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On
our way to attend a wedding in which both the bride and the groom are
blind, my date and I realized the futility of having wrapped their wedding
gifts.
"Oh!" the bride said enthusiastically, "I wonder what this
is!" And with each gift she eagerly ripped off the paper, tossing
it around her in a wreath of bows and tissue until the box was naked in
her hands.
"What is it?" she would ask the person to her left.
"It's champagne flutes."
And she and her husband felt up and down the ridges of the champagne flutes,
flicking them with their fingers to make a "ping!" sound on
the crystal. (“They sound so beautiful!”) And someone would
describe them -- iridescent with a rainbow pattern when they catch the
light. Everything was described and flicked and felt-up in detail. I have
never before watched someone so zestfully grope a peppermill.
"A Williams-Sonoma peppermill,” she specified.
Both the bride and the groom lathered attention on each of their gifts,
cradling an electrified milk steamer as though it were a Stradivarius
violin. On receiving a hand-made mirror whose frame was inlaid with tile,
their fingers walked up and down the gift in awe.
"This is beautiful," her husband said, reverently tracing the
tiles. "This is just...this is absolutely gorgeous."
And it was gorgeous. Gorgeousness, I found, feels like glass, or like
symmetry, radiating more from the giver than the gift. For those who may
be wondering what two blind people needed with a mirror (inlaid with tile
or not) please consider the beautiful, useless things on your own walls.
Their honeymoon options being limited (“There’s nothing to
see in Europe that I can’t see here,” the groom asserted),
they chose to stay in New York to spend time with friends.
Every friend at the wedding had been the sort of friend you are lucky
to find one or two of in a lifetime. The type of person who can read every
menu item and description without seeming irritated, or who can navigate
their way verbally through a crowd, their arms gently linked as a cane
is tapped violently back and forth, feeling its way through a crosswalk,
catching on a woman’s skirt and grazing a polite businessman’s
testes. Getting a blind person across a Manhattan sidewalk is like a voice-activated
game of Frogger.
"Go forward," I told her, her arm linked in mine as we walked
ten blocks to a diner on 34th street. "Left. Forward. Right. Right.
Forward. In two seconds there'll be a curb.”
“Tell me when,” the bride says. I pause for two seconds, slowly
advancing.
“Curb.”
She nods, steps up, and I continue.
“Go straight,” I say. “There are going to be four steps...and
now a little plateau.” She reaches the plateau and I acknowledge
it, saying something like, “Theeere it is.”
Telling somebody how to move feels strange at first -- saying where to
step and how to move seems fine when doing the Electric Slide, but awkward
when you are trying to cross a street before a bus hits you.
* * *
"We're in a piano bar," Hoover tells them. Hoover is my date
and is named for the President, not the vacuum. He is not particularly
talkative, normally, but flings endless descriptions for the sake of his
friends, detailing the minutiae of the city.
"There are Christmas lights and orange leaves in a garland around
the edge of the room, and the light is low.” He pauses for a minute.
"It's pretty," he says, surprised, both realizing and verbalizing
it.
"There's a mahogany wood bar with a bunch of people who look like
regulars and a female bartender who's in her 40's laughing with one of
the customers. There are lots of little round tables and a guy playing
the piano."
"So that's a real guy?" the bride asks. "I can hear the
piano, but I thought maybe it was just a good recording."
"No, it's a piano," the groom says. "I can feel it. Honey
-- come feel the piano."
I decide to surprise them. I write down “Can you play ‘Greensleeves’?”
on a napkin for the piano player. He nods silently and begins to play
and the bride whispers with a smile, “Oh, he’s playing ‘Greensleeves!’”
I tip the piano player two dollars, and we wait for the song to finish
before leaving the bar –
“Up, go forward about five feet. Okay, go right. Up seven stairs.
There’s a door. Sorry – okay, now it’s open…now
there’s an open door. Down two steps. And left. And stop here…stop.”
They keep walking until you tell them (or until they can hear you tell
them) – so I lunge for their jackets and reach them before they
clatter into a freestanding blue mailbox.
* * *
Later that evening they announce that they want “to game”
– “to play Dungeons & Dragons,” the groom specifies,
pulling statistics and character sheets from a folder on the bed –
in Braille.
"You're walking forward," the friend running the game begins.
"And there's a large black stone levitating in front of you. You
walk up to it and decipher the message on the stone."
"It's telling us to go left," the bride says, after much rustling
amongst players, "into the forest."
Left, I think. Up two steps, go straight, curb, now straight, another
curb -- step up, and a sharp left into the forest."
"While in the forest," the narrator begins again, "you
encounter a herd of centaurs. The forest is bright, in the midst of autumn,
with brightly colored leaves littering the road. The sun is shining and
your party walks along a designated path."
Brightly colored leaves, I think. Interspersed with Christmas lights.
There are small, round tables in the forest. And a guy playing the piano...not
a recording, but an actual guy playing the piano in the forest. This forest
is dangerously near the
Christopher Street subway stop.
"The centaurs hand you a sacred object," the narrator continues,
"a goblet."
It's iridescent, I say to myself. The goblet has a sort of rainbow pattern
where it catches the light. And then the centaurs give you a peppermill.
"A Williams-Sonoma peppermill," say the centaurs.
"Yes fine," I tell them, "A Williams-Sonoma peppermill."
And then the centaurs hand you a mirror inlaid with tile that is gorgeous,
or that feels gorgeous, at least.
"No, it's actually gorgeous," say the centaurs.
"Fine," I say. "Whatever." It's a gorgeous magic mirror
in which you and the person you have just married will be young forever,
where your reflection will never grow old or die.
"What a nice gift!" says the bride.
It is a nice gift. The game ends and the friends leave and the next day
Hoover and I walk them to Penn Station.
We go straight for fifty feet, then a curb. We stop, as a minotaur and
a windstorm of uncomfortably large fairies block traffic on 29th street.
"Go left," I say, guiding them. “Ok, curb...we're waiting
for the light to change. Now straight. Now another curb -- step up.”
Past the Temple of Athena and the Yangtze River. Past a levitating stone
and a Starbucks. Past two hot dog vendors, a circus run by misshapen wizards,
and a man with a sandwich board yelling, "Free Verizon Cell Phones!"
"Did that guy say, 'Free Verizon Cell Phones?'" the bride asks.
She stops short.
"That can't be what he said."
"He did, but there's always a catch." I tell her calmly, passing
a parade of battle axe-wielding trolls as we approach the station. The
trolls are speaking to the Verizon representative, asking about anytime
minutes and roaming charges. The bride lingers a moment, pulling out her
own cell phone and debating. I smile at her naiveté, while pushing
through the trolls in order to make our train at 2:05.
"There are no free Verizon cell phones in this world,” I tell
her, tugging her arm to encourage her along.
“But that man said --” she frowns, unhappy at being duped.
I lead her into Penn Station, through the doors, where soft classical
music travels patiently up the escalators.
“People say a lot of things," I explain, as a bevy of gnomes
heads toward Track 12: New Brunswick, and the four horsemen of the Apocalypse
wait patiently in Hudson News, flipping through copies of GQ and the Atlantic
Monthly, buying Trident for their presumably rancid breath.
"Anything that sounds too good to be true usually is,” I say
frankly, each of us calmed somewhat by the violin solo leaking gently
out the speakers and flooding the scuffed floors.
“I don’t want to be the bearer of bad news,” I tell
her, “but you can't believe everything you hear." [B]
RAQUEL D'APICE
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- 9 mois
by falling apart
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