Too Lucky to Live Read online

  Then he told me how it was for him. The fragrance of my scrubby little garden, the murmuring voices of the water, the way the sound and feel of a room could describe its size and shape to him. His words made it flower for me, as though I’d overlooked half the things there were to love about it.

  I guided Tom and his battered Joe’s Super Market bag into my kitchen and cleared off a bar stool so he could sit. He took off his dark glasses, planted his elbows on my ugly ocher counter, and settled in, listening to me make chili while enjoying his beer.

  I was adding his seasoning packet and two of the chipotles when Margo, my landlady and best friend in the current world, stuck her head around the door and called “Al? You here?” and then, “Oops. Sorry. I’ll come back later.”

  She was using her moment of retreat to scope out poor, unsuspecting Tom. She shot me an approving glance and kept backing out. I stopped her. “Come on in, Margo. Say hello. I met this guy on my way home from work. And stop fussing with your hair. He’s blind. Pay me ten bucks and I’ll tell him you’re blond, five-six, and a hundred and ten pounds.”

  Margo Gallucci would be more accurately described as none of the above. Black hair, dark eyes, a complexion rosy enough to inspire a Tintoretto. She’s a short, round Italian Buddha. A woman of indeterminate, but ample, age. Her temperament is a fascinating and sometimes appalling swing from Zen serenity to Italian pyrotechnics. And back. Margo’s Alternating Current, I call it.

  Margo was now giving Tom her full signature onceover. I could see her checking off the long leanness, ravishing tee-shirt, brown, unfocused, eyes. Check. Check. Check.

  He passed.

  “I’d like to shake your hand, but the way I see it—oops, sorry. I bet that’s a never-ending problem. Let’s agree to bulldoze over that one—you’re going to have to lead off. Otherwise it’s awkward.”

  He crinkled his eyes in his irresistible smile and presented her with the dimple as he offered his hand. “Thomas Bennington.”

  “The Third,” I added.

  “The-pleasure-is-all-mine-Thomas-Bennington-the-Third-may-I-call-you-Tom?” She turned to me and added the word “babe” with almost silent lips.

  Margo. My own little matchmaker.

  “Margo, his hearing is acute. You might as well tell him straight up you think I might have somehow missed that he is a babe.”

  He was nodding in time to my words. “Tom is plenty, Margo. I use the rest of it to put women at ease after they save my life at the bus stop. She’s right. Sound is my secret weapon. Thanks for putting in the babe recommendation with—did you call her Al?”

  “I did. She doesn’t like the name her mom and dad gave her which is—” She shot me her evilest glint. “Al…exis.”

  “He’s also got a fine-tuned lie detector, Margo. Get over yourself. We’ve agreed on Allie.”

  “Well,” Margo shrugged, “it certainly beats Alice Jane. Now, I’d love to stay and hear all about how our Al saved your life at the bus stop, Tom, but I truly was passing by. We’ll talk later.” She gave me a meaningful, but soundless glance. “Day after tomorrow maybe? Wonderful to meet you, Thomas Bennington the Third. I hope I see you—oh, sorry. Oh, screw that—again soon.”

  Margo. Over and out.

  ***

  I pulled some odds and ends from the fridge and converted them into a simple salad. While the chili simmered, we ate that. He knew how to be quiet and enjoy his food. I like that in a man.

  “Your Margo is good. Tell me what she really looks like. To me she sounds fifty-ish, about five two and a hundred-seventy. Do not tell her I said that. She’d never forgive me if it’s not true and she’d kill me if it is.”

  I was staring at him, stunned silent by the accuracy of his guesses. After a second, I ventured, “What about me? Do you have one of those magic mental pictures for me?”

  He winced. “That’s so tricky. Okay, I’ll try. Remember I took your arm when you helped me across the street? I estimate you’re five-ten, a couple inches shorter than me, and…hmmm…one-thirty-five?”

  He paused.

  I waited for the rest of me.

