by Peter Straub
I stopped my hand on its way to switch off the tall bedside lamp, then lowered it to the creamy folded sheet, and let my head find the waiting pillow.
The Eel had walked into that meadow without me, and now I could never undo the choice I had made, never untie that knot.
Just now, the light could stay on.
“It’s a simple business, really,” I had said to Don Olson in the Governor’s Lounge late that night. We sat at a table next to the big windows, and lights burned in windows near and distant. Alone in his goldfish bowl, the friendly bartender (who had requested, and been gratified by, our evaluations of the restaurant he had recommended) seemed to have lapsed into a deeply meditative state. On the long sofa at the front of the room, a young couple facing the fireplace leaned whispering to each other shoulder to shoulder, like spies in love.
“I doubt that,” Olson said. “Look at you.”
“Don’t you ever get obsessed with a weird story? Play it in your head, over and over?”
“You’re tap dancing. Start with the easy stuff. When did this whatever-it-was happen?”
“In 1995,” I had said, surprised to have recovered the date so clearly and so swiftly. “Autumn. October, I think. Lee was called away to Rehoboth Beach, Delaware, on an odd mission, almost as a detective. In the end, she was a detective, and she caught the bad guy!”
Lying in my bed, hands folded on my chest, the light spilling into half of the room, I went over the conversation with Olson, word by word by word.
—Called away? Who called her?
—The ACB. The American Confederation of the Blind. Your old buddy, the Eel, is very close to the Delaware chapter. In Rehoboth Beach.
It sometimes seemed to me that beautiful Lee Truax had been one of the founders of the ACB’s Delaware chapter, but of course she was not. She just knew everybody there. How had that happened? She had helped organize that chapter, that’s how, she had worked with the first generation of members to establish their structure, someone had invited her, an old friend from New York, Missy Landrieu, a name I of course remembered only fifty percent of the time, sometimes I barely noticed her friends, it seemed. So although neither she nor they had ever lived in Rehoboth Beach, Delaware (and in fact being self-absorbed and work-obsessed, I had never so much as visited the place), the former Eel had deep roots in that pleasant beachside community where the chapter often met. There she was loved and respected, perhaps even more greatly than she was loved and respected everywhere else in ACB-land. And of course it meant everything to this little local chapter in a small, little-regarded state, the Rhode Island of the Eastern Shores, to have a good friend who was on the board of the national organization. Or a trustee. One of the two, unless they were the same thing, which I thought they were not. The friend from New York, Missy, another trustee or board member, though sighted, not blind, and as fantastically wealthy as a heroine in Henry James, had reached out to the former Eel for assistance in a sticky matter that concerned her particular pet chapter—apart, of course, from Chicago, her own.
This sticky matter had to do with funds that had been disappearing, at the rate of a couple of hundred dollars a month, from the chapter’s account. The officers had noticed only when the missing dollars added up to just over ten thousand.
It was then an oddity of the Delaware chapter of the ACB that nearly all its officers were women. They decided not to call in the police, but first to turn to the national office for advice. By way of answer, the national office had sent Lee Truax, loved, respected, and wise, out from Chicago to solve this problem before it became public.
They knew the names of everyone who had access to that account. Nine women, scattered all over the region, but most of them in the Baltimore area. What the Eel did, I told Donald Olson in words recalled as I lay in my twelfth-floor bed, was to invite the nine women to the Golden Atlantic Sands Hotel and Conference Center, located on the boardwalk at Rehoboth Beach. By virtue of often hosting ACB conferences both local and national, the Golden Atlantic Sands was familiar to all.
—Which is important to the blind, I remembered saying.
“What do you mean?” Olson said. “Everyone appreciates familiarity, though it’s me who says it.”
Ah, I had replied, but if you couldn’t see, or could only see a little bit, you’d know how much more comfortable you felt in a place you knew well. You could relax better, because on day one you already had a pretty good idea where everything was, from the drawers in your room and the taps in your bathroom to the elevators, the restaurant, and the meeting rooms.
And that was supremely true of the Eel. In a place as well known to her as the Golden Atlantic Sands Hotel and Conference Center, my wife glided, floated, strode unerringly down the corridors, across the immensity of the lobby, through the multiplicity of rooms identified by plaques, and through larger rooms where rows of folding chairs faced podiums with clamped-on microphones. She moved as if she saw, because in places like that she did see, and what she saw was an unerring map printed within her mind and body.
I had witnessed her negotiate conference hotels in Chicago and New York, had seen wondrous Eel rise from the chair beside mine at the announcement of her name, step back and set out, head high, smiling in acknowledgment of applause, to walk without hesitation around the long, white-draped table and move directly to the podium that she might thank her introducer and utter her first words. She saw, that’s what her unsleeping husband understood, she saw with a sight of her own.
Olson gave me a look of absolute patience and relaxed back into his chair. “She got those nine women together, you said? I bet the Eel was a good detective.”
