Crashing Through (18 page)

In the kitchen, his boys abandoned their toast and rushed to put a cereal box in his hand, asking if he could read its name. The letters were big, which helped, but he couldn’t read any of them instantly. He traced some with his index finger, perceived others as attached to each other, and struggled especially with those that were lowercase. Still, he identified the big first letter, an
R,
added in some deductive reasoning, and read his first two words: Raisin Bran. The boys cheered and ran to the pantry, pulling out all the other brands of cereal and asking their father to read those. May spelled out the words letter by letter, but again, by the time he’d reached the last letter, he’d often forgotten the first few, a source of great amusement to his boys.

As he did on most mornings, May walked his sons to school. But for their clothing and different shades of blond, he could not tell them apart. At the schoolyard, some of the moms noticed that May was looking around. They knew that he’d undergone surgery and asked if he could see.

“Well, I see you’re wearing a nice red sweater and have blue jeans on,” May said.

“That’s right! Wow!”

“And I can see that you’re both dazzlingly thin.”

“You should teach our husbands how to see!”

In fact, May could discern that the women were petite because he could see them next to a row of others. And he thought, “Man, people really do come in all sizes.”

Back home, May went to work for the first time since his surgery. He returned business calls, typed e-mails, and didn’t bother trying to read his computer monitor—it was much easier to keep listening to his screen-reading software, as he had for years. In between, he described his new vision to Kim Burgess, a junior at UC-Davis whom he’d recently hired as an assistant. Burgess had long blond hair and, by all accounts, was a knockout. May found himself smitten by her hair and lost himself watching it cascade to the side when she answered the phone and fly back when she pulled it into a ponytail. He could see Burgess’s mannerisms, postures, gestures, and it was all in front of him, all there for the taking by his eye, for as long as he chose to look.

During lunch at the backyard patio table, May delighted in his ability to use vision alone to reach for the milk carton and find his napkin after it fell to the ground. He could easily distinguish between Burgess and Jennifer based on their hair lengths and the color of their clothes. When the women spoke their heads bobbed, their lips flapped, their hands gestured. This bedlam at once amused and distracted him, and try as he might he could not keep track of what they were saying so long as their faces ran spastic like that, and he wondered, even as he continued to smile pleasantly at their stories, how they could keep track themselves of even a word that came from such facial commotion.

Ready to return to work, May stretched and looked up at the sky.

“Hey, Jen, what’s that white thing moving up in that tree?” he asked.

Jennifer looked where he was pointing. She saw nothing. Finally, in a distant and tall tree, she saw the flapping white wisp of a kite’s tail. She could barely make it out herself—from this distance it appeared the size of a thread.

“Wow, you can really see that?” she asked.

“Yep,” May said.

Jennifer looked again at the tiny piece of the kite. A minute ago her husband had had to press his eye against the milk carton to read the letter
M.
Now he had spotted a bit of fabric in a distant tree. She had believed that things couldn’t get more interesting than they had been yesterday. She was beginning to think she was wrong.

Late that afternoon, five-year-old Wyndham poked his head into May’s office.

“Come play ball with me, Dad!”

May’s heart raced. Many of his happiest days had been spent chasing, throwing, and kicking balls. Yet during the year he’d contemplated new vision, he’d never imagined that he’d see one.

“That would be great,” he said.

Wyndham ran and got a red-and-white soccer ball, then joined his father in the backyard. They stood about fifty feet apart. Wyndham placed the ball on the ground.

“Ready, Dad?”

“Ready.”

Wyndham kicked the ball on the ground. Instantly, May saw it rolling toward him, its bright white shape a perfect trill against the brilliant green grass below, and without thinking or planning he stepped to the left, shot out his foot, and trapped the ball under his shoe. For a moment, May simply stood there, astonished.

“Nice play, Dad!” Wyndham shouted. “Now kick it back to me.”

Jennifer watched from the kitchen window as May backed up a step, looked down at the ball, then swung his leg forward, connecting perfectly with the ball and sending it hurtling back toward his son, who barely needed to move to trap it himself.

