Honeydew: Stories (17 page)

We met in the young editor’s office. “The thing’s just too fucking unlikely,” he said. (He didn’t say
fucking,
but the word was essentially printed on his curled lip.) “Your other stories…you could make a case for them. Not this one.”

Toby tapped her manuscript with two fingers. “Much here might have happened.”

“Viking artifacts are thick on the ground in the Piscataqua area.” He had done his homework. “There’s not so much as a Roman fishhook. Your other heroes, your children as it were, have a habit of seeking their fortunes and finding them. That still sells books. But poor Titus finds only oblivion. Please change tack. Write something different…And, Ms. Bluestein,” he added as she was walking with that cleft chin raised, “no more carbon copies, I beg you.”

We met Uncle Franz in our favorite Hungarian place. He wore a black ribbon on his lapel; he had been a widower for several months. “There are other publishers,” he said.

“Not for me. Fictohistoriographia is out of style. Everything is out of style except sex”—Uncle Franz reddened—“and money.”

“About that…”

“There’s plenty to live on.”

Silence. “When,” he said.

“Now.”

“I must alarm the store.” While Toby went to Penn Station to buy him a ticket I accompanied Uncle Franz. He busied himself for a few moments among his display cases. A small satchel was beside the door, already packed. We met Aunt Toby at the train. We passed woods, farms, glimpses of the sea.

We’d left our car near the station. Uncle Franz and his satchel took the backseat. We drove the two-lane highway, then a smaller road, then a dirt road. And finally the water beckoned us, purple-blue in the afternoon, its surrounding pines blue-green.

“As you described it,” Uncle Franz said. “An economy of palette.” His sigh quivered. “Beautiful. Beautiful no matter who discovered it first.”

When we got to the stone house, Toby threw the manuscript on the couch and Uncle Franz settled his satchel beside it. We went swimming. Despite his age, Uncle Franz was fit, and a good swimmer, though he avoided jumping off our little raft, merely slid into the embrace of the water. His swimming shorts flared like a skirt. He must have bought them just after the war, when the Joint Distribution Committee brought him to New York.

At dinner he said, “The vegetable plot needs immediate work.”

The next day the three of us harrowed, raked, created furrows, planted tomatoes and lettuce and cucumbers. We dug up artifacts—barrettes, number 6d nails.

One day Uncle Franz brought inside an object covered with mud and laid it on a newspaper on our trestle table. He washed it with water and a cloth and detergent from his satchel. A magnifying glass emerged from the satchel too.

He passed the thing around and then held it in his palm and inspected it. “It’s copper,” he guessed. Once perhaps green, it was now as pale as the wings of his hair. “A woman on one side, a ruminant on the verso. The coin dates from about 400 A.D. It originated in Rome, traveled through the empire, perhaps spent time in Britain, who can say…”

Uncle Franz had once given me a lecture on fakes. “Sometimes the fakes are tooled…authentic, but improved by the tooling. Sometimes they are fantasy coins, or modern coins made to look ancient.” But this wasn’t a fake. Lifted by his loving fingers from the New England soil, it was metal money from Rome. “It has been deformed by age but the only deliberate defacement is that hole near the animal’s horns. It was probably worn as a lucky charm.”

“You could show it to that ass of an editor,” I said to Toby.

“I will show it to Mr. Jennings.”

She did. And Mr. Jennings, not questioning provenance or authenticity or age, accepted the coin on behalf of the historical society with the grace of a vanquished lover. He provided a display case on legs, and a card which read
ROMAN COIN C. 400 A.D.
Somebody snapped a color photograph for the Piscataqua weekly—Mr. Jennings, Toby, me, Uncle Franz, all but one of us looking down at the coin. And then I saw what I had already known without knowing I knew it: I might have Aunt Toby’s hair and chin, but I had Uncle Franz’s cylindrical brow and chocolate eyes, those eyes that preferred to look at me rather than the coin, though I don’t think he was ashamed of either of us.

I had long considered the train-wreck death that Toby had supplied for my vague father and mother unworthy of her imagination.

Uncle Franz (I will always call him that) sold his shop and said good-bye to New York. He moved in with us. Toby gave up fictohistoriographia and turned to writing adventure books, frankly invented. So she never told of the heroism of a mother who let go of her child to save him. And she never revealed the story of a woman of forty and a man considerably older who briefly combined in order to perpetuate a Hungarian family, their secret connivance encouraged by another heroine, one who would have performed the task herself but could not.

