The Blindfold

by Siri Hustvedt

Genres: Literary Fiction

Synopsis

Iris Vegan, a graduate student living alone and impoverished in New York, encounters four strong characters who fascinate and in different ways subordinate her: an inscrutable urban recluse who employs her to record the possessions of a murdered woman; a photographer whose eerie portrait of Iris takes on a life of its own; an old woman in hospital who tries to claim a remnant of the ailing Iris; and a professor she has an affair with. An exploration of female identity in an age when the old definitions - as some man's daughter/wife/mother - no longer apply, fuelled with eroticism and a sense of menace.

Publisher: Simon & Schuster

Print pages: 224

Sample

Blindfold
Sometimes even now I think I see him in the street or standing in a window or bent over a book in a coffee shop. And in that instant, before I understand that it’s someone else, my lungs tighten and I lose my breath.

I met him eight years ago. I was a graduate student then at Columbia University. It was hot that summer and my nights were often sleepless. I lay awake in my two-room apartment on West 109th Street listening to the city’s noises. I would read, write, and smoke into the morning, but on some nights when the heat made me too listless to work, I watched the neighbors from my bed. Through my barred window, across the narrow airshaft, I looked into the apartment opposite mine and saw the two men who lived there wander from one room to another, half dressed in the sultry weather. On a day in July, not long before I met Mr. Morning, one of the men came naked to the window. It was dusk and he stood there for a long time, his body lit from behind by a yellow lamp. I hid in the darkness of my bedroom and he never knew I was there. That was two months after Stephen left me, and I thought of him incessantly, stirring in the humid sheets, never comfortable, never relieved.

During the day, I looked for work. In June I had done research for a medical historian. Five days a week I sat in the reading room at the Academy of Medicine on East 103rd Street, filling up index cards with information about great diseases—bubonic plague, leprosy, influenza, syphilis, tuberculosis—as well as more obscure afflictions that I remember now only because of their names—yaws, milk leg, greensickness, ragsorter’s disease, housemaid’s knee, and dandy fever. Dr. Rosenberg, an octogenarian who spoke and moved very slowly, paid me six dollars an hour to fill up those index cards, and although I never understood what he did with them, I never asked him, fearing that an explanation might take hours. The job ended when my employer went to Italy. I had always been poor as a student, but Dr. Rosenberg’s vacation made me desperate. I hadn’t paid the July rent, and I had no money for August. Every day, I went to the bulletin board in Philosophy Hall where jobs were posted, but by the time I called, they had always been taken. Nevertheless, that was how I found Mr. Morning. A small handwritten notice announced the position: “Wanted. Research assistant for project already under way. Student of literature preferred. Herbert B. Morning.” A phone number appeared under the name, and I called immediately. Before I could properly introduce myself, a man with a beautiful voice gave me an address on Amsterdam Avenue and told me to come over as soon as possible.

It was hazy that day, but the sun glared and I blinked in the light as I walked through the door of Mr. Morning’s tenement building. The elevator was broken, and I remember sweating while I climbed the stairs to the fourth floor. I can still see his intent face in the doorway. He was a very pale man with a large, handsome nose. He breathed loudly as he opened the door and let me into a tiny, stifling room that smelled of cat. The walls were lined with stuffed bookshelves, and more books were piled in leaning towers all over the room. There were tall stacks of newspapers and magazines as well, and beneath a window whose blinds had been tightly shut was a heap of old clothes or rags. A massive wooden desk stood in the center of the room, and on it were perhaps a dozen boxes of various sizes. Close to the desk was a narrow bed, its rumpled sheets strewn with more books. Mr. Morning seated himself behind the desk, and I sat down in an old folding chair across from him. A narrow ray of light that had escaped through a broken blind fell to the floor between us, and when I looked at it, I saw a haze of dust.

I smoked, contributing to the room’s blur, and looked at the skin of his neck; it was moon white. He told me he was happy I had come and then fell silent. Without any apparent reserve, he looked at me, taking in my whole body with his gaze. I don’t know if his scrutiny was lecherous or merely curious, but I felt assaulted and turned away from him, and then when he asked me my name, I lied. I did it quickly, without hesitation, inventing a new patronym: Davidsen. I became Iris Davidsen. It was a defensive act, a way of protecting myself from some amorphous danger, but later that false name haunted me; it seemed to move me elsewhere, shifting me off course and strangely altering my whole world for a time. When I think back on it now, I imagine that lie as the beginning of the story, as a kind of door to my uneasiness. Everything else I told him was true—about my parents and sisters in Minnesota, about my studies in nineteenth-century English literature, my past research jobs, even my telephone number. As I talked, he smiled at me, and I thought to myself, It’s an intimate smile, as if he has known me for years.

