The Woman Who Married a Cloud: The Collected Short Stories (28 page)

Before I had a chance to swallow
that
one, he went on. “But I didn’t need my evil to be revealed because I had known it all my life. The earth was telling me I lied? So what?

“But the tongue was only the beginning, because when I was able to get out of Iran, almost the moment I crossed the border, the tongue stopped and the weather began. Then when I lied, the sky grew instantly cloudy and, no matter what kind of day it had been, a giant rain cloud came over me, only me, and began to pour down rain. It could be a brilliant sunny day and there I’d be, alone with my terrible little thunderhead over my head, soaking only me for minutes on end.”

“Gordon—”

“And after that stopped, it was the food. I would tell a lie and suddenly I was holding food in my hands—cooked turkeys or green beans, melting ice-cream or baked potatoes.”

I started to get up but he caught my arm. I pulled but he held fast. “Since I’ve come here, it’s this horse! One day it was there, outside the hotel door waiting for me. Do you know what it is, Radcliffe? All my lies together as one. Look at it, don’t you see that it’s too beautiful? Look at the eyes, look at how smart they are. Look at the way it’s staring at us. When I’m honest now, it goes away for a while, but I don’t know
how
to be honest. It’s not just lie/don’t lie. Dishonesty gets under the skin like bacteria and then it becomes a virus—it makes its own and they are all different. I never had to be honest, so sooner or later there is always something new—a cloud, a tongue, a horse.

“Do you remember Job? How God tested him with one terrible thing after another? It works the other way too, I’m telling you. Sometimes He tests the bad men too. But do you know how hard it is
not
to lie? Even with this—” he threw an arm out towards the horse—“near you every minute?”

I couldn’t resist. “How do I know you’re not lying now, Gordon?”

He smiled. “Look at the horse.”

I smiled back and did. In the animal’s mouth was an enormous and very beautiful bouquet of rare flowers, the kind you see at expensive florist shops. I had no idea where it came from. No idea of where it
could
have come from out there in the middle of that park of pine and chestnut trees, the spring not yet old enough for any real flowers to have come up yet, much less blossomed.

T
HE FIRST THING BEIZER
did after hearing he was going blind was to buy a camera. He knew nothing about photography other than he liked a good picture as much as the next guy. Once in a while he’d see one so startling, original, or provocative that it would stop him and make him gape or shake his head in wonder at the moment or piece of the world caught there. But beyond that he had given it little thought. That’s what was great about life: some people knew how to take pictures, others build chimneys or train poodles. Beizer believed in life. He was always grateful it had allowed him to walk in its parade. At times he was almost dangerously good-natured. Friends and acquaintances were suspicious. Where did he get off being so happy? What secret did he know he wasn’t telling? There was a story going around that when Beizer discovered a letter his girlfriend was writing to a new secret lover, he offered to buy her a ticket to this man so she could go visit and find out what was going on there. He said he wanted her to be happy—with or without him.

But now things would change! God or whoever had decided to give Norman Beizer a taste of the whip via this blindness. Friends were all sure he would change for the worse; start ranting and shrinking into self-pity and end up like the rest of them—tight-lipped, expert shruggers, looking for the answer in tomorrow.

Instead he bought this camera. A real beauty too—a Cyclops 12. Since he didn’t know anything about the art, he went into the store an admitted idiot. That’s what he told the salesman. “Look, I don’t know about this stuff, but I want the best camera you have for absolute idiots. Something I can point and shoot and know it’s doing all the work.” The salesman liked his attitude, so instead of offering a Hiram Quagola or a Vaslov Cyncrometer, the kinds of cameras used by strict Germans to do black and white studies of celebrities’ noses, he put the Cyclops on the counter and said, “This one. It’ll take you an hour to get the hang of it and then you’re on your way.” Beizer did something strange. He picked the camera up and, holding it against his chest, said, “Are you telling me the truth?”

When was the last time a stranger asked you that question? The salesman was flabbergasted. His job was lies and false zeal, fakes and passes behind his back. He had told the truth, but this customer wanted him to say it out loud too.

