Now I See You Read online

  Ahhh. Now I understood the point of the story. But just to be sure, my mother spelled it out.

  “Miracles do happen,” she said, looking at me with welled-up eyes. “And you’ll get a miracle, too. I know it.”

  I realized with no small amount of surprise that this crazy, out-of-the-blue pep talk had actually made me feel better. A lot better. Hopeful.

  Later, at a computer at the library at school, I researched “childhood epilepsy” and found out there is a strain of the disease that corrects itself, usually before puberty, but this didn’t contradict my mother’s story about being the beneficiary of a miracle. One day she was biting her tongue on the classroom floor, and the next she was perfectly, entirely well and would never be sick like that again. That’s a miracle no matter what scientific explanation there is for it.

  We never discussed the childhood epilepsy again. I don’t know if my sisters know about it, or my father. I’ve never even thought to ask them. I did wonder for a while afterward if maybe she really shouldn’t have told me sooner, if maybe that wasn’t exactly the sort of information the doctor meant when he asked the routine question, “History of epilepsy in your family?” Of course, since it was corrected, she probably figured it wasn’t relevant. And since it wasn’t relevant, it was easy enough to snip right out of her story.

  I could understand that. A similar phenomenon was occurring with my own sickness, which didn’t belong to my past but to my future. Something magical had happened while I was having adventures in Italy; my eye disease had been lifted out of the present tense, had been gathered together, all the loose ends tied up, and flung far, far down my timeline, beyond the vanishing point of my distant future. Now, it was as if someone had gazed into a crystal ball and told me that in ten to fifteen years, I’d suddenly be struck blind. It would happen at some point but it wasn’t happening now.

  What made this possible was the fact that over that long, eventful summer, my eyesight hadn’t gotten any worse. Not as far as I could tell, anyway. Intellectually, I knew that the deterioration of my retinas was slow, largely imperceptible, and that the steady elimination of my visual field happened even when I didn’t notice it. Of course, intellect, particularly in teens, is exceedingly easy to ignore. All that mattered to me was that in September, I could still see as well as I had in June, could still read my copy of The Unbearable Lightness of Being, could still sew buttons on my pants, could still make out a professor’s scrawl on the white board if I sat in the first few rows of the room.

  Nothing was different—at least, with my vision. Which was funny because all the rest of me was changing, more and more every day.

  I returned to college looking very much the same, seeing very much the same, but in the midst of a personality makeover. Of course, the transformation didn’t happen overnight; learning to make bad decisions and do stupid shit, like anything else, takes practice. I got the ball rolling the way any nineteen-year-old would, in the bedroom. If your destination is Life in Living Color, it goes without saying that the fastest shortcut is the Indiscriminate Sex highway. My experience in Venice had proved to me that if I wanted to “Find Great Romance” I couldn’t sit back and leave it all up to the men. If you want something done right …

  In the beginning, the whole thing was pretty clumsy. My inaugural attempt at seduction targeted a cute freshman who was hanging lights for a Mamet play I was rehearsing. My roommate and best friend Beth masterminded the affair, so that all I had to do was follow the script she laid out. At her coaxing, I called him one night and invited him over and at her suggestion, I answered the door in a red teddy and knee-high leather boots.

  What the hell do I do now? I thought, as the flannel-clad freshman looked around nervously, probably wondering the same thing. Beth hadn’t scripted this part. So I regurgitated phrases I’d seen in movies, wincing internally as I said things like, “Glad you could make it,” while lighting the wrong end of a Dunhill. I’d left the lights off in my room to create an atmosphere of romance, but it ended up backfiring when I couldn’t see jack and nearly lit my hair on fire. Of course, the promise of no-strings-attached sex is so blinding to a teenage boy, the freshman probably wouldn’t have noticed had I set his hair on fire.

  Afterward, I was very pleased with myself. I was taking life by the horns, becoming mistress of my own destiny. I called the shots, not some eye disease.

  Screw you Dr. Hall, I thought, I’m making changes but not the kind you had in mind.

