Beautiful Blue Eyes by Lawrence Buentello
Everett Anderson, like so many other people in the world, was searching for love ... of a particular kind.
At Christmas he might find himself decorating a traditional Scotch pine with beautiful glass ornaments, but always alone. On New Year’s Eve he might celebrate with old college friends, most of whom were married, though he’d arrive at such festivities invariably stag. And the Fourth of July holiday always seemed to find him sitting by himself in his brother’s backyard in Wisconsin watching his nephews tempt fate with illegal fireworks.
In short, Everett seemed incapable of attracting the opposite sex. Or any sex, for that matter. Some people in the world, especially those searching for a particular kind of love, never seemed to achieve their dreams. Some simply failed to perceive relevant social signals—a knowing wink, or a subtle comment on the clever orientation of a gold-plated tie clip. Some people, Everett included, seemed to simply possess the poorest of timing.
But, then again, sometimes a man can get lucky.
This was precisely what Everett Anderson thought when he found the advertisement in the Sunday newspaper’s singles column.
Secured deep in the maze of tiny boxes of plaintive requests for meeting the perfect—if not perfectly obscene—mate was the simple message: Beautiful Blue Eyes, #1001, New York.
Everett, an ordinary man with quiet hazel eyes and a decent apartment somewhere in the vicinity of Manhattan, pulled the paper closer to his nose, uncertain if he’d read the entry correctly. The sheets fluttered against his temples as he focused. But it was true—the entry clearly read ‘Beautiful Blue Eyes’.
This was a sign to Everett. Since adolescence he’d fantasized about the perfect woman, and his fantasies always centered around a singular quality: no matter how many hair styles, physical measurements and mercurial personalities flowed through his mind, they all seemed to collect around the central fantasy of a pair of gorgeous blue eyes. And not just any shade of blue, but the crystal clear blue of white light through a perfect diamond, or the bluest water on a haunted sea, or the untainted blue of a perfect summer sky.
Everett preferred not to think of this as a perversion.
But when a man feels the need for love—of a particular kind—and he’s lived to his thirty-first year without having had a single memorable relationship, sometimes the smallest sign seems profoundly significant.
Which is why he immediately rose from his chair and hurried to the kitchen, his eyes still focused on the tiny box, to find a pair of scissors. This foray was as much of a risk as he’d taken since playing competitive chess in college, and it was a minor miracle he made it to the kitchen without suffering serious injury.
He clipped the ad, with plenty of border space, wiped the perspiration from his ever-widening forehead (and didn’t he really want to find love before going completely bald), and taped it to the refrigerator. Then he opened the laptop computer sitting on the kitchen table and tremblingly sacrificed a major credit card number to join the agency sponsoring the advertisements.
When his credit card cleared and he received a welcoming email to “Special Loves, Inc.”, he sat for a moment in quiet thought before composing the following message—
* * *
Dear Blue Eyes:
After reading your ad I realized that it must be more than coincidence that has caused us to cross paths in this life. I suppose it’s premature to tell you of my dreams and desires, but I do feel the need to describe the supernatural intuition I feel that you and I are meant to meet. Please respond. I promise you won’t be sorry. I’m enclosing my email address, my home address and telephone number. If I’m not being too forward, I think our meeting was predestined.
Your future love, Everett Anderson.
* * *
Everett, being no Lord Byron, thought this sentiment full of romance and poetry. And who could possibly resist a man of letters?
He sent the message to the address provided by the agency and checked his email twenty times a day for a response. He made insensitive inquiries of the mail carrier. He foraged through the messages on his answering machine for an encouraging reply.
A week later, he was still foraging.
Two weeks passed, then a month. Everett thought about making queries to the agency, but eventually his ardor cooled, and he came to realize that some people, no matter how poetically inclined, were just meant to be alone.
* * *
The morning after this epiphany, however, Everett woke from the strangest dream of his life. He’d been swimming in a sea of crystal clear water, a drifting man-fish pursued by an ethereal vision of shimmering blue eyes circling him like a determined predator, or, perhaps, a watchful companion.
Now, this sort of subconscious symbolism was not lost on Everett. As he sat with his arms around his comforter-crowned knees he was absolutely certain these were the same blue eyes of his life-long fantasy. His dreaming mind was, apparently, not yet ready to surrender his youthful hopes and dreams.
