The Blindfold

by Siri Hustvedt

  Once inside my apartment, I walked straight to the long mirror in my bedroom. For weeks I hadn’t looked at myself, had always avoided it in fact, but I took a good hard look at the dirty, skeletal person with the shorn head and baggy pants cinched at the waist by a ragged belt, a person with no breasts to speak of. They had disappeared with the pounds, but the emaciation wasn’t what scared me. In my face I saw a morbid change. My eyes were different. They seemed to have gone quiet. I remember that I wanted to sob but I couldn’t. Then I took off my pants and folded them very carefully, which made no sense because they were filthy, as was the jacket which I also smoothed out and put away with the trousers in a plastic bag deep in my closet. For at least an hour I sat in the bathtub and cleaned my body. I was meticulous, energetic. Then sitting naked on a chair, I telephoned my parents and in an astonishingly calm voice explained that I needed money for the week. I had lost my job and couldn’t get by any longer. Not a lot, I said, just a little. My father wired more than I had asked for, two hundred and fifty dollars. It was manna from the sky. With it, I ate, a bit more every day so as not to shock my system. I bought expensive vegetables and meats, preparing three meals a day, chewing every bite methodically, waiting to see how my stomach would respond. It did well. Food was my salvation, and I imagined that I was getting fatter, that the roundness was returning to my body at an impossible rate. With every mouthful, I was burying Klaus, piling more and more dirt on top of him to keep him down. I worked at my own recovery like a robot programmed for survival, determined to come back to myself. The idea was to arrive at registration on the fourth fattened and blooming. The day came, and I went in a new dress ($39.99 on sale), thinking myself quite restored, even lovely, but my old acquaintances greeted me with shocked looks and exclamations about my weight and hair. Yes, yes, I said, I’d been sick, but I was much better now, a long bout of flu, quite severe. My hair had fallen out in big clumps so I cut it. It’s growing in, though. I’m sure I was ludicrous, a dolled-up corpse, half crazed with hope for a second chance. Then out of the corner of my eye I saw him, a slender, handsome boy with a serious expression. In his hand was a copy of The Portable Nietzsche.

  The boy was Stephen. He didn’t speak to me then, but a month later, we became lovers, of a kind. I chased him for eight months, and he was hot and cold for the duration, never sure whether he wanted me or not. I didn’t tell him about Klaus. Several times the desire to confess the whole story came to my throat and mouth, but it never passed into words. Ruth called me a few times, and we had a couple of dinners together. I drycleaned the suit but didn’t return it. It hung in my closet in its transparent bag. Paris telephoned as soon as I plugged in the machine on September fourth. “Jesus Christ,” he said. “I’ve been calling for weeks. You went underground, you devil. I thught you might be dead, lying on the street somewhere with no ID, already buried in Potter’s Field. I even went to your goddamn building and buzzed you. Nobody home. Nobody home.” “I’m sorry,” I said. “It was a bad time. I can’t talk about it.” And we didn’t. Now I marvel at our silence, but to have told it then would have been impossible, and the fact that Paris knew but didn’t ask seemed a testament to his loyalty. Still his knowledge of Klaus was there, unspoken but absolute, a paradoxical thing, because it brought both unnatural intimacy and suspicion. He called. We had lunch together. Paris was often away from the city, however. He had many fish to fry, and I saw him infrequently. In those days I stuck close to the university, feeling safer there than in the wilds of downtown. But by May Stephen was gone, and I faced another summer alone in the city. Vowing never to waitress again, I took odd jobs of an academic sort, doing research for a medical historian, an old man who regarded me with a mixture of contempt and lust. The lost twenty pounds were back, and my hair had grown to chin length. In the streets men craned their heads to look, and in grocery stores, at bus stops, any place where I wasn’t moving, they addressed me with hope in their eyes. I took up smoking for a while, Marlboros in the red box. Cigarettes seemed to steady me then, but I had to give them up when I got sick. In July Mr. Morning came along, for whom I wrote reports, another story altogether, but by the time I left him, I was desperate for money again, and the headaches started, bad ones that struck like lightning and left me wretched and depressed.

