Honeydew: Stories Part 13

"Freedom from second sight," Lyle added. "I can have that freedom?" He turned toward Marcus. His remarkable eyes, an unremarkable brown, seemed to swell a little-tears had entered from the ducts.

Marcus put his arm around the boy's shoulders, sc.r.a.ping his elbow grievously on the back of the tree. "I think so."

The next week, Marcus appeared at dinner with a pair of spectacles-rimless, with wire earpieces. The lenses were constructed of hundreds of miniature polyhedrons.

"Prisms," said Pansy, and went on dishing out lapin aux pruneaux.

"Involuted prisms," refined David, who now lived with the family. He had become comfortable at last with his celibacy and inwardness; he was sometimes even talkative.

Marcus turned to Lyle. "These are for you," he said, and he handed the eyegla.s.ses to the boy. "Put them on whenever you like."

"They will give you a different kind of vision," David said. "And, Lyle-it's all right if you don't like the spectacles."

Lyle did not put them on inside. He went out onto the lawn with its commanding beech tree and its flowering bushes. He looked around at the normal thousand-color summer scene-normal to him, at any rate, though he understood it to be his alone. Now maybe he'd know a competing normal. He put on the gla.s.ses.

It was as if someone had turned out the lights or a thick cloud had pa.s.sed in front of the sun. Most creatures see things less brilliantly in the dark, he knew that. He was seeing things less brilliantly. The house, made of flat stones, was gray. Perhaps the gray contained some gold. On the laboratory's green siding, each slat cast a slightly darker green on the one beneath it. The beech tree was a combination of brown and red. The geraniums were a shade of magenta-one shade of magenta. He looked at his skin. Plain tan. He looked at the sky. Blue, slowly deepening-it was dusk now. Dark blue.

He went inside. "I like the gla.s.ses."

"And the colors?" Marcus asked.

"Duller. Many fewer. Motionless. Perspective is less noticeable. Things seem to have only a touch of a third dimension. I'm glad for the...diminishment. Now I have two ways to see. Thank you, Dad. Thank you, David. You've given me a wonderful present."

"We have given you a choice," Marcus said. "Always an ambiguous gift."

Lyle said suddenly, "Spiders-what's their vision like?"

David said, "Spiders usually have eight eyes placed in two rows on the front of the carapace. The eyes have a silvery appearance. The retinas have relatively coa.r.s.e-grained mosaics of receptor cells, and their resolution of images is..."

"Poor," said Marcus, finishing David's lecture and answering Lyle's question at the same time.

Lyle wore his gift every day, all day, until he went to bed-and even then he took the new gla.s.ses off only after he'd turned out the light. His cla.s.smates were incurious about the gla.s.ses-they were teenagers, after all, not interested in much outside themselves. But Lyle's new and commonplace vision gave him new and commonplace manners. He no longer stared into s.p.a.ce, his conversation became less effortful. Girls phoned him. He got included in more activities. Marcus and David made sungla.s.ses for him, and swimming goggles, biking goggles, wraparounds for chemistry lab. They made him a pair of pince-nez, which he wore to a Halloween party, along with a stiff collar and a frock coat and a false beard. "Chekhov," he explained. He joined the chess club. The club met Sunday mornings. His Sunday mornings were free. Ms. Lapidus had recently died.

In the lab Marcus and David were now constructing wide-angle micro-optical lenses. The lenses could be implanted-and were, after the proper trials-in a sufferer's eye. They made new tools for photography and tomography. They made corneal inlays. Pansy was running the business aspect of the enterprise, and managing the staff of five. Having learned so much about the tricks of the eye-brain double play, she became expert at standard optical illusions, and then invented some of her own, with which she beguiled the twin sons who had been born to her and Marcus. ("Their complexion is Unglazed Bisque," Lyle said of his brothers, remembering the old paint wheel.) Pansy began a side venture selling games of her own design. Some elaborate inventions she used at the twins' birthday parties, held in a newly built room off the lab. The kids' friends entered an illusory universe for half an hour, then gobbled up Pansy's sweet-potato ice cream, which was real.

VI.

At eighteen Lyle was accepted at St. John's. He was looking forward to reading the Greats. The day before he was to leave for Annapolis, a thick autumn mist enveloped G.o.dolphin and G.o.dolphin alone-the sun was out in Boston. A graduation gift from Anansi, Lyle thought. He walked down to the river. There the mist rested, soft and colorless. Slowly, deliberately, he took off his gla.s.ses.

