by Paul Theroux
What disconcerted Ava was that in the days following the party the callers were mainly women. First were the wives of Steadman’s male friends, inquiring in the kindest way, and then the women he had known for a while before Ava, more oblique than the others, summer women, the unattached, the available ones, the speculators, the still-pretty, the newly divorced. Finally, the urgent callers, women who were strangers to him, who kept to the fringes of the Wolfbeins’ circle, and these were the most insistent on seeing him soon.
“I want to help you.”
What one woman said one morning, demanding, offering everything—this mothering, rescuing, bossing—stood for all the long conversations. Steadman took the calls while Ava sat nearby, halted in her dictation, glaring into the middle distance where the tape recorder lay turned off, exasperated, in an accusing silence, resenting the calls, hating every second of his being on the phone. All this was the consequence of his showing up at the party.
“That’s very kind of you.”
“Anything.” Was this the woman who had touched him, embraced him, offered herself to him at the party? “What can I do?”
“I’m busy at the moment.”
“I know how tough it must be for you.”
She was kind but persistent, like so many of them. There was something awful in the tone of the pitying people he knew, who possessed the clinging manner, hectoring voice, and unstoppable intrusiveness of telemarketers.
She said, “I could meet you today—this afternoon. Or later. Tonight I am completely free.”
Not hearing the words but somehow knowing, Ava sighed, exhaling harshly, amplifying her breath through her wide-open mouth, almost loud enough to be heard over the phone, making Steadman self-conscious.
“I have to go,” he said. “I’m working.”
Yet before he could resume his dictation, before Ava could make an unanswerable remark in a tone of scolding pity, the phone rang again.
“Slade—I feel I know your work well enough to call you Slade.” Another woman. “I’ve had an enormous amount of experience with visually impaired people.”
She was young, sweet-voiced, solicitous. Steadman imagined beautiful skin, lips close to the receiver in her damp hand, her tense receptive body slightly canted to listen to him.
“My vision is not impaired,” he said.
“I could read to you. I’d love that.”
Ava wanted him to bang down the phone, he knew. But he could not move the phone away from his ear—he kept it clapped against his head. He was fascinated: the woman was offering herself, pleading Take me.
“Where did she get the number?” Ava said.
She knew the caller was a woman, knew what she was saying, knew everything, which was why she was angry at the intrusion.
“Tell your friend that I care about you”—the woman had heard Ava’s question and was answering it. “All telephone numbers are available if you know how to access them.”
“Tell her—” Ava began to interrupt, but was cut off.
“There are no secrets,” the woman said. And just before she hung up: “I’m here for you.”
Then Ava said, “I was afraid of this.”
“Women chasing me?”
“Your calling attention to yourself. That charade at the Wolfbeins’.”
“‘There are no secrets.’ That’s what she said.”
“That should worry you.”
Pretending to sort his papers, aligning his pens and pencils, squaring up a set of notepads, moving the tape recorder, he said nothing and hoped she would stop.
But she spoke into his face: “Because there’s nothing wrong with your eyes. You haven’t even been to the eye doctor. Out of some weird look-at-me bravado, you went to a Vineyard party pretending you were a blind sage and got the president of the United States to believe you.”
“It was worth it.”
“Because you had the best seat in the house to get the lowdown on Diana’s death trip?”
“No. The president. I saw into his soul.”
“Oh, please.”
Ava began to snort, jeering at his pomposity, the grand manner that seemed a posturing part of his blindness. The manner itself was another form of blindness.
But Steadman merely stared at her with his dead eyes and waited for her to stop, knowing that if he persisted in his scrutiny he could unnerve her by boring a hole into her skull with his blank patience. And he felt that maybe he had succeeded, that she was taken aback, because she stopped challenging him with mockery, and when she spoke again she did so in a more reasonable tone.
“When you say things like that I don’t know whether to laugh or start worrying about your sanity.”
“He’s tormented,” Steadman said. “I really pity him. A part of him is lost and he doesn’t want anyone to know it. Imagine the dilemma: the man with the secret is the most conspicuous person in the world.”
“What sort of secret?”
“Something forbidden, something that shames him, like being helpless, smitten.” Steadman’s blank gaze was still fixed on her. “Cunt-struck.”
Ava said, “I’m sure the president would be reassured to know that you care.”
“I agree, strangely enough. Everything matters to him. He’s very thinskinned. And very tenacious. He came from nowhere. And he wants to be a hero.”
“Maybe that’s what you have in common.”
The phone rang before Steadman could reply, and he snatched the receiver as he had all the other times, before Ava could intervene.
It was a different woman. She said, “You touched me,” and hung up.
“I hate this,” Ava said, seeing the expression on Steadman’s face. “You’re pathetic and they’re sad.”
She told him angrily that he was deluding himself in enjoying the phone calls from these strange women. Instead of being strengthened by his blindness, as he had maintained, he had the egotism of an invalid, demanding attention and wanting to be cosseted and needing for his infirmity to be noticed.
