The Blindfold

  “It’s not him, Toots.” I honked into the paper napkin. “It’s me.”

  “I’ll take care of her,” said Professor Rose. He paid the bill and helped me out of the booth.

  “We’ll go to my office,” he said, once we were in the street. “It’s quiet there, and we can talk.”

  I nodded. We walked the four blocks in silence and turned into the university gate, moving quickly toward Philosophy Hall. He unlocked the door and we took the stairs to the sixth floor. I said nothing while he put the key in his office door, opened it, and made a gesture for me to sit down. He pulled his chair close to mine and put his hands on his knees. His face was the image of paternal concern. He’s going to berate me, I thought.

  He wrinkled his forehead. “Klaus? That man called you Klaus.”

  “I use the name sometimes,” I said. “It’s kind of a game with me.”

  “A game! What kind of game?”

  “Does it matter to you?” An involuntary gasp escaped me. I was still recovering from my crying jag.

  “Yes, it matters. I care about you. I walk into a bar at midnight and stumble onto one of my best students downing brandy and looking like something out of Dickens, for God’s sake. Those clothes and hair and that awful man calling you Klaus? What am I supposed to think?”

  “He’s not an awful man.”

  “All right,” he said, turning toward the blackened window. “He’s not awful.”

  I stared at his profile. He had a good nose. “I missed you,” I said. “I know now that I missed you terribly.” The ease with which I said these words surprised me.

  He turned to me, his expression sad. He let his arms fall to his sides. “Iris, you disarm me. I don’t know what to say.”

  We looked at each other for a long time, and he made no effort to disguise the torment in his face. Then, like a defeated man, he sighed. I saw his shoulders sink, and he reached out for me. He took me by the forearms and pulled me into him.

  We were noisy lovers that night in Philosophy Hall. I’m sure we made a racket, falling to the floor in a desperate heap under the harsh fluorescent light, and I know I screamed in crisis and that he talked to me, but I can’t remember what he said, probably what everybody says, the name of the other person or just “yes”—words fraught with meaning only when they are spoken. To repeat them is sacrilege. In short, we ate each other alive, and when it was over, we lay in silence, stunned, I think, by what had happened.

  The room was cold. I shivered and he held me. The suit lay crumpled beside us, and despite the chill, I was reluctant to put it on. Professor Rose covered me with his jacket, and after a time, he said, “I don’t think you should do it anymore.”

  “What?”

  “Klaus.”

  I welcomed the sanction, knew I had been waiting for it, had hoped for it. “I know,” I said. “I won’t.”

  • • •

  I started calling him Michael. In the beginning when I used the name, I always experienced a rush of feeling, a strong sense of having moved into a new position: universities may be the last place in America where first names still have the force of intimacy. “Michael” was for me a clandestine sign, a key to our secret, and I used the name over and over, to him and to myself. We saw each other late in the afternoon, when my window briefly caught the sunlight and then lost it. The light was important because even when he wasn’t there with me, the sun’s four o’clock slant was rife with erotic associations. He was an intense lover, and his zeal created in me a new sense of my own otherness. Sometimes after he was gone, I would examine myself naked in the mirror, and for an instant would imagine I saw what he saw—an enchanted body. Michael Rose wasn’t beautiful. He had a large, ragged appendix scar, a little extra flesh around his middle, and his blue veins were clearly visible through the pale skin of his legs. There were moments when the physical fact of the man estranged me, when my idea of the man and the man himself were disconnected, but they lasted only seconds. I was seduced through my ear. The more he talked, the more I wanted him, and he talked up a storm, wooing me with Catullus, Boccaccio, Donne, and Sidney, with Shakespeare and Wyatt, Fielding and Joyce, and that’s how I like to remember him now, in midsentence, lying in my bed with his eyes shut, quoting from memory.

  He didn’t tell me very much about himself, however. I knew that he had a wife and three older children, and that he had lived “almost” his whole life in New York City. Both his parents were dead. In the beginning I pressed him for details, but his reluctance made me stop. Once when I asked him to tell me about his boyhood, he said, “My father beat me, and when I was ten, I ran away with a band of Gypsies.”