He told me that he was a writer, that he wrote for magazines to earn money. “I write about everything for every taste,” he said. “I’ve written for Field and Stream, House and Garden, True Confessions, True Detective, Reader’s Digest. I’ve written stories, one spy novel, poems, essays, reviews—I even did an art catalog once.” He grinned and waved an arm. “?‘Stanley Rubin’s rhythmical canvases reveal a debt to Mannerism—Pontormo in particular. The long, undulating shapes hint at . . .’?” He laughed. “And I rarely publish under the same name.”

“Don’t you stand behind what you write?”

“I am behind everything I write, Miss Davidsen, usually sitting, sometimes standing. In the eighteenth century, it was common to stand and write—at an escritoire. Thomas Wolfe wrote standing.”

“That’s not exactly what I meant.”

“No, of course it isn’t. But you see, Herbert B. Morning couldn’t possibly write for True Confessions, but Fern Luce can. It’s as simple as that.”

“You enjoy hiding behind masks?”

“I revel in it. It gives my life a certain color and danger.”

“Isn’t danger overstating it a bit?”

“I don’t think so. Nothing is beyond me as long as I adopt the correct name for each project. It isn’t arbitrary. It requires a gift, a genius, if I may say so myself, for hitting on the alias that will unleash the right man or woman for the job. Dewitt L. Parker wrote that art catalog, for example, and Martin Blane did the spy novel. But there are risks, too. Even the most careful planning can go awry. It’s impossible to know for sure who’s concealed under the pseudonym I choose.”

“I see,” I said. “In that case, I should probably ask you who you are now.”

“You have the privilege, dear lady, of addressing Herbert B. Morning himself, unencumbered by any other personalities.”

“And what does Mr. Morning need a research assistant for?”

“For a kind of biography,” he said. “For a project about life’s paraphernalia, is bits and pieces, treasures and refuse. I need someone like you to respond freely to the objects in question. I need an ear and an eye, a scribe and a voice, a Friday for every day of the week, someone who is sharp, sensitive. You see, I’m in the process of prying open the very essence of the inanimate world. You might say that it’s an anthropology of the present.”

I asked him to be more specific about the job.

“It began three years ago when she died.” He paused as if thinking. “A girl—a young woman. I knew her, but not very well. Anyway, after she died, I found myself in possession of a number of her things, just common everyday things. I had them in the apartment, this and that, out and about, objects that were lost, abandoned, speechless, but not dead. That was the crux of it. They weren’t dead, not in the usual way we think of objects as lifeless. They seemed charged with a kind of power. At times I almost felt them move with it, and then after several weeks, I noticed that they seemed to lose that vivacity, seemed to retreat into their thingness. So I boxed them.”

“You boxed them?” I said.

“I boxed them to keep them untouched by the here and now. I feel sure that those things carry her imprint—the mark of a warm, living body on the world. And even though I’ve tried to keep them safe, they’re turning cold. I can tell. It’s been too long, so my work is urgent. I have to act quickly. I’ll pay you sixty dollars per object.”

“Per object?” I was sweating in the chair and adjusted my position, pulling my skirt down under my legs, which felt strangely cool to the touch.

“I’ll explain everything,” he said. He took a small tape recorder from a drawer in his desk and pushed it toward me. “Listen to this first. It will tell you most of what you want to know. While you listen, I’ll leave the room.” He stood up from his chair and walked to a door. A large yellow cat appeared from behind a box and followed him. “Press play,” he commanded, and vanished.

When I reached for the machine, I noticed two words scrawled on a legal pad near it: “woman’s hand.” The words seemed important, and I remember them as if they were the passwords to an underground life. When I turned on the tape, a woman’s voice whispered, “This belonged to the deceased. It is a white sheet for a single bed . . .” What followed was a painstaking description of the sheet. It included every tiny discoloration and stain, the texture of the aged cotton, and even the tag from which the words had disappeared in repeated washings. It lasted for perhaps ten minutes; the entire speech was delivered in that peculiar half-voice. The description itself was tedious and yet I listened with anticipation, imagining that the words would soon reveal something other than the sheet. They didn’t. When the tape ended, I looked over to the door behind which Mr. Morning had hidden and saw that it was now ajar and half of his face was pressed through the opening. He was lit from behind, and I couldn’t see his features clearly, but the pale hair on his head was shining, and again I heard him breathe with difficulty as he walked toward me. He reached out for my hand. Without thinking, I withdrew it.

“You want descriptions of that girl’s things, is that it?” I could hear the tightness and formality in my voice. “I don’t understand what a recorded description has to do with your project as a whole or why the woman on the tape was whispering.”

