Death Kit (34 page)

At exactly ten, Hester comes out of an elevator into the lobby. A nurse is holding her arm, carrying her suitcase. Diddy stubs out his cigarette in a free-standing metal ashtray, jumps up from the bench where he's been restlessly chain-smoking and thumbing through magazines, rushes across the marble floor to embrace the girl. And to grasp her arm and the suitcase. As they're walking out the imposing main door, Diddy notices that Hester's pretty face seems puffy. Has she been weeping? Her eyes, of course, are concealed by the large oval dark glasses, so he can't tell without asking. But doesn't want to ask. If Diddy can make Hester happy starting from today, it won't matter. And he can. Feels full of energy. Enough for both of them.

“Let's walk a little,” he says. “The sun is so good.”

An unseasonably warm day for late November. Diddy helps Hester take off the light brown camel's hair coat she's wearing, and folds it over his left arm.

Diddy steering, they walk the three blocks leading directly to Monroe Park. Diddy, exhilarated, wanting to think only of her, can't help noticing with displeasure how many men stop, turn around, leer grossly at her soft body in the slight, clinging dress. Like the one she wore on the train, a dress intended to be touched more than to be seen. Ordinarily, Diddy would be pleased to notice other men envying him his woman, coveting her. When men had stared in the street at Joan, Diddy liked it. Different with Hester. Joan could see the men staring at her, could look at the men themselves; appraise them, reject them, reaffirm Diddy. But Hester, who can't see anyone, can't make many choices. Take, for example, what's happening at this very moment. That bastard in the blue jeans who just strutted by. And stared, then mouthed and tongued at her obscenely. Maybe, if she could see, Hester would choose to go with him. Maybe she'd prefer him to Diddy.

Even though the sun is shining. Even though Hester is truly his for the first time: they're outside in the world, just the two of them; he has her entirely to himself. Still Diddy continues to think of the world. As well as of Hester. Diddy, not exactly glad she doesn't see, is glad she'll never see how ugly everything is. A potent ignorance. Perhaps, he hopes, contagious. If Hester can't see the ugliness, it's possible that, after a while, he'll be unable to see it, too. How fine that would be. Simply not to see. Garbage trucks, bums, neon signs, gutters, plastic toys, parking lots, unhappy children, Automats, old women on the benches of the traffic islands on upper Broadway.

He can't imagine ever, in Hester's company, being frightened of Incardona. Because she could never share his terror. How fortunate (now) for Diddy that Hester doesn't believe in what happened in the tunnel. Extra insulation from his fears, besides the fact that blind people can't see ghosts, any more than they can see palpable people. They can't be haunted. Can be, at worst, only bewildered. Diddy's not frightened of Incardona (now). Because he no longer has to think only, or even mainly, of himself. Hester is here, interposed between Diddy and himself. Unable to see. Refusing to see. Refusing to acknowledge the doubling of the self in dreams.

They're approaching the park. It had rained yesterday, and Diddy is dizzy with pleasure at the keen smell of the air this morning. “Smell it, darling,” he exclaims. His right arm, the arm he has encircling her waist, pulling her even more strongly against his right side. “Do you feel the sun?”

Yes.

“We're passing a pond with … let me see … seven white and brown ducks. A boy is trying to launch a metal model of a PT boat in the pond … But it's sinking. Listen, he's crying. Now his mother is picking him up.…”

Past the duck pond. “Do you want an ice-cream cone? A Popsicle? An Eskimo Pie?”

Yes. A vanilla thing on a stick with coconut icing. Diddy buys two of them.

A little farther, out of the vendor's sight. Diddy chooses a sunny piece of ground under a tree, lays their coats to one side. “Feel the bark of the tree, darling. Here, give me your hand.…” He sits beneath the tree, leans his back against the trunk; Hester stretches out perpendicular to him, rests her head on his thighs.

“You've gained weight.” Nuzzling her head against his belly. “You needed to. It's much nicer now.”

Diddy throws back his head against the trunk, looking up into the sky. If he could just have this moment always inside his head. No words are conceivable. She must understand. What Diddy feels for Hester is rooted more deeply than anything ever felt for Joan, or for any other woman. His love is the signature of his life.

