Blinding Light

by Paul Theroux

  Steadman ignored him and said calmly, “Those thefts you attributed to the Indians in the village and the people in the hotel. Your binoculars, your knife, your traveler’s checks—that was Manfred. He stole something from each of us.”

  Janey said, “Is this true, Manfred?”

  “Is a lie.”

  But just that denial and the way he swallowed and sulked seemed the clearest proof of his guilt.

  “I’m not missing anything,” Sabra said.

  “He knows your Social Security number,” Steadman said.

  He surprised himself with his own fluency, for he said these things without being aware of knowing them. And time was irrelevant, for nothing was hidden and he seemed to have access to the past in perfect recall. He knew everything that he had seen, and beneath each surface, as though in a state of controlled ecstasy—Sabra fussing in her wallet and Manfred staring hard at her clump of cards, the Social Security card on top, giving her full name and number.

  “He memorized your numbers. He has one of your American Express card numbers too, but there’s a credit limit,” Steadman said. “He has all your details. He can do a lot with them. Ever hear of identity theft? He can open an account in your name. He can access more of your information on the Internet. He can get a lot of money out of you long before you realize it. That’s why he’s leaving tomorrow. By the time you get back to the States, your cards will be maxed out.”

  The room was silent except for the coarse scraping sound of Manfred’s breathing through his nose.

  “I’m going to ask the hotel to go through his room,” Hack said. “If they find my knife and Janey’s binoculars, I’m calling the police.”

  “Go ahead, look,” Manfred said, with energy the others took to be bluff. But he stood up and seemed to be edging toward the door, as if to prevent anyone from leaving.

  “You look worried, Herr Mephistos,” Wood said.

  Hack said to Steadman in a slurry drunken way, matey, slightly cockeyed, “I don’t know how you knew this, but if you can prove any of it, there’s something in it for you.”

  Steadman said, “Maybe it’s better not to look for the things that Manfred stole. I mean, what he said is true—he has quite a lot of influence.”

  “He’s a thief. You said so.”

  “You’re a thief, too,” Steadman said.

  Ava said, “Darling, please,” as Hack bristled, stepping back, looking as though he were about to take a swing at Steadman, who was still seated impassively in an armchair. He stared straight ahead, looking through Hack’s face.

  “You’ve been sleeping with Sabra,” Steadman said.

  Sabra gasped and stood up and denied it. Wood went close to her and said, “Beetle?”

  Janey started to cry, saying, “I knew it!”

  Hack made a dive for Steadman, but was body-checked by Manfred, who simply stepped into his path and tipped the lunging man aside. With this new revelation, Manfred was attentive to Steadman, who seemed to know everything.

  “It’s probably been going on for years,” Steadman said. “For all the time you people have been taking trips together. Maybe it’s the reason you’ve been taking the trips.”

  “Get this guy out of here before I fucking kill him,” Hack said.

  Wood said, “If there’s any truth in this, Hack, I’ll take you apart.”

  “What a muggins I’ve been,” Janey said, sobbing.

  Hack said, “Can’t you see he’s trying to start trouble?”

  “But you’re a cheat too,” Steadman said to Wood. “You told me about your business, but your figures don’t add up. That can only mean that when you paid off all your partners you were cooking the books so you could sell the company for an inflated price. That’s just one instance. You are incapable of telling the truth. Every time you say a number, it’s false. That book you claimed you wrote was written by some students you hired and ripped off.”

  “Bullshit,” Wood said.

  “All you’ve ever done is screw people and play with a stacked deck,” Steadman said. “So it’s kind of appropriate that your wife is a liar too.” Sabra said, “No, Wood, it’s not true. Don’t believe him.”

  But her protests were drowned out by Janey, who had slumped to a sitting position on the floor and was sobbing loudly like a big sorrowing child.

  “This is the saddest one of all,” Steadman said, still facing forward, speaking in a confident monotone. “Poor little Londoner, lost in America. She’s having a nervous breakdown and doesn’t even know it. Her husband is fucking her best friend. Both of them are lying to her. She thinks she’s going crazy.”

