The Uninnocent (10 page)

“You all right?” asked Harrison.

Instinctively, I stared forward and said I was. “What did I break?” I wanted to know.

Out of the corner of my eye I saw him inspecting the damage, dressed to the nines in a deep blue silk robe, the same color I remembered Sarah's irises as being. His hair, which I'd always pictured black and short, was silver and stylishly long. His unshaven face was taut and handsome. Averting my eyes when he glanced at me, I noticed that he, like Sarah, had a little mole, though his was on the cheek. What bothered me most was that his robe was open in the front. If my wife or children were to walk into the room just then, what an eyeful they'd get. Think how embarrassed everyone would be.

Taking me by the arm, he sat me down by the gold wall in a chair appointed with fine overstuffed upholstery. “Stay right here,” he calmly requested, his voice sweet but the look on his suntanned face as annoyed as a pet owner scolding a naughty puppy. I could have sworn he cursed under his breath as he left, but at that moment I didn't trust my ears any more than my eyes. At least while he retreated toward the kitchen he tied his dressing gown. I had caught a subtle glimpse of what hung there, haloed by white hair. It was nothing anyone should want to see, let alone someone who'd been denied the privilege of seeing anything whatever for a decade.

Other astonishments soon appeared. The more I saw, the more I understood it was important, somehow, that those around me thought I saw nothing. Conspicuous among my discoveries was how wrong I'd pictured everyone and everything. I who had begun truly to believe my fervent homilies, urging my followers to keep the faith first by trusting themselves, their convictions, their own views—
be thee blind or seeing with lucid eyes
—now began to understand how utterly I'd erred. If that morning returned to me my sight, the rest of the day brought my insights, as I have come to think of them.

Harrison in his baronial robe waltzing through our kinky
nouveau riche
living room was merely the first verse in my New Apocrypha. Martita, who came to clean up the broken lamp, was someone whose voice, again, I recognized but whose appearance struck me as incongruous with the life I'd believed my family was leading. Not that she, poor Cayman immigrant and clearly a good if very illegal girl, behaved in any way that could be perceived as unchristian. No, it was that they had her in a black uniform with white starched trim and in a state of what might well be deemed quasi-penal subservience. Harrison wondered if I wouldn't like to go back to my room, said I looked exhausted, Lord knows no one would blame me for wanting a little more rest, given the grueling schedule I had just endured. Again I asked what I'd broken and he answered it was nothing, just a glass one of the kids had left on an end table, not to worry. The maid crossed herself and, having finished cleaning, left the room.

“Where's Sarah?” My hands were shaking although I anchored them between my thighs.

“Out,” he said, “shopping.”

When I inquired when she was expected back, he muttered something and, excusing himself, flew upstairs, ever silently, no doubt to change into some clothes.

Time passed—twenty-three minutes to be exact, now that I could watch the clock—then Sarah unlocked the grand front door. Making her way to the kitchen, she failed to notice her husband seated in an unwonted corner, escapee from his holy cage. The years had not been kind. My once-wholesome Sarah had acquired, I must admit, a gaunt sophistication. Though elegant and drily beautiful, her face was as if invaded by knives—angular, hewn, deblooded. It was all I could do to maintain on my own face the blankest possible expression. This was only the beginning. What I saw next I wouldn't wish on the Prince of Darkness himself. Harrison floated back downstairs, gathered my wife in his arms and kissed her, put his forefinger to his lips, and pointed in my direction. I would like to believe she might have fainted, standing there in the arms of this man, staring at her blind husband not thirty feet away. To the contrary, she sweetly called my name, breaking from Harrison's embrace, and asked me the same question he had, patting my head, offering to help me get back to my room. I needed more rest, she cooed. After all, we had less than a week before we were committed to going to Louisville for the Christian Recovery Convention, at which I was to be one of the headliners. Bed did seem a desirable destination at that moment.

“Yes, bed,” I answered, and allowed her to take me by the arm, as she had countless times over the last decade, and lead me into my monk's cell. I fell asleep immediately.

