Ordinary Daylight

by Andrew Potok

“They tested all day. They say that there’s some room for error, but they couldn’t detect anything.”

  When we hung up, my knees gave way. Sitting on the floor, propped up by an elbow on a low bookshelf, I began to lose feeling in my legs. I tried to stand up but couldn’t. With great effort, I stood at last. I rubbed my legs and walked painfully back and forth. In April, I had been a pioneer; now, in mid-June, I was a beggar, a fool. Helga had more power over me than I could possibly admit.

  My alternatives were unchanged, horrendous. Helga or blindness. Surrender to the latter still seemed abysmally boring and uninspired. I looked at my shape in the mirror, cheekbones beginning to protrude, tufts of graying unkempt hair. I imagined an ever-more-distant look in my unseeing eyes, unworldly, prophetic, paradoxical. Inspirational texts would sustain me. I would perhaps join some religious orthodoxy and hope for a better chance next time. Or I would pursue the path of rehabilitation, sheltered workshops, blindness agencies. As a provider of services, I would coax mirth and merriment from assembled groups of the blind as we transcended our condition together. On Saturday afternoons, I would organize blind bowling at some guild or Lighthouse or home.

  I hadn’t expected great transformation in Sarah’s eyes, but I did entertain notions of slightly improved night vision, a somewhat enlarged field, a little better acuity, perhaps almost immeasurable, but something, enough to make Dr. Berson wonder. But as Sarah looked at the dimming glow of the dark-adaptation apparatus, she did no better than she had done two years before. She did no worse either, Charlotte assured me, and that, they said, may have been a hopeful sign. Wired to the ERG machine, she was unable to make the crests of alpha or beta waves peak any higher than before. Her fields, which I had imagined expanding like ink on a blotter, showed no improvement.

  The telephone rang. It was Charlotte again. “I just talked with Ben Berman,” she said. “He and Beverly spent the whole day yesterday with Sarah and me in Berson’s clinic. Anyway, Ben thinks the ERG might be wrong. His reasoning is this.” She paused as if collecting her notes. “There are known cases of RP people with only some four hundred thousand rods left out of way over one hundred million, who can still see at night. Their flat ERG’s give no hint of their night vision. Ben thinks that the bees could have fixed, say, twenty thousand of Sarah’s rods in one quadrant and the ERG would not have picked it up. He’s not sure this means anything, but he offers it as a last hope for bees. Ben and I both thought it important to tell you this. They also want you to know that they think you’re wonderful. I think so too.”

  Bronka and Sta and Edith were delighted with my decision to stay. Vera said that had I gone back now, I might always regret it, especially if Helga could ever substantiate her cure.

  I dressed up in my blue summer suit with ivory-colored buttons and took the train to Sta’s office on Fitzroy Square. Edith and Sta met me at the door, and, one on each side of me, peering at me as at a newly discharged mental patient, they escorted me into a small conference room. Sta opened a safe and took out an enormous box of bills. The thousand pounds was all in fives, tens, and twenties.

  Like force-feeding a Christmas goose, we stuffed bills into every pocket of my suit, and when I stood up, my arms hung at an angle like the wings of a fattened bird. They stood at the curb with me as we waited for a taxi and told me last-minute tales of muggings and armed robberies. Then they wished me well as I climbed in, my arms clutching my sides.

  The lobby of the Grosvenor House was crowded with beautiful people. Men were dressed in white tropical suits, women in loose print dresses and wide-brimmed hats. I walked the length and breadth of the lobby looking for Helga, but she was nowhere to be found. I made myself visible to every nook and cranny, standing at the entrance to the cocktail lounge, beside the couches near the front desk, in the space in front of the elevators. Bulging and looking ungainly, I waited for an hour until she finally arrived, swearing she had been there all the time, looking for me.

  “You can see, though, and I can’t,” I said.

  “Yes, that is true,” she said, surprising me. “It is probably my fault.”

  She was wearing lipstick, rouge, and powder. A large feathered hat sat on the top of her head and obscured portions of her face, one of the feathers dangling in front of her glasses. She carried a leather bag, into which we began emptying the contents of my pockets.