  Janey was murmuring “No, no, no.” Wood was glaring at Hack. Sabra’s eyes were blazing. Manfred was smiling at the confusion, looking vindicated, and he loomed over Steadman like a protector.

  Hack said to Ava, “If you don’t get your boyfriend out of here I will fucking destroy him.”

  After all these revelations, spoken with assurance, Steadman rose to go and staggered slightly. Now grasping absently for something to help steady him, he seemed uncertain. He groped forward, seeing a different room, and then hearing Ava—“This way,” she said—he stumbled and fell.

  “What’s with him?”

  “He’s blind,” Manfred said, almost in triumph, as though Steadman belonged to him. “He can see nossing.”

  Sabra looked at Steadman with wonderment, searching his eyes. She moved her hand back and forth before his face. Steadman did not blink. “I was right,” she said in a hollow voice. “He doesn’t know anything.”

  Ava went to him and helped him up. Steadman whispered with feeling, “I can’t live without you.”

  He had never needed her more. He felt woeful, as though lost on a muddy star.

  TWO

  Blinding Light

  1

  STEADMAN ASKED, “What’s that?”in a different tone, slipping into a small suspicious murmur and sucking air. He had interrupted himself in another voice, lost his fluency. His whole face went hot. He was reminded of his blindness only at times like this—the moment of intrusion by an unknown visitor, a dark noise, a sudden shadow he knew to be human.

  You’re in full flow, the most intimate description, your last word “lingerie,” and now there’s a distant glimmering, the gulp of a quickening pulse, the chew-grind of trodden gravel, pebbles masticated by advancing footsoles. Until then it had been an average afternoon in his many-gabled house, on his estate up-island on Martha’s Vineyard. He was lying on the sofa with his back to Ava, dictating his novel—drugged, blinded. Then he heard the stranger’s heartbeat.

  His voice was sharp: “The back door. It sounds like someone. A woman.”

  “I don’t hear anything.”

  “She hasn’t knocked yet. Go look.”

  Narrating a sexually candid episode, he was unusually self-conscious; he had heard the sounds and felt like exposed prey. He lifted his head into the silence and moved like a listening animal, adjusting his body, tuned to danger, his alertness stiffening his neck, the whole room droning in his ears. He sensed that something was wrong. Anything unexpected here was like a threat to him.

  “It’s nothing,” Ava said. She did not glance up—his back was still turned to her anyway. He preferred this paranoiac posture, especially in the more sensual episodes. Even so, he could feel the warmth of her body when she was near him, as she was now, waiting, glowing, radiating body heat.

  Ava reversed the tape to play the last of Steadman’s dictation, where he had broken off: All he could think of was the woman waiting for him after the meal, the lingerie —

  Still poised upright, startled, animal-like, gone rigid in attention, listening as though in a green clearing, he seemed to see the shrouded head, the suggestion of a uniform, the reaching hands, the broken fingernails of a meddler. The staring eyes, the big heavy feet. Only such a heedless intruder would make those sounds. Someone who did not belong always announced the fact in clumsy noises, or in the glare of meaningles
s silences. Even without knowing who owned it, strangers were often attracted to the big Gothic island house set in a meadow behind high stone walls, its cupola taller than its oldest oaks; but all strangers were unwelcome here.

  Then there came a loud knock, insistent knuckles on wood.

  “I said, go look.” His voice was breathless, his jaw set in aggression. He hardly paused before he added, “Doctor.”

  While Ava went to check the back door, Steadman touched the face of his watch, examined the hands, and turning he felt the warmth of a fierce sunset reddening the side of his face, the back of his hand. Great hot quilts of cloud spread across the sky, a broth of blue growing pinkish in a vast band of color, then quickening to fiery tatters, molten and purple—five seconds of that before sudden tumbled lambs appeared and gathered, were whipped into peaks to become a mountain range of gilded summits, subsiding slowly, pink again, just an orange stripe low in the distance. The whole stripe was simplified to a speckled egg, but a crimson one, and ultimately a blind eye.

