A Blind Man Can See How Much I Love You

Stars at Elbow and Foot

I feel my baby’s arms around my neck. Hidden wrists, flesh the color and feel of white tea roses, the rising scent of warm cornbread. I wake up and find the pillow twisted beneath my chin, a few strands of my hair caught in the pillowcase zipper. Marc hears me or feels me beginning to cry and wards it off as best he can.

“Gotta piss,” he says, and he smooths the covers down as if to soothe his side of the bed.

I rock the pillow and reach for a Prozac and the glass of water on the nightstand. My whole house is decorated by an invalid: boxes of tissues, half-drawn curtains, sweaty nightgowns, aspirin, marjoram shower gel (guaranteed by Marcs New Age secretary to “lift your spirits”), fading plants. I do not understand why death inspires people to give greenery.

Marc comes back to bed, and I am kind enough to pretend that I’m asleep. If I were awake, he would have to comfort me. The circles under his eyes darken and crease the skin down to his cheekbones. Why should either of us have to endure his comforting me? He puts his hand on my hip, as if to balance himself, but I know he’s checking. Am I twitching, am I sweating, are my shoulders heaving? He’s a good man; he will avoid me only once. Having got off the hook earlier, he is compelled to be attentive. I sound like I hate him, which I don’t.

I do fantasize about his death, however. I strangle him with the umbilical cord, the blue-pink twist they took off Saul’s little no-neck. The doctor, my own obstetrician — a perfectly pleasant, competent woman, a Democrat who sits with me on the boards of two good causes — is perforated by the smallest, sharpest scalpels, as in an old-fashioned knife-throwing show, until she is pinned to the wall of the operating room in pieces, her lips still moving, apologizing, but not so profusely that I might think she was at fault and sue her for malpractice or wrongful death or whatever it is that my brother-in-law told us we could sue for. My wrongful life, my dying marriage, how about the house plants and the students I don’t give a damn about? For the nurses and the intern who assisted Mary Lou, I use dull scalpels, and I stick them with horse-size epidural needles when they try to escape.

I made an attempt to go back to my office three weeks ago. I picked up my mail and was doing fine, ignoring the silences and the sotto voce inquiries, which practically screamed “Better you than me.” Martha, our department secretary — old, frightened, useless since we all got computers — handed me my messages and a stack of departmental memos. Her ancient poodle was wheezing on his little bed beneath her desk.

“Your shirt…” she said, and I looked down at the wet blue circles and left.

I sat in the ladies’ room, pressing my breasts, kneading my shirt and my bra until tiny white tears dripped onto my fingers. I left my mail on the floor, and someone sent it to me anonymously, with kind intentions, two days later.

I go back again, braced with a Percodan-Prozac cocktail, which you will not find in the Physician’s Desk Reference. Information about an MLA conference I seem to have organized in Edinburgh is coming through on the department fax. The man faxing me is very excited, and his words leap about on the cheap, oily paper. He is expecting a draft of my presentation in two weeks and me in four. I don’t think so. I tell Martha to fax him back that I will not attend and that I will not send the notes for my talk.

She is concerned. I treat Martha the way my mother taught me to treat our domestic servants. I am gracious and reasonable and accommodating. She adores me (and appreciates her annual Westminster dog show tickets), and the faculty Marxists (former Marxists — I don’t know what they do with themselves now) gnash their teeth over us. Martha hesitates. It cannot be good for me professionally to cancel at this late date. Perhaps I will not be asked to chair a panel again soon. Perhaps my reputation at the university will diminish and Martha’s office status will go from endangered to extinct. I fax the message myself: “Cannot come. Baby dead. Maybe next year. Onora O’Connor.”

A girl is waiting for me in the hall. I don’t mind girls too much, and I can even feel sorry for them, since I know what’s in store for them and they don’t. When I was her age, I’d look at women like me with just that same disgusted disbelief. Their stomachs billowed out, their asses dragged, their hair hung in limp strands or was sprayed up into alien shapes. Why did they do that to themselves? They must all have been ugly girls and never recovered. But I was not an ugly girl, I put this young thing in the shade when I was her age. I did art modeling for tuition money — servants were a phase, not a lifestyle — and loved it. My body defied gravity, defined lush perfection. Peach juice would run out if I was bitten. I was fucking perfect for three years of my life, and not too shabby until the recent past.

I signed her forms, promised her she could be in my Auden seminar come fall, and escaped, feeling like a check bouncer in a mom-and-pop grocery. Sure, here’s my address, watch me record the amount, like it matters. There’s nothing in the bank. I am no more going to teach in the fall than play third base for the Yankees.

I leave the building, passing clusters of women. I hate them all; I don’t even see the men. When I hear or smell babies coming, I leave the room. These women, all these women, are pregnant, or will be, or have been, or don’t want to be, or have suffered some made-for-TV disaster like mine. It doesn’t matter; whether they are like me or lucky, I hate them, and I seem to make it pretty clear, because they turn just a little, feet unmoving while their hips shift, and I cannot join them without barging in.

