As She Climbed Across the Table

7

Could Alice love a blind man? Evan. Of the two of them, Evan seemed less inflexible. His part in the verbal remapping was wifely, supportive. Garth was the obsessor. And Evan had a certain skewed charisma, a Buster Keaton charm in his wrinkled suit. One-way gazes were infatuations, crushes. In that way a blind man was like an actor or rock star. Had Alice lost herself peering into the void of his eyes? I’m amaurotic, he’d said. I’m erotic. I pictured Alice folding his suit into a neat pile on a chair, kissing trembling, half-closed lids, guiding blind hands to her breasts. Nipples hard like braille.

Or Garth. Garth was her star, her Blind Physicist. But he struck me as a borderline autistic. Together with Evan he formed a closed system as perfect and impervious as a perpetual-motion device. I couldn’t imagine Garth without Evan.

Evan and Garth, then. A nightmare of Alice lost in the tangle of groping, clumsy limbs. Their mapping and remapping of the surface of her body, coordinating distances between landmarks and entrances.

What about Soft himself? Could Alice love that pasty, underground creature? Remotely possible. There was his greatness, his Prize. I pictured long nights in the Cauchy-space lab. Lonely discoveries, unexpected parities, one hand reaching to still the trembling of another as it jotted down formulae.

But then why would Soft talk to me about her passion? Couldn’t he see that he was the reason her physics had gotten “crappy”? So he was taunting me, toying with me. A classic example of a physicist’s contempt for other disciplines. I balled my fists.

What if it was somebody else, though? Another faculty member, from the English department. A decoder of sonnets. His sentences finer than mine, metaphors less grotesquely modern. Or a student, a graduate student in physics. Soft’s maybe, stepping out from behind his mentor, becoming real.

Somebody else. Somebody other. Some other body.

Alice with Mr. Someotherbody.