Blinding Light

by Paul Theroux

  One day in early summer he was with Ava in his library, working on the novel, when she handed a card to him. He framed the card in his hands, then smoothed it, touching the raised lettering with his fingertips, and said, “An invitation. I can just about read it. The Wallaces?”

  Ava said, “The Wolfbeins. Party at their house.”

  The noise Steadman made in his throat, adenoidal, approving, sounding interested, put Ava on the defensive.

  Ava said, “You could do without going.”

  She was the one who usually wanted to attend parties, and when they had stayed away she accused Steadman of being vain, of sniffing at his old friends, of being a prima donna. The Wolfbeins’ summer place was in Lambert’s Cove, which necessitated a long drive from Steadman’s up-island house, and for the past few summers Steadman had avoided such parties. Yet he was interested.

  “I think I should go.”

  “Are you serious?”

  “My debut,” he said.

  “What a word.”

  “To show myself as I am.”

  She laughed loudly. “You sound like such a fairy, saying that.”

  “You don’t get it.” He was smiling, with his face in front of her, his blank gaze. “I mean go blind.”

  He could hear Ava’s whole body react, seeming to stiffen in objection. “That’s just a stunt,” she said.

  “I am most myself when I’m blind.”

  “It’s a drug!” Ava said. “You are seeing phosphenes—they exist outside a light source. It’s a dazzling delusion, a kind of migraine. And what will you do when it wears off?”

  Steadman turned away from her and said, “I have to go there.”

  He was thinking of the future—his desire to move on, because he needed to distance himself from Trespassing and its youthful halftruths. And since taking the drug he had thought a great deal about death. He might die at any time. And the man he was now bore no resemblance to the man people thought they knew. He imagined them praising him in a eulogy, putting themselves in charge of his history, writing his obituary, speculating, for no one was more presumptuous or untruthful than an obituarist.

  “No one knows me,” he said. “No one ever knew me.”

  Ava was silent. She did not need to insist or even mention that she knew him, that she was the only one. She said, “Finish the book, if you want to reveal yourself.”

  He shrugged, because that was obvious and it had always been his intention. He was obsessed with writing the one book that would say everything about him, disclose all his secrets. He would have to call it a novel, because the names would be changed, but the rest, the masquerade of fiction, would be true, for a man in a mask is most himself.

  “I want people to see me like this,” he said. “My friends, anyway.”

  “Going to the Wolfbeins’ is going public,” Ava said. “It’s always the A-list.”

  He was silent again. He could see she wanted a fight. And anyway it was true—he wanted to go public.

  “Your blindness is a lie,” she said. “It’s temporary. The phosphenes are in your brain and your optic nerve, caused by whatever shit is in the drug.”

  “No,” he said.

  “A game,” she said.

  “A choice,” he said. “And I want to see these people.”

  “See?”

  “Know them,” he said.

  3

  STEADMAN WORE DARK GLASSES, he carried a narrow white cane. He did not need the cane, except as a prop and a boast. The insect eyes of his lenses and his thick pushed-back hair emphasized his sharp inquisitive face. Ava had chosen his clothes. He could have passed for a stroller at the West Chop Club—white slacks, yellow shirt, white espadrilles, a slender whisking cane.

  “You putz,” Harry Wolfbein said. And to Ava: “What’s with him?”

  Steadman said, “Relax, Harry. I’m blind.”

  A rush of air was audible at the word, and in a vacuum of embarrassment that followed it Wolfbein breathed hard in apology.

  Steadman wished only to state his blindness, not discuss it, not be clucked over and pitied. So, to cut him off, Steadman said, “There’s some sort of engine noise over there I’ve never heard before.” He gestured beyond the house, toward the big garage. “Transformer, generator—what is it?”

  “Bug zapper,” Wolfbein said.

  Steadman knew he was lying. He said, “Then what’s all the auxiliary power for?”

