On Looking: Essays Read Online Free

Inviting. Hospitable. I didn’t know that.
    I’ll go on then, angled to the pour of these forms.
    Though this may seem indecorous.
     
     
    The hotel manager in Cambridge that afternoon was impatient with me. His name was Khalid. He was bald and had a large, flat forehead that shone. But his forehead was crushed in one spot, like a soda can gets dented. Or a garbage can. And the light lingered there, on the dent, and darkened as I asked—and asked again—for directions to the airport. Someone must run their hand over the dent and smooth it and know the dip of bone and hammock of skin as one knows the contours of a temperamental lock, how to jiggle and fit the key, first one way and then the other, unthinkingly. And though I repeated the words back—Red Line, Green Line, Blue Line, Shuttle—I was really, standing in front of him, jiggling the key. Hand on the tumbler plate, pushing to go in.
     
     
    My child comes close to touch the imperfections of my face. Touches the flaws because they beckon. The white bumps and red bumps. Small scars. Dark spots. Counter, original, spare, strange. He touches because he can, because I allow it, though hiding back there (it’s bubbling up, he’s capping it, tapping it back down) is this: that thrill without a name. That weird package of love and revulsion, that “glad it’s not me” layered over with real tenderness. Some forward sway. Some retraction. And him teetering on the line between. When he does this, all the soft, pink, round things, all the brown, scarred, pitted things that held me as a kid come back. I remember my own secretive glances at the compromised, familiar faces I loved as a child. The tiny, stiff hairs that made nets to catch me. How even as I twisted free, I wanted to be caught.
     
     
    Here is a man fated to chew as if perpetually working an olive pit out of his mouth. There is a boy who spits when he talks and snuffles and is just too watery to make friends. And with the stem of a dandelion, cut, its bitter milk touched to the tongue, here I am, calling it “milk.” Swallowing the bitterness so that an outward sign might match the inner atmosphere I carry with me these last, long days of fall. Swallowing makes me wince and contort. I feel my mouth tighten and take some more in. If it’s poison, it’s not enough to hurt me, I reason. And anyway, I’m testing. Making tests. Rehearsing ways a face can twist.
    I use a mirror for this.
     
     
    I’ve been watching her run the bobbing-for-apples booth at the local fall festival with her friends. After long minutes, I draw a horizontal line to see the way the girl would look if her jaw could be fixed, reinvented, if it wasn’t so lumpy and overgrown. I draw with a black line, in my head. And then, because I’m at a distance, staring, I squint and hold up a finger to nudge the line of her new jaw into place. But the new line doesn’t work. Not at all. The next week, at a restaurant, in a booth across from me, is a younger girl with a half-sagging face and a bulging cheek. I go to work with my tools, sharp scalpel of sight, and pare her back to a simply chubby moon. I tack the sag up by her ear; I fix the slipped mouth. But her face is a soft curve of fine sand, a dune blown to an easy rise. It slips back into place and the fixing is wrong. The swell is like a velvet bag. What lovely behaviour of silk sack clouds. Throughout dinner she rested that cheek in her hand, as if she was thinking. Though I’m afraid she was hiding.
    “When the eye sees something beautiful, the hand wants to draw it,” said Wittgenstein. And DaVinci wrote of the bodies he took apart to study, and to his colleagues inclined to work as he did “. . . if you should have a love for such things, you might be prevented by loathing . . . and if this did not prevent you, perhaps you might not be able to draw so well as is necessary for such a demonstration . . . or if you had the skill in drawing, it might not be combined with