“‘Look at me—blind as a bat!’” Ava said, satirizing him. “You love it.”
He wondered if this was true. Yes, he had liked being noticed at the party. It had reminded him of the great days when he had been a celebrated prodigy.
“So I’m as vulgar and susceptible as everyone else—so what? Hey, what about the president?”
“You liked upstaging him.”
“Probably,” Steadman said. “Then Diana died and upstaged us both. What a night.”
He knew that Ava was still staring at him, still annoyed, from the way she breathed.
She said, “Not everyone wishes you well.”
“What does that mean?”
“I’m sure there are people who are glad you’ve been taken down a peg, and others who suspect you’re faking. Anyway, why haven’t you asked me to find you an eye doctor? I could refer you to a specialist.”
“You think I’m faking,” he said. “You’ve been cold.”
The party and all the gossip afterward, the fact of his having reappeared among all those people, this abrupt visibility, were jarring, and so their evenings were changed. The sexual masquerade at night, the delicious routine, was over for now. His being with Ava, blind, for the hours of that party, the president’s arm around him, had had a powerful effect—had sobered them, made them self-conscious, kept them from their usual intimacy. More than that, all this had let blinding light fall on them and exaggerate the space between them.
“I guess so. You’re someone different.”
“I’m writing again,” he said.
Until that night of visibility he had felt that this woman was also inhabiting his skin. He had loved the intensity of their seclusion, loved the shadows over them, the shadows within, the shadows they threw in the bedroom. But going public for the first time since arriving back from Ecuador, and being noticed, even praised for his handicap, had altered things. It was a change of air. Allowing other people into their lives, they had re
vealed Slade’s secret, the spectacle of his blindness, shocking everyone with the obvious ailment and keeping the deeper truth hidden.
“It’s a trick,” she said.
Not blindness at all, she went on, but a state of luminous euphoria brought on by a jungle potion. You reached for a bottle, you took a drink, and you were in a brighter, blazing room, and the room opened onto the world.
That last telephone call (“You touched me”) had exasperated Ava and left Steadman murmuring. They faced each other, seeing only the walls.
“Deny that it’s a trick,” Ava said.
But Steadman had no denial, nor anything else to say. Then, nagged by what he remembered, he said, “What do you mean, eye doctor? Why should I go to an eye doctor?”
“You have a condition without a name.”
“It’s called blindness.”
“Blindness is a result, an induced condition, because you’ve been taking that drug,” Ava said. “Or why else do you have it?”
Steadman turned away and stumbled slightly, hating his unsteadiness, resenting Ava’s accusations and wishing that he was dictating his book to her instead of listening to her. She was still talking!
“Blindness always has a cause. It has an etiology, a pathology. Do you want a lecture on the visual cortex and the neurological basis of visual imagery? Blind people are always experts on their condition. They lecture doctors about retinitis and macular degeneration, they know all about PET scans and functional MRIs. About cataracts, the various ways of operating, the recovery time, the risks of infection.”
“So what?”
“For you it’s metaphysical. It’s mystical. All you do is gloat over your blindness. You love the attention. You love people talking about you and calling you. Those sentimental women.”
“They don’t ask why I’m blind.”
“But the president did. I saw you squirming and evading the question. He wanted to help you. He wants to find you a doctor. You looked ridiculous in your hemming and hawing.”
“He understood that I’m blind. He also understood that I’m hypervisual, I’m prescient. I see more than anyone. I could smell his anxiety, I could hear it when he was talking about something completely unrelated—his mention of Chuck Berry. I could differentiate people at the party by their smell alone.”
“Do you want people to know that you got your blindness out of a bottle?”
Now he saw what she was hinting at. She was right: going to the party had exposed him to the possibility of questions he couldn’t answer truthfully. And there would be more questions. He needed a better explanation; he needed a story.
“They want to help you,” Ava said, and she laughed at the thought of it, but it was a shallow, wounded laugh.
“What would be the point of seeing a doctor?”
“So that you can say you’ve seen a doctor.”
“You’re a doctor.”
“I’m the blind man’s lover.”
5
HE WOKE much too early, seeing the whole day ahead in Boston and feeling cross, thinking of how he loathed medical doctors, their absurd authority, their bossy arrogance, their airs—you were familiar, they were formal; you were small, they were large; “Wait here, Slade, the doctor is busy at the moment.” A doctor posed as a figure of power and wisdom, knowing how to ease pain and cure sickness and save lives. Those skills were like a higher form of plumbing, mastered by earnest drudges, yet they regarded themselves as shamans and did not want to be judged like ordinary mortals. They hated their learning to be called into question, and they never listened.
Ava was different from every doctor he had ever known. She read books for pleasure, she did not advertise herself as a doctor, and she did not disagree with him when he declared that doctors caused illnesses, that hospitals were disease factories, that most new drugs were poorly tested and overprescribed. Doctors made people sick with dirty drugs. The ideal doctor-patient relationship was his love affair with Ava, or the Secoya shaman’s with his ayahuasca-taker. To be humbled by the chanting shaman and granted visions by his drug—that was the purest healing.