Seeing the world, I had not yet come to know how to reckon it. That was, I always felt, God's distinct purview, His task. Yet in the days that followed, seeing what I saw was judgment enough and though Job was my cherished Old Testament hero, I would prove to be no Job. Seeing, like my original blinding, was an unexpected trauma, a crossroads. The more I reflect upon what has happened, whether from a vantage of darkness or light, the more I see life as an investigation into just this: How much pain can we tolerate before we either turn ourselves humbly over to our God, that His will be done, or turn on the sadistic Bastard with every fiber of our being? Just how He found the fortitude, tenacity, and nerve to look down on me from on high these ten long suffering years, knowing all the while that every word of encouragement I offered to the far-flung members of His miscellaneous flock was fouled by the adultery and avarice of those who pretended to sustain His wretched servant, I cannot pretend to know. The myriad ways of the Almighty are, it has been often recorded, mysterious. We mere mortals who fail to know our own hearts can't begin to fathom what motivates His. Not that my poor wife's weakness of the flesh, her infidelity, and materialist lust are in any way the fault of the Precious Savior. Nor that my benefactor and proponent, Harrison, without whose support I might never have found my audience, all those hungry souls who have dined—I hope nutritiously—at my inspirational banquets, was guided by the hand, if not the hoof, of the Lamb. As I lay in the equally dark but somehow less blurry shadows of my new world, as deeply dejected as I ever was when I first lost my sight, I decided to follow my instincts and see what there was to see. My life became a blindman's bluff.

Sarah checked in on me later that same day, concerned why I'd been stumbling around in the living room. “You feeling all right?” she wanted to know.

“Fine, just fine,” I assured her, and, testing the waters, asked if I couldn't sleep upstairs with her tonight. We generally had separate bedrooms on the road, and so often slept apart at home. Surely, I reasoned, the Lord would want a wife to abide some snoring now and then, if only for the sake of Old Testament conjugal duty.

Though I stared at the wall behind her, the look of dismay that shrouded her face, like Beelzebub's specter, was unmistakable. Her voice smilingly assured me that we needed to take it easy during this week off, while the frown on her lips mutely bespoke another message. I wanted to say, How could I have been so blind to your true feelings all this time? but kept my own counsel and meekly agreed. That seemed to brighten her mood. Her face relaxed as she brushed back her frosted hair and asked what kind of soup I wanted Martita to bring me for lunch. “Barley,” I said, and watched my estranged wife's hips pitch softly back and forth as she left the sanctum.

The children were my only hope. My wonderful babies, my joys, bounty of my loins. They, I assured myself, had not veered from the path of righteousness like their mother. Persisting with my charade the next morning, I once more entered the main house. Rather than loiter in the garish living room, I joined Martita in the kitchen, which was also extensively renovated—shiny chrome, glass, and granite everywhere, and a tile-work splashback depicting urns choked with flowers and saccharine French farm scenes. Though she was at first surprised by my appearing in her domain, Martita helped me to a chair at the long table and got me my morning tea. It was quite early, I saw by the wall clock, too early for Sarah, but maybe not for the kids, who, I assumed, would come down first, on their way to class. Becca was in her last year of high school, and Luke, a junior. As Martita busied herself, chatting amiably about this and that, I furtively studied her, wondering just how much she knew about the goings-on around here. Her black hair combed into a chignon, her handsome, concise form moving lithely in her uniform, her dark eyes, her pretty hands—she cut a finer figure than I had imagined. Some obvious questions came to mind to ask her, but I thought the better of it. Ease up, I reminded myself. As St. Paul advised in his Epistle to the Hebrews,
Let us run with patience the race that is set before us
.

Luke entered the kitchen first. That is, a young man whom Martita referred to as Luke. Rather than coming downstairs, however, to have his breakfast, he ducked in through the back door, having apparently spent the night elsewhere. Abstracted, with eyes glazed, he noticed me as he opened the refrigerator door and drank long and hard from an orange juice carton, but said nothing. His hair was every bit as orange as the juice he consumed, and rose in numerous spikes off the top of his head. His mascara was smudged—little Luke wore mascara? Great chunks of silver graced each of his fingers. He was skinny as a broomstick and looked the warlock part he affected. I sat in stunned silence, maintaining my own vacant, glazed-over stare, which matched my son's. I didn't know they made boots that big.