And I, my provenance acknowledged at last, my parents together at last, went off to seek my own fortune, as Toby’s children are destined to do.

L
yle stares at a lemon.

How does the lemon appear to Lyle? The rough skin is what he has been taught to call yellow, and he knows many modifiers of that word—pale, bright, dull; he knows also metaphoric substitutes—gold, butter, dandelion, even lemon. What he sees in the humble fruit, though, and what he knows by now other kids don’t see, is a tangle of hundreds of shades, ribbons of sunlight crushed into an egg.

And baby oil? His mother, Pansy, works baby oil into her pale satin face and neck before going to bed, and a drop inevitably spills from her fingertip: transparent, translucent, colorless, or so anybody else would say. To Lyle, however, the drop is a rosy viscous sphere. The shade of
his
skin—caramel or butterscotch or café au lait according to foodies, mulatto to those interested in mixed races—incorporates movement too: on his forearm writhe all the hues in Pansy’s drawer of muddled lingerie.

And the neon sign projecting from the exercise center on the second floor of a building in Godolphin Square? Neon plasma has the most intense light discharge of all the noble gases. To a normal human eye it is red-orange; it also contains a strong green line hidden unless you’ve got a spectroscope. Lyle sees the green line unaided, the flowing molecules of it. It is as if the sign,
GET FIT,
has given him a gift.

But then, Lyle has been given many gifts, including Pansy’s love. Bathed in that love, Lyle in turn is gentle with other kids, especially with kids uneasy under their bragging, kids really as frightened as rabbits when a hawk darkens their world. Lyle’s underweight presence steadies them, and he is sought after—but not exactly as a friend. He is more like Anansi, the helpful spider of his favorite tales—a quiet ally and trickster who prefers his own company but skitters over to join you when you need him.

Yet another gift is money. These days, money resides in electronic bits; Pansy has plenty of bits inherited from her Alabama grandfather. And there is, or was once, the gift of a small amount of yellowish fluid containing enzymes, acids, and lipids. Semen, not to put too fine a point on it.

The unknown bestower of the semen had been living on the edge. He’d come from Africa in a troop of lost boys—not the famous ones from Sudan but less famous, less numerous ones from elsewhere. But the situation was similar: civil war, carnage, a few boys running from their ruined villages all the way to the United States.

One particular lost boy ended up in Massachusetts, lived in a house with other lost boys, got through high school, and at the time of his gift was employed in a lab in the area. But he was poor. And so he did what many people in his situation did: sold his blood. He thought about selling his sperm too, but he considered it too valuable to be made a commodity—he was proud and he was free and he wanted freely to sire a thousand American sons. So he did not sell but gave his sperm to a bank—really a hospital roomlet provided with facilitating magazines.

And then there’s a submicroscopic gift, the consequence of a genetic mutation that has passed mostly unexpressed through the millennia. It was bestowed by evolution not directly on Lyle but on a primate who was his remote ancestor. The gift was a mischievous gene, which, if it meets its twin, can affect vision.

“Primate vision unadulterated is trichromatic,” said Dr. Marcus Paul. “
Tri
means ‘three,’ and
chroma
means ‘color.’”

“Yes?” Pansy encouraged from the other side of the desk.

“Well, Mrs. Spaulding—”

“Miss.”

“Miss…”

“Or Ms., if you want to be correct.” She grinned.

“Ms., then,” the flustered man said, and took refuge in a disquisition. “You know the retina, at the back of the eye, the thing that captures light and color and ships them to the brain. The retina uses only three types of light-absorbing pigments for color vision. Trichromacy, see?”

“See,” she agreed, still grinning.

“Well, almost all nonprimate mammals are dichromatic, with just two kinds of visual pigments. A few nocturnal mammals have only one pigment. But some birds, fish, and reptiles, they have four.”

“They see more colors than we do? Damn it all.”

“They probably do. And some butterflies are even pentachromatic. Pigeons also. And there is one twig on the
Homo sapiens
tree whose members—a small fraction of them—are believed to be pentachromatic too: the Himba tribe. Himbas endure their usually short lives in Namibia…Lyle seems to be of mixed race.”

“Yes. I asked the sperm bank for a black donor. I believe miscegenation is an answer to the world’s ills. All people one color: tan.”

“Oh,” said the doctor, whose skin was the shade of eggplant. “Your donor was African?”

