The Blind Man's Wife

With the talk on the island that the astronomer and writer Willard DeWalt had lost his sight, no one asked him about his writing. Instead, people insisted on hearing a story. They were glad for the simplest thing of this gifted man, that he was alive, and were inspired by his stories, always uplifting, never about blindness. Yet there was a frown of unresolved crisis in DeWalt's features that made a crease of blame in his face, and the sour stillness in his house suggested the blurred stink of a sickroom.

He kept saying, "Look, I'm fine!"

He knew what they were thinking. The blind were not scribblers. They were celebrated in their evasions as storytellers and talkers. People patronized the blind, tried to propitiate them for their gloomy emanations, their supposed darkness; tiptoed around them, sat at their feet, feared them, asked them for stories, tried not to stare at the stains and crumbs on their shirtfronts, were jittery listeners, fearing what might come next.

"Of course, I dream much more," DeWalt said, and it seemed he was talking about before and after. He had married late, a mature passion of the most romantic kind, a very beautiful woman. What had happened to her? people also wondered.

Telling his stories, DeWalt spoke with the detachment, the fatalism of someone very ill and, as he went on protesting that he felt fine, seemed to suggest that he was serene because he was so dangerous--what need for a strong man to be violent?

•

Willard "Wink" DeWalt, author of that singular book The History of the Moon, lived on Martha's Vineyard, near West Chop, in the lane on the bluff where the paved road ends. Even years ago, when he still had sight, DeWalt believed that the active part of his life was over. He accepted that no great event would befall him, that he would grow smaller, his life narrower, less accidental, and he would die here in obscurity, one of those small rainy funerals in an up-island cemetery of old chewed-looking gravestones.

If that had been DeWalt's fete, there would be no story to tell.

For much of his self-imposed retirement, DeWalt seldom ventured out, he said, telling his story in the third person, and when he did he kept to the same safe walk. He was not seeking anyone, not looking for anything, just passing the time. He was supremely content, steadied by his indifference.

There had been one scare, but that was on his former route. An old wet-eyed pedestrian named Cubbage ambushed him, saying, "You're the writer they call DeWalt," and, feebly bullying him, invited him home. DeWalt praised the design of the house. "Got the plans out of Popular Mechanics!" DeWalt wanted to leave, but Cubbage detained him. "Want to buy it? It's less than a million. You could write another book here." The man seized a banjo off a tattered hassock; he said, "This is a little thing called 'Sleepytime Gal,' " and strummed a bit and began to cry miserably. "It's my wife," he said, his face streaming with tears. "Cancer took her. Thirty years we were married. You can't replace someone like that. Make me an offer on the house."

DeWalt fled. He changed his route. He believed that he was happy because he had conquered desire and was floating, having achieved some sort of Buddhist ideal of nonattachment, as he sometimes joked. He was satisfied with the work he had done, a major book, his history.

He had never married. "I'm married to my work!" He loved his house, which was built on the bluff from his own design. His old Toyota station wagon. "You can't get a better car." His Celestron telescope. "I can see dust storms on Procellarum." His book was still in print, still selling; he was constantly getting letters from new readers complimenting him, for his book was lunar history, lunar geography, lunar literature, astronomy, physics, philosophy, tours of the maria, chronicles of moonquakes. His life had been composed of many gestures, his work that became this book one great act of achievement. And the dumb luck of an inexpensive lot in West Chop years back that was now worth millions.

On good days he walked in the woods behind the lighthouse, loving the smell of the trees and flowers, the pitch pines, choke cherries, scrub oaks, the leaf mold, the squirrel-chewed acorns, the sun warming the long grass, hot tussocks of timothy and cushions of moss like dense velvet that made him feel weigh less.

He stuck to West Chop because in Vineyard Haven he saw women he had known years ago, swollen shapeless creatures like big bosomy men, and he realized that he had slept with them in his early days of fame, on the appearance of his celebrated book. He was chastened, for now they had come to look like him--solitary, unexercised, asexual, subtly mustached, unsteady, plodding like browsing animals, sad, anonymous except to him, who knew their history. He felt guilty and apologetic, for one he took to be a former lover, a misshapen woman in a familiar knit, was in fact a man he had never seen before and the sort of person he knew he would keep bumping into afterward at the post office and the market.