“Are you comfortable, Dalton? Never mind my head, if you want to change your position.”

“I am. I won't.” He strokes her hair, then grasps her head, and pulls it over the pulsing sex inside his trousers; against his belly. “Try to sleep.”

Hester seems to breathe more slowly and deeply. Is she asleep (now)? Diddy could push back her glasses to see whether her eyes are closed, but that might wake her. For one thing, because the sun is strong and he doesn't know whether her eyes still retain some sensitivity to light.

No, she's moving slightly. Passing her hand across her forehead.

“Were you crying this morning before you came down?” asks Diddy softly and after a longish silence. The girl nods. “Why? Will you tell me?” Maybe Hester was grieving for her mother. Had this operation succeeded in restoring her sight, her mother's crime would have been repealed. Stella Nayburn, though still guilty, would somehow be made less guilty. As Diddy's guilt would diminish, though never disappear altogether, if Incardona could rise from the dead.

“Why?” Diddy repeats.

“Because I still have so many tears inside me. And I don't believe in miracles.”

Diddy suspects that something bad is happening. But wants to allow it, not deflect it. “By a miracle, do you mean us? Our coming together. You don't believe in … that?”

“Yes,” said Hester.

“I see. No, maybe I don't see … Tell me, is believing in it so very important?”

“No. At least I don't think so…” Diddy gasped. Was it all right then? He could understand the words. Hester reaches up to touch his cheek. “Am I upsetting you? I'm sorry. I don't want to.”

“Don't worry about me,” Diddy said hoarsely.

“But I do,” Hester says. “You know I do. Everything's more difficult for you than it is for me, I think. You have a truth that's different from mine. Granted mine is painful. But yours is even harder to endure. Don't you know I know that?”

“I don't understand what you're saying.”

“Don't you? I don't know how to explain any better.… Look, Dalton, I understand what you feel about me. But it isn't as simple as you think. You're so pious, darling.” Diddy smiled at the endearment. “That's where the business of truth comes in. You want to annihilate your truth, and be like me. I don't think you can do that, Dalton. And even if you can, you shouldn't want to. You have to respect my limits. And yours. You mustn't be too eager to change yourself.”

Mainly, what Diddy heard were the sweet tones of Hester's voice. But does understand a little; knew that he was being rebuked. Tenderly. And, therefore, found the rebuke acceptable. As long as Hester wasn't taking back her love. Which, already, had become almost unthinkable. Suppose, one day, she declares in her quiet way, I don't love you. If what Hester would be saying was that she'd never loved him, never, he felt (now) he would die. However, if what Hester would mean was that she didn't love him any more, then Diddy could try to make her love him again. Putting his life as the forfeit. Of course, couldn't literally force Hester to love him. He'd have to convince her. But by what means? What signs, tokens, evidence of his love could he give to a blind person?

“I love you so much.” Is it wrong for Diddy to say that (now)? As his only reply to what she's just said? Words cannot compel the unconditional movements of the heart.

“You know I love you, Dalton. I just hope my love is good for you.”

Diddy, bending over to find Hester's mouth, her tongue. If she only knew.

Diddy satisfied. He has his treasure, has banished his swarthy demon with the flame of love. His blond, sightless angel will heal him, will redeem him. Which she's already begun to do. And he, in return, will protect her from the world. Which is partitioned off with walls, made of wood and brick and stone and cement; which is stocked with sharp pointed objects that cut the flesh; which is charged with dead looks and inhumane caresses that bruise the spirit. Diddy will devote himself entirely to taking care of her.

Goody Did aware of the selfish gratifications in all this. Attached to his pledge of absolute devotion and care, there's one stipulation. Hester is to depend on him, and on no one else. To see the world through him only, not through the eyes of any other. That much is fixed. Diddy won't share Hester with anyone. Does she know how fanatically possessive of her he's going to be? Will she hate that?

Gratified apart from the need to possess.… In contemplating all the arduous responsibilities and practical tasks about to be his, Diddy has, correctly, no sense that he's making a sacrifice. For he himself will be a co-beneficiary of his humblest daily services for Hester. If Hester will benefit from his faithful attendance in a practical sense, he gains more. Gains in a spiritual way.

