Driving Blind Read online

  They let Sam in. ‘“How do we get up to the hotel?” asked Linda. “Walk?” She looked at the rain outside the door.

  “Why not,” said her husband. “It’d be fun. God, we never do anything anymore, you know what I mean, we never walk anywhere, if we have to go anyplace past a block we get in the car. Hell, let’s put on our raincoats and march up, eh, Sam?”

  “Okay with me, how about you, Linda?” cried Sam.

  “Oh, walk?” she complained. “All that way? And in this rain?”

  “Come off it,” the husband said. “What’s a little rain.”

  “All right,” she said.

  There was a rustling as they got into raincoats. He laughed a lot and whacked her on the backside and helped her buckle it up tight. “I smell like a rubber walrus,” she said. And then they were out in the lane of green trees, slipping on the squelching grass, in the lane, sinking their rubbered feet into sludge mud furrows where cars came splashing by, whining in the thick wet dark.

  “Oh, boy, this is swell!” he shouted.

  “Not so fast,” she said.

  The wind blew, bending the trees, and by the look of it, it would last a week. The hotel was up the hill and they walked now, with less laughing, though he tried starting it again. It was after Linda slipped and fell that nobody said a thing, though Sam, when helping her up, tried to make a joke.

  “If nobody minds, I’m hitching a ride,” she said.

  “Oh, be a sport,” he said.

  She thumbed the next car going up the hill. When the car stopped, the man in it shouted, “You all want a ride to the hotel?” But he walked on without saying a word, so Sam had to follow.

  “That wasn’t polite,” said Sam.

  Lightning stood on the sky, like a naked and newborn tree.

  Supper was warm, but not of much taste, the coffee was thin and unpalatable and there were not many people in the dining room. It had that end-of-the-season feel, as if everybody had taken their clothes out of storage for the last time, tomorrow the world was ending, the lights would go out, and it was no use trying too hard to please anybody. The lights seemed dim, there was too much forced talk and bad cigar smoke.

  “My feet are soaked,” said Linda.

  They went down to the pavilion at eight o’clock, and it was big and empty and echoing, with an empty bandstand, which filled slowly until at nine o’clock there were a lot of people seated at the tables, and the orchestra, a nine-piece band (hadn’t it been a twenty-piece band in 1929, wondered the husband), broke into a medley of old tunes.

  His cigarettes tasted damp, his suit was moist, his shoes were sopping, but he said nothing. When the orchestra played its third number, he asked Linda out on the floor. There were about seven couples out there, in the rainbow changing lights, in the vast echoing emptiness. His socks squeaked water as he walked, they were very cold.

  He held Linda and they danced to “I Found My Love in Avalon,” just because he had telephoned earlier to have it played. They moved quietly around the floor, not speaking.

  “My feet are soaking wet,” said Linda, finally.

  He held on to her and kept moving. The place was dim and dark and cool and the windows were washed with fresh rain still pouring.

  “After this dance,” said Linda, “we’ll go to the cabin.”

  He didn’t say yes or no.

  He looked across the shining floor, to the empty tables, with a few couples spotted here and there, beyond them, to the watery windows. As he moved Linda across the floor, nearer to the window, he squinted, and there they were.

  Outside the window, a few child faces, peering in. One or two. Perhaps three. The light on their faces. The light shining in their eyes. Just for a minute or so.

  He said something.

  “What’d you say?” asked Linda.

  “I said I wish I were outside the window now, looking in,” he said. She looked at him. The music was ending. When he looked at the window again, the faces were gone.

  Madame et Monsieur Shill

  It was while shuttling his eye down the menu posted in a nineteenth-century silver frame outside Le Restaurant Fondue that Andre Hall felt the merest touch at his elbow.

  “Sir,” said a man’s voice, “you look to be hungry.”

  Andre turned irritably.

  “What makes you think—?” he began, but the older man interrupted, politely.

  “It was the way you leaned in to read the menu. I am Monsieur Sault, the proprietor of this restaurant. I know the symptoms.”

  “My God,” said Andre. “That made you come out?”

