Love Is Blind in One Eye

by Marianne Rogoff

  Copyright

  ©2016 by Marianne Rogoff

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission.

  Cover design by Laura Morris

  Cover image Shutterstock

  ISBN: 978-1-940838-83-0

  Published by Shebooks

  3060 Independence Avenue

  Bronx, NY 10463

  www.shebooks.net

  Table of Contents

  Copyright

  Table of Contents

  Praise for Marianne Rogoff

  Dedication

  Introduction

  Firewalking

  Someplace Else

  Emporio Rulli

  Raven

  Love Is Blind in One Eye

  Alive in Lisbon

  12 Hours in Barcelona

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

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  Praise for Marianne Rogoff

  “I loved reading these seven stories and spending time with Jewel. A curious, bold, sensual, and tender young woman, she pursues her adventures in Maui, Mexico, Marin, Lisbon, and Barcelona with light, sure steps.”

  – Molly Giles, Author of The Spokane Prize story collection All the Wrong Places and The Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction collection Rough

  “This is one beautiful book. I loved and devoured it—like candy, like medicine. Rogoff had me by the throat and the heart from first page to last. These extraordinary stories will stay with me for a very long time. What a gorgeous, devastating, liberating collection. Just perfect.”

  – Lavinia Spalding, Author of Writing Away and Editor of The Best Women’s Travel Writing

  “Marianne’s compelling yet simply told stories gently take our hand and lead us through moments of tragedy and daily triumph that could easily be our own as parents, as travelers, and as friends, and ultimately reveal the indelible strength of character and vulnerability that make us all human beings.”

  – Kimberley Lovato, Travel Journalist and Author of Walnut Wine & Truffle Groves

  “Rogoff’s writing is rife with an emotional acuity that is riveting; carved out of a fierce knowing of what it is to navigate – and survive – life on life’s terms. Deliciously poignant, the stories collected here are both raw and sophisticated, masterfully woven to reveal how one forges ahead with resilience and grace while on the precipice of a vast chasm of grief. An astounding, beautiful work.”

  – Bridget Crocker, Outdoor Travel Writer/Blogger: adventuresoflittlemama.com

  Dedication

  To my son

  You have brains in your head.

  You have feet in your shoes.

  You can steer yourself in any direction you choose.

  You’re on your own, and you know what you know.

  And you are the one who’ll decide where to go.

  – Dr. Seuss

  Introduction

  This linked collection is part truth, part fiction. I personally did not walk on fire or find a body on a beach but a co-worker I knew did both, and as I wrote her story it felt like my own; I began to identify with the woman walking, with Jewel’s desire to confront her fears then to let them go, “into the fire.”

  Jewel is an alter ego, “a second self, a trusted friend, the opposite side of a personality.” Travel offers a chance to try on new versions of yourself that you put on when you arrive and leave behind as you depart. Coming home, you reassess who you thought you were before you left and who you really are, or want to be. But this kind of internal shift can erupt anywhere, even at home, as you explore foreign emotions, or recognize what is extraordinary and always mysterious about everyday life wherever you are.

  Here, Jewel navigates the stage of life between 25 and 45, from the day she finds a body on a wild California beach to crossroads encounters with mystics, lovers, beggars, surgeons, and sailors on the shores of Maui and streets of San Miguel de Allende, Lisbon, Larkspur, Mill Valley, and Barcelona. Falling in love, whether with the one she marries, her newborn babies, total strangers, or the places she goes, calls forth conflicting sensations: ease/excitement, pleasure/danger, attachment/release.

  One eye sees and the other is blind as Jewel learns to love and grieve by staying in motion, finding and losing her way in the crowds and landscapes, heart cracked open.

  Firewalking

  The air is unseasonably hot for this stretch of northern California beach in June, where everyone expects the fog in summer to keep it cool. Then only the tourists are caught off-guard in their short shorts while the locals always carry sweaters in anticipation of the chill. This morning I am out walking RCA beach early and there is no fog; the view is clear for miles. The sun is up and I’m already sweating which is why I walk fast: I like to sweat. My body is tall and strong as I pick my way over rocks around bends where the tide, when it is in, consumes the beach, leaving no passage. For now the tide is low and leaves pools with pink edges and starfish, swaying circular fingers holding on tight that are like flowers and animals at the same time. There are tiny crabs, and kelp.

  RCA is a wild, empty beach because it is so hard to reach. But I had walked easily across the meadow, then shimmied the steep rocky trail down to this place that mostly only townies know how to get to, and usually only surfers bother to hike the difficult path. Seven am, no surfers, one figure carrying a fishing pole walking toward me. I’m not even thirty (I’m young!) but there are times when I feel every step I’ve ever taken down rocky paths in the bones of my knees. This morning I don’t. I squeeze my flesh and think I should go on a diet, then assure myself this body cushions me as I move along the craggy beach, confident about my feet and knees, how strong I feel and take deep breaths and stop to examine a seashell that looks like a small breast, the way it curls to a center with a shining tip, the way it is round and so extravagant looking there in the sand.

  The fisherman stops in front of me.