But it seemed his conscious mind was not so hopeful, so as he threw cold water on his face in the bathroom he also threw a little figurative water on his dreams. Dreams were only dreams, he told himself, and were more than capable of raising false hopes.
By the time Everett arrived at his office building he’d already forgotten the dream. He greeted his fellow travel agents at eight-ten, sat at his desk to review the day’s latest email at eight-fifteen, and by eight-thirty thought he was going insane.
There, overshadowing the spreadsheets and news reports, a pair of ghostly eyes floated on the computer screen.
Everett blinked, leaned forward (certainly this was an optical illusion caused by poor fluorescent lighting) and adjusted the contrast. But the blue eyes lingered in the nether sphere of cyberspace. He cut the power to the monitor and the eyes disappeared. He turned the power back on and the eyes reappeared (faintly, like his own reflection) amidst the software.
His initial reaction to this phenomenon was to realize that he was drooling because he’d left his mouth agape for too long. But then he thought to find a witness more reliable than his own affected psyche, so he stumbled to the cubicle nearest to his and said, with a straight face, “Bev, I’ve got a pair of eyes stuck in my computer. Would you take a look?”
Beverly Davis, a fortyish blonde with fair features and a coquettish smile—Everett considered this a well-practiced expression, no doubt rehearsed before a mirror for hours at time—laughed coquettishly and touched Everett’s arm.
“What did you want to show me, Everett?” she asked.
“The eyes in my computer. Hurry, before the screen saver comes on.”
So Bev, encouraged by Everett’s hand under her arm, stumbled to his desk wearing the kind of smirk reserved for bad jokes. She leaned over the desk and studied the screen. Her smirk vanished. She squinted, evidently mystified.
“What are you talking about? I don’t see anything.”
Everett cautiously approached the screen. Bev’s chin touched his shoulder. The drifting blue eyes were gone. He turned his head at various angles, but the phenomenon was not repeated. All he saw were spreadsheet entries for overpriced trips to the Azores. And then the screen saver erupted onto the screen. Drifting balloons. Strangely, none of them were blue.
Bev pulled her chin from his shoulder.
“Everett, you just called me over here to flirt.”
Everett stared at Bev, speechless. Her perfume was beginning to make his eyes water.
“No, I swear—”
“No need to explain. I understand how men are. Always trying to find a subtle way to get a girl’s attention.”
She smiled, squeezed his shoulder and walked a little too slowly back to her cubicle.
Everett sat staring at computer-generated balloons. He was sorry Bev had gotten the wrong impression—that she might return his unintentional flirtations meant nothing to him since her eyes were an ordinary brown in color, but this didn’t quite register as strongly in his mind as the fact that he must be going completely insane.
He sat at his desk for the rest of the day contemplating the apparition. Clearly, his most recent rejection had traumatized him in ways he wasn’t qualified to interpret. Was his obsession causing him to hallucinate? Was he so desperately lonely?
Everett ultimately failed to find any answers to these questions as he sat half-heartedly searching for the best price on travel packages to Buenos Aires and opening Bev’s suggestive emails: What do you want to show me now? He really wasn’t prepared to go insane. He hoped the symptoms would eventually fade, like a rash.
* * *
But the visions didn’t fade; in fact, they seemed to intensify.
On the subway ride home Everett noticed odd reflections in the window of the car. These reflections might have been an oversized pair of eyes, but he buried his face in the Times before confirming his suspicion.
He stepped in a pool of water as he left the subway car. As he stared down at his shoes in dismay—moderately priced, and evidently not entirely weather-proof—he saw the billowing image of two eyes (with lovely crystal blue irises and penetrating onyx pupils) staring up at him from the puddle. Startled, he dropped his newspaper across the visage and hurried along.
Once inside his apartment he bolted and chained the door, disconnected the telephone and huddled in bed with his knees pressed against his five o’clock shadow.
As the evening passed, Everett tried to comprehend the meaning of the visions. Could a man suffer psychological consequences if he remained alone too long? And if he became fixated on a particular kind of love was there an eventual psychic price to pay for his obsession?
He knew that what he really needed was the right woman to love—a woman with all the right qualities—and to be the only man privileged to have her love. If he could only stare into her perfect blue eyes every night secure in the knowledge that he was the sole recipient of their affection—
Everett covered his face with a pillow. Not only was he going crazy, but he was harboring desires for a love-slave. His prognosis was not getting any better.
