research and trying to keep my family together. It was nice to go out for a couple drinks and forget about everything for a little while.”

  He sighed. “Let’s not fall apart because your old man is.” The room darkened, and I moved to the window. I saw Nic in those sexy jeans with the patch on the ass. Clouds had covered the sun, and I could just make out the outline of the old goalposts in the northwest corner of the backyard.

  “He’s not trying to fall apart, Nico.” I used to lie out there with Ryder and Will, staring at a clear sky.

  “How’s he doing?”

  Paint was stiffening on the brushes; in Santa Fe, they would have been bone-dry by now. “Nothing’s changed since we talked yesterday. We’re waiting for his blood work
to come back.”

  “Did you decide how long you’re staying?”

  When I walked by Nic that first time, I knew the guest professor was watching me, knew he could see the outline of my legs through my sheer skirt. It was rumored he slept with his students. “Look at her,” he’d said to no one. “Sad and beautiful.” I’d kept walking, as though I hadn’t heard, my face burning. I’d wanted so badly to stop, turn around, go to him. It’d been so long since I’d cared if a man had noticed me. “It’s not like I have to rush back to the café,” I said now. “Hadley said his gallery assistant can fill in until I get back.”

  “Your job is not to serve people coffee at Hadley’s gallery. You’re a model.” He sounded anxious.

  I left the window and wandered over to the Victorian dollhouse that my father had hired an architect to build. “That’s not really a job,” I said. “It’s just standing around naked for some rich guys who think they’re sculptors. Getting the right amount of foam on a latte, now, that’s a job.”

  “Well, Dante is a serious artist, and he needs you to model for him.” Nic sucked in his breath. “His show is in October.” The dollhouse was Tudor in style. It opened in the front so all the rooms were exposed. “He needs his model—”

  “Eight weeks,” I said, interrupting him.

  He was quiet. The numbness arrived. It started as a faint ringing in my ears and then widened, like a diaphanous curtain, spreading through my limbs. I sat cross-legged in front of the dollhouse. I hated making Nico mad. “Jamie has to work, and my dad can’t drive.” We were supposed to spend the summer in Greece, looking for a house. He’d been talking about moving there for years.

  “I can’t be without you,” he told me, as plainly as if he were talking about oxygen.

  I put the mother in the bedroom, in front of the tiny vanity with the real mirror. It was odd that Nic got like this when I left. He brought beautiful models to the studio, stripped them of their clothes, and molded marble replicas of them. Ever since we made love that first time, he said I was too real to be his model anymore. “I see you in every woman,” he’d told me.

  “Did you hear me?” he asked.

  I picked the plastic father off the living room floor and propped him in the orange plaid recliner. I suddenly wanted to get off the phone so I could dust the floors and windows and use the tiny hand vacuum to clean the rugs. “Don’t tell anyone I play this with you,” Will had said. He’d stopped arranging the dining room one afternoon, his mouth serious, his blue eyes going back and forth on mine. I was eight, and he was not quite ten. “I won’t,” I told him. I remembered the importance of that secret, how loyal I’d made myself to it.

  “It’s only two months,” I said to Nic. “Just until he’s out of the woods.” The rotary phone on the wall by the bathroom rang. “Let me call you back,” I told him; “that’s the house line. We’re supposed to get labs back today.”

  “Just answer it,” he said. “I’ll hang on.”

  The old yellow phone hung outside the tiny bathroom, and I managed to grab it before the answering machine picked up.

  “Jamie,” Ryder said.

  My stomach lifted into my throat at the sound of his voice, just like it used to when I was fifteen. “Ryder,” I said. “It’s Jenny.”

  “Oh. Jenny.” I still hadn’t gotten used to hearing anyone call me that, but I liked the way he said it, almost singing my name. “I keep expecting you to sound like a teenager.”

  “Yeah.” I said, “I know.” I thought about calling him from Liv’s the night before. “Did the blood work come back?” I could tell he was at the hospital, because a doctor was being paged in the background.

  “Yes, nothing alarming there. We’ll proceed as planned. Radiation first, then, if need be, surgery.” His voice was flat, professional, not Ryder’s at all.

  I suddenly wished it was last night again, under the stars, his camel hair coat around me, signing I love you. “Is that a good thing?”

  He didn’t answer. I tried to think of something to say about the night before, but I didn’t know what.

  “We should talk about it with your parents.”

  “Ryder, it’s me, Jenny. You can tell me.” I could hear more voices in the background. “Listen, I’m sorry about last night. I was drunk, and I shouldn’t have called you. It’s just—”

  “Let’s stick to the plan. Radiation, then we’ll see where we are.” His voice was businesslike. “Tell your father to give me a call. I’ve got to go; I’m getting paged.”

