Blind in One Egg

I no longer remember the name of the friend of my friend who told the story about the guy she knew in high school when we were both staying at the house my friend had rented at the beach. My friend was there, too, of course. She had invited us, though all three of us were young, working people of ordinary means, meaning that neither we guests nor our host were wildly endowed or even sufficiently so such that any one of us could have invited the others along for a holiday in the genteel sense of “invited,” which is to say we three split the costs for the travel and the rental and the groceries. Still, it was my friend’s idea, and the house was one only she could procure since it was where she had stayed each summer with her parents when she was growing up, and the owners would agree to waive the hefty deposit for her alone. We wouldn’t have been able to rent it otherwise. The place was a seasonal cottage built a long time ago for summer sojourns, though I can’t remember whether it was built a long time ago, as in fifty years back, or much longer, as in a hundred-plus years. The surrounding houses were that old. They were wooden Victorian types with scrolling, botanical details embedded in the trims and scalloped shingles and polygonal towers that have a specific name. I’m referring to those columnar grafts with conical roofs one sometimes finds on Victorian houses here, far from England, or what were called Steamboat Gothic houses when I was growing up and may still be called that, though I wouldn’t know; I don’t talk to anyone about this sort of thing anymore and haven’t since I was a child, when I wasn’t the one talking, rather listening in from the backseat of a car while the adults up front commented to each other on things like local historic architecture. That was in a different part of the country. I’m speaking now about the coast of the Northeast, toward Canada and the North Pole where the water is too cold for dipping and the “beach” is made of rocks. Near where I grew up, beaches were made of soft sand, and the first time I discovered beaches made of rocks, I secretly felt superior for having other, softer beaches as my standard, and perplexed, too, as to why anyone would choose a beach of hard protuberances that was painful to traverse in bare feet instead of the pillowy drifts of the Southern gulf. The house, the exterior of which is lost to memory along with the name of the friend of my friend, may’ve been younger than the surrounding houses, I suppose, because the walls and ceiling weren’t insulated upstairs where we—the friend of my friend and I—slept, and when I wasn’t sleeping there, but was instead only lying silently, staring up at the ceiling from one of the twin-sized beds below, what I saw in the pale summer darkness were joists and angled roof beams and the dozens of rows of slats running across the beams to support the shingles above, and this wood didn’t look particularly old, being uniformly cut, presumably by modern mechanized cutters, and also quite light in color. It wasn’t new wood either, since it wasn’t marked here and there with the automatically machine-applied ink stamps of whatever mill or lumber supplier would have sold it to the original builders, the way wood seems always to be marked up and branded now. I remember the ceiling well, having spent a longer amount of time looking at it than at anything else in the house. And since it was meanwhile a relatively unremarkable object of study, offering less varied information to be learned and memorized than the furnishings or the assorted bathroom and kitchen fixtures, for example, it adheres to mind. I passed more hours lying in bed not sleeping that weekend than was usual for me, too, since the air was cold at night, even in August, due to the fact that we were so far north, and since I am thin-skinned, as they say, meaning I’m usually a bit cold, even in August, and my nose is never warm, and also that meeting someone new puts me on edge. Plus, there weren’t enough blankets, and the friend snored.

