He could go home but required watching. We would, gladly. Watch. Him. Unable to stare back at us, and therefore to defend himself, he’d be so darn watched. Now I see what a rehearsal all this was. Now, on rainy days, when the fingertips of my left hand go half numb, I understand that I was also hurt then. But for us, the idea of damage to Robert’s perfect features, his cool eyes especially—that riveted us most.

We’d never done home health care; we all rushed to be of use. We were fairly bad at it. We only wanted to try the fun parts—fresias near the bed, reading his Titanic quarterlies aloud to him. But oh the sight of him padding around his place, arms out, head all gauze, alive by touch, as blind as Justice—which is actually Injustice, having been blinded!

Robert soon found that he could dictate music to a girl we hired through Juilliard. I would sit there staring at his fine skull, wrapped “to go.” I sat silent, listening to him say notes aloud, and name the parts “now, French horns” and I would hear her pen, a real old-timey dip ink pen, go scratching. Making something the girl called “a fair copy.” The pen’s nib also sounded very smart if quite quite blind.

He wrote a lot of his First Symphony like that, saying it out from his pineappled fourposter, both the eyes sealed shut. She, at the window, nearer daylight, wrote it all down.

I’d never known anybody blind before. For some reason, his odd herbal scent seemed especially strong and alluring while his eyes stayed covered. I could sit three feet from him and catch its salted leafy sweetness, now lanolin, now nutmeg, then plain ole varsity B.O.

I read him all of Great Expectations. With feeling, doing every voice, and making Estella, the novel’s cold, sadistic beauty, sound as much like Savannah Angie as I could. He laughed, but with just his mouth. “Very funny,” she said flat, when I did some of her for her.

We’d all gathered. They would unbandage him today. Dr. Coen seemed disconcerted by our whole circle Marx-Brothering into a cubicle so small.

Scissors cut through gauze. Even that sound was painful. Angie and I cried, as in some forties movie. Doc’s first question, “Robert. Robert? Where is the window, Robert?” Angie and I bawled at that.

Sight began ebbing back into the right eye’s crystal-blue, the one hit worst. But its “white” remained bloodred five full months. The contrast between the red and blue—Angie admitted working with that in her painting. She cringed telling me, as if ashamed. “No, it’s good.” I touched her hand. “You’re using it, you’re making somewhat light of it, his blindness. I keep thinking about that sprayed gold magnolia arrangement on its side. I don’t know why. I feel I let it down by losing it like that.”