Mist. Still mist. Then, gradually, colors returned, filled the scattered bits of moisture. According to the laws of physics, each drop should have contained a rainbow-but no, on this eve of departure, the drops, directed by the spider, were breaking the laws, each producing a singular shade for his pleasure, all together producing a universe of colors. Purple deeper than iris, laced with yolky lines. Bronze striped with bra.s.s. He saw the indigo of infected flesh, he saw the glistening fuchsia of attacking bacteria, he saw the orange of old-age crinkles that wait invisibly on every smooth young arm. Yes, all colors, in all their headachy variations, colors as they had once been.

His man-made gla.s.ses, his trickster specs, had made life less sorrowful, but at a cost. They had deprived him of this sheen of blue blue blue violet seeping into blue blue violet violet pressing itself into blue violet violet violet that yearns to become shadow. Vanilla hectored its neighbor papyrus. There was moss concealing like a mother its multigreened offspring. There were squirming nacreous snakes, slightly nauseating. Much is properly hidden from the eyes of men, Anansi had said...Chartreuse slashed like lightning across his vision from upper left to lower right and also from upper right to lower left, both slants remaining on his retinas that were so cursed, so blessed. Where one diagonal intersected the other in this chartreuse chiasma rested an oval, deep within the intersection, for of course the mist in which these shapes and colors shudderingly resided was three-dimensional or maybe three-and-a-half, and it was in motion too, the color drops a.s.saulting one another in a chromatic orgy. The oval within the chartreuse X was scaled with overlapping hexagons of nearly transparent turquoise-there must have been hundreds of turquoises, each different from the other by so little, so little, yet, by that little, different. What's your favorite color? people used to ask, as they always ask children. Red, he would answer, divining even then that they had no idea how many reds there were: a cloud at sunset, a cloud at sunrise, blood from a scratch, blood from a nose, a run-over cat; the dappled skin of a tomato, with all reds swimming upon it...He wondered, not for the first time, who his original father was.

He put his gla.s.ses back on. Mist returned to mist, ordinary mist, mist in whose every drop curved what people called the spectrum, such a paltry number of colors. This sight was no truer a reality than the glory of a few minutes ago; no less true either. Truth had nothing to do with the witness of the eyes. What he saw now was simply what other people saw. He chose their limited vision; he meant to live in this world as an ordinary man. He would not remove his gla.s.ses again.

Flowers On a bright Monday morning in February, Lois and Daniel were reading in their monochromatic living room-gray walls, gray carpet, gray furniture. It was the kind of room that could soothe a panic attack, or cause one. From the stereo Scriabin flung a cat's cradle of notes.

The doorbell interrupted the Russian madman. Daniel was still in bathrobe and slippers-this was his day without seminars to conduct or office hours to show up at. Lois answered the summons. She was already dressed: stovepipe pants, tee, jacket, all black. Iterations of this uniform in various dark colors hung in her closet like a line of patient men. She had not yet put on her shoes. But even barefoot she was six inches taller than the lanky teenage boy in the doorway, though the offering of gladioli he thrust into her hands rose above them both. "'Mrs. Daniel Bevington,'" the kid read from a yellow slip. Lois nodded. "There's a note," the boy said, and raced to a curbside van that bore the name of a local florist.

Daniel, noiseless as always, had followed Lois to the door. "Have we a vase long enough for those?"

"No." You can't really bury your nose in a gladiolus, but she tried. Meanwhile, boots pulled on because of the snow, he headed for the garage. She followed him, still barefoot, the purple shafts in her arms. He scanned the garage's tidy innards, chose a tall rubber basket the color of earth, picked it up and rinsed it under the outside tap. Then he filled the thing halfway with water. He put it down and returned to the living room, Lois still behind him, her feet turning blue. He spread the automotive section of the newspaper on the floor in front of a bookcase. He went back out for the rubber basket. Lois went into the kitchen.

She laid the flowers on the kitchen table and loosened their wrapping. She slipped the note from between the stalks. Happy Valentine's Day, it said. Love, Daniel.

She returned to the living room, the gladioli now horizontal in her arms. "Daniel! How sweet of you. So sweet." She put the flowers in the rubber basket.

"I'm glad you like them," he said, looking up, sounding briefly young, younger than their twin college-age sons, younger even than the delivery boy, who had probably thought he was fleeing a house of mourning.

"Like them? I love them," Lois said. Especially since I'm not really dead, she added silently. She walked to Daniel's chair and kissed him. This was the first time he'd sent her flowers since her lying-in.

He noticed that her eyes were unnaturally bright.

The doorbell rang again.