I think of her from time to time because of the story she told about the guy she knew in high school, and though she told other stories about other people that weekend, particularly her mother, who was reportedly a narcissistic woman with an enviable, if gaudy, collection of massively-jeweled brooches and rings and one-of-a-kind rattan furniture, the way she told the story about the guy has continued to affect me all these years. We had finished the dishes and were sat around the dining table drinking wine. My friend had brought the wine in her car. She and the nameless friend drove up from xxxxxx, whereas I had taken a flight on a small propeller-driven plane to a nearby town since I was coming a day or two later. During our preparations, I had arranged with my friend to contribute a third of the cost of the food and alcohol and had even met her some days earlier to give her the money, but my friend apparently hadn’t mentioned this to the other woman when they did the shopping before making their departure since she commented to us while uncorking another bottle that there might not be enough for three in a way that made it clear to me that she meant there might not be enough for me since I wasn’t a contributor, but since I had indeed contributed a fair share, this interpretation didn’t dawn on me in the moment when I might’ve caught the error and protested the insinuation. Instead, I only understood the implications of the comment much later, when I was lying in bed staring at the underside of the roof above, speculating as to how old the lumber might be, when it was too late to bring up the incident without making a heel of myself, which the other woman already seemed to think I had anyway by not volunteering my share. Now that I think of it again, I wonder whether this means my friend took a half portion of reimbursement from her friend, the nameless one, instead of a third. In any case, my friend didn’t explain on my behalf, and I didn’t understand right then, when a poor impression of me had evidently already formed upon the other woman’s mental matrix. I found myself in that familiar state of low-grade bewilderment that I now take to indicate one has just been blamed unjustly for something one hasn’t done—unjust as much because one hasn’t committed the crime as because the blame is cast in a way that is too subtle to grasp and defend against in the moment of the accusation, which is also the moment, once passed in bewildered silence, that counts as one’s tacit confession—though, to be fair, my finances were touch-and-go at best in those years and remained so for many years afterward, and more than once, though not on that particular weekend, my friend, like other friends before and after her, fronted or even simply covered my share.

We discussed other subjects before we moved on to the topic that led to the story about the guy my friend’s friend knew in high school, though I don’t remember precisely how we got from the matter of the wine to the matter of him, except that we passed through talk of the city and the reconstruction of the xxxxxx xxxxxx xxxxxx xx buildings and shared recollections of where each of us had been xxxxxx xxxxxx xxxxxx xxxxxx xxxxxx xxx those few years earlier when xxxxxx xxxxxx xxxxxx xxxxxx xx. I was in xxxxxx xxxx. I worked as a freelancer for a major corporation then, as I would continue to do so sporadically for several more years. As a freelancer, I was paid more than twice as much for about half the labor time as the company would eventually offer to pay me in salary for taking the same position as a full-time employee. When the human resources lady told me about the pay package—that’s what it’s called: a package—I was shocked. “That’s less than the first salary I was offered out of college,” I blurted. “You want me to direct a department.” She was equally taken aback by my reaction. “Many people feel privileged to work here because of the opportunity to be associated with this brand and to spend their time around the art that they love,” was her response. “This is not a non-profit organization,” I explained to the Assistant Director of Human Resources. “It’s an auction house.” I asked for double the money and a month of vacation, which would be comparable to my then-current income but still amount to a significant pay cut for me on an hourly breakdown, and should therefore have been seen by them as a great bargain, I thought. The Vice President of Marketing, who had initiated the proceedings, said she would see what she could do and get back to me, but she didn’t, and I continued along for awhile as I was, at double the money for half the time with far more than a month of vacation, and with no boss to speak of, until I didn’t. I don’t remember how it finally ended, so I suppose it ended like a passionless friendship, when two lives change irreconcilably for unrelated reasons, and as a result both sides call less and less often, see each other less and less often, until one notices it’s been quite some time and neither party feels any lingering dependence on the other. There was no incident to mark the occasion. It was a fade.

