Honeydew

by Edith Pearlman

  And the neon sign projecting from the exercise center on the second floor of a building in Godolphin Square? Neon plasma has the most intense light discharge of all the noble gases. To a normal human eye it is red-orange; it also contains a strong green line hidden unless you’ve got a spectroscope. Lyle sees the green line unaided, the flowing molecules of it. It is as if the sign, GET FIT, has given him a gift.

  But then, Lyle has been given many gifts, including Pansy’s love. Bathed in that love, Lyle in turn is gentle with other kids, especially with kids uneasy under their bragging, kids really as frightened as rabbits when a hawk darkens their world. Lyle’s underweight presence steadies them, and he is sought after—but not exactly as a friend. He is more like Anansi, the helpful spider of his favorite tales—a quiet ally and trickster who prefers his own company but skitters over to join you when you need him.

  Yet another gift is money. These days, money resides in electronic bits; Pansy has plenty of bits inherited from her Alabama grandfather. And there is, or was once, the gift of a small amount of yellowish fluid containing enzymes, acids, and lipids. Semen, not to put too fine a point on it.

  The unknown bestower of the semen had been living on the edge. He’d come from Africa in a troop of lost boys—not the famous ones from Sudan but less famous, less numerous ones from elsewhere. But the situation was similar: civil war, carnage, a few boys running from their ruined villages all the way to the United States.

  One particular lost boy ended up in Massachusetts, lived in a house with other lost boys, got through high school, and at the time of his gift was employed in a lab in the area. But he was poor. And so he did what many people in his situation did: sold his blood. He thought about selling his sperm too, but he considered it too valuable to be made a commodity—he was proud and he was free and he wanted freely to sire a thousand American sons. So he did not sell but gave his sperm to a bank—really a hospital roomlet provided with facilitating magazines.

  II.

  And then there’s a submicroscopic gift, the consequence of a genetic mutation that has passed mostly unexpressed through the millennia. It was bestowed by evolution not directly on Lyle but on a primate who was his remote ancestor. The gift was a mischievous gene, which, if it meets its twin, can affect vision.

  “Primate vision unadulterated is trichromatic,” said Dr. Marcus Paul. “Tri means ‘three,’ and chroma means ‘color.’”

  “Yes?” Pansy encouraged from the other side of the desk.

  “Well, Mrs. Spaulding—”

  “Miss.”

  “Miss…”

  “Or Ms., if you want to be correct.” She grinned.

  “Ms., then,” the flustered man said, and took refuge in a disquisition. “You know the retina, at the back of the eye, the thing that captures light and color and ships them to the brain. The retina uses only three types of light-absorbing pigments for color vision. Trichromacy, see?”

  “See,” she agreed, still grinning.

  “Well, almost all nonprimate mammals are dichromatic, with just two kinds of visual pigments. A few nocturnal mammals have only one pigment. But some birds, fish, and reptiles, they have four.”

  “They see more colors than we do? Damn it all.”

  “They probably do. And some butterflies are even pentachromatic. Pigeons also. And there is one twig on the Homo sapiens tree whose members—a small fraction of them—are believed to be pentachromatic too: the Himba tribe. Himbas endure their usually short lives in Namibia…Lyle seems to be of mixed race.”

  “Yes. I asked the sperm bank for a black donor. I believe miscegenation is an answer to the world’s ills. All people one color: tan.”

  “Oh,” said the doctor, whose skin was the shade of eggplant. “Your donor was African?”

  She shrugged her slender shoulders. “I didn’t ask, and they didn’t tell.”

  “Well, I think Lyle’s a pentachromat. Those colors he reports.”

