Blinding Light

by Paul Theroux

  Her version of pleasure was so single-minded she made him feel more like her prisoner than her lover. Ava had taken charge again, but hers was not the tentative and maternal breastfeeding embrace of the night before. It was a piling on, aggressive and deliberate, an act in which he was a passive supine detail, something for the women to sit on and ride while they hugged and kissed. Lying there, he understood that he was an aspect of Ava’s fantasy, but not the object of it, not the center of her attention. There was no rapture for him, no tenderness, and now, as he was pummeled, hardly any arousal.

  The nameless person, the silent woman, was smearing his face, stifling him as he gasped for breath. He was pinned to the floor, the weight of the two bodies on him, his cock feeling twisted and raw from being ridden, his whole head burning from the hot clamp of the bare legs. They went on, like delirious children assaulting a giant. And he was rubbed and smacked, the heat of that wet rag of flesh like being slapped in the face with raw meat.

  In the women’s concentration on each other he was denied his orgasm, though they enjoyed a moment of frenzy together, yelping in triumph, sounding girlish. They didn’t seem to notice him then, but when they were done, laughing softly, shivering into each other’s arms, they gathered him up and helped him to bed.

  “I hope we didn’t hurt him,” the woman said as they left the room.

  There was so much he didn’t know. He lay there feeling bruised. All this time and he hardly knew anything.

  For the following few days Ava worked odd hours again. Steadman brooded on his humiliation. The next time she was on the day shift and they had dinner together at home, he tried to broach the subject. He did not know where to begin. Never mind the visiting woman; who had Ava become, and what did she want?

  “Shouldn’t we be talking about that”—he fished for the right word—“that encounter?”

  “That was my encounter, not yours,” she said, sure of herself. “So there’s nothing to talk about. I just want you to know it’s not retributive.”

  But he thought “retributive” was exactly what it was—retribution for the months and months of making his book, for the years of living his life, for his choosing the drug. And the retaliation was her way of showing him that she now knew what he had known all along, that sex was a different route, a different destination, for each person. Approaching that land of desire, one person saw a mountain and another a valley, a foreign landscape and culture, a confusion of language and costume. So that in any act of sex one person was at home feeling all the gusto and satisfaction of security, and the other was trespassing.

  “I want to talk about it.”

  “You’ll just interrogate me. I hate your writer’s questions.” As she spoke she got up and busied herself in the kitchen. “I’m happy. Therefore, there’s nothing to discuss.”

  He didn’t pursue her, but he was sorry. He had wanted to explain that fear had robbed him of his libido.

  A few days later he slipped into bed and was embraced. He did not know at first that it was the other woman until she kissed him and sighed. Bodies could seem almost identical, but a voice, a murmur, a kiss, they were a person’s uniqueness. And there was an odor—of breath, of skin and hair—that was singular, too.

  He let himself be embraced and caressed, and he almost apologized for his futility when Ava slid into the bed behind him and snuggled up to him. Though she was against his back, everything about her was familiar. He was in the middle. He knew that he was somehow necessary to them, yet from their gropings that they were more interested in each other than in him. And so they lay tangled, but he knew that only he was in darkness.

  The next morning, finding himself alone, he called Ava on her cell phone and left a message saying that they had to talk, and how about a drink somewhere? Ava returned the call later and said that she had reserved a table at the Dockside, overlooking the harbor in Oak Bluffs. She would pick him up after work. He took this as a good sign, something sentimental; it was the place he had brought her on their first date, where she had wept, realizing that he was the author of Trespassing.

  “Your table is outside, as you requested,” the waitress said. She led them to it and took their order, two glasses of Merlot.

  When she was gone, Ava said, “I love to see the island people waiting to meet the ferry. The bossy posture. The way they stand on the pier with their arms folded, searching for their friends on the boat. They seem so confident. ‘Here I am. I belong here. I’m going to take care of you.’”

  She was not looking at him. Was she glancing down the pier where the Island Queen had just docked?

  “What are you talking about?” Steadman said. She was speaking like a woman in a play, not listening, just making a superfluous pronouncement, pleased with herself, thinking she was giving information.

  “Ah, here’s our drinks,” Ava said. This was also spoken like a line in a play.

  Steadman sulked, thinking of his unwritten story, while the glasses of wine were set down. When he was sure the waitress had left, he said, “Can’t you see I’m miserable?”

  Ava said, “It’s a beautiful evening. The harbor is full of sailboats. You’ve got a drink. We’re together. Why don’t we simply enjoy what we have?”

  “What is this?” he said. She was haughty and enigmatic, and everything she said sounded stilted and fictional, as though she were not talking to him but merely reciting lines. “I don’t want to hear about the boats. I can’t see a thing.”

  “I’ll be your eyes for a while.”

  “I can’t read or write. I can barely think straight. Find me that specialist. Why don’t you help me?”

  He meant to challenge her, but she surprised him, saying with amused detachment and with an archness he had never heard her use before, “Maybe what we’re doing with my friend will help you.”

  It was the sort of thing he might have said before: sex as a cure, sex as vision, sex as blinding light, sex as a miracle drug.

