“Your hair,” he said. “It’s getting long.”
I looked straight at him. “I like it this way.”
Paris nodded. “It’s pretty,” he said. “But it lacks the audacity of a crew cut, doesn’t it?”
I stared at the table. “Yes,” I said. “It does.”
• • •
Michael came and went, but I sensed a difference. In the early weeks he had luxuriated in our adultery, had come smiling to my door, but there were times now when he arrived haggard and serious, like a man on a mission. Sometimes he would glance at objects in my apartment in a way that made me think he was looking for something. His distraction unnerved me. When I asked him about his mood, he was vague. “Maybe it’s too much for you,” I said to him once. “Sneaking in and out of here like a thief.” He just shook his head, and I didn’t press him further. The silence between us had become insinuation, and I didn’t know how to fight it, but at those moments I would see him from a distance, like a strange man in a crowd. One afternoon in April, Michael had taken a shower and was standing near the kitchenette in the outer room of my apartment. He was wearing only a towel. I put my arms around his waist and leaned against him.
“Do you always use two coffee cups?” he said, staring into the sink.
“Sometimes I’m too lazy to wash them.”
“You weren’t entertaining someone?” he said, his voice dull.
I released him and took his shoulders, turning him toward me. “No,” I said. “Don’t do this. Please. It will hurt us.”
He looked at me, nodded, and smiled with his mouth closed. “I know,” he said.
But Michael imagined signs of betrayal everywhere: a shirt of Stephen’s in my closet I had never returned, flowers Ruth sent me on my birthday, even a letter from my mother lying out on my desk that began, “My darling Iris.” He never accused me of anything. His interrogations were circuitous: “You’ve received flowers?” or “A letter from someone?” Jealousy is rarely unfounded. Although I had no other lovers, Michael had glimpsed my alienation, however momentary, and needed someone to blame. His suspicion brought with it an atmosphere of threat. He would rub his hands hard when he spoke to me, making me think he didn’t trust them. At times Michael’s jealousy turned me into an awed spectator. At other times it entered me like a sickness, and I would yell in frustration. That was the problem. I was a player and not a player. I was in and out. I became what is known as an impossible woman, one of those horrible creatures who can’t make up their minds. But my moods weren’t calculated. Michael changed. He was one and then another. He was near and then far. I shuttled back and forth between the two poles and felt the strain.
With Stephen, I had known jealousy from the other side, had come down with the disease myself, and perhaps that’s why the experience was familiar. And yet it was more than that. The ritual of his veiled accusations, my denials, and our eventual reconciliations had the force of reenactment from the first. Whether I was screaming profanity or cooing reassurance, the words I spoke seemed to come from a script as old as the hills, and I felt like a character in a farce. I’ve come to believe that there is no genuine language of love, only sounds. When I opened my mouth to speak to him, to pour out my pity and affection, it was nonsense to my ears. But we talked on, digging a rut with every sentence. We feasted on the rubbish heap of dead expressions, and the gorging made us worse. He turned pompous or maudlin, I nasty or inane. And so we teetered from one extreme to another, truly present in neither. Then we would find ourselves again and speak to each other in the old way, and there were hours of happiness. Still, a third presence, invisible and cloying, remained. I began to sense that when he spoke to me, whether it was about literature, philosophy, or science, he was circling around this other thing, this third presence. All his discussions were rife with innuendo. His speech had become less direct, more oblique and delicate. He talked a lot about cruelty, about the mystery of cruelty and the human impulse to maim and destroy. He talked about private sadism and mass barbarism, about psychopaths and the Nazis. There is no end to such discussions. They wind in on themselves. Explanations are spun out and then end in disbelief. Michael was looking for the heart of it, but it couldn’t be found, and I knew it was personal and that he was taking me with him, letting me in. He forced my complicity, saying, “You understand,” or, “We think alike.” But half the time he lost me, and once when he told me a story about a man who had survived Auschwitz as a musician and then many years later committed suicide after he slapped his daughter in public, I burst into tears. He brought up The Brutal Boy again, studying me when he spoke about Klaus and Krüger’s fate in the death camp. “Let’s not talk about it anymore,” I said. “It gets worse and worse somehow. I wish I’d never laid eyes on the stupid book.” I remember his exact words then. “We can’t turn back the clock now. It’s in us. If we close our eyes, it will jump out at us in the darkness.” I didn’t know what the “it” referred to, whether he meant the story or evil or an amorphous presence, and I didn’t ask. By then I didn’t want to hear. At the same time, I was ensnared like a person in a horror movie who covers his eyes and then, peeks.