  Before Wolfbein could recover and respond, a man entering behind him said, “Oh, God, another rat-fuck.”

  Recognizing Bill Styron’s voice, Steadman greeted the writer and his wife, Rose. They said they were glad to see him. He did not announce his blindness; everyone would know soon enough. As for his dark glasses and cane, the Styrons just smiled in sympathy. In his nonwriting years, as a reaction to his obscurity, Steadman had affected odd habits of dress and behavior, as a defense, so that his raffish eccentricity would be noticed and not his silence.

  “Rat-fuck” was the right expression for a party where a mob of people stood and drank and yelled in your face, looking past your head as you looked past theirs, for relief, for escape, for someone better known or wittier. At a certain point a party was just that: a loud room of coarse static, like a rookery of big frantic birds.

  The moment he had arrived at the Wolfbeins’ house in Lambert’s Cove he knew the party was unlike any other summer thrash. He did not discern the contours of people; he understood their essence. He needed to be blind to feel the voltage, the pitch and whine of it, like the whir of a spinning ball of molecules. The furious hum beneath the chatter that drifted from the house kept Steadman listening and in that hum discerning the distinct character of people. If he had not been blind, would he have been aware of the woman—all eager atoms—who had begun to stare at him and stalk him from the moment he stepped onto the front porch?

  He heard her heartbeat, he sensed the woman as a pulse in the air, as an odor, a hot eye, in the deepening shadow. And when he drew near her and was surrounded by other guests, she touched him, probably thinking that he would not be able to distinguish her from the others—stroked his arm, touched his mouth, left a taste on his lips. It was not her touch that lingered but an oily dampness, as if her salty sweat-warmed hair still clung to him and got into his nose and onto his tongue. He had caught the animal scent and kept sniffing it, the trail of it that curled from the woman’s body like a distinct invitation in all that noise.

  As a younger man, Steadman had liked such party loudness for its concealment. The noise was like darkness and made your plea inaudible to everyone except the woman you were imploring. A party was an occasion for a dog-like mating ritual, for bottom-sniffing and innuendo. In a large noisy crowd in which anyone could be touched, a party was a liberating prelude to sex. A crowd became a sort of dance, in a room in which you paired up with someone and got her to agree to see you later, meet you secretly; it was an opportunity, a beginning, an abrupt courtship.

  But this event at the Wolfbeins’ was not that at all. It was a gathering of older, milder, successful people, all of them friends, and well past the frenzied adulteries of their earlier lives. Steadman was a friend, too, but different in being a year-rounder on an island where summer people believed they mattered most.

  The summer-camp atmosphere of the Vineyard in high season was so intense and infantilizing that Steadman hardly went to parties. Besides, when the summer people departed just before Labor Day, the year-rounders were on their own, and it was awkward for them to admit that in the off-season the islanders seldom met except at the supermarket, the post office, or the ferry landing.

  “The guest of honor isn’t here yet.”

  “Steadman thought he was the guest of honor.”

  “Maybe he is, now,” Wolfbein said softly, with a new sort of reverence. “It was really nice of you to come, Slade.”

  The gratitude in Wolfbeins chastened voice Steadman heard as piety—that Steadman, crippled and handicapped, was doing them
all a favor by showing up, being brave. Like a limper dragging himself into daylight, the proud damaged man was going public.

  If only they had known. Steadman believed himself to be gifted through his blindness, superior to them all, with the power of special insight. He had come just to be visible, to declare his blindness. He was Ishmael, believing that no man can ever know his own identity until his eyes are closed. Steadman thought: No one can ever claim to know me now.

  And, as he had suspected, the fact of his blindness at the party gave him a kind of celebrity. The only way to reveal his secret was to present himself here, where most of his friends happened to be, none of them his confidants, since he had none. He was greeted by Mike and Mary Wallace, Beverly Sills and her daughter, Alan Dershowitz, Mike Nichols and Diane Sawyer, Mary Steenburgen, Walter and Betsy Cronkite, Skip Gates, Evelyn de Rothschild and Lynn Forester, Olga Hirshhorn, Ann and Vernon Jordan. He would either keep his blindness a secret or allow these people to know. He could not be selective in telling people on this island, where people talked—did nothing but talk.

