In the early winter I sat on a bar stool at the 40th Street Grill drinking a beer with Rob, another teacher at the Phoenix Country Day School, when he said, “You know who you should go after? Ellen Reeve. She’s got the most beautiful blue eyes and a very athletic body. Did you know she coaches the boys’ soccer team?” I had set up the conversation brilliantly by asking Rob who the good-looking teachers were, not letting on that I was really most interested in Ellen. Little did I know that Ellen would be at the top of his list.
Rob had gone through the teachers, first highlighting the ones who wore miniskirts barely covering their thighs, next the Ivory girls with wholesome good looks, and finally the older babes who still showed traces of their former beauty. I told him the ones who I thought had hot voices: some with a rough sexy purr, others high pitched and chirpy, and still others rumbling and spit-firing their words quickly and articulately; and Rob would confirm or dispute. Some think that blind people do not care about looks, that we are above assessing one’s desirability through surface beauty, but if that’s the case, I proudly break the stereotype. I am as much a pig as any sighted guy. In fact, I take offense at those who would assume that just because I am blind I am supposed to be asexual. Blindness has little to do with the virtue or villainy of one’s character. I can be just as shallow, but my shallowness comes from the voluptuous hum of a sexy voice or the electrifying grasp of a smooth supple hand.
It is embarrassing the desperate lengths I have gone to learn what a woman looks like while trying to keep alive her angelic impression of me. Once I met a woman on the train back to Boston. We had talked and laughed together the whole way home. She had a clear pleasant voice, but although the connection between a sexy voice and a shapely body is often accurate, it is still a big risk to proceed by the sound of a voice alone. At the end of the ride I had gotten the courage to ask her out. When at last I met her for our date, I shook her hand and was a little worried. She had not passed the hand test: short, fat, stubby fingers nine times out of ten means a short, fat, stubby body; and, now standing, I was aware of her voice projecting from a long way down. I arranged for us to go have pizza at Geo’s Pizza in Harvard Square where my friend conveniently worked behind the counter. I shook his hand as I introduced her and knew, instantly, my growing alarm was well justified. He had shaken my hand with his fingers curled and cupped together, forcing my hand to curl and cup in return. He had given me the ugly shake and there was nothing for me to do but to finish out the date.
So, in the bar with Rob it was comforting to hear his approval of Ellen. Before Rob’s visual assessment, I had been working solo, as usual, with only Ellen’s voice to guide me—but, oh, what a voice. When I had interviewed for a job at Phoenix Country Day School, the principal had taken me to observe his showcase teachers at work. Ellen’s classroom was the first stop. I sat in the back of her room in an undersized chair as Ellen briefly set up the activity. Her voice was smooth and soft, and if I hadn’t been paying attention, I would have missed the subtle, dancing spark behind the calm. Her words didn’t leap out at the students in rapid-fire bursts or rambling diatribes, but seemed to roll out of her mouth like music, or even better, a musical roller coaster, soaring and swooping through the room, up and then down, up and then down. Before long, her voice would grow quieter and it would sound like doves’ wings rising up together, or like the muffled whisper of a cascading waterfall through a deep hidden forest. I scooted my chair up to a table full of sixth graders, listening to them discuss their project, but I was a sufficient distraction and they began firing questions at me.
“Where did I come from? Where did Wizard come from? Was I married?”
When Ellen came over, instead of doing the typical teacherly thing like asking the children to get back on task, she began asking questions too. It turned out, we had gone to the same teacher’s college in Cambridge, had lived in the same broken down apartments, had walked the same streets, and had eaten in the same restaurants. She was as curious about me as the children. It was obvious that she didn’t see herself as the supreme leader, but just another learner in the discovery process. The question “Are you married?” from a student posed a major dilemma. A guy in my graduate class had advised me to tell all interviewers that I was engaged. He said it would make me sound more stable, as though I were ready to set down roots and become a pillar in the community. So, I decided to stick to the game plan and blurted out, “I’m not married, but I’m engaged.” I figured if I were hired, later I could say that it just hadn’t worked out. Besides, it might even work to my advantage. I could explain that I had grown more sensitive and vulnerable through the whole torturous affair. I had been hurt to the very core but, for the right woman, I might just be ready to take a chance again.
