by Paul Theroux
Ava said, “Now I know why you’re a writer, because you’re so sure of yourself even when you’re wrong. Especially when you’re wrong.”
“And I know who waited on you,” he said.
“You smell these women.”
“That one for sure,” he said, “in her white top, slightly torn sleeves, and her tumbled curly hair. She’s hardly more than twenty. I liked her last year, when she was blond. She’s dark-haired now.”
He knew that Ava was staring at him as they walked through the parking lot to his car.
“Cutoff blue jeans and that halter top without a bra and those long legs.” He slipped into the passenger seat, still talking, and handed Ava the keys. “What I liked most was that she was wearing that hillbilly getup with high heels. I loved hearing her walk back and forth, stretching to the upper shelves to get things for you.”
“It’s all true. What else do you remember?”
“The shoes are red. They have a teasing sound.”
“What else?”
“She’s Daisy Mae,” Steadman said.
Back at the house, he needed to sit quietly to contain and enjoy the image—did not want to move or talk or eat. He was possessed by the thought of the busy girl in the ragged shorts and skimpy top, walking smartly back and forth—the breasts, the buttocks, the pretty hair and lips, the slender legs, the local girl playing at being a country girl, Daisy Mae, perhaps without knowing the innocent original, whose simple cartoon image had stirred him as a boy.
Steadman was so absorbed he did not bother to wonder where Ava had gone. He had had a good morning of dictation. The trip to Vineyard Haven had taken most of the afternoon.
Then, the sound of the shoes, the heels hammering, was unmistakable—the walking in the house, not toward him but back and forth, tantalizing him. He listened. They receded. They returned, rapping. He was on the porch, in the heat, and then she was with him, brushing past him, tidying the coffee table or, more likely, pretending she was doing so. Passing him again, she turned away and he reached out and touched her shorts, ran his hands over her, felt the softness and the rivets and the cutoff fringe and her warm thigh, and tugged her closer, slipped his hands up to her halter top, her shoulders, her curls. Her back was turned. He went on kissing her, touching her, her clothes, her skin, her shoes.
“Say something.”
But the voice came from the far end of the porch, Ava’s voice: “She’s not paid to talk.”
The woman he held began to laugh and, laughing, she relaxed and turned to kiss him, though he was unprepared—startled that the woman embracing him, groping him, was not Ava; shocked that he had not known; touching her breasts with his dumb fingers. He released her, but she lingered to lick his face.
“You can go now, sweetie,” Ava said. “I told you, he’s blind.”
And with that the girl let go and laughed shyly, and as they heard the car departing up the gravel driveway, Ava led Steadman into the house, saying, “Now you’re all mine.”
3
CERTAIN ITEMS of women’s clothing unfailingly raised his lust,” Steadman said in his dictating voice, with a cadence that helped him remember the narrative line. “The soft hand of silk, the open weave of lace, the tug of elastic, the neat cut of pleats in a short skirt, the way that satin smoothly bulked over skin—and particular loose combinations, warmed by a warm body. Much more than a woman’s nakedness, the clothes were powerful aphrodisiacs. They were veils of enticement.”
“Nakedness,” Ava said, still writing, and in the tone that he was using, to let him know where she was in the middle of a sentence.
“Because a naked woman was someone stripped bare,” Steadman said when she glanced up. “And he had never seen a naked woman his own age, only older ones, or pictures of them, looking so much like meat he wasn’t interested.”
Writing fast, her thumb driving the ballpoint, Ava muttered, “These are abstractions.”
“To his terror-struck mind,” he said, “such women seemed unattainable and far-fetched. And he was so young, the gaping straightforwardness of nudity seemed artless and demanding—nerve without guile, all flesh and hair. And where were the naked girls? He looked for young ones but he never saw them.”
“Talk a little about his reaction to their nakedness.”