Wyndham kicked a few more on the ground. May moved and stopped them all. Then Wyndham got a new idea.

He took a big approach this time and sent the ball flying not on the ground but in the air, off to May’s right. Instinctively, May moved right, lifted his leg, and knocked the ball down.

“Whoa! That was so cool!” May exclaimed. “Do more like that, Wyndham!”

His son obliged. May knocked them all down. Then, without either of them saying a word, they arrived at a new idea together. Wyndham placed the ball on the grass, took a couple of steps back, then ran forward, kicking the ball even higher to his father. May streaked back and to his right, stuck out his arms, and clenched his hands around the ball.

“Yes! Great catch, Dad! Awesome!”

May stopped and looked at his hands. The ball was still there, bright white with little red designs, in his control, like it belonged there, like they had rendezvoused from a long time ago.

“I caught it,” May said.

He asked Wyndham to kick more. Soon May was catching four out of every five his son sent streaking his way, including some that sailed over his head or required a running leap to reach. Even when he missed, he ran after the ball like he was four years old again. For an hour, he and Wyndham lost themselves in the game, in keeping score, and in each other. Kids had never taken it easy on May when he’d played sports as a boy, and as he made another running catch of yet another difficult kick, he felt like the best part about this game was that Wyndham never thought to, either.

That evening, after his kids had gone to bed and the dinner dishes had been dried, May and Jennifer retired to their bedroom. She turned to the bathroom to wash up. He reached for her hand.

“I want to look at you,” he said.

Jennifer stepped forward, took May’s hands in hers, and kissed him, first lightly on the cheek, then more passionately, on the lips.

“I’m really nervous,” she said. “But I want you to look at me.”

She unbuttoned May’s shirt, pulled it off his back, and let it fall to the floor behind him. She pulled her own shirt over her head, un-hooked her bra, and let it fall to the floor, a white swoop he could see as clearly as the soccer ball. She lifted herself on her toes and leaned into May’s ear.

“Stay here,” she said.

Jennifer walked to the far wall and turned on the ceiling lights, then turned on the bedside lamps until the room glowed intensely bright. The light helped May find his clock radio, which he used to play some music. Jennifer pulled down her jeans. A moment later she was fully naked. And, she felt, fully bright.

“Are you completely undressed?” he asked.

“Yes,” Jennifer said, crossing her arms over her breasts. “It’s just me now.”

May pushed off the rest of his clothes.

“This is great,” he said. “I finally get to gawk at you.”

Jennifer laughed and felt her face flush. She climbed into their bed and lay flat on her back.

“Okay, I’m ready,” she said.

May knelt beside the bed and began to draw near for a closer look. Jennifer pulled the covers over her body and up to her chin.

“It’s cold in here,” she said.

“If I have to go under the covers I’ll need a flashlight, and I think we’re out of batteries. That really leaves me no choice.”

Jennifer slowly crept out, pushed the sheets to the foot of the bed, and lay back flat, arms at her sides, legs pressed together. It had been a long time since she’d felt so nervous and aroused all at once.

Already, May found himself in a battle to keep his hands from Jennifer’s body. Her shyness only electrified that impulse. But he wanted to see what vision delivered by itself, how this most glorious object in the world, a woman, entered his world when he touched her with eyes alone.

May walked on his knees toward the head of the bed. Suddenly, he could see Jennifer’s streaked blond hair, a different species than she owned while dressed and washing dishes, no longer well mannered and patient but swooped across the pillow like a fanned deck of cards, its blond and gold streaks a call of abandon into which it felt like he could fall in a hundred different places. He moved his glance to her forehead. There, lost between her eyes, he saw a stray lock of blond hair, innocent to the idea that it had been separated from all the rest, a private accent mark even his wife couldn’t see was there.

“Look at me,” May said, still on his knees beside the bed.

Jennifer turned her head to the right. Now he could see her mouth—the light vertical lines etched into her lips, the hills that fell to a valley at the center of her top lip, a reddish pink unlike any color he’d seen. She began to breathe a bit more heavily, which caused her lips to part just slightly, a distance that looked to May wholly different from a smile, a distance that, when combined with the sound of her breath, looked sexy to him.

