Blinding Light

by Paul Theroux

  A woman in white appeared. “Mr. Steadman, please come this way.”

  He was friendly with the woman, wondering if she was the doctor. She was small, compact, efficient—those white silent shoes. She asked him if he was taking any medication, and was he allergic to antibiotics, and what exactly was the reason for his visit? After the woman recorded his answers, she smiled and asked him to wait. She was the nurse.

  Another woman entered, older, bigger, dressed in white. She took his temperature, strapped his arm for his blood pressure, then jotted down the numbers. She led him to a small room and left. So it was a series of steps, a gaining admittance by degrees, wait here, now wait there, refining the questions, advancing toward the final room by passing through a set of subtle antechambers.

  “Yes?”

  Another nurse, probably, another stage of waiting, more questions. But she said, “I’m Dr. Katsina,” and shook his hand.

  He was at first anxious and then inexpressibly relieved, for she was attractive—long-legged, thin-faced, lanky light hair, full lips, her lovely blue-gray eyes staying on him with a curious and intelligent gaze. He guessed she was in her mid to late thirties, athletic, brisk, with a bike rider’s calves, a good grip from handlebars and hand brakes.

  As she washed her hands she said, “You’ve been doing some hard work.”

  Steadman looked at his hands and wondered what she had seen.

  “What have you been lifting?”

  He loved her coming straight to the point, the swift deduction, the summing up.

  She smiled and put her scrubbed pretty face close to his. She was warm and clean and her nearness was like a remedy for the yearning in him. Placing her thumb near his left eye and the other fingers at the back of his scalp and tilting his head, she looked into his eye as if through a keyhole, and then she used an instrument to peer.

  “Any pain?”

  “No.”

  “Not too serious.”

  “What is it?”

  “A subconjunctival hemorrhage. A burst capillary. That’s real blood. You were bending, lifting something heavy.”

  He smiled at the accuracy of her diagnosis. “Do I take anything for it?”

  Dr. Katsina shook her head and, washing her hands again, said, “It looks scary, but you’re fine. It should subside in a week. If it doesn’t, come back. Was there anything else?”

  Steadman was so relieved he felt excited, grateful, restored to health. He wanted to hug her. He said, “What can I do for you?”

  “I’m okay,” she said, finding this funny.

  Detecting a trace of unease, for he was staring at her with his bloody eye and looking eager, Steadman said, “How about a drink?”

  “That’s against hospital rules—and unprofessional. I’m a doctor. You’re my patient. Anyway, I have a woman in labor. She’s due any minute but I have a feeling it will be two A.M. It always is.”

  Dr. Katsina made a gesture of helplessness and departure that was also a signal of dismissal—time’s up.

  “How do you deal with someone in labor?”

  “I wait until I’m paged.”

  “Maybe we could wait together.”

  She equivocated with her shoulders. It was like a yes, but she said, “Not today.”

  He didn’t insist, because he felt she was cooperating, and now that he knew her name, he was certain he wanted to see her again. Instead of phoning her, he wrote her a note, wondering when she would be free. She did not reply. He told himself that doctors were busy. He tried again, giving her his telephone number.

  She called him a few days later, saying, “This is Ava Katsina,” and it took him a moment to recall who she was, for she hadn’t said “Doctor.”

  He said, “I want to see you—please.”

  “Okay,” she said, “but this means I can’t be your doctor.”

  “I’ll agree to anything.”

  Her laughter reassured him. She said she was free the following day. He waited by the emergency door of the hospital, gladly at ease, watching through the window, seeing her dress tighten against her body as she bent forward over the counter to sign out.

  “I have to leave my pager on,” she said, getting into the car. “I have another woman in labor. I can’t go far.”