  “Yes!” The older man examined Andre’s coat, the worn cuffs, the too-often-cleaned lapels and said, “Are you hungry?”

  “Do I sing for my supper?”

  “No, no! Regardez the window.”

  Andrew turned and gasped, shot through the heart.

  For in the window sat the most beautiful young woman, bent to ladle her soup to a most delicious mouth. Bent, as if in prayer, she seemed not to notice their tracing her profile, her mellow cheeks, her violet eyes, her ears as delicate as seashells.

  Andre had never dined on a woman’s fingers, but now the urge overwhelmed him as he fought to breathe.

  “All you must do,” whispered the proprietor, “is sit in that window with the lovely creature and eat and drink during the next hour. And return another night to dine with the same lovely vision.”

  “Why?” said Andre.

  “Regardez.” The old man turned Andre’s head so he might gaze at himself in the window’s reflection.

  “What do you see?”

  “A hungry art student. Myself! And … not bad-looking?”

  “Ah hah! Good. Come!”

  And the young man was pulled through the door to sit at the table while the beautiful young woman laughed.

  “What?” he cried, as champagne was poured. “What’s so funny?”

  “You,” the beauty smiled. “Hasn’t he said why we’re here? Behold, our audience.”

  She pointed her champagne glass at the window where people now lingered outside.

  “Who are they?” he protested. “And what do they see?”

  “The actors.” She sipped her champagne. “The beautiful people. Us. My fine eyes, nose, fine mouth, and look at you. Eyes, nose, mouth, all fine. Drink!”

  The proprietor’s shadow moved between them. “Do you know the magician’s theater where a volunteer who is the magician’s assistant pretends innocence to secretly help the sorcerer, eh? And the name of such assistants? Shill. So, seated with a proper wine and your audience beyond the window, I now dub thee …”

  He paused.

  “Shill. Madame et Monsieur … Shill.”

  And indeed as the lovely creature across from Andre raised her glass, in the twilight hour beyond the window, passersby hesitated and were pleasured by the incredible beauty and a man as handsome as she was lovely.

  With a murmuring and shadowing the couples, lured by more than menus, filled the tables and more candles were lit and more champagne poured as Andre and his love, fascinated with each other’s immortal faces, devoured their meal without seeing it.

  So the last plates were cleared, the last wine tasted, the last candles extinguished. They sat, staring at one another, until the proprietor, in the shadows, raised his hands.

  Applause.

  “Tomorrow night,” he said. “Encore?”

  Encore and another after that and still another followed with their arrivals and departures, but always they met in silence to cause the room’s temperature to change. People entering from the cool night found summer on this hearth where he fed on her warmth.

  And it was in the midst of the sixteenth night that Andre felt a ventriloquist’s ghost in his throat move his mouth to say:

  “I love you.”

  “Don’t!” she said. “People are watching!”

  “They’ve been watching for weeks. They see two lovers.”

  “Lovers? No. We
’re not!”

  “Yes! Come back to my room or let me come to yours!”

  “That would spoil it! This is perfect now.”

  “Being with you would be perfect.”

  “Sit! Look at all the people we make happy. Consider Monsieur Sault, whose future we assure. Think: before you arrived last month, what were your plans for next year? Drink the wine. They say it’s excellent.”

  “Because they say it’s excellent?”

  “Careful. The people outside might read lips and leave. Give me your hand. Gently! Eat. Smile. Nod your head. There. Better?”

  “I love you.”

  “Stop or I’ll go!”

  “Where?”

  “Somewhere!” She smiled her false smile for the people beyond the window. “Where working conditions are better.”

  “Am I a bad working condition?”

  “You endanger us. See, Monsieur Sault glares! Be still. Pour the wine. Yes?”

  “Yes,” he said at last.

  And so it went for another week until he burst out and said, “Marry me!”

  She snatched her hand from his. “No!” Then, because a couple had paused at their window, she laughed.

  “Don’t you love me a little bit?” he pleaded.

  “Why should I? There were no promises.”

  “Marry me!”

  “Monsieur Sault!” she cried. “The check!”