The last few minutes of class, Ellen walked to the front of the room, sat down and began reading a story she had started in a previous class. The story was The Little Prince, and she read a part where the prince talked about a rare flower that grew on his planet and was in danger of being eaten by a sheep. “If someone loves a flower, of which just one single blossom grows in all the millions and millions of stars, it is enough to make him happy just to look at the stars. He can say to himself: ‘Somewhere, my flower is there . . .’ But if the sheep eats the flower, in one moment all his stars will be darkened.” Her voice made the story sound beautiful, sad and playful all at once. Soon into the story, it wasn’t as though she were reading anymore, but had started a video and we could see the little prince and hear his proud, pleading voice. I sat in the classroom praying that Ellen’s physical appearance was as stunning as her essence. Despite the obvious problems with the voice/body connection, and with no trusted handshake to guide my feelings, in the back of Ellen’s classroom that day, squeezed into a sixth grader’s plastic chair, I couldn’t help but fall hopelessly in love with a teacher who at first, at least, was only a voice.
When I was offered a job teaching English and math to fifth graders, I took it, perhaps partly because of Ellen and her class. I wanted to be the kind of teacher that she was, and to create a classroom like hers. In graduate school, a professor had compared teachers to coffeemakers. “Some stand above the students letting their knowledge and ideas trickle down into the minds of the students, but then there are those rare situations where the teacher and students all brew and percolate in the same pot.” It was an intriguing idea: teacher and students discovering and evolving together, the teacher not a pedagogue but simply a facilitator, students not empty vessels, but important resources, bursting with ideas to contribute to the classroom. It was revolutionary and I had wondered if it could truly work, but experiencing Ellen’s class, I was convinced. Ellen’s classroom was the rarer kind of coffeemaker, and I decided that Phoenix Country Day School was the place I could learn to percolate the minds of my students too, and maybe even my own.
Often, in those warm autumn months, I kept my classroom door open to the Arizona sun and would hear people walking back and forth down the sidewalk. Eventually, I could identify people by their footsteps, and each of their heels told a story. Principal John Crabb’s gait verged on a run. His flat-footed steps pounded the pavement and spoke of a dozen unwritten memos and another dozen unanswered parent phone calls. Most of the women administrators clip-clopped down the sidewalk in a precise high-heeled power walk. Their heels screamed with purpose: student financial aid to handle, scholarships to grant, textbooks to buy. “Get out of my way,” they commanded, “’cause I’m walking and there ain’t no stopping me.” Ellen would visit my classroom from time to time, and I would never hear her coming until she was already inside the room, pattering across the carpet toward my desk and asking in her soft voice, “How’s your day going?” I never had any time to react. If she had been a clip-clopper, I would have heard her coming with enough time to re-gel my hair, dab on a little cologne, and put on a tie, but she glided silently like a panther, her soft muffled sound materializing just inside the doorway of my room.
Sometimes, Ellen would offer to give me a ride home, and even though I only lived a five-minute walk away, I never turned her down. Once, we sat parked in front of my apartment complex talking for an hour before Ellen said, “Do you want to go get a beer?” So we walked across the street to the 40th Street Grill. In the bar I ordered the beer on tap, but Ellen ordered a vodka tonic and, with that, I figured I had no chance. No one sophisticated enough to drink vodka tonics could ever be interested in me. I was a little intimidated. With greyhound races blaring over a dozen television screens, Ellen asked, “So, when are you getting married?” Ellen’s simple question hit me like a hammer. I had forgotten about my little white lie.
“Uh!” I stuttered. I should have known that one would come back and bite me, I thought.
“Aren’t you engaged?”
I thought about my prepared lines. Could I tell her I had broken it off only two months into the school year? That might make me look more like a shallow loser than a vulnerable, sensitive guy. Besides, I wasn’t sitting in a dorm room, trying to hook up with a college girl. I was sitting across from a sixth-grade English teacher. She lived in a cottage on a hill with a garden; she drove a Volvo; and at this very moment she was sitting across from me drinking a vodka tonic. Finally, I said, “Well, I wouldn’t mind getting married, if I actually had a girlfriend.” Ellen was silent, no doubt quickly losing faith in another standard-issue-male pig. Then, I blurted out the whole truth, and ended with, “I really wanted the job.” Ellen laughed hysterically, so I guess that meant she believed me. No cheating scum could make up a story that ridiculous.