  She nodded. She was all at once serious. “Yes. No wonder he has headaches, my poor boy.” Then she paused, partly to let this young Jamaican take a frank look at her, as he was clearly eager to do—at her inky curls, at her small straight nose that angled upward a degree more than is usual, robbing her of beauty and instead making her irresistible; physiognomy’s gift to Pansy, you might say. The doctor could see also her wide mouth, her dimples, her long neck and long hands. Her long legs were hidden from him by his desk, but he must have noticed them earlier. She hoped so. Oh, yes, and when she parted her lips, out flashed the bright white of her perfect incisors. Men often remarked on that…She continued now: “What’s it like to be a pentachromat?” Though she knew, or had an idea; Lyle had told her of the numerous dots of color he could detect on a plain manila envelope. She had taught him a new word: pointillism. “Doctor?”

  What’s it like to have a face like yours? He said: “Neither we nor they have the words to describe this sort of thing. How would you describe color to someone who was color-blind? What we do know is that tetrachromats and pentachromats make distinctions between shades that seem identical to the rest of us. For example, I read about a woman in California, she’s dead now—”

  “From hyperchromaticity?”

  “From old age. She was a seamstress, the article said. She could look at three samples of taupe fabric cut from the same bolt and detect a gold undertone in one, a hint of green in another, a smidgen of gray in the third. She could look at a river and distinguish relative depth and amounts of silt in different areas of the water based on differences in shading that no one else was aware of…So it’s probably safe to say that tetrachromats and pentachromats have a richer visual experience of the world than the rest of us.” But my own experience has become richer in the past fifteen minutes because of this woman sitting in front of my normal, trichromatic eyes. I hope she likes my dreadlocks.

  III.

  Lyle had been an unfretful baby, though for a while he confused day and night. Pansy slept through the days along with him. Gave him breakfast at twilight and took him for a walk, sometimes across the river to Boston but usually around Godolphin. Lyle lay angled on a pillow in his old-fashioned perambulator, facing her or staring upward at the dark green of trees, the charcoal sky. He turned his head to notice glossy books in the window of the bookstore, always open late. There was a full-length mirror embedded in the door of the pedicure place. Sometimes, again turning his head, he stared at mother and child, and she did the same. There she was, in black leather pants and a glistening white poncho; there he was, a baby whose skin had not yet begun to darken. Her own skin had never darkened, though her southern ancestors had no doubt mingled with their slaves and then admitted the lighter progeny into the mansion. A gene for a dusky epidermis might lie embedded in each of her cells. In his early childhood Lyle went from phase to expected phase—resisted the occasional babysitter, considered the toilet fine for other people, couldn’t bear carrots. He played with blocks in a bored way. Idly he mentioned headaches. The pediatrician found no cause for them.

  He continued his habit of staring at everything. He himself was odd to look at—the skinny arms, the thin beige face, the unsmiling gaze. When he took a walk with his mother, he put one hand in hers, like collateral, while his mind wandered somewhere she couldn’t follow, and she had to relinquish the treasured notion that mother and child were one.

  He didn’t like picture books—all those primary colors, he wouldn’t look at them. It made her wonder.

  The psychologist she took him to said no, he wasn’t on any spectrum. “He’s not interested in those little board books—so what. He’s intrigued by the wider world. Wants to wait and see what catches his fancy.”

  She thanked him and stood up, a vision in her striped black-and-white sundress and her black cartwheel. She walked toward the door.

  “You too,” the psychologist called. “Wait and see.”

  She’d waited several years. One day irregular blurred lines appeared on the wall of her bedroom
. Their interiors filled in; now they were splotches. Then they turned into continents. The plumber found the leaks that were their source, and fixed them. Pansy hired a painter and brought home a color wheel. It was a collection of about three hundred long slender cards of thick laminated paper, each with a hole at one end, allowing them all to depend from a metal ring, to be held in the hand at once, or fanned out into a circle. Each card bore seven contiguous squares of similar hues, with names, about two thousand colors in all. She dropped the device with idle grace beside Lyle, prone on the floor. He abandoned his book—he was reading adventure stories now, aping his classmates, though he frequently returned to those old trickster tales.

