فصل سی و یکم

CHAPTER 31

The projection room at Baeder Chemical was small – five rows of folding chairs with an aisle in the middle.

Dolarhyde arrived late. He stood at the back with his arms folded while they screened gray cards, color cards, and cubes variously lighted, filmed on a variety of infrared emulsions.

His presence disturbed Dandridge, the young man in charge. Dolarhyde carried an air of authority at work. He was the recognized darkroom expert from the parent company next door, and he was known to be a perfectionist.

Dandridge had not consulted him in months, a petty rivalry that had gone on since Gateway bought Baeder Chemical.

“Reba, give us the development dope on sample . . . eight,” Dandridge said.

Reba McClane sat at the end of a row, a clipboard in her lap. Speaking in a clear voice, her fingers moving over the clipboard in the semidarkness, she outlined the mechanics of the developmentchemicals, temperature and time, and storage procedures before and after filming.

Infraredsensitive film must be handled in total darkness. She had done all the dark room work, keeping the many samples straight by touch code and keeping a running record in the dark. It was easy to see her value to Baeder.

The screening ran through quitting time.

Reba McClane kept her seat as the others were filing out. Dolarhyde approached her carefully. He spoke to her at a distance while there were others in the room. He didn’t want her to feel watched.

“I thought you hadn’t made it,” she said.

“I had a machine down. It made me late.”

The lights were on. Her clean scalp glistened in the part of her hair as he stood over her.

“Did you get to see the 1000C sample?”

“I did.”

“They said it looked all right. It’s a lot easier to handle than the 1200 series. Think it’ll do?”

“It will.”

She had her purse with her, and a light raincoat. He stood back when she came into the aisle behind her searching cane. She didn’t seem to expect any help. He didn’t offer any.

Dandridge stuck his head back into the room.

“Reba, dear, Marcia had to fly. Can you manage?”

Spots of color appeared in her cheeks. “I can manage very well, thank you, Danny.”

“I’d drop you, love, but I’m late already. Say, Mr. Dolarhyde, if it wouldn’t be too much trouble, could you-“

“Danny, I have a ride home.” She held in her anger. The nuances of expression were denied her, so she kept her face relaxed. She couldn’t control her color, though.

Watching with his cold yellow eyes, Dolarhyde understood her anger perfectly; he knew that Dandridge’s limp sympathy felt like spit on her cheek.

“I’ll take you,” he said, rather late.

“No, but thank you.” She had thought he might offer and had intended to accept. She wouldn’t have anybody forced into it. Damn Dandridge, damn his fumbling, she’d ride the damned bus, dammit. She had the fare and she knew the way and she could go anywhere she fucking pleased.

She stayed in the women’s room long enough for the others to leave the building. The janitor let her out.

She followed the edge of a dividing strip across the parking lot toward the bus stop, her raincoat over her shoulders, tapping the edge with her cane and feeling for the slight resistance of the puddles when the cane swished through them.

Dolarhyde watched her from his van. His feelings made him uneasy; they were dangerous in daylight.

For a moment under the lowering sun, windshields, puddles, high steel wires splintered the sunlight into the glint of scissors.

Her white cane comforted him. It swept the light of scissors, swept scissors away, and the memory of her harinlessness eased him. He was starting the engine.

Reba McClane heard the van behind her. It was beside her now.

“Thank you for inviting me.”

She nodded, smiled, tapped along.

“Ride with me.”

“Thanks, but I take the bus all the time.”

“Dandridge is a fool. Ride with me . . . “ – what would someone say? – “for my pleasure.”

She stopped. She heard him get out of the van.

People usually grasped her upper arm, not knowing what else to do. Blind people do not like to have their balance disturbed by a firm hold on their triceps. It is as unpleasant for them as standing on wiggly scales to weigh. Like anyone else, they don’t like to be propelled.

He didn’t touch her. In a moment she said, “It’s better if I take your arm.”

She had wide experience of forearms, but his surprised her fingers. It was as hard as an oak banister.

She could not know the amount of nerve he summoned to let her touch him.

The van felt big and high. Surrounded by resonances and echoes unlike those of a car, she held to the edges of the bucket seat until Dolarhyde fastened her safety belt. The diagonal shoulder belt pressed one of her breasts. She moved it until it lay between them.

They said little during the drive. Waiting at the red lights, he could look at her.

She lived in the left side of a duplex on a quiet street near Washington University.

“Come in and I’ll give you a drink.”