  He almost smiled to think that something might be wrong, that there might be an intruder. So much else had gone his way these past months that he was prepared to be thrown.

  The glow was still in the sky, still on his cheek, and though the trees were cooling fast, the shade thickening in their boughs, some light and warmth remained in the western quadrant beyond the cove, like a lamp in the corner of a room, fading from pink to yellow-blue, the way embers go cold.

  Ava entered the room holding something against her body—a package, a dense parcel, which she placed on the table. The way it settled told him the thing was heavy for its size.

  “A woman,” Steadman said.

  “Right.”

  “Told you.” He was the assertive man again, speaking in his own voice.

  Instead of answering that, she said, “FedEx. The latest transcript of the book.”

  He saw it as Book. The manuscript was always capitalized in his mind, for he thought of it as The Book of Revelation.

  That news pleased him—to think, after so many years, that he was embarked on a new book and was making progress. Even if he was just a name to some people, he had a large and appreciative public, eager for this book, and he was glad. For almost two decades he had struggled with this second book. And, writing steadily since his return from his trip downriver in Ecuador, he had finished perhaps a third of it. That trip had changed his view of almost everything in his life and in his writing, and had given him a sense of power.

  “Shall we continue?”

  Ava sat heavily in the chair. The way she dropped herself, making the cushion gasp, was emphatic, a whole blaming statement in the sound of her sitting down: You are putting me in the wrong for hesitating to go to the door.

  Steadman felt her gaze as a shimmering light, as heat and reassurance, which said to him, You have never been safer.

  “Yes, Doctor.”

  He did not mind that she was annoyed. He was glad that his instincts had guided him: the foot-crunch in his gravel driveway spoke to him more clearly than a watchman or a sentry. Delivery people were also intruders, and the more familiar they tried to be (“Nice place you got here”), the worse their intrusion. But seeing his suspicions confirmed made Steadman calm enough to resume the dictation—or, rather, not resume but find fluency in a digression.

  All he could think of was the woman waiting for him after the meal, Ava wrote, at Steadman’s talking speed, while watching the jumping columns of light indicating the stresses in his voice on the tape recorder. Waiting in the candlelit conservatory, wearing the black lingerie he had bought for her. As he entered the room, saying softly —

  And he smiled, because this improvised collaboration was the best part of the day. He never wanted it to be spoiled by someone blundering in. When he came to the end of the day’s work he changed his tone; it became intimate, and a full day of fictional inspiration became a halting description of how he wanted the evening to end.

  Helping him, Ava said in a muted voice, “Over here.”

  Saying softly, “Over here.”

  “And he obeyed,” Steadman said.

  “Because he was in her power.”

  Because he found pleasure in submitting to her will, obeying her demands.

  Steadman loved Ava for the intensity of her confident suggestions, for her knowing how to dictate to him. I am yours. If you don’t tell me explicitly what to do, I’ll take charge, she had said in the beginning. Her assertiveness had surprised him. Their sexuality was based on trust, on invention, on surprise; making it fictional excited him.

  Because he was in her power, Steadman repeated, and was helpless to do more than obey her. He faced her in the candlelight. The lingerie— “Loose panties of black silk that she had been saving for him,” Ava said, speaking slowly, watching him closely for a reaction.

  Dictating his novel to Ava, Steadman was always reminded of the consolations of storytelling, and how it had never been much different from this, the people in ornate halls, and little huts, and around the fires at cave entrances, relating stories of desire and its consequences, whole tales for a single occasion, bright eyes fixed on the narrator, the storytelling explicit and simple, tales of travel and discovery, of startling encounters, of adultery and deceit, the satisfactions of revenge, the reverses of fantasy.

  He was afraid of them, the clothes, Steadman dictated, for the way they transformed the body, like a mask or a blindfold or makeup. Afraid, too, because they excited him—the danger of that.

  She picked this up, continuing, She realized that she had bought them for him, not herself, knowing that he wanted secretly to submit. Wearing them, she would tie his hands and slip off the black panties. She said firmly, “Put them on.” But he was helpless and so she did it for him, slowly, complimenting him on his prettiness. Then the lipstick. He would protest but be so aroused, she knew —

  “That’s enough,” he said.