Michael’s rambling lectures always brought me back to the bar and to the gun, to what I couldn’t tell him. The episode returned with nauseating repetition. And yet it was a false memory, because I fled my body and saw myself do it. In effect, I became a spectator of my own act, one of the shocked onlookers in the Babydoll Lounge! But it was you, I said to myself, you who wanted the gun, you who tried to take it. My motive was inexplicable. The impulse that had pushed me so far was buried with Klaus.
He brought me gifts, little presents of food and books but also things: a bottle of perfume, tiny earrings of topaz and gold, and a crystal vase for the flowers I had been keeping in an old mayonnaise jar. I loved these offerings and loved his face when I opened the boxes. He looked young then and eager to please. But these tokens also made my life less stark. Owning them pulled me farther away from the bleakness of having nothing. They were symbolic, of course, but when I looked at the vase filled with tulips, daisies, anemones, or freesia, I was comforted. In early June Michael gave me what would be my last present from him. He had taken me out to dinner at a small French restaurant not far from my apartment but outside the Columbia orbit. It was a risk and we took it. We were celebrating my summer job. I was to teach freshman English at Queens College, and the salary, small as it was, promised to keep me solvent. We ate and drank and laughed. Several times he reached across the table and squeezed my hand. The next day he would leave for the summer. His wife owned a house in Vermont, and he would join her there for July and August. The subject of our parting was taboo, and we didn’t mention it. Michael worried about leaving me in the city alone, and I knew he was tormented by fantasies of me with other men. I read it in his eyes and mouth, in his body, and in his oblique but ominous references to “the summer.”
After dinner, he handed me a box. The paper was gold and it was tied with a pale blue ribbon. I opened it slowly, pulled aside the tissue, and found a silk scarf—white, navy, red, and green. It was beautiful and expensive, with the name of the designer written in one corner. I held it up. “I’ve never had anything like this,” I said, and draped it over my shoulders. I leaned forward and kissed him. By the time we left, it was almost eleven-thirty, and we began the walk back to my apartment. Michael put his arm around my shoulder and hugged me close to him. We could have met any number of people we knew, but he was throwing caution to the wind, and it made me happy.
“These familiar streets,” he said. “I’ve been here too long.”
“How long?”
“Almost fifteen years.”
We said nothing, and then I spoke. “I’ve been here three years now. I’ve walked these streets hundreds of times. The rhythm is in my feet.” I nodded ahead of me. “I bet I could walk this last stretch blindfolded.”
I felt his fingers dig into my arm, and he turned his face sharply toward me.
Then he moved his hand to my neck and caressed the scarf, rubbing his third finger into my skin. “You’re on,” he said. “Let’s see if you can do it.”
“You’re kidding.”
One side of his mouth twitched, and even in the dark I caught the green of his eyes. He stopped and untied the scarf. “Turn around,” he said.
His words brought a tremor of excitement that I felt in my abdomen and an involuntary tightening in my stomach and thighs. He was methodically folding the scarf on his lifted knee and wobbled for a second on one leg. “Turn around,” he repeated.
I did, and he pulled the silk scarf around my eyes, knotting it tightly at the back of my head.
“This is crazy, you know,” I said.
I saw nothing. The material was dense. “I’m really blind,” I said.
“Can you get home?”
“Yes,” I said. “We’re at a Hundred and Third. I can count the blocks. But you have to keep me from walking into buildings or cars.”