  He shook his head and mumbled, “Don’t be a dope, Tom....” But he sighed and forged on. “You sound maybe late twenties. Brown hair. Brown eyes—that’s a dead guess. And pretty,” he added, hastily. “Very pretty.”

  His eyes were a fantastic brown, that was for sure. They followed the sounds he was listening to, though not the way vision tracks sight. When he smiled, the smiling warmed them even warmer. He seemed comfortable with his face. I like that in a man.

  All in all, he was close to right on, although I chalked those “pretties” up to self-defense. I could see his blindness was not going to give me the glamour boost I’d been counting on and, what with the human lie detector thing, I wasn’t going to press my luck. I went ahead and signed off on the whole package. And added, “Very-early-thirties.” For honesty’s sake.

  “Early-mid-thirties, for me,” he returned. “As long as we’re telling the truth here.”

  “You haven’t been blind forever.”

  “No. I had a stroke. The doctors called it a ‘bizarre anomaly.’ When I was twenty-five. Almost done with grad school. All ready to get married and start my life. For a long time they thought I’d be able to see again. The other effects wore off. But my sight never came back.”

  “That must have been—”

  “Yes. It was. All that. I was angry. Bitter. Hard to be around. The girl dumped me. Not because I was blind but because I was a terminal pain in the ass. And then, oddly enough, I started to cheer up. She was beautiful, this girl, but not a lot of fun. I think I maybe drove her away on purpose because I’d realized, down deep, she wasn’t the woman for a blind man.”

  “You’re from somewhere in the South. Even I can hear that.”

  “Atlanta.”

  “How did you end up here? In this neighborhood, of all places? And what do you do? You went to grad school? Do you have a PhD? I could call you Dr. Bennington, III? I went to grad school, too. You can call me Allie Harper, M.A. Or maybe Master Allie….”

  He exhaled a chuckle. “Stop with the ‘Doctor,’ Master Allie. Let me answer your questions—which are numerous, I’d like to point out—in order.”

  “Sorry. I’m interested, is all.”

  “And I’m looking forward to grilling you when it’s my turn. Let’s see.” He ticked off a question on one finger. “I ended up here because my family wouldn’t let me be independent.”

  Something about the shape of his hand compelled me to stare at it, and I was glad that he couldn’t see me watching. It was slender and sinewy, his fingers tapered and graceful. I closed my eyes, breathed in the soapy guy smell of him, and listened to his voice, telling himself to me.

  “I needed to be someplace people would let me fall down and not pick me up.”

  My eyes popped back open. “Well, you sure chose the right place for that.”

  “True. You’d have to say it’s a pretty tough neighborhood when someone would honk at a blind man with a cane in a crosswalk.”

  “I had the same thought. Go on.”

  “But you picked me up.”

  “In a manner of speaking.”

  “Don’t get all weird about it. I was grateful. That was a bad moment. All those horns. I had no idea what was happening.”

  “A lot of them were honking at the woman in the Hummer. Because of what she’d done to you.”

  “God. It was a Hummer? I’m lucky to be alive. And a woman. That’s cold.”

  “We’re currently at the question about what do you do?”

  “I had always planned to teach. Even before the stroke. And us blind associate professors?” The dimple flashed. “We’re everywhere. A campus can be a contained, manageable space. And now there’s incredible technology for reading and writing. Apps for
everything…I love teaching. My students are great.”

  “What do you teach?”

  “English Lit. At CWRU.” He named the university maybe more famous for its science and engineering than its liberal arts.

  “Isn’t literature a stepchild there?”

  “Not anymore. And anyway, those smart, ambitious young scientists need to get their heads in contact with their hearts. That’s my specialty.” He paused, listening, I knew, to the sound of me breathing. Maybe he could even hear the thud of my own disconnected little heart.

  We were sitting at the counter with our salad plates pushed back and the beers empty. I could smell the chili cooking down. I should jump up and fill our bowls and get us new beers. But I sat still, looking at him, meeting his gentle unseeing eyes with my own. It felt unnervingly intimate, how he opened his face to me, a woman he’d never seen. My heart thudded faster. What was this? Hadn’t he been a stranger in a crosswalk? Hadn’t we barely met?