This time the truck was from a florist in a neighboring town. Another teenager said, "Lois Bevington?" He handed her twelve tall bloodred roses in their own vase.

She placed this gift on the low coffee table. Daniel was suddenly at her side. "Heavens," he said.

"Heavens," she echoed. She fingered the little pink envelope before opening it. He took the delay as an invitation to move still closer. Finally she slid out the card. From one who loves, it said. No signature. The words had been printed by a computer.

"Century Gothic," he identified. "I too was offered the use of the keyboard. I could have selected that font or any other. But I used my own pen."

"I prefer handwriting," Lois said in an earnest tone.

They returned to their chairs, though not to their reading.

The third truck belonged to a notable Boston florist. Its delivery person was a middle-aged woman. "Bevington?" she said.

Into the kitchen again, both of them. These flowers erupted from a shallow bowl. The elaborate ribbon and cellophane bright as tears at first prevented their identification, but when she cut the ribbon and removed the cellophane a rush of glory met their two gazes. The flowers were mostly white lilacs, with occasional sprays of heather and spikes of something very blue. She carried the bowl into the living room and placed it on the piano. An envelope fell to the floor. Daniel picked it up, as if the gift were for him. But it was meant for Lois, the four letters rounded, perhaps to disguise the penmanship, perhaps to make it legible.

"Open it," Daniel said in an unlikely bark. "Please," he amended. She extracted the card.

Love consists in this: that two solitudes protect and touch and greet each other.

Neither could identify the quote. Side by side on the gray couch they consulted their Bartlett's. The source was a letter written by Rilke.

"I don't believe those lilacs were sent to you by Rilke," said Daniel. "Not the tulips either."

"Roses," she murmured.

"Roses. They didn't come from a dead poet."

"No," Lois said, but whether she meant accord or disagreement or let's not speculate...that was anybody's guess.

In order to understand the sudden beflowering of an unadorned room, one must go back a month in time and half a mile in s.p.a.ce-back to the evening McCauley Bell selected the menu for the fiftieth birthday party he was throwing for his wife, Andrea. Lois had been hired to cater the event. She waited in her outsize kitchen, dreading the interview. McCauley Bell was a cardiologist, and so of course he'd forbid meat, soft cheeses, pte. He'd turn thumbs-down on her signature tiramisu, any mouthful of which could kill you if you were genetically inclined. He'd probably demand fruit salad and hardtack.

But he turned out to be a paunchy man of sixty with a voice as rich as Lois's seven-layer frivolity. She offered him a slice of frivolity, and then another. He indicated that he wanted to serve his guests exactly what his caterer liked best to make. He took all her lethal suggestions except Brie en crote; he explained that he had a relationship with a cheesemonger who supplied him every so often with very special wheels of Camembert.

"And every so often you sc.r.a.pe out his arteries?" Lois asked.

He smiled at her. "That's the surgeon's work." He felt a curious sympathy for this bony woman. She seemed to find smiling difficult-was it the slight malocclusion; had no one ever told her that buckteeth were s.e.xy? He knew she was married, but he suspected that she was insufficiently attended to.

"Yes," Andy said later, at home. She had taken an adult-education cooking course taught by Lois-Sweet Soups and Saucy Pies-and she had formed one of her shallow friendships with the tall teacher. They'd gone to Pirates of Penzance together. "The husband is out to sea and she doesn't know how to haul him in-that's my guess. He teaches algebra or something." In fact Daniel Bevington was a world-cla.s.s mathematician, but McCauley didn't trouble Andy with that information. "Lois does know how to monkey with ingredients, combines things you'd never think of. Chilies and melon, say."

The night before the party, the Bevingtons carried hors d'oeuvres and pastries into the Bells' permanently disordered kitchen. Lois opened the refrigerator that McCauley and Andy had emptied that afternoon. The Bevingtons stacked trays inside the fridge, taking turns, never b.u.mping into each other. Then Lois and Andy walked through the downstairs discussing the placement of the bar, the various routes from kitchen to the other rooms, the fact that the piano player could play just about anything if he was kept drunk enough.

McCauley watched the two women confer, Andy's soft freckled beauty facing Lois's profile. The sweet awning of the caterer's upper lip did not quite cover the uncorrected teeth. Her husband was still in the kitchen, looking out the window. There were probably rabbits in the backyard; there might also be coyotes. Rabbits with their rapid hearts, 335 beats a minute in some breeds, can go into shock when a coyote comes close: convenient for the predator. But McCauley saw as he too neared the window that there were no rabbits just now. The mathematician was staring at something else, maybe the birches, white as the snow....The man's pulse was seventy to eighty if his heartbeats were normal. McCauley estimated them to be on the slow side.

