by Paul Theroux
She was touching his face softly with her fingers, tracing his features. She lifted the shirt of her scrubs and supported her breast with her hand, grazing his lips with her nipple, saying, “Take me into your mouth. Bite me a little, suck me.”
Her taking the initiative now, as he was suffering—her attempt to interest him in sex—left him feeling awkward and faintly repelled and ever more the captive. He had no hunger, and dread had killed his desire.
One of her hands was behind him, steadying his head; her other hand, feeding her breast to him, pressed her nipple against his mouth. Lying against her, he heard her sigh, her whole body rippling with satisfaction.
She was warm and sexual, yet he was heavy, tense, unresponsive, and he was on the point of asking her, “What do you want me to do? Tell me, I want to please you,” as she had once asked him.
She seemed to understand, and in her crooning way she said, “You’ve got to stop thinking about your anxieties. Just let yourself float free. Can you do that, baby? It’s like finding the confidence and relaxation to be buoyant in a deep sea. Remember the first time you lay back in the ocean and let yourself float?”
But he lay as though afraid of drowning, his body locked and thick with misery.
“I want you to imagine being in water. Just let go, relax, and let it happen.”
She went on gently encouraging him, as if he felt apart, like a spectator at the edge of sex; and powerless, he sank in her arms and prepared himself to be weightless.
“Sex can be a way of seeing. You know that.”
He was hardly listening. His mouth was on her, he was comforted by her, and he was so absorbed, lying against her bare stomach, he really did seem to become less heavy, almost buoyant, her arms glowing on him. With this levitating sense of pleasure seeping into him, he felt detached and stopped listening to her. And Ava went on talking in a low regular cadence, as though to someone else, as he lay sucking on her nipple, the softness of her breast squashed against his cheek.
“Is that nice?”
As she spoke another hand crept across his leg from below and followed the seam on the fly of his jeans, feeling for his cock through the dense layer of cloth, the busy fingers asking a general question. And a moment later he felt his jeans being unfastened and loosened and tugged down. How could this be? He felt Ava’s two hands, one under his head, the other directing her breast. He was outstretched on the sofa, sleepy and slightly drunk, yet aware of the odd number, the insinuation of the third hand.
He made a move to pull away. Ava said, “Just let it happen,” and the ghost-like hand groped further, the fingers manipulating him until it was no longer so strange. Then the searching of a licking tongue and the heat of an eager mouth.
Burying his face in Ava’s breast, Steadman became fearful as the other mouth nuzzled him and enclosed his cock, at first gently, in a tasting way, and finally with gusto, sighing, the sighs sounding within his flesh and swelling. In a twinge of alarm, he let one hand trail down until he could feel the long hair of the woman below. She was wearing a studded leather dog collar that was tight on her neck. He felt further, into the warm declivity of her shoulder, and grazing his knuckles on her smooth cheek, he let his hand fall, and was greatly relieved when it found the fullness of her breast. She must have been kneeling next to the sofa, leaning across his legs, as though drinking at a fountain. Her breasts hung loose, slack and soft, and danced in his hand.
Unexpected light blazed in his mind. He surrendered to the caresses, and for the longest time on the sofa in the warm room he lay half smothered, half floating, while Ava consoled him. Or was she speaking to the other woman? There was a confidence in the way she spoke, almost as if she were gloating. It ceased to matter, for at last the separate strands of his desire became a knot, and the knot began to twist in his guts, and it slipped and tightened in his groin until it was an animal’s cramp of tortured muscle. In an instant it was yanked hard and it liquefied, spilling warmth all over him. He cried out once, and then he was raw and innocent again.
He sank into sleep, and was unconscious, wrapped in a happy dream of release. He had regained his eyesight. Sex had freed him. He recalled how he had suspected that there had been another person in the house—the shadow, the presence, the odd sounds. In his dream he was in the White House, at a jostling press conference in which he was doing all the talking to a respectful crowd. But he was defiant, tearful, saying “See? I was right!”
