Blinding Light

by Paul Theroux

  The president was so much there, so willing to respond, so quick to read reactions, so present, that he had to be hiding something. Evasion and calculated secrecy were important to him, for he was both puppet and puppet master. But he searched with such close attention, charmed so completely, he took possession.

  Only Steadman saw through him, and he was fascinated, as though watching a man balancing on a high wire, while the others at the table spoke to him in such a respectful way. The aged Cronkite, so courtly as he leaned forward, said, “Mr. President, forgive me for wondering, yet I can’t help...” And the president nailed the question with an even more courteous reply.

  The man had something on his mind. He was always a fraction late in his responses, as if the lapse were another voice in his head, distracting him and demanding to be heard. What was he thinking about? Perhaps a matter of national importance, yet Steadman felt deeply that it was something else—an embarrassment, a source of shame and strength.

  “Is that the ferry out there?”

  Aware that he was being observed by Steadman—uncomfortable under his blind gaze—he seemed to be struggling for relief.

  “That’s the big ferry,” Olga said.

  “Might be the Uncatena,” Betsy Cronkite said.

  “Crossing the Sound with a bone in its teeth,” Walter said.

  Steadman said, “To Woods Hole, just to the left of the flashing light. That’s Nobska.”

  The people at the table stared at him, and the president hitched his chair back on the sand to have a view of Steadman and the things that Steadman described.

  “The lights to the west are the Elizabeth Islands. The scoop of darkness is Tarpaulin Cove. To the east, past Nobska, the Falmouth shore, Falmouth Harbor, Falmouth Heights, East Falmouth, Green Pond Harbor entrance, Waquoit, and Cotuit around that flung-out arm of lights.”

  The president was relaxed and grateful, for scrutiny had been suspended, all eyes off him at the moment.

  He said, “That’s wonderful. That’s amazing.”

  Steadman then named some of the stars in the northwest sky.

  “I don’t see a thing!” Olga said.

  “Light pollution,” Steadman said.

  Walter said, “Slade knows these waters well. I like having him on board when we take the Wyntje out.”

  Steadman said to the president, “The white line just offshore is the standing wave in the chop on Middle Ground Shoal. Sort of foaming in the moonlight. Great fishing spot.”

  The president, seeming to be lost in this conversation, said, “We had a real nice sail yesterday in James Taylor’s boat.”

  Just then a weak blade of light crossed the president’s body, and a man looking official, perhaps someone on security detail, dressed in a dark uniform and swiping the ground with his flashlight, crept to the president’s elbow and shone the light on a piece of paper that was crumbly and insubstantial. It had to be a fax, for the way it crinkled and did not lie flat.

  Now Steadman was more aware than ever of the president’s slender, almost feminine hands and long, delicate fingers, his small wrists, his tremulous touch. The fax paper rattled softly as the president read it, looking grave, all his attention on it.

  “Keep me informed,” he said to the man, who nodded and slipped away.

  “There’s been an accident,” he said, his self-conscious solemnity commanding the attention of the table with its drama—and all around them, on the shore-side tables of the clambake, there was a gaiety that gave this single table the look of a seance. “Princess Diana was hurt in a car crash. Her friend has been killed.”

  As Steadman touched his watch face—it was a little past ten o’clock—the president was answering questions: “Paris ... that very night ... in the hospital ... No other news.”

  The president seemed to relax, not in an idle way but with great solid confidence, like a man in an important chair, at the center of things, directing operations, like a captain taking command in uncertain weather and setting a course. And because he was in control of this serious business of leading, no one questioned him or scrutinized him. He was accepted, trusted, needed—he had what he wanted.

  Steadman perceived the man’s secret through the man’s relief; yet the relief was temporary and the secret was a scar on the man’s soul, an obsession that had become a wound.

  “Do any of you have memories of Princess Diana?” he asked, as chairman of the table. “Some of you must have met her.”

  This was brilliant—easing the pain of worrying about her injury by remembering the good days, as a whole, healthy memory of something hopeful.