He positioned himself in the dining room so he could see both husband in the kitchen and wife in the living room. He already knew that the caterer was competent and reliable, and she probably was master of the renunciation you often saw in people who cooked for a living: she knew she must taste only enough of her creation to test its merit and not enough to satisfy her appet.i.te. But she had that streak of inventiveness Andy had reported...He shook his big head. Other people! Other people's marriages! He himself could be considered imperfect as a husband: he never noticed clothes, he'd be d.a.m.ned if he'd make the bed. As for Andy: she buried herself in idle novels, talked forever on the telephone, played tricks on people. All is lost. Fly-once she had telegraphed this message to her cousin, an importer of wines; and the fellow did leave town for a while...She forgot to buy toilet paper and pick up his shirts and complain to the electric company about the bill. But he loved her tolerant nature and ready arms and generous bosom and the light laugh when he reached his peak-he was still capable of it, even if the postcoital heartbeats had become more irregular and the breathlessness more prolonged. Then she'd laugh again, again lightly, while his slow detumescence brought her to her own pleasure. All couples have their peculiarities. Suddenly he wanted to get rid of the skinny pair who had invaded their house to do their work so capably, like dancers who knew each other's moves.

"Darling," he said to Andy and Lois. "I think you've obsessed enough about the pianist; just make sure the minions keep his gla.s.s filled." And then, gliding into the kitchen, his belly shaking just a little, he said to the mathematician, still staring out the window, "You must be sure to come back in the spring and see the three hundred tulips I planted last October, like the October before, and the October before that. Many of the old ones keep coming up. Nature has its way with us."

Daniel had not been looking at anything in the yard. Instead he'd been recalling an episode he'd witnessed earlier. It was brief, and soundless, and reversed-he'd seen it through the black mirror of the window, superimposed on the backyard geometry. He had been standing here then as he was now. All the stuff had been brought in. His dogsbody role had been played and he was at liberty. Lois was rearranging a tray of carved carrots and little pots of condiments. The Bells had been standing in the dining room behind Daniel. That is, in reality they stood behind him, but reality be d.a.m.ned; they were stationed right before his eyes in the very middle of the backyard. McCauley's left arm slid across Andrea's shoulders. Her right hand busied itself unseen, no doubt thrusting itself into his back pocket, curving her fingers around his pouf of a b.u.t.tock. They didn't look at each other, but she moved her head a couple of millimeters so her hair would tickle his nostrils, and he bent his head to ensure that result. That was all, decorous foreplay reflected in a window, yet he'd felt as if one of Lois's wooden spoons was stirring his entrails. He roiled first with jealousy and then with painful relief: for why envy the fat cardiologist his unkempt wife when he had as his own companion a gentle-voiced person who had painted all the rooms of their house gray and had grayed the rest of his life too, just the way he'd wanted it, perfect for contemplation. She'd even developed an interest in Scriabin. But such consideration must be commutative, or should be-what had been placed on her side of the equation?

And so, three days before Valentine's Day, he'd ordered the gladioli.

Oh, the roses? Lois had sent them to herself-perhaps they would light a flame, and fan it...

And the lilacs? They were paid for in cash at the Boston florist's-both Daniel and Lois separately winkled that information out of the proprietor. But the lady would say no more-probably knew no more. So Lois had to be content with the discovery that the deception she had concocted had doubled itself. Apparently she did have an admirer. It would not be the first time.

Daniel's interior was again contorted with anxiety. Two other bouquets! His wife was so desirable that unknown persons-persons unknown to him, anyway-sent flowers to her. Attention must be paid. And you can say this of him: he had a good memory, a strong resolve, and an ability, once something was brought to his notice, to keep noticing. Certain attributes could not be changed-he found numbers more interesting than anything else-but an affection that had once been planted in his heart now belatedly flourished. Nature does have its way with us.

After a time Lois found herself smiling more readily.

The day after the birthday party the Bells went to the Caribbean, and on Valentine's Day they were still there. Early that morning, while Andy still slept, McCauley padded to the office of the little resort, and collected the camellias he'd ordered, and took his pill. He returned to the cabin and strewed the petals over her naked form. Brushed by this silken shower, she opened the hazel eyes that had brought many men to their knees, some literally, and smiled at the one she'd chosen, and slipped out of bed to go to the bathroom, disturbing only a few blossoms. She came back and lay on the petals and opened herself to her husband. As he was entering, she remembered the lilacs she had impulsively arranged to be sent anonymously to her caterer and wondered if they had done mischief or good or anything at all, and then-Oh, my love, my darling, McCauley panted-she stopped thinking about the flowers and devoted herself to the work at hand.

