Leaving Brooklyn (10 page)

The doctor's waiting room was like others I had waited in, with inexpressive leather chairs and ceramic ashtrays and prints of snow-covered cottages on the walls. He went in for glossy fashion magazines, along with the usual
Life
s and
Look
s, as well as a few
Junior Scholastic
s for his young patients. “He won't be long,” said the middle-aged receptionist encouragingly, and very soon a door opened and we were beckoned into the office.

The doctor, reputedly a pioneer in lenses, was a tall fair-skinned man with thinning hair, a sandy mustache, and glasses—I noticed at once he had not availed himself of the new technology. He didn't seem nearly as ancient as the doctors we had seen in my childhood, but then again I was older now. He wore a white shirt and tie, without a jacket or white coat, and there was a controlled energy in the way he moved. Unlike the spacious, genteel offices of earlier big men, his examining room, where my mother perched on the edge of a brown leather couch, was small, draped, and cluttered, dominated by a huge leather chair. There I sat facing an array of equipment like the space flight paraphernalia in science fiction movies. He was a man of few words, polite though aloof, as if distracted by higher matters. He ran through the usual tests, patterns projected onto a screen, illusions of height and width, hidden diagrams, all the ingenious eye doctor games that had once amused but now bored me. His face bent close to mine as he examined my eye; his breath smelled of something unfamiliar, heady and sweet but sharp. With machines
pressed against my eye, he took measure-ments and wrote them down and said good-bye.

A week later we returned and he presented the lens in a little snap-open case, the kind in which suitors present engagement rings.

Primitive contact lenses were not the minuscule glistening transparencies they are today. Mine was a hard, clear plastic disk with about the diameter of a half dollar and the thickness of a fine china cup. It was molded like a human eye, a raised circle in the center for the iris. The lens suggested a squashed miniature volcano, or the bowl of a specially designed spoon for a rare fruit. It would cover the entire visible portion of the eye, white and all, like half an eggshell.

The doctor squirted some liquid on both sides of the thing and, in the swift sneaky manner of doctors, spread my upper and lower lids with his fingers and slipped it in. I wanted to howl in protest. Feelings in the body rarely correspond to what causes them, the nervous system being so desperately inventive. A burn can feel as if the skin is stretched and split on a rack, a cramp in the gut feels like an iron lasso. But this sensation, perhaps because I had seen the lens first, was entirely accurate. I felt as if I had a hard plastic disk the size of a half dollar trapped between my lids, and I marveled that my mother showed no urge to shield me from the pain, as she did from so many insignificant ones.

He leaned over me, peering into my armored eye, his liquory breath dazing me and making me slightly sick, his right leg brushing against mine, producing an ellipse of warmth. I saw the pores of his cheeks, the dark of his nostrils; his gray pupils, enormous behind the thick glasses, seemed to vibrate. I was dizzy. His trousers felt rough against my thin cotton dress.

At last he spread my lids again. As he took the lens out, there was a wet sucking sound—my eye, gasping in relief when the cool air struck it. He showed me, in his terse way, how to squirt the liquid onto the lens and how to get it in, raising the
right lid high and slipping the lens underneath, which I tried and did awkwardly; I had a horror of inserting foreign objects into my body. Then he told me to raise the upper lid with the index finger of my right hand and flick the lens out from below with the left index finger, quickly cupping the right hand to catch it. I tried, but couldn't get it out. It careened around in my eye, all askew. I panicked, hot and dizzy, terrified that the lens would scratch something and I would lose the little and precious vision I had in that eye. I blinked wildly and it dropped, wet and sticky, into my lap. The doctor picked it up, cleaned it, and suggested I try again. As he watched, as I spread my lids with my fingers, I knew for certain I was violating myself, doing something perverse and masochistic, “for my own good.”

The doctor outlined a complex schedule for “getting used to” the lens. I would keep it in for five minutes, three times a day, for the first three days, fifteen minutes the next three days, till eventually I could wear it all day. I loathed the progressions of self-mastery that always accompanied “getting used to” anything, and I loathed the euphemism too—if it were pleasant, there would be no need to get used to it.