  “But there has never been a check!”

  “Tonight,” she said, “there is.”

  The next night she vanished.

  “You,” cried Monsieur Sault. “You fiend! Look what you’ve done!”

  Inside the window there was no beautiful young woman: the last night of spring, the first night of summer.

  “My business is ruined!” cried the old man. “Why couldn’t you have shut your mouth and eaten your pâté or drunk a second bottle and stuck the cork in your teeth?”

  “I told the truth as I felt it. She’ll come back!”

  “So? Read this!”

  Andre took the note the old man gave him and read:

  Farewell.

  “Farewell.” Tears leaked from Andre’s eyes. “Where’s she gone?”

  “God knows. We never knew her real name or address. Come!”

  Andre followed up through a labyrinth of stairs to the roof. There, swaying as if he might pitch headlong down, Monsieur Sault pointed across the twilight city.

  “What do you see?”

  “Paris. Thousands of buildings.”

  “And?”

  “Thousands of restaurants?”

  “Do you truly know how many there are between here, the Tour Eiffel, and there, Notre-Dame? Twenty thousand restaurants. Twenty thousand hiding places for our nameless wonder. Would you find her? Search!”

  “All twenty thousand restaurants?”

  “Bring her and you’ll be my son and partner. Come without her and I will kill you. Escape!”

  Andre escaped. He ran to climb the hill to the white splendor of Sacré-Coeur and looked out at the lights of Paris drowned in the blue and gold colors of a vanished sun.

  “Twenty thousand hiding places,” he murmured.

  And went down in search.

  In the Latin Quarter across the Seine from Notre-Dame you could wander past forty restaurants in a single block, twenty on each side, some with windows where beauties might sit by candlelight, some with tables and laughing people in the open.

  “No, no,” Andre muttered. “Too much!” And veered off down an alley that ended at the Boulevard St. Michel where brasseries, tabacs, and restaurants swarmed with tourists; where Renoir women spoke wine as they drank, spoke food as they ate, and ignored this strange, haunted, searching young man as he passed.

  My God, Andre thought. Must I cross and recross Paris from the Trocadero to Montmartre to Montparnasse, to find a single small theater-café window where candlelight reveals a woman so beautiful that all appetites bud, all joys, culinary and amorous, conjoin?

  Madness!

  What if I miss that one window, that illumination, that face?

  Insane! What if in my confusion I revisit alleys already searched! A map! I must cross out where I’ve been.

  So each night at sundown with the shades of violet and purple and magenta flooding the narrow alleys he set out with bright maps that darkened as he left. Once on the Boulevard de Grenelle he shouted his taxi to a halt and leaped out, furious. The taxi had gone too fast; a dozen cafés had flashed by unseen.

  Then suddenly, in despair, he said:

  “Honfleur? Deuville? Lyon?”

  “What if,” he continued, “she is not in Paris but has fled to Cannes or Bordeaux with their thousands of restaurants! My God!”

  That night he woke at three a.m. as a list of names passed through his head. Elizabeth. Michelle. Arielle. Which name to speak if at last he found her? Celia? Helene? Diana? Beth?

  Exhausted, he slept.

  And so the weeks passed into months and in the fourth month he shouted at his mirror:

  “Stop! If you haven’t found her special ‘theater’ this week, burn your maps! No more names or streets at midnight or dawn! Yes!”

  His image, in silence, turned away.

  On the ninety-seventh night of his search, Andre was moving along the Quai Voltaire when he was suddenly seized by a storm of emotion so powerful it shook his bones and knocked his heart. Voices that he heard but did not hear made him stagger toward an intersection, where he froze.

  Across the narrow street under a bower of trembling leaves, there was a small audience staring at a brass-framed menu, and the window beyond. Andre stepped, as in a trance, to stand behind the people.

  “Impossible,” whispered Andre.

  For in the candlelit window sat the most beautiful woman, the most beautiful love of his life. And across from her sat an amazingly handsome man. They were lifting glasses and drinking champagne.

  Am I outside or in? Andre wondered. Is that me in there, as before, and in love? What?