  He drove to Oak Bluffs, parked at the Dockside Inn, and they climbed to a second-story bar overlooking the inner harbor. He was struck at once by its roughness, the sourness of spilled beer, the loud music. The place was a bit too busy for May, perhaps because there were so few other bars open, the drinkers not vacationers but islanders, an after-work crowd of shouting friends. The porch was chilly, damp, uncomfortable, noisy, and when the sun went down there wasn’t enough light to read a menu. The service was slow, and along with the discomfort and din was the chill in the air, one of those days in clammy procrastinating spring when people called out, “Not summer yet!” and the Vineyard felt more than ever like a remote island, detached and dark, the Cape hidden by low clouds, the north wind thrashing the water, making whitecaps on the ebbing tide and pushing corrugations of froth across the Sound.

  Steadman had been so preoccupied with these distractions—he had hoped to find a quiet bar or cafe—he had turned away from Dr. Ava Katsina. He looked at her to apologize, to make a joke about the place being so awful, such a dive, and to smile at her.

  She was crying. She saw his sudden concern, something like alarm, and she said, “I’m sorry. I can’t help it.”

  He was always torn by tears, anyone’s tears, and a woman’s sobbing undid him. He had no reply, he was helpless. Please stop, he wanted to say.

  “It’s just that I don’t believe it.” And she went on softly sniffing and swallowing, dabbing at her eyes with a ragged ball of tissue. “I am so happy.”

  He smiled again, hoping to encourage a smile from her.

  “You’re the writer,” she said. “ Trespassing.”

  Steadman nodded, he clinked his glass against hers, he drank not knowing what to say.

  “I was wondering if we’d meet. I knew you lived here.”

  “Everyone lives here.”

  “In the summer,” she said. Her tears made her look young and inexperienced, as unlike a doctor as it was possible to be. She blew her nose and wiped it, reddening the rims of her nostrils, becoming plainer, innocent, almost boyish. She sniffed. “I’m so sorry.”

  Steadman took her hand and felt her gentle fingers; she let him comfort her. He could see she was shaken but happy, her tears like the glow of a rapture. He liked her emotion, the change in her face, the way she looked younger with tears on her cheeks. He was the doctor, she the ailing patient, needing reassurance, emotional, as though sobbing in relief.

  “Take it easy.”

  “No, I’m happy. Really.”

  He could see she was, even with her wet eyes and dripping nose.

  He was about to embrace her when her pager sounded—important, a dull repeated note, demanding to be noticed—and immediately she scooped the thing out of her leather bag and studied its message. In a clear efficient voice, scoured of tears, the tone of a timekeeper, she said, “I have to leave here right now to see to that delivery.”

  Like that, in a flash; and now it was he who was impressed and helpless.

  The waitress appeared—young, fresh-faced, with a beautiful smile and thick tumbling blond hair that she arranged with tosses of her head. She held a pen and a pad and said, “Some more drinks for you guys?”

  “Just the check,” Dr. Katsina said.

  Steadman watched the waitress leave, shimmying through the crowded bar, and then said, “I can tell you’re a really good doctor.”

  “I know what I’m doing most of the time. And I can go on being your doctor—but that’s all,” she said.

  “What’s the alternative?”

  “Find another doctor. I’ll be your friend. I’m a good friend. You won’t need to make appointments.”

  She spoke with an intensity that had to have come from her be
ing so solitary, so hardworking. A sociable person would never have said it that way. He tried to take her hand, but she was already rooting in her bag for her car keys.

  He hardly recognized her the next night. They had agreed to meet at a restaurant on the harbor in Edgartown, but when he was led to the table, reserved in his name, he did not see her. In Dr. Katsina’s place was a blonde in a red blouse, applying lipstick. Seeming to see Steadman behind her in the small mirror of her compact, she clapped it shut and looked up at him, fingering the ringlets of her hair, not smiling, looking intruded-upon.

  “It is you,” he said, and sat down.

  Then she smiled. “I saw you staring at that waitress in the bar last night and I thought, Why not? Anyway, I’m a doctor and we don’t do things like this, which is why I did it. It’s a wig. Want me to take it off?”