“It’s the best for what you want. Try it a couple of days and, if you don’t like it, bring it back and we’ll find you something else.”

The problem with the Cyclops was that it was exactly what Beizer had asked for. It took an hour to read and understand the instructions. By the next morning, he had shot his first roll of film and had it developed. The pictures were as precisely focused and uninteresting as fast-food hamburgers. Everything was there; he’d got what he paid for, but a moment after experiencing the picture, he forgot it. The first of many revelations came to him. How many thousands and millions of times had certain things been photographed since the advent of the camera? How many times had people aimed at their pets, the Eiffel Tower, the family at the table?

Walking around the house one day trying to think of interesting and artistic things to photograph, he got down on his knees in the bathroom and took a picture of his toothbrush up through the glass shelf it rested on. That was pretty clever, but when he saw it developed, he frowned and knew at least a few hundred thousand people had probably had the same idea in one way or the other. Out there in the large world were drawers full of photos of toothbrushes shot “artily”. Worse, other people had had to take the time to fix their shutters and set the speeds because cameras had never been so sophisticated as they were now. Now they were point, shoot, baf, you’ve got your toothbrush. But back whenever, one had to think, adjust, and figure out how to get that shot. There was process and careful thought involved.

While this played across his mind, he heard shouts through the open window and realized kids were having fun in the park across the street. Their calls were wild and screechy and he thought, If I were going deaf, how could I preserve those great sounds, so that in my silence I could somehow remember them exactly and know them again? We’re all aware that in the end the only thing left is our memories, but how do you preserve them when one part of you decides to die before the rest? He realized he had bought this camera so he could go around seeing the world he knew for the last time and, in so doing, perhaps teach his memory to remember. But that wouldn’t work if he had a mindless genius machine that did exactly what he told it to but gave him nothing of himself in return. It was like those exercise machines with electrodes you hook up to your body, then lie down and take a rest while electricity makes you thin and muscular.

He went back to the store. When the salesman saw him again he was almost afraid. Beizer decided to tell the man everything. About the blindness, about his need to find a camera that would not only do what he told it, but teach him how to see and remember as well.

As he walked to the counter, the thought came that, whatever machine he left with this time, he would use a week to learn its principles, then allow himself to take only ten pictures before he put it down forever. The doctor said he had about three months before the disease marched across his vision dragging a black curtain behind it, and then that would be the end. In the ninety days he had left, he would try to learn and consider and achieve all in one. Ten pictures. Ninety days to take ten pictures which, when his sight was gone, would have to provide his empty eyes with what he had lost.

The salesman heard him out and immediately suggested he go to a store specializing in books of great photography. “First look at books on Stieglitz and Strand. The guys in the Bauhaus School. They were the masters. That’s the best way to start. If you wanted to learn how to paint, you’d go to a museum and look at Da Vinci.”

“It won’t help. I’ll look and maybe see some great stuff, but that won’t help me remember. I don’t even want to remember what they ...” Beizer held his hands up to the sides of his head as if showing the other how little space he had to fill there. “I don’t want to learn how to paint or take pictures. I want to remember my sights, not theirs. And I don’t have much time left.”

The salesman shrugged. “Then I don’t know what to tell you. There are two directions to take: I can give you a child’s camera. The simplest thing in the world, which means you’ll have to do all the work. When you want to take a picture, the lighting will have to be perfect, the focus, everything will have to be there because the camera won’t do anything for you but click; just the opposite of the Cyclops which does everything. The other way is to buy a Hasselblad or a Leica, which are the best. But it takes years and thousands of pictures to figure out how to use them best. I don’t know what to tell you. Can I think about it some more?”

Beizer left the store empty-handed. But for the time being perhaps that was best; having the right camera meant he’d have to begin to start deciding. In this interim without one, he could go around looking at the world, trying to choose.

A few blocks from home, a man sat on the street with a hat turned over on his lap and a handwritten sign that said, “I am blind and heartbroken and have no work. Please be kind and help me.” There were a few brown coins in the hat.

“Are you really blind?”

