Elizabeth Christopher
Maurice Charles
The first person Maurice thought to call was Sylvia. Even though they had divorced several years earlier, and she remarried, it was she he thought of even before his doctor. That morning, Maurice woke up to find that he couldn’t make out anything more than a few inches away from his face. Neither his reading nor distant-vision glasses made a difference. Near and far, it was the same: The world remained a blur.
Maurice had worn glasses since he was a boy, and he had learned that what sight he had was in jeopardy when, at age 13, he was told he had diabetes. He could still picture the doctor’s face as he recited a list of maladies that could befall Maurice should he fail to keep his blood sugar levels under control. The doctor’s cheeks deflated as he spoke. “Blindness,” he said “is common for those who are not rigorous about control.”
But Maurice had been rigorous. He meticulously weighed his foods so as not to have too many carbohydrates that would fill his bloodstream with glucose. He read book after book on diabetes and nutrition and was careful to get enough exercise each day. Each morning and evening, he administered his insulin at the same time. He recognized that the best way to inhabit his body was to follow its rules.
That morning, Maurice administered his insulin at the same time he had for the past 33 years. There was no explaining why his vision was failing now. But he did not call his doctor. Instead, he prepared a bowl of cream of wheat and a banana just as he had the day before. He took a shower and sat down at his dining table to work. The table served also as a desk, and the surface was cluttered with things one would typically find in its drawers: notepads, spare change, rubber bands, pens of various colors and tips, eyeglasses, scraps of paper scribbled with notes, and a draft of one his short stories. He had let a colleague read it. Miranda was teaching English while working on a Ph.D. in American Literature. For the past semester, she taught the class before his in the same room. Her class would often run late, leaving Maurice standing out in the hall with his students. He never opened the door to warn her that she had run over; instead he’d watch her through the door’s window. She sat on top of one of the small desks meant for students and leaned forward, moving her hands about when she got excited about a point she was making. Maurice found himself smiling at these times. The two of them had taken to talking between classes and sometimes in the English Department’s office. She was divorced and about his age and wanted to teach full time at a university. She asked if he was working on another novel. He told her he was writing short stories now, which wasn’t completely a lie. He had written one in the past five years, which he brought to her to read. When she handed it make to him, there were comments in the margins as if he were her student. She said she liked it very much and would he like to join her sometime for coffee to discuss it? That was two weeks ago. He hadn’t yet responded.
A folder of his students’ stories lay flat in front of him. He opened it. He looked down at a page that was filled with type. This student refused to double space his pages. “I want to save some trees,” the student had said. “And I want to save my eyes,” Maurice replied. But this was taken more as a witty retort rather than a mandate. Now, as Maurice looked at the page, the horizontal lines of text blurred together. The breaks in between words formed vertical lines of white, which he watched for a moment to see if an image would emerge like in one of those magic paintings. He brought the page close to his face in an attempt to read the title of the story. He moved it back a couple of inches. He closed one eye. He put the page down again. His head was beginning to pound. It would have been nice to have someone make tea for him. It would have been nice to have someone there to rub his shoulders and tell him everything would be ok. But things had not gone according to plan.
His apartment was a perfect square. This fact became clear to Maurice one day when he sat at his dining table and sketched it out for no apparent reason. His front door opened into the living room, the top third of the square. The next third was shared by a kitchen and dining area. His bedroom, bathroom, and a closet shared the final third. When he completed his drawing, he was impressed by the efficient use of space and took to measuring each room just to confirm his findings. The walls of his apartment were the same beige as the walls in the corridors outside the apartment. Management prohibited painting the interior any other color. But Maurice had decorated the walls with prints he’d find at yard sales or next to trash bins. It always surprised him what people threw away. The plants that now stood in front of the window in his living room had been left atop the dumpster of his apartment building the year before. But the fact that they had been left on the dumpster and not in it meant something to Maurice. It was an act of hope that someone would come along and save them.
He got up from the table to make his own tea. He turned on the burner and listened for the click-click-click of the lighter, as he set the kettle down. Then he went into the living room and sat on the sofa. He was surrounded by books and magazines. They formed piles on his coffee and side tables. He clicked on the TV, which he could not see clearly, but the jocular voices of the morning news shows made him feel less alone.
He would call Sylvia, he decided. Sylvia had a big PR job for one of the teaching hospitals downtown. Sylvia answered the phone by stating her name, which always annoyed Maurice, since her married name was no longer his.
