Chapter 2 New Frames #3
Richard hurried out through the glass hospital doors and lit a cigarette in the wind near Public Parking.
He was the problem. Smoking when he said he’d quit.
Dating someone much too young. He was Debra’s eternal quarry, and she would hunt him down, even to his mother’s sickbed—even when his mother wasn’t sick.
He was the sick one. Sylvia was wonderful, as she told everyone. Lew did everything right, but Richard returned to Philly with a raw cough and sore throat. He leaned against the train window and when he closed his eyes he saw Debra sitting down to interrogate Corinne.
By the time he got home, he felt like crap. This is what he told Corinne on the phone. He couldn’t see anyone, not even her. “Trust me, it’s bad,” he said. For three days, all he could do was drag himself to work, drink Scotch, and sleep.
—
“Don’t kiss me,” he warned when Corinne came over Friday night. “You’ll catch my cold. It’s a terrible cold.”
She wasn’t afraid of colds. She sat with him, sharing his armchair, and he wanted to confide in her.
He wanted to tell her his worries and his fears—but in the end what could he say?
Debra was after him, his taxes were overdue, his body ached, he missed Max, and he felt guilty about missing his dog so much.
He had children, after all. “I feel behind,” he told Corinne at last.
“What do you mean?”
“I’m behind on everything.”
“Make a list!”
He stroked her arm. She was so practical, and, of course, she had no idea.
She said, “Seriously. Let me help you!”
“You can’t.”
Corinne straightened, resisting his resistance. She worked as a project manager. She planned entire kitchens! “Just tell me what you have to do.”
“Okay, first of all, I have to make sure I don’t screw up my kids.”
“No, I’m talking about stuff you can actually get done—like this week.”
He shook his head at her.
“Just do the little things first.”
“There are no little things! I’m talking about my entire life.”
“Okay,” she said quietly.
“Not everything fits into a list.”
“I know that.”
“I’m sorry.” He realized that he’d offended her.
She rested her head on his shoulder. “I’m just saying you have to start somewhere.”
“You’re right,” he said. “I’ll get new glasses.”
“Yeah!” Corinne brightened immediately. “That’s what I’m talking about.” She took off his rimless glasses and her blue eyes blurred; her hair poured over her shoulders. He sensed rather than saw her loveliness.
“I need a new prescription,” he told her.
“You need new frames,” she said.
—
He asked her to go with him to 4EYES, and she practically skipped into the store. He spoke tentatively to the salesperson, but Corinne was already plucking frames off the displays.
Standing back, Corinne watched Richard try on each. No. No. No. No.
“Really?” he said, after eleven pairs.
“Trust me.”
“I’ll have to.” Without his own glasses, Richard couldn’t see himself.
“No way,” she declared when he slipped on gold-rimmed aviator glasses.
Richard turned to the salesperson, Nora, a puffy woman his own age. “She’s decisive.”
“That’s the way to do it,” Nora said.
“I guess I’m trying on everything in the store,” he said, even as Corinne handed him a pair of black rectangular frames.
“Yes,” she said as soon as he put them on. “Those are amazing.”
Nora said, “Wow. Just wow.”
“These are the ones?” Richard squinted at the mirror.
“Don’t you feel like a new person?” Corinne said.
Phototrophic, he turned toward her bright spirit, and he said yes. I’ll take these. He said, These are good, but he meant Corinne’s hope and confidence. He handed Nora his prescription and filled out paperwork and it felt right to choose new frames.
“You two take care now,” Nora said, as he walked out with Corinne.
“You two!” Corinne whispered, laughing.
At the end of the week, Richard picked up his new glasses. Nora was there, and all the displays, just as he had left them, but he came alone. The errand was ordinary, gray—until he left the store with his new lenses. Then the world changed. The train, the streets, the smallest details were precise.
Revelation. Upgrade! At work he recognized his colleagues all the way down the hall.
In restaurants he no longer mistook every pear-shaped woman for Debra.
With his new prescription, he could read street signs.
Walking through Old City he could discern individual red bricks.
At Lily’s orchestra concert, he could pick her out playing her half-size cello, way up on the risers.