“Of course.” He laughed.
“Are people looking at us?” I said.
He had a hand on my elbow. “Do you care?” he said.
“No. Let’s start.”
He removed his hand. I walked slowly forward, feeling for the curb with every step, determined not to fall.
“You’re weaving,” he said.
“Even blind people have canes, for God’s sake.”
There was a breeze. I remember wondering if there were stars, wishing I had looked, for some reason. Michael was close to me. I went over the curb awkwardly, feeling exposed in the night air. I laughed. “Is everyone staring?” I said.
“The whole world is staring,” he said. “They think we’re mad.”
But there weren’t many people on the street at that hour. I heard footsteps coming toward us, and I stopped. Michael spoke in a low, clear voice but not to me. “It’s a wager, madam, a simple wager.”
The steps quickened. I burst out laughing. My shoulders shook. Michael laughed too, pulling me toward him and kissing my cheeks and chin. “Time out,” he said.
Those six blocks were an odyssey. My equilibrium was gone with my sight, and I lurched and tottered forward, marking each block in my head. Once, Michael reached out to guide me, but I pushed him away, saying, “I can do it.”
At 109th Street I turned, holding my hands in front of me. Michael never left my side, and his presence in the blackness was an advantage. His body, although invisible, occupied a certain place, and I heard him breathe and cough, listened for his voice, and imagined his wry face. Groping, I discovered the brick wall of my building and let one hand graze it, expecting the stoop at any moment, but I miscalculated and hit a metal object, stumbling to one side. Michael grabbed me around the waist, and I slumped into him, exhausted. “It’s a garbage can,” he said. “But you’ve done it.”
I reached for the scarf to pull it off, but he took my hand. “Not yet,” he said.
“But I’m too tired. I can’t do it anymore.”
“I’ll take you,” he said. “Keep it on until we’re inside.”
Michael picked me up off my feet and carried me up the steps. His strength seemed remarkable, and I gave way to it, letting my cheek rest against him. The last person who carried me like this, I thought, was my father when he lifted me out of the car where I had been sleeping. It was years and years ago. Michael dropped me to my feet and took my bag. I heard the jingle of keys, the sound of the door. He pulled me inside. The light in the hallway shone through the cloth over my eyes. Again he carried me. “You’ll hurt yourself, Michael,” I said.
But he didn’t answer. He breathed heavily up the single small flight of stairs, again let me stand while he opened the door and drew me inside. I heard the door slam. I think he kicked it with his foot. Again I went for the scarf and again he stopped me, saying, “No, not now. I want you blind, just this once.”
He kissed me, and it was good not to see him. He could have been any man. The anonymity was his and mine. Like a child, I felt that my blindness made me disappear, or at least made the boundaries of my body unstable. One of us gasped. I didn’t know who it was, and this confusion made my heart pound.
We were in the other room. He had his hands on my shoulders and pressed me down on the bed. There was no light. He was fast, tugging at my clothes. Blind, I thought, the word stirring me. I’m going under. He had taken my wrists and held them above me in a gesture of conquest, and the recognition aroused me. I took the role and played it. The pleasure was in the staging, the idea of ourselves as a repetition of others. I knew this without saying it, felt my femininity as the game of all women, a mysterious identification in which I lost myself. He was caught too, and I wondered what he saw, whom he saw. It didn’t matter. Let’s drown, I thought, and I felt my pulse in my temples beneath the tight cloth. But then he seemed to race past me, to be overtaken by urgency. I moved my face close to his to kiss, him, but he turned away. I searched for a new rhythm, but there was none. The blanket underneath me irritated the skin of my back. I wanted to tug at the blindfold, to adjust it, but he held my arms, intent, feverish. His skin was hot and clammy. I wandered from the drama in my mind, and my body went dead. His hands hurt my wrists, and I struggled to free them, but he jerked me back onto the warm sheet and his fury shocked me. It’s strange that one thinks at such moments, that thoughts move freely, that I remembered our conversations. Unspeakable acts, seizures of cruelty, Klaus. I choked on my fear, heard a noise come from me, an animal sound of alarm, and then I said, “No!” He put his hand over my mouth. “Shhhh! Someone will hear you.” “No!” I cried out again, fighting him with my free hand. He grabbed it, but I kicked underneath him and screamed again. “Witch,” he growled, and the name made me cry. He slapped me across the mouth. The pain astonished me. He doesn’t know, I thought, he’s still inside it. He can’t know. Again he held his hand over my mouth as he pushed on me, dragging me to the end, but I beat his back with the fist of one hand and felt with my mouth for his fingers. I bit him, listening to the noise of his howl, and the sound made me happy. He pulled away, and I sat up, ripping the scarf from my face and throwing it down on the bed. I tugged at the blanket and draped it over my shoulders to cover myself completely. Moving away from him, I withdrew into a corner of my bed near the window and stared outside, gazing through the diamond bars of the safety gate into the airshaft below lit by the moon and distant neon. On the ground I saw some wayward garbage and stones. Where did the stones come from? I thought.