No effort is greater than the effort of forcing the flesh to move in untried ways, clearing paths in the tangle of nerves to make way for an alien sensation. Even today, with all my travels, when finally I can say the word “I” without a feeling of uncertainty, I harbor a deep longing for immobility—the Brooklyn in me—an instinct at war with change and growth, those holy processes of liberal psychology. Maybe only those who have been compelled, or have compelled themselves, to travel have glimpsed the broad, unexplored terrain of human laziness—too lazy to live, some of us, yearning to lie still and sink back into primeval ooze, reversing evolution. My kind of eye, despite or perhaps because of its wandering, belongs to the genre called lazy eyes, an incarnation of the body's dearest tropism, the leaning towards more somnolent forms of life, towards death.

I was near death once—I, not the girl—and as far as I was
conscious, felt that laziness pulling slowly and methodically, like the tortoise in the race, against the agile will to live and fight. How much more natural it seemed, how much easier to give in, as if giving in were what we desire all along and living is the un-natural, neurasthenic struggle. What a voluptuous numbness, how alluringly right it felt. I don't know what strength called me back – maybe just the ministrations of technology. The first eye I opened when the struggle was won, or lost, was the bad eye, and it shed a tear of utter estrangement, of long-suffering patience. The tear trickled to the corner of my lips and I tasted deep-sea brine. That eye was so powerful in the girl, in me when I was the girl, that I fear to think what would have happened had she been the one in a near-fatal accident. It might well have won. She might never have become me—I—and I would not be telling her story, my lazy eye's story.

Getting the lens in and out was as repellent as I expected, but I soon became adept at it, as I had become adept at many things that got under my skin. School, for one. The first time I inserted the lens on my own, fighting nausea, standing over the bathroom sink (no danger of its going down the drain, large as it was), I felt that slow somersault of the brain just as in first grade. So
this
is what it will be like.

I would remove the lens between classes, at the girls' room mirror, while the crowd around me puffed hastily on their cigarettes. With both eyes the same size, identical, I was a stranger to myself. My bad eye was kept in its place, its wanderings frustrated by the lens; and with its confinement, a freedom seemed to have been taken from me—no matter that the freedom to wander was accounted a blemish. With a fingertip I felt the hardness of the restraining lens beneath the veil of my upper lid. It triggered a sick lurch in my stomach that grew to a galloping, roiling fury, and this lurch and fury I never got used to.

The next Monday after school I took the subway to the doctor's office to have the lens and eye checked; no more need for my mother beside me, we agreed. I had resolved not to feel as out
of place on Park Avenue as I had before, in my girlish yellow cotton dress with cap sleeves. I wore a narrow, bottle-green jersey dress usually saved for special occasions (my mother had once pronounced it “stunning” on me), and new sandals, and I put on make-up in the girls' room—my father would not let me out of the house with make-up until I reached sixteen. I had washed my hair that morning and it shone. Grownups—my parents' friends, the card players—had often teased me about my “knowing” look. Lou Zelevansky went further and joked that I had “bedroom eyes” and an “hourglass figure,” phrases that made me want to squeeze my eyes shut and hide my body in a sack. I wasn't sure what a knowing look was, but I tried to assume it nonetheless, a kind of resigned, sleepy slackness of the features. In this guise I felt more of a match for Park Avenue.

It was hard to attend to what the doctor said with him leaning over me, breathing his liquory breath, his right leg at moments casually brushing against mine. But I was too wrapped in Brooklyn platitudes even to register how uneasy I felt, or why. I knew only that I found an infinity of things wrong with my life, from the commonplace—adolescence and high school and my mother's refusal to let me take two acting classes a week and the color of my eyes (that they weren't lustrous blue or green to suit my dramatic nature, but dull bedroom brown, bothered me far more than their oddity, and back then the color couldn't be changed by a lens)—to the cosmic—the uncertainty of the future and the human condition: anything except the simple fact that the doctor leaned over me too close for comfort and I didn't want to be wearing the lens or visiting his office to begin with.

