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

Jane liked Northampton. The Panda Garden Chinese Restaurant, elegant gold earrings shaped like ginkgo leaves, and the beautiful blunt hands of the saleswoman unfolding Italian sheets, snapping thick ivory linen down the length of a pine table, charmed her, and she still visits every couple of years on her own long after Jess has come to prefer Seattle and Vancouver.

Jane walks to the mall. They need toilet paper. Jane needs emery boards. She has to get vitamins and Tropicana Original orange juice (testosterone has not changed Jess’s lifelong hatred of orange pulp and of green vegetables) and high-protein powder for shakes and maybe some books on tape until Jess has the energy to read.

Jane strolls through the entire mall, buying funny socks and aloe vera gel and Anthony Hopkins reading The Silence of the Lambs, and winds up at the Rite Aid, the least glamorous stop on a not very glamorous list. She recognizes the man at the end of the aisle. Not part of Dr. Laurence’s staff, she would have noticed those hazel eyes. Someone she knows from home? Did she decorate a house for him? An office? Cheekbones like a Cherokee and flat waves of slick dark hair like a high-style black man from the forties.

“I’m Cole Ramsey,” he says, and Jane smells bay rum aftershave. “I think I saw you at the medical center? Down the street?” He is not really asking, he is Southern. And he keeps talking. “Forgive me for being so forward.”

Jane has goosebumps and her chest hurts, and it has been so long since she’s had these symptoms that for a moment she thinks she’s getting the flu. She introduces herself and drops the package of emery boards, which Cole Ramsey picks up and holds on to.

“May I walk along with you?”

“Through the Rite Aid? Be my guest.”

By the time they’ve finished shopping and bought a Pooh Corners mobile from the Disney Store for Cole’s brand-new nephew, Jane knows that he is an endocrinologist who sometimes consults with Dr. Laurence and has his own regular-people practice on the other side of Santa Barbara. Cole likes to talk. He talks about malls and why he enjoys them (“Of course, I also like kudzu, so there you go”) and Dr. Laurence (“A good man and a good surgeon — a rare combination, not that I should bad-mouth the profession, but most doctors are half-people and most surgeons are not even that”) and the poetry of Richard Howard (“He’s so decorous but so willing to disturb”), and he tries to talk Jane into dinner.

“My son’s having surgery day after tomorrow. Tonight’s his last chance for Chinese food.” That’s enough information, Jane thinks.

“Of course. Just a drink, then? Or a post-shopping cappuccino?”

Jane calls home, and Jess, still drowsy from the sun and anxiety, says, “Fine. Go. Whoop it up.”

Jane says, “I’ll be home no later than seven, and we can go out for dinner and catch the nine-thirty movie.”

“Whatever, Mom,” Jess says. “It’ll be fine. I’m going back to sleep.”

Jane falls on her bed, after the sixteen-ounce Bloody Mary with Cole Ramsey and the beer with Jess and their all-appetizer dinner and malted milk balls at the movie, and she thinks of Cole and exhales happily. His soft, light voice. The focused, flattering attention. The self-deprecating jokes. Jane has not had a close gay male friend since Anthony died in ’88, and Cole is charming and such a pleasure to look at.

In the morning Jane and Jess kick around until it’s time for him to check into the hospital. They play gin and walk to the bookstore and waste time, and eventually they pack and watch an afternoon rerun of Friends. They act more like pilots before a big mission than like patients. At the hospital Jess is hungry and nervous and unwilling to let Jane sit with him any longer.

“Love you, Mom,” he says.

“Love you, too, honey,” Jane says, and thinks, Oh, my brave girl.

Jane sees Cole in the hospital lobby, patting the cheek of a fat blond nurse. When he sees Jane, he gives the nurse a squeeze on the shoulder and she hugs him, her wide body hiding him from view. Cole hurries to catch up with Jane.

“You must have just left your son. May I walk along with you?”

They walk through the parking lot, into the wet grass and waving palms and blooming Jacarandas of the small, unexpectedly tropical city park.

“This is nice,” he says. “A little bit of Paradise we didn’t know about.” He makes it sound as if he and Jane have been exploring municipal parks together for years.

“You have a good relationship with the nurses,” Jane says.

“Patients and nurses are about everyone that counts in a hospital.”

“I bet that one’s in love with you,” Jane says. She’s teasing; she and Anthony used to talk about women who fell in love with him with a particularly gratifying mix of compassion and malice.

“Oh, I’m over fifty, no one falls in love with me anymore.” Cole sits down on a bench and pulls gently on Jane’s hand.

“Don’t be silly. Men have it easy until they’re seventy. And look at Cary Grant, he looked fabulous until he died.” And he was gay too, she thinks.

“Well, I’m not Cary Grant, I’m afraid, just a skinny doc from South Carolina. Not that I wasn’t a fan. Particularly Bringing Up Baby. ”

“Well, yes,” Jane says. “One of the best movies ever made.” They talk through the movie from beginning to end, and he applauds her imitation of Katharine Hepburn, and when they get to the scene with the crazy dog and poor Cary Grant in Hepburn’s peignoir, they laugh out loud.

Cole looks at his watch and sighs. “This has been just lovely, but I do have to run.”

Jane looks at him. “Of course. Someone waiting at home?” It would be nice to be friends with a gay couple. She could invite them over for dinner, for pizza at least, while Jess is in the hospital, or maybe while he’s recuperating and getting bored.

Cole looks down at his hands.

“I’m in mid-divorce. I promised my soon-to-be ex-wife that we could do a last furniture divvy tonight. We’ve been trying to stay out of the lawyer’s office as much as possible, but that does mean that we spend far too much time talking to each other. Comes under the heading of no good deed goes unpunished, I suppose.”

“What good deed?” Jane is trying to figure out whether he means “wife” in the sense of “woman I am married to,” or “wife” in the sense of “man in my life who played a kind of wifely role.”

“Oh, you know. I don’t want to bore you. The good deed of ending twelve years of unhappy marriage with an amicable divorce. After God answered my prayers and sent her the kind of man she should have married in the first place.”

Straight? Jane thinks.

Cole holds Jane’s hands in his. They are the same size.

“I am sorry to have to run, and even sorrier that this kind of dreary talk should ruin our little moment. I’ll walk you home.”

“You don’t have to,” Jane says. “It’s a safe couple of blocks.”

“It will be a pleasure,” he says. “And it will be my last pleasure for a few hours.” He smiles. “Except when I insist that my wife take back some of the horrible furniture we got from her mother, the Terror of Tallahassee. I used to hope our house would just go up in flames and we could start again.”

Actual wife, Jane thinks.

At the doorstep Cole says, “I have to tell the truth. I saw you before our serendipitous meeting in the Rite Aid. You were daydreaming in the cafeteria. You looked so far away and so lovely. I wanted to be wherever you were.” He brings her hand to his mouth, kisses it right above the wrist, and goes.

In bed Jane holds her wrist gently and hopes very hard that Jess will be all right. She does not believe in God, but she believes in Dr. Laurence, and she believes that people who are loved and cared for have a better chance in life than people who are not.