Later we talked about the big adventures in our lives. I told her about packing up and moving to Arizona. “How did you know you’d like Phoenix?” Ellen asked. “I didn’t know much. That’s why I picked it. It seemed like an adventure,” I answered, and actually Phoenix was like nothing I have ever experienced. Even my morning walk to school was refreshing, the feel of the cool desert air rising up to meet the hot rays of the sun and the pungent smell of the desert mixing with the sweet smell of orange blossoms. What still blew me away was plunging into the pool at my complex after teaching for the day. A few years ago, Ellen had felt her life was growing a little stale and was looking for an adventure to give her a jump start. So, she had applied to the Department of Defense Dependents’ Schools, the wing of the government that contracted to educate the children of military people overseas. Out of an immense pool of applicants, they offered Ellen a job in Oppenheim, Germany, a small hamlet situated on the banks of the Rhine River. “I had never even been out of the country,” Ellen told me. “When I waited for my plane, I was so nervous, I had to sneak away from my parents, who had come to see me off, to secretly puke in the bathroom.” But it was the story of her first day in Germany that made me feel strangely connected to her. Alone in her hotel room, with no one there to escort her, she had decided not to eat in the boring hotel restaurant, but instead had taken a walk through narrow, twisting, cobblestone streets. “Everything was so strange,” Ellen said. “The cars and trucks were strange with long license plates and stubby bumpers; the houses were strange. They had pointy tiled roofs and window boxes filled with bold, red flowers; the signs over the shops had strange sounding names like Spielgefahrt and Schuhgeshaft; even the trees were strange. They were so much taller and skinnier.” Ellen had stumbled upon the town square, where drunken men in stockings and lederhosen and women in frilly blouses and long skirts celebrated the grape harvest by dancing arm in arm to an oompah-pah band. Above the square loomed a giant cathedral with a huge stained-glass window and an enormous bell that reverberated through the village every fifteen minutes. “Behind the cathedral,” Ellen said, her voice almost a whisper in the loud bar, “I found a bone house.”
“Bone house?” I repeated. “It sounds like a horror movie.”
“No,” Ellen replied, “just history.” Behind us, in the bar, greyhound races were blaring over TV sets and someone was yelling out, “Go number six! Number six!” and banging his fists on his table. “It was a little house with a tiny square window,” Ellen continued. “When I looked through, it was pitch black, but when I pushed a button, the room lit up and I could see ancient bones. They were stacked up like cordwood. One pile was for bones and the other for skulls. I was staring through the window wondering how all those bones got there when the town bell rang out. I almost leaped out of my skin.”
Ellen finally found a tiny restaurant on the bank of the Rhine River where she sat down, alone, at a table on the porch. She looked out at long, flat-bottomed barges rolling down the river with plump tidy children swinging on squeaky rusted swing sets encased in chain-link boxes. With much trepidation, Ellen had ordered the only item on the German menu that she recognized, a chef salat, but even the salad came out strangely. Instead of being fresh, all the vegetables were pickled: pickled cauliflower, pickled zucchini, pickled beets. So, she sat there alone, eating her strange pickled vegetables and envisioning plump tidy children and men in weird leather shorts dancing arm in arm, stained-glass windows and houses filled with bones. She was a young American woman marveling at the strangeness of it all; the only thing familiar was the sparkling canvas of the German sky.
I have never been to Oppenheim; I have never even been to Germany; I have especially never eaten pickled vegetables, but somehow the scene had locked itself inside me. I could feel the nervous energy, the restlessness, the expectancy, the bare trace of loneliness, and I could feel the pulse of her heart as if it were my own heart, beating hope through her living body.
Now back in Phoenix for six years, Ellen had felt that stale feeling coming on again, and Germany had definitely been an exciting period of travel and adventure. Maybe, she thought, it was the answer again. She had reapplied and was offered a new job in the Netherlands. Ellen was seriously contemplating going, convinced that travel would be another jump start. The idea that there was no clamp holding her down to this place began to haunt her. No boyfriend. No friendship strong enough to keep her in Phoenix. She had felt like a drifter, a lofty balloon that had slipped away from a hand. Finally her father had given her the advice she needed. “Maybe,” he said, “your adventure is right here. Maybe you don’t have to go halfway around the world to find it. Maybe it’s time to take a stand and find your happiness right here.” So, she had stayed and only a month later, Wizard and I had walked into her classroom.
