Reading Aloud
On Mondays and Wednesdays at 4:30 P.M., Anna takes off her clothes and reads to Sam. Reads him cable-box directions and instant-soup instructions, unpaid bills and pages from his textbooks. Each week she peels off her garments one by one, arranging them beside her chair with practiced stealth. Usually, Sam makes an exotic tea and they revel in descriptions from their mutual senses; it smells like cinnamon berries, it tastes like honey smoke, it feels warmer today. Both can hear its soft percolation, but only Anna can see its cloudy mauve whirlpool. Only Anna can see her wilting breasts and her varicose veins. So she looks at him and he looks at nothing. And they let the words lift off the pages of the manuals and brochures and cereal-box backs and float fully formed from the sixty-something naked woman to the twenty-something blind man.
*
Her doctor suggested it. The reading, not her wardrobe choice. Said something about the benefits of purpose or the advantages of routine. Anna was sick and she knew it. Ever since her husband un-retired, she’d had an ache in her left knee joint and she sometimes felt nauseous. For four days last April, she was convinced unquestionably of her pulmonary tuberculosis; for three days in June of her endometrial cancer. She’d taken to leaving an old copy of The Diagnostic Almanac on her bedside table, flipping ardently through its pages. Naturally, she’d verify each hypothesis with recurrent appointments. Anna liked her doctor and his magazines, his lemon drops, and his pristine coats. Liked him enough to forgive his misidentification of her symptoms as “psychologically derivative.” Liked him enough to agree to volunteer at the city library’s Visually Impaired Assistance Program for “purpose and routine.”
*
On a Monday at 4:28 P.M., Anna knocked on Sam’s apartment door. It was the same knock she knocked every week for twelve weeks—like she knew he knew she was already there. Her knee hurt and the building elevator was under renovation, so the two flights of stairs added a glisten to her forehead and a rhythm to her breathing. She hated herself for it. Back when her back could bend and her toes could point, Anna could do Black Swan’s thirty-two fouettés en tournant without moistening her leotard—spinning and tucking on a single slipper. Aging is harder for beautiful people, and Anna was beautiful. The was haunted her from mirror to mirror in her Westchester high-rise. People used to stare at her, envy her, pay seven dollars to watch her grand jeté at the Metropolitan Opera House. But not Sam. Sam never watched her do anything. So twice a week, Anna didn’t watch herself. His place had no mirrors and even his fogged eyes were unreflective. So when he opened his door, she focused on his face.
“Hi Anna,” said Sam.
“Hi Sam,” said Anna. He reached forward, placing a hand on her elbow in his standard gesture of greeting.
“Your knee doing okay?”
“Well, not really.” She stepped forward, swinging the door shut behind her. “They just don’t know about these things these days. Might be pulmonary tuberculosis. They just don’t know.” She shook her head. “There’s a large brace on it right now, actually.”
There wasn’t a large brace on it, actually, but Anna liked the way it sounded. She also liked Sam.
Sam hadn’t always been blind; he’d managed a whole two years before the fog came. His visual memory puzzled him, tricked him, disillusioned him. Trapped him with a visual arsenal of table bottoms and grown-ups’ feet, forever restricting him from the bipedal perspective. He was a master’s student in a divinity school just outside the city, and at night, in the black, he moved about his apartment, tracing his fingers across the thousands of tiny dots of Jacob and Isaiah, Luke and Matthew. Fingering the Psalms and stroking the Gospels. “Religious Studies,” he would clarify to friends and uncles and the women like Anna who read to him. “I study God, not worship Him.”
Sam’s apartment lived an immaculate life. Clutter was more than an inconvenience—it was a hazard. Anna walked by the Bibles and Torahs and Korans convened with books on Indian cooking and music theory in alphabetized rows of Ikea shelving. He’d built them himself. Felt every screw and every piece of artificial wood, sliding them together as Anna read him the instructions during one of her first visits. Everything had a location. Every utensil had its hook and every coat had its hanger. Tiny blue dotted labels speckled the apartment like some kind of laboratory. The microwave buttons, the light switches, the drawers, the cans: all had their names displayed in bright Braille blue. A Malaysian tapestry hung above the sofa and an Andy Warhol print hung opposite the door. “For company,” he shrugged when Anna asked. “My mother’s idea.”
