by Paul Theroux
“I’m going where you’re going.”
They ascended in silence. He inhaled a vaguely familiar aroma, a thick odor of fresh blossoms, like syrup in the air. When the elevator stopped at the fourteenth floor the woman got out with him, still touching his arm. Her fingers told him everything: she was nervous, eager, young, excited. Her leather bag was not large, but it was heavy and dense.
“I know the way.”
She released him as he tapped toward the door of his room. She remained, walking slightly behind him.
He tucked his plastic key card into the slot of the door lock, but when it buzzed he did not push the door open. The woman was a warm breathing shape of perfumed flesh next to him. He heard the binding of her shoe strap. Her long naked body was apparent to him as a bright shadow, submissive beneath her insubstantial dress.
“Yes?”
“I was wondering if there was anything I could do for you.”
“I’m thinking,” he said.
She hesitated. She leaned toward him as though to kiss him. They stood at his door in an empty corridor, on a thick carpet, the distant sound of a food cart rattling out of a service elevator.
“I’m very oral.”
Now he hesitated. She was faced away from him, not out of shyness but making sure that no one would interrupt, the edginess of a fox near meat.
“Good. Then you can read to me.” He pushed his heavy door open.
He sensed her whole body reacting with relief as she passed him, still radiating warmth, and went inside. He followed her and kicked the door shut.
He put down his cane, took off his jacket, and threw it on the sofa. He found a bottle of mineral water and poured himself a drink. He jerked the drapes, closing them. Then he excused himself, went to the bathroom, brushed his teeth, and returned to the sitting room of the suite, where the woman was standing in the center, stiff with puzzlement, clutching her hands. She had placed her heavy handbag beside the sofa.
“Dewy?”
“I’m here.”
“I know. What do you think of my suite?”
“I can’t see anything.”
Only then did he realize that he had not turned on the lights. He laughed and switched on a lamp next to the sofa. He sat and stuck his legs out.
“It’s beautifully appointed. Very comfortable-looking. Exquisite taste.”
The words made him frown, but as he pitied her he was aware that she had stepped to the door and hooked the safety chain. And she had glanced into the bedroom as she passed it.
He went to her. He caught her arm and held her hand and touched her face. She was not tall, and though she radiated heat she was fleshy, even plump. He could tell by passing his fingers over her face that she was pretty, and when he touched her she did not resist. She relaxed and took half a step nearer and smiled. So far, in the strange distortions of this book tour the only women who had offered themselves to him had been heavy and slow and unsubtle, incurious about his mode of living. But this one, Dewy, was bright and attractive and—he wondered why—very curious. From the moment he had switched on the lamp she had not stopped looking around.
“I can see in the dark.”
“Incredible.”
“I know you from somewhere.”
She put her hand over her mouth to stifle her reaction.
“I signed a book for you.”
“If you say so.”
“I’m trying to think where it was. New York, maybe? What are you doing here? You’re a writer, aren’t you?”
“I do a little writing.”
“You’re following me. You were waiting for me in the bar.”
The answer yes was a perceptible twitch in her body.
“What is it you want to know?”
Her silences told him everything, and she was still looking around the room, as if searching for clues.
“Nothing,” she said.
He laughed, because he had made her so self-conscious and defensive. He said, “You said you’d read to me. What did you have in mind?”
“Something from your book.”
“It’s a little late.”
She felt for him, her fingertips stroking his thigh. “I’ve got all night.”
He was smiling at her, and she did not seem to be aware that he knew that as she was stroking him she was nodding at the corners of the room, pausing to examine the items on the tabletops, the clothes showing in his open suitcase, glancing back at his face to peer at his eyes.
“Something from my book.” That had surprised him. Even though he was suspicious of her, he was flattered by the suggestion. He moved away from her and, sitting on the sofa, felt for a copy that he had left on a side table.
She sat beside him and said, “Mind if I get comfortable?”
She slipped her shoes off and drew her legs up beneath her and still, from where she sat, she was searching the room.
“I like the scene where you’re in the car, making out,” she said. “And your date goes down on you.”
“Not me. The main character.”
“He doesn’t have a name—how am I supposed to know?” she said, and took the book from him and flipped pages. “Anyway, the back seat of the car. A hot night. It was a turn-on. Here it is.”
She began to read. “I look fucked!
“Still smiling and peering intently into the mirror of her compact, she wiped the smears of lipstick from her face, dabbed at her eyes, combed her hair. And just as he thought she had finished, she took out a pouch of cosmetics and applied mascara and thickened her eyelashes—slowly, paying no attention to him, who watched with fascination as she prettied her face. She rouged her cheeks, reddened her lips again using a brush and lip gloss, made herself a new face, a mask of desire.
“I love that,” she said. “It goes on.
“She faced him. The dusty moonlight deepened the texture of her makeup and softened the planes of her face, and what had seemed an innocently questioning smile in the small mirror was now lust lit by moonbeams.
“She leaned toward him and her lowering arm crushed her gown as she reached down and slid her hand along his thigh.”