  He could only swallow his heart as, for an instant, the gaze of the beautiful young woman passed over him like a shadow and did not return. Instead she smiled at her friend across the candlelit table. Stunned, Andre found the entryway and stepped in to move and stand close by the couple who whispered and laughed quietly.

  She was more beautiful than in all the nights he had imagined her multitudinous names. Her travels across Paris had colored her cheeks and brightened her incredible eyes. Even her laughter was made rich by a passage of time.

  Outside the restaurant window, a new audience watched as Andre said:

  “Excuse.”

  The beautiful young woman and the handsome man looked up. There was no remembrance in her eyes, nor did her lips smile.

  “Madame et Monsieur Shill?” Andre asked, numbly.

  They held hands and nodded.

  “Yes?” they said.

  And finished the wine.

  The Mirror

  Good Lord, there must be a thousand ways to tell of these two ladies. When they were girls, in yellow dresses, they could stand and comb their hair looking at each other. If life was a great Swiss clock, then these were the sprightliest cuckoos that ever jumped out of two doors at once, announcing the exact same time, each of them, not a second lost between. They blinked as if one cord was pulled by a great magician hidden behind the scenes. They wore the same shoes, tilted their heads in the same direction, and trailed their hands like white ribbons on the air as they floated by. Two bottles of cool milk, two new Lincoln pennies were never more the same. Whenever they entered the school proms the dancers halted as if someone had suddenly removed all of the air from the ballroom; everyone gasped.

  “The twins,” everyone said. Not a name was mentioned. What matter if their name was Wycherly; the parts were interchangeable, you didn’t love one, you loved a corporative enterprise. The twins, the twins, how they floated down the great river of years, like two daisies tossed upon the waters.
/>   “They’ll marry the kings of the world,” people said.

  But they sat upon their porch for twenty years, they were as much a part of the park as the swans, you saw their faces uplifted and thrust forward like winter ghosts in the dark night of the film theater.

  Oh, once there’d been men, or a man in their life. The word “life” is suggested because a plural noun would not do justice to their oneness. A man had tipped his hat to them here or there, only to have the hat returned to him as he was floated to the door. “Twins is what we’re looking for!” you could hear the older sister saying across the twilight lawns. “We’ve two of everything in the house, beds, shoes, sun-chairs, dark glasses; and now how wonderful if we could find twins like ourselves, for only twins would understand what it is to be an individual and a mirror reflection—”

  The older sister. Born nine minutes before the younger, and the divine right of elegant queens in her veins. “Sister do this, sister do that, sister do the other thing!”

  “I’m the mirror,” said Julia, the youngest, at the age of twenty-nine. “Oh, I’ve always known. Coral, everything went to her, the sense, the tongue, the mind, the coloring …”

  “Alike as two vanilla cones, both of you.”

  “No, you don’t see what I see. My pores are larger and my skin redder and my elbows are rough. Coral says sandpaper is talcum by comparison. No, she’s the person, and I only stand here and act out what she is and what she does, like a mirror, but always knowing I’m not real, I’m only so many waves of light, an optical illusion. Anyone who hit me with a rock would have seven years bad luck.”

  “Both of you will be married come spring, no doubt, no doubt of it!”

  “Coral maybe, not me. I’ll just go along to talk evenings when Coral has a headache and make the tea, that’s a natural-born gift I have, making tea.”

  In 1934 there was a man, the town remembers, and not with Coral at all, but with the younger Julia.

  “It was like a siren, the night Julia brought her young man home. I thought the tannery had gone down in flames. Came out on my front porch half-dressed with shock. And there was Coral on the front porch making a spell on the young man across half the lawn, and asking the earth to swallow her, and Julia hidden inside the screen door, and the young man just standing there with his hat on the wet grass. The next morning I saw Julia sneak out and grab it and run in. After that, didn’t see the twins for, well, a week, and after that, there they were, sailing like boats again, down the sidewalk, the two of them, but after that I always knew which was Julia—yes, you could tell every year after that which was Julia by looking in her face.”