  “No,” I said. “The real story.”

  “My father beat me, and I spent my childhood waiting for the Gypsies.”

  “Is that true?”

  “More or less.”

  “How much more or less?”

  He smiled with one side of his mouth. “Oh, I don’t know. It’s not that I don’t remember, I do. Sometimes I find it odd that I’m not a kid anymore, that I’m getting old. I wonder where my baseball glove is. Whatever happened to Charlie Shapiro?”

  “Why don’t you tell me about all of that?”

  “I’ll tell you, Iris, one day, but this isn’t the time to dredge it up. Telling all is a dubious form of generosity. Some things are better not told.”

  And that was all. He left me with a bad father, the Gypsies, and Charlie Shapiro.

  We didn’t talk about Klaus. I wanted to tell him, but the words that might have announced my feelings about those nights were buried, and to carry them from that hidden place to my mouth required an effort I couldn’t make. Michael was too close to the origins of my wanderings, was a collaborator of sorts, and I had a strong instinct to keep him out of it, even though I knew it was Michael who killed Klaus. After that night in Philosophy Hall, I had lost all desire for the roaming boy. Michael had made him vanish, and I was possessed by the crazy idea that if he could do this, he could also bring Klaus back. Krüger’s boy was our Frankenstein’s monster, a creation we chose to ignore.

  • • •

  We went on into the spring, and I was well From time to time, I would fall into bed and chant when my head fogged with an oncoming migraine, but the pain was negligible. The nausea and vomiting were over. I saw no black holes. My hair grew. In March I took my oral exams. For the first hour I spewed out information like an automaton gone berserk, citing names, dates, places, and every scrap of knowledge that appeared in my head. I brought in philosophers, linguists, spun theories and quoted from the novels I loved. Then I ran out of gas, puffing and sputtering my way through the last hour and my three minor fields, forgetting what I thought I knew, and I saw the faces of the five middle-aged men on my committee, amused only minutes before, drop into identical expressions of pity and concern. They passed me anyway. I knew so much and so little. That was that. They were kind. I was humbled. Michael said, “It’s a rite of passage, nothing more. Put it behind you.” But I replayed my stumped moments over and over, stung by regret, and I thought, If only I had stayed at home reading the Metaphysical poets instead of running around the city like some half-cocked drifter.

  Not long after that, Michael spent the night with me. His wife was out of town. We had never had so many hours together, and by morning we were changed. The difference was subtle, but it hinged yet again on the story. Michael told me that Columbia University Press would publish the novella. He had written a preface, and I would get full credit for the translation.

  “You don’t seem exactly overjoyed,” he said.

  I looked at him. “But your name has to be on the translation,” I said.

  “It’s yours. You did all the hard work.”

  “That’s not true. It’s just as much yours as it is mine!”

  He sat up in bed and adjusted the pillow behind him. “What are we talking about here, Iris?”

  “You know. You’ve always known. I can’t stand the pretense. I r
eally can’t.”

  He put his hands up and started waving them.

  “Don’t do that,” I said.

  He stopped and turned to me. “Iris, I can’t read your mind.”

  I crossed my legs Indian style and looked at him. “You said a long time ago that it was a Pandora’s box.”

  “I was talking about our working together.”

  “No you weren’t.”

  “Iris,” he said, a sad lilt in his voice.

  “There’s something about the story, something in it that was horribly exciting, and it got to us.”

  “Iris.” His voice was soft. “You’re the one who borrowed the name. To what end, I’ve never properly understood. I haven’t wanted to pry. But that’s why you’re upset now. Fiction is not life.”

  “You don’t believe that.”

  “I think I do.”

  “You know as well as I do that the line can’t be drawn, that we’re infected at every moment by fictions of all kinds, that it’s inescapable.”

  “Don’t be a sophist,” he said. “There is a world and it’s palpable.”

  “I don’t mean that,” I said. “I mean that it’s hard really to see it, that it’s all hazy with our dreams and fantasies.”