“She got the job done,” I said. “First thing she did was meet them all in a little coffee shop on the boardwalk, a place they’d all been a million times before, and say that the national organization had sent her out to ask these prominent members of the Delaware chapter about how to handle a problem that the New York office saw brewing. She wanted to talk to them individually, and the ACB had arranged for her to use the most formal of all the public rooms, called the Director’s Chamber, which happened to be the only conference room or facility the ACB had never used.”
—But, the Eel had told me, the Director’s Chamber almost had a presence all its own within it, some unacknowledged being summoned by the luxury even a sightless person could register. When you walked in and stood quietly for a moment, absorbing the atmosphere, you could feel that the walls had been paneled in rich dark wood, that fine old paintings and tapestries hung beneath small soft lights, and that what met the touch of your foot was a glowing Persian carpet.
—Do you understand? The Eel had asked. You could feel the presence of the paintings, you could feel the lamps above them, it all set off vibrations, changes in texture, subtle variations in air pressure—an old and precious thing affects the atmosphere in a different way from something new and more cheaply made, how could it help it? Everything causes movement. But in that wonderful room, so much was going on, you really felt as though an unseen, unannounced presence had been there all along, waiting for you—waiting to take your measure! Naturally, for sighted people this wouldn’t even come close to working. Sometimes, it seems like sighted people can hardly see anything.
—And what she did, I said to my old friend and houseguest, what Lee Truax did, was she sat in there and waited as they came up, one by one, at their scheduled half hour intervals, knocked on the door—tentatively, uncertainly, their uncertainty increased by what they could feel of the weight and density, the sheer seriousness, of the wood that made up the door—heard her invite them in, felt for the big handle, and walked inside through a forest of unexpected impressions, almost groping their way along through the crowded silence, until Lee Truax spoke again and invited them to take a chair across the table. When they sat, another figure seemed to join them, a figure perhaps from a portrait, someone known not to be present but present nonetheless, an authoritative ghost. And they had to deal not only w
ith her, but with this illusion their minds and senses had created for them. It would be hard to say which of the two was more powerful.
I regarded the soft yellow lamplight flattening out upon the folded white sheet and melting into the pale blanket, and saw the thin, shadowy face hovering beside my wife in a richly appointed room. That what I pictured could have no connection to the face imagined by the Eel’s disquieted visitors placed leaping flames beneath my gathering unease. They—he and she—had been together in the State Street diner, in the basement of the Italian restaurant, again on Gorham Street, yet again on Glasshouse Road and in the meadow, twice. Twice. Loathsome, loathsome Hayward had been close enough to hold her hand. And when she made space for him, he had come back to her. I knew what had happened in that room, and it was obscene.
“One at a time, they knocked and came in,” I had said to Olson. “One by one, they sat down across the table. A few of the nine women who passed through the Director’s Chamber that day could distinguish light and dark. I think two of them had a vague, blurry, partial vision in one eye. The rest saw nothing but a complete darkness. But no matter what their eyes did or did not report, they could not but feel that another figure, a figure conjured from the materials of the room itself, had been waiting in there for them all along.
This is what the Eel told me.
In the necessary lamplight, I remembered the shock of realizing that I had fallen into the old habit of referring to her by her old nickname. How many times had I done it already? Three times, four? If so, the battle was already lost.
—She started gently, the Eel said. The woman opposite her had already sensed that this meeting, this summons, in fact, was not quite what she had been expecting, and her antennae were up.
—Tell me about yourself, the Eel requested. Anything, it doesn’t matter. I want to hear you talk about yourself. Outrage me. Delight me. Offend me. Horrify me. All I ask is that you do not bore me.
So they began, the women, one by one, feeling their way toward whatever they imagined the Eel wanted. At the start, it was about where they grew up, their mothers, the schools they attended, and how they wound up getting married. This is the way I got involved with the ACB.
—Could you tell me something else? What is there about you that nobody knows?
(That other presence, that shadowy face, flickered with interest and came a little nearer. It knew all about things unknown—things unknown were where it lived.)
—Surprise me, she said. This is why we are here.
—I’m what people call ‘straight,’ and I have been all my life, I like having sex with men, but right now what I’d most like to do in all the world is lie down with you on top of this table and hold you as tight as I can. Is that outrage enough for you, Lee Truax?
—I’ve been blind since the age of two, and I grew up in a house with three sighted older brothers. The oldest one was killed by a drunken driver, the second one committed suicide with his girlfriend in the front seat of our family car when they were in high school. The one closest to me, Merle, who should have died like the other two but didn’t, used to take me into the field behind our house and make me play with his ugly thing. And worse. My parents, they never thought he could do anything wrong, they thought Merle was the same as Jesus. When I was eighteen, I got married so he wouldn’t be able to rape me anymore. Now I have three boys of my own, and the only way I can stop myself from detesting them is by getting out of the house. That’s probably why I work for the ACB.
(The shadowy third shivered with delight. Slowly, it snaked a cold arm over the Eel’s shoulders.)