  Just like that, before you can say, “woefully self-deluded,” I’d persuaded myself that casual sex was a crucial part of my Carpe Diem strategy.

  The rest of my college career was filled with brief dalliances each pretty much indistinguishable from the next, save for a tiny detail, some small remembrance—listening to “Blue Eyes Crying in the Rain” for the first time while a Texan made breakfast; the chiseled biceps of a King Crab fisherman; opening a gift box containing silver earrings brought back from Barcelona. These moments were little shards of color and if you put them all together the right way, I thought, they’d make a mosaic showing a grown-up, gutsy girl living life out loud, a girl who didn’t take orders from a fat doctor on Park Avenue.

  The whole idea was, of course, bullshit. I was doing nothing more bold or original than any other college coed does, desperate for attention and distraction—just tarting up, plain and simple. Still, I loved my new-and-improved persona. I loved being the kind of ballsy broad who wore geisha red lipstick and skirts short enough that you could catch a glimpse of garters. I loved cursing like a sailor, adopting pets without asking my roommates first, taking late-night skinny dips and generally undertaking asinine antics that would make my parents gasp, just because I could. Still could.

  All of it was so terrifically exciting, I hardly ever thought about my eye disease, except every once in a while, and then only to convince myself that the diagnosis might just be the best thing to ever happen to me. It had woken me from complacency, given me a new lease on life and all without me actually having to grapple with any real consequences because my vision was, as far as I could tell, untouched. And since I wasn’t thinking about the disease, and it didn’t really affect me in any way, there was no reason to tell anyone about it.

  I’d shared the news of my diagnosis with a handful of people, my close friends, right after I visited the Park Avenue doc, while I was still reeling. But once I’d found the cloud’s silver lining, I decided not to share the news with anyone else. I didn’t want the awkward pep talks and looks of pity. I didn’t want my tale of woe to undercut the sexy, coming-of-age story I was improvising.

  Besides, who knew what the future held? By the time the shit hit the fan with my eyes, I’d be like, thirty, maybe even older. Ancient, in other words. Who knew if I’d even live that long? And anyway, it was personal. Sort of like how I didn’t go around volunteering my bra size when I ordered a cup of coffee or announcing to my Introduction to Fractals class every time I was on the rag.

  It wasn’t like it was a secret or anything, I convinced myself. I knew about keeping secrets and this wasn’t that. You had to protect a secret with lies, like when a wife of my dad’s colleague asked my mother for her famous cheesecake recipe and my mother maintained she’d lost the index card. My mother knew precisely where that stained and crinkled index card was; she just thought the lady should do her own legwork if she wanted to be known throughout downtown Brooklyn for her prize-winning cheese-based confections. Yes, I reasoned, I knew secrets and this wasn’t one. This was an omission.

  For all we know, Anna Karenina had a hint of a lisp or suffered from a touch of hip dysplasia; Tolstoy didn’t tell us about it because it simply wasn’t relevant. Really, I reasoned, this was the same thing: an extraneous detail I could cut out of the story. For now, at least.

  Tip #5: On mood lighting

  When attempting a scene of seduction, create ambience and prevent accidents by availing yourself of mood lighting. Candles are the obvious choice, but
not the safest, since chances are good that you’ll knock one over while climbing into bed or toss your lace demi-cup right on to the open flame, thus setting the room ablaze, only not the way you intended.

  Try a lava lamp instead.

  5. TECHNICOLOR

  “Are you insane?” my mother’s voice rang out from the phone receiver. “Circus school?”

  “Just for the summer,” I assured her. I was sitting on my dorm bed amidst piles of Post-it-riddled library books, making a meal of Twizzlers and Cherry Coke. “Don’t worry,” I added, “I’m not going to actually join the circus.”

  “Well, what a relief,” she answered, piling on the sarcasm. I heard her yell to my father, who was probably reviewing echocardiograms in his office down the hall, “GREAT NEWS! YOUR DAUGHTER DECIDED NOT TO JOIN THE CIRCUS AFTER ALL!!!”