  The line clicked off. I stood there with the phone in my hand, hating him for hanging up so soon. And then I remembered Nic. I put the receiver back and picked up my cell. “Sorry, Nico.” He didn’t answer. I thought he’d gotten tired of waiting, but the display said we were still connected. “You there?”

  Nic never said anything when he was mad; he just simmered, like water that wouldn’t boil. Days could go by, the silence between us like a hard wall neither of us would reach through. Sometimes I wished we would fight, yell at each other. Silence was so infuriating, and lonely, but I was also grateful for it. I thought if we fought, I might say things I would regret.

  “He calls you Jenny?” His voice was cold.

  “What?” I sat in front of the dollhouse again. The father had fallen off the plaid chair. “Everyone called me Jenny when I was a kid.” The floor was covered in contact paper that looked like hardwood, peeling at the edges.

  “And now they don’t. Remember when I introduced you at the ‘Nightingale’ exhibit as Jenny? You screamed at me when we got back to the hotel that your name is Jensen. Not Jenny. Not Jen. Jensen.” I’d told him Jensen was an adult’s name. What I hadn’t said was that Jenny belonged to Ryder.

  “Jesus, what’s the big deal?” But I knew exactly what the big deal was. One word had cracked open my past. “It’s just a name.”

  “One that you’d never let me use, but some old boyfriend from preppyville still gets to.”

  “Did Hadley tell you?” I knew right away I shouldn’t have said it.

  His breath caught in his throat. “No,” he said. “I can hear it in your voice.”

  “It was a long time ago.” I saw now that the dollhouse was all wrong. The living room couch was in the kitchen and the bathtub was in the attic, as if another child, a ghost, had come and played with it while I was gone.

  “And what about last night?”

  I didn’t have the energy to explain. “Nothing happened.”

  “J.,” he said quietly. “You’re making me crazy.”

  I laughed, a harsh, mean sound. “If I didn’t know any better, I’d think you were jealous. I thought you didn’t believe in that. Jealousy coming from the guy who always used to say monogamy and monotony were interchangeable.”

  “That was before we were married. And have I ever once acted on it? Is there anyone I want more than you?”

  “You’ve ruined me for every other woman,” he’d said when I’d asked him a few years before if he’d been with anyone else. His voice got louder now. “I’m just feeling a little blindsided by all this, you being away for the summer, hanging out with your old boyfriend.”

  “There’s nothing going on between Ryder and me, if that’s what you’re worried about.”

  “But you’re staying for eight weeks?”

  The familiar panic rose. Since I’d dropped out of college, I’d surrendered to Nico. Modeling and working at the café aside, my job was to be his wife, traveling from country to country with his exhibits, getting lost in his world, belonging to him. He was all I’d known for so long. But it was different now. I was different.

  “Why don’t you come out here?” I asked. If I didn’t have Nic, what did I have? I wanted to tell him I’d be on the next plane. “Now that your falcon exhibit is done, can’t you get away for a little while? My parents would love to see you.” I didn’t know if that was true, but I had to say something. Understand, I pleaded with him in my mind. Understand.

&
nbsp; “All right,” he finally said, surprising me. “I have that show in a few weeks at Lazelle in New York. I’ll come before it starts.”

  “It’s still you and me, Nico,” I said quietly. “We’re not going anywhere.” But I had that unsettled feeling I got when I lied.

  8

  On Monday evening, I found my father in his office, going through art therapists’ résumés for A Will to Live. “You ready?” I asked him.

  He crumpled a page and threw it across the room at the wastebasket. It hit the rim and went in. “Are we going out dancing?”

  “Nice try. Tonight is all about Dr. Novak.”

  “The radiation doc?”

  “The one and only.”

  “I’d much rather boogie.” He shimmied in his chair. “Let me make some quick notes on this one.” He held up a résumé on cream-colored paper. “She might be a keeper.”

  “Dad.” The old grandfather clock in the foyer chimed six times. “Your appointment is in fifteen minutes, Mom’s already outside.”

  He put a sticky note on it. “All right.” He sighed. “Let’s go.”

  I drove the fifteen minutes to Yale–New Haven Hospital. Jamie sat in back; my father traced shapes on the passenger window. He had been doing things like that lately, and it made me think of a child daydreaming.

  There were no pictures in Dr. Novak’s waiting room. The furniture was expensive leather, but when I sat, it was stiff and uncomfortable. I leaned back against the hard chair and tried to ignore Jamie, who was madly texting someone.

  I closed my eyes. I saw the self-portrait I’d been working on that afternoon in the attic. The eyes still weren’t right and my cheeks were too dark in the painting, as though I were stuck in shadow. And my strange almost smile made me look like I’d murdered someone.