Just before winter break Ellen and I had talked about the plans each of us had made for vacation. Ellen was sticking around Phoenix, visiting her parents, who were retired south of town, and I was going to Florida to visit my brothers and dad. That afternoon I had packed up my bags and was rushing down the sidewalk to catch my plane when Ellen breathlessly ran up behind me and handed me a holiday card. I opened it up, beginning to hand it to Ellen to have her read it to me, when Ellen said, still panting, “No! You read it.” Then my fingers explored the page and found the bumps protruding from the surface. “Merry Christmas,” it read, “It’s been very nice getting to know you.” I read the Braille aloud, then lifted my face to Ellen and smiled. “Well,” she admitted, “I had to keep it a little bland. Realize, I was dictating to an eighty-year-old blind man at the special needs center at the library.” That morning, Ellen had put the card in my mailbox in the front office, but throughout the day she had repeatedly passed through the office and had seen the card poking out from the mailbox in the exact spot she had placed it. Moments before the closing bell it was still there. Without looking to see who was watching, Ellen had bent over, snatched up the card, and sprinted out the door toward my classroom. As my fingers ran over the Braille note, I wanted to hug Ellen, but instead, I only slid the card into my bag and shook her hand. I felt her thin graceful fingers. They were strong, poised, and her smooth nails were cut straight across with no pretension. Faint lines crisscrossed her palms. They weren’t deep but the lines of an athlete. To me they showed a blend of softness and competence. As I rushed off to the taxi that would take me to the airport, all I could think was that she had passed the test. Ellen had passed the hand test.
* * *
Two days after Christmas I had called Ellen from Florida and invited her out for New Year’s Eve upon my return to Phoenix. I went all out, renting a limo to take us to dinner, dancing, and later a comedy club. After that night, we were seldom apart. Our first months together passed in a blur of excitement: long rides on my tandem bike and hikes in the desert where we encountered rattlesnakes and javelinas. Over a romantic dinner I asked Ellen what she wanted out of her future, and her response was quite miraculous. “Some girls dream of a fancy church wedding with rose petals carpeting the aisles and bells ringing. They want a big house with a white picket fence,” she said, “but I’ve never dreamed of those things. I want to live a life that is extraordinary, never ordinary,” and if extraordinary was what she truly wanted, she definitely got a healthy dose of it by dating me.
At first, I could tell Ellen especially struggled with the peculiarities of blindness. She was sort of a shy and private person, and she wasn’t used to the attention I often received. Everyone is fascinated with the relationship of a blind man and his working dog and it often feels as though we are at the head of a parade. Ellen would watch as people lined up, crouching low, pointing, and staring. “Look, Mom, there’s a dog in the supermarket. Can I pet him?”
“Honey, that’s a working dog. He helps that nice blind man see.”
“Why does he need a dog to help him see?”
“Because he’s blind, honey.”
“Then how does he know where he is? Does that lady tell him?”
I could almost hear Ellen’s grimace. She knew, however, that people had good intentions, and they just wanted to let me know how wonderful they thought our partnership was. “Such a beauty! Is it your best friend?”
“It sure is,” I replied, massaging Ellie’s shoulder.
“What’s its name?” And I replied, “Ellen.”
In February I persuaded Ellen to go away with me to northern Arizona for a lovely romantic ski weekend. “We’ll sit in the hot tub,” I urged, “drinking wine with the snowflakes landing in our hair.”
“And what about the skiing part?” Ellie asked innocently. “Have you skied before?”
“Plenty of times,” I lied. Actually, I had only been once, five years ago in college, and the experience had ended with me lying spread-eagled on top of a bush, pulling burs out of my crotch. “Don’t you worry!” I tried to set Ellie’s mind at ease. “Guiding a blind person down a mountain is really easy. There’s nothing to it.”
Intuitively we had managed by Ellie skiing close behind me while calling out some simple commands like, “Turn—turn now! Oh, God I can’t look!” and had managed to avoid any major trauma until the end of the day. We had chosen President’s Day to embark on our maiden ski voyage, the most crowded day in the resort’s history we later learned. So it was quite miraculous that we remained upright as long as we did. I found myself actually in sync with Ellie’s commands and showed off my athletic ability by whipping aggressively from turn to turn in my best Wide World of Sports impression. Skiing down a blue run, we had just dropped over a steep, mogul-filled, icy section. Unknown to Ellie at the time, a woman had just wiped out ahead of us and she and her boyfriend were sitting at the worst possible place on the slope—just hidden below the lip. We were moving so fast and they were in such a bad spot that when Ellie saw them it was too late. I think she said something like, “Ughhshhtuh.” The lady’s boyfriend was right next to her, helping to sort out her skis, so when I connected, it was with two bodies, not just one. In this case, blindness worked to my advantage, because sight didn’t cause me to tense up or to flail pointlessly. The whole thing was surprisingly painless. We were a contorted tangle of protruding arms, legs, heads, and skis, like a monstrously deformed octopus. I popped up, brushed myself off, and laughed off the whole incident, annoyed underneath, but not wanting to make Ellie feel guilty or cause her to lose her confidence.
