Blinding Light

by Paul Theroux

  She knew that without his saying so; she always seemed to know what he was thinking, and when he was sunk in silence, she knew what was in his mind.

  “If I ever write anything more,” he said, “it will be about this—us—the feeling in the flesh, the two of us at our most monkey. How the truth can be drawn from sexual pleasure. Knowing that we are going to die. Everything that lies beyond love.”

  The way he dismissed the delusions of hope and the self-deception of future plans and the farce of romance moved her. She said, “I’m glad we found each other. I want to be your friend. It’s purer. It’s much better. Friendship asks nothing, it gives everything, and friendship with desire is paradise.”

  “I agree. Love doesn’t make you better. It excludes the whole world. For a brief period you have an adoring partner, and later an enemy. Love is like some horrible twisted religion the way it changes you. And afterward, when love ends, you’re lost.”

  “Please don’t marry me,” she said one day outside the hospital, still smelling of disinfectant. She laughed with conviction: the words were like an aphrodisiac to them both.

  “I promise. I will never marry you,” he said, and embraced her, kissed her, feeling beneath her loose clothes and her doctor’s smock, the girlishness of her eager body.

  “Let’s be friends.”

  “Yes, yes.”

  “We have no future,” she said.

  “None at all.”

  From his marriage to Charlotte he had learned love, and you could not know love without knowing its opposite. He remembered now how his marriage had ended and the love soured and he had been cut loose—like one of those mute and damaged men released after a long spell in prison who find they cannot function in the crowded world of decent people, and turn to crime again, and get sent back to a cell to sulk. That was how dangerous he regarded loving. It was waywardness and weakness and failure.

  “Friendship is so much better,” Ava was saying. “You have to love your lover, but you can be truthful to your friend. Love isn’t blind—it’s sickness, it’s surrender.”

  The extravagant talk was the self-conscious reassurance of two people passionately attached and at pains to be kind to each other, aching for each workday to end, for night to fall so they could be together.

  She, the stronger, more confident one, strengthened him. The manner in which she bucked him up made him long for her.

  “This is what I want you to do to me tonight,” she would say, usually in public, a bar, a restaurant, the supermarket, a neutral place where they would hold hands, nothing more. And she would describe in the minutest detail where she wanted to be touched, and how, and what she would be wearing, and the way she wanted him to be dressed. It was her script for the evening, but it was not complete until she said, “And this is what I want to do to you.”

  In these fevered dialogues, in her insistence on order and ritual, the stages of their lovemaking, she could be almost clinical, as if running through the phases of what would be a brilliant but tricky operation, the object of arousing her, bringing her to orgasm. But when the time came, what ensued was anything but tidy, and it was less like an operation than the rehearsal of a black mass.

  “You have more germs in your mouth than in your ass, didn’t you know that?” she said, turning him over and tonguing him. And when she was done, she said, “Now it’s my turn for a black kiss.”

  She challenged him to go further. “Deeper, deeper, deeper,” she would say. He had never known a woman to be so explicit in daring him. Theirs was nothing like the sort of courtship or love affair in which by degrees trust was gained and plans were made for a future together. Next month, next year, a vacation, children, a mortgage—none of that. They had no future; tonight was enough. They wrecked themselves on each other, and yet the following day they met again, like insatiable conspirators, for more.

  She was able to surprise him as no other woman had ever done. One night she said, “I’ve got something for you,” and he expected exotic lingerie or Polaroids, as in the past. But if she promised something new, it was original, all hers, and certainly new to him. She did not disappoint.

  That night she met him at the Dockside bar wearing a dark tailored suit and slacks, a wide tie, a felt fedora. He smiled—he had never seen this suit on her before. She looked like a decadent schoolboy. On the way home she told him to pull into a side road and park. “I want to make out with you,” she said, and kissed him, let him grope her, fondle her breasts, and she opened her knees and held his hand against her. He felt something hard, like a rubber truncheon, between her legs.

