Eye of Flame

by Pamela Sargent

  She never did master the intricacies of managing property, but Nick was soon taking her out for late dinners after class. He had a law office in downtown Wellford and owned two commercial buildings and two apartment complexes. He had reached that point in his life when he was looking for a nice woman to settle down with, someone who wasn’t as driven and hard-edged and career-minded as a lot of the women he knew, someone who was more gentle and old-fashioned.

  When Nick asked her to marry him, Cheryl quickly said yes. The warm, kindly feelings she had for him had to be love, and he accepted her as she was. He had hoped to find a quiet soul, a contrast to his outgoing and vociferous temperament, someone for whom he could play the outmoded role of protector. He did not mind the quirks he thought of as her charming eccentricities.

  “What do you do all day? Why can’t you ever finish anything instead of just dabbling in one thing after another? Why can’t you find a job so you’d at least have something to do? Why can’t you even answer the goddamned phone and retrieve messages?”

  Those were the kinds of questions Cheryl got from Nick lately. She no longer looked forward to having him come home in the evenings, when he was likely to destroy whatever serenity she had won during the day. What did he expect her to do with her days, anyway? She did the housework and shopping, and would still have been doing all the cooking if he had not recently decided that he preferred cooking spicier dishes she didn’t much like. She took a course at the state college every semester, her favorite ones lately having been anthropology, Italian Renaissance art, and the nineteenth-century novel, and could not see why she had to limit herself to one thing in order to get another useless degree. There was no economic reason for her to get a job, one that would undoubtedly force her into confronting a phone.

  Nick was on the telephone now. He had been on for almost half an hour, ever since the end of dinner, and now he had retreated to his study next to the living room with the cordless. She could hear him talking behind the closed door. Hearing his voice indistinctly through a closed door only made the call seem much more ominous. He had never gone to his study, closing her off, to take calls before. He was speaking in English, so he could not be talking to either his mother or Mr. Vassilikos.

  Cheryl put her book down, got up from the sofa, and crept toward the door. “… don’t know,” she heard Nick say. “It’s driving me …” She leaned closer. “… try to get there by one.”

  She could not listen any more. She would never be free of the calls, the messages, the efforts of all these callers to wrench her from her refuge. Because she could not pick up a phone and speak to someone at the other end, her husband now considered her disturbed and possibly in need of help. He no longer saw her horror of telephones as a charming eccentricity; he had, the day before, raised the possibility of counseling.

  Maybe he was talking to a counselor now, the kind of person who would consider her healthy and normal if she went around routinely spilling her guts over the phone to all and sundry. Maybe Nick was complaining to a friend. He could hatch a plot against her with impunity over the phone. He knew she would be incapable of tiptoeing up to the bedroom and listening in on the extension.

  The door opened; Nick came back into the living room and hung up the phone. He sat down in his chair in front of the television, picked up the remote, channel-surfed for a while, then turned off the set.

  “We have to talk,” he said. Cheryl stared at her book, refusing to lift her eyes. “We’ve had that answering machine for four months now, and it hasn’t helped at all. It’s probably made things worse. You’re just using it as a barrier, something else to put between you and everything outside. I could put in one of those things that gives you the number of who’s calling, and it wouldn’t do any good, because your problem isn’t just the phone—it’s something more.”

  “You’re wrong,” she said. “You don’t understand.”

  “I’ve been trying to,” he said. “You can’t say I haven’t been patient. I thought you’d get over it, but it’s becoming pathological.”

  How could she explain her fear to him? How could she convey her horror of phones? Having to speak to someone she could not see, having to fear that at any moment a call might come from someone she could not see or touch, with a message she could not anticipate—the thought was unbearable. Throughout her life, on those rare occasions when she had picked up a phone, she had imagined invisible callers listening to her stammered, uncertain words with mockery and contempt and indifference while feigning friendliness.

  It was the interconnectedness of it all that got to her, the vision of a world hooked up and wired and always in contact, with fibers and cables and satellites carrying messages that no one could escape. It wasn’t enough to put telephones in everyone’s home; now people could carry pagers and drive around with cellular phones. They would all be sucked into the constant babble, the noise that would allow for no peace. There would be no solitude, no time for quiet moments; they would all be nothing but automatons reacting to the latest stream of messages. Nervousness, some might call her fear, or a speech problem, or a lack of interpersonal communication skills, but at last she knew it for what it was—her defense of her innermost self.

  “You can’t keep going through life,” he went on, “without coming to terms with telephones. I mean, you can’t escape them.”

  “Yes, I know,” she murmured. “I know that only too well.”

  “I don’t care how you do it. Go to a psychiatrist, or a group—if there is such a thing as a group for people like you—or just sit there and practice picking the damned thing up when nobody’s calling, but you’ve got to get over this. I have to cover for you all the time. Even making a dinner reservation or calling back a friend is beyond you.”

  “I can’t,” she said.

  “You can. You’d better.”

  “All right,” she said, because that was easier than arguing with him.