  “I feel like Zelig,” Dershowitz said, bumping into him, then profusely apologizing, before inquiring about the cause of his disability, as though appraising his condition in a bid for a possible personal-injury lawsuit.

  “All my fault,” Steadman said.

  “Our own Tiresias,” Styron said with his customary gallantry.

  Steadman did not mind being seen as a tragic hero. The only alternative was to joke about his blindness, and he saw that as vulgar ingratiation—not beneath him, but a distortion of how he regarded his blindness. When his book appeared, his true responsibility would be known.

  As though commiserating, Wolfbein was talking about someone he knew who had macular degeneration—how sad it was—and Steadman seemed to surprise him by saying, “That might be the best thing that ever happened to him. What’s his profession?”

  “That’s the point,” Wolfbein said. “He’s a writer, like you. He needs his eyes.”

  “He doesn’t. He’ll be a better writer,” Steadman said.

  “I don’t get it.”

  “Our eyes mislead us,” Steadman said.

  “I hope you’re right.”

  “You’re looking at me as though I’m a cripple,” Steadman said. “Your eyes deceive you.”

  “What do I know?” Wolfbein said, insincerely, helplessly conceding it, as if deferring to a cripple, changing the subject.

  Steadman said, “Harry, you’re not convinced. You’re thinking I am a poor bastard trying to make the best of it, putting a brave face on his handicap, saying, ‘Cripples have a lot to teach us!’ Because I’m a hopeless case, banging into walls, grinning into empty space, stumbling down stairs, with food on my chin.”

  “I don’t think that,” Wolfbein said, but still he sounded insincere.

  “‘The blind man shits on the roof and thinks that no one sees him,”’ Steadman said. “Arab wisdom.”

  “Don’t be a putz.”

  Steadman could sense the man’s uneasiness. Wolfbein was trying to be a friend. He was so overwhelmed by the sight of Steadman, transformed with dark glasses and a white cane, he did not know how to conceal his pity. And so, more than ever, Steadman was sure he had done the right thing in showing up here. He would never have known this otherwise.

  But between his up-island house and this party—between the seclusion of his Gothic villa, with its long blind nights and sexual revelations, and the glare of this public appearance—there was nothing. Anyway, wasn’t that the point? He was glad to attend such a lavish party, because it allowed everyone he knew here to see at once what had happened to him.

  When he had said that to Ava, she had replied, “They’re seeing what didn’t happen to you. Why are you misleading them? This is such crap. You can see perfectly well.”

  “No. I can see better this way. Only they don’t know it.”

  Ava cringed whenever the partygoers expressed their sympathy for him. And it was worse for her when they commiserated with her, confiding their fears. They clucked and urged him to be brave, and all the while Steadman was laughing and protesting, “I’m fine. I’m working again. I’m doing a book.”

  Wolfbein said, “No reflection on Ava, but are you seeing a good doctor?”

  “I am seeing what is not visible,” he said. “And I am seeing more of Ava than you will ever know.”

  Wolfbein had been joined by his wife, Millie. She kissed him, her large soft breasts cushioning her embrace. She said, “I’m really glad you came.”

  “So am I,” Steadman said. “I didn’t realize until I got here that it was such a big deal. Whom are you expecting?”

  In the silence that ensued he could tell that she exchanged looks with her husband, hers a meaningful frown that mimed, Who told him?

  “It’s someone important,” Steadman said, sure of himself.

  “Whose mind have you been reading?”

  “There are so many people here who don’t belong. I don’t mean guests. I mean lurking heavies, muttering men. The tension, too. Some people suspect, some don’t.”