  He inspected this new toy. He knew what he had before him—paint samples. He guessed that these two thousand colors were about as many as human beings could create—in their labs, their paint factories, their electronics workshops. He had endured years of feeling different, of possessing something that was a secret to others and also to him. Now the color wheel enlightened him…People gave hues such hopeful names. There was a square called Orange Froth and next to it Orange Blossom and next to that Florida Orange. Lyle could see the Froth globules deepen to a color that almost matched Orange Blossom but didn’t, and the Orange Blossom itself acquire a gloss as it approached but did not attain Florida Orange. “Mom,” he called.

  “Yes, darling?” from the other room.

  “I have…” he said, and paused. In the Anansi tales, secrets were meant to be stuffed into the heart and never pulled out; there could be unforeseen results if they were.

  She walked in. “…Something to tell me?”

  “Well…”

  And then came the visit to Dr. Marcus Paul; and then came the tentative diagnosis of a condition, though not an ailment, unknown to most scientists probably because of its weak grant potential. And then came romance. Love at first sight? It can happen. There’s often a lot of palaver.

  “I love you not only because you’re beautiful,” Marcus told Pansy a few weeks after they met. “I love you because of your admirable politics, your wish that the world’s population become one color. Because you mop floors in a soup kitchen. Because you cook like a four-star chef.”

  She kissed him then, and she caressed his hip with her knee, a gesture that cannot be achieved unless both parties are lying on their sides facing each other. They happened to be lying on their sides facing each other—Lyle was at school—and so the caress impossible under other circumstances was now possible, probable, necessary, unavoidable, though who would want to avoid the deep shudder each felt as joint saluted joint. Then Marcus entered his lovely woman.

  Afterward she took over the colloquy. “I love you because of your single-mindedness,” she said. “Your voice. Your dreadlocks. I love you because our coupling feels like destiny.”

  “Arranged by Anansi.”

  “Anansi? Lyle reads stories about him…”

  “He’s a powerful spider who used to make his home in Africa and now lives in Jamaica. But he gets around.”

  “Please thank him if you see him…And I love you because together we belong to Lyle.”

  “And Lyle belongs to us,” Marcus said. In a state of postcoital clarity he realized that he had found his life’s love and his life’s work in a single ophthalmologic interview. “We are Lyle’s caretakers, guardians, keepers of his secret.”

  “It’s like the housemaid marrying the butler,” Pansy said.

  “If you say so.” He felt like the stable boy marrying the princess.

  There was a brief three-person honeymoon. They visited Italy, where plump lemons offered even more yellows than the ones Lyle knew. They went to Iberia, where the tiles of Lisbon and the airport in Madrid presented a chromatic joy, many colors new and glorious to Marcus and Pansy and about twelve times that many to Lyle.

  Marcus’s clinical practice was easy to transfer to a colleague. He’d been mostly engaged in research anyway. After returning from the colorful honeymoon, he built a lab behind Pansy’s spacious house and invited his cousin David to join him. The reclusive David, an optician, was interested in the changes to vision that curved or beveled glass, glass within glass, prismatic lenses, all those things, could make when placed in front of the eye. The two cousins had already designed a number of spectacles that helped people with eye diseases see better.

  Their little optical laboratory—incorporated, after a while—produced many improved devices. Telescopic eyeglasses for everyday use. Microscope lenses, and surgical snakes with tiny cameras in their heads, and smoky instruments for astronomers. These tools became much in demand.

  The company flourished, and Pansy’s return on her investment was substantial. She was proud of the men’s success. Still, when Marcus and David entered their laboratory day after day, she liked to imagine that, in addition to their other products, they were working on a superinvention that would grant Lyle’s vision to everyone. Performance-enhancing, you might say. When perfected, it would encounter regulations; when produced, it would inspire inferior imitations. Even so, it would be a vehicle for public good.

  But after four years it had not yet appeared. So one day the patient Pansy inquired.