  “There’s a body over there,” he says, and I look into his white bucket in which three silver sea bass float, eyes wide, not seeing. The man explains where the body is; he is on his way to call someone. He’s wearing hip waders, shuffling awkwardly with his gear, and does not say much except how surprised he was when as he was fishing he saw it from the water. He expected another dead seal or sea otter, he says, because of the size of the mound. But as he waded in he noticed this glinting off the surface of the water, then saw that the shining came from a ring on a woman’s hand.

  “It’s not a pretty sight,” he says as he walks away. “You might want to turn around right here.”

  I have walked on fire. I have no fear.

  I keep going forward, in the same direction.

  Five years earlier I went along as the photographer for my reporter boyfriend Lee when he was researching his Pacific Sun article on firewalkers. I was 25, maybe 24, and we were happy, in love, oblivious, laughing at the whole idea on the way over in the car.

  “Any mother would tell her child not to walk barefoot over hot coals,” Lee said, and I agreed, walking on fire sounded like a crazy thing to do.

  We sat there smug as the group gathered into a circle and we were told to introduce ourselves.

  “I’m Jewel,” I began….

  “Without words,” the leader ordered. I had to think about how to do that, and then I smiled and shrugged.

  As the sun dropped behind Mount Tamalpais I listened and watched the others, and found I had to take my camera away from my face beca
use Simone was not one of those silly New Age California types you hear so much about. We had joined a group of seekers not so different from us: reticent, easygoing men and women we liked on instinct. In the glow of everything Lee and I basked in our passionate love, arrogant, certain of our glorious future.

  We all sat cross-legged in the dark around a blazing fire of hardwood and embers and Simone instructed us to write down our fears.

  “The first part is to name your fear.”

  Loving Lee, losing Lee.

  “Next is to banish it.”

  Simone told us to crumple the lists into tight balls and throw them in the fire.

  I kept looking at my list – loving Lee, losing Lee – afraid to admit either possibility, then I watched the fears of the others shrivel into smoke, so I freely let mine go, too, up in flames.

  Now, Simone raked the fire out from its neat round heap into a long bed of red coals, about ten feet from end to end.

  “It’s five quick steps,” she said.

  One. Two. Three. Four. Five.

  “You have all that fear and you feel the heat for less than ten seconds. The fear is taking up more of your time than the thing you fear.”

  My toes tighten inside my sneakers on the beach as the waves roll toward me. The sun has risen fully now over the steep cliff where sand and stones are ever-eroding, slipping down the hillside in a constant musical cadence much like the rhythm of the ocean that swallows the beach and reaches the cliff at high tide, twice a day.

  Dead body? Here? On this beautiful beach?

  Simone firewalking had slipped out of her shoes, stepped onto the hot bed of embers, and walked in a regular pace, five steps from end to end, across the coals.

  Lee had declined, unconvinced, but I’d felt enlivened, bold, then fearless: I walked on fire.

  I have no fear.

  The corpse is face-up on the sand, seawater crashing around her feet and legs. Her clothes are torn; skin dry, purple, bruised; neck and arms twisted; deep gashes on her thighs; fists clenched. She’s blonde, around my age (!), and the look on her face, in contrast to the shape of her body, is serene. Her eyes are open, as calm as the fish in the fisherman’s bucket.

  After firewalking everyone else had soaked their feet in big pails of cold water but my feet had felt fine as I made portraits of newfound friends. We all wrote declarations on index cards: “I have walked on fire. I can do anything.”

  Mine is pinned to a bulletin board in my kitchen now but I want to turn around like the fisherman said and leave this woman to her fate in someone else’s presence, not mine. On the way home from the firewalking my feet felt burning hot. By the time Lee had driven us back home over the mountain, blisters had formed all over the soles of my feet, most painfully in the arches. I stoically stripped off my socks and said, “They’re just little blisters, they’ll be gone in the morning.”

  But by morning I could barely walk.

  The tide is coming in. The fisherman has not returned. The body is floating in and out on the waves.

  I recall a Raymond Carver story where a group of men go on a weekend fishing trip and discover the body of a woman near the shore of the river, tangled in branches. Far from phones or civilization, having just driven a long way, they decide it’s not their problem; they’re tired; they have come to fish. The men play cards and drink whiskey; they sleep, wake, fish, drink, and eat; the dead woman remains in the river downstream from where they fish and they don’t report her death until the end of the weekend.

  When the narrator’s wife hears the story she’s outraged.

  “That woman needed you,” she tells her husband.

  If I take no action, this body will be swept back and forth by the tide and she may be here when the fisherman returns with help or she may not.

  I remember the morning in my childhood when my mother urged me to kiss my dead grandmother goodbye and how awful it was to learn how unyielding the dead are to touch, like stones or walls. How my blistered feet burned after firewalking, how painful it was to stand on the bottoms of my own feet, how Lee mocked me as I became an old lady who had to walk with a cane, leaning on that stick like a third leg.

  I was fearless then. Now I am afraid.

