Thomas Murphy (17 page)

But I resist it anyway, and spin the big guy around where he sits, and give him a knuckle sandwich, square in his right eye. He rocks back, shocked. Then he laughs. So, you forgive me, Murph?

SHE HAS ME
THINKING
about blindness. I never gave it much thought before. There was a Portuguese novel I read a long time ago, called just that,
Blindness—
about a mass epidemic in an unnamed city. Everyone but a doctor's wife is stricken, and she, because she has retained her sight, is mistrusted and scorned by the blinded citizens. One character stands out: a beautiful girl struck down during casual sex in a hotel room. Tough and icy at first, she is humanized by her blindness, and she takes care of an orphan boy. When she no longer is able to see, she finds that she can dream reality, and recognize the beautiful without seeing it. Perhaps that's why I can remember her.

Tiresias, Polyphemus, Jesus healing the blind. Milton, of course, and Homer, and Blind Lemon Jefferson and Ray Charles and George Shearing. Others. Once you're on the subject, the names, real and fictional, roll out. Velázquez painted a blind woman with Sarah's
Madonna-like serenity, her eyes cast down in the portrait. H. G. Wells had a story called “The Country of the Blind.” A sighted man finds himself trapped in a land where no one else can see. He endures prejudice turned on its head.

Sarah's blindness affects the way I think about her. It lends her a kind of magnetism. I am drawn to her darkness, as if I am able to join her there in the permanently dark room of her mind. Yet her mind is not dark in the sorrowful or funereal sense. It is more like a photographer's darkroom, in which it takes time for a picture to develop. She is willing to wait. I am, as well. She was born blind, and all she knows of the light comes from what she is told or what she reads. I find her darkness enlightening. My eyesight is improved by it.

One blind old woman I knew on Inishmaan. She scared the shit out of me, perched in a wicker chair before her cottage, all day, every day, even in the rain. She was not frightening because of anything she did or said, but simply because she embodied aloneness. One felt alone enough on the island, without an extra kick in the pants, like blindness or deafness, or being crippled like my uncomplaining da. Sarah feels alone, too, so she says. But I think she is using the word only technically. She appears so self-contained, one feels she needs nothing she does not seek. So she seeks me. That's interesting, because I seek her. Dancing in the dark?

SHE HAS ME
thinking about sight, too, and foresight. During a phone chat the other day, out of the blue she asks how I intend to spend the rest of my life. I think about little else, I tell her. People do tend to go on these days, she says. Ten more years for you, Murph? Twenty? Any suggestions? I ask her. I'll think about it, she says. What do you see in my future, Madam Sarah? What do your tarot cards tell you? She puts on a sort-of-Hungarian accent. Your future, Meester Murphy? Your future? Better I see your past.

You've helped me see, you know, Murph. How so? I ask. Your poems see quite well. You make the reader see. But you never have seen the things I describe in my poems, I tell her. How do you know I'm right? I want you to be wrong, she says, and you never fail me. You imagine things your way, not as they are, which allows me to imagine them based on your imaginings. You make me see best, she says, when you apply your imagination to things that are real, things I know the shape of already. When you write about them, I see them your way. You have a poem about a chameleon warming itself in the tropical sun. I've never seen a chameleon, so all I know is that it camouflages itself by adopting the colors of its surroundings. What I did not know—and thanks to you I now do—is that a chameleon takes R & R.

I ask her, Do you suppose I can imagine what I'll be doing the rest of my life? For that to happen, Meester Mur
phy, she says, you may need to imagine what you already know.

ARTHUR ZEROES IN
on me through the thick Plexiglas window in his cell door. His eyes burn deep in his fur. I do not know what to do. I wave meekly, hoping he'll recognize me. Arthur! His dark lips do not move. Nothing on him moves. His doctor tells me that he has made not a sound since they brought him in. Silent in his cell, he eats dishes of berries. Sometimes he paces, says the doctor. Mainly he stares, watches. The hospital staff is waiting for a change in behavior, in effect waiting for Arthur to become human again.

Dark, dark. His eyes blaze blackness, like black gemstones in a velvet box. Do you want to kill me, Arthur? Do you want to kill us all? There are no bears in Ireland. They vanished in the tenth century, after the Vikings killed them off for the pelts. I stand at the Plexiglas window for maybe twenty minutes. I do not budge. Neither does Arthur. He doesn't flinch, doesn't blink. What do we know? What do we ever know? Bear paws at his side. Bear claws showing. He has scratched himself. Bear blood.