As Dewy read, her voice thickened and purred, and she let one hand drop onto Steadman’s leg. Though her fingers crawled across his thigh he was hardly conscious of it. He was listening closely, not aroused by anything she read but instead questioning the punctuation and certain words. “Lust lit by moonbeams” seemed purplish and pointless. She was racing ahead, reading with emphasis.
“The sound of his pleasure came slanting from deep within his lungs and seemed like an echo of a softer sighing in her throat. Her breasts were in his hands, his thumbs grazing her nipples. Her touch was surer and so finely judged that she seemed to feel in the throb of his cock the spasm of his juice rising—knew even before he did that he was about to come. Then he knew, his body began to convulse, and as he cried ‘No’—because she had let go—she pushed him backward onto the seat and pressed her face down, lapping his cock into her mouth, curling her tongue around it, and the suddenness of it, the snaking of her tongue, the pressure of her lips, the hot grip of her mouth, triggered his orgasm, which was not juice at all but a demon eel thrashing in his loins and swimming swiftly up his cock, one whole creature of live slime fighting the stiffness as it rose and bulged at the tip and darted into her mouth.
“Holding him with one hand, she devoured it and was still swallowing as he went limp and slipped out of her mouth. When she looked up at him with her smeared face and smudged eyes, she was still greedily gulping, licking droplets from her gleaming lips.”
She put the book down and moved her hand between his legs, and then he kissed her. Moments before he had sensed warmth, a glow of pleasure, but there was none on her lips. She was made of clay, going through the motions—he could taste her indifference, another low temperature. Her hands and arms were cold, her grip was perfunctory, as if coaxing a stubborn lever. She was placid, really; there was no thirst in her body.
But she said, “That feels nice.”
He smiled at her lie. He could easily discern her calculation, a different sort of scrutiny, like the squinting gaze of a bobble-headed passenger sitting across from him on a train, sizing him up. As a blind man he had become used to that stranger’s gaze—people staring at him in public. But in his own room it alerted him. She sniffed as she searched, and still her hand was closing on him.
Then she stood and slipped out of her dress, and when she sat again and was naked he sensed that he knew her absolutely. He reached behind her and turned off the lamp.
“Why did you come here?”
She let go of him. Her whole body contracted as though denying the implication behind his question.
“I have a feeling someone sent you here.”
Her reaction, which was not audible, not visible, not an odor, nothing except a suggestion of furious molecules, her stiffening and becoming a fraction smaller, told him it was true.
“You’re trying to find out if I’m really blind.”
Again the whir of molecules, a swallow of air, her knees together, her surprise. He sensed all this in the darkness as a liquefaction slipping slowly past him.
“There’s no story,” he said. “Put your clothes on. You don’t belong here.”
She said, protesting, “You wrote this sexy book and I want to give you head and you throw me out of your hotel room? Tell me that’s not a story.”
But she had started to dress, trying to be calm, like someone woken and startled by the smell of smoke, preparing to flee a dangerous room.
“It was in New York,” he said. “In the hotel. You asked me to sign your book when I was with Manfred.”
“No.”
“He sent you here to check on me.”
“No.”
“Tell Manfred to stay away from me.”
She was fumbling with her dress, hopping a little as she pulled it on and straightened it. “Please put the light on.”
“If you tell me the truth.”
“Manfred said you were a kind of mind reader. I didn’t believe him. But I believe him now.”
Steadman switched on the light and said, “You have a yeast infection.”
The woman began to cry, and her crying hindered her movements as she finished dressing, her sobbing slowing her and making her clumsy. When she was done and had put on her shoes, she stumbled slightly as she left, yanking the door, catching and straining the safety chain, and crying in frustration as she unfastened it and went out.
Steadman sat, a film of guilt like scum on his face. Needing to complain, he rubbed his eyes and dialed Ava. Just as quickly he hung up, realizing as he tapped the keypad how late it must be. He had not checked his watch—he unconsciously assumed that his watch face would be visible. It usually was at this hour. Touch was like sight: he stroked the hands of his watch—almost midnight. He cursed Manfred. And he imagined the phone call he had just aborted, Ava saying, You pushed your luck—what did you expect?
What happened next was odder than anything that had happened on that odd day. He was groping toward the bedroom when he remembered that he had not taken the drug since rising that morning in New York to catch the early train to Washington. He had been blind for more than eighteen hours—unprecedented, unexplainable. And the moment this disturbing thought occurred to him, he bumped into the bedroom wall.
7
HE WAS SHAKEN out of the soup of an obscure dream of interrogation by the ringing phone—a man’s overbright voice saying “Hi” and nothing else, one of those needling people who do not identify themselves, but instead make you guess, as though to unsettle you or test your friendship. Who at this hour was so alert for this sort of teasing? But Steadman was certain—still limp with sleep, even as his unpleasant dream faded—it was Jerry, the escort from yesterday, saying in a more tentative way, “Are you there?”
“Right here.”
“What train do you want to catch?” He seemed chastened by Steadman’s abruptness. “I can meet you anytime.”