  He said, “Maybe you’re just using me.”

  “This is an opportunity. Don’t ask me to explain it, but I know I won’t have another chance like this again.”

  Women were usually spoken about by men—and by other women—as casualties of indecision, fretful, always on the hook, helpless, forever trifled with. But that had not been his experience at all. Men were the ditherers, the smilers, the feckless triflers. Men were fritterers, too: they took their time, because they had plenty of time. But women were remorseless timekeepers, ruthlessly so sometimes—certainly the women he had known in his life. They had given the impression of being passive and submissive, but they were not indifferent, far from it. They were watchful, perhaps silent, but obsessively alert, like raptors awaiting their chance.

  And when the opportunity arose they knew it, and they pounced and gave it everything they had. He admired that, the way they singled out a choice and went for it.

  “You like that other woman,” he said.

  “You can’t imagine.”

  Ava was smiling, he was sure of it, but he could not say how he knew —something in her tone.

  Ava was another raptor. She had found someone else, and it so happened the lover was a woman. He was in between and felt weirdly privileged and perverse. He had never seen this ferocity in Ava, and he took it to be love.

  “How was that Merlot?” the waitress said when Ava asked for the check.

  “Very nice,” Ava said.

  “Fine,” Steadman said.

  “And how about that frozen daiquiri?”

  What frozen daiquiri? Steadman thought.

  “It was fabulous.” A woman’s voice at the same table—how was that possible? But as soon as he asked himself the question, he knew the answer.

  And that night was another night with the other woman.

  4

  SUMMER NIGHTS on the Vineyard, thick with humidity, saturated with the rush of the tide, its lift and splash, its ebb that left bubbling mudflats, and the warmed blossoms of Rosa rugosa, a du
stiness of daylilies and the sweet decay of leaf piles and pinched acorns under the scrub oaks: he knew every detail and still felt that he was trespassing. The sociable people on the island for the season rushed from party to party. Even Ava was on the circuit, perhaps with her woman friend—how was he to know? His friends called—Wolfbein was persistent—but Steadman made excuses and stayed home. He had discovered that going out was dangerous.

  The seamless dark turned him into a pedantic clown in a gloomy farce, intending to be serious as he stumbled and fell. He was so lost he began to question whether he had been blind before. He repeated to himself with disbelief that this was like nothing he had ever known.

  Even those times years ago on the Trespassing trip when he had woken in a reeking room in the middle of the night, gasping and swallowing black air and the shit stink of a rural village, not the slightest idea where he was. Burma? Bangladesh? Assam? That simple confusion, which cleared up at daybreak, was better by far than this. What he knew now was trespassing with the direst consequences. No way out. He seemed to exist in a deep hole, with all the stifling cushions of night stacked upon him, making him very small.

  How could he beg for pity? Yet he wanted sympathy. Ava had a bystander’s slack attention. Would she listen to him? The curse of his involuntary blindness she seemed to regard as no more than another distraction, hardly amounting to an event, more like the continuation of his extended and episodic egotism as the famous recluse. He was another patient clamoring to be seen—at least that was how she made him feel. Her cold gaze held him in an unsubtle way as merely disabled, rather inconvenienced, somewhat bothered. And he felt he was dying.

  His state of mind was the opposite of his old settled writing mood—the drug mood, which was bliss, and which he assumed by drinking datura. The mood that he put on, the mood that wore off. That was in the past, a game he had learned, and it no longer served him. He was now desperate. He had no control over this imprisoning shadow. He had not used the drug for months.

  “I like the imagery,” Ava said when he told her these things. “But it’s like poetry, pretty but vague. It doesn’t help in making a diagnosis.”

  Her pauses made him suspect that she might be taking notes about his condition. Something in her nose-breathing, air pauses like punctuation, suggested she was writing. She didn’t deny it.

  “I always update my case histories.”

  He tottered toward her on crooked unbelieving clown’s feet, his arms extended. “I’m a case history?”

  “Just an expression.”

  Still, it baffled him. And the confident way she said that, the way he was unsteady, groping for the arm of a chair that had been moved—and where was the sofa he had always used for dictation?—it all threw him. His disorientation robbed him of his sense of security and, worse, seemed to whisper that the house was not his anymore. The whole carefully built estate belonged to her and to her passions now.

  “I don’t mean to minimize the bother.”

  “Bother?” He tried to get his face close to hers, to show how strongly he objected to this belittling word.

  “Slade, you’ve been this way for a year and a half.”

  Even she, the physician, avoided the word “blind.”

  “Not like this.” In spite of himself he could not contain the scream in his voice, and that also made him feel small.

  She didn’t understand that the prescience he had experienced before as a mind reader, and the dark helplessness he felt now as an ignorant cripple, were two opposite modes of being. Maybe the drug had not really blinded him before but only given him a convincing illusion of blindness.

  He knew that drinking even a drop of the drug had heightened his perceptions to the point where he was hyperreceptive to all physical stimuli. But there was an imaginative dimension, too. He was given so precise a memory that all experience was available to him—not just his ability to view the present: he was granted such an exalted reverie of insight that he saw both past and future illuminated in the diamond-bright datura darkness of his drug trance, which was a starry night of unlimited knowing in dripping stipples of color.

