Acts of Love (17 page)

Ann put the girls in party dresses, white anklets, Mary Janes, though Julia, at nine, already considered herself too mature for such paraphernalia. The three sat in the front seat of Ann's Buick. In the back there were sesame chicken wings, stuffed mushrooms, homemade brownies. Carl's wife, Alice, was bringing punch, and the men had filled their new garbage cans with ice and beers.

When they arrived, the offices were already filled with many people Ann had never seen before, subcontractors, electricians, local merchants, prospective clients, as well as Carl's family. The desks, the windows, the floors all sparkled with a hard, crystalline newness. Ann put the food down on the table Alice had set up and watched the girls burst away from her, Julia first, Ali following. She spotted Ted across the room, patting a squat, red-faced man on the back while his eyes wandered skittishly about, too quickly to stop on anyone, anything. His mouth was curled at the edges with a certain dissatisfaction that had been absent in these months of feverish planning.

“What's with him?”

Ann turned to find Sandy reaching down into a garbage can to grab a beer.

“I don't know. Maybe it's a letdown. They've worked so hard for this. Do me a favor. Go tell him how great the office looks.”

Sandy smiled. “Just call me Miss Congeniality.”

Ann watched her thread through the small crowd to Ted's side, reach up and kiss him hello, and for the first time that evening, Ted's shoulders and face and eyes relaxed. Their voices twined with the low murmur in the room, and though Ann tried, she could not hear what made them laugh, first Ted, and then Sandy. Their conversation broke up only when Carl approached with someone he wanted Ted to meet.

“Mission accomplished,” Sandy said, returning to Ann.

But when Ann, Ted, and the girls left that night, the last to go, Ted grabbed a beer from the sea in the bucket, downed it in two long gulps, and raised his empty bottle to the empty office. “Welcome to the rest of my life,” he toasted.

“I'll drive,” Ann said as Ted reached back in to snatch one more for the road.

 

S
HE GOT THE GIRLS
out of their party dresses and tucked them in. When she returned to their bedroom, Ted was lying down, fully clothed, staring at the ceiling.

“Do you want something to eat?” she asked.

“No.”

“You haven't eaten all day.”

“Will you stop? I said no.”

She began to undress quietly, fearful that any sudden motion, any abrupt sound, would set him off.

“What's the matter with you?” he grumbled at her back.

“Nothing.”

“Right.”

“You should be more careful with your drinking,” she said, turning to him.

He reared up. “Fuck you. No one's ever told me what to do, and you're not about to start now.”

“I'm not telling you what to do.”

“Don't tell me what to do,” he continued, oblivious, “just don't tell me what to do. Do you hear me?” He was stripping as he sputtered out the words, his face becoming red and redder. “Who the hell do you think you are? I've always had to take care of myself, and I've done an okay job. Just don't tell me what to do.” He had balled up his shirt into a tight knot in his hand, his fingers working it over in rhythm with his sodden repetitions. She stood frozen, wondering with a long-distance objectivity if he was going to throw it at her—there was a certain thrill to the idea, it would make everything so sharp, so clear—but instead he flung it at the floor, where despite his force, it landed without a sound.

They went to sleep without uttering another word.

Deep in the middle of the night, Ann was awakened by the sound of Ted's body crashing to the floor in the center of the bedroom. She got to him just in time to see his eyes roll back in their sockets, his mouth drop open. She cried out his name, shook his ashen head, but he did not respond—dead, gone. She stumbled to the telephone on her night table and dialed 911. “My husband's had a heart attack,” she gasped, love and all the long-presumed inevitability of its loss returning in equally blinding measure. But just as she was giving the operator the address, she heard Ted grunt and sputter as he came out of his faint, peeing all over himself and the rug. She put down the phone, went to him.

“I thought you were dead.” Tears filled her eyes.

“I'm sorry,” he whispered. “I'm sorry, I'm sorry.”

She helped him out of his soiled underwear and back to bed.

“I'm sorry, I'm sorry,” he muttered, as he burrowed once more into sleep.

 

T
ED DID BECOME ABSORBED
in his new business and the efforts it took to get it off the ground. He and Carl spent long hours courting clients and spying on competitors and learning how to work together. After some splintery trial and error, they decided that Carl would be the one to negotiate with clients about contracts and prices. He loved the give and take, the bartering and arguing and haggling—the very things Ted despised. At first, Carl teased him, “Relax, enjoy. It's all part of the game.” But Ted took it as a sign of personal disrespect if someone questioned his price on windows or wiring, and was always in danger of erupting, “Fuck you, take it or leave it.” He was most satisfied by the sites themselves, the feel of well-made tools and materials in his hands, the scent of fresh wood.

But still it did not fill him up, abate the restlessness. And something happened: Ann lost faith in him. At first she thought it was like love, that it could go undercover and resurface, but she soon discovered that once lost, faith is gone forever.

Ted saw this loss in her eyes, this matte hollowness where faith used to be, and for the first time he was haunted by the possibility of losing her, losing what, despite all its changing hues, he had assumed from the day of their marriage to be a fact, an immutability, something that did not need to be questioned and reclaimed anew each day.

 

A
NN ROSE EARLY EVERY MORNING
, got the girls dressed for school, made them hot cereal. She loved sitting across from them, watching them drink their milk, the way they held the glass with both hands, eyes wide open, staring at a fixed spot in space. So serious and grave, like staring into infinity itself.

Until, at a certain point, they no longer grasped the glass with both hands but became casual, one-handed. Fast. Grown-up. On the way to being lost to her.