  Then she turned her attention back to me: “Let me get this straight. Your father and I have been killing ourselves, working like animals, to send you to the most prestigious college, just so you can graduate and go to—clown class? While everyone else in your class is clerking for judges and working at Goldman Sachs?”

  I wasn’t the first college graduate in my family—my father, the son of a plumber, had matriculated from a small college in Brooklyn and worked his way through medical school in Italy—but I was the first to get a name-brand diploma, which had been my parents’ greatest dream for me since I was a zygote. One of my earliest memories is meeting a Yale student while on the N train from Bensonhurst with my mother. As I read a Nancy Drew mystery, my mother had bombarded the girl with questions about the application process, SAT test prep, and the price of textbooks.

  “That’s the best college, anywhere, and it is very hard to get into,” my mother had explained as we watched the girl exit the subway car in Lower Manhattan. “But you’re smart enough to do it. I’m already saving money for your tuition.”

  She’d delivered on her end—squirreling away money every month into a college savings account—and I’d delivered, first, gaining admissions, and now, readying to graduate.

  This, my mother kept telling me, is why my grandmother had immigrated to America and worked three jobs—not including the seamstress work she took in on the side; this is why my mother had scrimped and saved—never taking those Club Med vacations, only eating out on special occasions—all so I could be a Big Shot. And now, just when three generations of hard work was about to pay off, I was going to throw it all away for clown class?

  “Actually,” I clarified, gnawing on a licorice stick, “I’ll specialize in contortion.”

  “I’m hanging up before you give me heart palpitations again,” my mother decided. “We’ll discuss this after your finals.”

  My new lease on life was proving a real hardship for my parents, instigating an epic case of agida. They were befuddled as to where they’d gone wrong with me. I knew this because my mother asked me on a regular basis: “Where, Nicole? Where’d I go wrong?” I might have elucidated the reasoning behind my sudden commitment to hare-brained adventures, namely the Lights Out deadline I was working under, but I didn’t want everyone to get all depressed again. Particularly since there was no cause for gloom and doom; I was having the time of my life.

  The last two years of college had flown by and now I was at the end of senior year, about to graduate. After a summer adventure in San Francisco, I’d be renting an apartment in Brooklyn with Beth, securing a talent agent, and pursuing my dream of stardom—which could be lucrative, too, I was fond of reminding my mother as she massaged away her tension headache. Before I graduated though, I had one last college play to perform in, a lesser-known David Rabe doozie in which I played an exotic dancer who gets thrown out of a moving car. Which meant: not only did I get to simulate coke-snorting and wear a stripper costume, I also got to apply immoderate amounts of fake blood. Could things get any better?

  They could, in fact. Because starring opposite me, playing the guy who threw me out of the car, was David.

  I’d seen David around—he was a Theater and English major, too—but hadn’t actually met him until we were cast in the play. Both our characters appeared only in the first act so we ended up having a lot of down time together backstage.

  You couldn’t ask for a better companion to kill an hour with every night. David was solicitous and attentive; he’d remember little things like the fact that Charleston Chews were my favorite candy and would just so happen to have one in his pocket. May not sound like much but when you’re used to emotionally unavailable hipsters, this is the stuff that takes your breath away. I attributed David’s thoughtfulness to the fact that he was a Southerner. I’d never been below the Mason Dixon line and as far as I knew, all the guys down there were just like David, raised to finish everything on their plate, wear their hearts on their sleeve, and never tell a lie. I imagined Tennessee, where David was from, populated with tall, dashing Ashley Wilkeses who remember your preferred type of candy and remind you where you left off in the riveting story of how your roommate borrowed your favorite jeans without asking.

  But unlike Ashley Wilkes, who despite his many positive attributes is about as interesting as a piece of zweibach, David had a tortured artist dimension that shot his appeal though the roof. He smoked Chesterfields, drank black coffee in the morning and Maker’s Mark at night, and wrote lovely lyrical short stories in the style of William Faulkner. He’d read everything, the whole Western canon and then some, including all of James Joyce’s novels, even Finnegan’s Wake which no one read, even the people that claimed they had. His sense of humor was deliciously dry. And he looked like he’d just stepped out of the Sweet Valley High books I read as a kid, six-four with sandy blond hair and sea blue eyes.