“A naked woman was raw pork,” Steadman said, talking over her mutter. “The word he used for ‘naked’ when he was growing up was ‘bollocky.’ It didn’t apply to girls—they didn’t have bollocks, but boys did. ‘Swimming bollocky.’ He didn’t have a word for ‘naked girl’ and in a sense could not imagine what a skinny girl with no clothes on would look like. But clothed ones were everywhere.”
“Go on,” Ava said, encouraging him.
He turned to her and said in a sharp voice, “Why did you do that to me yesterday with that young woman?”
“Just having fun,” she said.
He had no reply, because the object of his own life these days was his pleasure in his book. He said, “It was strange. I didn’t realize. Those clothes threw me.”
“Clothes,” she said. “That is today’s topic.”
He resumed his dictation, saying, “Different clothes, the subtlety of styles, each one resonating with a year, a season in his life. He loved reading women’s bodies through their clothes.”
“Fetishism?” Ava said. “Role-play?”
“Semiotics,” he said.
“Oh, please.”
“Don’t write that word. Write: red lips, tight sweaters, tight blue jeans, bare feet in high heels. Capri pants were popular when he was fifteen. Tight shorts, shaping the ass and giving it a smirk. There was so much expressiveness he saw that aroused him—the face in the crotch, the manner in which a girl’s ass seemed to respond with a wobble in hot pants, silver lamé, ignescence from buttock to buttock as she walked.”
“Delete ‘ignescence,’ I’m begging you.”
“Okay. ‘Sparkling.’ More of the body showed because it was clothed, and it all beckoned because it was highlighted.” He paused, then said, “One girl he remembered.”
Ava’s murmur now was both laughter and affirmation, but Steadman was staring, solemn, his voice croaky, dry with desire.
“It was madness. He watched her and thought, Your lips are a cunt. Your cleavage is a cunt. Your neck. Your ass. Your eager hands are fuckable. He wanted to come on her fingers and watch her lick them. It was more than madness.”
He was sitting forward, upright, blindly seeing every detail he described, speaking in a scorching whisper as he listened to her writing as fast as the tape recorder was turning. The pad was in her lap and her exertion was audible, not just the rustle of paper but a peculiar sighing of her chair legs that was somehow plaintive, even sad, a loosening and sometimes a creak, like the complaint of a tight knuckle joint. It could have been her body, but it was always her chair.
“He loved it all. He wanted more.”
He had drunk a pint of the datura and at the same moment he was dazzled. He saw a woman’s face and other, separate elements at the margin of his sight—shoes, painted fingernails, breasts lifted against the filled bodice of an evening gown, a glimpse of lace, a bra strap showing, a full skirt pressed against crushable buttocks, a black veil over staring eyes—images from old magazines, fragments of drawings, memories of women he had seen and never forgotten, the wonderful covers of old paperbacks—the titles, too, The Revolt of Mamie Stover and The Wayward Bus, Nana and I, the Jury —depicting reckless women half dressed and dressed up. They had been the icons of his education.
“‘All dressed up’ was the expression that excited him then, much more than ‘stripped naked,’” Steadman said. “He loved the drama of the event—the preparation, the clothes, the costume. He was possessed by the word ‘girlie,’ the word ‘panties,’ the word ‘bra.’”
He was looking past Ava at a young girl in a gown, framed in a doorway, backlit by a bright lamp inside a house on a warm night, her hair piled up, knowing she w
as beautiful, realizing she was desired.
“How far back are we going?”
“Way back,” Steadman said, and resumed, “Sex was the past, deep inside him, smoldering. Desire was mostly a memory.”
The best sex was a second chance at something he had longed for and had never outgrown—datura had helped him understand that. Sex for him was not a foray into the fast lane. It was the recognition and recapture of a moment of intense longing in the past—reliving it, using it, completing it. And the best of it was that even then the longing was not exhausted of its pleasure.