  “You’re talking about Klaus, your Klaus.”

  “Our Klaus,” I said. “Do you know that for one moment I thought you had written the damned story.”

  He grinned. “I wish I had.”

  “You see,” I said. “You adopted it, took it on, and the thing is, it’s cruel.”

  “There are lots of cruel stories, both real and imagined.”

  “Yes, but—”

  “But this one got under your skin.”

  “Our skin,” I said.

  “We’re not one and the same, Iris.”

  “I know, but I can feel that it’s between us—no, of us. There’s a piece of the puzzle you’ve never shown me.”

  “You’re being mysterious.”

  “And you’re hiding.”

  He sighed. Then he reached over and touched my hair.

  “I know it sounds demented,” I said. “But that missing part, that thing between us, I think it’s evil.”

  “Evil?” His eyes clouded, and he pressed his lips together until they turned white. “What is evil?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Is Klaus evil?” he said quickly, his eyes narrowed. He looked straight at me.

  “He doesn’t kill the cat.”

  “No, but he meant to,” he said. “Is he evil? Is it a peccadillo, or a crime?”

  “The law has its measurements,” I said.

  “Yes,” he said, “but we all imagine committing crimes, and there’s no penalty for fantasy. Klaus is full of nasty ideas. What if he had never acted out any of them? Does that make him less evil? Surely evil consists of more than the bad act.”

  “I didn’t say he was evil.”

  “So the person and the act can be separated, is that right?”

  “I’m not sure.”

  “The law has endless allowances, doesn’t it? Temporary insanity, hormonal swings—too much testosterone, menopausal manias, postpartum depressions, too much junk food—drove him to murder. It’s the the-devil-made-me-do-it theory of defense. But aren’t we the demons?”

  “Yes,” I whispered to him. “We are.”

  He said nothing.

  “But to think something terrible is not the same as doing it.” I shuddered as I spoke. “When do people turn their thoughts into action?” I felt cold and put the blanket over my legs. I saw the policeman’s gun, and seeing it in my mind made me want to scream. I clamped my jaw shut and closed my eyes.

  “A barrier is lifted. In some people it’s never formed. For others it means crashing down the gate. And then I think sometimes you just open the door and walk through—like nothing. Unspeakable crimes have been made routine, orderly.” He paused and took a breath, looking away from me at the wall. “Every day, people do the incredible. I don’t just mean political torture far away. I know a woman who threw her three-year-old son out the window. She jumped out after him, but she didn’t die. She’s still alive.”

  “Did you know her well?”

  “For a time I did. I visited her in the hospital. Lila knew her best. They were very close, but Lila was so angry she couldn’t see her . . .”

  A chill took my entire body, and my teeth chattered. “That woman, she must have been out of her mind.”

  “Yes, I suppose, but what does that mean? We’re back to the same place. Where do you locate responsibility?”

  I studied the spines on my books that lined the wall. “I’ve often felt that ideas of goodness, of the truth, have to be unbending, absolute, or everything falls apart.”

  He looked at me. “You mustn’t confuse virtue and the truth. The two are very different.”

  The words took hold, and my mistake jarred me.

  “Virtue is a moral quality distinct from what’s true,” he said.

  I nodded. “So that evil can be the truth.”

  “Of course.”

  “But none of this explains what it is.”

  Michael shook his head.

  “Do you think Augustine was right?” I said. “I mean, that evil is a kind of lapse or distance, a falling away?”

  “He was avoiding dualism, Iris. The whole argument is predicated on a belief in God . . .”

  “I know, but he must have felt it that way, that evil was an emptiness, a lack of something, not a presence.”

  He turned his head fast and looked at me. “That’s what desire is, isn’t it? The lack of something.” He sounded angry. Then he grabbed my upper arms with his hands and shook me, not hard but firmly. “You want to hear the truth?” he said. “Goodness aside. I’m going to make you run. You’re going to hate me before we’re through. I feel it, that pit, that emptiness. I’m going to lose you.” He laughed for an instant and dropped his hands. “The terrible irony is that more than anything in the world I want you to stay.”