She decided to do volunteer work. Not completely altruistic. She hoped that she would meet enough people, have enough meetings to go to, to fill the red leather agenda book she had bought the day she made this decision. Independence seemed something you could practice, learn through repetition. She signed up to work two afternoons a week at the hospital's outreach program, reading to the blind.

She sat in a glass cubicle with Mark Karinski, a handsome, muscular man of forty-four who was slowly losing his vision to retinitis pigmentosa. “It's like pieces of a mirror peeling away,” he told her. “In some places there is still an image, in other places, nothing.” He had once worked for the EMS, but that was no longer a possibility. Still, he liked to keep up with his profession, and each week he brought in the Morbidity and Mortality Report, which held the statistics for the previous week's fatalities and their causes.

“Read me the index,” he instructed. “And please, read quickly. The last one was so slow.”

The dry heat that rose from the soiled grating by the window parched Ann's lips as she read. Mark opened the small bag of nuts he had brought from the health-food store, and she could hear the shells cracking, the meat being separated, chewed, swallowed, as she rushed through the words. Every few minutes, he opened the face of his watch and touched the raised numerals. Precisely two hours after she had started, he interrupted her while she hurried on to the next paragraph. “That was very good.” She looked up to find his expressionless face headed toward her. “Will we see you next Tuesday, then?”

Ann started to nod, then quickly said, “Yes.”

That night, she tried to navigate the kitchen with her eyes closed, or, to better approximate his description, with her fingers gridded in front of her eyes. She lay in bed with Ted, a movie on the television, with her eyes shut.

“Are you all right?” he asked.

“Just tired.”

By the end of the week, her shins and knees were bruised from her explorations.

Though the outreach program had a policy of switching readers around to prevent attachments from forming, they made an exception for Mark, who was so hard to please and had finally found a reader he approved of. Each Tuesday and Thursday, Ann sat in the small glass cubicle with him. He could be short-tempered, as if he wanted to rush past any inconvenience, any hint of sympathy his increasing blindness might engender, and at first Ann hastened to the reading, fearful of taking up his time with unwanted pleasantries. Slowly, though, they began to talk. He worked out for hours every day, going to a Chinese man who taught him all about self-defense, how to feel an attacker's approach, and his arms bulged from the short-sleeved shirts he preferred even now, in midwinter. He told Ann about his girlfriend, who had just moved out after four years, and about his plans to move to Albany soon, or maybe New York City. “You can't live in the country if you can't drive,” he said matter-of-factly. “Cities are much better for blind people.” When he was done with the Morbidity and Mortality Report, he asked Ann to read a newsletter from an organization he belonged to, “The Secular Humanist.” The words were disjointed, meaningless to her. There was only the steam heat, the nuts, her own dry throat, her desire to impress him with the speed and efficacy of her reading.

At home, she dreamt of him, oddly mute, dark dreams, dreams of body parts, limbs, torsos, falling into each other, touch itself transmogrified.

One Thursday, after she had been reading to him for about two months, he asked her to drive him home. “My neighbor who usually picks me up has the flu,” he told her. He took her forearm as they walked through the parking lot to her car, his fingers resting firmly, as if she were his.

When they pulled up in front of his building, they sat in the car in silence for a moment, the engine running. She was debating whether to ask if he needed help to his door; she was never quite sure what aid he would consider an insult, what he would appreciate, just as she was never quite sure what he could or could not actually see. She had just decided to offer when he reached over and kissed her, finding, after the briefest fumbling, her mouth. He pulled away a half-inch and she could feel his breath, warm, smelling faintly of cashews. She closed her eyes, pulled him back to her.

 

T
HEY CONTINUED TO MEET
in the glass cubicle every Tuesday and Thursday and, within its confines, to speak in polite, impersonal voices, a simple exchange of goods, reading and listening. And afterward, they went to his apartment, where, as soon as they entered, he considerately turned the lights on, though it made no difference to him.

Everything inside was neatly ordered. In his drawers, there were white shirts to the right, gray to the left. In his closets, five pairs of black pants hung side by side, with perfectly pressed creases. In the kitchen, nine cans of Campbell's tomato soup sat on a shelf in three stacks. After buying flavors he did not want too many times, he had the stock boy load his cart with every can of tomato soup in the store, twenty-seven, and he was gradually making his way through them. Ann was fascinated by the order, the discipline, and by the greedy, lonesome hunger that crashed through its veneer when they made love. At first there was only this, a devouring of each other, a rush to meet, to fill, to sate. Later, when there was more time, he ran his fingers into and around crevices and corners of her body that she hadn't known existed, touching her as if she were new.

And they talked.

After evading his questions about her husband, her children, her house, they settled on the more distant past, their childhoods, as their terrain. Mark's father had suffered from retinitis pigmentosa as well, and Mark had grown up waiting for it to claim him.

“Even though I knew it was a gradual thing, I never quite believed it wouldn't be sudden, that I wouldn't just wake up one day totally blind. Every day that didn't happen, I thought I had won. But somehow, even though the chances were only fifty-fifty, I always knew I'd get it eventually. Sometimes I even think it was believing it that caused me to get it. I know that doesn't make much sense. My brother is two years older than me and he's fine. It's hard to explain.”

“I understand,” Ann said, and she told him about Estelle, about her days in bed and her angels and her own feints to elude them, something she had never told anyone before.

“You're safe from them,” he reassured her.

“What makes you say that?”

“Because you can see the enemy. It takes away the element of surprise, which is how you win wars.”

“But you could see the enemy.”

Mark laughed. “I don't know how to break it to you, ma'am, but I can't see shit. Hell, I don't even know what color hair you have. All I know is that you have a beautiful voice.”