In his life, Dolarhyde had been in fewer than a dozen private homes. In the past ten years he had been in four; his own, Eileen’s briefly, the Leedses’, and the Jacobis’. Other people’s houses were exotic to him.

She felt the van rock as he got out. Her door opened. It was a long step down from the van. She bumped into him lightly. It was like bumping into a tree. He was much heavier, more solid than she would have judged from his voice and his footfalls. Solid and light on his feet. She had known a Bronco linebacker once in Denver who came out to film a United Way appeal with some blind kids.

Once inside her front door, Reba McClane stood her cane in the corner and was suddenly free. She moved effortlessly, turning on music, hanging up her coat.

Dolarhyde had to reassure himself that she was blind. Being in a home excited him.

“How about a gin and tonic?”

“Tonic will be fine.”

“Would you rather have juice?”

“Tonic.”

“You’re not a drinker, are you?”

“No.”

“Come on in the kitchen.” She opened the refrigerator. “How about . . . “ – she made a quick inventory with her hands – “a piece of pie, then? Karo pecan, it’s dynamite.” “Fine.”

She took a whole pie from the icebox and put it on the counter.

Hands pointing straight down, she spread her fingers along the edge of the pie tin until its circumference told her that her middle fingers were at nine and three o’clock. Then she touched her thumbtips together and brought them down to the surface of the pie to locate its exact center. She marked the center with a toothpick.

Dolarhyde tried to make conversation to keep her from feeling his stare. “How long have you been at Baeder?” No S’s in that one.

“Three months. Didn’t you know?”

“They tell me the minimum.”

She grinned. “You probably stepped on some toes when you laid out the darkrooms. Listen, the techs love you for it. The plumbing works and there are plenty of outlets. Twotwenty wherever you need it.” She put the middle finger of her left hand on the toothpick, her thumb on the edge of the tin and cut him a slice of pie, guiding the knife with her left index finger.

He watched her handle the bright knife. Strange to look at the front of a woman as much as he liked. How often in company can one look where he wants to look?

She made herself a stiff gin and tonic and they went into the living room. She passed her hand over a floor lamp, felt no heat, switched it on.

Dolarhyde ate his pie in three bites and sat stiffly on the couch, his sleek hair shining under the lamp, his powerful hands on his knees. She put her head back in her chair and propped her feet on an ottoman.

“When will they film at the zoo?”

“Maybe next week.” He was glad he had called the zoo and offered the infrared film: Dandridge might check.

“It’s a great zoo. I went with my sister and my niece when they came to help me move in. They have the contact area, you know. I hugged this llama. It felt nice, but talk about aroma, boy . . . I thought I was being followed by a llama until I changed my shirt.” This was Having a Conversation. He had to say something or leave. “How did you come to Baeder?”

“They advertised at the Reiker Institute in Denver where I was working. I was checking the bulletin board one day and just happened to come across this job. Actually, what happened, Baeder had to shape up their employment practices to keep this Defense contract. They managed to pack six women, two blacks, two chicanos, an oriental, a paraplegic, and me into a total of eight hirings. We all count in at least two categories, you see.” “You worked out well for Baeder.”

“The others did too. Baeder’s not giving anything away.”

“Before that?” He was sweating a little. Conversation was hard. Looking was good, though. She had good legs. She had nicked an ankle shaving. Along his arms a sense of the weight of her legs, limp.

“I trained newly blind people at the Reiker Institute in Denver for ten years after I finished school. This is my first job on the outside.” “Outside of what?”

“Out in the big world. It was really insular at Reiker. I mean, we were training people to live in the sighted world and we didn’t live in it ourselves. We talked to each other too much. I thought I’d get out and knock around a little. Actually, I had intended to go into speech therapy, for speechandhearingimpaired children. I expect I’ll go back to that, one of these days.” She drained her glass. “Say, I’ve got some Mrs. Paul’s crabball miniatures in here. They’re pretty good. I shouldn’t have served dessert first. Want some?” “Umhmmm.”

“Do you cook?”

“Umhmmm.”

A tiny crease appeared in her forehead. She went into the kitchen. “How about coffee?” she called.

“Uhhuh.”

She made small talk about grocery prices and got no reply. She came back into the living room and sat on the ottoman, her elbows on her knees.

“Let’s talk about something for a minute and get it out of the way, okay?”

Silence.