  In August I got work as an English instructor for low-level employees in an insurance company. My seven students were eager to better themselves, and one young man named Jefferson had the sharpest memory I’ve encountered. He never forgot a word I said. We met every day for four weeks, and one day near the end, I was looking at Jefferson and he was looking at me, and half his face vanished. It didn’t last long, but I stopped talking and clutched my chair. That hole wasn’t the first and it wouldn’t be the last, but staring into the black emptiness, I believed it was real. I thought a part of his face was gone. Only later was I able to tell myself that I had suffered a migraine aura. The following months were a time when the everyday became precarious. At any moment an ordinary thing, a table or chair, a face or hand, might disappear, and with the blindness came a feeling that I was no longer whole. I had put myself back together and now my body was failing me. I knew the damned thing would crack.

  That fall I studied hard for my oral exams in the spring. I read the plays, poems, novels, and essays on the fantastically long list and then forgot them. My brain was a sieve. The words were wrapped in gauze, one letter as blurred as the next. The pain in my head was sometimes weak, sometimes strong, but it rarely left me. At Christmastime I went home to Webster and was well for two weeks, but in January I finally went to pieces. By then I had seen several neurologists with no luck. It was Dr. Fish who put me in the hospital. He gave me giant pills of Thorazine, a drug that made me so inert I couldn’t wiggle my toes. My thoughts, however, were a madhouse of insight and delusion, and I hadn’t the least idea which was which. After ten days, I checked myself out. Dr. Fish, whom I had hardly seen, was annoyed, but I pulled my frail carcass out of the bed, dressed, and tottered out to the desk in the hospital lobby. “I’m signing out,” I told the woman there. After I gave her my name, she presented me with a bill for $2,038.46 and asked me to pay it before I left. My university insurance had covered eighty percent of the bill. This was the remaining sum. I stared into her brown eyes and examined her straightened hair, combed smoothly behind her ears. The pain in my head seemed to put her at a great distance but at the same time, she was paradoxically large, like a person on a movie screen. She was speaking to me, explaining hospital procedure, telling me what had to be done. The bill was in my hand, and I studied the numbers. Stupidly I began to ponder the forty-six cents. I can pay that, I thought. Yes, that can easily be paid. The change was in my pocket. “Are you all right?” said the woman. I looked at her. She was lovely. Her skin was nearly black. I stared at it, then gazed down at the bill. “I’m sick,” I said to her finally, explaining myself to her simply. She gave me a perplexed look and waved someone over to the desk, a man. “Talk to her,” she said. “She doesn’t seem to understand about the bill.” The man was large and white, with pink blotches on his cheeks and forehead. I heard his voice drone on about what was expected, but rather than meet his eyes, I brought the paper very close to my face and read the numbers again: “Young lady,” he was saying. I’m unwell, I said to myself, sick as a dog. “The money . . .” he said. “Do you need time . . .” Slowly, thoughtfully, I folded the bill into a tiny square, put the paper in my mouth, and ate it. Walking across the lobby, I listened to their voices rise in protest, and when I put my hand on the door, the man said, “Let her go. We’ll bill her through the mail. She’s obviously got a screw loose.”

  I walked home through the park in the snow. As soon as I was inside my apartment, I fell into bed. Just before I slept, I thought to myself, He’s back, but it doesn’t matter. Nothing matters anymore. I slept for two days, waking intermittently to the pain and then falling again into unconsciousness. When I finally woke up, it was nighttime, and it seem
ed to me that the migraine was thinner, less severe. A tremendous excitement at the prospect of being well came over me. I sat trembling on the edge of the bed and caught a glimpse of myself in the mirror. You’ve lost weight again, I thought. You must eat. But I wasn’t hungry. I went to the closet, unwrapped the suit, and put it on. It’s all right, I told myself. There’s nothing to be done about it now. You can’t go on the way you’ve been going. It was Klaus who ate the bill, after all, and silly as it was, there’s a lot to be said for it. I went out the door, but this time I headed north toward Harlem, and when I crossed the threshold at 125th Street, I knew it was beginning again.