For one instant, in an assault of truth that can sneak up on the most swaddled souls—like the boys at school slipping ice down the collars of our winter coats—it struck me that the doctor might be pressing his leg against mine more than necessary to examine my eye. But I dismissed this—hopped around, shook out the ice—as utter nonsense, even sacrilege, he being a grown man, a big man, on Park Avenue, and I a gauche child from
Brooklyn. It was untenable; it could have opened a road to other untenable thoughts, to a universe where human nature was not as Brooklyn conspired to portray it, progressing towards ever more expansive plateaus of decency and tolerance, but rather where people were driven chaotically by impulses, everyone wanting something from everyone else and staggering about to get it. That might be the way it was in books, locked between covers, due dates stamped in the back so that they didn't even stay in your bedroom too long, but not in real life.

Going home in rush hour was a long nasty ride, crushed against sweaty strangers. I resented the trip, and the trips and checkups to follow—twice a month till I was completely “used to” the lens; “adjustments” might be needed. I had the wretched thing, I was looking normal to please my parents. Wasn't that enough? I didn't complain, though: once a process was set in motion in Brooklyn, it took more initiative to stop it than to keep it going. That was how we were; we did what we had done the day or the week before.

 

THE NOTION THAT people could be driven by want rather than propriety was not entirely new to me. It was more or less what my father had said about McCarthy two years ago, that glimpse of greed and lust I had shoved behind my bad eye. Now my father's predictions were coming true—they were getting the bastard. He had had a bad summer, everyone was gloating—gone too far with his machinations, gotten himself into trouble with the Army. The sweetness of revenge by proxy was mellowed by television. He had been challenged publicly, and to my father's glee would have to submit to censure, to sticks pounding on the bucket. His days were numbered, said my father. Elections were coming up. Power would shift. Soon we would be released from his grip, like a village that has sacrificed a maiden every month to feed its resident dragon, finally released by an avenging prince.

But there was no prince. He was destroying himself—a suicidal
dragon. Brooklyn had done nothing but wait. Brooklyn could maintain, unperturbed, its trust in waiting.

If only Brooklyn had been shaken to the point of revolt! How wondrous to see crowds carrying banners through the streets, singing songs, or even tearing up the paving stones, as I had read in accounts of the Paris Commune. I was guiltily disappointed, too, that the pig had not touched anyone in Brooklyn, as far as I could tell. His victims were famous names: movie people, government people, writers. I wanted to see in the flesh, on my street, someone who had lost his job, whose furniture had been hurled down the stairs after him by a terrorized landlord, and who sat on the curb with his head in his hands, desolate, embittered, ruined. I knew this was not a nice craving, that it would horrify my mother, but I indulged it. My bad eye, growing up, was hungry for reality, famished for a scene worthy of its kind of vision.

My acting class in Manhattan also trafficked in motivations less than pure. Each Thursday afternoon eight of us, six girls and two boys, did improvisations in a bare room under the eye of a scrawny, spindly teacher with a nasal voice, who had been a great surprise the first day—I thought actors had to be handsome and sexy. He was to surprise me further, years later, by winning an Academy Award. Had I known I was in a room with someone destined for an Academy Award I might have been too intimidated even to speak; as it was I had trouble with the simple improvisations. He said we had to have a motive in each scene, some-thing we wanted urgently. Every word we spoke, every movement, must be part of the effort to get what we wanted. Of course we needed to be quite clear in our minds about what we wanted—and that was the gist of his criticism.

“Something's not clear, Audrey. What exactly are you
after
?”

I was playing a scene with a girl who was supposed to be my mother. I was twenty-five years old, unmarried, and I ostensibly wanted to leave home and get my own place, but I didn't
know how to say such an outlandish thing; maybe I wasn't certain I wanted it, either.

“Mother.” I turned to her, a tiny long-haired girl named Lizzie, from Greenwich Village. “I may as well tell you outright. I want to get an apartment of my own.”