  “Just as you were getting interested.”

  “Whose book is this?”

  His face was serene, for she had thought of something new—she was expert, she was full of suggestions. He was reminded of how he would have failed in Ecuador without her: she had made all the difference then in her doctoring; she was making all the difference now as his listener and his lover. They had approached this fantasy before but had never ventured further into its details, the mention of lingerie and makeup. Thinking out loud was one of the pleasures of dictation: you could say anything, you could rewind it and erase it; it was just a story, it was vapor.

  But Ava was much more than someone taking notes as he talked into the tape recorder. She was truly the doctor, watching over the man in a drug trance. Steadman, the writer, more confident than he had ever been, was reassured by her presumption. His success had begun with his dictation. He had used a typewriter and his travel notes to write Trespassing, but that was the distant past. Now he never wrote. He drugged himself and talked instead, and his novel, The Book of Revelation, was lengthening, engrossing him, a truer expression of the world he knew than Trespassing had ever been. Though the words were his, he never touched a pen or a keyboard, never made a note—that was Ava’s work. He spoke his books in the dark, in his trance state. In the dark, words mattered so much more.

  “How about a drink?” he asked.

  There was no reply. Had Ava left the room? Their routine was such a fixed sequence he could not remember whether she had excused herself or announced the fact of her leaving. But it was the same most days, that break between the end of his writing day and the onset of night. The idea was that they would have something to think about before meeting again. Reflecting on the last of the dictation, he found it supremely pleasurable to sit in this twilit part of the day alone. Ava’s elusiveness excited him and made him curious.

  Deftly searching the coffee table where they kept the tape recorder, and using his hands like feelers, he discovered a cold bucket with a bottle of wine in it. Next to it was an empty gla
ss on a tray.

  He needed variation, for the day was so orderly. There was his work, and then the end of his work, this teasing incomplete fantasy, Ava taking notes and repeating them back to him. Ava’s vanishing and the appearance of the wine signaled the end of dictation. The glass of wine meant the suspension of all work, the day at an end. At daybreak or earlier—for he could see in the dark—work would start again.

  In this solitude he sipped his wine, liking the solidity of the house, the smell of books and carpets, the whiff of wood smoke from the fire, the aromas from the kitchen, always lamb or fish stews and chowders, and bags of fresh salads sent up every morning from a restaurant in Vineyard Haven, grateful for the off-season business.

  The pale yellow Chablis in his glass was so rich that when he tipped his glass to sip, and righted it, he saw it was viscous, showing its legs sliding on the side of the glass. He tasted its sunshine on his tongue, in his throat, and its warmth relaxed him.

  Some evenings Ava helped him off with his clothes, like a mother undressing a child, her clothes brushing his nakedness, her sleeves against his bare skin, nannying him with expert hands.

  “I like that.”

  He could tell that she liked it, too, and though at these times there was no sexual pressure in her fingers, he could feel that she enjoyed touching him, her hands familiar and warm. This was especially so when she methodically shaved him, bringing a pinkness to his cheeks with the shaving brush and scented soap, lathering his stubble, sliding the razor and making a satisfying burr as the hairs were scraped away. And every two weeks she gave him a haircut, with clippers and a straight razor, standing quite close to him, leaning her slender thighs against him, her breasts brushing him. She was not just deft hands but a whole confident body, somewhat off balance.

  Some nights she would wash his hair with a light touch, so gentle and yet with assured finger pressure. And then she would give Steadman a towel and help him into his robe. But tonight he bathed alone. The tub was full, the bathroom was fragrant with a scented candle. He could not eat until he had bathed and changed his clothes and had a drink or two. In clean clothes he was preparing himself for the next part of the day, and was a new man. It was all as deliberate as the ritual of dictating his book. He could not rush from his day of writing in his studio to Ava’s suite. It was important that he pause and savor the interval. He needed to think deeply about what was to follow.