A Blind Man Can See How Much I Love You (3 page)

“My son’s having surgery day after tomorrow. Tonight’s his last chance for Chinese food.” That’s enough information, Jane thinks.

“Of course. Just a drink, then? Or a post-shopping cappuccino?”

Jane calls home, and Jess, still drowsy from the sun and anxiety, says, “Fine. Go. Whoop it up.”

Jane says, “I’ll be home no later than seven, and we can go out for dinner and catch the nine-thirty movie.”

“Whatever, Mom,” Jess says. “It’ll be fine. I’m going back to sleep.”

J
ane falls on her bed, after the sixteen-ounce Bloody Mary with Cole Ramsey and the beer with Jess and their all-appetizer dinner and malted milk balls at the movie, and she thinks of Cole and exhales happily. His soft, light voice. The focused, flattering attention. The self-deprecating jokes. Jane has not had a close gay male friend since Anthony died in ’88, and Cole is charming and such a pleasure to look at.

In the morning Jane and Jess kick around until it’s time for him to check into the hospital. They play gin and walk to the bookstore and waste time, and eventually they pack and watch an afternoon rerun of
Friends.
They act more like pilots before a big mission than like patients. At the hospital Jess is hungry and nervous and unwilling to let Jane sit with him any longer.

“Love you, Mom,” he says.

“Love you, too, honey,” Jane says, and thinks, Oh, my brave girl.

Jane sees Cole in the hospital lobby, patting the cheek of a fat blond nurse. When he sees Jane, he gives the nurse a squeeze on the shoulder and she hugs him, her wide body hiding him from view. Cole hurries to catch up with Jane.

“You must have just left your son. May I walk along with you?”

They walk through the parking lot, into the wet grass and waving palms and blooming Jacarandas of the small, unexpectedly tropical city park.

“This is nice,” he says. “A little bit of Paradise we didn’t know about.” He makes it sound as if he and Jane have been exploring municipal parks together for years.

“You have a good relationship with the nurses,” Jane says.

“Patients and nurses are about everyone that counts in a hospital.”

“I bet that one’s in love with you,” Jane says. She’s teasing; she and Anthony used to talk about women who fell in love with him with a particularly gratifying mix of compassion and malice.

“Oh, I’m over fifty, no one falls in love with me anymore.” Cole sits down on a bench and pulls gently on Jane’s hand.

“Don’t be silly. Men have it easy until they’re seventy. And look at Cary Grant, he looked fabulous until he died.” And he was gay too, she thinks.

“Well, I’m not Cary Grant, I’m afraid, just a skinny doc from South Carolina. Not that I wasn’t a fan. Particularly
Bringing Up Baby.
”

“Well, yes,” Jane says. “One of the best movies ever made.” They talk through the movie from beginning to end, and he applauds her imitation of Katharine Hepburn, and when they get to the scene with the crazy dog and poor Cary Grant in Hepburn’s peignoir, they laugh out loud.

Cole looks at his watch and sighs. “This has been just lovely, but I do have to run.”

Jane looks at him. “Of course. Someone waiting at home?” It would be nice to be friends with a gay couple. She could invite them over for dinner, for pizza at least, while Jess is in the hospital, or maybe while he’s recuperating and getting bored.

Cole looks down at his hands.

“I’m in mid-divorce. I promised my soon-to-be ex-wife that we could do a last furniture divvy tonight. We’ve been trying to stay out of the lawyer’s office as much as possible, but that does mean that we spend far too much time talking to each other. Comes under the heading of no good deed goes unpunished, I suppose.”

“What good deed?” Jane is trying to figure out whether he means “wife” in the sense of “woman I am married to,” or “wife” in the sense of “man in my life who played a kind of wifely role.”

“Oh, you know. I don’t want to bore you. The good deed of ending twelve years of unhappy marriage with an amicable divorce. After God answered my prayers and sent her the kind of man she should have married in the first place.”

Straight? Jane thinks.

Cole holds Jane’s hands in his. They are the same size.

“I am sorry to have to run, and even sorrier that this kind of dreary talk should ruin our little moment. I’ll walk you home.”

“You don’t have to,” Jane says. “It’s a safe couple of blocks.”