  Because I had no classes to attend, just exams to prepare, I was free to hide. I took out my phone again, using it only to call my parents once every two weeks. The truth is, I didn’t want anyone to see me sick. Although the migraines were better, I still had bad fits of nausea and vomiting, bowel trouble and periods of stupefying exhaustion. No doctor could help me. I had to handle it myself, and I discovered that if I lay in bed and chanted, repeating over and over the little incantation “Never mind,” I could dampen the pain considerably. I chanted a lot in those days. When I looked at the list of books I was supposed to know and felt the panic rise in my chest, I chanted. Each time the hospital sent a bill, I chanted. After an aura, I chanted. Before a meal, I chanted to keep the food down. And Klaus? I needed Klaus, and despite my sense that I had fallen again, the walks at night did me good, cleared my head. I haunted the Upper West Side, sporting the suit under the winter coat I had bought at a secondhand store—a man’s greatcoat. And. I had my hair cut so short that when I touched my neck, I felt bristle. I avoided the bars frequented by students and stuck to the seedier neighborhood joints. Again I found people unruffled by my eccentricity. The nights were dangerous. I walked where I shouldn’t have walked alone, but my recklessness pleased me. I sang loudly in the darkness, whistled at strangers, and once, I wrote NEVER MIND in huge letters on a wall with spray paint I had bought specifically for that purpose. These misdemeanors left me both invigorated and guilty. Each night, I told myself it was the last. Then in one of my late spots, a place called Stars, I bumped into Professor Rose.

  The bartender at Stars was an obese man who went by the name Toots. He was a sweaty, kind man who worried or pretended to worry about me. He had already been fed the pack of lies about Klaus or Klausina and had listened with sympathy. At the same time, it wasn’t clear to me that he believed these stories. He winked at me often and had a very intelligent look about him.

  “Klaus,” he said to me one night. “It’s time you got some new clothes. You’re a good-looking girl, you know, and that shabby suit looks dumb. Dumb, girl. Do you hear me? I don’t want to interfere, mind you. I’m not the interfering kind. It’s none of my business, but I say it’s a shame, and what’s more, I know you’re not a dyke. There’s not a dyke in the world as sweet as you.”

  “Thanks, Toots,” I said. “I guess you mean that as a compliment.” I looked down at my brandy.

  “And you’ve got to put some meat on those bones, fill out. Why, a strong wind would blow you away.”

  “Yes, Toots,” I said, and smiled at him.

  “Let me get you a burger from the kitchen,” he said. “It’s on the house.”

  “That’s okay,” I said. “Don’t bother with it.”

  Toots feigned deafness and went into the ktichen. The bar wasn’t crowded. It was late. A headache had set in, but it was mild. I realized I wanted the hamburger and was glad. Toots waddled back with a plate, fussing with the napkin and silverware. “Eat up, honey,” he said, and I felt a hand on my shoulder. It was Professor Rose. He studied me.

  “Iris?” he said. “Is it you?”

  “Yes,” I whispered.

  Toots was leaning on the bar. “Everything okay, Klaus?”

  Professor Rose gave him a sharp look.

  “Yes,” I said.

  “Come with me,” said my teacher, and taking my hamburger in one hand and my elbow with the other, he led me to a booth and gently pressed me into the seat. He sat down across from me and folded his arms. His face was the same, and the familiarity aroused me. I looked at the wall and felt his eyes. When I turned, his expression was ironic, the wary beginning of a smile on his lips. “What are you doing here? What’s happened to you?”

  I blushed. “I’ve been sick,” I said. “I know I look terrible.”

  He leaned back and shook his head.

  “I might ask you the same question,” I said. “An eminent professor like yourself. What are you doing here? This is a dump, in case you hadn’t noticed.”

  He grinned. “Even eminent professors need to get out of their apartments and have a drink late at night every once in a while. I live a block from here, Iris.”

  I watched him hesitate. He had heard Toots call me Klaus, and I guessed he was searching for the right words. He waved his left hand just above the table’s surface, and I remembered the mannerism. “Iris,” he said. “You’re in some kind of trouble. Maybe I can help you.” He paused. “I often thought of sending you a note from North Carolina, but it never got done.”

  I’m not sure whether it was the unwritten letter or just his voice that undid me, but I felt my face contort and my mouth quiver. One or the other was the catalyst for what must have been months of pent-up self-pity. In good times I cry often, shedding tears easily, but when times are bad, my ducts go dry and I almost never weep. The misery I felt then was grief. I wanted her back, my old self, the girl who had watched him go, and she was dead. I had mucked it up. Stephen, the hospital, my meager bank account, the suit, the half-eaten hamburger on my plate, all seemed equally pitiful, equally to blame, and I wept my heart out. I shook and sobbed and made a scene. The good, nosy Toots whisked my plate away and looked suspiciously at Professor Rose. “Klausey, Klausey,” he said, patting my arm. “It can’t be as bad as all that. You want me to get rid of this character?”