  “I will rush this money over to my departing friend,” she said. “It is a miracle that he is going right away. Ach, how the price of herbs has gone up. This inflation is entirely out of hand. Anyway, angel, have a good rest for a few days. You deserve it. I will call you as soon as your new bees are ready.”

  We stood up. She shook my hand energetically and warmly, and then she left. I saw her waddle into a distance of some twenty feet and disappear into the floral design of the carpet. I sat back down on the settee and contemplated my next three months. I would certainly have to change. No more isolation and total devotion to bees. No more yogurt and wheat germ or mandatory eight hours of sleep a night. I would try to be more skillful documenting my London experience in my journal. I would try to identify and understand the emerging voice within the notebooks. I would look up friends of friends who were authors, painters, theater people. I would disentangle myself emotionally from Helga and stop hanging on her every word. I would not pay constant, total heed to my vision; if it improved, it would have to do so with authority, without question.

  Two women stood talking an arm’s length from me. They were both tall, one in white, the other in a light shade of blue or green. Both wore droopy cloth hats, in the shadows of which their faces seemed flushed with a Vermeer rosiness, a guileless yet profound sensuality. Next to them I felt small and insignificant. Now that my pockets had been emptied and I had been duped into continuing my folly, I felt like a gullible little boy whose legs, as they swung from the couch in the Grosvenor lobby, were too short for his feet to touch the floor.

  THIRTEEN

  AT ETON RISE, I was glad to be alone again. I wanted to stop thinking about my crisis of indecision and the flimsy reasoning that had settled it. I dreaded questions about an action I couldn’t defend. I had no experience justifying acts of faith. I poured myself a drink and walked it around the apartment. I ran a bath, and while it filled, I carried a chair into the bathroom, on which I set a bottle of Scotch, one of soda, and my tape recorder. I would make my ritual cleansing as pleasant as possible. As the water gushed in, it obliterated all other sounds. I felt alone and peaceful as I stuck one leg into the tub.

  The phone rang. Chet was calling from the Midlands asking to stay with me for the weekend. Before we hung up, I had told him everything, all that had happened during the day. Chet has an orderly mind. Whatever he does—glass-blowing, blacksmithing, homesteading, or car fixing—he does rationally, patiently, in measured steps. Once he had watched me as I struggled frantically to mount some industrial junk onto an intractable assemblage I was making. Everything wobbled and shifted; nothing stuck or penetrated. I smacked the sheet-metal base with a hammer, I cursed and sat down, defeated. “Put it on sawhorses,” Chet said calmly. “Take your time. Step by step.”

  I now awaited his judgment like the swish of the guillotine. “Sure,” he said. “I would have done exactly as you did. You’ve got nothing more to lose. You’re already here, so you might as well keep trying until the treatment is over.”

  I bathed, drank, and listened to my journals. My taped voice was transparent, betraying every nuance of mood from haughty, brash, and hopeful in the first weeks, to confused and fearful, as long silences crept into the narrative. Finally, I whispered my drama into the microphone, conspiratorially, secretively. On one tape I heard Charlotte’s voice in the background, and I longed for her company, her warm body. I longed for sex. I wanted another body in the bathtub with me, even though, in so many ways, I had grown accustomed to my solitude, my self-sufficiency. As my sex, so cruelly welded to my retinal circuits, seemed to wane, and as the impotence I fe
lt in daily activities infiltrated my bed, I withdrew more and more from everything that seemed threatening.

  On my most recent trip to New York, Dr. Lubkin said she had been amazed that I hadn’t sought psychiatric help during the past five years.

  “You know,” she said, “I have looked everywhere for a therapist who concerns himself primarily with the eyes. It seems only natural that a major psychiatric interest should arise in connection with sight loss. Do you know that I haven’t found a single person, not one?” Her warm, understanding tone turned angry. “What are all those Freudians doing? After all, it takes no special genius to recognize the link between a pair of eyes and a pair of testicles. And if you take the eye, stand it on end and put a little fur around it, you’ve got the vulva.” In all my experience, she was the only person who seemed to understand what going blind was really like.

  Rather than risk being foolish, a failure, a blind bungler, I had started to withdraw from the contest, especially the sexual contest. I had started to probe the manner of being a recluse, trying it on, experimenting with it, to see what, if anything, I would miss and which renunciations would offer the greatest relief, which would be unbearable. At times, sacrifice seemed easy, particularly when the alternative was humiliating, even crushing. And sacrifice had its nobility. It had been quite foreign to me in my previous life, but it was considered characteristic, even expected, of the blind.