He didn’t reply for a second or two. And when he did, his voice quavered: “Sylvia… it’s Maurice.”
“Maurice,” she said, “What’s wrong?” She said this flatly, not with concern, but the way a detective would in an old movie: “Give me the facts.”
“I don’t know,” he said. “I mean, I’m not sure—”
Sylvia interjected: “Did you have another collapse?”
“No—it’s not that. When I woke up this morning, I could barely see.”
“Did you call your doctor?”
Maurice sighed at this question. That would have been the reasonable thing to do. Sylvia was reasonable if anything, and she wouldn’t be able to understand why he had failed to take this obvious step.
“Not yet.”
“Why not Maurice? It could be serious.”
“Yes, I know.”
“And you checked your blood sugar?”
“I’ve checked it six times—it’s fine. I’ve gone over everything I’ve eaten—nothing unusual.”
“Well you need to call your doctor.”
“I know, Sylvia. And I will. But can you please come over?”
Sylvia made a long, audible sigh before she replied. “Maurice, I’m very busy, can you meet me for lunch?”
“Sylvia.” He was growing impatient. “I can’t drive, I can’t work. Please, can you come to my apartment?”
Sylvia agreed to go to Maurice’s apartment after work on the promise that he would call his doctor.
The kettle whistled. Maurice lifted himself from the sofa and went into the kitchen. He plucked a tea bag from a container on the counter and placed it into a mug. He must have made himself thousands of cups of tea in his lifetime, and this simple act did not require full vision. Thank God for that. He poured the boiling water and stood at the counter, dunking the bag several times before dropping it into the sink. He went back to the sofa, where he stayed until Sylvia arrived.
He thought back to when they met. She had been in his creative writing workshop for several weeks and had produced a couple of poems, which she shared with the class. But the first time he really noticed her, she was wearing a sleeveless shirt and had let her mane of brown hair, which she normally pinned up, flow over her shoulders. She was beautiful, but she was also one of the few students who hadn’t been afraid to disagree with him during class discussion. He began to develop a crush and had taken to making witty comments in the margins of her work. But a year later, when they met haphazardly at a bar, it was she that came onto him. She said that she had signed up for his workshop because she thought his novel was brilliant. He asked if that was so, and she nodded and said it was. Then she added that, in person, he was even better looking than he was in the photo on the book jacket. It was then that something let go inside him and he kissed her, letting his fingers explore the terrain at the base of her head.
When the doorbell rang, he buzzed Sylvia in and went out into the corridor. He recognized her instantly—the sway of her walk, the shape of her body. Even without his full sight, Maurice could see that the figure moving toward him was Sylvia. She embraced him, and he could feel the cold air on her.
“Thanks for coming,” Maurice said over her shoulder.
She pulled back from the embrace, and looked him over. “You look tired, Maurice.”
Maurice didn’t say anything, and led her into the apartment.
She took off her coat and tossed it onto the sofa. She looked around the living room. They had met several times since the divorce, but she had never been to his apartment.
“Can I get you something to drink?” Maurice asked.
“No, Maurice.” She sat down on the sofa. “Did you call the doctor yet?”
Maurice shook his head, no, and sat down beside her.
“I didn’t think so. I called Phil after I spoke to you this morning. He knows an ophthalmologist downtown. And he got you an appointment for tomorrow.” She opened her purse and pulled out a piece of paper.
Maurice took the paper from her, held it close to his face, and then tossed it on the table in front of him.
“Maurice, usually it takes months to get an appointment with this guy.”
“I’m getting used to bumping into walls.”
“Maurice you have to take this seriously!”
“I do.”
They were both silent.
“Maurice, you have to think of your health.”
“Yes, I know.”
On his 40th birthday, the novel Maurice had been working on for a decade was published.
It had been the prospect of reaching middle age and having only a spotty career as a copy editor to show for it that made Maurice finally finish it. It was a crime novel in which the murderer was the brother of a respected politician.
The reviews themselves were mediocre and he blamed the sloppiness of the copyeditors for twice getting his name wrong and referring to him as “Charles Maurice,” but the book was a bestseller, which Maurice attributed to luck and the astute marketing campaign behind it rather than the eloquence of his prose. It seemed, a similar, real-life scandal had made national news, which the publishing house did not fail to notice. “We can certainly ride that wave,” the agent had said to him over the phone. A book tour and a teaching position had been handed to him after that.