There was a downside to such clarity. He noticed thick dust covering his shelves, a faint water stain on his kitchen ceiling. Outside he saw rotting leaves shellacked to sidewalks. Peeling paint. Wires wrapping tree branches, not just twinkling lights.
Of course, no one else noticed Richard’s new lenses. Everyone remarked on his new frames.
“Dude,” the guy at the gas station said approvingly.
“Hey, hey, hey,” Richard’s assistant at work exclaimed.
He heard that he was hot, that he looked like a novelist, that he seemed European. He went alone to a bar after work and a young man approached at closing time. A very young guy, even younger than Corinne.
“My name is Milo.” The kid’s eyes were liquid brown and earnest. He had faint stubble on his chin. “Pardon me for staring.”
What is happening? Richard asked himself, although he knew exactly what was happening.
Milo said, “I think you’re very interesting.”
Richard stood and shook the kid’s hand in a manner almost fatherly. “It’s good to meet you, Milo.”
The boy looked hurt, curious, and finally amused as Richard buttoned up his coat and walked out, stepping heavily, trying to embody age and experience, maybe even wisdom, although his black frames told a different story.
Could new frames make such a difference? Richard remembered a cartoon from his childhood. An ordinary insect donning square eyeglasses to become the mighty Fearless Fly.
His daughters approached warily. Sophie said, “Dad!” as though he had embarrassed her again.
Lily mourned the old frames. At night, she cried into her pillow. “Why did you change?”
“They’re just glasses. I’ll take them off. I’m taking them off.” Richard bent over her.
Lily wailed, “Now you can’t see me!”
He didn’t need to see. He knew what Lily was thinking. He was not the same; he would never be the same.
He sat up worrying, but as usual, Lily felt better in the morning.
The girls got used to his new look. His friends stopped commenting.
Fashion victim. Narcissist. They judged him silently, but what did Richard care?
He had confirmed their worst opinions long before.
The scary part was the way Corinne began to treat him.
Was it his new frames? Or had he spooked her by admitting his sadness and fears? Somehow she lost her banter. She was sweet—even concerned—while she had joked before.
Standing outside the Miller Theater for Chicago, the national tour, she looked at him with tenderness, even concern. “Don’t smoke.”
He paused but lit his cigarette anyway.
She had never lectured him before. In fact, she had smoked with him on occasion. Now she said, “Seriously, don’t.”
“What’s going on?” he asked.
“Nothing! I just don’t want you to die.”
He waited for some quip to follow, but that was all. “You sound like Lily.”
She didn’t take offense. She mused, “I should probably meet her.”
“What?”
“I mean, sooner or later I have to meet them,” Corinne explained. “Debra messaged me.”
“Debra?”
“She was really casual like Hey this doesn’t have to be awkward I’d love to talk sometime p.s. I don’t bite.”
“P.S. Debra is not casual.” Richard took a long drag. “Everything she does is preplanned. Do not go near that woman. She’ll eat you alive.” He was trying to find words dark enough, but he had been a father for too long. “This is not okay!”
“She sounded pretty—reasonable.”
“She hates me.”
“Maybe now she’s in a different place.”
He put out his cigarette to pick up their tickets at the Will Call window.
“Richard Eisen,” he said. “Thank you.” Then, in a low voice to Corinne, “She is not in a different place. She’s in the same place as before.
Living in my house, driving my car. She would actually kill me if she could get away with it. ”
“She would not.”
“You don’t know her! This is a woman who won’t let me visit my own dog.”
“That is sad,” Corinne admitted.
“Do not write back.”
She hesitated.
“You answered her?”
“I didn’t want to be rude.”
He threw up his hands. “What did you tell her?”
“Nothing specific,” Corinne said. “Just sure maybe sometime soon. I wasn’t trying to upset you. Sorry!”
—
Enough. Richard confronted Debra about her proxy wars. He stood in the foyer of his old house and his voice was low but furious. “Stop. Just stop. Do not talk to my mother or Corinne behind my back. You want to tell me something, speak to me directly. Do not manipulate them.”
“I’m not manipulating anybody,” Debra whispered back.
“You crossed the line.”
“I crossed the line?”
“The children are not pawns,” he said.
“Don’t start.”
“What are you talking about? Don’t start what?”
