Sight Unseen Read online

  “What’s the matter, Grandma? Is there something else wrong with Mom?”

  She shook her head.

  “Just let her sleep.”

  “Then what is it?” He raised his voice and tugged his wrist out of her grip. His heart had begun to beat rapidly again, and the warm air had become hot and uncomfortable. His blue polo shirt was sticking to his back, and he felt the redness in his cheeks turn into fire under his skin.

  “Mr. Hoffman,” she said. “He had a heart attack this afternoon and died.”

  2

  When spring in the Catskills was as warm as this, David couldn’t resist going out at night. The stars were magnetic; they drew him away from books, away from the glow of the radio with its promise of adventure or mystery, and away from lights and other voices. He liked to go to the school and lie down on the front lawn that sloped up from the road. With his hands back and under his head, he could lie there and look up at the sky for what seemed to be hours. Sometimes, if he looked hard and long enough, he would feel the earth turning, and he would imagine falling upward into the constellations.

  But lately, when night came, there was a new stirring within him. His skin felt more sensitive; his clothing was confining. Something was being born inside him, he thought, and whatever it was, it turned his fingers into spiders exploring his own body. His blood rushed toward whatever spot he touched. It made him feverish and so hot that he believed he could scorch the earth wherever he lay.

  David had only a vague understanding of sex. In those years, little was said about it formally in school, and it was usually disguised through lessons in animal and plant reproduction. Certainly nothing was said about it at home, except for the references his mother made to dirty women and diseases. Whenever she and his grandmother got into a conversation about anything that could remotely be thought of as sexual, they stopped immediately if he were within earshot.

  This had the effect of making sex more mysterious and enticing. From what he could see, sex was something older people horded. They did what they wanted to do behind closed doors and in dark rooms, and what they did, they never discussed. If he were to believe what they said and the way they said it, he would think that most children were born out of immaculate conception.

  For one thing it was especially hard for him to accept that his mother and his father ever had sexual relations. From the way his mother spoke about his father, he couldn’t imagine their ever touching each other affectionately. He almost believed that story Charlie Burger told about the girl who got pregnant after going to the bathroom and sitting on the dirty toilet seat. Supposedly it happened in the rest room at Skip’s garage.

  There were a number of stories like that passed around. Didn’t he hear a group of senior boys talking about Shirley Dorfman, who went into the same bath water her brother Tommy had just finished using, and then two months later she got pregnant. She had to be sent away to have it fixed.

  David’s entire sexual education so far had come from his classmates. They shared tidbits greedily, each one trying to surprise and astound the others with some new information, verified by an older brother or an older boy. Lately, he was more interested in what was being said because girls had become more interesting to him. He sensed a new aura about them, an aura that was even around the girls he had known all his life. Whenever he entered their galaxies, he was held like a planet, circling them and kept in orbit by their smiles, their laughter, and their promise of something greater.

  What was that promise? The mystery was becoming more and more fascinating with every day that passed. The solution was buried in the magic of their bodies, in the way they moved and turned their shoulders, and in the way they smiled at him when they found him staring with this new interest. Girls were smarter when it came to all this, he thought. Those his age already knew much more than he did.

  One night he came home from the village via Turtle Avenue, a shortcut to his house and, purely by accident, saw seventeen-year-old Diane Jones in her bra and panties, walking through her bedroom. Her shades were up and her house, built on a little knoll, was slightly above eye level, making it easy for him to see her. The sight of her stopped him, and he took refuge behind a wide maple tree, waiting for her to reappear.

  When she did reappear in the flesh, she seemed unreal, like an actress in a motion picture. The distance between them kept her aloof and larger than life, despite the fact that he was only about twenty yards away. He couldn’t imagine why she kept her shades up, making the view so clear and complete, even though there were no other houses behind hers. Women were usually more careful about such things. At least his mother was. Her shades were always down, and if it wasn’t for his grandmother, the shades on the other windows would be down most of the time, too.

  As soon as she stood in the window, David pressed his body hard against the tree, almost as though the pressure and resulting pain were necessary to calm him. He was awash with excitement, his gaze so intense that all the rest of the world was shut out.

  Diane moved across her room and sat at her vanity table. He shifted to the other side of the tree so he could maintain a good view of her. For a few moments she just stared at herself. Then she turned toward the window, and his heart skipped a beat. Would she close the shades and end it? He willed her not to.

  He had willed things before. It was more than simply making a wish and leaving things to chance and hope. Willing something meant grimacing hard, concentrating and chanting silently. Sometimes it literally exhausted him, but he had come to believe in the process, even though it didn’t work all the time. Tonight it did.

  She didn’t close her window shades. Instead, she began to brush her light-brown hair. All of her strokes were slow and soft, the strokes of someone in deep thought. What was she thinking? he wondered. That curiosity, as much as anything, pulled him out of the shadows and toward the window.

  Bending over, he scurried through the darkness until he reached the small picket fence, which was about a dozen yards from the house. The light spilling out of her windows nearly reached him. He squatted within the protective shadows, but kept himself high enough to see her fully. He could see her face in the mirror, and that reflection was fascinating.

