The Blindfold

by Siri Hustvedt

  It was over, and I could feel pain in my head. I suffer from migraine and am susceptible to nervous tricks and minor hallucinations, but I have never been able to write off these experiences as aberrations that are purely neurological, because while they are happening, I am convinced that I am seeing the truth, that the terrible fragility and absence I feel is the world—stark and unclothed. That nakedness is irretrievable. It is left behind in the raw, voiceless place that exists beyond the muttering dreams of everyday life, where you cannot ask to go but must be taken. As I sat in Stephen’s apartment, recovering from what I had seen, I gave the vision meaning. It had been, I told myself, a revelation of the photograph’s inherent darkness and a sign of an infection among us: Stephen, George, and me. I wonder now whether it isn’t dangerous to assign significance to that which is essentially vacant, but we can’t seem to avoid it. We cover up the holes with our speech, explaining away the emptiness until we forget it is there. My head hurt, and I was enervated. I felt the mysterious fog of depression begin to lower—a formless burden I couldn’t throw off. I heard a noise and lurched forward in the chair.

  “What the hell are you doing here, Iris?”

  It was Stephen. I looked up at him. “The door was . . .” I stammered over the word “open.”

  He glared at me. “I’d never rummage around in your apartment,” he said. “What do you think you’re doing?”

  “I didn’t rummage,” I said. “Where were you? I was scared something had happened . . .”

  “I was checking on Mrs. Stone. She’s been sick, but that’s beside the point.”

  I didn’t answer. Mrs. Stone was an eighty-year-old theosophist whom Stephen had befriended. I had forgotten all about her.

  “What were you doing with it?” He walked toward me, picked up the photograph from the floor and shook it at me. “You’ve bent it,” he said, looking down at it. “You were going to take it, weren’t you?”

  I touched the painful spot in my temple and looked at Stephen. “Of course not,” I said.

  “Have you been talking to George?”

  “What do you mean?”

  Stephen looked straight at me. His handsome face appeared frozen and was very white, but his ears burned red. Those red ears had a calming effect on me, and I stared at them with interest.

  He pressed the photograph to his chest like a child claiming possession of a toy. “What were you doing with it then?” he said.

  “I was looking at it.” My voice was so soft I wondered if he could hear me.

  “What right do you have to look at it, to come barging into my apartment—”

  “The photograph is horrible,” I said.

  Stephen held the picture out in front of him. His face regained its color, and his ears turned pale again. “I look at it all the time,” he said. “Ever since I first saw her, I’ve wanted to know how she works, how it works. I’ve wanted to take it apart, break the code, but she’s a mystery. George can’t explain it either. You say it’s a horrible photograph. I don’t know what that means. You’re making a moral judgment, but this face, this woman, is beyond all that.”

  “Stephen,” I said. “It’s a picture of me.”

  He shrugged his shoulders. “It’s obvious you don’t understand. Look at it,” he said, holding the photograph in my face.

  I turned my head. “No.”

  “You won’t look at it?” He laughed in surprise.

  “No,” I said. “Put it down.” I gazed at Stephen’s bookshelves. I was so tired I wanted to lie down. Stephen made a little noise, a kind of snort, and I felt him grab my arm and pull me toward him.

  “Iris, have you gone crazy? It’s just a picture. Look at it!” He was waving the picture near my face.

  I closed my eyes and jerked my arm away from him. “No!”

  “You’re serious,” he said. “You’re afraid of it.”

  I didn’t answer him. Without thinking, I put my hand to my head. My scalp was sore. Stephen knelt at my feet and reached out to touch my face. He no longer held the photograph.

  “What’s going on, Iris?” he said, and brushed a piece of hair from my eye. “You’re so pale. Is it one of your headaches?”

  His kindness made me weep. I must have sat there sniffling and honking into a Kleenex for a good five minutes before Stephen began to unbutton my shirt, his fingers at my throat, his mouth close to my ear.

  In the morning I left before Stephen was awake. The headache was gone. I considered leaving a note but decided not to. On my way out I saw the photograph lying facedown on the desk. One look, I said to myself, one look to check, but I withdrew my hand. When I stepped out into the street, the daylight, the cool air startled me. Leaving those small, dark rooms is like coming out of a grave, I thought.

