Ordinary Daylight: Portrait of an Artist Going Blind

I had come to that point in my life when I felt that no matter what I did I had nothing to lose. The day-by-day losses of eyesight, slow and inexorable, took with them my life as a painter, my sources of pleasure and intelligence, my competence as a man. Pleasures I had taken for granted--the recognition of landscape, the coordination of hand and eyes, ordinary daylight--were slipping away. But going blind and passing forty, with dreams of youthful heroism and virtuosity gone forever, seemed, at times, too hard to bear.

All those downhill things that happen in spite of the marvels of science were now happening to me. My dentist, seeing a relentless decay infiltrate the hidden crevices in my mouth, suggested, as I lay under his bright lights, my mouth full of rubber dams, suction tips, and hard metal, that he pull all my teeth "so you don't have to worry about receding gums or that goddamn plaque."

I nearly choked as I sprang up, still connected by hoses, yelling through the spray and bubbles: "Driscoll, Driscoll, try to understand! I can't take it anymore, not one more loss!"

He moved away to his sink and began washing his hands. As the nurse untangled me, he leaned against a wall. "Look, Andy," he said, "we'll try to fix the damage. We'll do the best we can."

Some forty years before, my mother had taken the train from Warsaw to Vienna to have her teeth "done," but she was a rising star in the fashion world then, sure of her powers and much in demand. Nevertheless, the bad teeth came from her. The gene for retinitis pigmentosa was my father's gift.

I walked into the waiting room where every chair was occupied by a shadow, one of which was my wife. "Charlotte?" I said tentatively, and the appropriate shadow rose, put away her glasses, then the magazine, and took my arm.

"Jesus, what happened to you?" she asked. "You look white."

"He wants to yank my teeth," I said.

"He what?" Charlotte asked as I pulled her into the coat closet.

The nurse poked her head into the foyer. "Mr. Potok, the doctor wants to know when you can come for a double appointment. . . ."

"Tell him I can't," I said. "I'm going away. I'll call when I get back."

"Where are you going?" Charlotte asked as we walked down the stairs into the parking lot, my hand clutching hers.

"I don't know. I can't take it anymore. London . . ."

"London? That's nice," she said, humoring me.

"I mean it. London. The bees . . ."

"The what?" she winced.

"The goddamn bees!" I yelled. "The Observer article."

"The one Mary sent?" Charlotte asked fearfully. I leaned against the door as far from her as I could and looked out at the black-and-white jumble. We drove in silence for a while.

"You're nuts," she said under her breath. Vermont, after the long stasis of winter, was at its worst, the snow sinking slowly into barren, slimy mud.

"I can't see a goddamn thing. I hate my work. I'm no good at it. . . ."

"Oh, Andy," she said softly. "You're learning. Everybody says you're terrific. . . ."

"I'm not a social worker," I complained. "My thesis stinks." Nothing was going right. My reading, a euphemism for listening to tapes, usually put me to sleep because my body wasn't engaged in book holding, page turning, and eye movement. And I couldn't stand the boring psychology texts, the soft, sweet counseling books that were eventually to give me a degree, a Doctorate of Listening or something like that. I craved movement, a leap, a risk. I remembered my Yale days when we divided the world into poets and plumbers. This patchwork therapizing felt like plumbing, Band-Aid work, makeshift coping stuff.

"People have gone out of their way to help you get started," Charlotte was saying. "And what about your group? What will they do if you leave?"

"My group? You'll see, they'll want to come with me. . . ."

We got off Route 2 in Plainfield, sloshed by the Methodist church, the village store, and onto our dirt road, heaving and swaying in the potholes and ruts. We pulled in by the kitchen door, and I crossed the road to check the mail. The mailbox overflowed with black cases full of recorded books, cartons of taped material, letters and announcements from organizations "for the blind" and "of the blind," all covered with white canes, eyes, beacons of lighthouses, the terrible symbols of a dreaded new world. I was invited to join in the battle against blindness and disease, to send blind children to camp, to demand my new rights, to ask my congressman to support eye research. I was incited into outrage at the treatment of the handicapped. I was sent newsletters picturing happy blind students at the White House, the smiling faces of movie stars lending their names to national campaigns to prevent this, promote that. I was provoked into shock that a blinding disease such as mine existed in spite of the miracles of American medicine.