  “I’m not all head. That’s for sure—” I faltered, trying to ease the moment back to solid ground. But he leaned toward me and with one, unerring motion, captured my face in those beautiful hands. Now he knew exactly where my mouth was. I closed my eyes.

  Chapter Three

  But he didn’t kiss me. He ran his beautiful fingers over my face in a way that set every inch of me on fire. “You’re lovely, Alice Jane,” he murmured after a moment. “I’m so looking forward to getting to know you. If I’d had any idea you were going to rescue me today, I’d have laid myself and my chili mix right down in the road. Hummer and all.”

  He took his hands away and I opened my eyes, trying to gain control over my disappointed mouth. For a long moment, I couldn’t say anything. And then I blurted, “Oh. Chili. Speaking of chili. It’s ready. We should eat.”

  Way to go, Allie.

  So we had the chili. After a couple seconds of awkwardness, we segued back to the getting-acquainted talk. When the rubberiness had purged itself from my arms and legs and the flames had died down in some other parts, I got interested in the conversation again. Soon we were chattering like zoo monkeys.

  He loved books. I loved books. He loved poetry. I loved poetry. I liked to write. He liked to read. He liked indie, classical and jazz. I liked those, plus bossa and country. He enjoyed teaching. I enjoyed my part-time, pathetic-paycheck job at the Memorial-Nottingham branch of The Cleveland Public Library. He had accepted living in a dicey part of town so he could hear the sound of water.

  Well, me too.

  As the evening cooled, we moved ourselves out to the backyard to sit side-by-side in a couple of rickety Adirondack chairs. The sunset was one of those that linger over the water on August nights, long after dark. Tom recited to me a sunset poem about a man lying in a hammock by a field in summer. It might seem to be about horse manure, this poem.

  The poet says,

  The droppings of last year’s horses

  Blaze up into golden stones.

  But then he says,

  I lean back, as the evening darkens and comes on.

  A chicken hawk floats over, looking for home.

  I have wasted my life.

  Bam. Just like that, it pierced my heart, the way truth and poetry does. The poet, this James Wright, had nailed me and my question. Would I ever make anything of myself? Had I let my prison sentence of a marriage and my wrecked finances derail me from whatever I was supposed to be doing? Should I stop trying so hard? Let myself breathe and enjoy the sunset? Not waste all this? This unearned, precious, fragile gift. My human lifetime?

  Tears surprised me and I said, “Ah.” With a catch in my throat I couldn’t suppress. He reached out and found my hand.

  After a moment, I swallowed a couple of times and got my voice back on track to ask him another question. “What’s the lake like for you? It’s so visual for me. Watching the sky change and the water. It’s different every day. Maybe every moment of every day. Should I apologize for reminding you?”

  “No. Of course not. I’m mostly over losing my sight. It’s been a long time. I went straight through the stages—denial, anger, bargaining, getting your girl to dump you—the whole thing.

  “Now I have my sixth sense. It’s a kind of fusion. Of sound, of course. And smell, which is almost touch because of the way it comes inside you, down into your lungs, all the way into your blood. And touch, which is a blend of everything it means to have a body. What’s inside, what’s outside, how the inside and the outside commune.”

  Commune. After forever sitting here alone, here I was with a man who used words like “commune.” God bless you, HummerWoman.

  Unaware of my silent prayer of thanksgiving, he continued. “It also explains why I live here. I can afford a small house like yours, one good for me like this one is for you. And since I don’t see that the neighborhood is rundown, it doesn’t make me uneasy the way it might others. Having all sorts of beautiful, expensive things, living in a fancy zip code, would be more important if you could see, don’t you think?”

  Yeah, maybe. But I didn’t want to admit that. I’d spent too many years uptown. I didn’t want to confess I’d squandered them on the accumulation and management of shiny objects. Especially since I didn’t have most of the objects anymore.

  “Tell me what you hear right now that maybe I’m missing.”