She shrugged her slender shoulders. “I didn’t ask, and they didn’t tell.”

“Well, I think Lyle’s a pentachromat. Those colors he reports.”

She nodded. She was all at once serious. “Yes. No wonder he has headaches, my poor boy.” Then she paused, partly to let this young Jamaican take a frank look at her, as he was clearly eager to do—at her inky curls, at her small straight nose that angled upward a degree more than is usual, robbing her of beauty and instead making her irresistible; physiognomy’s gift to Pansy, you might say. The doctor could see also her wide mouth, her dimples, her long neck and long hands. Her long legs were hidden from him by his desk, but he must have noticed them earlier. She hoped so. Oh, yes, and when she parted her lips, out flashed the bright white of her perfect incisors. Men often remarked on that…She continued now: “What’s it like to be a pentachromat?” Though she knew, or had an idea; Lyle had told her of the numerous dots of color he could detect on a plain manila envelope. She had taught him a new word:
pointillism
. “Doctor?”

What’s it like to have a face like yours?
He said: “Neither we nor they have the words to describe this sort of thing. How would you describe color to someone who was color-blind? What we do know is that tetrachromats and pentachromats make distinctions between shades that seem identical to the rest of us. For example, I read about a woman in California, she’s dead now—”

“From hyperchromaticity?”

“From old age. She was a seamstress, the article said. She could look at three samples of taupe fabric cut from the same bolt and detect a gold undertone in one, a hint of green in another, a smidgen of gray in the third. She could look at a river and distinguish relative depth and amounts of silt in different areas of the water based on differences in shading that no one else was aware of…So it’s probably safe to say that tetrachromats and pentachromats have a richer visual experience of the world than the rest of us.”
But my own experience has become richer in the past fifteen minutes because of this woman sitting in front of my normal, trichromatic eyes. I hope she likes my dreadlocks.

Lyle had been an unfretful baby, though for a while he confused day and night. Pansy slept through the days along with him. Gave him breakfast at twilight and took him for a walk, sometimes across the river to Boston but usually around Godolphin. Lyle lay angled on a pillow in his old-fashioned perambulator, facing her or staring upward at the dark green of trees, the charcoal sky. He turned his head to notice glossy books in the window of the bookstore, always open late. There was a full-length mirror embedded in the door of the pedicure place. Sometimes, again turning his head, he stared at mother and child, and she did the same. There she was, in black leather pants and a glistening white poncho; there he was, a baby whose skin had not yet begun to darken. Her own skin had never darkened, though her southern ancestors had no doubt mingled with their slaves and then admitted the lighter progeny into the mansion. A gene for a dusky epidermis might lie embedded in each of her cells. In his early childhood Lyle went from phase to expected phase—resisted the occasional babysitter, considered the toilet fine for other people, couldn’t bear carrots. He played with blocks in a bored way. Idly he mentioned headaches. The pediatrician found no cause for them.

He continued his habit of staring at everything. He himself was odd to look at—the skinny arms, the thin beige face, the unsmiling gaze. When he took a walk with his mother, he put one hand in hers, like collateral, while his mind wandered somewhere she couldn’t follow, and she had to relinquish the treasured notion that mother and child were one.

He didn’t like picture books—all those primary colors, he wouldn’t look at them. It made her wonder.

The psychologist she took him to said no, he wasn’t on any spectrum. “He’s not interested in those little board books—so what. He’s intrigued by the wider world. Wants to wait and see what catches his fancy.”

She thanked him and stood up, a vision in her striped black-and-white sundress and her black cartwheel. She walked toward the door.

“You too,” the psychologist called. “Wait and see.”

She’d waited several years. One day irregular blurred lines appeared on the wall of her bedroom. Their interiors filled in; now they were splotches. Then they turned into continents. The plumber found the leaks that were their source, and fixed them. Pansy hired a painter and brought home a color wheel. It was a collection of about three hundred long slender cards of thick laminated paper, each with a hole at one end, allowing them all to depend from a metal ring, to be held in the hand at once, or fanned out into a circle. Each card bore seven contiguous squares of similar hues, with names, about two thousand colors in all. She dropped the device with idle grace beside Lyle, prone on the floor. He abandoned his book—he was reading adventure stories now, aping his classmates, though he frequently returned to those old trickster tales.