  Reluctantly, cautiously, then boldly, I touch her. Tenderly, I unwrap sea kelp from around the throat then dare to outline the lips with a fingertip. The skin is rubbery, strange, not alive; no blood pulses, but she’s not bones or ashes yet. I examine the ears: dried peach halves dehydrated by salt water. Diamond stud earrings, what will become of them? I fondle the gems then the face: bruised cheek, crushed forehead. The eyes stare; I stick my finger on her eyeball (peeled grapes) and no one blinks.

  Do the wounds suggest she was killed then left on this remote beach to float unnoticed out to sea? Or did she get here on her own volition, by jumping off the famous bridge? The beautiful body has scraped past all obstacles and rests beside me here in the sand. Getting acquainted without words, I hold hands with the dead. As I imagine her life, I foresee my own future: high tides and crumbling losses. I come to know my own death.

  Waves splash and spill foam so I slide my forearms under the shoulders to move her farther up on shore, but she is too heavy to move. Now I know the meaning of dead weight. The tide rides her hips. I don’t want the body taken by the ocean. She needs to be here to be found. I stay with her and wait.

  Someplace Else

  Mirage

  When I told my mother I was going on vacation to Maui with my husband and two-year-old, she mentioned plane crash, volcano, and tidal wave.

  “Do you not want me to go?” I asked.

  “Oh no, go. Have a good time.”

  Our first afternoon there, while Lee and Dale were napping, I read Guide to Maui, and there it was: tsunami, “a very real threat.” We had just flown over from San Francisco, earthquake country. How prepared should we be? Do we need flashlights, canned food, batteries, a radio?

  The Guide said, “Go to higher ground immediately when you hear the bell sound.” What would I take with me, besides my baby boy? What was valuable, worth risking time to save? I.D. cards, so someone would call my mother if I died, and money, in case we survived on higher ground while everything left behind was lost. Since being robbed last time we were on vacation I now left my most sentimental jewelry at home, although our empty house, I always thought, was as good a target as a hotel room or rented car.

  I left Lee a note and slipped out for a swim. The owner had warned us about the sharp, cutting coral when we arrived. “Pick your feet up and start swimming right away,” the old guy with his arm in a sling told us, “That’s the ticket.”

  I stepped through breaking waves and dove lightly onto the water’s surface, then turned over and floated face-up; I let go and the shallow ocean held me up. I swam. Alone. Felt myself, judged my body, good, stroking muscles through water, taking deep breaths, floating on the aqua sea. Swam out far from shore, strong, aware of my strength. Then a bright yellow fish startled me. In its light brightness I saw the soul of my firstborn, and yearned for her, I thought you were dead, forcing my arms and torso through thick waves, faltering as the so-bright color disappeared in the dark reefs. The stark brightness swam far away and there was the stark truth: Silvie IS dead. I suffocated under this fact, weakened, struggling to save myself from whirlpools and undertows, down-sucking emptiness, the watery tide shoving me along to land and air: safe, only my baby girl was gone.

  I lay on my back onshore as a gust of wind ransacked the beach. I sat up: wind-blown sand in my mouth; in the distance, Lee and Dale. Dale was two; Lee and I had survived more than two years with Silvie dead. Time so reliably passing while we lagged behind in our baby girl’s nascence and eternity, out of step with the fast necessary pace of living. Our perfect son meanwhile moved swiftly across the beach, deft and well balanced, regaining his footing quickly after dips and changes in the shifting land. Then he made a beeline for the ocean. Here, the water was a bay, and calm. But the smallest
wave would knock him down. He was so little, vulnerable, brave, and foolhardy: oblivious to danger. We wanted him to feel safe but our next job as parents was to alert him to danger. Edges, waves, thorns, strangers with bad intentions. Plane crash, volcano, tidal wave.

  Vacation

  Lee and I walked past the open windows of our vacation neighbors and we could see them on the couch watching TV and drinking shots over ice from a half gallon of dark liquor.

  “Probably bourbon,” Lee said.

  “I’m glad we’re not them,” I decided, and Lee agreed, “I’m glad we’re not drunks.”

  We were on vacation in Maui. We had hired a sitter for Dale and were going out on a date, to a seafood place on the water. What we planned to do besides eat, we didn’t know, we were just walking, so far.

  “We could be very comfortable in a place like this if we had the money,” I said.

  “We are in a place like this,” Lee pointed out.

  I was wearing a new pink silk blouse, an expensive one, imported from Paris.

  “I’ll act like we’re rich and comfortable, for you, because we’re here.”

  Alone at the restaurant without our baby boy, we talked about how much we loved him, admired him.

  “We’re lucky,” Lee said.

  There are the boats rocking on the water.

  The moon is full.

  Look, first star.

  Palm trees.

  “I don’t feel like myself,” I said.

  “Who do you feel like?”

  “Here we are on this island. God.” I pulled a fishbone from my mouth.

  “Aren’t you having a good time, Jewel?” Lee asked.

  “I’m not sure.”

  “I feel lost, too, as lost as you do.”

  When we left the restaurant it was drizzling and we walked in the mist past tied-up, rocking boats to the bar at the end of the harbor. Most people in there seemed drunk; it felt like a locals place, like they’d come straight from work to here and spent the afternoon, now evening. At a table near us, a guy was lining up empty beer bottles in a winding spiral that ended at the center with a full ashtray.