While I was still there at the office in xxxxxx xxxxxx xx, but perhaps not long before I wasn’t anymore, the company hired an expensive external consultant whom, as I was told rather indiscreetly by someone else in the department who was privy to the hiring process, would be paid more than $300 an hour to advise me and others on what are called “best practices.” We were facing a tight deadline for the rollout of a new service—that’s what it’s called: a rollout—which was advancing more like a drunken stagger than a graceful entrée, and the consultant had offered to meet me on a Saturday to assist in my part of bringing the team forward to reach its next milestone on schedule. Security protocols at most buildings in xxxxxx xxxx and throughout xxxxxx xx were xxxxxx xxxxxx xxxxxx xxxx, so I necessarily greeted her in the lobby, and we rode the elevator up to my floor together since we needed my key card to cross the various thresholds. In other words, I stood in the lobby with this woman, entered the elevator with her, walked through cubicles with her, and sat down to work at my console with her. Ultimately, we spent several hours there together that Saturday, only a few inches apart. I recall perfectly what she wore. She looked so much like a cross between the author Jane Bowles and the actress who played the fictionalized Jane Bowles in the Bertolucci interpretation of Paul Bowles’ novel The Sheltering Sky, that I wondered whether she had intentionally cultivated the resemblance. “What are you doing here?” she asked me after we were seated for a few minutes, working and talking. She had recently returned from a trip to India and had been describing to me the textile dyeing and block-printing processes she had observed there. We easily spent half a billable hour on the topic, which means our combined breeze-shooting time cost the company as much in today’s dollars as a round trip cross-country airfare on a budget airline. “What am I doing here?” I knew what she meant. A friend from school had visited me once at my previous job at a fashion magazine and asked the same thing after the door to my office was closed. “What are you doing here?” Wasn’t it obvious? I was getting paid and/or indefinitely deferring the question. But I knew what they meant. The consultant said she would like to put me in touch with her friend, an artist, who ran yet another, different kind of consultancy, where I might be “better utilized,” as she put it. I consented, and some months later the work with the consultant’s friend had largely replaced the work at the auction house while my relationship with the consultant’s friend came to comprise the end and extent of my relationship with the consultant, whom I haven’t seen since the referral. Years passed before I asked the friend over lunch one day why the consultant wore braces on her arms. Had she been in an accident? The friend and I hadn’t worked together for years ourselves by then. She, the friend, had survived xxxxxx xxxxxx xxx in the intervening period. This luncheon, too, has already been a long time ago by now. Or so it seems. When did any of this happen, really, and how is it possible for the many happenings to have spread so far and thin in time? I’m not old yet, except to people who are actually young, but I have reached an age when most of my life has been adult life, a point at which five or ten years qualifies as both “recently” and “a long time ago.” I can only suppose this is an age beyond which the difference between five and ten years ago will become increasingly difficult to grasp. At any rate, the question about the arm braces wasn’t a surprise to the friend, who had been asked by others before. She answered that people rarely notice that she, the consultant, has only one leg, which is why she wears the braces, which are attached to poles, which extend from her forearms to the ground: so she can walk on one leg. I’m sure I gasped. I never saw her walk on two legs. I couldn’t have. But I didn’t not see her walk on two legs, either. Such was the effect of her presence, her comportment, on my faculties. She was in an automobile accident as a child, the friend explained. She was in an automobile accident as a child and had lost her leg that long ago, but people rarely notice.

My job in xxxxxx xxxxxx xxxxxx entailed acting as liaison between Information Technology and Marketing divisions of the company to help produce what are called “marketing solutions” to support the company’s primary objective, which was to make money via commission by selling art and other rare objects to wealthy buyers around the world. The actual tasks of which my job consisted rarely involved working with the personnel who are publicly associated with the company and what it does, but on some few occasions I did have cause to speak to or otherwise interact with one or two of these people, who are referred to by the company as its “specialists,” and in the course of my work I often had cause to read the articles and essays penned by these “specialists” in support of the company’s objective of driving sales, making sales, increasing sales, setting sales records, and generally generating revenue. What is noteworthy about these specialists’ writings is the great importance of the designation of “important” to qualify an item listed for sale. Any given object, or in the case of furnishings, any given objet, would necessarily be described as “important,” or often “very important,” by a specialist, which struck me as ponderous at the time since to apply such an important evaluation so liberally would seem to undermine the credibility of everyone involved in the discourse (even if it is only a pseudo-discourse), not to mention the significance of the designation, itself. Intuitively, of course, I knew this “importance” was code, just as the title of “specialist” was code, and the quasi-art historical essays in question were all but irrelevant to the transactions at hand, at least in terms of their specifics. This connection between a title and its designee’s pointed vocabulary was no mere coincidence or fad, I understood, but it took some time (not focused time, dear reader, rather the time of involuntary absorption and unconscious reflection that can neither be stopped nor directed) before I understood the connection, which is this:

The specialist is to importance as the expert is to value as the salesman is to price, and these analogous pairs are nested together in a Russian doll arrangement by which each progressively nested pair consists of a more obscure and more authoritative association. “How much does it cost?” one asks a salesman. “What is it worth?” one asks an expert. “What can you tell me about this piece?” one asks a specialist. The objectives are the same, but the protocols are different. An especially talented salesman is an expert and a specialist, as well, in which case you should imagine the Russian doll made of latex and fully invertible because it’s the specialist, whose motives must be more obscure than the salesman’s, who appears before the prospective buyer. She doesn’t tell you how much it costs. She makes a thorough introduction to a very shaggy dog, and only when you’re feeling relaxed and engaged and have been adequately distracted by miscellaneous details and other manipulations does she open her palm to reveal the sum already extracted from your purse.