Sylvia mesmerized him. At 19, she was more comfortable in her skin than he had ever been in his. Without his book, he knew he would never have gotten her. But to his surprise, she had fallen in love with him. One morning, after they made love, he taught her how to administer his insulin. Her hands were steady as she pressed the syringe into his thigh. Despite his success, her parents didn’t approve of him. He was far too old for their daughter. Nevertheless, he proposed to her on her graduation day. They eloped that summer.
Sylvia surveyed the magazines on the table. There were all sorts of titles. She picked up an aviator trade journal from the coffee table. “Still reading everything under the sun, I see.”
“Not lately.”
“I think you buy these to pick up girls. You used to try to impress me with trivial facts,” Sylvia leafed through the magazine’s pages.
“You noticed.”
Sylvia stood up. The bookshelf on the opposing wall held a number of figurines. She crossed the room. “This doesn’t seem like your taste, Maurice,” Sylvia said handling one.
“What is it?” He squinted in an attempt to see what she was holding.
“It’s a little girl with her dog.”
“That was my mother’s. You take it. She’d want you to have it.”
“Oh no, I couldn’t.” Sylvia set the figurine back down. “I’m sorry I didn’t go to the funeral.
“It’s ok,” he said.
“I liked her very much. It’s just that,” she paused. “It was so soon after the divorce.”
“I understand,” he said.
Sylvia walked over to his dining table. “This place is a mess, Maury,” she teased.
Maurice laughed. “It doesn’t bother you when you can’t see it.”
“How are your classes going?” Sylvia said. “Are you still at—”
“Yes. Community college students aren’t exactly Hemingways.”
“And you, are you working on anything?”
“Nah. I’ve given that up, so to speak. I had my one great novel. I know to quit when I’m ahead.”
Sylvia spoke slowly. She didn’t look over at Maurice. “You used to have such passion—in class, when I met you. You were a great teacher because of it.”
“That wasn’t passion. That was desperation.”
Of course the university had expected him to publish a second novel. The head of the creative writing department would often peer into his office asking to preview early chapters of the next book. But Maurice wasn’t writing. He no longer cared about writing. He’d arrive home hours before Sylvia, who worked for a burgeoning PR firm downtown, and cook an elaborate meal or draw a bath for the two of them. If it was warm enough, he’d coax her outside and they’d hold each other in the hammock while the sun set. With Sylvia, he was impulsive—although he’d still wake at the crack of dawn for his shot. He was happy for the first time in his life. But by the next year, Maurice still wasn’t writing, and the university told him they would not need him back in the spring.
“Are you seeing anyone?” Sylvia asked, still surveying the bookcase, her back to Maurice.
“No,” he replied. Then he thought of Miranda, and how she brushed her red curls from her face when she spoke with him. “I mean, yes. Sort of.”
“Good,” Sylvia said, turning around. “Good. I’m glad to see you moving on.”
“I’m sorry if I haven’t been able to move on quite as quickly as you did.”
“Maurice, it's been three years.”
Maurice didn’t need Sylvia to tell him that. He knew exactly how long it had been.
“I’m sure all this must be pretty revealing for you,” Maurice said.
“What?”
“All of this,” Maurice waved his hand through the air.
“My apartment. My life.” He forced a laugh. “I mean, you have the fortune to look down the path not taken. That is a very special opportunity. Down one path is your ex-husband: Middle-aged, a failed novelist, possibly going blind. Down the other—the one you have wisely chosen—is your new husband, a young, successful doctor. It must make you feel pretty good.”
“Stop it, Maurice. Is that why you had me come here? To watch you feel sorry for yourself?”
Maurice gave a half smile. “How is Phil?” Maurice asked.
“I’m not going to do that anymore. Feel sorry for you. And if you knew better, you would stop doing it too.” Sylvia walked across the room toward her coat.
“No, don’t leave. I’m sorry. Please stay. Have a cup of tea with me. What time is the doctor’s appointment tomorrow?”
Sylvia watched him carefully. “Noon. Phil got him to see you during his lunch break.” Sylvia released her coat.
“Well, be sure to thank Phil for me.”
Sylvia looked at Maurice, but didn’t respond.
“Really,” he said. “Thank you.”
They made tea and sat on the sofa. Maurice was glad to have the company. He had created a monastic lifestyle for himself since the divorce, without regular social contact. Teaching at a community college meant he was surrounded by younger and younger instructors who would teach for a year or two while working on their PhD.'s and then disappear to respectable, four-year institutions. He had not been on a date for over a year, and the women he did meet he was not interested in. They all seemed to be overweight and wary of men. That was until Miranda showed up. But he knew she was out of his league, just as Sylvia had been.