“He was so happy and horny as a boy,” Steadman said. “It was beautiful, but he wanted more. He burned and burned, wanting it all again. He renounced God for it, he turned his back on salvation, and if there was a hell he was willing to risk it for the luxury of enjoying a woman’s hungry embrace. What is the greatest pleasure in life?”
Ava was writing, wondering whether she was being asked to suggest the answer.
“Pure happiness is the fulfillment in middle age of a childhood fantasy. Freud at his finest. Having now what you wanted then. At last the blind man could revisit the past and use what he saw.”
“And what did he see?”
“He saw everything, and he could have any of it, any conquest, any moment. His special sight gave him access to the past.” Steadman raised his hand to signal that he was delivering an aside. “I want you to know how serious I am when I say that the past is incomplete, unfinished. Certain occasions.”
Ava had stopped writing, stopped moving. “The helpful cliché ‘You’re never too old to have a happy childhood,”’ she said, and then there was only her breathing, like the softest swing of air. “Name an occasion.”
“Prom night,” he said. He wasn’t dictating. He was tense with eagerness. “The thrill of it.”
“There’s the whole world to choose from and you choose a prom queen.”
“Not a queen. A skinny girl!”
“For most high school kids of your generation wasn’t the prom a letdown?”
“Of course. That’s why it never went away.” He sat forward. He said, “It was a golden moment that ended in frustration. What a thrill it was for him to uncover a yearning he had in the past, a tremendous sexual longing, and pick it up and complete it.”
She resumed writing fast, to catch up, and remained attentive, snatching at the pages of her pad and flipping them.
“He wanted now what had been denied to him. He desired only what had been thwarted. What had been withheld, he hungered for.”
He heard Ava’s chair responding to her body as she wrote, and the chair sounded as though she were riding it.
“He wanted Rosemarie Fredella in a blue low-cut prom dress—bare shoulders, bare neck, her breasts crushed together and her hair swept up beautifully as he had never seen it before. And white high-heeled shoes and a pearl necklace.”
“Pearl choker.”
“Yes. And dangling earrings. Pink lips, pink nails. Mascara. A new face. He had never seen her look this way before. She had gone to a lot of trouble to change from a pretty smiling girl into a seductive young woman. And now he understood—in his blindness, from his experience as a traveler—that this was like a tribal rite of sex play, in which the choicest virgins in the village were dressed up in elaborate costumes, their whole being made more beautiful, for the sole purpose of exciting desire in potential lovers. A kind of betrothal, for their initiation.”
The girl in the lovely dress, glowing with eagerness, his girl for the night, waiting alone for him at her doorway, looking fresh, looking willing, her smile and her whole posture saying, “I am ready. I am yours. Take me.”
Ava’s chair legs were murmuring, so he knew she was still writing. He said nothing more, even when she finished. He knew she was looking over the page, surmising what it was cuing her to do. An instruction was always implied in his narrative, implicit directions. She was glad. He needed her. Without her he was alone. With her his fantasy could live. There was no point to his blindness if his fantasy could not be activated. It had to be lived first and described afterward. The acting out of the fantasy contained the revelation.
He could trust her to be faithful to him, but he knew when he was being teased. She had tricked him yesterday, but playfully, proving that he was not as strong or as knowing as he thought. But he had liked the touch of the strange girl, and he had loved Ava’s stratagem, how she had taken the girl’s place, dressed as she was. He loved her for liking the game.
Now Ava said, “I need a little time.”
“Then go now.”
“Promise me you won’t drive blind.”
“It’s wearing off. Don’t worry.”
She left the room, she left the house, he heard her car on the driveway gravel. He knew she would call and he hoped soon. She was serious, and always more alluring when the episode was formal, perhaps a result of her medical training—her instinct for order? Even though she sometimes rebelled against it, she found it awkward to be casual, took pride in preparation, and seldom explained what it was she was doing. Putting herself in charge—more medical doctor traits.
He found the right clothes for himself, the tuxedo he seldom wore, the black shoes, the stiff shirt. He set them out, the tux over a chair, buffed the shoes, and found himself pacing.