The guy my friend’s friend knew in high school was, according to her, handsome and confident and a star athlete, and, in the economy of an ordinary public high school, that meant he was wealthy and powerful, with his pick of social and sexual resources to consume. My friend’s friend wasn’t without powers of her own, being attractive and not lacking for confidence herself, but she wasn’t part of the same proto-leadership class, whose members mostly didn’t hail from families headed by alcoholic mothers with very important rattan furniture who were several times divorced. Nevertheless, she and the guy were friendly, having been assigned as partners for a science lab during freshman year, and since her best friend was another guy, from whom she was nearly inseparable, this meant that the three together became casual friends, who would hang out sometimes if the inseparable two found themselves in the same place at the same time as the third, separate one. They hung out more and more as high school progressed, and by the end of the second year or so were quite close as a trio, now often going out of their way to coordinate ensemble time. The inseparable friend—the friend of the friend of my friend, this second guy—happened to be gay, and, as it turned out, eventually this first guy, the star, made known his sexual interest in the second guy, who was openly gay, though he, the first guy, only made it known to the second guy and to the friend—this woman, my friend’s friend—and to her only because it was inevitable that she would know and because in effect she provided cover for a secret desire that he—the popular guy—didn’t wish to reveal to the rest of the world.

It’s a turret. Turret is the name for the round tower at the corner of a Victorian house, same as on a castle. And the woman’s name was Txxxx.

Txxxx, indubitably a specialist, went on in great detail for about twenty minutes, retelling the story of how the three friends—herself and these two guys—became entangled in an intense relationship that was idyllic for awhile, at least for the sake of Txxxx’s recollection to us, which was strange, yet strangely, believable. The two guys were in love and the three friends were happy together, sharing a fluid intimacy elevated by the bond their noble secret enabled, though the sexual consummation was strictly between the boys. For reasons Txxxx never fully understood, but which she inadequately explained to herself as “cold feet” on the part of the first guy, the exceptional mood among them soon shifted, however, as exceptionally synchronized emotions inevitably do, no less abruptly when anchored by a first love. The golden boy abandoned his two friends rather suddenly and retreated to the more insular echelons of his native clique, where he was eagerly reabsorbed after brushing aside his foray with Txxxx and her friend in the simplest, most obvious terms: Txxxx was easy and the sex was fun until he grew bored. This news soon saturated the rest of the student body, which was the entire world at the time as far as those involved were concerned. Txxxx, who didn’t strike your narrator as one naturally inclined to yield, or, certainly, to respond passively to unfounded aspersions, broke character to preserve the secret of the trio’s dynamic for the remaining friend’s sake. He was heartbroken, she was sympathetic. As it happens, the first guy, who may well have been a sociopath according to Txxxx, or who might’ve been deeply conflicted and closeted and—who knows?—even gone on to privately regret the harm he caused himself and his friends, undoubtedly went on to enjoy academic accolades at a premier college, which he parlayed into his eventual professional success as a financier of some kind.

Txxxx’s tale accelerated after the high school affair ended, her summary of the young man’s subsequent glory seemingly attached to the earlier tract as mere epilogue, and the entire incident would’ve remained a compelling non sequitur, if not for the entirely unanticipated conclusion, which she dropped on us almost absentmindedly, like an unremarkable feather one might’ve picked up during a walk in the woods for the sake of fidgeting around with it while babbling to one’s companion, only to let go of it minutes later without even noticing: “Yeah, he’s the one person I knew who xxxxxx xxxxxx xxxxxx xxxxxx xxxxxx xxxxxx xxxxxx xxxxxx xxxxxx xxxxxx xx.” We sat in devastated silence for long seconds afterward before abruptly changing that subject to which we never did return.

Txxxx and I didn’t exchange numbers that weekend, and I’m no longer in touch with our common friend. We grew apart over the years. She became relatively well-off and had a child while I didn’t. I moved away. Some years later, she moved away.