  “A strap-on,” she said. “That’s for both of us.”

  And when they set off again, Steadman became sweaty, anxious, eager, and fearful, as she described how she was going to use it on him. But in the house she would not go into the bedroom. She lazed on his sofa and pulled the thing out and played with it and refused to take any clothes off. “On your knees,” she said, “get me in the mood,” and forced his head down. Seeing how he was making her happy—she screeched with pleasure as she gagged him—he became aroused by the madness of her voluptuous laughter.

  Again and again he had to remind himself that she was a physician, respected in the hospital and on the island. Yet how was it possible, knowing the most delicate surgery and all the anatomy—the name of every tissue, every muscle, every organ—that she could lose herself in the darkness of the body in which nothing had a name? A doctor was trained to see the body as something coherent, namable, dissectible, like a symmetrical cabinet of flesh and blood. But that was her daytime preoccupation; at night she stripped him naked and operated on him with her mouth and her fingers, devouring him, nameless part by nameless part, as though they were hardly human.

  “You are my meat,” she said.

  That summer passed. People saw them together, the writer and the doctor, but as Steadman and Ava always looked semidetached and distracted, like friends, never a couple, the people observing did not speculate unduly. They were glad to see Steadman at last out of his selfimposed captivity. His good mood seemed to indicate that he who had published nothing in years might have freed himself from his seclusion by finishing a book and would be publishing it soon.

  There was no book, and now his silence was a virtue, for he was spending time with Ava and glorying in her paradoxes—the medical doctor who was a debauched sensualist. Summer faded into fall, and fall declined into winter, and the cold weather made them more companionable, allowing them to possess the darker, emptier island. Winter was perfect, their solitude complete. The Vineyard seemed to belong to them. The hospital was less busy, there were no parties, hardly any social events, no “Taking another trip?” no “How’s the book coming along?”

  And there was nothing more exciting to him than Ava’s phoning him in midafternoon: “Tonight—a house call,” then click, and his anticipating her arrival in the early dark of winter, frost gleaming on the grass, and the approach of her car, the fat tires announcing her on the gravel driveway, and her kiss, her warm breath, her open mouth, “I want you,” and her taking off her laboratory smock or her ER scrubs and revealing herself in a pretty dress or lingerie. The great room of his house was so warm they were comfortable lying half naked on the sofa; the candle flames, the mirrors, her sighs, which became low howls of pleasure. Out here, in the winter, she could scream—and sometimes did, foulmouthed in uncontrollable desire, shocking him with men’s words—and no one would hear, for they were in the middle of a dark ice-bound island.

  When they were done, drenched in sweat, panting for breath, they lay in each other’s arms.

  “I hadn’t expected you to call.”

  “I had to see you,” she might say. “We lost someone today, a nice old man. I needed to do something life-affirming.”

  He smiled, he held her.

  “Something human. Something perverted.”

  But he would sometimes stare, seeing only the elderly blood-drained face of a patient yellowing o
n a pillow, open-mouthed, as though having died screaming.

  “Now I’m better. You cured me. Gotta go.” Abrupt, all business, like a man on a mission, she was out the door and in her car, and at last two receding red lights.

  Spring came, full of equivocating winds and low temperatures, dawdling promises, daffodils in April, drizzle and mud in May, reminders of the previous spring and their first meeting, and somehow giving a sense of repetition to their days and weeks. They had been together for a full year. In the second summer Ava was busier at the hospital, in greater demand, and he was the one who was made to wait. Waiting was hard for him, because he had no work. He wondered if there was someone else; he couldn’t ask—that was their agreement, proposed by her. “When we’re together we should possess each other. When we’re alone we have no claims.” Steadman had thought that was a good, enlightened idea, but as the summer passed and he saw less of her, he became insecure, suspicious, jealous.

  “I think I have a rival,” he said one day, hating himself for even raising the subject.