  Walter Cronkite said, “There was a rumor going around that she was staying with us in Edgartown and was seen sailing with me on the Wyntje, sunbathing on the deck as I steered. My goodness, how I wish that had been true.”

  “She was supposed to visit the island this summer,” Styron said. “Rose said something about it.”

  The president said, “She had been in touch with me. She wanted to come to the States. She was very concerned about land mines.”

  Millie said, “I met her in London at a movie premiere. She was really sweet. There was no sign that anything was wrong in her marriage. She might have had a lover. I certainly would have if I had been married to that twerp Charles.”

  The president smiled. “She came to the White House. She was so beautiful.”

  Betsy Cronkite said, “And did you dance with her?”

  “I wouldn’t have missed that for anything.”

  “Let’s toast her health,” Styron said.

  Millie said, “It would be so horrible if she died.”

  “But if she did,” Steadman said, “my advice is, don’t die tonight.”

  “I had no plans to do that, thank you very much,” Olga said.

  “But if any of us did, no one would know. It wouldn’t be news,” Steadman said, realizing that his sightless eyes gave him an importance that transfixed the table. “The papers tomorrow will be full of this story.”

  “So what if we did die?” Millie said.

  Steadman smiled at her and leaned over. “When did Aldous Huxley die?”

  No one knew. Steadman could see that the president hated to be asked a question to which he did not have the answer—and by a blind man, who was now the center of attention.

  “I have no idea,” Olga said, and giggled a little.

  The others murmured, but Steadman waited until they had gone silent again and were staring at him. He had begun to enjoy this reverence for his blindness, like the veneration of believers before a mute statue of a deity.

  He said, “November 22,1963.”

  “The day JFK was killed,” the president said.

  “And stole the headlines—the whole paper.”

  “Don’t die tonight, dear,” Betsy said to Walter.

  The president was impressed and pleased, not because Steadman’s challenge had given the table more drama and depth, but because the diversion was a relief, obscuring the president’s secret.

  While the others fretted, Steadman stared at the president and saw him stripped to his nerves. Did he suspect this? He was so sensitive, so quick to know, it was possible. It was clear to Steadman that he was upstaging the president, at the same time as the president closed in on him and held on to him for a photographer, who was passing the table. On the face of it he was making Steadman a poster boy for blindness—Give generously, so this man might see again!—but the reality was that he needed Steadman badly, his sudden celebrity, his inner light, as a cover for his secret passion.

  The president became strangely possessive and familiar. All his life he had advanced himself with his knack of making important friends. He remembered everything, less like a politician than like the greatest friend, or a desperate and fearful animal.

  Now he had risen from the table and was telling the Diana story to a larger group of party guests, and he had assumed an air of calm authority, in contrast with the misery and panic on the fa
ces of the listeners. The story had already become polished as he spoke to them.

  “Just a horrible crash, apparently. And we’ll just have to wait and see.

  While Steadman listened, the woman returned and touched him again. Steadman sensed that the president saw her. But she was not the only one. Women seemed to be fascinated by Steadman’s blindness, for it licensed them to touch him, hold him, steer him, take him in their arms. His sightless face seemed to have a sexual attraction—the women felt freer, almost maternal, liberated from a man’s scrutiny of their bodies and their clothes. They were reassuring voices and eager hands.

  In what he had called his debut, being visible, his blindness known and gaped at, he began to understand how the women were eager to mother him. More than that, they wished to be seen as mothers in the drama of a pieta, holding his wounded body so they would be judged on their altruism and sympathy, not on how they were dressed.

  But he could feel the heat in their desire. They were aroused. They wanted to possess him. He could smell the ripeness of their lust, like raw salty flesh, as they touched him, kissed him like an idol, something inanimate that might be given life through their hands.

  The president’s back was turned. He was still delivering the Diana news—not much news, but even this small amount had the weight and value of tragedy.

  “Can I borrow Mr. Steadman for a minute?”