  Amused and fascinated, he said, “Not now.”

  It was another cold evening but a quieter place, and she told him how she had delivered the baby, a normal delivery, a little girl—happy mother, nervous father—just like that, eased a whole child into the world, dripping and squalling, and wiped its wet head. Her lipstick, her blond wig, made the clinical details of the childbirth story wonderful and slightly improbable.

  “I can drink tonight,” she said. “My pager’s off.”

  She was strong, she was confident, she alluded without apology to old boyfriends. (“This guy I used to date turned me on to your book.”) She told him stories of the operating room, and Steadman was fascinated by her conceit, for while there was something incomprehensible and mystical in it, there was also a mastery of anatomy, the ultimate in physical transformation—a cesarean section, cutting out an appendix, ridding a person of a diseased organ, setting a bone, snatching a sick person from the brink of an abyss. A patient staring horror-struck at death she was able to restore to health. She knew the chemistry of drugs, she had the authority to order them, she knifed open flesh, she sewed it together with stitches, made a healing seam in the skin. All of it a vigorous challenge of his belief that doctors caused illness.

  He was so conscious of his skepticism that he said, “You’re like a shaman.”

  She laughed at his hyperbole and denied it with a hint of insincerity—the medical doctor’s confidence, the surgeon’s arrogance: she knew her power. She was the only truly fulfilled person he had ever met.

  “I’m glad you think so.”

  But as though to deny it she told him how at medical school they had fooled with cadavers to take the curse off them—she and a boyfriend with a corpse. Or saying nothing during a long operation she performed jointly with that man, while dropping sexual hints, knowing that after the thing was done and the patient wheeled away they would hurry to his house—this was in Boston.

  “The rush you get from a successful operation—I mean, working together, the tension, the efficiency, the body lying there on the table between us,” she said. “When it was all over we’d go and fuck.”

  “The private life of a shaman,” he said, but he had been taken aback by her frankness. “Too bad you can’t be my doctor.”

  “I can be other things.”

  “My friend.”

  What she said next was so memorable to him, he kept it to himself as a wicked secret, and never recalled it afterward without seeing the redness of her lips and tongue, the unsuspicious smiling Yankee with his tankard in the white blouse and the silly improbable hair on the Sam Adams beer sign, the slant of light and wooden threads on the screw bung of an ornamental wine cask, the saltshaker shape of the fat, squat Edgartown Harbor lighthouse, the outgoing tide swelling and chafing at the edge of the On Time Ferry plowing a dark furrow through the current near the Chappaquiddick side, a woman walking nearby on the beach with a cigarette in her mouth and a scarf twisted on her head—all of it fixed in his mind with her blunt statement.

  “Statistically, only six percent of the women who give blowjobs get any real pleasure from it,” she said.

  Steadman’s mouth was already dry; the words he had attempted had shriveled and blistered on it and were gone. He was looking helplessly at her lipsticked mouth, her damp swollen lips.

  He anticipated what she was going to say next, and his ears were already ringing, all the louder because he could see she wasn’t smiling, only relating an established fact. Yet he was shocked. It was one of the boldest sentences he had ever heard from a woman—a taunt, a tease, a promise, the ultimate pickup line delivered as a statistic. She seemed to understand the effect it had on him and to desire him for being shockable, as he desired her for being able to shock him, Slade Steadman, reclusive author of the well-known book of surprises, Trespassing.

  “I’m in that six percent.”

  Except for his facetious response, which he delivered hoarsely and hopelessly—“So what’s in it for me?”—he did not remember the rest of the meal, only his urgency that they finish and hurry home, and she seemed as eager as he was.