So he called his brother in Wisconsin to unload his burden, and his brother told him to start a stamp collection. So he surfed the net to find the names of a few promising psychologists, but stopped when he realized he would be too embarrassed to make an appointment. So he paced the limited floor space of his kitchen as he tried to avoid eye contact with reflective surfaces. Then he realized that the singles ad was still taped to the refrigerator door.
He stood in bare feet studying the ad (the extra border was indeed a considerate touch) as he tried to divine the reason why it might have triggered the spilling of so much psychological dunnage. But the words were so simple, so pure, so delightfully expressive that he fell in love all over again.
Everett shrugged at his own gullibility. Exquisite as they seemed, he could either surrender to his delusions or fight to suppress them.
But suppressing delusions seemed to be beyond his sphere of influence.
That night his dreams returned, and this time they were accompanied by a soundtrack.
Everett, why are you ignoring me? the eyes seemed to whisper through a billowing unconscious sea. Or, at least, he thought they were whispering. The eyes circled him in a great ocean, drifting through undulating tendrils of seaweed. I thought you loved me, I thought we were destined to be together.
Everett’s dream-persona sputtered unintelligible bubbles.
Everett’s real-life persona rolled out of bed and bounced his forehead off the carpet.
When he was able to recognize his surroundings he stumbled to the kitchen, stripped the singles ad from his refrigerator and stuffed it down the garbage disposal. It was only a symbolic act, but it was the only action he could think to take to counteract the morbid feelings left by the dream.
* * *
The next day at the office, however, he thought of another way.
Everett asked Bev Davis out to dinner.
She seemed to accept his invitation as an inevitable event. Her smugness was nearly impossible to endure, but endure he did, showering her with imaginative compliments and painful conversation. It really wasn’t fair of him to use her as a psychological distraction, but Everett was desperate.
They went to Henri’s On the River and sat at a fairly decent table with candlelight and aperitifs. A huge aquarium festooned with tropical fish stood near the hostess’s counter, which troubled Everett a bit, but he managed to smile as he handed the woman his coat. The only eyes that watched him from the aquarium belonged to a wayward angelfish.
“Everett, I never thought you’d find the courage to ask me out,” Bev said as she dropped her linen napkin onto her thighs.
“I decided to risk rejection,” he said with a grin. “But what fun is life without taking a few chances?”
He could see, in an objective way, that she was an attractive woman with a good deal of sensual allure—but her eyes were dark, unresponsive, impassable. It was as if he was staring into a body without depth, without a soul. He felt no arousal for her, no desire.
Still, he hadn’t seen anything out of the ordinary since picking her up in a cab outside her apartment building. He was beginning to think Bev was just the right therapy.
“You’re such a peculiar man,” she said as she probed her lobster. “But I find strangeness attractive. You know, oddness. Someone who seems connected to something beyond the ordinary.”
Everett bit his lip and nodded.
“Amour is something beyond the material world. The language of love is ethereal. You wouldn’t believe what speaking in tongues does for me.”
“Tongues,” he said, sipping his martini.
“Love is something that needs to be experienced through other senses. Love and sex.”
“Sex,” he murmured.
His fork was poised to spear the lightly baked flesh of his flounder when he suddenly realized that the olive in his martini had become a perfect blue eye—a blue eye that was staring at him accusingly.
Everett, how could you cheat on me with another woman?
Everett dropped his fork and began choking.
An old gent grabbed him from behind and began administering the Heimlich maneuver.
“Everett, what’s wrong?” Bev asked imploringly, though her consumption of lobster wasn’t significantly compromised.
Everett managed to fight off his elderly savior and stared at the martini glass. The olive had reappeared.
“I’m sorry, Bev,” he said abruptly, “I have to go.”
“Why? Is it me? You don’t like me, after all? We haven’t even had sex yet. Who’s going to pay?”
Everett dropped a credit card on the tablecloth and hurried to the door. As he pulled his coat from the hostess’s hands he caught a glimpse of the aquarium—the angelfish’s eyes were now terribly large and human. And blue.
She’s not right for you, Everett. I’m the one you dream about.
Everett dropped his coat and fled.
* * *
Later that evening the doorbell rang.
