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

“You are my only entertaining friend.”

I sat on the bed, stroking his hand, storing it up. This is my fingertip on the gold hairs on the back of his wrist. This is my fingertip on the protruding blue vein that runs from his ring finger to his wrist and up his beautiful forearm.

“If you cry, you gotta go.”

“I’m not.”

“D.M., I may want something from you.”

I put my hand under the sheet and laid it on his stomach. This is my palm on the line of brown curling hairs that grow like a spreading tree from his navel to his collarbone. This is the tip of my pinkie resting in the thick, springy hair above his cock, in which we discovered two silver strands last summer. His cock twitched against my fingertip. Jack smiled.

“You’re the last woman I will ever fuck. I think you are the last woman I will have fucked. You’re the end of the line.”

I was ready to step out of my jeans, lock the door, and straddle him.

“I had a very good time. D.M., I had a wonderful time with you. My last fun.”

Naomi stuck her head in. “Everything all right? More tea, Mr. Malone?”

“No, dear girl. We’re just having a wee chat.”

I never heard him sound so Irish. Naomi disappeared.

“Well, Erin go bragh.”

“You’ve got an ugly side to you,” he said, and he put one stiff hand to my face.

“I do. I am ugly sides all over lately.”

“When it gets bad,” he said, “I’ll need your help. I seem to have taken a sharp turn for the worse this time.”

I put my face on his stomach, which seemed just the same beautiful stomach, hard at the ribs and softer below, thick and sweet as always, no wasting, no bloating.

“And when I’m worse yet, I’ll want to go.”

I saw Jack’s face smeared against the inside of a plastic bag.

“That’s a long way away. We all want you with us. Jennifer needs you, Naomi needs you, for as long as you’re still, you know, still able to be with them.”

Jack grabbed my hair and pulled my face to his.

“I didn’t ask you what they want. I didn’t ask you what you want. I can’t ask my wife. I know she needs me, I know she wants me until I can’t blink once for yes and twice for no. She wants me until I don’t know the difference. You have to do this for me.”

I put my hands over my ears, without even realizing it until Jack pulled them away.

“Darling Mistress, this is what I need you for. I can’t fuck you, I can’t have fun with you.” He smiled. “Not much fun, anyway. I can’t do the things with you that a man does with his mistress. There is just this one thing that only you can do for me.”

“Does Naomi know?”

“She’ll know what she needs to know. No one’s going to prosecute you or blame you. I’ve given it a lot of thought. You’ll help me and then you’ll go, and it will have been my will, my hand, my choice.”

I walked around the room. With a teenager and a sick man and no cleaning lady, Naomi’s house was tidier than mine on its best day.

“All right? Andrea? Yes?”

“What if I say no?”

“Then don’t come back at all. Why should I have you see me this way, see me worse than this, sweet merciful Jesus, see me dumb and dying, if you won’t save me? Otherwise you’re just another woman whose heart I’m breaking, whose life I’m destroying. I told you when I met you, baby, I already have a wife.”

Avinu Malkenu, inscribe us in the Book of Happiness.

Avinu Malkenu, inscribe us in the Book of Deliverance.

Avinu Malkenu, inscribe us in the Book of Merit.

Avinu Malkenu, inscribe us in the Book of Forgiveness.

Avinu Malkenu, answer us though we have no deeds to

plead our cause; save us with mercy and lovingkindness.

“You’re a hard man,”I said.

“I certainly hope so.”

Iam waiting. I have cleaned my house. I paint. I listen.

You wouldn’t have known me a year ago.

A year ago I had a husband and my best friend was Margeann at the post office. In no time at all my husband had a final heart attack, I got a new best friend, and house prices tumbled in our part of Connecticut. Realtors’ signs came and went in front of the house down the road: from the elegant forest-green-and-white “For Sale by Owner,” nicely handmade to show that they were in no hurry and in no need, to the “Martha Brae Lewis and Company,” whose agents sold only very expensive houses and rode their horses in the middle of the day when there was nothing worthwhile on the market, and then down, down to the big national relocator company’s blue-and-white fiberboard sign practically shouting “Fire Sale, You Can Have This House for Less Than They Paid for It.” I have thought that I might have bought that house, rented out my small white farmhouse, and become a serious capitalist. My place was nothing special compared to the architect’s delight next door, but it did have Ethan’s big stained-glass windows, so beautiful sightseers drove right up our private road, parked by the birches, and begged to come in, just to stand there in the rays of purple and green light, to be charmed by twin redheaded mermaids flanking the front door, to run their fingers over the cobalt blue drops sprayed across the hall, bezel set into the plaster. They stood between the cantering cinnabar legs of the centaur in the middle of the kitchen wall and sighed. I always said, “Come in,” and after coffee and cookies they would order two windows or six, or one time, wild with real estate money, people from Gramercy Park ordered a dozen botanical panels for their new house in Madison, and Ethan always said, “Why do you do that?” I did it for company and for money, since I needed both and he didn’t care. If I didn’t make noise or talk to myself or comment aloud on the vagaries of life, our house rang with absolute silence, and when Ethan asked for the mail, or even when he made the effort to ask about my bad knee, not noticing that we last spoke two days before, it was worse than the quiet, and if I didn’t ask the New Yorkers for money, he’d just shuffle around in his moccasins, picking at his nails, until they made an insulting offer or got back in their cars.

Six months after Ethan died, I went just once to the Unitarian Widows Group, in which all the late husbands were much nicer than mine had been and even the angriest woman only said, “Goddamn his smoking,” and I thought, His smoking? Almost all that I liked about Ethan was his stained glass and his small wide hands and the fact that he was willing to marry little Plain Jane when I thought no one would, and willing to stay by me during my miscarriage-depression. That was such a bad time that I didn’t leave the house for two months and Ethan invited the New Yorkers in just to get me out of bed. All in all it seemed that if you didn’t hate your silent, moody husband after twenty years and he didn’t seem to hate you and your big blob of despair, you could call it a good marriage, no worse than others.

I have dead parents — the best kind, I think, at this stage of life — two sisters, whom I do love at a little distance, a garden that is as close to God as I need it to be, and a book group I’ve been in for fourteen years, which also serves as mastectomy hotline, menopause watch, and PFLAG. I don’t mind being alone, having been raised by hard-drinking, elderly parents, a German and a Swede, with whom I never had a fight or a moment’s pleasure, and so I took off for college at sixteen, with no idea of what to say to these girls with outerwear for every season and underwear that was nicer than my church clothes. Having made my own plain, dark way, and having been with plain, dark, but talented Ethan all that time, I’ve been pleasantly surprised by middle age, with yoga and gardening for my soul and system, and bookkeeping to pay the bills. Clearly, my whole life was excellent training for money managing of all kinds, and now I do the books for twenty people like Ethan, gifted and without a clear thought in their heads about how to organize their finances or feed their families, if they are lucky enough to have more than a modest profit to show for what they do.