3
FEELING FOR AVA with creeping spider-like fingers in the bed when he woke, not knowing whether it was day or night, he found her arm and grasped it. At once he was doubtful, remembering. “Is that you?” She kissed him and drew him to her. He kissed her shoulder in a grateful way. She was happy, he could tell, not by anything she said—all she did was murmur—but by the teasing sigh in her throat, a simple grace note of irony.
“Who was that woman?”
“What does it matter if you liked what she did?”
He wondered whether he had really enjoyed it, because it had been so unexpected and unasked for, too sudden to savor. He did not reply at first; he considered that Ava, with her customary doctor’s thoroughness, had been preparing the encounter for weeks. He had to admit that he had finally been aroused, coaxed out of his impotence. But the truth was that he had felt lost in the act, slightly panicky and bewildered, too startled to be possessed. He had been foundering and flailing at the periphery of her pleasure. Her enjoyment had disturbed him.
“I loved it,” he said.
From the way her body settled as she was pressed against him, he knew it was the answer she wanted. Still, he felt the need to apologize.
“Maybe it’s because I’m feeling so anxious about my eyes. I can’t believe I’m so feeble.”
“You were blind before. You were blind for months. And you managed.”
“It was nothing like this. That was a kind of insight—you know! This is a prison. It’s punishment. And I’m not taking the drug”
“There’s such a thing as discontinuation syndrome.”
“I’m afraid to go very far.” He was too humiliated to say that he feared to leave the house at all.
“You should try. You’re stronger than you think.”
“Find me an eye doctor,” he said. “Please help me.”
“I have one lined up. She’s in Boston. She makes a monthly visit to the island. She’ll see you and run some tests.”
“What do I do in the meantime?”
“Write your story. You said you wanted to.”
He had told her of the short story he had planned, something like a Borges tale, compressed and allusive, something he would publish to prove that he was able to work. But all he had was a vague notion of the form; he had no narrative, no characters, no names or incidents.
“Nothing,” he said, summarizing what was in his mind.
“Can’t we do this?” She felt for him, but playfully.
Sex was like an intrusion, a hovering threat that made him feel small. When she touched him he felt clumsy and ignorant, like a big goofy boy intimidated by the mysteries of life and death, darkness and light, thinking, What will I do when I grow up? He had lost the ability to take a walk, to drive down the road, to sail a boat, to swim. He was a cripple, blind and incapable in the most fundamental way. Listening to the radio humbled him by reminding him of how futile he was, twisting a knob, holding his pathetic earphones. Though he struggled, mumbling to himself, he could not read or write, and even his speech seemed to be impaired. Half the time he stammered, unsure of whether he had a listener. For sex, for any pleasure, he needed the insight he had known before: the liberation of light.
What convinced him of that was the third hand of the night before. At one point in the intensity of his arousal, during the cramped convulsive unknotting, the sudden slippage of his ejaculation, he had sensed a sliver of light pierce his eyes. But no sooner had it blazed within the crevice of its narrow entry than it was gone. It was another remi
nder of what he had lost. He could not think of sex without feeling sad.
“Anyway, I was right,” he said, remembering the niggling thought. But it was a victory of sorts for him, something he badly needed. “There was someone in the house.”
Instead of speaking, Ava kissed him, but in a thoughtful way, holding her lips against his as though replying. She was always so scrupulous. She might refrain from responding but she never lied to him. He wondered what lesson there had been in her life that prevented her from deceiving him. Perhaps her study of medicine: the exactitudes of science had kept her truthful.
“Maybe I’m not as blind as I thought I was.”
“Gotta go,” she said, and bounded out of bed. “I’ll be late.”
He lay in bed trying to recall details of the night before. He had resisted, he had felt enticed, but he had little memory of it. The third hand had been like a wicked imp emerging from the darkness.
Before Ava left for the hospital, she said, “Try to get out today. Call a taxi, go into town. It’ll do you good.”