He inspected this new toy. He knew what he had before him—paint samples. He guessed that these two thousand colors were about as many as human beings could create—in their labs, their paint factories, their electronics workshops. He had endured years of feeling different, of possessing something that was a secret to others and also to him. Now the color wheel enlightened him…People gave hues such hopeful names. There was a square called Orange Froth and next to it Orange Blossom and next to that Florida Orange. Lyle could see the Froth globules deepen to a color that almost matched Orange Blossom but didn’t, and the Orange Blossom itself acquire a gloss as it approached but did not attain Florida Orange. “Mom,” he called.

“Yes, darling?” from the other room.

“I have…” he said, and paused. In the Anansi tales, secrets were meant to be stuffed into the heart and never pulled out; there could be unforeseen results if they were.

She walked in. “…Something to tell me?”

“Well…”

And then came the visit to Dr. Marcus Paul; and then came the tentative diagnosis of a condition, though not an ailment, unknown to most scientists probably because of its weak grant potential. And then came romance. Love at first sight? It can happen. There’s often a lot of palaver.

“I love you not only because you’re beautiful,” Marcus told Pansy a few weeks after they met. “I love you because of your admirable politics, your wish that the world’s population become one color. Because you mop floors in a soup kitchen. Because you cook like a four-star chef.”

She kissed him then, and she caressed his hip with her knee, a gesture that cannot be achieved unless both parties are lying on their sides facing each other. They happened to be lying on their sides facing each other—Lyle was at school—and so the caress impossible under other circumstances was now possible, probable, necessary, unavoidable, though who would want to avoid the deep shudder each felt as joint saluted joint. Then Marcus entered his lovely woman.

Afterward she took over the colloquy. “I love you because of your single-mindedness,” she said. “Your voice. Your dreadlocks. I love you because our coupling feels like destiny.”

“Arranged by Anansi.”

“Anansi? Lyle reads stories about him…”

“He’s a powerful spider who used to make his home in Africa and now lives in Jamaica. But he gets around.”

“Please thank him if you see him…And I love you because together we belong to Lyle.”

“And Lyle belongs to us,” Marcus said. In a state of postcoital clarity he realized that he had found his life’s love and his life’s work in a single ophthalmologic interview. “We are Lyle’s caretakers, guardians, keepers of his secret.”

“It’s like the housemaid marrying the butler,” Pansy said.

“If you say so.” He felt like the stable boy marrying the princess.

There was a brief three-person honeymoon. They visited Italy, where plump lemons offered even more yellows than the ones Lyle knew. They went to Iberia, where the tiles of Lisbon and the airport in Madrid presented a chromatic joy, many colors new and glorious to Marcus and Pansy and about twelve times that many to Lyle.

Marcus’s clinical practice was easy to transfer to a colleague. He’d been mostly engaged in research anyway. After returning from the colorful honeymoon, he built a lab behind Pansy’s spacious house and invited his cousin David to join him. The reclusive David, an optician, was interested in the changes to vision that curved or beveled glass, glass within glass, prismatic lenses, all those things, could make when placed in front of the eye. The two cousins had already designed a number of spectacles that helped people with eye diseases see better.

Their little optical laboratory—incorporated, after a while—produced many improved devices. Telescopic eyeglasses for everyday use. Microscope lenses, and surgical snakes with tiny cameras in their heads, and smoky instruments for astronomers. These tools became much in demand.

The company flourished, and Pansy’s return on her investment was substantial. She was proud of the men’s success. Still, when Marcus and David entered their laboratory day after day, she liked to imagine that, in addition to their other products, they were working on a superinvention that would grant Lyle’s vision to everyone. Performance-enhancing, you might say. When perfected, it would encounter regulations; when produced, it would inspire inferior imitations. Even so, it would be a vehicle for public good.

But after four years it had not yet appeared. So one day the patient Pansy inquired.

“I don’t think we can do it,” Marcus admitted. “We’ve tried; it was one of our original purposes. But we cannot duplicate work that nature took millions of years to accomplish. We cannot invent an external instrument which will produce an internal variant. The butterfly has a genome, the pigeon too. But where does the pentachromatic gene lurk? We cannot tell. And if we could tell, and could extract it, and could transfer it to a human cell, would the cell survive? And if yes, yes, yes, yes…for what purpose? To give people headaches?”

“It would be only a carnival attraction,” Pansy slowly acknowledged. “A rich man’s plaything. But oh, Marcus. No one else can ever become like Lyle. He’s stuck being unique.”