“Don’t bother. I’ll take a cab to the station.” And Steadman hung up before Jerry could reply. He was still annoyed by “They ask really great questions,” implying that—blind, standing in front of the bookstore crowd, speaking without notes for a full hour—Steadman had made no impression. All that Jerry could commend was the brilliance of the audience. But it was a strategy, his belittling, like not giving his name on the phone.
Steadman’s indignation was twofold. I am a writer, he thought, and I am blind. Bastard!
He had to put the phone down to concentrate. It was bad enough to be woken by an idiot call, but, much worse, he was not sure at that moment whether he was blind or sighted. In his confusion his mind was scoured of all thought. He sat up in bed stupefied. Feeling vulnerable, his memory impaired, he felt an animal compulsion to flee the hotel and the city.
He needed to leave, to return to New York; needed people to observe him in order that he could function. He felt lost when he was alone and blind, but the physicality of other people, their glances and gestures, the way they breathed and swallowed, all their human responses, their smells, their skin, their very nerves, helped guide him on his way.
He needed friends, Ava especially, a woman whose intelligence would match his, whose eager flesh was like a torch to bring the foreground into focus and make the wider world visible. That was nothing new; he had always wanted a woman near, someone to challenge him, to comfort him, a sexual friend, a listener, the ideal companion Ava had been throughout the writing of his book. The paradox was that while he had loved her for her independence, he had also wanted to possess her, so they could be sexual, wise and foolish together. He loved her for being so reckless and so bright, for often being the aggressor, for lighting his way, for her risks and her dares. Even now, though she seemed out of sympathy, she was necessary to him.
Alone, he saw the future as a grainy monochrome of days, indistinct and worrisome. He wanted color and perspective, the stabilizing echoes of human voices. He needed to be witnessed. This he realized anew as he moved through his hotel room, gathering his clothes and filling his bag. The young woman’s perfume clung to the sofa where she had sat and read to him from his book.
He finished shaving and was about to take a measure of the drug when, mixing it in a glass of water, he faltered and batted the air and put the glass down untasted. He was already blind. He felt for the mirror, fingertips on the glass, saw nothing, felt nothing, except the hot lights framing the mirror on his face. I’m losing it, he thought.
Often he had gone to bed blind, but when had he ever woken blind? The effects of the drug had always worn off while he slept. Now his heavy eyes made him clumsier as he stuffed his suitcase. And at last he went back to the bathroom and drank the drug hurriedly, splashing his chin. And he stood, unsteady, as if he had swallowed a syrup of light. The warmth spread from his stomach and whipped through his blood until the nerves throbbed behind his eyes and crackled, a phosphorescence that was electric.
Downstairs, in a suit like a school uniform saturated with the woolly smell of cigarette smoke, the bellman approached on big flapping feet to take his bag. The man was black and broad-shouldered, and the bag was insubstantial in his hand as he swung it into the taxi, holding the door open.
“You going to be all right?”
The man pitied him with a helpless, burdening concern, easing him into the taxi as Steadman studied him, summing him up as someone poor and unappreciated, living on his own but with children somewhere, who were kept away from him. Having to be at work at five a.m., he was already weary. His uniform was fairly new but his shoes were worn, the leather crushed, with thin soles. The man coughed, covering his wide scraped-looking face and his bruised lips. His lungs were spongy and rotten.
The taxi driver said, “How’d it happen?”
Strangers swept in, querying, seizing on his blindness like predators spotting a weakness.
“Long story.”
&
nbsp; “You think you got problems? Check out the president. That man is breathing hard.”
“What’s the latest?”
“Talking ’bout ’peachment.”
The president’s woes, the scandal, the repeated denials and counterattacks, were on the radio in Steadman’s earphones all the way to New York. As he listened, he saw the president’s pink sheepish face and blue uncertain eyes, the bags of sleeplessness under them, as naked as a man’s features could be, as blank and pathetic and symmetrical as a target. He looked fragile and insulted and ashamed. He was everywhere on TV screens with the sound turned down, mouthing words and looking like a cornered man trying to persuade a gunman not to shoot. A man could not look more powerless, more hunted, more like prey, more bullied.
Steadman removed his headphones, and as though recognizing a decisive gesture, the woman sitting next to him on the train inclined her head and spoke in a gentle voice. “Going home?”
“No.”
“Not a New Yorker?”
“Just visiting.”
“I could show you around,” she said with conviction.
He wanted to surrender to her, to hold her; there was such a purr of protection in her voice.
“Where might you be staying?” she said.
She seemed as she spoke to invite him onto her lap, and in his mood of self-pity he was prepared to call her bluff and crawl beneath her arms, to lie there squashed under her breasts and allow himself to be suckled.
Instead of replying to her, he lifted his head and stared in her direction and watched her dissolve, become a pale flesh tone and an odor of crushed flowers. And just as quickly she bulked up again into the fattened reality of a broad-faced woman with a sack-like body and thick thighs, a rumpled dress, and puffy sorrowful eyes behind old-fashioned purple-rimmed glasses.
I am not blind, he thought. Could she tell?
Fading, narrowing, as though liquefying, she became a small anxious girl again. She was inquisitive and sexual, and he was aroused once more. But who was that woman he had just seen?
