Now I See You (7 page)

“That’s the best college, anywhere, and it is
very
hard to get into,” my mother had explained as we watched the girl exit the subway car in Lower Manhattan. “But you’re smart enough to do it. I’m already saving money for your tuition.”

She’d delivered on her end—squirreling away money every month into a college savings account—and I’d delivered, first, gaining admissions, and now, readying to graduate.

This,
my mother kept telling me, is why my grandmother had immigrated to America and worked three jobs—not including the seamstress work she took in on the side;
this
is why my mother had scrimped and saved—never taking those Club Med vacations, only eating out on special occasions—all so I could be a Big Shot. And now, just when three generations of hard work was about to pay off, I was going to throw it all away for clown class?

“Actually,” I clarified, gnawing on a licorice stick, “I’ll specialize in contortion.”

“I’m hanging up before you give me heart palpitations again,” my mother decided. “We’ll discuss this after your finals.”

My new lease on life was proving a real hardship for my parents, instigating an epic case of
agida
. They were befuddled as to where they’d gone wrong with me. I knew this because my mother asked me on a regular basis: “Where, Nicole? Where’d I go wrong?” I might have elucidated the reasoning behind my sudden commitment to hare-brained adventures, namely the Lights Out deadline I was working under, but I didn’t want everyone to get all depressed again. Particularly since there was no cause for gloom and doom; I was having the time of my life.

The last two years of college had flown by and now I was at the end of senior year, about to graduate. After a summer adventure in San Francisco, I’d be renting an apartment in Brooklyn with Beth, securing a talent agent, and pursuing my dream of stardom—which could be lucrative, too, I was fond of reminding my mother as she massaged away her tension headache. Before I graduated though, I had one last college play to perform in, a lesser-known David Rabe doozie in which I played an exotic dancer who gets thrown out of a moving car. Which meant: not only did I get to simulate coke-snorting and wear a stripper costume, I also got to apply immoderate amounts of fake blood. Could things get any better?

They could, in fact. Because starring opposite me, playing the guy who threw me out of the car, was David.

I’d seen David around—he was a Theater and English major, too—but hadn’t actually met him until we were cast in the play. Both our characters appeared only in the first act so we ended up having a lot of down time together backstage.

You couldn’t ask for a better companion to kill an hour with every night. David was solicitous and attentive; he’d remember little things like the fact that Charleston Chews were my favorite candy and would just so happen to have one in his pocket. May not sound like much but when you’re used to emotionally unavailable hipsters, this is the stuff that takes your breath away. I attributed David’s thoughtfulness to the fact that he was a Southerner. I’d never been below the Mason Dixon line and as far as I knew, all the guys down there were just like David, raised to finish everything on their plate, wear their hearts on their sleeve, and never tell a lie. I imagined Tennessee, where David was from, populated with tall, dashing Ashley Wilkeses who remember your preferred type of candy and remind you where you left off in the riveting story of how your roommate borrowed your favorite jeans without asking.

But unlike Ashley Wilkes, who despite his many positive attributes is about as interesting as a piece of zweibach, David had a tortured artist dimension that shot his appeal though the roof. He smoked Chesterfields, drank black coffee in the morning and Maker’s Mark at night, and wrote lovely lyrical short stories in the style of William Faulkner. He’d read everything, the whole Western canon and then some, including all of James Joyce’s novels, even
Finnegan’s Wake
which
no one
read, even the people that claimed they had. His sense of humor was deliciously dry. And he looked like he’d just stepped out of the Sweet Valley High books I read as a kid, six-four with sandy blond hair and sea blue eyes.

The one catch was that he was taken. David had a serious girlfriend who he was moving in with after graduation. And a guy this honest, this steadfast wasn’t about to step out on his lady. Until he did one night, with me.

It was a few weeks after our play had closed, just before finals, and we’d gone out for a catch-up drink and ended up back in my dorm room, reading ee cummings poetry. There’s no chance two college coeds start reading all those gooey, lowercase run-on sentences and don’t end up tangled in the bedclothes.

The thing that shocked me wasn’t so much that he kissed me hard on my mouth right in the middle of my reading “i carry your heart with me.” What shocked me was that he told me he loved me.