I find a woman sitting in my kitchen, not obviously pregnant but she might be — she could let it drop in the middle of our conversation or else make a huge effort and say nothing at all so Marc can struggle with telling me privately. I wonder if he’s sleeping with her, but I can’t imagine it. He looks as bad as I do. Every time he shaves he nicks another spot; his whole face is lightly gouged, as if he’d been rather listlessly assaulted. There are four deep-green rows of wine bottles on our kitchen counter. Marc has been steadily working through cases of California Merlot and Zinfandel.

“I’m Jessica? From the Neonate Program at the hospital? Memorial Unit Three?” She goes on talking, but I’m stuck. Doesn’t she know who she is? Is she asking me? Does she think I’ve forgotten the floor name? Does she think I remember her? Marc is nodding, with tears in his eyes. She must be talking about Saul.

“… that you might be interested in …”

“What?”

She sighs, just a little bit — I should appreciate how patient and understanding she’s being. Do I look like I give a fuck? You, do you think I can even smell you without wanting to puke? I may start puking if she doesn’t leave soon. Hormones, medication, lots of obvious explanations for my sudden vomiting. I measure the distance to the kitchen sink and figure whether I could hit her shoes on the way. She’s still talking, and Marc has put his hand on my shoulder. Saul is definitely the subject.

“… your loss. I worked with one woman who went through this experience, and I think she found it very helpful. So I mentioned it to your husband.”

“What?”

“The Pediatric Volunteer Program. After orientation, you spend time with children on the unit until they go home.”

“Or die.”

Jessica looks at Marc, who is no longer touching my shoulder in a display of emotional support. He cradles his face in his left hand, rolling a wet cork across the table with his right index finger.

“Oh no, you don’t spend time with terminally ill children. Our volunteers visit with the children recovering from surgery, getting fitted for prostheses, things like that. Not terminal cases.”

I can see her thoughts through a suddenly opened window in her forehead. Jesus, she’s thinking, this woman is clearly not suitable for any kind of program, how do I leave without upsetting her? The transparent patch in Jessica’s forehead is a product of sleep deprivation, as Mary Lou has already explained to Marc and me. The moments when Saul, at various ages, comes to me and weeps in my arms, the tendency to see people’s words as they say them and sometimes when they don’t, the sensation that objects are only two-dimensional — these are typical symptoms of sleep deprivation. Not to worry.

“I’ll think about it. Why don’t you leave your card. Thanks for coming. Good-bye.” I think this comes out pretty well, but I can see from her face that I have left out something key, like inflection. Too bad. If she wants affect, she can talk to Marc. I go upstairs and lie down with my shoes on (but my soles don’t touch the bedspread — I’m not that far gone) until I hear the front door close.

Another agonizing evening with the O’Connor-Schwartzes begins. Marc is solicitous, then hurt, then apologetic, then furious, then guilty, then back to the beginning, then exhausted. He usually falls asleep between guilt and the third bottle of wine.

I cannot kill myself — we do not commit that sin, it is such bad form — but I find myself teetering at the stair landings, walking quickly on the narrow, slick marble steps of the library, seeing how long I can keep my hands off the steering wheel. Come and get me.

This is not a hospital ward, it is the Hieronymus Bosch Pediatric Purgatory. I have been told to wait with the other child lovers shuffling along in pastel sweatsuits and massive sneakers or two-hundred-dollar cardigans thrown over jeans and posy-covered turtlenecks. Apparently, only women are in need of this kind of entertainment. As we go through the halls of gasping infants, and toddlers with metal shunts sticking out of their heads, and older children playing tag with their IVs, I notice that my little group is more varied than I thought. Two of the six look late-middle-aged, and their expressions are of pleasant concern and universal affection. Two others are quite young, very Junior League, and if they have lost babies they’ve been spending quite a bit of time in the gym ever since. The woman right next to me is black, meaning the color of strong coffee, and her expression, at least, is familiar to me. She looks enraged and terrified, and when she sees a nurse her lips curl up and back, revealing wonderfully pointed incisors. When we are seated for orientation, in a window-less room with firmly cushioned chairs and love seats, I perch on the edge of a table, and the little nurse leading the group knows enough not to encourage me to join the circle. She asks what each of us hopes to get out of this program, and the others say whatever they say, and the black woman and I snarl and look away. Even I, with my impaired judgment, cannot believe that they’re going to let people like us have contact with helpless children. Then she asks if we have preferences about the kids we spend time with. The others say prettily that it really doesn’t matter. The she-wolf says, “Not a black child,” and I say nothing at all.