But when she was gone he became self-conscious, believing the other woman might still be in the house. He listened hard for a telling sound. Walking, he held his arms out, feeling his way forward, prepared to defend himself. His greatest fear was that without warning a stranger would touch him.
“If you’re here, say something.”
From the way his voice rang in the room he guessed there was no one, that she had gone.
He moped all morning, and toward midafternoon he called the taxi service and asked to be dropped on Main Street. “You going to be all right?” the young driver said with the bossy insincerity all the rest of them showed. In Vineyard Haven Steadman could tell that the sidewalk was busy with shufflers, but he also heard the remarks of people making way for him, even heard his name whispered several times, and “the writer.”
Moving slowly, tapping his cane, he did not fall, and he was encouraged to walk farther than he had planned. He made it past the deli, the gift shops, the Bunch of Grapes bookstore, the drugstore, and kept going, past the bank and the bagel shop. He was still going slowly but, more confident, more upright, now he guessed he was on West Chop Road—no people crowding him. A car with a rapping engine pulled beside him and a man’s voice called out, “Slade Steadman.”
Steadman stopped and, taking care, angled his body toward the street.
“Let me give you a lift.”
The car door slammed. The man was close to him, nudging him.
“Do I know you?” Steadman asked.
“Don’t think so, but I sure know you. Here, get in,” and the man guided him into the car. Steadman was too tired and confused to resist. “You’re not safe stumbling around like that,” the man said.
“I wasn’t stumbling.” Steadman spoke so sharply the man was silent. “Who are you?”
“Whitey Cubbage?” the man said in a querying way. “I guess your friend didn’t like that,” as if he had already forgotten Steadman was blind.
“What friend?”
But the man didn’t seem to hear. He drove on, narrating: “Lovely day ... Damned cyclists ... God, they’re tearing down the Norton place”—and soon made a turn. The car engine strained, seeming to climb a steep driveway, and with the car on this incline he stopped and yanked the hand brake.
“Where are we?”
“I live here,” the man said testily, as though rebuffing an ignorant question. “Come on in. Bet you could use a cup of coffee.”
He helped Steadman out of the car, and was so abrupt and impatient, leading him so clumsily, that Steadman stumbled on the porch steps. Seeing Steadman on his knees, holding the handrail, the man apologized.
“Can’t kill you” he said. “You’re the writer.”
“Yes.”
“And you’ve got everyone dogging your heels.”
Cubbage guided Steadman like an usher, cupping his elbow, steering him to a chair. The house smelled of unwashed clothes, and though he heard a clock marking time like a metronome, there was a great stillness, as of tightly shut windows. A trapped fly buzzed and bumped one windowpane. A faucet dripped, drops plopping into a brimming sink basin. Cats, too—Steadman smelled the litter box and heard the complaining purrs, some of them like swallowed bubbles. The whole world was shut out, and the stinks shut in.
“I know it’s a mess.”
“It’s fine,” Steadman said. “But I have to go.”
“You haven’t even heard my story yet.”
The man’s voice was wet-eyed and jowly, and the implacable ticks of the loud clock made his procrastination absurd.
“Got the plans of this house out of Popular Mechanics. Want to buy it? If you don’t, my idiot son will get it. It’d cost you less than a million. You could write a great book here.”
Steadman said, “Is that your story?”
“Of course not,” Cubbage said. “Listen, you shouldn’t pay a blind bit of notice to what people say. There’s no connection between anything you’ve done and this damn president.”
“Who said there was?”
“I don’t know, it’s going around,” the man said carelessly. He seemed to be stirring his hand in a cardboard box of oddments, because he made a clattering, the scrape of loose paper and the clink of trifles. Then came four clear notes of a banjo. “This is a little thing called ‘Sleepy Time Gal.’ ” He began strumming, but his plucking slowed and stopped as he began to sob miserably. “It’s my wife,” he said. He snuffled snot and tears. “Cancer took her. Forty-two years we were married. You can’t replace someone like that.”