  Steadman knew that touch, those fingers. He listened for Ava, but she was nowhere—the party had broken up in the wake of the Diana revelation. Many people had gone up the stairs from the beach to the house, to see what was on CNN.

  The woman guided Steadman into the darkness along the shore, away from the glare of the kerosene torches, nearer the lap of the water and the low hooting of a foghorn. The damp breeze off the Sound was against his face.

  “If it weren’t for the light pollution, you’d be able to see Buzzards Bay,” he said.

  The woman was not listening. She took his hand in a commanding way and lifted her dress and touched herself between her legs with his fingers. Her wetness had the slippery feel of a sea creature, a small warm squid, like the fish salad he had poked his fingers into earlier, but warmer, wetter, softer.

  Then she lifted his hand and helped him taste it and, still holding him, led him back to where the torches still blazed and the president was still speaking to the people, being reasonable and reassuring.

  “She’s a fine woman.”

  But as the president spoke—and he could only have been referring to the woman who had led him away—the woman vanished.

  The president led Steadman up the stairs to the house, and the remaining guests followed. Clutching him like this, the president was still revealing himself. He was wounded, carrying this secret inside him, and the secret made him clumsy.

  But he said, “Does Harry Wolfbein know how to get hold of you?”

  “Oh, yes,” Steadman said.

  And then, seeing Ava approach, the president let go, and embraced her, and told her again how lucky she was.

  The president was hoarse and still talking to a group of people as Steadman and Ava left. Waiting in the driveway for the valets to bring his car around, Steadman was approached by Wolfbein.

  “I think you’ve made a new friend,” Harry said.

  4

  AFTERWARD —as early as the next morning, when he woke to squirm in bed and squint in the dirty slanting daylight—the whispers began. So distinct and so insistent were they, he could hear them from his seclusion: the words, the tone, even the hot breath, the beat and glee of the gossips. Was it the timing—the awful event, the shocking news? Steadman believed he got greater sympathy for clinging to life, or seeming to, because the world was in mourning for Princess Diana, while he stood uncomplaining at the periphery of that tragedy.

  Steadman’s blindness seemed to make him another object of that outpouring of grief and pity. He was brave, wounded, still alive, a limping survivor, staring at the world with dead eyes. He seemed to represent hope, for there was defiant life in his damaged body, and people were kinder, clinging to him, because of the awful news of this sudden bereavement, the car crash in Paris, which was overwhelmingly the topic in all the newspapers. On the Vineyard everyone was talking about Steadman, too. He drank the datura and the shadow fell over him and he heard them clearly.

  The whispers said, Slade Steadman is blind, and some went further, explaining, Slade Steadman, the writer— Trespassing —just like that, lost his sight, as though he had reappeared after many years’ absence. Not just showed up but magically materialized, descended from the heavens, covered in glory, his blind eyes blazing like a luminous sky over Buzzards Bay late on a summer afternoon from a profusion of scudding smoke that was a ballooning jumble of gray-bellied clouds and pink plumes and feathers slipping from a great flock of molting flamingos with green-yellow highlights—appropriately lurid for a wounded artist to burst through and step forth from volumes of smoke backlit by fire, a whole sky of it, and pure gold slipping behind all of it, and in the crucible of rising darkness only the gold remaining to drain into the bedazzled sea.

  Those were Steadman’s images, fanciful, because that is what he imagined they saw, a heroic visitation: the ideal way to show up after all that time. People seemed so glad to see him. And Princess Diana’s messy death helped give contrast, for her departure—the public sacrifice of a cheated wife, a slighted heroine, a sidelined royal, a celebrated risk taker—had made him seem a survivor against the odds.

  Fearing his affliction, the whisperers wanted to care about his life, they wanted to help, they were manipulative and bossy, they knew eye doctors, they had heard of miracle cures, and they mentioned the possible causes—infected cataracts, macular degeneration, diabetes. Their caring was part of a ritual of warding off the evil of the misfortune. They were so relieved that the shocking ailment was his and not theirs.