  The one catch was that he was taken. David had a serious girlfriend who he was moving in with after graduation. And a guy this honest, this steadfast wasn’t about to step out on his lady. Until he did one night, with me.

  It was a few weeks after our play had closed, just before finals, and we’d gone out for a catch-up drink and ended up back in my dorm room, reading ee cummings poetry. There’s no chance two college coeds start reading all those gooey, lowercase run-on sentences and don’t end up tangled in the bedclothes.

  The thing that shocked me wasn’t so much that he kissed me hard on my mouth right in the middle of my reading “i carry your heart with me.” What shocked me was that he told me he loved me.

  “But you hardly know me,” I pointed out. Like why I keep the lava lamp on, I thought.

  The fact that he knew little about me was, in David’s opinion, a minor point. He wanted to be with me. He needed to be with me. I was like the very air to him, necessary for life. Which made it really very unfortunate because he couldn’t be with me. Not right now anyway. Right now, he was going back to his girlfriend Mary’s dorm room before things got too hot and heavy. The heart feels what it feels, he said, but that didn’t mean it would make him a liar and a cheat.

  “Maybe in another time, another place,” he offered before walking out the door, exactly like the protagonist in a romantic comedy does at the end of the second act, before the cheesy music montage.

  What the hell was that? I wondered, sitting on the edge of my unmade bed as the door closed behind him. The confession of love had been so sudden and had been snatched back so quickly, it was hard to know what to make of it all.

  It was a distinct possibility, I thought then, that this whole Take Life by the Balls campaign might be a form of denial, a cheap way to dope myself up so I didn’t feel sad and scared. Maybe, just maybe, I was acting out like Helen Keller did as a kid, thrashing around and knocking everything off the dinner table. Possibly, it was time to grow up, make a lasting connection, something in the realm of, maybe, love.

  It was a distinct possibility—just not one I was willing to entertain.

  Screw David and his earnestness, I thought, I am on the cusp of beginning my adult life and it is going to be blow-your-mind, not-intended-for-all-audien
ces, fucking fabulous.

  I mean, who wanted to piss away precious time staring at the same mug across from you at the same restaurant where you ordered the same dish every Friday night? Let David wither in the boredom of monogamy. I was crossing shit off my bucket list—mainly the same item over and over and over again, but still, all the same, making indelible memories, feeling alive! I was about to train as a circus artist in San Francisco!

  “It’s going to look great on my resume, in the special skills section,” I assured my mother as I packed my California-bound suitcases after graduation. “How many people have trapeze experience?”

  “I’m developing an ulcer,” my mother replied from my bed, folding a pile of T-shirts I’d tossed there. “An ulcer!”

  I knew that the ulcer wasn’t really about me choosing circus school over medical school; the real source of anxiety for my parents stemmed from the fact that their tunnel-sighted, night-blind daughter was headed three thousand miles away. But to my relief, they didn’t mention my visual impairment, choosing to fixate instead on the fact that Berkeley was where all the “crazies” lived and did I pack my pepper spray? In fact, since the summer of my diagnosis, no one had said anything much about my disease. My parents and grandmother could tell I didn’t want to talk about it—or maybe it was me who could tell they didn’t want to talk about it. Either way, it made us all feel better to pretend the diagnosis had never happened.

  At circus school, I was trained by a bona fide Shanghai Circus veteran. Master Liao. Every morning, the tiny, smiley man with an unbending will had me holding handstands, knocking out push-ups, and shaking on chin-up bars. By the summer’s end, I was in total command of my body, with every muscle boasting a perfect attendance record. “Here!” chirped my abs. “Present!” went the glutes. I could touch my toes to my head while in a handstand. Won’t get you a job but it is a pretty cool trick at parties. It was exhilarating to feel like I was so in control of my body.