  “I don’t think we can do it,” Marcus admitted. “We’ve tried; it was one of our original purposes. But we cannot duplicate work that nature took millions of years to accomplish. We cannot invent an external instrument which will produce an internal variant. The butterfly has a genome, the pigeon too. But where does the pentachromatic gene lurk? We cannot tell. And if we could tell, and could extract it, and could transfer it to a human cell, would the cell survive? And if yes, yes, yes, yes…for what purpose? To give people headaches?”

  “It would be only a carnival attraction,” Pansy slowly acknowledged. “A rich man’s plaything. But oh, Marcus. No one else can ever become like Lyle. He’s stuck being unique.”

  IV.

  And what of the unique Lyle during these years? Well, he had things to occupy him: school, cello, baseball, walks at night with Marcus or David or Pansy. Music was blessedly colorless. When he stood in center field, the sky showed him its myriad blues and the field its hundreds of greens, but none of that distracted him from the flight of the sphere, a headless wingless bird, a ball white and off-white and off-off-white. Nothing distracted him from the task of predicting the bird’s destination and putting himself beneath it, mitt at the ready.

  He played in the school orchestra. Once in a while he went to a party and talked to whoever seemed left out—talked awkwardly but soothingly, or maybe soothingly because awkwardly.

  He thought about someday becoming a doctor. He liked looking at anatomy plates, vivid to begin with, garish under his inspection. He wondered whether his vision, trained, might develop an X-ray component. Marcus doubted it. They discussed diseases of organs other than the eye—diagnosis, treatment, treatment failure.

  But despite the error-free fielding record and despite the mild friendships with his peers and despite the comfort of nocturnal darkness in the company of one of the three people he loved, Lyle, heavy with his secret, often felt sorrowfully alone.

  When he was sixteen, he began to spend Sunday mornings with last year’s biology teacher. They drove to a nature preserve and then hiked its trails. And then one Sunday, during a forbidding rainstorm, she invited him to forget nature for a day. She was forty, the ideal age to relieve a sensitive boy of his virginity and satisfy his curiosity too. He noted that her areolae were not sepia, as novels said, but pulsing pink rose mauve…This dear woman would be fired without a hearing if her generosity became known—he knew that, and he realized how uncalibrated were the rules that claim to protect us from one another. But Lyle was used to keeping things to himself, and anyway he would never betray Ms. Lapidus. Their Sunday-morning explorations continued—in the nature preserve if the day was bright, in bed if otherwise.

  He shared his secret with her—she would not betray him either.

  “But, wow!” she
said, turning to look at him, her head on her palm, her elbow on the mattress.

  “Wow? It’s an affliction.”

  “Really? By me it’s an opportunity. Think of the things you could do with those special eyes. Detect art forgeries.”

  He blinked at her.

  “You could tell the difference between Rembrandt’s paint and pseudo-Rembrandt’s paint,” she explained. And on another occasion she said, “You could identify altered substances. Traces of banned pesticides.”

  “Or find the fault lines in a rock,” he unenthusiastically contributed.

  “Or see a smear of makeup on a man’s tweed shoulder.”

  “Huh?”

  She told him that adulterers usually tried to keep their activities hidden, and that their wronged spouses often hired detectives for a substantial fee. And on yet another rainy Sunday she suggested that he could identify fish misnamed by dishonest restaurants. “And sometimes they serve brains masquerading as sweetbreads, or maybe it’s the other way around. You could bring miscreants to court.”

  He didn’t answer. He was again looking at her breasts. The areolae were mauve, yes, but mostly by contrast to what he now noticed as yellowish skin; and when he raised his eyes he saw that her sclera were curdling. To foresee the coming of disaster—that was not how he wanted to use his gift.

  “Would you do something for me?” he managed.

  “Just about anything,” she confessed.

  “Would you have your doctor do an MRI of your abdomen?”

  “What? I feel fine.”