Everett answered the entreaty with a bottle of Wild Turkey cradled against his chest.
The deliveryman handed him the envelope without changing expressions. When he extended his hand for a tip, Everett handed him the bottle.
At first he thought it was a certified letter announcing a civil suit filed by his angry co-worker for psychological damage suffered on their date. His credit card had, unfortunately, expired the previous month.
But once he opened the envelope and read the letter his heart began to pound like a drunken jazz drummer.
* * *
Everett:
Your letter was inspiring, and I share your intuition about our future. I hope our meeting will be the beginning of a lifetime of love and caring. I’ll be visiting your apartment tomorrow about eight o’clock. I hope your arms will be open and waiting for my love.
Your future recipient of affection, Beautiful Blue Eyes.
* * *
Everett couldn’t find a name on the paper, only the familiar #1001, New York of the advertisement.
He stared at the letter a moment, trying to settle his thoughts. He tried envisioning the face of the woman who’d sent it, her hair color, weight, potential blemishes, the timbre of her voice—but all he could really see were her eyes. Beautiful blue eyes, swimming in the Sargasso Sea of his dreams.
He felt some pity for the woman, though. Tomorrow she would arrive to find a lunatic obsessed with visions. How long would it take for her to perceive his unraveling perceptions and flee the building?
Everett lay down on his sofa. Perhaps his thinking was too defeatist. Perhaps this woman (beautiful, beautiful, beautiful blue eyes) would be the one to wake him from his obsession and set him on the right path. The right path being, of course, sanity.
Which meant that he only had a little time to run his best sport coat to the cleaners, vacuum the apartment and get an emergency teeth-whitening.
And, strangely, once he was preoccupied with these preparations, he found himself free of visions. He hurried to the elevator (slowed a bit by too much Wild Turkey), dragging his sport coat across the hallway by the sleeve.
* * *
Sitting in his living room, remaining motionless to prevent his trousers from wrinkling, Everett felt a delightful calm fill his mind. It was nearly eight o’clock. The room was immaculate, the dishes washed, the bathroom sanitized, and his bad breath neutralized by masticated sprigs of mint. The apartment’s atmosphere was as near to religious purity as he could imagine.
He’d seen no visions, heard no voices since receiving the letter. And he’d slept dreamlessly the previous night. He felt so good about his circumstances that he let the last few days spiral away from his consciousness as if nothing unusual had happened at all. A box of chocolates lay strategically positioned on the coffee table, and a magnum of champagne stood chilling in a bowl of ice in the kitchen. The telephone directory lay by the telephone, opened to the best restaurants in the city. Well, the best restaurants that delivered, anyway.
The doorbell rang.
Everett nearly hurdled the coffee table getting to the door. He peered through the peephole hopefully, but was disappointed to see a scruffy teenager wearing a baseball cap peering back at him.
“Who is it?” Everett said.
“Runners Express. I got a delivery.”
He tried to remember if, in his delirium, he might have ordered some Mandarin chicken from The Wokkery (his favorite), but decided he hadn’t.
“I didn’t order anything.”
“I got a package for Everett Anderson. Are you Everett Anderson?”
“Yes.”
“Then I got a delivery for you.”
“All right, but hurry up, I’m expecting company.”
Everett opened the door, signed the teenager’s manifest and accepted the package. It was now past eight o’clock and he knew she would be stepping off the elevator any minute. He looked around the apartment for a place to hide the box and settled on the closet. But before he opened the closet door to drop the delivery onto his neatly aligned shoes he noticed the return address on the package: #1001, New York.
Curious, he began unwrapping the brown paper enclosing the box, wondering if his future love had sent him a gift. Cigars, perhaps? A nice set of candles? When he finished pulling off the paper he found he was holding a small aluminum cube adorned with an odd array of dials and clasps. The words Caution—Fragile were stenciled on the cube’s shining material.
Everett knew then that a woman would not be stepping off the elevator. He realized, most intuitively, that there would be no woman at all.
Strangely, though, as he stood in his immaculate living room holding the cool aluminum container, he felt no anxiety, only a quiet sense of anticipation. So when he opened the carefully sealed lid the experience wasn’t nearly as unnerving for him as, say, someone without Everett’s particular perspective on beauty.
Hello, Everett.
Actually, it was love at first sight.