“It will be a pleasure,” he says. “And it will be my last pleasure for a few hours.” He smiles. “Except when I insist that my wife take back some of the horrible furniture we got from her mother, the Terror of Tallahassee. I used to hope our house would just go up in flames and we could start again.”

Actual wife, Jane thinks.

At the doorstep Cole says, “I have to tell the truth. I saw you before our serendipitous meeting in the Rite Aid. You were daydreaming in the cafeteria. You looked so far away and so lovely. I wanted to be wherever you were.” He brings her hand to his mouth, kisses it right above the wrist, and goes.

I
n bed Jane holds her wrist gently and hopes very hard that Jess will be all right. She does not believe in God, but she believes in Dr. Laurence, and she believes that people who are loved and cared for have a better chance in life than people who are not.

Cole rings the doorbell at midnight.

“Forgive me. You must have been sleeping. I don’t know what I was thinking. Well, I do. I was thinking about your energy, your mix of acceptance and strength, and I felt in need of it.”

He talks nonstop, flattery and Southern folk sayings,
snatches of Auden and Yeats, a joke about sharks and lawyers whose punch line he mangles, and finally Jane pours him a glass of wine and wraps his hand around it.

“You must think I’m demented,” he says.

“No, just worn out. Actually, I thought you were gay.”

Cole smiles. “Oh, my. I wouldn’t mind being, except that that would require having sex with men.” He looks right at Jane. “That is not my preference.”

“I’m embarrassed. I don’t know why I thought that. Your manners are so good, I guess.”

Cole pats her hand. He doesn’t look surprised or offended. “Crazy Creole mother. Jumped-up Irish father. I was terrible at team sports. Just barely American, in fact.”

Jane pours herself a glass of wine and yawns. Cole loosens his tie.

“Spending all my time at Dr. Laurence’s clinic, I could have been wondering if you were, you know, genetically male.” Jane smiles.

Cole laughs. “Mmm,” he says. “If I were not my mother’s son, if I have a few more glasses of wine, if you allow that robe to slip open another inch or two, then I might say, Oh, dear Jane, it would be my great pleasure to satisfy your curiosity.”

There is a long silence. Cole touches the side of her face with two fingers, from her brow to her chin, and Jane leans forward and kisses his temples and then his cheek.

“I’m so out of practice,” she says.

Cole kisses her neck, and the goosebumps return.

“No,” he whispers. “There’s no practicing for this.”

They kiss on Jane’s couch until dawn, unbuttoned and unsure, hot, restless, and dreamy. In between, Cole says that his back is not great. Jane tells him, as she has not told anyone, that her doctor thinks she’ll need a hip replacement by the time she’s sixty.

“The erotic life of the middle-aged,” he says. “Let’s soldier on.”

Cole undresses Jane a little more, and at every moment of skin revealed he kisses her and thanks her. He sits behind her, biting her very gently down the spine until she cries out. Jane turns to face him, now in just her underpants, and sees that he has taken off only his shoes. She puts both hands on his belt buckle. Cole lifts them off firmly and kisses them.

“Let me go on touching you,” he says. “For a little longer.” And he holds her hands over her head and kisses the undersides of her breasts and the untanned shadows beneath them.

His beeper goes off.

Jane puts her robe back on. “The vibrating ones seem more discreet.”

She feels clotted and cold, and to stave off shame (really, she has known him just a couple of hours; really, is this what she does while her only child lies in a hospital bed?) she is prepared to make him feel terrible, but his hands are trembling and he cannot put his feet into the right shoes.

“I have to go. Like the Chinese sages, crawling with
charity, limp with duty.” His jacket is on, his beeper is in his pocket. “But I am prepared to grovel, for weeks on end, if necessary.” His thick hair sticks up like dreadlocks, and there are wet, lipsticky blotches on his shirt. “I’ll come look for you tomorrow in the hospital, if I may.” He stands there, slightly bent, expecting a blow, as if this is the right, inevitable moment in their relationship for Jane to backhand him.

Jane shrugs. After all his trouble, his shirttail is hanging out.

“Jane. Forgive me, please.” He says “Forgive me, forgive me” until he is out the door.

J
ane sits in the hospital waiting room until two p.m., and after they wheel Jess from the recovery room to his bed she sits next to him, leaning forward from the green vinyl armchair, her hand on his arm. His waist is bandaged, and tubes run from his left arm and his lower body.