“But you hardly know me,” I pointed out.
Like why I keep the lava lamp on,
I thought.

The fact that he knew little about me was, in David’s opinion, a minor point. He wanted to be with me. He needed to be with me. I was like the very air to him, necessary for life. Which made it really very unfortunate because he couldn’t be with me. Not right now anyway. Right now, he was going back to his girlfriend Mary’s dorm room before things got too hot and heavy. The heart feels what it feels, he said, but that didn’t mean it would make him a liar and a cheat.

“Maybe in another time, another place,” he offered before walking out the door, exactly like the protagonist in a romantic comedy does at the end of the second act, before the cheesy music montage.

What the hell was that?
I wondered, sitting on the edge of my unmade bed as the door closed behind him. The confession of love had been so sudden and had been snatched back so quickly, it was hard to know what to make of it all.

It was a distinct possibility, I thought then, that this whole Take Life by the Balls campaign might be a form of denial, a cheap way to dope myself up so I didn’t feel sad and scared. Maybe, just maybe, I was acting out like Helen Keller did as a kid, thrashing around and knocking everything off the dinner table. Possibly, it was time to grow up, make a lasting connection, something in the realm of, maybe, love.

It was a distinct possibility—just not one I was willing to entertain.

Screw David and his earnestness,
I thought,
I am on the cusp of beginning my adult life and it is going to be blow-your-mind, not-intended-for-all-audiences, fucking fabulous.

I mean, who wanted to piss away precious time staring at the same mug across from you at the same restaurant where you ordered the same dish every Friday night? Let David wither in the boredom of monogamy. I was crossing shit off my bucket list—mainly the same item over and over and over again, but still, all the same, making indelible memories, feeling alive! I was about to train as a circus artist in San Francisco!

“It’s going to look great on my resume, in the special skills section,” I assured my mother as I packed my California-bound suitcases after graduation. “How many people have trapeze experience?”

“I’m developing an ulcer,” my mother replied from my bed, folding a pile of T-shirts I’d tossed there. “An ulcer!”

I knew that the ulcer wasn’t really about me choosing circus school over medical school; the real source of anxiety for my parents stemmed from the fact that their tunnel-sighted, night-blind daughter was headed three thousand miles away. But to my relief, they didn’t mention my visual impairment, choosing to fixate instead on the fact that Berkeley was where all the “crazies” lived and did I pack my pepper spray? In fact, since the summer of my diagnosis, no one had said anything much about my disease. My parents and grandmother could tell I didn’t want to talk about it—or maybe it was
me
who could tell
they
didn’t want to talk about it. Either way, it made us all feel better to pretend the diagnosis had never happened.

At circus school, I was trained by a bona fide Shanghai Circus veteran. Master Liao. Every morning, the tiny, smiley man with an unbending will had me holding handstands, knocking out push-ups, and shaking on chin-up bars. By the summer’s end, I was in total command of my body, with every muscle boasting a perfect attendance record. “Here!” chirped my abs. “Present!” went the glutes. I could touch my toes to my head while in a handstand. Won’t get you a job but it is a pretty cool trick at parties. It was exhilarating to feel like I was so in control of my body.

I paid for my training by teaching clowning to the little kids enrolled in the circus school summer camp. The endorphin rush from my morning workout was matched by the high I felt in the afternoon when I was with the kids—sweet, preschool-aged, hippie offspring. There was a little Russian girl I babysat for sometimes; we’d sit on a blanket in Golden Gate Park and I’d French braid her long blond hair while she taught me how to say stuff like, “My name is Nicole and I love porridge” in Russian. The gig afforded me disposable income, and more importantly, the confidence to believe I might make a competent mother one day, even with my failing vision.

At night and on the weekends, I worked at a fair-trade coffee shop in Berkeley and rehearsed for an off-the-wall comedy whose leading man, Ollie, was my sorta-kinda boyfriend.