  His speech was like a crack in the world. When he spoke, it was true, and I felt I had seen not only into him but into other people, into myself. But then I shook it off. It was melodrama. We were carried away. “Don’t say that,” I said. “You can’t predict the future . . .”

  “We’ve talked too much,” he said. “It’s late. We’re here together now.” He embraced me tightly, crushing my face against his chest. I had to pull my head away to breathe.

  During the night, he slept badly, shifting his position often and mumbling to himself. He woke me near morning when he cried out in his sleep, but then he grew quiet. I didn’t catch the words. It’s guilt, I thought. I imagined his wife, whom I had never seen—a slender, aging woman with a soft face and long brown hair tied up at the neck. God only knows where this image came from—it must have been a collage of the long line of faculty wives I had known in my life—but that is how I saw her, and the sight made me pity her, and him, and I thought to myself, I’ve betrayed someone I don’t even know. I spoke her name inwardly. Lila, I said. It’s a pretty name.

  At breakfast Michael was jittery, distracted. His eyes were red, and he rubbed them often. I half expected him to leap up from the table and run to the door.

  “My God,” I said. “You’d think the secret police were coming for you. Relax.”

  He was embarrassed. “Sorry.”

  I smiled at him. “You’ve never seen me in the morning before. I’m probably scaring you away. I bet I look like a witch.” I made a face at him, pulling my mouth to either side with my fingers and bulging my eyes.

  He laughed. “You’re a witch, all right,” he said, reaching across the table to pat my head. “But you’re beautiful.”

  Within minutes of that comment, he was gone. His absence produced a new feeling in me, a mixture of dread and guilt. I washed the dishes very slowly, scrubbing each one methodically, holding it up to the window light to make sure it shone. Then I cleaned the entire apa
rtment.

  • • •

  That same week, Paris called and invited me to see a movie at the Thalia. Michael was with me in the afternoon. At six he was still there. I told him I had to get dressed to go to the movies. While I was putting on my lipstick, Michael stood behind me in the bathroom.

  “Who’s taking you to the movies?”

  “No one’s taking me. I’m meeting a friend.”

  “What friend?”

  “Paris. I’ve told you about Paris.”

  “The art critic?”

  “Yes, Michael, the small, unattractive, but not uninteresting art critic.”

  Michael looked pained. He put on his jacket. “I’d better leave now,” he said. “So you can get ready.”

  “Wait a minute,” I said. “You’re married. You go home every night to her.” It was a television conversation. I knew it, but I continued. “Do you want me to stay here and mope?”

  “I didn’t say that,” he said. “I know very well that I’m not in a position to say anything.”

  The little miseries started then. All the way to the Thalia, I went over the scene, rethinking my language. I wished I had stated my case better. When I saw Paris, I hugged him for the first time.

  “What was that for?”

  “I’ve missed you.” I smiled into his face. Paris took my arm and we walked into the dark theater. It was not crowded, and I let my legs hang over the seat in front of me. Someone several rows in front of us farted loudly. Paris and I exchanged smiles. The film was Sunrise, directed by F. W. Murnau in 1927. I can’t remember its sequence well, and I can’t reconstruct the whole story, but I remember its effect on me, and the way the city looked in the movie—a carnival in hell, a grotesque playground; and I believed it. Paris turned to look at me every once in a while, which made me suspect he was monitoring my responses. The obscure light in the room was amiable, and I felt glad to see no one except the people on the screen, to have Paris next to me without being forced to look at him. After the movie, Paris took me to dinner at the Cafe Luxembourg, a noisy, fashionable place on the West Side. I gabbed uncontrollably as I let my eyes wander to other tables. The conversation is lost. I recall only the way it ended. I had been laughing at some remark Paris had made, when I noticed he was studying me, his face suddenly serious. Before he spoke, he put a finger to his pale pink tie, leaned over and touched a lock of my hair, and then sat back in his chair.