  • • •

  Stephen left town that day. He told me he was spending six days with his parents in San Francisco and was going to a cousin’s wedding. I believed him. The photograph had become for me the experience of seeing it in Stephen’s apartment. I couldn’t separate the image from the hole, and although I could describe the picture with some accuracy, could name its parts, I was unable really to see it. Its presence in my mind was, in fact, an absence that I felt as a small but constant threat. That was quite bad enough, but what unnerved me altogether was that the picture began to turn up elsewhere, and I was gripped by the uncanny feeling that it had taken on a life of its own. I don’t mean this literally. What I mean is that the photograph seemed to be in circulation—if not an actual print, certainly the news of its existence. The day after Stephen’s departure, I was reading in the library and a young man I had never seen before sat down next to me and said, “You’re the girl in the photograph, aren’t you?” I was dumbfounded. He looked at me and laughed. “Jonathan Mann showed it to me.” “I don’t know anyone by that name,” I said to him. “Really?” he answered. “Jonathan said he had met you.” “I don’t think so,” I said, staring into the young man’s face. Then he looked at the clock, sprang up from his chair, and ran to the door. “And who are you?” I called after him, drawing irritated looks from other readers. “Whorf,” he said, “Ian Whorf—art history.”

  I used the telephone in the hall to call George, but he wasn’t home. Who the hell is Jonathan Mann? George must know, I thought, and tried the number a second time. No luck. The next day it happened again. My linguistics professor, a big, friendly man with a white beard and a red face, stopped me after class and said, “I hear you have a second career as a model.” He smiled at me. “Who told you that?” I said, hearing the strain in my voice. Professor Phibbs looked confused. “Over in the English Department office,” he said. “Marge, the secretary, seemed to know all about it.” “Marge.” I repeated the name aloud. I knew Marge dimly. She was a small, officious woman who sat behind an enormous desk in the middle of the office. I tried to conjure an image of her talking about the photograph. Could Stephen have shown it to her? The whole idea was fantastic. I said goodbye to Professor Phibbs, walked to Philosophy Hall, and took the elevator to the sixth floor.

  When I entered the office, I saw a young woman—she must have been a student—sitting alone in the outer room. She had a remarkable mass of brown hair that stood straight out from the sides of her head, and I looked at it while I spoke to her. “Is Marge in?” As I said this, I was stung by the absurdity of my errand. “No, she’s out for a couple of days. Maybe I can help you.” “No,” I said. “It’s a personal matter.” “Would you like to leave your name?” “No, I wouldn’t.” My voice was too emphatic. “No thank you,” I said in an attempt to change my tone. “Suit yourself,” she said, and busied herself with a pile of papers on the desk.

  I spent the whole evening calling George. I let the telephone ring and ring, but he was out. I also looked up Ian Whorf in the Manhattan book and found no listing. When dawn lit the air shaft outside my window, I was still awake, my bed cluttered with reading material—books, Xeroxed articles, magazines—which I had read through the
insomniac hours. Finally I slept, a thin, restless sleep, full of chattering voices and anonymous crowds.

  When I awoke three hours later, I went to the library and produced three pages on Dorothea Brooke, whose delusions had taken on renewed vigor, and then, exhausted, I walked to Philosophy Hall to have tea in the graduate lounge. This ritual, conducted entirely in whispers, took place every afternoon. A morose woman sat behind a large silver contraption doling out tea and small, pale cookies. We were expected to pay a quarter for this privilege, but the dish meant to receive the contribution was usually empty. Betsy Wingate was sitting in the far corner of the room, and she waved to me as I entered. I joined her after standing in line for my tea. Betsy was an acquaintance, not a friend. I knew her from a class on English Romantic poetry in which she had been strikingly articulate, delivering paragraph-long questions to Professor Kreeber, who had been known to sigh when she raised her hand.

  “Iris,” she said. “You’re just the person I’ve been dying to see.” She patted the chair next to her. I sat down. “Ralph was here a few minutes ago, and he mentioned you.”

  I must have looked blank.

  “You know, Iris, the Derridian fellow with the ponytail. He sat behind you in the Romantics—you remember, the tall one.”

  I nodded. I remembered Ralph.

  “He said that there’s a stunning photograph of you floating around taken by a downtown artist. ‘A study in eroticism,’ he called it.”

  I caught my breath.

  Betsy continued. “I have to ask you, as one feminist to another, you understand. Didn’t you feel compromised posing in the nude?”

  I looked into Betsy’s enlarged eyes through the thick lenses of her glasses. The distortion made me think of dreams in which a single physical detail on a person overwhelms all the others. So I’m naked now, I thought. I gripped my teacup with both hands and stared into the brown liquid. Everywhere I go, the stupid thing seems to have been there before me. It’s like I’m chasing it. Betsy was waiting for my considered opinion. I was fully clothed, I imagined myself saying. The photograph isn’t what you think, it’s . . . Then I knew I couldn’t explain myself.

  “Not a bit,” I said, and rose to leave.

  She looked disappointed.