Without being conscious of it at first—for almost two hours had passed and he had not received Ava’s call—he was impatient. Then he felt sure he was being kept waiting deliberately. The doctor is busy. There was absolutely nothing he could do except wait: could not read or write, or distract himself, or stray far from the telephone.
Such an old tormenting feeling, the impatience he had felt as a boy, wanting so badly to act on his own and hating the feeling that he needed permission, that he had to be summoned. Those were among the sharpest pains of his youth, impatience and delay, and they had created such yearning in him: his passion to vanish that he called travel.
All this was recreated in his mind without his having planned it. And how could she have known how much it had mattered to him, that delay itself made his desire greater and brought it to a pitch of lust? Almost five hours had passed.
His faltering blindness had turned to twilight, matching the actual twilight at the window, for he had been pacing in the house sightlessly, without switching any lights on.
When the phone rang, his blindness had moderated to the point that on the second ring he actually saw the telephone by the window in the last light of the waning day, almost eight o’clock this August night.
“It’s me.”
“Who?”
“Rosemarie, your prom date,” she said, and gave him her address.
He dressed quickly and considered a swig of the datura while he did so. But though he rued the fact that his blindness—his lightness—was completely gone, and he squinted at the confusing harshness of the lamps, it meant that he could keep his promise not to drive blind. He brought some of the mixture with him in a hip flask that had once held his whiskey.
The address she gave him was a house number he did not know, on a side road off Franklin Street—probably a friend’s place—but when he found it he could see it was perfect: a frame house with an open porch, a light burning on the porch, a lantern on a post beside the brick-paved front path.
As he approached the house, the front door opened and she stepped out in a blue prom gown, her hair upswept, white high-heeled shoes, white gloves. She wore lipstick and blue eye shadow, and he marveled at her resourcefulness. There was more detail in her appearance than he had suggested in his dictation: everything that he had remembered, and more, from the half-buried memory of his boyish desire.
“You look great.”
“Thank you,” she said in a small voice, seeming more uncertain than shy.
In the car, she said, “Are we going dancing?”
He said nothing. He hadn’t thought of that. He only wanted to be alone and to hold her.
“I know
a place,” he said.
They went by the unpaved back roads to the beach at the harbor entrance to Tashmoo, where they parked, hidden amid the high rose bushes, facing the Sound. Satisfied that they were alone, Steadman took out his hip flask and drank two large swallows. He then sat quietly, feeling the drug course in his blood and rise into the bulb of his head and warm his brain.
“This does amazing things to your pulse,” Ava said, her fingers on his wrist.
But he was smiling, he was blind, he got out of the car and went to her side and slipped off her shoes. Then, hearing music from a house in the woods they could not see, they danced slowly on the sand. He held her close, felt her frilly dress, the silks beneath it, all the layers against him, her body too, her sinuous dancing in his hands. He could hardly bear it.
He touched her, let his fingers slip to her buttocks and clutched them. Ava murmured but said nothing. He felt for her breasts in the crispness of all that cloth. She seemed to pull away, a tug of modesty, yet she allowed it.
They kissed. She kissed his ear, his neck, and he thought how holding her and kissing was a form of dancing.
“Not here.”
They went back to the car, which was fragrant with her perfume, something sensual in its stuffy heat, all the windows closed. He helped her into the back seat and kissed her again, sucked on her lips, groped at the bodice of her dress and found her breasts and put his face between them and kissed and nuzzled her cleavage.
“Long ago the answer was always ‘Please, stop.’”
Ava said, “Please, don’t stop.”
She sighed as he slipped his hand beneath her dress, all those layers, snagging his fingers on her petticoats, and found her panties. He extended his fingers to touch the lace trim and slid them under the tight elastic to the slick hair and soft lips, and as he slipped a thick finger into her, she moved her legs together and clasped his hand between her thighs and moaned and rode him.