TO IMAGINE WHAT
YOU
already know. Solitary on the bay side of the island, on the flats leading to the water, were the remains of a cottage consisting of three stone walls.
One was the back of the house. Two stood at each end, where the thatched roof once had lain between them. How old the place was—a hundred years, six hundred—no one seemed to know. Do you remember who lived there? I asked my da. It stood just as it is now, when I was a boy, he said. The upper portions of the side walls looked like bookends, with no books in between. They supported only themselves. A road curved off to the right of the house, and the bay lay under clouds beyond.

Throughout my childhood, I kept waiting for the house to fall into ruin, but it did not. No one tore it down, no one rebuilt it. It belonged to no one, just standing where it always had stood, a monument to what Synge, referring to the old empty British manor houses, called the “splendid desolation of decay.” Was it incomplete? I wondered, since it had been complete at one time. I felt that you called something incomplete only if you thought it was heading, or hoping, for completeness. The house was complete in its incompleteness.

Sometimes I'd take it in from a great distance, viewing the house as part of the whole Inishmaan landscape. Then it looked small to me, incidental. Sometimes, I'd stand inside the three walls, among the grasses and the weeds. Then the house seemed to constitute the world. Once I stood within the walls during a rainstorm, trying to hear what the family to whom the house had belonged and to which it belonged in turn, would have been speak
ing of, as the rain beat down on the thatch all those years ago. There's a leak on the east side of the roof, said the ma. The pa said, I'll see to it in the morning.

CHRIST WAS PREACHING
up a storm on St. Nicholas Avenue, when I happened by. Kids paused their game of stoop ball to laugh at him and his sermon on greed and luxury. Just you wait, he told the kids, beseeching heaven for their sins. And in a New York minute, sure enough. A storm.

Do they who live here feel the strangeness that I feel? There is no sign of it. Inishmaan, Manhattan, the same. The people live where they live, and I as well, with them. Yet to me, a solitary fisherman, the bitter rains, the plumage of the ladies, the mad laughter of birds (etc., et al.), exist in a luminous incompleteness, like that three-walled cottage, as if I, and I alone, their distant, present cousin, had been created to perceive the whole. The glowing restaurant, the smoke-glass reservoir, the doorman in his epaulets, the family's promiscuous maid, Arthur the Bear—who lives where I live? Hello, stranger. I am greeted by the owner of a bookstore I haven't visited for years. Hello, stranger. She has no idea.

And the people in my building. I'm sorry to learn they complain about me and have no affection for me, 'cause I have tons of affection for them. Botsford of the blue Vespa. The Lewises. The DeBoks, natural aristocrats, whom I
see every Christmas at the local soup kitchen dishing out grub. We just nod. Says everything, a nod. Mr. Jones, a widower like me, but more dignified. Who couldn't be? And Dr. Berman, the only Belnord resident crustier than I am, who grumbles past me in the hallways like a cement mixer. I speak his language. I grumble back. And relentless Mrs. Ginnilli, who keeps trying to collar me for her book club meetings, so that I'll talk poetry with the ladies. We need your brains, Mr. Murphy, says the sweet thing. Oh, I'm sorry, Mrs. Ginnilli, I tell her. I'm having my brains removed next week. All of them adorable, admirable, and to me, magical.

Time was, I am told, there was more magic in the world than world. And the red eyes of daisies and the men who spoke reindeer were as common as rocks. Whenever you wanted something, anything, you needed to do nothing but dream. Say you wanted the morning light to be condensed into a hunting bow, or to spend Easter vacation on the far side of a mirror. You had only to say so. And presto. Magic. Bring back the dead for a dance at Roseland? For one last spin around the floor? Not a problem.