  He picked up the remote and went back to channel-surfing. Cheryl stared at her book. He had not even told her who had called, something he had always done before, as if trying to reassure her that her fears were unfounded.

  The telephone rang. Nick got up, muttered a greeting, then retreated to his office and closed the door.

  There was no one Cheryl could turn to, no close friend or confidant who might offer her some sympathy. Acquiring and cultivating close friends seemed to require making telephone calls at some point. The people she met in her classes, or the couples who occasionally went out with her and Nick to dinner, remained only distant acquaintances. She had lost track of her college classmates, and would have to drive to her home town to consult her few friends there.

  Nick was up to something. He had stopped nagging at her about counseling, and she had stopped lying to him about the psychologist she was allegedly seeing in Fensterburg, a small city one hour’s drive from Wellford. He wasn’t likely to discover her deception, since there was little chance of his running into her alleged psychologist. She had always taken a long drive on the days she supposedly had appointments, in case Nick checked on her mileage. The driving soothed her; she was enclosed in a protective carapace, away from chores and disturbances and telephones. Sometimes she would drive as far as her home town. She still owned her parents’ house, but Nick had rented it out to a couple with two young children; Cheryl could not even park near the house to gaze at it nostalgically without hearing the sound of ringing telephones through the open windows.

  Nick seemed to be getting more phone calls than ever. He often spent most of the evening in his study, behind his closed door, taking one call after another. In the evening, before he came home, the light on the message machine was often blinking nine or ten times. He was doing it deliberately, just to annoy her. Sometimes she was sure she saw him smile whenever the phone rang, seemingly glorying in her distress before he went to answer it.

  He was in his study now, speaking in a voice so low that she could barely hear him from her chair. He had
been talking to his mother before; she had overheard an occasional shouted Greek phrase. She had also heard her own name spoken several times. Nick had not sounded as though he was sticking up for her. He had probably been telling his mother that there was no excuse for his wife’s rudeness, that he had pressured her to make the occasional phone call to Mrs. Christopoulos until he was blue in the face, that he no longer knew what to do.

  She got up and moved toward the door. “… sorry I ever got married,” she heard before Nick’s voice again fell. Cheryl crept back to her chair. So her suspicions were correct. With the telephone as his tool, he could call up anyone he liked and say whatever he wished, and her phobia made her powerless to stop him, to have any control over his actions.

  The door to the study opened; Nick came toward her and sat down on the sofa. “I may not be home for dinner tomorrow,” he said. “There’s a chance I’ll have to talk to a colleague about a case, and I can’t call you up later to let you know for sure, so just don’t worry if I’m not here.”

  “Fine.” She did not believe him. He was probably getting together with a friend to drink and commiserate. “By the way, didn’t you mention a while back that the lease on my old house is almost up?”

  He leaned back. “Yeah, I did. Almost forgot—the Ruddocks are moving out in three weeks. I was going to bring that up. I’ve been thinking—” He sat up again. “Maybe we ought to sell. I know you feel attached to it, but trying to rent it and keep an eye on it from here is kind of a pain.”

  “I know.”

  “It’s your house, though. We ought to decide what to do with it together.”

  An inspiration came to her. “We shouldn’t rent it out again,” she said quickly. “We could live there ourselves. The town’s quiet and safe, there’s plenty of room for the two of us, and you could still get to your office here.” This was, she realized, the answer to a lot of problems. Nick’s business, and its potential disruptions, would be farther away. There was less chance his various tenants would pester him with phone calls about relatively insignificant problems if they had to call long distance, and his clients would have to leave messages at his office. Perhaps Nick would come to appreciate the virtues of a life without so many distractions.

  “Absolutely not,” he muttered, shattering her reverie.

  “Why not?”

  “For one thing, because I don’t feel like commuting for two hours a day, and it’d probably take even longer in winter. Also because it’d be harder to tend to all my business from there.”

  Cheryl looked down. “Well, you could cut back on some of your business.”

  “No, I don’t think I could.” His hand was suddenly around her wrist, gripping her tightly. “Oh, there’s one way I might manage it. I could get another computer for the house, and hook it up to a modem. I could put in a fax machine, and another phone line to handle any business calls that come there. I might be able to do more of my work at home, and drive into my office less often. How would you like that, Cheryl?” She lifted her head; he was smiling now, but his eyes glittered with anger. “Pretty soon everything’ll be on the phone lines. You won’t just be worrying about phones—it’ll be more and more: home computers, modems, faxes, TV, and God knows what else. What are you going to do then?”

  She pulled her hand from his. “Stop it!”

  “Don’t you understand? I’m trying to help you, shock some sense into you.”

  She jumped to her feet. “Is it so wrong to want to be free of that damned thing?”

  He gazed up at her. “You’ve got to do something about this, Cheryl. It’s for your own good.” He sighed. “I’ll give you a month. That’s about as patient as I can be at this point. If you can’t answer a simple phone call by then, or ring me up for a couple of minutes at the office—” She waited for him to complete the threat. “You’ve got to put this phone bullshit behind you.”