“The whisper is essential, because the full human voice is too idiosyncratic, too marked with its own history. I’m looking for anonymity so the purity of the object won’t be blocked from coming through, from displaying itself in its nakedness. A whisper has no character.”

The project seemed odd to the point of madness, but I was drawn to it. Chance had given me this small adventure and I was pleased. I also felt that beneath their eccentricity, Mr. Morning’s ideas had a weird kind of logic. His comments about whispering, for example, made sense.

“Why don’t you write out the descriptions?” I said. “Then there will be no voice at all to interfere with the anonymity you want.” I watched his face closely.

He leaned over the desk and looked directly at me. “Because,” he said, “then there’s no living presence, no force to prompt an awakening.”

I shifted in my chair again, gazing at the pile of rags under the window. “What do you mean by awakening?” “I mean that the objects in question begin to stir under scrutiny, that they, mute as they are, can nevertheless bear witness to human mysteries.”

“You mean they’re clues to this girl’s life? You want to know about her, is that it? Aren’t there more direct routes for finding out biographical information?”

“Not the kind of biography I’m interested in.” He smiled at me, this time opening his mouth, and I admired his large white teeth. He isn’t old, I thought, not even fifty. He leaned over and picked up a blue box from the floor—a medium-sized department store box—and handed it to me.

I pulled at its lid.

“Not now!” He almost cried out. “Not here.”

I pushed the lid back down.

“Do it at home alone. The object must be kept wrapped and in the box unless you are working. Study it. Describe it. Let it speak to you. I have a recorder and a new tape for you as well. Oh yes, and you should begin your description with the words, This belonged to the deceased.’ Could you have it for me by the day after tomorrow?”

I told him I could and then left the apartment with my box and tape recorder, rushing out into the daylight. I walked quickly away from the building and didn’t ldok into the box until I had turned the corner and was sure that he couldn’t see me from his window. Inside was a rather dirty white glove lying on a bed of tissue paper.

• • •

I didn’t go home until later. I fled the heat by going into an air-conditioned coffee shop, sitting for hours as I scribbled notes to myself about the glove and made calculations as to the number of objects I needed to describe before I could pay my rent. I imagined my descriptions as pithy, elegant compositions, small literary exercises based on a kind of belated nineteenth-century positivism. Just for the moment, I decided to pretend that the thing really can be captured by the word. I drank coffee, ate a glazed doughnut, and was happy.

But that night when I put the glove beside my typewriter to begin work, it seemed to have changed. I felt it, felt the lumpy wool, and then very slowly pulled it over my left hand. It was too small for my long fingers and didn’t cover my wrist. As I looked at it, I had the uncanny feeling that I had seen the same glove on another hand. J began to tug abruptly at its fingers, until it sailed to the floor. I let it lie there for several minutes, unwilling to touch it. The small woolen hand covered with smudges and snags seemed terrible to me, a stranded and empty thing, both nonsensical and cruel. Finally I snatched it up and threw it back into the box. There would be no writing until the next day. It was too hot; I was too tired, too nervous. I lay in bed near the open window, but the air stood still. I touched my clammy skin and looked over at the opposite apartment, but the two men had gone to sleep and their windows were black. Before I slept I moved the box into the other room.

That night the screaming began. I woke to the noise but couldn’t identify it and thought at first that it was the demented howling of cats I had heard earlier in the summer. But it was a woman’s voice—a long, guttural wail that ended in a growl. “Stop it! I hate you! I hate you!” she screamed over and over. I stiffened to the noise and wondered if I should call the police, but for a long time I just waited and listened. Someone yelled “Shut up!” from a window and it stopped. I expected it to begin again, but it was over. I wet a washcloth with cold water and rubbed my neck, arms, and face with it. I thought of Stephen then, as I had often seen him, at his desk, his head turned slightly away from me, his large eyes looking down at a paper. That was when his body was still enchanted; it had a power that I battled and raged against for months. Later that enchantment fell away, and he passed into a banality I never would have thought possible.

The next morning I began again. By daylight the box on the kitchen table had returned to its former innocence. Using my notes from the coffee shop, I worked steadily, but it was difficult. I looked at the glove closely, trying to remember the words for its various parts, for its texture and the color of its stains. I noticed that the tip of the index finger was blackened, as if the owner had trailed her finger along a filthy surface. She was probably left-handed, I thought; that’s a gesture for the favored hand. A girl running her finger along a subway railing. The image prompted a shudder of memory: “woman’s hand.” The words may have referred to her hand, her gloved hand, or to the glove itself. The connection seemed rife with meaning, and yet it spawned nothing inside me but a feeling akin to guilt. I pressed on with the description, but the more I wrote, the more specific I was about the glove’s characteristics, the more remote it became. Rather than fixing it in the light of scientific exactitude, the abundance of detail made the glove disappear. In fact, my minute description of its discolorations, snags, and pills, its loosened threads and stretched palm seemed alien to the sad little thing before me.