Jennifer tucked some fallen hair behind her head. May leaned in close.

“You have smaller ears than I thought,” he said. “Why didn’t you tell me before we got married that you had small ears?”

“I do not!” Jennifer laughed, fluffing her hair back over her ears.

May climbed onto the bed and knelt beside his wife, who remained on her back. He put his eye to her neck.

“I can see the hollow of your throat,” he said. “Remind me to tickle that later.”

“Michael! Oh, gosh, no tickling! I’m feeling wiggly enough already!”

“Hey, what’s this?” May asked, pointing to a dark spot.

“That’s a birthmark,” Jennifer said. “I’ve told you about that a million times, remember?”

May did not remember, but judged it best not to admit it and keep looking. He lay on his side, stretched out, and set out to finally see what he’d been imagining, conceptualizing, and contemplating since age twelve: a woman’s breasts.

He looked toward the middle of Jennifer’s chest for the dark circles of her areolas, but found them instead lying to either side.

“That happens when you’re past forty and you’ve had kids…”

“You’re beautiful,” May interrupted. His hands moved toward her breasts and finally he was powerless to stop them as they traced exploratory circles near her nipples and moved underneath for a fuller touch. Jennifer breathed deeply.

“What do you see?” she asked.

“It’s incredible how the color changes from the nipple to the areola to the breast. There’s so much going on. And I can see that your nipple is erect.”

“You’re looking too closely!” Jennifer said. “I feel like a cereal box!”

May continued to caress her breasts, molding, lifting, sculpting, and kneading. Jennifer fought the urge to dive back under the covers—she had never been inspected like this—but as she watched him hit and miss and gasp and exclaim, as she watched him try to understand her, she knew she was watching a kind of birth, and she tried to imagine the kind of love and courage it took to allow another person to watch you being born.

May slid his arm under Jennifer’s neck and she snuggled into him. A single word now, a brush of the hand, even a hot breath would have pushed the moment into intimacy. Neither of them said anything. May still had places to explore. Turning over, he crawled backward until he was straddling Jennifer’s waist with his knees.

“What do you see now?” she asked.

“It’s amazing. I see your ribs. It’s obvious what they are. Wow. Ribs.”

May moved to Jennifer’s waist and hips. Here she felt especially confident. In her forties, things weren’t quite as perfect as they used to be, but she’d been working out, eating California healthy, and feeling better and more confident than ever in her body.

“I’m turning on my side now,” she said. “That should really show you my shape.”

Jennifer rolled onto her side. May was not yet fully able to direct his eye itself, so he began to move it over her curves like a roller coaster car, dipping from the top of her ribs down to the valley of her small waist, then slingshotting back up through the area’s highest peak, her hip bone.

“Oh, man, Jen, you really are curvy!” May said. “This must be what the panorama looks like at Kirkwood!”

Jennifer laughed and fidgeted and laughed some more. May ran his hands over the same curves his eyes had just traversed. At the same time, he used his vision to inspect the curling skin twists of her belly button, the wisps of baby blond hair on her arms, the turn of her stomach, and a birthmark of which she most definitely had not informed him. Then he stepped back and took in the whole of her body, and it made sense to him; he didn’t have to assemble her parts the way he had to add up letters in order to read. He thrilled to this multitiered access. Often, during lovemaking, he had wished for another hand. But here, with an eye that could touch anywhere and everywhere at once, he felt he’d been given the gift of as many more hands as he desired.

May crawled backward on his knees until he reached Jennifer’s bikini line.

“Okay, I’m going to look at everything,” he said. “I’m going to really look.”

“Okay…I think,” Jennifer replied.

May put his eye just above Jennifer’s private parts. She strained not to wiggle or laugh or jump him.

“Well,” May said, “I guess you really are a blonde.”

“Michael!” Jennifer protested.

“I can see your tan line, too. Even though it’s still winter I can see where it is.”