DEAR MURPH,
I wanted to tell you how I drowned my brother David. I was eight. He was two. We were with our parents on the beach in East Hampton, on a rainy Sunday. No one else was there, as far as I could
tell. My folks never left David and me alone for more than a few minutes, and they would tie a little rope around his waist and around my wrist, so that I would feel it if he tugged. That afternoon, I had brought a braille copy of
Little Women
to the beach and I was lost in it, so I did not notice when there was no tension in the rope. Where's David? My mother fairly screamed from up the beach. David? David! We all cried. I felt the rope that had been around his waist, slack in my hands. There was a lot of screaming of David's name, both from my parents and from others elsewhere who had heard the screaming. I just sat where I had been,
Little Women
in my lap. In a few minutes I heard police and ambulance sirens. I remained sitting. My father cried, Oh God! Oh God! My mother was hysterical. I did not move. My face felt paralyzed. There! There! A man's voice. And people running in shoes on the sand. Someone said, Again. Someone else said, Keep trying. A great silence followed, and I continued to sit and listen. Finally, I heard a terrible weeping from my parents, and their footsteps as they approached my blanket. They said not a word to me till we were home.

DEAR SARAH,
I wanted to tell you how I drowned my best friend Cait. We were eighteen, and had
been on-and-off lovers, but mainly friends all our lives. In a place as small as Inishmaan, a good friend is a treasure, and Cait was that to me. She had the heart of a lion. Her death too, like your brother's, occurred on a beach. We were there one spring evening, the two of us, looking out toward Galway Bay and the mainland. Cait brought a jug of poteen, our Irish homemade hooch, and we were getting pretty smashed. I was half dozing, when Cait thought it a good idea to take off her clothes and swim out to a rock island sticking up out of the bay. She was always doing daring stuff like that, and I thought little of it. I should have swum out with her. I knew she was drunk. And then I saw her slip off the rock and go under. When she didn't surface, I went after her, swimming around the rock, and calling her name the way your folks called David's. Funny about that. We call out the names, though we know it's no use, as if the sound of the name itself were a lifesaving measure. But I did find her, and brought her, still alive, to the shore. Her eyes swam in her head, and her limbs were limp. By the time we got her to the hospital in Galway, she was as good as dead, the doctors said, brain dead. When I'd carried her from the water, she felt light as a sheet of paper.

I LIKE THIS
GIRL,
Oona. I'm telling you now in case anything develops between us, and I don't want you saying, Isn't this a fine how-do-you-do! The truth is, you would not be surprised that I like her, at least not any more surprised than I am. Love comes to old Murph one last time? I don't know. It may not be love yet. But as the song says, it'll do until the real thing comes along. It's just that I feel a strength in her, akin to yours, and a basic goodness, akin to yours, and a horse sense akin to yours, too. She isn't you, old girl. No one could be. But she has something that gets under my skin, in a peace-giving way, as if I knew her a long time ago.

There have been but three women in my life, that is, if Sarah qualifies as the third. One I found and lost on Inishmaan. One to whom I gladly gave my heart and vows. You know that one. And now this girl, who steps in so quietly, you'd hardly know she's there. Oh, nothing will come of it, most likely. There are more years that separate our ages than years she's been alive. And she's got a husband, to boot. God knows where. But still. And I really don't know if I have any love left in me, after you.

Her being blind? You might worry about that, since I'm having a little trouble taking care of one person, who at least can see what he's messing up. The odd thing is, she makes me quite comfortable with her blindness. She gets around well on her own, but that's not what I mean. Most of the time, I do not notice that she's blind. I guess age
does that to you, makes you focus on what counts. And she seems comfortable not being able to see me. I try to tell her of the glory that she's missing. She fires back that my mind is so dazzling, she does not know if she could survive the blaze of my physical beauty. You can see what I like in her. It's you.

What she sees in me, I have no idea. Apart from my manly manliness, brains, and rugged good looks, I mean. Frankly, I don't really know if she sees anything in me at all. But she sees, this blind girl, Oona. She sees.

Of course, if Sarah and I do get together, I'd have to divorce you, since I still feel married to you. But divorce it must be, old girl. Sorry about that. Alert the Church and the Holy Father. Oh, is that so? you say. And divorce on what grounds? you say. The oldest, I say. Infidelity. With Heaney. And don't deny it. Heaney bought the farm less than a year ago. And I know you, Oona. You always liked him better than me, and now you have your chance. I'll divorce you for playing around with Seamus, shacking up in heaven. And you'll both live in disgrace among the angels. Just like Adam and Eve. How do you like that apple—my dearest, darlin' love?