Everything changed for Willard DeWalt one end-of-summer day on the bluff of West Chop near the lighthouse when he saw a lovely woman standing alone. She faced him looking fascinated and then turned away from him and walked toward the tennis courts. DeWalt felt panic so deep in his throat it chafed his heart. He was hobbled. One look told him he needed this woman. Back home he pondered the irrationality of his desire for this young reckless-looking woman and concluded that she was the one person who had been missing from his long life.

Understanding this, he was briefly happy, then he was ashamed and finally sorrowful, knowing the despair of infatuation. He would wither and die without her; with her he would live. He now knew the reason he had taken the same walk every day. It was to meet this woman and have hope. This realization occupied him for one whole muddled day. If this was love, it was something terrible.

That night he lay in bed and could not call up her face. Her beauty was too subte to remember with any particularity or to describe without his seeming smitten. He hungered to see her again. He wanted to hold her tightly, and not kiss her but devour her.

The next day he found her on the same spot, and she hurried away, her suddenness like a flushed quail calling attention to her flight down the road to the set of mailboxes reading Loss, Titley, Ours, Levensohn, Lempe. Which was she? In the days that followed he saw her twice more.

Self-conscious, he was reduced to being stealthy, glancing sideways to stare at her, to satisfy himself, but staring only made him hungrier. He became impatient, honest, even brutal. He was reminded of his distant past, of being small and poor, rather young, ignored by more powerful people while he toiled at his astronomy and felt fameless. His book's title, the very mention of moon, provoked his friends to patronize him, until the book was reckoned a masterpiece and was then the occasion of their envious jokes.

Now people asked, "How are you, Wink?"

He said, "I'm miserable," but misery made him truthful.

Speaking bluntly released his feelings of frustration and shame. In the past he had often said the opposite of what he meant. "You seem perky," to distracted souls; "Great talking to you," to laconic men; "I'll try to remember that," to pedants.

Now he would say, "People might call themselves perfectionists, but at the bottom of pedantry is an abiding laziness. They were against mybook. Raise enough objections and you never have to accomplish anything. Pedantry is aggressive, it's obstructive."

This truthfulness gave him confidence, and the next time he saw the beautiful woman at West Chop he said hello.

"I was looking at that sailboat," she said.

The windjammer Shenandoah out of Vineyard Haven.

"Isn't she beautiful?"

With his customary bluntness he said, "I hadn't noticed. I couldn't take my eyes off you. You are so lovely." He wanted to add, You represent all the joy I've missed in my life.

Her laughter told him he had made an impression, and he could see she was gentle, kindly, even conversational. They talked inconsequentially about the ferry schedule. He said, "See you tomorrow."

That night he thought, And I hate my face.

He had fallen in love with her, and he knew it was love because it was agony, the worst hunger, the sort you died from. He felt famished when he saw her--her bright eyes, her full lips, her clear skin. She was like another species from the women he had known. (continued on page 168)Blind(continued from page 100) He sought her out and felt humiliated by his longing for her.

To his delight, he began to run into her everywhere--at the drugstore on Main Street, on the beach below the lighthouse, walking along the ferry landing, in the bagel cafe and in the camera store where he was buying a pair of binoculars. Melanie Ours was her name.

These encounters took the form of an old-fashioned courtship in the open air. He wooed her, doing most of the talking. She encouraged him to describe his book. He pointed to the bright crusted moon and made a narrative of its barnacles. Melanie was simple, soft-spoken, appreciative and loving. One day she was clutching a small dog in the crook of her arm, nuzzling it and cuddling it in a way that suggested, I could treat you like this.

"It's not mine," she said. "It's a friend's."

Wondering what friend made him unhappy. But he saw Melanie Ours again and loved her more. He mentioned to her that he was older than she by more than 20 years. She said, "So?" He feared she might want children. She smiled and said, "I want you."