  But now he had a bag over his head. He could not walk without stumbling, and his speech was affected, too. He spoke in a tentative and halting way, in a calling-out voice, never sure whether anyone was listening. Stammering and stumbling were similar uncertainties, and his loss of sex drive seemed to be related—blind and faltering in every way. Wasn’t it obvious to her that feeling powerless terrified him?

  “Are you there? Say something.”

  “I’m listening.”

  “Who is that woman?”

  Ava made a mirthful noise in her throat. She said, “Don’t you like her?”

  “I’ve got other things on my mind.”

  “But I don’t.”

  He had suspected all along, but he was sure of it then: the woman was her opportunity. And what was he? “So you really are using me.”

  “I promise I will do everything I can to make you well,” Ava said. “The specialist, the tests—I told you.”

  “I think you’re playing some kind of game with me.”

  “Nothing that should surprise you.”

  “That woman—” he began to say.

  Interrupting him, she said, “Don’t tell me you’re shocked.” She was playful, slightly mocking and resentful. “I don’t want to be your dolly. I was your dolly. And now are you saying you don’t want to be my dolly?”

  While she was speaking he screamed, a horrible incompetent honking, just to shut her up, and then he screamed again, “I can’t see a fucking thing!”

  He shattered the air in the room and shocked her into silence. He hadn’t wanted to raise his voice and betray the extent of his fear. But now she knew. He sensed her coming near him. Before, he would have known what was in her mind; would have seen into her heart, would have been able to turn away and sweep out of the room. But all he knew now was a lurking shadow and her unsteady breathing. She clasped his hands in hers.

  “I’ll look after you,” she said. “Please don’t worry.”

  He wanted to weep with confusion.

  “But don’t deny me my pleasure,” she said. “I’ve never denied you yours.”

  He didn’t believe her. That was another effect of his darkness. Nothing was real; even voices were false. Ava’s reassurance just depressed him. The more certain-sounding the promise, the less he was convinced. He was sure she was procrastinating, and selfishly, so she could go on involving him in her dalliance with her woman friend. And what he would have found pleasurable before was a torment to him now.

  The woman did not show up after that conversation. Maybe his scream of “I can’t see a fucking thing!” had given Ava pause. Or maybe the woman had been present and had heard it, and had fled.

  The echo of that fearful scream went on booming in his mind. It finally resolved itself into an angry idea, like a tight whipping wire. He saw a wicked fable, not as a narrative but as a vivid picture.

  He remembered The Sleeping Herdsman, a postage-stamp-sized Rembrandt etching he had once seen, showing a man with a beard dozing in a grove of trees and near him a smiling and impish young woman, his wife or lover, fondled by a young man while the older man snoozed and his cow gaped. But there was a wickeder version. Not a sleeping man but a blind man trapped by his lover, the man a naive blunderer, the woman a calculating plotter.

  The picture in his mind was a summing up of the whole drama. In the foreground, the blind man was sitting blank-faced in a garden, while nearby a gleeful woman with her legs apart was being mounted by a goggle-eyed youth—and the long-haired youth could have been a girl. The drama was straightforward and the image stayed in his memory, like the Rembrandt or a stark woodcut in a book of fables. This one would have been titled “The Blind Man’s Wife.”

  She was the central figure, with her welcoming embrace; the blind man was helpless and fooled, the embodiment of inaction. It was impossible to tell from his ambiguou
s expression whether he knew what was happening, but even if he did, what could he do except rage at his blindness?

  For that reason—the shame of it—Steadman did not rage. He persisted, though. He was so demoralized by seeing nothing, by writing nothing, by his dependence on Ava, that only this mocking picture of a betrayed man gave him hope.

  Ava went on promising that the doctor would visit. And some days later the doctor came. Was it a few days? Was it a week or more? He didn’t know. He was blind to the passage of time, too.

  “I’m going to ask you to sit right here next to me.”

  It took him a moment to realize that the doctor was a woman. She was all business. This was not the lover—he understood that immediately from Ava’s deference.

  “Let me give you a hand,” the doctor said when she saw him groping.

  Her big hands wrapped his in their soft pads. An odor of strong soap and salty sweat told him that she was plain and heavy. She led him haltingly to a chair.

  “Darling?” he called out.

  “Dr. Katsina’s in the other room.”

  Her familiarity with the layout of the house perplexed Steadman, and it made him feel like more of a stranger himself.

  “Just relax for me.”

  She held his chin, and he could tell from the warmth on his eyes that she was shining a light into them, one then the other.

  “Are you taking any medication?”

  “No.”

  “No drugs?”

  His mouth was woolly as he said, “No drugs.”

  “Any discomfort?”

  He hesitated then, for the agony of his blindness was like a raw seeping wound in the torn-open meat of his body, which prevented him from being able to think about anything else.

  “None.”

  She put a cuff on his arm, cinching it with Velcro, and took his blood pressure. She made notes; he heard the rattle of the paper, the click of her ballpoint. She was hovering near his face. He sensed her breath, felt her fingertips positioning his head; she was peering at him.