Maurice took a sip from his cup and set it down on the coffee table. He turned to face Sylvia. “You know, that day in the courtroom. You were standing in front of the judge, buttoned up in your suit; your hair was wrapped up in a bun. And there was a lawyer standing next to you and a lawyer standing next to me and I wanted to call out to you and say ‘stop. Just stop and come home.’ But you were standing there in your panty hose and you didn’t look at me. And I was thinking, ‘she’s gone, my wife is gone.’”
“Maurice, that was a long time ago.”
“You broke my heart, Sylvia.”
Sylvia didn’t respond.
“And then I collapsed. The doctors later told me it was the stress, the trauma of the divorce, that contributed to my blood sugar dropping so rapidly. And the next thing I knew, you were beside me. My head was in your lap. You took one of the hard candies I always keep in my jacket pocket and rubbed it in small circles on my tongue.”
Sylvia moved slowly as she set her cup down on a stack of books. She picked up the piece of paper from the coffee table. She spoke softly, without looking at him “You need to learn how to take care of yourself—for both our sakes.” Sylvia stood up to put on her coat. “I do hope you get better, Maurice.”
The next day Maurice took a cab to the address Sylvia had written on that piece of paper. The ophthalmologist’s office was on the eleventh floor of an old brick building downtown. When he got out of the elevator, he half expected to be told that there had been a mistake and that he didn’t have an appointment, but the receptionist instead asked him to take a seat and fill out some paperwork. Maurice explained that it strained his eyes too much to read and write, and she agreed to fill out the paperwork for him. He leaned into the window and answered each of her questions until the forms were complete.
He was escorted to the doctor’s personal office instead of an examining room and was invited to take a seat in one of the two leather chairs that stood in front of a large desk. When the doctor came in, he introduced himself and shook Maurice’s hand. He was tall and spoke quickly. As far as Maurice could tell he was in his forties, but he wasn’t able to make out the details of his face.
The doctor asked him how long he had been experiencing blurred vision and called him Mr. Charles. He folded his arms as he listened to Maurice and leaned against his desk.
The doctor followed up with several more questions, asking if he had experienced any ringing in the ears or headaches. Maurice told him he had. The doctor made some notations in his chart, and nodded several time. He explained to Maurice that many of the symptoms he had been experiencing could be attributed to high blood pressure.
“Do you mean that I am not going blind?”
“We’ll need to check your eyes to see if there is permanent damage, but if carefully controlled, hypertension should not cause further damage to your eyes, no.” A nurse then led Maurice into an examining room where she dilated his eyes and took his blood pressure several times, putting him in a different position each time—seated, standing, and lying. The nurse confirmed that his blood pressure was indeed elevated, and the doctor set about examining Maurice’s eyes.
The good news was that Maurice’s eyes were not permanently damaged. The doctor gave Maurice a prescription for blood pressure medication, and urged him to make an appointment with his general practitioner right away. The doctor also had a nurse get Maurice a home kit so that Maurice could track his blood pressure daily. The idea of tracking his blood pressure appealed to Maurice. He was used to checking his blood sugar level every morning and evening and this routine had made him feel—if not that he had control of the diabetes—that they shared a civil coexistence.
When Maurice got home, he sat down at his table and placed the kit in front of him. He wrapped the cuff around his arm and attempted to take a reading as the doctor had shown him. He held the gauge close to his face, straining his eyes to make out the numbers, but couldn’t get an accurate reading. Frustrated, Maurice ripped off the cuff and let the gauge bang on the table as it fell. He slumped forward, holding his head in his hands and closed his eyes. He knew he would not see Sylvia again.
He opened his eyes. He was not going blind, he reminded himself. He would get better. He looked at the pile of his students’ stories and then at the draft of his own story, with the red scribbles in the margins. He was glad Miranda couldn’t see him this way: Frustrated and helpless. He wanted to be better than he was. Maurice put on the cuff again, securing it with the Velcro strap. He squeezed the rubber bulb until the cuff stopped the flow of blood through his arm. He held the gauge close to his face and released the valve slowly, watching intently for the first beat of his heart.
©2005 by Elizabeth Christopher
Elizabeth Christopher lives north of Boston with her husband and two cats, Nuala and Ted. She thanks her father for getting her started, and the sessions with Sara at Diesel Café for keeping her going.