“Don’t talk to me about pawns.”
Their volume was escalating, but they cut off as the girls ran downstairs.
—
That week at parent-teacher conferences, Richard and Debra sat as far apart as possible. Lily’s teacher had to turn her head to speak to each of them.
“Sometimes Lily looks tired. I think she’s having trouble concentrating.” Mrs. Grolnick placed a math quiz on the table.
Richard tried to make out Lily’s answers slashed with red. “Is she sleeping in class?”
“No, but she’s having trouble focusing. She seems down.”
“What do you mean down?” Richard asked.
“There’s a lot going on,” said Debra, and Richard shot her a look because he knew those words were meant for him.
“What happened here?” Debra bent over the quiz.
Mrs. Grolnick said, “Well, this was the unit test. I think she’s having trouble with the…”
Richard tried to understand the teacher’s explanation, but like a man with tinnitus all he heard was Debra berating him and Lily crying. He heard Lily’s voice, SEE ME, although those were the teacher’s words in pen.
“Listen,” Debra told him in the hall afterward. “We’re going to have to work together on this.”
“Yes,” Richard said.
“We can’t let Lily spiral into math anxiety.”
“Agreed,” Richard said.
“So, I’m going to look for a tutor, and we’re going to work with her at night. And also, I think she needs to see someone about her anxiety. My sister knows someone who specializes in anxious kids.”
“Okay, yes. Good,” Richard said.
“Thank you.”
Debra drove off in Richard’s ex-car to his ex-house and he ducked into the boys’ bathroom.
The urinals were short. The tiled room was empty. He stared at himself in the mirror washing his hands. What was he doing with those ridiculous black frames? He took his glasses off and his eyes were shadowed, slightly red.
—
He went to 4EYES and got Nora to find him rimless glasses like his old ones, self-effacing.
“I have to say, I like the square ones,” Nora said shyly. “They’re showstoppers.”
“That’s the problem,” Richard said.
Two days later he picked up his new frames.
When he met Corinne that night for drinks her face fell. “Ohh, what happened?” she exclaimed, as though he’d hurt himself. “Why did you change back?”
“The new frames weren’t good.”
“The ones I found you?”
“Yeah, I didn’t like them.”
Puzzled, she said, “Yes you did!”
“They looked ridiculous.”
“What do you mean? You looked amazing.”
“Well,” he said wearily, “what if I don’t want to look amazing?”
“You liked them before,” she insisted.
“You liked them.”
She looked confused.
“I really have to concentrate,” he told her.
“And those ugly glasses help?”
“Yes!”
“Okay,” Corinne said, slowly.
“Lily’s failing math.”
Corinne didn’t see the connection, but she tried to follow him. “Maybe she can get a tutor.”
“We are. We are getting her a tutor, obviously.”
“You don’t have to be mean.”
“It’s not just Lily. It’s Sophie too.”
“What’s wrong with her?”
“Nothing. She hates me.”
“How are you so sure?”
“She’s my kid,” Richard said simply.
“Therefore, she hates you?”
“Therefore, I know.”
Corinne sighed.
“You don’t want to hear all this.”
“Yes I do.” She had been carefree, lighthearted before. Now she was involved with him.
He said, “I’m not dragging you into my kids’ problems.”
“That’s okay!”
He could see her hurt and confusion as he said, “No. Not happening.”
She flinched, and he hated himself, but what else could he do? Wryly, he admitted, “The thing is, I can’t run away with you.”
“I know,” she told him.
He said, “I have to think.”
“About what?”
“You’re wonderful,” he said. “You deserve everything. But I have to help Lily. I’ve been distracted.”
She didn’t answer.
“You’re so young,” he said.
She stared at the table.
“I’ve got to pay attention.”
“I thought you were paying attention before.”
“Only to you,” he said.
“Okay.” She did not lift her eyes.
“Okay?” he echoed hopefully. He just wanted to avoid a scene and tears. He wanted Corinne to laugh with him as she had in the past. To end this lightly. But she did not laugh.
He kept talking and explaining. He said, Believe me, if it were different, but she did not say, I understand. He said, The children need me, but she did not say, Of course. Please, he said, but she would not engage. She wouldn’t even look at him.