Genoa (16 page)

pause to set the cigar carefully on the table-edge, and then go to the door . . .

          
“Michael . . .”

There is at once, as I open the door, before the word is spoken, the view, the perception (the door swinging darkly, from right to left)—what I see:

Linda, standing midway on the stairs, perhaps a little nearer the top, her feet close together, her body, her attention turned (as I had felt) in two directions: not twisted or unnatural, but, in the disposition of her feet, her hips, her shoulders, her head, a tendency of motion: partly upward, toward me, and partly down the stairs, toward Mike Jr., the oldest child,

who stands near the bottom, his motion or rather his stillness likewise tentative: ready to climb or withdraw, so that he seems peeking from behind himself. His right foot is advanced to the tread above, his head tilted slightly; and I guess at the look in his face, hidden within the oversized plastic space helmet (he insisted on getting the large one), which makes his head seem a great gray globe, nearly as large as his trunk, with vast space between the plastic and the boy. In his hand he holds (I remember the cereal boxtops collected and squirreled away on kitchen shelves until the necessary accompanying dimes and quarters could be accumulated) the cosmic atomic space gun, green, with concentric circles on the handle and the barrel—the gun pointed upward, not directly, but vaguely, toward his father.

          
“Michael, what have you been doing? What’s the meaning of this?”

          
“What . . . ?” (still holding the door, my body erect, so that an ironlike firmness runs up from the clubfoot through the knee-joint, the hip, the shoulder, and down through the arm, to the brass knob) “. . . the meaning of what?”

          
“Michael . . .”

. . . and as she begins to speak, to act, moving her body, swinging her arm in a small arc (as large as the stairwell permits) I endeavor to sort out the feelings, the emotions that slam into me. There is her appearance: short, like myself, a little shorter than I, and getting stout, so that her stomach protrudes, just below the belt of her dress—protrudes further than her breasts; her feet small, her feet and legs that seem to go so well with any floor, pavement or ground on which she stands, so that however tired she may become, however sagging her posture, she seems to belong to and celebrate, be it in grace or in weariness, the act of standing; her arms, seeming to grow shorter as they gain more flesh; and her head, her face, not pretty now because she is complaining, but, in all its plainness (the blond-auburn curls hanging in disarray over the steel-rimmed glasses, and her eyes, blue, set wide apart, not angry, but simply committed to an act, a gesture, committed to and facing and participating in it) a great delicacy that, even now, as so often in the past, I find compelling . . .

          
“Michael, every light in the house is burning, the children are in an uproar, the television going . . .

          
Mike Jr.
(gains confidence, takes a step up—the voice muffled): “Jenifer’s crying!”

          
Linda:
“What have you been doing?”

and, not waiting for an answer,

          
“I came home early, I had to tell the foreman I was ill, because I knew something was wrong, I just felt that things weren’t right . . .”

and

          
“I suppose we’ll have to hire a sitter . . .”

Relaxing my hold on the doorknob, I shift balance to the other foot, take a step, gesture toward her,

          
“Linda . . . I’m sorry . . . I didn’t know . . .”

and before I say more she turns away from me, careful to reject what I have to say before I say it, and for this I feel no annoyance, neither at her failure nor mine, but only a great stupid sort of pity for both of us . . .

          
Linda
(turns downstairs, her voice snapping): “Mike Jr.! Get down there! Get into your bed!”

. . . angry now, because she doesn’t want to, will not, cannot face what is with me . . . The boy vanishes with the crack of her syllables, and

          
Linda
(turning at the bottom of the stairs, her words pointed, not directly, but vaguely, toward me): “After all, the kids have to get up for school tomorrow, and you have to work . . .”

Without speaking, I start down the stairs, but again, quickly, she stops me:

          
“Never mind . . .” (her back turned toward me, her feet now on the floor below

          
and I: “Linda . . .”

          
then she, turning partly toward me again): “I’m home now . . .” (and closes the door at the bottom of the stairs).

Pausing, pivoting on the club, my hand on the rail, I stand in the near dark—the only light being that which spills, many times reflected and diminished, through the open doorway above.

For some moments, I am still.

Turning, then, completing the half-circle pivot, I glance at the stair treads above, and take a step upward, the right foot leading, the left dragging heavily behind . . .

                                        
(Melville: “But live & push—tho’ we put one leg forward ten miles—it’s no reason the other must lag behind—no,
that
must again distance the other—& so we go till we get the cramp . . .”

Reaching the upper floor again, the old planks, I pause and look around, to recreate the dimensions of the attic. Walking to the desk, I am conscious of the act, the motions and sounds I make, as on a
voyage: the few steps across the boards, from the head of the stairs to the desk. I pick up the cigar, draw on it, and stand for some moments. I recall that

Columbus at first thought he had discovered India . . .

                                        
(“They found a large nut of the kind belonging to India, great rats, and enormous crabs. He saw many birds, and there was a strong smell of musk . . .”

. . . thereby lopping off, roughly, one-half the globe: a hemisphere gone . . .

          
Melville, describing Hawthorne: “Still there is something lacking—a good deal lacking—to the plump sphericity of the man.”

FOUR

I have been holding my head still for some moments, and I experience something like a headache, but not quite the same . . . a wall seems to run through the middle of my head, from front to back, and all of me, the total “I,” is cramped into one side, the right . . .