  The more I soaked, drank, and illicitly shrank the swelling on the back of my neck with hot water, the more sensuous I felt and the more I wanted to share the tub with smooth female flesh, to use the Nivea cream to better advantage than to soothe my cratered skin. This thing that floated between my legs had a lot of life left. It was surfacing like a submarine, expressing a will of its own. Tingling with heat and desire, I jumped out of the bathtub to call Vera.

  “It’s all done,” I said. “I’ve settled with Helga. I’m staying for three more months.”

  “Splendid, Andrew,” Vera said. “I am positive you did the right thing.”

  “I’ve got a few free days. I want to see you. . . .”

  “Mmm,” she intoned sweetly with the smoothness of a flight announcer at Orly. “I’ve been waiting for your call. But damn it all,” she added, “I’m going out right now. . . .”

  “Tomorrow for dinner then?”

  “Why wait till dinner?” Vera said. “Come early tomorrow. We’ll start with breakfast.”

  I got out of bed at dawn, did twice as many push-ups as usual, gulped down twice the number of vitamins, and bathed again. I was out in Adelaide Road looking for a taxi before nine, but everything on wheels sped by on the way to work. I walked all the way to Swiss Cottage and into St. John’s Wood before I found one. I imagined, hoped, that Vera was still in bed. It would be the perfect affair, far from home. I would stay a week, all of it in bed. Should Helga fail to make me better, Vera would succeed.

  I was wearing new white pants and a new navy blue shirt Bronka had picked out for me at Marks and Spencer. I never shopped alone anymore, not since I had come home with an expensive jacket I thought to be as gray and tweedy as I liked. It turned out to be liberally speckled with fluorescent greens and Chinese reds. Charlotte and I had taken it back, but there were no returns on altered merchandise.

  As the cab drove through the city, I trembled a little with sweet anticipation. I remembered really shaking once when I was sixteen and a very large lady that my friend and I picked up started taking off her clothes in a California motel. I sat on the edge of the bed and trembled uncontrollably, my whole body convulsed with fear and anxiety. My friend had graciously offered me first try; but the lady had little patience with the strange ecstasy of growing boys. She threw me out into La Cienega Boulevard.

  As the cab crawled through Knightsbridge, I began to fear my incompetence, my lost aggressiveness. I imagined Vera’s lovers, one of whom might still be in bed with her as we drove, as swarthy giants who were capable of superhuman feats, while she, preferring two, perhaps three of them at a time, thirsted for night-long debauches and an incalculable progression of multiple orgasms.

  I asked the driver to let me off in Sloane Square. I walked into King’s Road and the antique mall that had sparkled for me two months before and that was now wrapped in impenetrable darkness. I bought a dozen roses in the square and walked the few blocks to Cadogan Gardens listening to my metal-tabbed doctor shoes make bell-like echoes off the stone façades of Victorian houses.

  Vera wasn’t in bed at all. She was dressed, bright and cheery. She wore a light print dress and looked the only way she could possibly look, at least to me: full and dazzling and sumptuous. We had coffee and talked of bees and quacks, subjects I hoped we would quickly exhaust. “Let’s go for a drive,” she said gaily. “I’m sure there are places you’d like to visit.”

  “No,” I protested. “I’ve seen all I want to see. Let’s just stay here and talk.”

  “Oh come, Andrew, it will be good for us to get out, walk a bit. It’s such a lovely day.” She smiled, looking wholesome. “I know,” she said, “let’s go to Kew Gardens. The flowers smell divinely now.”

  Her Aston-Martin was in the street. We climbed in, and Vera took off with a roar. She wore a kerchief and driving gloves. Her dress pulled halfway up her thighs. She drove well, ducking in and out of lanes, nimbly subduing London traffic. I sat deep in my leather bucket, my head back, knees up, tilted as for dental work or space travel. We settled into pleasant conversation about our family, about our interests.