Nothing could have been simpler. They married, she moved in with him, he was joyful. They lived together in his house on the bluff behind West Chop.

He sometimes mentioned places where they had bumped into each other.

She said, "I knew you'd be there," and explained that she had known his movements and had contrived deliberately to appear at these seemingly chance encounters. He laughed shyly, feeling desired. She said, "I found you fascinating." It had been an adventure, an achievement more satisfying than his book.

What more was there to know? Perhaps nothing except that he learned she was devoted to him, responsive and loving, forgiving as only a friend can be.

"I'm sorry, darling," he said, early on, in bed, feeling futile.

She held him, kissed him, and he wanted to weep with gratitude.

Months of bliss. He sometimes became alarmed when she was out of his sight. Setting eyes on her, he fell in love with her all over again and blessed his luck. She was a light to him. Her flesh glowed, her eyes, her hair; she was his moon now. "I thought I knew what happiness was." He was reminded that in the early, active part of his life he had been deluded.

This clarity of vision--his life now-- was philosophical but a paradox, for he found that in fact his eyesight was failing. He had trouble reading, even with glasses. He could not drive at night without being dazzled by the headlights of oncoming cars.

He had his eyes tested. He failed the exam. "It's to be expected at your age," the doctor said. "But new glasses won't help. You have cataracts."

He regarded this as good news--the promise that after his operation he would see better and be bathed in the glow of his lovely wife. But why before the operation was he asked to sign a waiver?

The doctor said, "There's less than a one percent chance of the operation going wrong."

After the operation, still bleary-eyed and groping, he was given drops for his eyes. Melanie helped him apply the drops, and his eyes became scorched and infected; he lost his corneas, got a transplant and more drops. The transplant failed. He howled.

As though rehearsing his defense in a malpractice suit, the doctor sternly reminded him of the odds: "Someone had to be in that one percent."

Because he had signed the waiver DeWalt could not sue, he was not compensated--he did not need money anyway. He wanted his eyesight back, even the feeblest sort, as on the days when he had said, "I can see your face, sort of dark, but not your features." He would have settled for that.

Blind, he could not bear to be away from Melanie. Yet even when she was with him he was not consoled. He spoke to her--she did not seem to hear him. He reached for her but was seldom able to put his hand on hers. Something wintry in her manner--why? He had never sensed it before, perhaps because her adoring eyes, her face, her luminous skin had always overwhelmed him. Now he was aware of her as a different presence--her thumping footsteps, she was clumsy; the sharp odor of her body; her harsh voice.

When she touched him her hands chilled him, he was appalled; her fingers felt reptilian even as she said, "Of course I love you." Or, he thought, is it me? Sometimes, as though to keep away from him, she used the juicer--juiced every piece of fruit in the rackety thing. "Can't hear you!" and gave him juice and told him he was ungrateful.

He was now confined to his house, and the house that had been a vantage point on the universe was now his tiny prison. He was bewildered in it, in rooms like obstacles. He tripped over his telescope and broke it. So what? He couldn't use it. He could not go anywhere with her, yet more and more she was absent.

"I need to shop--everything takes longer when you come along."

Shop for what? She had never shopped before. He began to ask her where she had been.

"Getting my nails done," or "Having my hair colored," or "At the dressmaker's."

But why? He could not see the nails, or the hair color, or her clothes.

"It's for me," she said.

He was confused by the mingled smells of her perfume, her nail polish, her shampoo, her new clothes. His blindness had wakened his other senses--he was hyperalert, sensitive to all stimuli. "I smell ginger," or "Smoke--tobacco smoke--in your hair."

He smelled a man, he smelled sex, something humid, doglike and a roughness like razor burn on her chin. He was too sad to kill her. Instead, I'll kill myself.

What kept him from it was that she was sadder, and tense, as though she had received some bad news.

"What's wrong?"

"Please, leave me alone."