  The whispering was not all praise, not only amazement. Some of the whisperers were oddly gladdened—because they had been spared, gloating over their good fortune—others were appalled. Some whispers were dark, some blaming, mocking his foppishness, his hat, his cane, his arrogance—his spelling out what he saw in the Sound, like a deaf man whistling Mozart. Some envious guests exaggerated his conceits, for Steadman had been sitting with the president, and what they knew about him they had learned secondhand or had glimpsed in the twilight at the clambake.

  The whispers made him a marvel, a freak, a figure of obscure power, somewhat remote even to his friends, known for his arrogance, who was both pitied and feared. He knew that on the Vineyard he was celebrated less for his book than for his being a multimillionaire as a result of the clothing catalogue. So it often happens with such tragedies: in their panic and ignorance people look more closely at each other and notice how frail they are, how damaged and failing, and give thanks for being alive in the shadow of death. Alert to his blindness, saddened by the death of Diana in the mangled car, people went on whispering.

  In the succeeding days of gossip Steadman relived the fame he had known as a new resident of the Vineyard, when he had been in the headlines and had kept himself hidden. He was reminded of his notoriety, the fatness of it, his pleasure in the enigma of being satisfied, seeking nothing. Yet there was a great difference, for he was aware that the renewed interest in his work contained a deeper respect, and his writing was now a larger achievement because it was an aspect of his blindness. The handicap he had surmounted was now seen as a strange gift, and in his sad eyes a sort of holiness.

  All this in less than a week. Steadman heard the whispers before anyone actually called. He knew that something amazing had occurred, his coincidental link to the death of Princess Diana by his having been sitting at a Wolfbein clambake with the president when the flunky appeared with the fax and the flashlight. The people at the president’s table had been among the first in the entire world to learn the terrible news. These few people were the earliest whisperers, and they approximated the curi
ous admonition of the blinded Steadman, saying to the president and others: Don’t die today. No one will remember.

  At last the phone rang, acquaintances called—he had no close friends. Most were the people from the Wolfbeins’ party, the inner circle of celebrities, who lived at such a remove from the ordinary, and kept to themselves, that Steadman was sure the news of his blindness would not travel far, at least for the time being. But because of their celebrity these people would eventually carry the news to the wider world. Soon everyone would know.

  In some of the commiserating calls there was a note of concern, less for Steadman than for the speaker, who nearly always sounded fearful and somewhat vulnerable. Steadman wondered if what they feared was the insight granted to him by the crisis of his serious condition—how losing his sight made him especially watchful and alert. He was no longer the aloof and arrogant money man. He was an extraordinary victim. And what could these helpless people say to console him? The truth of the world of mortals is that people fall ill and weaken and die. As a wounded man Steadman was nearer to death than to life, and was reminded of his fate, and so life meant more to him, and he knew more of it and was a hero.

  In a few of the phone calls he heard something rueful, almost a lament, bordering on jealousy, for on this island of celebrities his sudden handicap contributed to his being a greater celebrity, as though blindness were not a sickness at all, not a defect, not a disability, but a sort of distinction conferred on him, something to be resented and envied.

  He was indifferent. No one knew him well enough to understand the truth of his blindness or the prescience it allowed him. All that mattered was that when the fact of his blindness became common knowledge, as he knew it would, and his name as a writer became known again, he could honestly say that he was working on a book and that his blindness had helped him resume his work.

  To be writing was to be alive, to wake up happy and to pick up where he left off. His thinly fictionalized narrative expressed the deepest part of himself, exploring the farthest recesses of his memory, his oldest and most enduring feelings, in the ultimate book of revelation. He knew many writers who had published whole shelves of half-truths and evasions, made-up tales, fables, and concoctions. Sometimes it seemed that was all that writers did—spin yarns. “I’m doing a novel.” “I’m working on a story.” “I’m trying to develop an idea.” But if you used your own blood for ink, and what you wrote was the truth, and your life was the subject, one novel was enough; there was nothing else to know, no more to see, a heart laid bare. So he believed.