  I hated being driven. I thought of my arrival in Vermont, between marriages, speeding over the narrow, hardly passable back road to Charlotte’s house. Even at night, after putting Mark and Sarah to bed, I drove the few miles following the shadow of the road shoulder or the plowed hills of snow on the sides. Driving myself to her at night, I felt powerful, invincible, immortal; and hours later, loved and refreshed, I would drive back, my headlights finding enough clues to get me home, though at times the road looked so monochromatic and homogeneous as to make me wonder if my car was moving at all.

  As Vera drove, I had to keep reminding myself that it was only my eyes that didn’t work. I couldn’t engage in their sophisticated language, a language I had loved beyond all others, and now, a few inches from lusciousness, I had no access to the eyes’ ambiguities, no playful enigmatic dialogue, no sexual finesse. I felt particularly loutish without my eyes. Like a sniffing dog, I wondered what signs I was missing, whether her countenance was sparkling or dull, bored or preoccupied or aroused. I yearned for the absolute truth of the eyes’ and body’s involuntary code. If only I felt self-assured, I could profit, like Babel’s Kerensky, from the liberation of surgical vision. All women would look beautiful if I willed it. All breasts would be smooth and full, nipples taut, bellies flat and enticing. I saw no blemishes, birthmarks, scars, or pimples. Until I touched, all bodies were perfect, all faces as ethereal or provocative, as aroused and loving as I wanted them to be. I didn’t so much miss the sight of breasts or thighs or hips, which, like a paleontologist, I could reconstruct from fragments I still saw. I missed the stimulation of eyes and their swift, unmistakable messages.

  “It’s absolutely super that you’re here,” Vera said. We had arrived at Kew Gardens. She leaned over, touched my chin lightly with her gloved hand and brushed her lips, thick with lipstick, against mine. “Mmm,” she said again, then opened her door.

  We strolled over lawns, on paths, through bushy alley-ways heavy with azaleas. Patches of my retina were animated by the beds of color, planted in formal patterns. But everything other than Vera was unfocused, not only blemished by the usual hazy spots but like a dreamy stage set whose only purpose was to serve her. The garden’s fragrances mixed with Vera’s, the azaleas, the Ma Griffe, and the moist ripeness of the inside of hothouses. She had wanted me to smell all this loveliness. It was making me dizzy with desire.

  We lay on our backs under a tulip tree and talked of Poland, of Zakopane and Rabka, where
we had spent vacations as children. Thinking of Poland with Vera, I remembered things that remained dormant until now, like the pension near the sea where a little girl sneaked into the woods with me to watch me pee. I was six or seven, but on recollection, the moment was as erotic as it must have been then. “Maybe you were the little girl,” I said to Vera.

  “I wish I had been,” she laughed. “But if you were seven, I was only two. Precocious, no doubt, but two? No, Andrew, I didn’t have the attention span.”

  I told her about the big boats that anchored in the bay of Gdynia, bedecked with flags and banners, the rails crowded with tourists, about the stillness of the Tatra mountains where I had learned to ski. She had lived her few prewar years in Krakow. I told her of the parks that, to me, defined my Warsaw childhood. I told her about Lazienki, with vast light lawns and sparkling white palaces where Chopin’s weeping willow grew, and of the somber Saski Gardens, whose towering chestnut trees dropped spiked fleshy burrs ripe with rich mahogany nuts as smooth as the wood of the grandfather clock in the Moniuszki Street dining room.

  We had tea at the Maids of Honor Teahouse, with scones and jams and whipped cream. Nearly all our senses were close to exhaustion. In the late afternoon, we drove back to her house.

  While Vera disappeared into her bedroom, I took some books from the shelves and looked at fragments of details of once-familiar paintings: Poussin, Fra Angelico, Velázquez, Cézanne, Matisse. All her art books were bound in white morocco, and they were a joy to handle. I fell asleep with my favorite Catalan frescoes spread on my belly. Some time later, a hand playing with my ear woke me. Vera sat on the floor beside me, all her perfumes and pomades reapplied. A white silk dress with blue polka dots clung to her body, and as she moved, the silk glided across it, emphasizing every soft rise and fall of flesh. “Why did you stop painting?” she asked, as she removed the book. I heard the distant sound of heavy traffic, but the street below was silent, as was our snug den, muffled with thick draperies and hung with icons, prints, and fragments of old woven cloth.