He heard her on the phone, speaking with the sort of childlike urgency that a person uses with a doctor, as he had spoken to his own eye doctor--and he was struck by the way she listened, with respect and self-conscious impatience.

She was gone all the next day. She returned spent, emptied of all her vitality. "I must lie down."

He said, "If I didn't know better, I would have guessed you've just had some sort of medical procedure."

She said nothing, yet she smelled of antiseptic and cheap soap.

"Something like an abortion."

"I'm too weak to argue with you."

"You're never home."

"I was sick! You don't care!"

After all that time, their first argument--she insisted that she loved him but was like someone else, someone cruel, a stranger. He knew nothing about her. After she raged and frightened him she disappeared for a day more. She returned with a new smell on her. These odors overwhelmed all other impressions and became like colors and shapes, some of them as layered and complex as unanswered questions.

Was he missing something because he was blind, or was he seeing her as she really was? There was that voice. Sometimes, speaking to him, she seemed a little formal and overinformative, as though she were also addressing someone else; and a little too obvious, trying to prove a point, as though she had a listener she was teasing with scripted detail and a sort of mocking pomposity.

"I certainly would not expect someone like you to understand the priorities of a woman whose primary goal is to find some sort of focus to give a balance to her life."

"What's that noise?"

He was still, stifled by unfamiliar creaks in distant parts of the house.

"I didn't hear anything."

One evening at a party DeWalt felt awkward and lost in the house, so he stood to the side, out of the way of guests, waiting for Melanie to bring him a drink. Brushed by a stranger, he inhaled a familiar odor.

"You've been sleeping with my wife," he said without thinking.

He was surprised when a woman snorted and pinched his arm and said, "You're imagining things!"

Guilty people in farces recited that platitude, but farce was so near to tragedy. He saw that he was becoming shrewder; he had a clear vision of that woman's drunken face, purple, putty-like, with weepy, reddened eyes.

He was nimbler in his house--he knew the phases of the moon. Melanie stumbled in the dark, she banged doors, she fuddled with simple things like the telephone and the bath plug, and she faltered in corridors where now to his astonishment he was completely at home. There was someone else lurking; he knew it clearly one new-moon night, in the big cluttered front room that looked onto the Sound. He had become accustomed to the dark. The other person was lost in it and made an uncertain doglike shimmy, a backing up: someone making way for him.

"Who's there?"

"Who do you think?" And she laughed in that overprepared way as though she had an audience and was laughing on someone else's behalf.

"A man."

She jeered much too loudly, attempting a convincing denial, a bit of theater.

Using his fingertips he traced his way through the room, surprised by how well he knew the route, and went upstairs, where he paused and heard the front door click shut. Then he heard his wife unsteadily on the stairs.

"It was a woman. That's why you laughed that way."

Memory helped, the moon helped, desperation helped, blindness did the rest. He could see with his teeth, with his tongue, his lips, his face, his whole body. He knew later that the two must have been making love--an unmistakable vibrato--the specific sounds, irregular like a lapse from ordinary life, and not like sex between a man and a woman, a pattern of slaps he knew, a familiar rhythm, a top and bottom, an act writhingly echoic, but instead a ptussle of equals, the percussive kisses, the whappity-whap of two women: a sudden sandwich with no filling.

From believing that he was always alone, he began to understand that he was never alone. Even when there was no conversation he was aware of another presence, a muffling physicality that filled a space in the room and blunted the sounds he made, something molecular and clothlike. No darkness at all, only light that was loosely or tightly woven, always revealing a coarse or helpful light. What people called darkness and feared, for him had a face and features: He now knew the whir of human atoms.

Smells, too, perfumes that pierced his eyes, duskier aromas in his nostrils, a further fleshier suggestion that he tasted on his tongue, the distinct earthiness of swallowed food. Another person--had to be a woman; a man would have been less circumspect.

He tried to follow these smells, to account for them.

"I don't smell anything."

If she believed that betraying him before his blind eyes was working, she was wrong.

"It was a man last week, but this week it's a woman."