The beggar raised his head slowly and smiled. He was used to abuse. Some people taunted him. Now and then they’d ask stupid questions but then give him money if they liked or pitied his response. Before he had a chance to answer, whoever stood above said, “Tell me what you miss most about not seeing and I’ll give you ten dollars.”

“Fried chicken. Can I have my ten dollars, please?”

Beizer was stunned but went for his wallet. “I don’t understand.” He handed over the money.

The blind man brought the bill to his nose and sniffed it. It was money, he was sure of that. Maybe even ten bucks. Why not? The world was full of lunatics. Why not this one?

“You know smoking? A cigarette is three things—smell, taste, and sight. You gotta see that grey going out your mouth and up in the air to really enjoy a cig. I stopped smoking about a month after I went blind. I know guys who can’t see but keep doing it, but it’s a waste of time, you ask me. Same thing’s true with fried chicken. Taste it, smell it, do all that, but seeing it’s most important. The way that gold skin cracks when you pull it apart, the smoke coming up from the pink meat underneath if it’s just fresh, then the shiny oil on your fingertips after you’re finished ... Don’t get me wrong, I still eat it, but it isn’t the same. You gotta see to really eat it.”

Beizer gave him another ten dollars, then went right home to write that line down: “You gotta see to really eat it.” A week later, he found another in a book he was reading on photography: “The celebrated painter Gainsborough got as much pleasure from seeing violins as from hearing them.”

Somewhere in the land where those two ideas lived was what he sought, and Beizer knew it.

The girlfriend called, having returned from the romantic trip he had paid for. “It didn’t work. Know what he did, among other things? Sent these incredible love poems I thought he’d written specially for me. Turns out he only copied them out of an anthology he kept from college.

“I’m sorry I haven’t called. What have you been doing?”

“Going blind.”

“Oh my God!”

They spoke a long while before she said gently, “Honey, you can’t do photography when you’re blind.”

“Actually you can: I heard there’s a whole bunch of blind people taking wonderful pictures. But that’s not what I’m after. I don’t want to do photographs—I want to be sure to remember fried chicken and what violins look like.”

After hanging up, he thought over what she’d said about this man trying to pass off other people’s poetry as his own. Other people’s deepest-felt emotions. It was a clever way to trick a heart, but what did it say about the man? Beizer turned a few facts here and there and saw himself showing someone a famous photograph he had not taken and saying, “This is one of my ten. This will comfort me when I can no longer see.”

That night he woke up and padded slowly across the dark to the toilet. Relieving himself, he realized this was what it would be like when he was old. Getting up, probably nightly, to go to the bathroom because one’s plumbing begins to falter as one grows older. A familiar sound from when he went to visit his parents—the toilet next to their bedroom flushing in the wee hours of the morning. The wee hours. That made him smile. A good title for a poem. “Weeing in the Wee Hours.” He should give it to the poem stealer ... Sleepily finishing his business, Beizer once again had the feeling of some invisible connection here. Finding it would help him overcome the problem of the pictures he wanted to take.

In bed again, quickly slipping back into sleep, he thought, Poems are as personal as fingerprints. Steal one and you instantly give up your own identity; as if you were actually giving up the lines on your fingers or the features on your face.

The features on his face! He started, sat up, very much awake. An old man peeing in the night. What would he, Norman Beizer, look like when he was seventy and holding his old cock in his hand? He’d never know. He couldn’t look at someone else’s pictures of that! Too soon he’d never know how the first deep lines on his face would change him, what white hair would do to his appearance. These are important details.

He had begun to grow used to the idea of how much time would be wasted in his future. The seconds lost spent on useless fumbling for a wall switch or the string to pull a curtain across. To move a curtain was a much larger concern for the blind. First find the strings, figure out which is the correct one, pull it. A matter of seconds for a person with sight, for the blind it would take three four five times as long to do it. He was slowly beginning to accept the unfairness of that, all the time he’d soon need to waste on what he did now with no trouble. But how much of Beizer would he lose when he could no longer see him in the mirror? Watch the progress of time and life across that most familiar geography? He sensed that in time he would be able to accept the loss and forced limits that were coming, but until now he hadn’t realized something so important—he would also lose large parts of himself.