“You haven’t said anything lately. In fact, you haven’t said anything since I mentioned speech therapy.” Her voice was kind, but firm. It carried no taint of sympathy. “I understand you fine because you speak very well and because I listen. People don’t pay attention. They ask me what? what? all the time. If you don’t want to talk, okay. But I hope you will talk. Because you can, and I’m interested in what you have to say.” “Ummm. That’s good,” Dolarhyde said softly. Clearly this little speech was very important to her. Was she inviting him into the twocategory club with her and the Chinese paraplegic? He wondered what his second category was.

Her next statement was incredible to him.

“May I touch your face? I want to know if you’re smiling or frowning.” Wryly, now. “I want to know whether to just shut up or not.” She raised her hand and waited.

How well would she get around with her fingers bitten off? Dolarhyde mused. Even in street teeth he could do it as easily as biting off breadsticks. If he braced his heels on the floor, his weight back on the couch, and locked both hands on her wrist, she could never pull away from him in time. Crunch, crunch, crunch, crunch, maybe leave the thumb. For measuring pies.

He took her wrist between his thumb and forefinger and turned her shapely, hardused hand in the light. There were many small scars on it, and several new nicks and abrasions. A smooth scar on the back might have been a burn.

Too close to home. Too early in his Becoming. She wouldn’t be there to look at anymore.

To ask this incredible thing, she could know nothing personal about him. She had not gossiped.

“Take my word that I’m smiling,” he said. Okay on the S. It was true that he had a sort of smile which exposed his handsome public teeth.

He held her wrist above her lap and released it. Her hand settled to her thigh and halfclosed, fingers trailing on the cloth like an averted glance.

“I think the coffee’s ready,” she said.

“I’m going.” Had to go. Home for relief.

She nodded. “If I offended you, I didn’t mean to.”

“No.”

She stayed on the ottoman, listened to be sure the lock clicked as he left.

Reba MeClane made herself another gin and tonic. She put on some Segovia records and curled up on the couch. Dolarhyde had left a warm dent in the cushion. Traces of him remained in the air – shoe polish, a new leather belt, good shaving lotion.

What an intensely private man. She had heard only a few references to him at the office – Dandridge saying “that son of a bitch Dolarhyde” to one of his toadies.

Privacy was important to Reba. As a child, learning to cope after she lost her sight, she had had no privacy at all.

Now, in public, she could never be sure that she was not watched. So Francis Dolarhyde’s sense of privacy appealed to her. She had not felt one ion of sympathy from him, and that was good.

So was this gin.

Suddenly the Segovia sounded busy. She put on her whale songs.

Three tough months in a new town. The winter to face, finding curbs in the snow. Reba MeClane, leggy and brave, damned selfpity. She would not have it. She was aware of a deep vein of cripple’s anger in her and, while she could not get rid of it, she made it work for her, fueling her drive for independence, strengthening her determination to wring all she could from every day.

In her way, she was a hard one. Faith in any sort of natural justice was nothing but a nightlight; she knew that. Whatever she did, she would end the same way everyone does: flat on her back with a tube in her nose, wondering “Is this all?” She knew that she would never have the light, but there were things she could have. There were things to enjoy. She had gotten pleasure from helping her students, and the pleasure was oddly intensified by the knowledge that she would be neither rewarded nor punished for helping them.

In making friends she was ever wary of people who foster dependency and feed on it. She had been involved with a few – the blind attract them, and they are the enemy.

Involved. Reba knew that she was physically attractive to men – God knows enough of them copped a feel with their knuckles when they grabbed her upper arm.

She liked sex very much, but years ago she had learned something basic about men; most of them are terrified of entailing a burden. Their fear was augmented in her case.

She did not like for a man to creep in and out of her bed as though he were stealing chickens.

Ralph Mandy was coming to take her to dinner. He had a particularly cowardly mew about being so scarred by life that he was incapable of love. Careful Ralph told her that too often, and it scalded her. Ralph was amusing, but she didn’t want to own him.

She didn’t want to see Ralph. She didn’t feel like making conversation and hearing the hitches in conversations around them as people watched her eat.

It would be so nice to be wanted by someone with the courage to get his hat or stay as he damn pleased, and who gave her credit for the same. Someone who didn’t worry about her.

Francis Dolarhyde – shy, with a linebacker’s body and no bullshit. She had never seen or touched a cleft lip and had no visual associations with the sound. She wondered if Dolarhyde thought she understood him easily because “blind people hear so much better than we do.” That was a common myth. Maybe she should have explained to him that it was not true, that blind people simply pay more attention to what they hear.

There were so many misconceptions about the blind. She wondered if Dolarhyde shared the popular belief that the blind are “purer in spirit” than most people, that they are somehow sanctified by their affliction. She smiled to herself. That one wasn’t true either.