Ours wasn’t a sweet romance like I’d shared with Frog Legs, or a tender union like the one I’d enjoyed, briefly, with David. This was a rocky, lopsided love. Meaning, I craved him with every ounce of my being and he … dug me to some extent. It was hard to tell where he stood on the spectrum of amorous feeling—somewhere beyond “like” for sure, but before “love,” which would have required that he stop banging his ex whenever the opportunity presented itself. I didn’t care much what terms I had him on though, because when I was with him, I felt alive, awake. The drama was consuming and the sex made me feel like I was in a romance novel, a real bodice-ripper. Lamps were knocked over. Roommates squirmed at the banging on the wall. It wasn’t quite the Great Romance I’d vowed to find but it was greatish. Memorable, anyway.

One night, as I lay languidly against him in the bath, I broached the subject of my eyes. Tentatively, I told him I had this condition; that I couldn’t see in the dark or out of the corners of my eyes. I told him about the fat Park Avenue doctor. I hadn’t revealed the diagnosis to anyone in a year or two and was out of practice, so the whole confession was vague and rushed and as soon as I’d started speaking, I regretted it. He hmm-ed and uh-huh-ed but didn’t say a word. A few days later, in the middle of a bodice-ripping sex scene, I accidentally elbowed him in the jaw.

“Fuck!” he yelled grabbing his jaw.

“I’m sorry,” I said, flushed with embarrassment. I was waiting to see if I’d be forgiven, now that he knew my extenuating circumstances.

“Well,” he grumbled, “just be more careful.” Then he turned back to the business at hand.

Either he hadn’t heard me or he’d chosen not to hear. Either way, I shouldn’t have told him. In this respect, he was right: I did need to be more careful.

Toward the middle of the summer, I stepped out of my front door one night to meet Ollie for dinner on Telegraph Avenue and I met my next-door neighbor for the first time. He was walking out of his front door at the exact same moment. Had it been a movie, we’d have locked eyes and fallen instantly in love.

But we couldn’t lock eyes because he was blind.

Not a little bit blind, the kind you could hide, but wear-dark-sunglasses-to-hide-your-freaky-eyes-that-don’t-work blind. Carry-a-cane blind. He looked just a few years older than me, in his late twenties, a large man with broad shoulders, so tall he had to hunch down when he stepped through his doorframe. It was odd to see a man who looked that young and strong, imposing even, carrying a cane. It was odd, too, to feel a kinship with this stranger, like he was wearing an emblem that signaled we belonged to the same club. More than odd, it was unsettling. I didn’t want to belong to that club. Not now. Not ever.

I stood motionless in the doorway, one foot inside my apartment and one out, feeling nauseous and panicky. Should I just creep back into my place and wait for him to pass? Or—wait—maybe he wasn’t all the way blind yet, and he could see me, in which case my backing away would be unforgivable. Was I supposed to introduce myself? Was that patronizing? I mean, why should I assume he was sociable just because he was blind? Maybe he was a misanthrope. Maybe he fucking hated unsolicited introductions, just wished do-gooders would leave him alone. Did he have the same eye disease as I did? Had he fallen into a bucket of lye as a child? Could I ask him or was that gauche?

As I stood there, exposed and bewildered and depressed, my neighbor turned to me. Even without a super-keen sense of hearing—which he, no doubt, possessed—you couldn’t miss the sound of my hyperventilating.

“Hi,” he ventured, his face pointed a few feet to the side of mine.

“Hi,” I replied haltingly. “I’m Nicole. I, uh, live next door.”

His face broke into a smile. “Oh, you must be subletting for the summer. Welcome, welcome! I’m Greg.” He had a musical voice, deep and smooth and appealing and he smelled good, too, the light aroma of aftershave wafting my way.

How does he shave
, I wondered,
without slicing his face to shreds?

I was staring at his cane, which he held pointing straight down to the ground at his chest, so I was able to catch sight of his hand as it let go of the handle and reached out to me.

I extended my right hand to meet it.

“Good to meet you,” he said, gripping my palm firmly. “I hope you’re enjoying Berkeley. It can take some getting used to.”

We stood opposite each other for a few minutes and chatted; he gave me recommendations of good places to eat and tips about which mentally ill homeless people were harmless and which to steer clear of. He told me he worked in development for a film company, and I told him I was an actress.