  “Two rivals,” she said. “A man with emphysema, on a ventilator, with pneumonia, whose family wants to pull the plug. And a man in constant pain, in a head and neck brace, who fell from a roof he was fixing and cracked three cervical vertebrae, whose heart is too weak to let us operate. Who just wants to die.”

  She was the strong one, and understanding this he was ashamed of himself. He felt more like one of her patients than her lover, but a fatuous and fussing patient, whining for her attention. He sometimes wished that there really had been something wrong with him, so he could justify seeing her more often. She had a busy life that was determined by the urgencies of medical procedures. She was sometimes so reflective that she fell silent when she was with him, and he knew she was thinking of a critical case, someone at the hospital.

  Her work was full of life and death—rescue and cure, real flesh, real blood. What had he to offer in return? Blank pages and complaints, the insubstantial fictions of someone who had forgotten how to write, who might have nothing to write. By the end of the summer she was polite but preoccupied, and though they remained sex partners—the blunt, unsentimental expression was hers; she often described previous lovers that way—the passion was gone, and with it the sexual innovation. She was a good doctor; he did not feel let down, but he knew she was caring for him.

  “I’m still very fond of you,” she said, and he laughed, because the expression was empty of desire. It was like a way of saying goodbye.

  He knew it was over. “Fond” said it all. “Fond” was the opposite of her teeth and lips, her torn panties, her stabbing finger, his flogging her smeared face with his cock as she teased him with her tongue.

  They made a ritual one night of burning their Polaroids. In their solemnity they were so reproached by what they saw, they hardly recognized their own bodies. They spoke of needing to find a way to end the affair, to formally seal it somehow.

  As lovers they had talked of going to South America. Maybe following through with that was the answer. Ava had found the Ecuador tour on the Internet while searching the ethnobotany Web sites, especially the ones that were obvious drug tours dressed up as culture quests. It was all her idea—the river trip, the yaje, the Secoya village—a possible journey for Steadman to find a subject to write about. It had everything: Indians, rain forest, drugs, difficulty, exoticism. She had contacted Nestor and bought the tickets, because she felt certain that it was their last trip, an innovative goodbye, “a ceremony of farewell” was how she put it, like the despedida, a word she was to learn later. He agreed. Months before, they had stopped making love. That coincided with his abandoning his writing, as though writer’s block was another expression of impotence. Neither of them imagined that the trip would keep their relationship together—blind him, inspire him as Burroughs had been inspired, arouse him, fire him with the idea for a book.

  How were they to know that the farewell would become its opposite—the way home, truth-seeking, a renewal that was a kind of betrothal? They now saw that the trip to Ecuador had been a revelation, for from the moment he was overwhelmed, fearing he was lost, Ava took charge. At the onset of his darkness she gave him light and propped him up, so he hardly knew the terror of blindness—or, more precisely (for he wanted to be precise), what he knew of it, the descent of blackness had so terrified him that he was not even aware how long it lasted. In that seemingly endless loop in the hazy time-scheme of a dream, just before he woke from his datura trance and she was holding his hand, he understood that it was not blackness at all but rather a bedazzlement, a blinding light of revelation, more than he could bear by himself.

  Ava promised not to leave him. She left the hospital instead. She asked for a leave of absence. “I need a break. I’m tyrannized by my pager.”

  She moved onto the estate with him, and he began his book. Writing occupied his whole day now. He talked, she recorded it, she took notes; she played his words back to him. She was full of suggestions; he needed her encouragement and approval. And his prose always sounded better to him, with a ghostwritten concision, when she repeated it.

  He was living at the margin, trespassing again, and delighting in being on the frontier. The shadows had always given him a clear view of the world. He had Ava’s word on this. The man in the book was him. The women, all of them, were Ava.

  She repeated that his taking the blinding datura was an indulgence—his conceit, his arrogance—but in the same breath would admit how fluent and observant he became in his blindness.

  Saying “Now let’s finish it,” she praised him for noticing particularities, for remembering so much.

