Read Innocents and Others for Free Online Page A

the wires to the phone lines to a switching station, turned into microwaves speeding across the country with the memory—the imprint—of her exact tone, her high and low frequencies, her elegant modulations, to the switching station in Santa Monica, sending electric current up the PCH to a Malibu beach house and into Jack’s receiver—undoubtedly a sleek black cordless phone. So fast too: instantly made back into a sound wave by the tiny amplifier near his ear. All that way, all those transformations, but no distortions. A miracle of technology. The sound was as clear as speech in a room. She could, she could—amazing—hear the ocean in the background. A gull, the sound of water pulling back from beach. She swore she could hear the sun shining through his west-facing windows.

JELLY AND OZ
    Many years before Jelly called Jack, before she had begun phoning men for love (not work), and before she had recovered her sight, she had fallen in love with Oz. She met him in the summer of 1970 at the Center for the Blind.
    Oz was bald and a lurching, lumbering six four. But his hands were soft and she liked the push of sweat with the air-faded tinge of clove that she got when he put his arm across her shoulders. Jelly was more than a foot shorter than Oz, and his arm across her shoulders was a natural fit. Later she would discover that the faint clove she got under—or right up alongside of—the sweat was from an old sachet that she found when she pulled open his undershirt drawer to put away the laundry she had washed and folded for him. It shocked her to see this girlish thing, an ancient silk square with a ribbon. She only saw it as a bruise of pink, but she could feel the slight catch that comes in the weave of older silk fabric. The sachet must have been in the bureau when he got it from the Salvation Army. Because Oz wouldn’t buy a sachet of spices and put it in his drawer, would he? That seemed very unlikely. But surely he noticed the scent—his blindness made every scent noticeable. Distracting, even—one got so sensitive, and the overlay of scents could be deceptive, puzzling. Jelly had slowly stopped calling a smell “good” or “bad.” Instead shethought of them as “real” or “cover” smells. She just wanted everything to smell as it was. Actually. An armpit should smell of sweat and hair and skin. A mouth should be clean but not minty. Hair should smell slightly vegetal, plantish. And a room should smell like old wood. A candle like melted beeswax. The street like rain and leaves. The backyard of grass, earth, flowers. Walking into a store and getting the rank sting of ammonia under fake pine could make her feel ill in a matter of minutes. She would leave gasping for air, clutching a hand to her nostrils.
    Even the real smells overwhelmed her lately. She could barely walk past her neighbor’s house with its ridiculous lilac tree. What kind of tree is this, with its heavy sudden bursts of overripe flowers? It too made her bring her fingers to the base of her nose. Just thinking about the rotting blossoms brought back the dense thickness of the odor. She had taken to crossing the street and pointedly facing away when she couldn’t avoid walking in the direction of that house and that tree.
    Oz gradually taught her the phone stuff. He had a kid’s red plastic whistle that he got from a Cap’n Crunch box, and he showed her how to blow pitch tones into the phone. Oz had perfect pitch and on his own could whistle the unlocking combination: seventh-octave E at 2600 hertz. Short bursts achieved with tongue against lips and pushed over-and-out air, or by covering the second hole on the toy whistle. (“What’s a hertz?” she asked. “A vibration,” he said. “It is all waves and vibrations.”) He could connect to anyone anywhere without any charges to his line. Jelly did not have perfect pitch, but she learned how