That week of revelation on the Aguarico River reminded Steadman that they had not left the Vineyard since arriving back from Ecuador last November—had been buried alive all winter and spring and into the summer, those dazzling months of work and sex. And then at nine, starting for the airport, Ava at the wheel, Steadman furious in the passenger seat, scowling at an impenetrable line of traffic they were trying to join, they came to a dead stop at the junction of his country lane and the main road.
Summer people in crawling cars, sunburned and squinting in impatience, children’s bored bobbing faces at the windows—an unbroken line of cars going nowhere. Disgusted by all these intrusive strangers in their Jeeps and minivans and truck-like vehicles with big wheels and bumpers and bike racks, only ten minutes into the trip, Steadman regretted agreeing to the eye appointment in Boston.
“Take the shortcut.” He was staring at her leg, praying for it to articulate her gas-pedal foot.
“I can’t even get into the traffic.”
Trying to force a space for herself, Ava eased the car forward, but when a Range Rover hesitated and a space opened, a man on a moped darted into it, as though sucked into a vacuum, and after him a procession of bikes—dad, mom, wobbling kids, and another adult in skintight spandex on two wheels towing a bike trailer. Then the urgent inching cars closed the gap. A red-faced woman in the passenger seat of a convertible peered at Steadman, and with her arms folded and her head forward she opened her mouth wide, her nose pinched white, and yawned irritably, with a coarse goose-hiss that he could hear.
“Go home!” he called out.
The woman smacked her lips and blinked and calmly mouthed the words “Fuck you.”
Ava sighed at the slowly moving line of cars and headed into them, forcing open a space angled sideways, in the path of oncoming cars, but still only half inserted, for the traffic had stopped again in what was a two-mile backup into Vineyard Haven. The shortcut to the airport was still almost a mile away.
Mopeds veered in and out of the stopped cars, cyclists bumped along the side of the road, and two women jogged ostentatiously past, sweat-soaked in their scanty clothes—a dog barked at them, thrusting its loose spittle-flecked jaws out of a car window, sounding outraged. Someone’s radio—the convertible in front?—was very loud, and among the unmoving cars in the still summer air someone’s cigar smoke reached Steadman and Ava.
“The president was puffing a cigar at Wolfbein’s, did you see?” Ava said, just to make conversation, because the delay was so serious and she wanted to calm Steadman’s anxiety about the plane they had to catch.
“What the fuck is this traffic all about?”
Steadman’s anger was a gumminess in his mouth and grit in his eyes and his guts churning with frustration. He felt like an innocent loosed upon a mobbed and noisy world. He was upset and angrier for the way that Ava, with that pointless cigar remark, was trying to distract him from the bikes, smoke, noise, strangers, New York license plates, joggers, the leafy road blocked with cars—and the most annoying thing about slow traffic was the visibility of bumper stickers on the SUVs. The more expensive the vehicle, the more frivolous the message.
“Look at the size of them. They’re made for jungles and deserts.”
Ava said, “That reminds me. The agency wants you to sign off on a proposal from Jeep for some kind of Trespassing Limited Edition. Like the Eddie Bauer Ford Explorer.”
He imagined the vehicle in the Trespassing style, the safari look, the earth tones, the sturdy seats, the loops and brush guards and compartments, the compass, the altimeter, the gear bags, the khaki, the canvas patches, the leather details. All this because he had written a book. He went sad and silent.
Ava said, “Anyway, there’s another flight at noon,” and kept on, sounding hopeful, offering consolation, until she became aware of the silence from Steadman.
Gazing straight
ahead, smiling slightly, licking his lips, Steadman held a small bottle in his hands that Ava could tell was empty.
“What did you just go and do?”
Instead of replying to that, he said, “The traffic’s moving”—though it wasn’t—so he added, “A mile down the road,” for he was blind again, in another dimension of understanding, relaxed, seeing past the jammed-up cars and the bikes, and calculating that they would easily make the flight.
At the airport, Steadman was smiling behind his dark glasses as they checked in.
“Just carry-ons,” Ava said to the woman behind the counter tapping the computer keyboard.
Steadman said softly, as though to himself, “That traffic was in my head.”
Swishing his white cane, he loped confidently toward the small plane, ahead of Ava but following the other boarding passengers.
“Brother Steadman, how’re you doing?” a man said from one of the forward seats.
“Bill,” Steadman said, recognizing Styron’s voice and, sensing him begin to rise from his seat, “Please don’t get up.”
“You’re doing just fine,” Styron said. “Wasn’t that a great party at the Wolfbeins’?”
“A historic occasion.”
“You made it so. You’re a brave guy.”
“Cut it out.”
“No, you’re a trouper. I was fetched by the sight of you talking to the president. He was mighty impressed, too.”
Ava’s embarrassment was visceral—Steadman sensed it powerfully, feeling what she felt, tightening like a cramp, reproaching him, and he said, “Please don’t say that, Bill. I’m the same as always, maybe a little brighter.”