  As he concentrated on it, he felt as though he were moving out of his body and right up to the window. He could see deeply into her eyes. Their thoughts crisscrossed. It was her voice that he heard in his own mind.

  He sought to influence her, to get her to continue her undressing. He willed it with all his mental might. Suddenly her hand stopped in midair. She held it there so firmly and still that he suspected she sensed his presence. His heart skipped a beat. He couldn’t lower his body; he couldn’t hide. It was almost as though he wanted her to discover him standing there and watching her, but she didn’t turn around.

  Instead, she put the brush down softly and reached behind her back to unfasten her bra. With a quick but graceful movement, she undid the garment and slipped it down her arms. For a long moment she simply sat there like that.

  Then she spun around as though she heard his thoughts and his heavy breathing. He pulled back farther into the darkness and stared at her as he would stare into the flame of a burning candle. She wavered; her breasts flickered before him when she stood up and walked to the window. She stood there looking out. Could she sense him in the same way he felt he could sense her? He held his breath until she pulled the shade down. And then her silhouette retreated and was gone.

  Almost immediately, he experienced a sense of cool relief. His body had been all aglow, the excitement consuming him. He found that even his palms were damp with sweat. He put his hand to his chest and felt the heavy thump slow down and lessen. It was over almost as quickly and as unexpectedly as it had begun. He looked about guiltily and then rushed away, running toward home with a new and frantic burst of speed. He was being pursued by Diane Jones’s image in the window.

  He was disappointed when he got home because he wanted to enjoy quiet meditatio
n. Instead, he found a house filled with noise and activity. He had forgotten that it was his mother’s night to host the Mah-jongg game. His grandmother was preparing coffee cake for them. The women looked crowded about the small table. Their bodies, their chatter, and the smoke from their cigarettes made the room look bloated and stuffed. He felt as though the walls were straining at their corners. The kitchen was overwhelmed with the combination of different scents: the burning cigarettes, the inexpensive toilette water, the sweet cinnamon cake. He thought only of escape.

  No one paid much attention to his entrance anyway. His grandmother gave him the big eyes which meant, “Stay out of their way.” He thought about going right to his room and closing his door, but he knew that would be no good. His room was too close to the kitchen. So he backed out. No one called to him. His mother was too involved with her game, and his grandmother was too involved with her work.

  At first he decided he would sit on the porch until he knew he was too tired to be bothered by their noise; but almost immediately he felt a need for real solitude. He left the front yard and continued up the hill until he came to the entrance of Okun’s bungalow colony.

  Okun’s colony was a big collection of resort cottages with an olympic-size pool, a handball court, baseball field, and playground. It had a large casino building for entertainment and weekly bingo games as well.

  There were no streetlights this far out of the village, but the quarter moon peekabooing the clouds provided enough light to silhouette his surroundings. There was a fieldstone wall at the entrance. He boosted himself onto it and sat there listening to the peepers. Behind him, the summer bungalows waited in anticipation against the inky background. Soon enough, he thought, they would be overrun by an invasion of tourists. He felt an affinity with these little vacation homes. He felt as though they shared an understanding, a sadness.

  This year, for the first time, he had noticed that his village and its surroundings seemed to lean more. The weight of the summers had either grown heavier or the community had grown weaker, older, and more tired. Store buildings sagged, the roads had more potholes and cracks, and the small hotels and bungalow colonies like the one behind him showed their age. He detected that some significant change had begun, but he wasn’t sure yet what it all meant. The visions and images that flashed across his mind occasionally were still not clear enough for him to make any conclusions, but it was almost as if he could see the end of one world and the beginning of another.

  His gaze went out through the darkness in the direction of Diane Jones’s house. He couldn’t actually see it from where he sat, but he was able to conjure it up before him so clearly and distinctly that it was as though he were back there standing beside that tree.

  Had she seen him out there, outlined against the tree? What if he saw her in the village tomorrow? Would she acknowledge him and let him know she knew? He felt as if he had stolen something from her. But what? The secret of her body? Would it change the way he looked at her?

  It had to. Surely he would feel something intimate every time he passed her, whether it be in the school corridors or on the street. He closed his eyes and imagined the experience. He wondered. Would he see her half naked every time he saw her? And more importantly, would she see it in his face? Would she blush? Would she be embarrassed? He didn’t want her to feel embarrassed. He didn’t want to hurt her.

  Somehow, he didn’t think she would be. When he closed his eyes and imagined the confrontations, Diane had a knowing look on her face, but there was warmth there, and there was sexual sophistication. No matter what she wore, her breasts were uncovered to him. He had X-ray eyes like Superman.

  What a great thing this was. Realizing his power to reproduce this erotic image so vividly was a wonderful discovery, so it couldn’t be something evil. He wouldn’t let it be. Of course, he would tell no one about it. To do so would diminish its significance and reduce it to something dirty.