Conveniences Amanda Jenkins was having a little trouble with her article, "Connubis."

"Not cannabis," she explained to Frieda, the girl from downstairs. "Do you really think anybody would read yet another dissertation on gra.s.s? Be your age."

"I'd rather be yours," said Frieda, who was fifteen to Amanda's twenty. "What's connubis?"

Amanda hesitated. Ben Stewart, eavesdropping from the bedroom, could hear for a few moments nothing but the sound of crockery being stacked. He and Amanda had agreed that dishes would be her task, laundry his. Now, at five thirty in the afternoon, she and her young friend were washing last night's plates, which had lain odorously in the sink all day.

"Connubis," Amanda resumed, "a coined word, refers to being married. Or being as if married."

"Like you and Ben," Frieda said.

"More or less."

Ben wondered why she was so wary. They were indeed living together as if married, a conventional enough arrangement these days. Only the difference between their ages was exceptional. But that difference was a mere ten years...

"Actually," Amanda was saying, "I am not Benjamin's lover but his daughter."

"Stop it," Frieda sighed.

"His niece," Amanda smoothly corrected. "By marriage," she further invented. "His relationship with my aunt soured considerably when he fell in love with me. We eloped. Now we live in fear of detection. If a large weeping gray-haired woman should one day appear-Ben's wife, my aunt, is a great deal older than me-please tell her..." She paused. Frieda waited. Ben waited too.

"Tell her what?" Frieda said at last.

"To peddle her vapors elsewhere," Amanda said triumphantly.

"Mandy!" shouted Ben.

She appeared in the bedroom doorway, curly-haired and ardent. Her T-shirt said AUTEUR.

"Please stop feeding nonsense to poor Frieda," said Ben. "What will she think?"

Amanda joined him on the bed and lay on her side, propped on an elbow. "She'll discount the nonsense and think what she already thinks. That we're libertines."

"Ah. And are we that?"

"I don't know. What are we, Benjy?"

Ben considered the question. He himself-dark, thickset, Brooklyn-born-was a respectful sort of person. He particularly respected Amanda, whose upright Maine family he also respected. Once, years ago, he had loved her older sister, presently married. Now he loved Amanda, but in a casual way. And impudent Amanda-what was she? At the least, an excellent student of literature. He wished that the college kids he taught were as clever.

"I am a conformist," he said, ill.u.s.trating his words by curving his hand around her breast. She giggled. He muzzled the Auteur, then put his chin into her curls and noticed that her double stood in the doorway. Frieda's T-shirt read G.o.dOLPHIN HIGH, CLa.s.s OF '82. "But, Frieda, you don't even live in G.o.dolphin," Ben remarked across Amanda's head.

"The shirt belongs to my cousin," Frieda said with her usual blush.

G.o.dolphin was the town-really a wedge of Boston-in which Ben, who worked in New York, and Amanda, who went to school in Pennsylvania, had elected to spend the summer. They had sublet a snug apartment at the top of a three-decker house. On the first floor lived an old couple, and on the second lived Frieda's aunt, Rennie, a young divorcee with a son at camp. This aunt exhausted herself day and night in her antiques store. Frieda herself was a child of Manhattan. Her parents, both art historians, were spending their summer in Italy, and Frieda had chosen G.o.dolphin over Florence's I Tatti.

"Your cousin would not recognize his garment," Ben said gravely to Frieda.

Amanda was on her feet again. "Come into the kitchen with us, Ben," she said agreeably. "Have you been asleep all afternoon?"

Ben got out of bed. "I'll be with you in a minute."

He used the bathroom, then paused in the dining room. He and Amanda were in the habit of eating at the round table in the kitchen and reserving the heavy oak table in the dining room for work. Their two typewriters, one at either end, looked like combatants. Each machine was surrounded by papers and books, Ben's piles orderly, Amanda's in disarray. Though he had no intention of working at this hour, Ben sat down in front of his typewriter in order to groan.

Frieda had an affinity for jambs. Now she stood aslant between the kitchen and dining room. "What are you writing about?"

"Hawthorne," he said. "The first novel," he expanded. "Name of Fanshawe," he summed up.

She waited for a while. "Oh," she said. "I haven't read any Hawthorne."

"Do so soon."

"Fanshawe. A book of Gothic posturing," Amanda called from the kitchen. "But the setting is excellent. And there are a couple of more or less comic characters. I find Hawthorne a not-bad writer."