—You want to be horrified, Ms. Truax? I can probably horrify you, if that’s what you really want. What you’re here about, the reason you asked us to meet you at this hotel, has nothing to do with some vague problem the New York office saw “brewing.” It’s a lot more specific than that, isn’t it? The powers that be want you to investigate the sexual harassment going on in this chapter. A pattern of sexual harassment. Or to be more accurate, Ms. Truax, they want you to ask around, discreetly, without ever doing anything that might actually uncover anything sordid, and after a couple of days go back and report that the rumors are unfounded. But they are not unfounded. One of us makes life very uncomfortable for some of the younger women working under her supervision. I’ve been waiting for someone to come around here looking into this matter, and you’re it, and I’m saying, yes, this horrible behavior is going on. But I’m not going to tell you who it is. That’s your job, Ms. Truax.
—You want me to tell you something about me that nobody knows? All right, Lee. Why not? I don’t imagine you’re going to tell the police or anything, are you? This is like a trust exercise. It is, right? I know how this works. And I don’t think you’ll blame me, either.
(Here the shadowy third tightened its grip on the Eel’s shoulders; here, lying between smooth white sheets and too fearful to turn off the bedside light, I closed my eyes.)
—The reason you won’t blame me is because you’re going to understand what I did, even if you won’t precisely see it my way. I lost my vision at about the same age as you, when I was in my early thirties. Well, I didn’t exactly “lose” it. I was attacked and blinded by a man I had just broken up with. Robert didn’t want me to be able to look at another man, so he made sure I’d never see anything again. I turned him in to the cops, and I testified at his trial, and he went bye-bye. His sentence was fifteen to twenty-five, only he got out in seven. You know what he did? He called my mother and told her he wanted to apologize to me, so could he please have my phone number? He paid his debt to society, he’s a changed man, he wants to know he has my forgiveness. Like a dope, she gave him my number.
—The guy calls me up, asks can he come over? No, I say. You make my skin crawl, of course you can’t come over. He begs me to meet him, anyplace. Please. I just want to say a few words to you, then you never have to see me again.
—All right, I say, meet me at this café, the Rosebud, and I told him where it was.
—I didn’t say the Rosebud was half a block from my apartment. Probably had half my meals there, everybody knew me, everybody knew my story. One of the staff, Pete, the son of the owner, used to take good care of me, make sure everything went all right. Look, I was thirty-nine, still reasonably good-looking, I was told, and Pete was twenty-eight, he probably had some older-woman crush on me. Anyhow, when he led me to my table, he said I looked kind of tense, was anything wrong? Not really, but, well … I explained the whole situation, and he said he’d keep an eye on my table.
—In spite of my tension, the meeting went okay. Robert’s voice sounded different than I remembered it, a little lower, a little softer. Nicer. That threw me off, a little—I tried to remember his face, but it was just a pink blur. He said he knew he’d done a terrible thing, he understood that no apology could ever be adequate, but it would mean a lot to him if I could at least say that I no longer hated him. It’s not as simple as that, I said.
—We go on talking for a while, and Robert has a burger and a cup of coffee, and I have a tuna salad and a Coke, and he’s telling me how hard it is to get a job if you’re an ex-con, but he has a line on something good. His parole officer is pretty happy about it. Do I have a job now, what with … you know. Yes, I have a job with a foundation, I say, life is all right for me, it’s a struggle, but I try not to complain, even to myself. He says he admires me. I say, Listen to me, I don’t want your admiration, and I don’t want your respect, either. Just be straight about that.
—Robert got it, he really did, at least he seemed to. After that, things went surprisingly well. He said that we had a deep connection, we had done certain things to each other, he understood that I’d had to go to the police, he understood that he’d put himself in prison, but it was through my agency, which involved a choice. It was interesting to hear Robert say these things.
—At my insistence we split the bill, whereupon Robert asks if I’d mind if he walked home with me, no m
ore. A farewell gesture, he called it. Come on then, I said, make your gesture. If that’s what you want.
—Stupid me. Between my place and the Rosebud there’s this enormous empty lot that goes down into a big ravine, and after we get about midway past it, he tells me he wants to take a detour, and before I can say anything, good old Robert clamps a hand over my mouth and puts his other arm around my waist, and he drags me into the empty lot.
—No matter how I thrash around, I can’t break his grip. The bastard pulls me clear across the lot and down into the ravine, where he throws me down and jumps on top of me with his hands pinning my shoulders. I’m sure he’s going to rape me, and I say everything that comes into my mind, mainly a lot of begging him not to do it. It’s no use screaming, because no one could hear me.
—Shut up, he said. I’m not going to rape you. I just wanted to scare you so bad you’d know how I felt almost every day during the past seven years. Scared shitless. Being blind can’t be as bad as some of the shit that happened me. I just evened the score. Now get up and get out of here. I never want to see you again.
—I sat up and put my hand on a rock I didn’t know was there. That rock moved right into my hand.
(The figure crowded in beside the Eel snickered in delight. I was seeing a ghoul with his arm around my wife.)
—YOU never want to see ME again?
(Then—right then—I could feel someone next to me, the Eel said. It wasn’t just them, those women from Delaware, who sensed the presence of someone else in that room, it was me, too. And the figure that joined me was nothing like the judge I had been counting on, not at all. It was sick, it was disgusting … it was what we call evil because we don’t have any better words for it.)