I ask for a little time to get acclimated, and the nurse lets me trespass quietly, unsupervised. All the children I see are engaged. They are being fed and held, or being sung to as their dressings are changed. They cry out briefly as their scarlet stumpy parts are washed and rewrapped. When the nurses and aides see me watching, they scowl or smile quickly; visitors are not much help. Some of the rooms are overflowing with Mylar balloons, photo-filled bulletin boards, parents, toys, comic books. I am looking for a room with nothing but a kid and a cot.

He is there, at the end of the hall. He comes out of his room to greet me in a state-of-the-art wheelchair, its front built up like a combination keyboard and portable desk. He holds a silver stick in his mouth and presses the keys on the console with it. We watch each other. He is ugly, not at all what Saul would have been. Sallow, greasy little rat face, buzz-cut black hair, stick-out ears. As he bends over the console, I see the back of his thin, hairy neck.

“Hey,” he says, letting go of the stick. I thought he couldn’t be more than three, but no toddler could speak like that — as if he’d been living on the streets for fifteen years and this hospital was just one more dead-end job.

“Hey, yourself.” I’m blushing.

“Could you move?”

I flatten myself against the wall and he rolls past, stick pressed hard to the flat orange disk in a row of concave blue buttons. The wheelchair has tires fit for a pickup truck, and the sides go up to his neck like a black box. I look down as the whole thing lumbers past. Under his little T-shirt he has no arms.

“Bye,” I say.

“Yeah.”

I cannot befriend the nurse at the front desk, but I do persuade her to tell me about him. Jorge. His story is horror upon unending horror — proof, not that I needed it, that the thought of a God is even more frightening than a world without one. Nobody is coming to take him home. He is not considered lovable, and the occasional saints — the foster parents who take in the AIDS babies and the cancer-ridden children — don’t want him. What does he like? I ask the nurse. Nothing, she says. Whatever he likes, he’s been keeping it to himself.

I wait by his room. He will not show his pleasure, but he will be reluctantly, helplessly pleased. Who has ever come back for a second, nonclinical look?

“Gum?”

“What kind?”

“Bubble Yum. Mint or grape.” It is what I chew.

“Grape.” He opens his mouth, and I unwrap the gum and place it on his white-coated tongue. He chews away, and then purses his lips around his joystick and moves off. At the end of the hall, he sits up and looks over his shoulder at me. He tongues the stick aside, keeping the blue gum in.

I wave. “See you tomorrow, Jorge.”

At home, I prepare for diplomacy and war. I shower, even using the marjoram gel. My spirits are lifted. I make Julia Child brisket and arrange a pretty salad. I open a bottle of Stag’s Leap and use the big-bowled wineglasses, the ones I have to wash by hand.

I tell Marc about him, lying. I make him sound sweet, responsive, appreciative. I don’t tell the story the nurse told me: how he spat in the face of an aide, saving up a mouthful of penicillin to do so. I don’t mention his all-over ugliness, the gooey squint in his right eye, the slight fecal odor surrounding him. I might as well have told Marc the truth. No, he says, we cannot take a disabled child right now.

We? I have to laugh. That old joke: What do you mean “we,” white man? I pick over the words in my mind, to get him to say yes, and then I don’t care.

“I’m bringing him home if they let me. He doesn’t have to be in the hospital, but his family can’t care for him, and his needs are too much for a residential place.” Of course they’ll let me. It must cost a fortune to keep him. And he’s so ugly.

“If you bring him home, I don’t know … I don’t think I can stay. Please don’t do this to us.”

An aide brings Jorge off the elevator, and they both stare at me in surprise. I open my briefcase slowly, making a show of the tight buckles as Jorge approaches. I can hear the warm, sticky roll of the tires on the linoleum floor. We’ll have to pull up the guest room carpeting.

“Gum?” he says.

I unwrap the gum and put it in his mouth, telling him my name so that the grape sugar on his tongue will become his thought of me.

He nods and chews. I sneak my hand to the vinyl headrest, almost skin temperature, and smoothed by his neck and hair.

“Let’s go find the unit chief,” I say, and Jorge follows, the heavy movement of the chair shaking the floor beneath us.

I get into bed with the phone book and my list: medical equipment, pharmacy (delivery service?), furniture, foreign-language tapes (in case his Spanish is better than his English), carpenter (ramp). I underline “carpenter” twice and call three names, leaving messages on their machines. It can’t take more than a week to put a ramp where the kitchen steps are now. In my mind I move the living room furniture around and get rid of the glass coffee table. When Marc falls asleep, dried red wine sitting in the corners of his mouth, I get up and move the actual pieces, shoving the coffee table into Marc’s study for now. My body hums. I hang up my clothes, wipe Marc’s damp mouth with my fingers, and pull the blanket up around him. I fall asleep easily, dreaming of Jorge, my little egg, rolling around on our queen-size bed, the silk spread smooth beneath his skin.