Amy Bloom - A Blind Man Can See How Much I Love You

“You do not have a scratch on you,” she said, and patted my cheek. “Walk over toward the door, there’s nothing that way. I’ll get a broom.”

I could see her, both more and less clearly than I would have liked. She pushed herself up, and the view of her folded belly and still-dark pubic hair was replaced by the sharp swing of her hips, wider now, tenderly pulled down at the soft bottom edges, but still that same purposeful kick-down-the-door walk.

She came back in her robe and slippers, with a broom and dustpan, and I wrapped a towel around my waist. I stood up straight so that even if she needed glasses as much as I did what she saw of me would look good.

“Quite the event. Is there something, some small thing in this room you didn’t run into?”

“No,” I said. “I think I’ve made contact with almost everything. The armchair stayed out of my way, but otherwise, for a low-key kind of guy, I’d have to say I got the job done.”

My mother dumped the pieces of glass and the light-bulb and the lamp remains into the wastebasket.

“You smell like the whole Napa Valley,” she said, “so I won’t offer you a brandy.”

“I don’t usually drink this way, Ma. I’m sorry for the mess.”

She put down the broom and the dustpan and came over to me and smiled at my towel. She put her lips to the middle of my chest, over my beating heart.

“I love you past speech.”

We stood there, my long neck bent down to her shoulder, her hands kneading my back. We breathed in and out together.

“I’ll say good night, honey. Quite a day.”

She waved one hand over her shoulder and walked away.

“It’s six-fifteen,” Lionel says to his stepmother. “Decent people have started drinking.”

“Maybe I should put out some food,” she says.

Lionel nods, looking around for the little cluster of liquor bottles she had thrown out when his father was alive and trying to stay sober, and replaced on the sideboard as soon as he passed away. Lionel’s not sorry he dragged himself and his stepson from Paris to Massachusetts for their first trip together, but it seems possible, even probable, that this Thanksgiving will be the longest four days of his life.

“It’s all over with Paula?” Julia doesn’t sound sorry or not sorry, she sounds as if she’s simply counting places at the table.

“Yeah. Things happen.”

“Do you want to tell me more about it?”

“Nothing to tell.”

After his first wife, the terrible Claudine, Lionel had thought he would never even sleep with another woman, but Paula had been the anti-Claudine: not French, not thin, not mean. She was plump and pretty, a good-natured woman with an English-language bookstore and a three-year-old son. It did not seem possible, when they married in the garden of the Saints-Pères, with Paula in a short white dress and her little boy holding the rings, that after five years she would be thin and irritable and given to the same shrugs and expensive cigarettes as the terrible Claudine. After he moved out, Lionel insisted on weekly dinners and movie nights with his stepson. He wants to do right by the one child to whom he is “Papa,” although he has begun to think, as Ari turns eight, that there is no reason not to have the boy call him by his first name instead.

“Really, nothing to tell. We were in love and then not.”

“You slept with someone else?” Julia asks.

“Julia.”

“I’m just trying to see how you got to ‘not.’”

“I bet Buster told you.”

“Your brother did not rat on you.” He had, of course. Buster, the family bigmouth, a convert to serial monogamy, had told his mother that Lionel slept with the ticket taker from Cinema Studio 28, and Julia was not as shocked as Buster hoped she would be. “A cutie, I bet,” was all she said. (The beauty of Lionel’s girlfriends was legendary. Paula, dimpled, fair, and curvy in her high heels, would have been the belle of any American country club, and even so was barely on the bottom rung of Lionel’s girls.)

Buster talks about everything, his wife’s dissolving sense of self, Jordan’s occasional bed-wetting, Corinne’s thumb-sucking, all just to open the door for his own concerns and sore spots: his climbing weight, his anxiety about becoming a judge so young. Julia thinks that he is a good and fine-looking man, and tall enough to carry the weight well, although it breaks her heart to see her boy so encumbered. She knows that he will make a fine judge, short on oratory and long on common sense and kindness.

“Even in my day, honey, most people got divorced because they had someone else on the side and got tired of pretending they didn’t.” Julia herself was Lionel Senior’s someone on the side before she became his wife.

“Let’s not go there. Anyway, definitely over. But I’m going to bring Ari every Thanksgiving.” Everyone had liked Paula (even when she got so crabby, it was not with the new in-laws three thousand miles away), and no one, including Lionel, can look at the poor kid without wanting to run a thumb up his slack spine. Bringing him is no gift to anyone; he’s a burden to Jordan, an annoyance to little Corinne. Of course, Buster doesn’t mind, he’s the soft touch in the family, and Jewelle, inclined to love everything even faintly Buster, tries, but her whole beautiful frowning face signals that this is an inferior sort of child, one who does not appreciate friendly jokes or good cooking or the chance to ingratiate himself with his American family. It is to Ari’s credit, Lionel thinks, that instead of clinging forlornly, he has retreated into bitter, silent, superior Frenchness.

“Julia, are you listening?” Lionel asks. “On Friday I’ll fix the kitchen steps.”

Julia sets down a platter of cold chicken and sits on the floor to do ColorForms with Jordan. She puts a red square next to Jordy’s little green dots.

“It’s like talking to myself. It’s like I’m not even in the room.” Lionel pours himself a drink, walking over to his nephew. Jordan peels a blue triangle off the bottom of Lionel’s sneaker without looking up. Jordan takes after his father, and they both hate disturbances; Uncle Lionel can be a disturbance of the worst kind, the kind that might make Grandma Julia walk out of the room or put away the toys, slamming the cabinet door shut, knocking the hidden chocolates out of their boxes.

“Oh, we know you’re here,” Julia says. “We can tell because your size thirteens are splayed all over Jordy’s ColorForms. Squashing them.”

“They’re already flat, Julia,” Lionel says, and she laughs. Lionel makes her laugh.

Jordan moves his ColorForms board a safe distance from his uncle’s feet. Uncle Lionel is sharp, is what Jordan’s parents say. Sharp as a knife. Ari, not really Uncle Lionel’s son, not really Jordan’s cousin, is sharp, too, but he’s sharp mostly in French, so Jordan doesn’t even have to get into it with him. Ari has Tintin and Jordan has Spider-Man, and Jordan stretches out on the blue velvet couch and Ari gets just the blue-striped armchair, plus Jordan has his own room and Ari has to share with Uncle Lionel.

“You invite Ari to play with you,” Julia tells Jordan. “Take Corinne with you.”

“He’s mean. And he only talks French, anyway. He’s—”

“Jordy invite your cousin to play with you. He’s never been to America before, and you are the host.”

“I’m the host?” Jordan can see himself in his blue blazer with his feet up on the coffee table like Uncle Lionel, waving a fat cigar.

“You are.”

“All right. We’re gonna play outside, then.” Ari is not an outside person.