  “Well, for starters, I hear the waves rushing in and crashing around, because of the wind, which is picking up. The wind sound is layered over the water noise. But there’s also a hole of some kind in the rocks at the bottom of your cliff, and the water glugs in and out of there every once in a while. There are a couple of gulls circling high up, crying. Somebody behind us, up the street, is playing an excellent recording of the Goldberg Variations, maybe Glenn Gould, but I can’t be sure yet. And your neighbor on our left is watching some sitcom, turned up loud.”

  He tugged on my hand. “Take me over to the top of your cliff so I can hear that glug sound up closer.”

  I put some suspicious eye-squinting into my voice. “Is that a ploy?”

  “Are you kidding? Standing on the brink of oblivion, in the night, with a pretty woman who picked me up at Joe’s? That’s no ploy. That’s living dangerously. C’mon. How about it?”

  The end of my lawn is about six long strides from the chairs. There’s a steep, scary flight of steps leading down to the lake, but I almost never go down there. I don’t swim or sail. Most of the time, I sit and look. Most of the time, I’m alone. As noted. Alone and lost in the morass of my own head. Perhaps, after tonight, I thought, I’ll breathe more deeply and use my ears better. And appreciate my eyes more, of course. Even if, after tonight, I’m all alone here again.

  Shut up, Allie. Carpe tonight.

  We’d reached the edge. Tom had a firm grip on my arm. It was hard for me to fathom what it would be like to walk and not know there was a twenty-foot drop in your path. “If I weren’t here, would you know how close you are?

  “If you weren’t here, I’d have my cane and it would keep me from falling off. I’d be a lot more cautious, though.” He paused. “And if you weren’t here, I’d wish you were.”

  He reached out toward my face again. This time when he found me, he ran his fingers along the line of my jaw and then up into my hair, until he was cradling my head in both his hands.

  I was having one of those sixth-sense moments myself. I imagined I could feel the blood circulating in my veins and the oxygen from the heavy night air feeding my blood. Fueling my galloping heart. The night was full of sound, the most intrusive at the moment being an amped up commercial on Ralph’s annoying TV. I tried to block that out and only hear gulls and water as Tom bent down and put his lips on mine.

  I closed my eyes and summoned the lush darkness he had described to me.

  His mouth was warm and sweet. We both tasted like chili and beer. Not a bad thing. I mov
ed in closer, figuring out for this first time how our bodies could fit against each other. He was taller. I was rounder. As a kiss, this was working fine. Our lips parted. He was a talented and committed kisser. I like that in a man.

  My fingers went to the delicious smoothness of his neck, exploring the supple curve of his spine and the prickle of his hairline as he bent down to me. He slid his hands from my face over my shoulders and on down until they met at the small of my back, gathering me into him, pulling me close, close. And then—

  Everything stopped.

  He dropped his arms, pulled away, and stood there, frozen, with his head cocked to one side. Frowning. Listening. In the moonlight, he looked like a handsome animal alerted by an almost inaudible threat. My lips were tingling and my body still yearned toward the heat that had been building between us. This felt like being thrown into cold water. Again.

  Damn.

  At my back I could hear a woman’s voice. Loud. Saying numbers. “Thirty-four, fifty-seven…”

  In the darkness, she sounded chill, impatient. Almost angry. What the hell? And then she droned, “Mondo Ball: Eight.” Ah ha. The lottery drawing on Ralph’s TV. This guy was checking his number?

  Tom’s frown had deepened and his expression was worried. He refocused on me. “Sorry, Allie. Sorry. That was unforgivable. I’m so sorry. But—I—do you know what happened to the lottery ticket I had in my bag?

  Chapter Four

  We were back in the kitchen. I had tossed the torn grocery bag into the recycling can, and when I fished it out, the piece of paper was crumpled. Tiny, electrical sparks zinged down my fingers as I extricated it, and my heart rocked as I laid it down on the counter, smoothing it as best I could.

  For some reason I heard my mother’s voice. “Alice Jane Harper, only you could throw five hundred million dollars into the trash.”