  “We’ll see,” she said softly, then walked toward the stairway. Her parents had never raised their voices, she thought as she climbed toward the bedroom. She suddenly hated Nick for insisting that she change, for making a scene, for trying to frighten her with his talk of faxes and modems and all the other devices reaching out for her through the wires.

  No, she told herself. I won’t let them.

  Cheryl parked her car a block from Nick’s office and walked to the boutique across the way. Nick came out at six; a beautiful blonde young woman was waiting for him in a blue BMW. The blonde beauty looked familiar; Cheryl dimly recalled meeting her a year ago at a local bar association dinner. She had to be the colleague Nick was meeting for dinner. How convenient for him, she thought, to have to discuss business with such a babe.

  A week later, when Nick told her once again that he had to meet another lawyer for dinner, Cheryl drove to his office once more. She was not surprised to see the same blonde pick him up again. There had been even more mysterious phone calls lately, calls that came in the evening and that Nick took in his study. The two were plotting against her, and the telephone was their ally.

  She had tried to give Nick a refuge. She had thought that was what he wanted. How great it would have been if he could have come home to her and retreated from the outside, at least for a while.

  She had known what was happening, long before she was fully conscious of the source of her fear. Telephones had only been the harbingers. The networks people had built to communicate with one another would soon flood them with so much babble that they would be unable to tell which thoughts and feelings were their own. They would become no more than receivers passing on the messages of the networks. Their most private thoughts would be overwhelmed by all the noise; they would call out to others through their phones and modems and microphones and never truly be heard. Solitude would be impossible.

  The information lines were a growing nervous system, drawing her into itself, but she did not want to be part of it. She desperately needed to be apart, to be herself. She could not fight the system alone. But at least she could protect herself.

  Nick was spending more evenings away from home, allegedly at business dinners. It was easy for Cheryl to pack some of her belongings each night and hide the suitcases and boxes in the basement before he came home.

  She was ready to leave in a week. It was surprisingly easy to walk out the door with the last of her packed belongings and turn the key in the lock, having avoided an unpleasant confrontation. In a way, she was grateful that Nick had found someone else; that made it even easier to leave.

  Her spirits lifted as she approached her home town. The family in her parents’ house had moved out; except for some crayon scrawlings on a couple of walls and worn spots on the living room carpet, the rooms were in good shape. She could sleep on the futon she had brought with her until she got a bed, and would drive to the electric company’s local offices in the morning to get the power turned on. The Ruddocks had installed telephone jacks in both of the bedrooms and the kitchen, but had apparently taken their phones with them. The only telephone left in the house was her parents’ old black one in the basement recreation room, and its receiver was off the hook.

  Cheryl approached it hesitantly, then leaned down, picked up the receiver gingerly, and managed to put it back in its cradle. The telephone company would have disconnected this line by now. She could always drive over to the local offices to see about having it reconnected.

  Assuming, of course, that she could come up with any good reasons to have the phone hooked up.

  Nick came to the house two days later, just after the two men from the local furniture store had delivered her new bed. She managed to lock the front door just before he reached the porch.

  He pounded on the door. “Cheryl! Cheryl! Open the goddamned door! I have to talk to you!”

  “Go away!”

  “You can’t just walk out like this!”

  “Oh yes I can.”

  “Cheryl!” He pounded on the door again, then stepped back. She could see him through the peephole. “A
re you still there?”

  “I’m here.”

  “Then I’ll just have to shout at you through the door. I found somebody. He can help you. I’ve got it set up, he works with people like you all the time. He’s actually kind of interested in your particular disorder. It took me a while to set it up, but he’ll take your case on right away.”

  Cheryl said, “I’m not a case.”

  “Damn it, will you listen to me? You can beat this thing!”

  “What do you care if I do or not? You’ve got that gorgeous blonde to run around with, that colleague who’s been joining you for dinner.”

  He gaped at her. “Rita? You know about Rita?”

  “You’re goddamned right I know about Rita,” she replied, wallowing in righteous fury. “I was outside your office. I know who you were meeting. Bet she was calling you up all those times, too.”

  “Then you should have spied on me some more and followed me to the restaurant, because her husband always met us there. You idiot! Rita had this massive phobia herself once, about airplane flights! She told me about this psychologist, the one who wants to see you. She helped me set it up.”

  She would not let him trick her into leaving her refuge, now that she was safe. “You wanted a quiet home,” she said. “At least you said you did. You liked having someone around who wasn’t competing, who looked after you, who just wanted some peace. I kept my side of the bargain. You’re the one who’s changed.”

  “Maybe you made me change.” He thrust his face closer to the peephole. “If I’m ever crazy enough to get married again, I’ll find somebody who’s aggressive and loud and a workaholic and who’s always on the phone.” He wiped an arm across his brow. “You’re not afraid of phones. You’re afraid of life. You’ll have to cut yourself off from everything to be happy.”

  “Go away.”

  “Cheryl—”

  “Go away.”

  He turned around and left.