On the campus of Phoenix Country Day School, Ellen and I tried to keep our relationship private from the snooping eyes and ears of students and, even worse, other teachers. At work, it was fun to be formal around Ellen. I never quite knew who might be listening. At break, I got a kick out of saying very properly, “Good morning, Ms. Reeve.” With her responding, just as properly, “Well, good morning to you, Mr. Weihenmayer.” But even with no exchange of words, when passing by her, I had a secret weapon to tell me she was near. If she was within range, Wizard would slow down and begin veering slightly toward her, panting a little harder and sometimes even making tiny high whimpers. Ellen and Wizard had become good friends, often playing a game of catch together after school in front of my apartment. If I was walking with a line of fifth graders behind me, I’d point in the direction of Wizard’s subtle veer and call out confidently, “Hello, Ms. Reeve,” to the complete amazement of the students. “Didn’t you know all blind people have a bit of ESP?”
* * *
Each relationship has a transitional moment when two people begin to feel so comfortable with each other that they decide to share something embarrassing or let slip something a little less than appealing. It might come with a fart or belch in front of a partner for the first time. At this moment it might be argued that you are truly intimate. Our moment was a bit different from most people’s. We were sitting on my bed when I took out my glass eye for Ellen. I had been warming her up to the idea by mentioning the possibility of a glass eye and then pretending to take it out by pulling down my lower lid and exaggeratedly popping the back of my head with my hand. But just to throw Ellen off, I’d perform the procedure on my right, real eye. Ellen would peer closely into the eye and proclaim, “It looks too real. It couldn’t be fake.” So, I would repeat the procedure on the left eye. “That one looks real too,” she’d say. Then, sometimes, over an intimate dinner in the midst of a conversation, I would begin to casually tap one of my eyes with the nail of my forefinger, as if I were thinking really hard about what she was saying, except I would really be tapping the bottom of the table. I kept this up for a week, until Ellen was thoroughly confused. Behind all the joking, I was actually very sensitive about the loss of my left eye. I had never taken it out in front of anyone, even members of my own family.
Once in graduate school, with a relationship growing quickly sour, I had considered taking it out, but for less admirable reasons. We were on a ferry going to Nantucket Island for a girlfriend’s birthday. My idea was to have her close her eyes while I placed something in her hand. “Honey,” I would say gently, “it’s a birthday surprise.” And when she opened her eyes and peered excitedly down at her hand, something unexpected would be staring back at her. But I was scared that she would be so shocked, she might fling my eye overboard, and so the surprise gift only remained a fantasy.
With Ellen it was different. Even though I wasn’t comfortable with the idea of a prosthetic eye, I wanted her to know me, even to know me with one less eyeball than I was supposed to have. So, while sitting on my bed, Ellen looked into my eyes and said, “Come on! Take it out.” Her voice sounded like she had scrunched up her face, preparing for the gruesome sight. “Take it out! Take it out!” she chanted. “It won’t gross you out?” I asked. “A little, but take it out anyway.” She insisted. So I pulled down my lower lid, nodded my head forward and popped it out for real. Ellen let out a little puff of air. Since she was just a little grossed out, I decided to go the distance and fully gross her out. I stretched out my arms in front of me, palms up, the prosthetic eye lying on top of my palm like a crown jewel, and shuffled stiffly toward Ellen like a mummy. Ellen squealed and darted from the bed. As I chased her around the apartment, I moaned like I had just woken from the dead and opened my eyelids as wide as they would go. I heard her tucked down on the couch, trying desperately to quiet her breathing. When I came near her, she laughed and I collapsed on top of her. I laid my hand on her face and knew her eyes were squeezed tight, so I gently pried them open so she could see my one open socket and the pink flesh behind it as I kissed her. Ellen returned my kiss.
* * *
It was Wizard who finally gave our secret love affair away. One day, I was helping a student after school and was late for the faculty meeting. Out of breath, I rushed down the sidewalk, around the corner, and swung open the door. The meeting had already begun. Quietly, I told Wizard to find a chair. Customarily, he would walk us over to an empty chair and lay his head on it. When he stopped, I would slide my hand from his back, down to his head and muzzle, touch the empty chair and sit down. Wizard weaved through the crowded desks and lowered his head. My hand slid down his muzzle but instead of an empty chair, I felt knees and heard Ellen’s giggle. Wizard laid his head on Ellen’s lap, his big tail wagging. She whispered, “Wizard, Wizard, not here. Find another chair.” Ellen had been waving him away, while stifling a giggle, but to no avail. The entire faculty erupted in laughter. Wizard’s wagging tail and his bright eyes staring up into Ellen’s shocked and laughing face had confirmed their every suspicion. The cat or, in this instance, the dog, was out of the bag.