In the evening I edited my work and then read it into the machine. Whispering bothered me; it made the words clandestine, foreign, and when I listened to the tape, I didn’t recognize my own voice. It sounded like a precocious child lisping absurdities from some invisible part of the room, and when I heard it, I blushed with a shame I still don’t understand.

Late that night I woke to the screaming again, but it stopped after several minutes, just as before. This time I couldn’t get back to sleep and lay awake for hours in a vague torment as the shattered images of exhaustion and heat crowded my brain.

• • •

Mr. Morning didn’t answer the bell right away. I pressed it three times and was about to leave when I heard him shuffling to the door. He paused in the doorway, looked me directly in the eyes, and smiled. The beautiful smile startled me, and I turned away from him. He apologized for the delay but gave no explanation. That day the apartment seemed more chaotic than on my first visit; the desk in particular was a mass of disturbed papers and boxes. He asked me for the tape; I gave it to him, and then he ushered me from the room, gently pushing me behind the door where he had concealed himself the last time.

I found myself in the kitchen, a tiny room, even hotter and smellier than the other. There were a few unwashed dishes in the sink, several books piled on the counter, and one large, white box. From the next room I could just manage to hear the sound of the tape and my soft voice droning on about the glove. I paged through a couple of books—a world atlas and a little copy of The Cloud of Unknowing—but I was really interested in the box. I stood over it. The corners of the lid were worn, as if it had been opened many times; two of the sides were taped shut. I ran my finger over the tape to see if I could loosen it. I picked at the tape’s yellow skin with my nail, but my efforts made it pucker and tear, so I stopped, trying again on the other side. My head was bent over the box when I heard him coming toward the door, and I leapt backward, accidentally pushing the box off the counter. It fell to the floor but didn’t open. I was able to return it to its place before Mr. Morning appeared in the doorway. Whether or not he saw my hands dart away from the box, I still don’t know, but when the box fell, whatever was inside it made a loud, hollow, rattling noise, and he must have heard that. Yet he said nothing.

We walked into the other room and sat down. He looked at me and I remember thinking that his gaze had a peculiar strength and that he seemed to blink less often than most people.

“Was the tape okay?” I asked.

“Fine,” he said, “but there was one aspect of the thing you neglected to describe and I think it’s rather important.”

“What’s that?”

“The odor.”

“I didn’t think of it,” I said.

“No,” he said, “many people don’t, but without its smell, a thing loses its identity; the absence of odor cripples your description, makes it two-dimensional. Every object has its own scent and carries the odor of its place as well. This can be invaluable to an investigation.”

“How?” I said it loudly.

He paused and looked at the window. “By evoking something crucial, something unnoticed before, a place or time or word. Just think of the things we forget in closets and attics, the mildew, the dust, the crushed dry bodies of insects—these odors leave their traces. My mother’s trunks smelled of wet wool and lavender. It took me a long time to realize what that odor was, but then I identified it, and I remembered events I had forgotten.”

“Is there something you want to remember about this girl who died?” I asked.

“Why do you say that?” He jerked his head toward me.

“Because you obviously want something out of all this. You want these descriptions for a reason. When you mentioned those trunks, I thought you might want to trigger a memory.”

He looked away again. “A memory of a whole world,” he said.

“But I thought you hardly knew her, Mr. Morning.”

He picked up a pencil and began to doodle on a notebook page. “Did I tell you that?”

“Yes, you did.”

“It’s true. I didn’t know her well.”

“What is it you’re after, then? Who was this person you’re investigating?”

“I would like to know that too.”

“You’re evading my questions. She had a name, didn’t she, this girl?”

“Her name won’t help you, Miss Davidsen.” His voice was nearly a whisper.

“Well, it won’t hurt me either,” I said.

He continued to move the pencil idly on the page in front of him. I craned to see it, trying to disguise the gesture by adjusting my skirt. There were several letters written on the paper—what looked like an I, a Y, a B, an O, an M, arid a D. He had circled the M. If those markings were intended to form some kind of order, it was impossible to make it out, but even then, before I suspected anything, those letters had a strange effect on me. They stayed with me like the small but persistent aches of a mild illness.

Putting the pencil down, he looked up at me and nodded. He patted his chest. “The heat has given you a rash—here.”