Michael grunted, and I turned my head to look at him. He sat at the edge of the bed, his bare legs apart, his shirt open. He was crying. I watched him, fascinated by his shuddering back and the unfamiliar sounds that came from him—short, uneven blasts of noise. He was ugly in his misery and it repulsed me. It’s difficult to say how long we remained like that, how long it took before I felt the turn in myself. It came as a sharp, wrenching sensation in my gut, and then I pitied him.
He was speaking, the words disguised by sobs. What’s he saying? I thought. I can’t make it out. I inched toward him, taking the blanket with me, and then when I was very close to him, I put out my hand and hesitated. Finally I let my fingers rest lightly on his shoulder. The wet stripes on his cheek struck me as incredible. Fragments of sentences entered my head and then vanished. I opened my mouth, closed it. Then I whispered, “Why?”
He shook his head, folded his hands in his lap and rubbed the palms together. I stared at the fingers and saw the tiny wound where I had drawn blood on one knuckle. I shifted my gaze from his hand to the bed where the scarf lay still tied on the white sheet. Strange, I thought. Everything is strange.
Michael moved so that he could see himself in the long mirror opposite us. We stared at the reflection. I saw him, saw the soft, pale flesh of his belly, the deep navel and flaccid genitals. I looked away. I had seen it. In the mirror his body appeared as a thing of comic horror, vulnerable, aging, the site of decay.
He saw it too. “Look
at me,” he said. “I’m an old man, absurd, contemptible.”
I moved behind him and studied myself in the glass—the small head and wild hair, the colorless cheeks, the darkness under my eyes, my thin fingers holding the blanket. I let go, and the covering fell to the bed, exposing my naked body, but what I saw then was my mouth. The lips appeared very red and swollen, a lonely sign of blatant sensuality, an advertisement.
Michael seemed transfixed by my reflection.
“Look away, Michael,” I whispered to him. “The mirror. Don’t stare at me like that.”
He met my eyes in the glass, our reflections locked in confrontation. “Can you see it?” he said.
“What?”
“The answer. It’s there, in you, on you.”
I didn’t speak. He looked at me. “No,” I said. “It’s what you think you see. It’s the old thing between us, what you’ve been trying to say, trying to tell me . . .” I couldn’t finish. The vagaries made me tired. Speech was sickening.
Michael continued to look at himself and then at me in the mirror. I moved out of view, covering myself again under the folds of the blanket, and went to open the grate and lift the window. I need air, I thought. Then I breathed it in, cool air that smelled of gasoline, soot, and brick.
“Tonight,” he said, “I was someone else.” He waited but I said nothing.
“It is”—he paused—“unforgivable.”
“You hit me,” I said. I stumbled over the phrase, and the emotion returned. I pressed my lips together and closed my eyes.
“I can’t believe it.” He said this quietly, to himself.
We were silent. Then I moved closer to him and said, “I felt it coming. I almost expected it.”