The nurse, busy and kind, says, “His vitals are good, but that’s pretty heavy anesthetic, you know. He might be out for another hour or two.”

“Thank you,” Jane says. “Thanks for your help.”

An hour later Jess opens one eye and Jane brings him the water glass. He takes a sip, gives her the thumbs-up, and falls back asleep until the nurse wakes him at six for painkiller and antibiotic. Jane is still sitting there when the shift changes and a new nurse, equally busy, equally kind, sticks her head in the door.

“Everything looks good. You know what they say about the difference between God and Dr. Laurence? Sometimes God makes a mistake.”

Jane says, “Thank you so much. That’s nice to hear.” And thinks, Another group of people to be pleasant to.

J
ane walks home, through the little park again, scuffing her feet through the ribbed curling leaves on the path. Cole is sitting on the steps of the condo, two bouquets of red roses beside him. He stands as she comes up the walk, and then he bends down to pick up the roses, huge and stiff in green tissue and white ribbon. Jane doesn’t like roses, she especially dislikes the cliché of ardent red roses, she doesn’t find short men attractive (the two she’s slept with made her feel like Everest), and she doesn’t want her life to contain any more irony than it already does. And standing on the little porch of the condo, barely enough room for two medium-size people and forty-eight roses, Jane sees that she has taken her place in the long and honorable line of fools for love: Don Quixote and Hermia and Oscar Wilde and Joe E. Brown, crowing with delight, clutching his straw boater and Jack Lemmon as the speedboat carries them off to a cockeyed and irresistible future.

Cole says,
“Dum spiro, spero.
That is the South Carolina motto. While I breathe, I hope.”

“Well,” Jane says, “I expect that will come in handy for us.”

“T
he Barcelona Cancer Center,” Charley says. “Where are the tapas? Maybe there should be castanets at the nurses’ station. Paella Valenciana everywhere you look.”

He says this every time they come for chemotherapy. The Barcelona family made millions in real estate and donated several to St. Michael’s; there is almost nothing worth curing that the Barcelonas have not given to.

Charley puts his hands up in the air and clicks his fingers. Mai ignores him; the person with cancer does not have to be amused.

Ellie smiles. She has already had breast cancer, and her job this summer is to help her best friend and her best friend’s husband.

“How about the internationally renowned Sangria Treatment? Makes you forget your troubles.” Charley stamps his sneakers, flamenco style. Since Mai’s mastectomy
he has turned whimsical, and it does not become him. Mai knows Charley is doing the best he can, and the only kindness she can offer is not to say, “Honey, you’ve been as dull as dishwater for twenty years. You don’t have to change now.”

Ellie believes that all straight men should be like her father: stoic, handy, and unimaginative. They should be dryly kind, completely without whimsy or faintly fabulous qualities. As far as Ellie’s concerned, gay men can be full-blown birds of paradise, with or without homemaking skills. They can just lounge around in their marabou mules, saying witty, brittle things that reveal their hearts of gold. Ellie likes them that way, that’s what they’re for, to toss scarves over the world’s lightbulbs, and straight men are for putting up sheetrock.

Mai sits between Charley and Ellie in the waiting room as if she’s alone. Charley makes three cups of coffee from the waiting room kitchenette. The women don’t drink theirs.

“This is disgusting,” Charley says.

“I’ll get us some from the lobby.”

Ellie heads for the Java Joe coffee bar, a weirdly joyful pit stop at the intersection of four different Barcelona family wings, with nothing but caffeine and sugar and attractively arranged carbohydrates; everyone who is not confined by an IV drip or a restricted diet eats there. Mai sips herbal tea all through chemo, but Ellie goes down and back a few times, for a currant scone, for a cappuccino, for
a mango smoothie. She is happy to spend three dollars on a muffin, grateful that she lives in a country where no one thinks there’s anything wrong or untoward in the AM A-approved pursuit of profit at the expense of people’s grief and health.

Ellie prepares a little picnic on the seat next to Charley. Coffee the way he likes it, two different kinds of biscotti, a fist-size apple fritter, two elephant ears sprinkling sugar everywhere, and enough napkins to make this all bearable to Charley, who is two steps short of compulsive. Ellie presents him with the food-covered seat.

“This is great,” says Charley. “Treats. Honey, look how she takes care of me. Yes, folks,
that’s
a wife.”