          
Melville, describing Ahab: “Threading its way out from among his gray hairs, and continuing right down his tawny scorched face and neck, till it disappeared in his clothing, you saw a slender rod-like mark, lividly whitish. It resembled that perpendicular seam sometimes made in the straight lofty trunk of a great tree, when the upper lightning tearingly darts down it, and without wrenching a single twig, peels and grooves out the bark from top to bottom, ere running off into the soil, leaving the tree still greenly alive, but branded. Whether that mark was born with him, or whether it was the scar left by some desperate wound, no one could certainly say.”

          
And elsewhere: “Seems to me some sort of equator cuts yon old man . . .”

          
And
P
IERRE
:
“. . . his body contorted, and one side drooping, as though that moment halfway down-stricken with a paralysis, and yet unconscious of the stroke.”

The vision in my left eye dims, all but disappears. I remain still, effectively blind in the left eye. Then, as suddenly as it vanished, the vision returns, starting from a central point and opening over the normal field. There remains something strange about it, however, not as before. I reach for the cigar, which I had placed on the edge of the desk, and am surprised when my hand goes beyond it. Reaching again, my hand this time falls short. There is emptiness in my stomach, and I realize what has happened: I have lost binocular vision—am unable to judge distances. It is only with the utmost care and concentration, now, that I am able to pick up the cigar.

Leaning back in the chair, smoking, I experiment with vision, let it do what it will . . . but there is no change . . . still the strange, two-dimensional sensation. I recall a time when Carl, late in life, experienced something similar, only apparently much worse. For a time he lost three-dimensional vision altogether, the world appearing to him as a flat plane.

          
M
OBY
-D
ICK
:
“Now, from this peculiar sideways position of the whale’s eyes, it is plain that he can never see an object which is exactly ahead, no more than he can one exactly astern. In a word, the position of the whale’s eyes corresponds to that of a man’s ears; and you may fancy, for yourself, how it would fare with you, did you sideways survey objects through your ears . . . you would have two backs, so to speak; but, at the same time, also, two fronts (side fronts): for what is it that makes the front of a man—what, indeed, but his eyes?”

Not only this, but Carl’s eyes—set wide apart in his head—seemed to focus and move independent of one another, to receive separate images, imperfectly blended.

          
“Moreover, while in most other animals that I can now think of, the eyes are so planted as imperceptibly to blend their visual power, so as to produce one picture and not two to the brain; the peculiar position of the whale’s eyes, effectually divided as they are by many cubic feet of solid head, which towers between them like a great mountain separating two lakes in valleys; this, of course, must wholly separate the impressions which each independent organ imparts. The whale, therefore, must see one distinct picture on this side, and another distinct picture on that side; while all between must be profound darkness and nothingness to him.”

He was expert in dissembling, in making his way among others without arousing suspicion. Only a few of us who knew him well, who knew what he was experiencing, could see him falter and waver, manipulate others into doing things for him that he was afraid he might fumble . . .

          
“It may be but an idle whim, but it has always seemed to me, that the extraordinary vacillations of movement displayed by some whales when beset by three or four boats; the timidity and liability to queer frights, so common to such whales; I think that all this indirectly proceeds from the helpless perplexity of volition, in which their divided and diametrically opposite powers of vision must involve them.”

The condition of my own vision remains unchanged. Smoking quietly, musing over it, I think that in flattening the world,

as Columbus, at first, saw India for America,

                                        
(and as others, much later, while living off the fat, still see only India

one loses the look of the land . . .

And it occurs that when the world comes in upon a man, it whirls in at the eyes: two vortices, gouging the outlook . . .

          
Melville in Cairo: “. . . multitudes of blind men—worst city in the world for them. Flies on the eyes at noon. Nature feeding on man.”

And Columbus, fourth voyage, engaged with the natives at Belén:

Captain Diego Tristan went upstream to get fresh water, just before the caravels were to depart—his boat was attacked by Indians, and he was killed by a spear that went through his eye. Only one man of his company escaped. All the corpses floated downstream, covered with wounds, and with carrion crows circling over them, for Columbus and his men—their ships trapped by low water inside the bar—to see.

Melville and Columbus, men of vision:

          
“. . . my eyes, which are tender as young sparrows.”

          
“. . . on my former voyage, when I discovered terra firma, I passed thirty-three days without natural rest, and was all that time deprived of sight . . .”

          
“. . . like an owl I steal about by twilight, owing to the twilight of my eyes.”

          
“There the eyes of the Admiral became very bad from not sleeping . . . he says that he found himself more fatigued here than when he discovered the island of Cuba . . . because his eyes were bloodshot . . .”

          
“. . . my recovery from an acute attack of neuralgia in the eyes . . .”

          
“. . . nor did they burst and bleed as they have done now.”

          
“. . . and I felt a queer feeling in my left eye, which, as sometimes is the case with people, was the weaker one; probably from being on the same side with the heart.”

And there was the country fellow, a relative of Mother’s (she tried to deny him because he was thought to be not right in his head—lived by himself in a little shack, did odd jobs, studied strange books at night although it was thought he couldn’t read, had difficulty forming thoughts in his head and passing them as words under his hare lip—but there was the name, Stonecipher, and the relationship, some sort of cousin): I remember him trying to explain to me (he used to get up early in the morning and observe the wild animals, gather herbs in the woods to sell to the neighbor women for medicines) what it is about a baby’s eyesight, how it takes days or weeks after birth for the infant’s eyes to focus, and gain depth perception.