  He had looked with intensity at Diane Jones before, admiring her hair, her angelic smile, her small hands, and the way she could turn an ordinary street into something spectacular when she walked. He always had paused to stare at her even though he was only a ninth grader and she was a senior. If she saw him, her eyes brightened. She was like a princess granting him a smile. Surely someone so beautiful was aware of how easily she captured adoration.

  But what happened tonight was different, he thought. It shattered the air around him. It changed the face of the night and made the darkness sensual.

  He closed his eyes to remember the erotic scenes, but this time it was different. He wasn’t outside by the tree looking in at her; he was in the room. He was sitting on her bed, and she had her back to him as she looked out the window and closed the shades. It was incredible. He was in that room! He saw her clearly from this new and even more intimate perspective. When she turned, she didn’t acknowledge him. He was invisible to her, but he was there.

  She slipped her panties off. Totally naked now, she was moving about the room, preparing for her shower. Everything she did was so vivid and so close. He watched her take her robe from the closet. He saw her lay out her nightgown beside him on the bed. When she leaned over, her face nearly grazed his. He could actually smell the scent of her hair. Her warm breath caressed his cheek.

  She gazed at herself in the mirror, pressed her hands against her hips as though to measure them, and then left the room. When she did that, he opened his eyes again.

  For a moment he forgot where he was. Then, moving in a daze, he slipped off the stone wall and started down the hill toward home. As he walked, the realization about what had just happened took hold of him. He had really seen her again. He hadn’t imagined it; he had done it. He didn’t know how he had done it, but he had done it. It was something special that he could do. But how?

  All he had done was concentrate, shutting out everything else from his thoughts and directing his full thought power to one thing. Could he do it again? Do it at will? It made him tremble to think so. What was really happening to him? Was he going crazy? Who would believe this? Dreams were one thing. Everyone had dreams and talked about them, but to actually move yourself through the darkness and place yourself somewhere else—to go beyond walls and within the minds of other people—to know the next moment before the hands of the clock touched it—

  He stopped before the house to test himself. The very idea made his heart pound again. He looked at his house and closed his eyes. He concentrated on his grandmother until she was so vivid and close he could touch her. She was taking the cake out of the oven and placing it on the counter. Now she cut a corner piece to save for him. She wrapped it in wax paper and put it up in the cupboard with the cups and saucers. After that, she cut pieces for the women at the table. He knew her motives. If she didn’t hide his piece, they would eat it along with the rest of the cake. He smiled, realizing how she always thought about him.

  An approaching car, its headlights bright, its engine accelerating, headed toward him. He didn’t move, and the driver leaned hard on the horn. The blaring noise brought him back outside the house. He stepped off the road quickly and watched it rush by, the driver shouting a curse. It made him wonder: When he drifted off like this, what happened to his body? What if he hadn’t heard that horn? Would he have died out here or in the house?

  He decided to go back into the house. The women had taken a break to enjoy their coffee and cake, so now they all acknowledged him.

  “Where were you?” his mother asked. “You should be getting ready for bed.”

  “I wasn’t tired yet so I went for a walk.”

  “You hear?” she said, directing herself to the other women as if she were in a performance. He didn’t like her when she became so dramatic; he recognized how false it was. The women nodded and smiled when they looked at him. Then they took on that sympathetic look that said, “We’ve all been through this many times.” For a moment he despised them all for their smug understanding of motherhood.

  �
�They’re never tired, Roselyn,” Tillie Green said. Her cigarette dangling threateningly from the corner of her mouth. The ashes looked as though they would fall into her coffee any moment.

  “My son would stay up all night and listen to the radio if I let him, and then in the morning, he wonders why he can’t get up for school,” Marion Wells said. David thought she was right. Bobby Wells always looked half asleep.

  “That cake smells good,” he said quickly, before anyone else could add support to his mother’s complaint.

  “Well it’s all gone,” his mother said, gesturing at the cake plates. “If you would have come home early, you would have had a piece. Grandma made it with cinnamon,” she added with an almost sadistic air. “Your favorite.”

  He didn’t mean to sound arrogant and all knowing, but it was the only way he could respond.

  “She saved me a piece,” he said. He said it with such assurance that all the women looked up at him and then looked at his grandmother. She didn’t smile, but when their gazes met, her eyes widened with understanding. Without speaking, she went to the cupboard and took out his piece, the corner piece.

  “You see how she spoils him? You see?” There was some sympathetic laughter.

  “I’ll go to sleep after I hear the end of ‘Inner Sanctum,’” he said and went into the living room. His grandmother brought him his cake and milk and stood there watching him eat it. The heavy, eerie organ music of the radio program seemed a fitting soundtrack for his mood.

  “I want you to tell me things,” he said without looking up at her.

  “What things?”

  “Things about yourself when you were a little girl. Things you remember.”

  “I always tell you those things.”

  “I want to know other things,” he said and looked up abruptly. For a moment she did not speak. The heavy voice on the radio seemed to belong to someone beside them in the room. He had a quick vision of the two of them being sucked into the radio and made part of the tale of terror. They were both scratching on the inside of the dial, trying to get out.