She laughed again, the conspiratorial, informing laugh, and her laughter roused an unmistakable movement that jarred the room.

"Or two women"--guessing that was why she laughed.

Sometimes the sound of kissing was like the sound of a certain sort of secret eating, furtive snacking on overripe fruit, and at other times the lovemaking resembled two soft bodies plopping through heavy clouds, encountering turbulence; or like a single person sleeping badly. They were bold in daylight but even bolder in the dark, believing that because they could not see they could not be seen. It was all desperate and deathlike, the eroticism of solitude, the opposite of the crackly randomness of ordinary life.

People held in the rapture of sexuality were trapped animals. He shamefully remembered, I'm sorry, darling.

"I know what you're doing."

To test her he pleaded for help and he found himself alone. It was a ruse: He knew his way around the house, but he could expect nothing from her. In the daylight he understood much; at night he understood almost everything. He was not confused by the shadows: He thought of night as a friend, blindness as a gift.

His dead eyes made his wife reckless. He was not fooled. He knew her better, knew that she had taken lovers, thieved his money, his blindness her opportunity; but he was not deceived.

There was worse to come. At another party he sniffed at a vase of flowers and said, "That water smells of my eye medicine."

"You wouldn't want to put that in your eyes," the hostess said, and she explained that the chlorine in the water kept the flowers fresh longer by killing the bacteria.

Now he understood exactly who Melanie was and what she had done to him. She had the Evil Eye, but that was not unusual: Everyone who had eyes to see had the Evil Eye. She was the one who sounded lost and said in the dark, "Who's there?" The woman was simple, greedy and obvious. He knew her and pitied her; he knew himself with a kind of hatred. The paradoxes of his recent past exhausted him.

All the beauty he had once known was false; he conceded that the world was an illusion. His book was false, history was false, what you saw was false. His life was not a tragedy but a revelation of unanswerable facts. He now knew what it was like to be dead, to be a specter, to see everything without being seen. What did you do with this enlightenment? You understood why. You became obnoxious, truthful, stubborn. You went mad.

A man said, "I've been on a diet."

He replied, "You've got a long way to go."

The editor of a magazine introduced herself. He said, "Not at the top of my reading list, I'm afraid."

"That is hateful," he said to a boy in Oak Bluffs in a convertible listening to Missy Elliott singing "Get Ur Freak On."

Explanations were pointless, understanding was like torture. It did not help that he now saw clearly his wife's crime--not the dallying but her plot against him, her blinding him. How the woman who had plotted to marry him, whom he had loved, had substituted another solution for the one that had been prescribed to counter his eye infection. She had blinded him with the drops. He had lived through a mystery. He had solved a crime. Would anyone believe him? He interested a lawyer in the case, demanding secrecy, and rid himself of Melanie Ours.

The man Cubbage, who had accosted him and played the banjo and wept over his wife? DeWalt met him again on the road, and Cubbage was happy, pitying DeWalt for his blindness, and was over his bereavement--indeed he had remarried and was delighted that he had not sold his house. "We're sitting on a fortune here." The old misshapen women friends that DeWalt had shrunk from before he now saw as contented souls, healthier than he was. "I am so sorry, Wink," they said.

He sometimes wished for his sight back so that he could be calm, generous and benign. He was not pathetic, he was powerful; another life was beginning, but a harder one--he had no faith. He read nothing. He did not believe the lies of written history, the daily news or the consolation of friends. His own book he regarded as little more than a lunatic fiction. Every written word was fiction or a half-truth. The worst of the visible world was bearable only because of its deceits and the way its truth was always hidden. But as a blind man liberated by a selfish woman, he saw everything, and so he suffered, not from blindness but from clear-sightedness.

He had an answer: He would leave the island and live in a place where no one could identify him as blind, yet he knew with sorrow, having told his story, that a kind of hideous fame awaited him.

He had fallen in love with her, and he knew it was love because it was agony, the worst hunger, the sort you died from. He felt famished when he saw her.

He was now confined to his house. What had been a vantage point on the universe was now his tiny prison.