  The room was warm, too warm. I have to get out, I thought. I walked quickly to the door and through the lobby, passing two people who were speaking in hushed voices, and it occurred to me that they too were in on the rumor, telling each other the news about the photograph. They glanced in my direction. I paused on the steps outside the building to collect myself. Butler Library rose up in the sunshine, and I remembered Stephen touching George, his mouth at his friend’s ear. It had begun there, and now strangers were talking. The course of gossip is invisible. One thing becomes another, like the weather. Jonathan Mann, Ian Whorf, Professor Phibbs, Marge, Ralph, Betsy Wingate—the names blew through me. A day before, I would have pursued it, tried to track the route the photograph had traveled, and confronted those who had passed the word, but I understood now it was impossible. I had no stamina for a wild-goose chase through the dark halls of Columbia University listening to variant accounts of my exhibitionism. I sat down on the steps, closed my eyes and turned my face to the sun. Betsy’s version was as good as any. In the end nudity was a tame metaphor for what had happened to me. I had not only been stripped. I had been turned inside out.

  For the next two days I hid in my apartment, writing about Dorothea’s desires and Casaubon’s emptiness, stopping periodically to call George, who was never home. It was then I began to suspect George and Stephen were in league. They had left the city together, after all. Perhaps there was no cousin, no wedding, and Stephen had lied to cover himself. But my suspicions weren’t limited to the two of them. I had begun to feel uncertain in public places, to expect stares and questions, and as I walked into the library after my seclusion, I looked at no one. The morning and most of the afternoon passed without incident. With every hour that went by I grew more relaxed, and by four o’clock I was sitting very happily, picking through my copy of Middlemarch, when a strange man approached me.

  He appeared from behind a trolley piled high with books that were to be returned to the stacks, a handsome man wearing a red sweater and sunglasses. He leaned over the table where I was working and looked down at me with a broad grin. His movements had a proprietary quality I disliked. He was too old to be a student, too flashy for a librarian. I felt sure no librarian in the history of the world had worn sunglasses indoors.

  “You’re Iris,” he said, “aren’t you?”

  I looked at the dark plates over his eyes. “No,” I said, “I’m not.”

  He looked surprised. “I was sure . . .”

  “No, you’re looking for someone else,” I said. “Another person entirely.” I heard the conviction in my voice.

  He cocked his head to the side as if to see me better. “I could’ve sworn . . .”

  “Sorry,” I said, fixing my eyes on a paragraph. He loomed over me for a moment and then left. When I was sure he was gone, I looked up. My feeling of triumph was short-lived. In a matter of minutes the denial struck me as yet another turn for the worse. The ease with which I had sidestepped my identity alarmed me. I had done it before. A few months later, I would do it again, but that’s another story.

  I started for home, my book bag over my shoulder. When I came to West 109th Street, I passed it and continued walking. My mind was too full for that small apartment. A wind blew off the river, and my feet made time, became a pulse for my thoughts as I walked on and on. I had no destination, just the will to go, and I went fast, the noise of the city in my ears, its fumes in my nose and mouth. The books were heavy and my bag gnawed into my shoulder. I stopped at a delicatessen on Fifty-fourth Street and ate a large, expensive sandwich before continuing my walk downtown. The sky was deep blue when I finally arrived at Washington Square. I crossed it in the darkness, walking under the arch and onto the sidewalk. I shook my head when a man came close to me, his hand outstretched, his voice melodious. “Loose joints, loose joints,” he chanted, and I thought of people wobbly at their knees and elbows like marionettes and walked more quickly.

  The man vanished behind a tree. When I reached the other side of the park, I knew that I would walk to West Broadway and look for George, that I would sit on his steps if necessary and wait into the night.

  When I put my finger to the bell, I didn’t expect him to answer, but he did, and when I came upstairs, I found him alone, his apartment strewn with clothes and papers, an opened suitcase on the floor. I thought he would explain the chaos, but he didn’t. “I have to talk to you,” I told him, sitting down on the sofa, and I spoke without interruption for a long time, relating the peculiar events of the last few days, wondering aloud about the origin of the rumor, and as sanely as possible touching on the photograph itself and my extreme reaction to it as well as Stephen’s. Throughout my monologue, I looked at George, seeking clues in his face, but though he was attentive, he displayed no emotion. I concluded by saying, “It’s gotten out of hand. You can see that, can’t you? It’s gone wild.”

  George sighed. “It was probably Jon.”

  “Jonathan Mann?” I said.

  “He’s a dealer, Iris. There’s going to be a show. It happened very fast. One of his artists is in the hospital and can’t come up with the work, so he’s asked me. I have the photographs. I want to use the one of you—among others.”

  “When did it happen?” I said.

  “A week ago.”

  “You should have told me then.”

  “I’ve been gone.”

  I looked at a crushed blue shirt on top of the suitcase. “With Stephen?’ I said.

  He didn’t answer me.

  “Were you with Stephen?”

  “For a couple of days. Then I went to Los Angeles.”

  “He lied to me,” I said, “about the wedding.”