  All the rooms he had known as a sensualist, their odors like reeking ghosts, and every disfigurement of their ceilings; the peripheral sounds of birdsong, wisps of music, muttered remarks, far-off voices—these and more. One entire chapter was background, no foreground, although all that was implied—a love scene, in fact. The man on the floor, the woman kneeling astride him, facing his feet—this was suggested by the movement in the mirror, the tugging of the carpet, the frantic cheeping of the caged bird, the shapes they cast on the wall, like Javanese shadow puppets—more subtle for being elongated—and the way it all sounded to a thirteen-year-old girl named Flora passing in the street outside, walking her dog. It was the dog that first noticed, frisky at the almost inaudible sounds. Then the young girl looked up at the jumping shadows and the fluttering candlelight, and she stopped to watch and remember a scene that might not make complete sense to her for years.

  “And what did Flora say?”

  “Flora just watched.”

  Flora just watched, she wrote, saying, “But Flora was mumbling to herself, as if seeing into a cloudy aquarium.”

  “She doesn’t know what she’s watching, but we do. And so we are seeing it through her eyes, understanding it, though she doesn’t.”

  “That’s nice. Details, please.”

  Every detail was in his description except the sight of the two people on the floor, the man hovering, holding the woman’s ankles as he penetrated her, but in the way Steadman dictated it the whole room was suffused by the sexual act, the lamplight, the wallpaper, the flowers, the reflections from the wineglasses, the half-heard murmurs vibrating in furniture, the walls glimpsed incompletely from outside, so much of it a play of warm lopsided light on the ceiling and finally filling the imagination of the young girl in the street.

  When he was done he told Ava he loved being alone with her, spinning his story.

  “You’re not making it up,” she said. “You’re remembering it.”

  He wondered at her certainty. He saw it all so clearly, peering within himself, his life so vivid in recollection it did not matter to him whether it was real or invented. He could see so distinctly into his early youth, memories of yearning and discovery, of the satisfying approximations of desire, when to his boy’s lust, sex was everything, in the far-off country of the flesh.

  “I want you t
o look at me like I am a piece of meat,” Ava said, and laughed, and he could tell she meant it. “Salivate and then take me. I want to watch you eat me.”

  He was aware in his blindness that Ava closely observed him, remembering his reactions and using them to please him. Early on, his glance at the waitress’s blond hair was one of her insights, inspiring her to wear the blond wig—a simple thing, but on her straight-haired and serious doctor’s head it was a wild promise. In the first flush of his love affair with Charlotte she had done that—studied him in order to please him. When another woman flirted and he responded, Charlotte didn’t scold but instead flirted with him and aroused him. It hadn’t lasted. He had forgotten it until the memories were all returned to him in his blindness. And his blindness allowed Ava to explore his curiosity, giving her access to the hungry man within him who hardly had words for what he wanted but was obsessed by imagery.

  Another summer day he chose to drive blind, walk blind, shop blind, get money blindly from an ATM machine, tap his cane near the ferry and take pleasure in the way he could part a crowd, cutting a swath through it like a prophet in a hurry. Men became anxious and helpless when they saw him; women lingered to watch, wishing to touch him. What was it about his blindness that roused women and made them protective, maternal, calm, sexual, all at once? Seeing him, it seemed they would do anything for him.

  He tapped his way into a health food store on a side street in Vineyard Haven. He rummaged and by smell alone found a box of herbal tea bags and a jar of honey and a bag of garlic-flavored croutons and a package of sun-dried tomatoes, placing them in the basket that Ava carried. The shop’s sections were defined and made logical by their delicious fragrances. But these too were memories. He had been there many times before. Years of being solitary had made him obsessive and turned him into a food crank. A preoccupation with health and the body was one of the consequences of isolation. Another was its opposite, disdaining health and order, damaging yourself. There was nothing in between. It was either self-denial or gluttonous indulgence; lonely people were either health nuts or chain smokers. He had told Ava that. He had told Ava everything. He repeated it that day as they left the place.