  That began the summer of hot nights in the walled compound of his up-island house—nights when she was not on duty, nights so dedicated to their desire that often they met in the dark and drank and touched and groped and uttered nothing but sighs, twitching and tearing at each other’s clothes and bodies. She held him off, she said, “Let me, let me, I like it”—holding him down, mothering him, sucking him—until he could not stand it anymore, and as the night grew darker, their bodies glowed. He loved it because it turned them into blameless animals, monkeys rutting for the play of it and the pleasure she took in arousing him. And when she was aware of the closeness of his panting, that he was seconds from exploding, she squirmed free and got down on him and held him in her mouth and pumped with her hand until he came with a roar while she squealed and licked it from her lips, her eyes rolling up as she became sightless, white-eyed in ecstasy.

  “Do you love it?”

  “I love it,” he said.

  “Now do as I say.”

  Then, after she had cared for him, searching his body in the most intimate way, she insisted that he please her—and he was unexpectedly gladdened as the moans crept from her throat, as she directed his hand or, opening her legs, seized his head with all her fingers and thrust it against her, smearing his face with her desire.

  He loved his nights with her for her demands, and her fairness, for she encouraged him in his demands. Whole greedy nights of saying nothing, or muttering disconnected words in a darkness in which their hands spoke and everything was allowed, everything insisted upon. Or the opposite: talking all night, pressed together, kissing, telling each other their most elaborate fantasies. And the intensity of their singleminded desire kept them strangers to each other, communicating on the lowest frequencies, dwelling on their satisfactions, loving what they shared, and needing each other for their secrets.

  Their secrets were safe—trust was what bound them together in the beginning, as they became ever more candid about their needs. At the same time, all this while, Ava remained a woman in white, the most skillful doctor at the hospital; and he began to work with greater confidence and with renewed imagination, the inaccessible writer in his up-island seclusion, smiling again. Yet still they remained strangers. Their lives were separate, only the act of sex joined them, they knew each other in the dark but nowhere else. They did not believe they had any future, and felt certain that all desire, fierce as it seemed, hot as it might burn, had an end in ashes that cooled and dispersed like the dust they were.

  Steadman loved having her because he had so little else in his life. Charlotte was gone. He did not resent the divorce, but he questioned his own judgment: how could he have been so wrong about her? The girlfriends were gone, too. After his first struggles to be alone on the Vineyard, with his curt answers, his evasiveness, his lack of cooperation, he had actually succeeded in keeping people out of his life—and, at last, after the first years of his reclusiveness, keeping the press and interviewers away, they ceased to care. He had no new book. He slipped beneath the surface of
events and seemed to sink. Except for the summer people who invited him to parties and were polite about his work, keeping their inquiries vague, there was no one. The summer people were his friends, though, and more than that: for a season they were his world. When they left around Labor Day he had remained on the Vineyard, wondering what to do with himself. Now he knew. He had Ava.

  Of course everyone talked, for on the island, summer people and locals alike were passively nosy in the Vineyard manner, watchful while pretending not to care, and always alert for gossip. They were noted for their attention to detail and for their long and remorseless memories. They knew he was having an affair; they knew with whom. His car, her car, the groceries, his movements, even his moods, his happiness—it was all monitored and noted and whispered about. People were glad for him, for her too, for though she was a recent arrival and was hardly known, she was respected for her efficient doctoring. The islanders took an ignorant pleasure in commenting on how different the two people were, the wealthy risk-taking writer with local roots and the modest physician from off-island. Steadman was aware of those rumors and thought: If only they knew how reckless and greedy she was, how depraved and demanding, how lavish in bed, how she made a happy slave of him.

  “Desire me,” she said. She was content, she almost crooned the words. “You don’t have to love me. Love is a burden. It’s a pain. It causes unhappiness. Just be my friend.”

  He knew the deceptions of love and its meaningless language. He told her that it was also a delusion. It came, it went, and made you crazy. It was mainly about wanting to possess someone. Sex was something else: it promised nothing, it had no future, it was magic enacted entirely in the present. They did not expect the affair to last. They hardly met in the daytime, they made few plans, and Steadman assumed that the ashes of their desire, the useless fragments and residue of its end, were not far off.