That benefit consisting in the fact that, when he will be charged with narrating the visible world to Hester and negotiating for her all her transactions with palpable things, he'll have a chance to see the whole world with fresh eyes.

Diddy will tell Hester about old sunsets, and the sun will be seen to fall behind the horizon for the first time. Seeing a child being beaten will not make him weep blood for days after. The literature about the Nazi concentration camps will no longer seem the only real truth about man. The death of a gnat will become something trivial: the death of a gnat. The muck of large cities will not so easily leap from its crevasses and ledges, and adhere to him. The loud, rude, metallic voices won't collect like silt inside his head.

And all the imaginary and swiftly imagined lives of bedraggled passers-by in subways, in buses, in auditoriums, on beaches, in parks, in offices, and on the street will seem less mortally horrifying.

Though his job is to protect Hester from the world, Diddy will try to view the world more generously. Not only as an arena of contamination, but also as a space to be continually reinvented and reexamined. If only he weren't so fearful of being touched. Convinced in advance as he is that it's bound to be wounding, not soothing. So fearful of touching. Convinced in advance as he is that he's bound to be repulsed.

Undoubtedly, Diddy's fears would be modified if he couldn't see. Sight permits him to reach conclusions at a distance, before he's come close enough to touch and be touched. Sight encourages abstractions—a luxury of sighted persons. While for Hester, as for all blind persons, judgment must wait until she closes, in specific contact, with something particular. When nothing has a look, there are no general categories. When nothing has a look, everything becomes concrete, palpable, touchable.

It occurs to Diddy that perhaps all his terrors derive from the mixed blessing of being able to see. Because he can see, he can perceive the world abstractly. At a distance. That's what Diddy has to unlearn. Disband his imagination, which is glued with incredulity upon past images and gazes with apprehension into the tube of the future. That imagination which depletes his vitality, consigning everything to the rack of time. To be in the present; to be without imagination, unable to anticipate anything; to be.

Of course, he can't get rid of his eyes. Not the right sort of guilt. Diddy's is the harder task: with the fleshy globes—ninety percent water—still lodged in his skull and functioning normally. Must unlearn the old ways of seeing. If it's not too late.

Immediately upon his return with Hester to New York, Diddy submitted his resignation to Watkins & Company. “Reasons of health.” The refund of what he'd paid into the company pension plan, proceeds from some stock, which the company was eager to buy back, and three years' savings add up to enough to keep himself and Hester going for at least a year and maintain the payments to Joan. Diddy vaguely thinks of some kind of job he might do at home before the money starts to run out. Such as translating technical books; Diddy's good at languages, knows German and Russian. Or free-lance editing for a publishing house that specializes in scientific and medical literature; he's qualified for such work and through his former job has many contacts in the scientific-journal and book-publishing worlds. But hasn't yet done anything toward lining up such a job. Or about going down to City Hall and getting a license. Or started looking for a new apartment.

In the opening days of an unseasonably warm December, Diddy and Hester spend most waking hours outdoors and, so far as the word applies, sightseeing. Hester, though made nervous by the roaring, screeching, and honking of heavy oncoming traffic, seems to crave variety and the sense of movement. At first Diddy conducts long excursions: the Bronx Zoo for the animals' sounds and smells; the lake in Central Park to get away from cars; the Battery and the Staten Island ferry for the stench of the sea, tar, and creosote, and for the rocking and dipping of the boat. As they roam about Coney Island, Diddy conjures up with words the ravaged skeletons of last summer's contraptions for amusement; after sneaking in to poke amid the rat-infested ruins of the World's Fair, Diddy keeps up two hours of the same kind of animated verbal picturing. Diddy can be a lively talker when he wants to please someone. Then a silent day: wandering hand in hand along the wintry deserted beach at Montauk.

Piece by piece, reentering the world. But hasn't Diddy mistaken this enterprise, and drawn the map of too big a world? Isn't his reach too long? Remember who is his companion (now). Hester is not only blind but entirely unfamiliar with this city and its environs. But maybe being blind is all that counts. To her, all places and all distances must be virtually the same. Unable to surmise what relation one place has to another, how can she ever know, at any given moment, where she is?