“No, it’s my birthmark.” I touched the skin just below my collarbone.

“A port-wine stain,” he said. “It has character—a mark for life. If you’ll forgive me for saying so, I’ve always found flaws like that poignant, little outward signs of our mortality. I used a birthmark in something I wrote once—”

I interrupted him. “You aren’t going to tell me anything, are you?”

“You’re referring to our subject, I take it?”

“Of course.”

“I think you’ve failed to understand the nature of your task. I hired you precisely because you know nothing. I hired you to see what I cannot see, because you are who you are. I don’t pretend that you’re a blank slate. You bring your life with you, your nineteenth-century novels, your Minnesota, the fullness of your existence in every respect, but you didn’t know her. When you look at the things I give you, when you write and then speak about them, your words and voice may be the catalysts of some undiscovered being. Knowledge of her will only distract you from your work. Let us say, for the sake of an example, that her name was Allison Hart and that she died of leukemia. Something appears before you, an image. A row of hospital beds perhaps, in a large room lit by those fluorescent tubes, and you see her, I’m sure you do. Allison—it’s a romantic name—pale and emaciated, once beautiful, she lies under white sheets . . . And what you see will not only be shaped by my words but by my inflections, my expression, and then you will lose your freedom.”

I began to speak, but he stopped me.

“No, let me say my piece. Let us say I tell you that her name was”:—he paused—“Maxine Robinson and that she was murdered.” He looked out past me toward the door and squinted as if he were trying to see something far away. He took several deep breaths. “That she was killed right here in this building. What would you compose then, Miss Davidsen, when you look inside my boxes? You’d be suffocated by what you know, just as I am. It wouldn’t do; it just wouldn’t do.”

“You’re playing with me and I resent it,” I said. “If you admit that I bring my own associations to the descriptions, why shouldn’t I bring my own baggage to the facts of her life? And death.”

“Because!” he almost shouted. “Because we are about the business of discovery, of resurrection, not burial.” He grabbed the edge of the desk and shook it. “Atonement, Miss Davidsen. Atonement!”

“Good God,” I said, “atonement for what?”

He was suddenly calm. He pushed his chair back, crossed his legs, folded his arms, and cocked his head to one side. These movements seemed self-conscious, almost theatrical. “For the sins of the world.”

“What does that mean?”

“It means exactly what the words denote.”

“Those words, Mr. Morning,” I said, “are liturgical. You’ve gone into a religious mode all of a sudden. What am I to think? You seem to have a talent for saying nothing with style.”

“Be patient, and I think you’ll begin to understand me.” He was smiling.

I had no reply for him. The hot room, the darkness, his outburst and incomprehensible speech, had robbed me of the will to answer. Exhaustion had come over me in a matter of seconds. My bones hurt. Finally I said, “I should leave now.”

“If you stay, I’ll make tea for you. I’ll feed you crumpets and tell you stories. I’ll dazzle you with my impeccable manners, my wit and imagination.”

I shook my head. “I really have to go.”

He paid me with three twenty-dollar bills and gave me another box—this time a small white jeweler’s box. He told me he didn’t need the description until Monday of the following week. I had four days. We shook hands and then just before I walked through the door, he patted my arm. It was a gesture of sympathy and I accepted it as if it were owed to me.

• • •

Inside the second box was a stained and misshapen cotton ball. I found myself hesitant to touch it, as though it were contaminated. The wad of fiber was colored with makeup or powder that looked orange in the light and was also marked with an unidentifiable clot of something dense and brown. I drew away from the little box. Had he salvaged this thing after her death? I imagined him in a bathroom bending over a wastebasket to retrieve the used cotton ball. How had he found these things? Had he hoarded more of her refuse in boxes? I saw him alone, his fingers tracing the outlines of an object as he sat in his chair in front of the window with the closed blinds. But in the daydream I couldn’t see what he held. I saw only his body hunched over it.

In those four days between visits to Mr. Morning, I was never free of him. Bits and pieces of his conversation invaded my thoughts, appearing unsummoned at all hours, especially at night. The idea that the girl had been murdered in his building took hold of me, and I began to imagine it. He had taunted me with it; he had intended to entice me with it as just another possible death, but once it was said, I felt that I had known it from the beginning. Resurrection. Atonement. He had seemed genuinely passionate. I remembered his troubled breathing as he spoke, the letters on the page, the white box falling, his hand on my arm. At the same time, I told myself that the man was a charlatan, someone who loved games, riddles, innuendo. Nothing he said could be believed. But in the end it was his posing that made me suspect that he had hidden the truth among his lies and that he was earnest about his project and the gir