“What's
he
doing here?” Luke asked Martita.

I interrupted, “How are you this morning, Luke?”

“Awright, I guess,” he answered.

“You're up with the roosters,” I pressed, at the same time wondering if he oughtn't be nervous that the coffin lids were all supposed to be down by this time, and then saw him give Martita a look that could only be described as threatening.

“Whatever,” he said, taking a fat green apple from the bowl of fruit on the table and politely excusing himself with a sneer.

After he left the kitchen, I said, “Luke's a fine young man, isn't he.”

If both Sarah and Luke had gone the way of Judas, and Harrison with them, it seemed improbable Rebecca had managed to resist the tide of treachery. For having
betrayed my credulous innocence with vizor'd falsehood, and base forgery
, as blind Milton himself once wrote,
the pillared firmament is rottenness, and the earth's base is built on stubble
. I fled to my cave.

A pestilence had swept through my household, like the very dogday locusts that had prophesied the onset of my blindness that summer night a decade ago. I lay on my cot, hands over my forehead and face, unable to move, loath to think, as sweat broke out across the length of my body and a range of black emotions chased through me. Above all, I wanted never to leave my room again. They could bring me my filthy barley soup and vile cinnamon tea whenever they found time between the commission of sins, and to hell with the rest of it. Indeed, when Sarah ventured by later, reeking of sage and roses, and found me prostrate, she let out a little cry of fear. Perhaps I should be ashamed to admit it, but that cry was like sweet music to me—even better than the opening strains of Stravinsky's
Apollon Musagète
, though it sounded more like Honegger's Symphony No. 2, the
molto moderato
, so very crushingly ominous, as performed by von Karajan and the Berliner Philharmoniker. Not because I was deluded enough to think it meant she was concerned, as such, for my sake, or that my heart melted with sudden forgiveness. No, no—rather because it gave rise to my plan. Whereas before I couldn't see her face if she voiced distress on my behalf, now I did, and Sarah's look was that of a caretaker grown weary of her role, disgusted, in fact, by it. Humanitarian that I long strove to be, and that many had seen fit to call me, I reluctantly sympathized with her. I understood her failings and well knew how many persons of good intent and a hopeful heart nevertheless plant the earnest seeds of their goodness and optimism in the yielding muck of ambition. Look at Harrison. He probably hadn't had designs on my wife, my home, my finances, my very self, when he first got me into print and onto a podium. How do I know? Because by the same reasoning one might say that I never intended for him to succeed so assiduously in ruining me, even as he saved the souls of thousands by helping me to save my own. Having noted that, inspiration took hold of me and would not give way to any alternative from that day forward, until it had fulfilled itself like the competent beast it was.

The plan began simply. I didn't feel up to Louisville. We would have to cancel.

Sarah thought we should all pray for guidance, and so we went through the gesture of prayer. I still didn't feel like going. Harrison suggested that a doctor ought to be brought in to look me over. Louisville was, after all, “awfully darned important to the furtherance of the crusade”—the Christian Recovery Convention was, if I didn't mind his saying so, the Holy Grail of such gatherings, the motivational orator's Valhalla. It was a dream come true for me, for Sarah, and everyone who believed in my message of hope.

“A doctor won't find anything wrong with me,” I said, staring right through him.

“What then?” he asked, after underscoring again the importance of keeping this engagement, reminding me it was the kickoff to our big tour through the South, saying something about another book deal in the works.

I appreciated how much work Sarah and he had put into Louisville, the tour, all the rest, but couldn't do it. The problem was this. Somehow I had lost my calling. Sarah's face drained of all color as she looked at Harrison, who was also pale.

“You still believe in God, of course,” my wife whispered.

I told her I supposed I did, it wasn't that.

“Well, what is it, man?” Harrison asked, noiselessly taking my wife's hand in his.