“Well, sit down, sit down!” He gestured to the exact spot of her usual armchair, turned forty-five degrees to the left, and took six paces before stopping in front of the counter. “I’ve got a lot for you today.”
“I think I can handle it,” she said.
“Anna, Anna.” He mocked distress. “What would I possibly do without you?”
“You know perfectly well they’d just send someone else by.”
Sam smiled as he placed his pile on the table.
“I’m teasing you,” he said. “You know I love teasing you. Come on, sit down. I don’t want that knee of yours giving way. What was it? Pulmonary tuberculosis? Let’s not play around with pulmonary tuberculosis.”
Anna could see Sam’s grin, but she blushed anyway. She sat down and studied him. The way his skin held taut around his forearms, the way his pants creased in as he walked, the way his hands pulled and pushed and shifted and organized, steadily, confidently, free from a seer’s incessant second glances or double checks. He was young, and his hair was thick, and his body was still strong. Anna thought he had a dancer’s body and imagined his hands on her waist, lifting her up above his head before placing her down as he jumped. She imagined his fingers tracing her fingers in backstage shadows, the pulse of the crowd turning air to endorphin. High off the heat of their bowing bodies, all she could hear was the rhythm of their breath. The same breath she felt quicken when she sat in this armchair, when she slipped off her shoes and sat down to read.
“All right then.” Sam handed her the pile of mail and bills and misplaced receipts. “Let’s start with the boring stuff.” He sat down at his computer, ready to translate her voice into his language of dots.
She read him an advertisement for car insurance and unbuttoned her sweater.
She read him a credit card receipt and rolled down her stockings.
Sam sat at his desk, blind. Sat typing and sipping and small-talking between his chorus of Toss it. Toss it. Keep it. What? Toss it. What? Repeat that. Don’t throw that out! Anna knew she wasn’t the strongest reader; she’d spent her childhood staring at mirrored music boxes, not pages of books. But he never corrected her. Never smiled into his keyboard when she struggled with entrepreneur, bureaucracy, Jesuit, psalms. Not like Martin. Martin would have said something, would have laughed. Laughed at his wife, who—“Oh, did I mention, used to dance at the Met.” Excused her dinner-party mispronunciation of bon appétit to platefuls of partners at the firm’s annual dinner. She’d said it again once they’d served the dessert, deviously looking him in the eye and smiling her victorious smile: “Bone appetite, everyone! Bone appetite!”
But that was before Martin retired. Before he left work to stay home and question the amount of mayonnaise in the tuna salad and why she let that damn Chinese family overcharge her for the dry cleaning. Before he reconsidered and, at seventy-one, went back to the firm. Before she realized that she’d liked when he complained about the mayonnaise and didn’t really mind that he was home for lunch.
One morning, Martin made Anna scrambled eggs before she woke up. She didn’t say anything when they tasted oddly sweet, but once she found the empty cream carton in the trash, they nearly cramped up laughing. The next weekend, Martin took her golfing for the first time. And later that summer to the city for a show. But he must have missed his keyboard and his meetings and his legal briefings because the following fall he went back to his office, his job, his early mornings and late dinners. Anna’s career had peaked in her twenties, deteriorating with her body, not expanding with her mind. She retired at twenty-eight and worked in a dance studio for a while, but she eventually settled into her house and her hobbies. His decision puzzled her. And sooner or later her knee started hurting and her nausea began and she got The Diagnostic Almanac and Dr. Limestone prescribed her “purpose and routine.”
Sometimes, in the shower, or in the car, or loading the dishwasher, Anna would wonder what would have happened if she had offered to read to Martin. Offered her eyes to cable-box directions and instant-soup instructions, unpaid bills and pages from his law books. I’ll be your glasses, she would have said. That doesn’t say milk, it says cream.