  He knew Millie was smiling, and he could hear the flutter of her heart.

  “All this apprehension,” he said. “What are you waiting for?”

  “POTUS.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Elvis.”

  “I knew it.”

  Millie squeezed his hand and left him, and a heavy breather he knew as Hanlon massaged his shoulder, said, “Great to see you”—the blind, Steadman now knew, were constantly being touched. Since arriving at the party he had been pinched, fingered, handled, steered, all by well-intentioned people.

  Even Ava touched him when she reappeared. He said, “The president’s coming.”

  “Cut it out,” she said, but he sensed her looking around and recognizing the oddities—the generator, the buzzing phones, the extras, who must have been security men.

  The president was on the island—everyone knew that—and there was always a possibility of his appearing, since Wolfbein was a friend and a fundraiser. But of all the guests, Steadman alone knew with certainty that it would happen. He understood the voltage that seemed to run through the party, heard the scattered cell phone crackle, the awkwardness of the advance team.

  The party guests saw only the people they knew; he saw everyone. The deck and the garden were full of people, but near the big garage and among the trees were the president’s support crew and the mute, watchful Secret Service people. Beyond this crowd was another crowd.

  Before anyone else, before the Wolfbeins even, Steadman knew that the president’s car had drawn up at the front of the house, and after the president was greeted in the driveway by his hosts, Steadman was the first to know when he came near and presented himself. It was a pulsing in the air and a heartbeat—distinctly the president’s, distinctly quickening, an ugly flutter of embarrassment.

  The moment the president entered the room, Steadman felt a change in the atmospheric pressure. Then some people turned; others were still talking. There was a rattle in the air, an anxiety, the president exposed, prowling yet seeming like prey. The hot concentrated gazes of the guests were all directed one way, making a crease in the room.

  “I can’t believe he’s talking to Mike Nichols.”

  “Roth,” Steadman said.

  Philip Roth was chuckling. “Mike is saying, ‘I should have put you in my movie. You’re perfect. Why did I use John Travolta?’ See his face?” Then he clasped Steadman’s arm, a bit too tightly. “Oh, Jesus, Slade, I’m so sorry.”

  But Steadman said, “I can see his face. He looks more complicated than I expected.”

  The party became circular, electrified and orderly like a magnetic field, the whole house in motion, with the president at the center and the first lady at the periphery, another eddying motion, people wheeling around her.

  Noticing that Steadman was carrying a white cane and wearing dark glasses, the unmistakable props
of blindness, with his head alert, looking proud in his obvious posture of listening, the partygoers gave him a wide berth, which allowed him to slip nearer and nearer to the current of the force field, toward the president, whom he could make out as a warm pink smiling being, hyperattentive and talkative at the center of a large admiring group.

  Likable, friendly, sexually obsessed, everyone knew his traits: charming, needy, subtly competitive, willing to woo, craving power and adulation in such a compulsive way, yet indifferent to personal wealth, not materialistic, funny, intelligent, eager to please. And because of all of this, especially his strange deflecting smile, he conveyed the strong impression of trying to live something down, that he was burdened by secrets.

  To Steadman he was like a high school senior from an ambiguous background who fought desperately for influence, eager to charm everyone, to be the student-body president. He had the high school attitude toward money, too—the insight that money was not power, that only persuasiveness and approval were power, and the president craved approval.

  The president was speaking in his easy unhesitating drawl to Mike Nichols, an enthusiastic assertion about a movie, but he was also speaking to his dazzled listeners. Steadman approached and at once the group parted for him, and the way the human heat was bulked in that opening conveyed to Steadman the physicality of the man, the confident way he was standing, gripping one man’s shoulder, holding a woman’s hand. He eased her against him for a photographer, all the while talking to Nichols about the movie, which was The Barefoot Contessa.

  “I was fourteen, fifteen, just a kid, sitting there in the movie theater in Hot Springs and going like this!”