“I’m very sorry,” Steadman said.
“Do you know what true love is?”
In a voice like stone Steadman said, “No.”
“Go ahead”—and he plucked the banjo again, a twangling note—“make me an offer on the house.”
“I can’t stay here any longer,” Steadman said.
“What about my story?”
“I’m late for an appointment.”
“Don’t you realize I saved you back there, from those people?”
“What people?”
“The ones following you. Looked like they wanted to pester you. And that man?”
“What man?”
“Dogging your heels.”
“Can you describe him? What did he look like?”
“How am I supposed to know what he looked like?” Cubbage was on his feet. “You’re the writer—you describe him.”
In a mood of resentment Cubbage fumbled and bullied Steadman down the stairs and into the car. Because of all the one-way streets, he took him by the back route down to the taxi stand at the ferry landing.
“That’s the thanks I get,” Cubbage said.
“I’ll call you,” Steadman said, to pacify him.
By the time he got home he could tell from the descent of cool air and the dropping of the wind that night had fallen. He also suspected from the way Ava spoke to him that she was not alone. Something dense, like a thickness of cloth, blotted the echo of Ava’s voice in the room.
She said, “I was beginning to think you’d taken up residence somewhere else.”
The choice of words, too—the sort of facetious and brittle formality a person used when someone else, someone who mattered, was listening.
Steadman was too rattled to banter with her, and he was acutely aware from the pulse of the stranger’s breathing that this other person was watching closely.
“What about that doctor who was going to examine me?”
“All in good time.” Another stagy and supercilious phrase, meant to be overheard. “Now, how about a drink?”
It was all like theater, all the obvious talk, but he was lost here. He said, “Okay,” and felt for his armchair. Sitting, drinking, he was weighted with a sense of captivity. Ava had put the glass of wine into his hand. She lingered beside him.
“I’ve been waiting for you.”
Her growly affection was unambiguous: she w
anted sex. Yet he had hardly recovered from the old man’s weeping and bullying and the crazy interlude in his house, which was like an abduction. Do you know what true love is? and Dogging your heels— what was that all about? He was rueful: a blind man was everyone’s victim.
“I had an insane afternoon,” he said. “I did as you suggested. I went into town. I almost fell down about fifty times. I think I was being followed. Some crazy old bastard was after me.”
“Come over here,” Ava said. “You need to relax.”
She helped him to his feet. She led him onto the carpet and had him crouch and lie down. She put a pillow under his head.
As he lay, letting her fumble with his belt buckle, she radiated warmth, hovering over him. He tried to imagine her propped on one arm, leaning to tug his jeans off. But apart from a vague picture of her warm presence, he got nowhere and was conscious only of his naked legs stretched out. Even when she touched him, using her fingers and then her mouth to arouse him, he felt unfocused and unprepared.
“I’m sorry.”
He struggled to fantasize, yet his sense of being trapped, a reminder of the afternoon, crowded and distracted him. A hardening spark in his flesh gave him hope, but was more light than heat. He wanted to be overwhelmed, and he knew that was what Ava wanted. He lay on his back as though adrift, and she worked on him, squealing, her mouth filled with his flesh. When he was harder she mounted him. She rode him with furious impatience, and he was like a woman again, wincing beneath her thrusts.
“Now, yes, that’s what I want,” she said.
From the directness and practicality of her tone he knew she was not talking to him. A moment later he was nudged, something pressing his ear, and then his head was gripped and a mass of moist flesh settled against his face, warm soft skin at his ears, his nose and mouth brushed by the lips of a dripping vulva.
As Ava rode him, the other woman’s body rose and fell against his face, as if in the saddle of a cantering horse. Each time she lifted herself, releasing his ears, he could hear her squeals—and the sighs of Ava’s rapture, too, as she steadied the woman and kissed her. It was not the fierce kissing he had known, but a gentle chafing of soft lips and the pressure of fondling hands.
