Blinding Light (23 page)

On some days of dictation he felt that he had poisoned himself and died; that in death he had entered the shimmering chambers that some people had glimpsed but none had described, because unlike Steadman they were unable to come back from the dead. He died once a day and woke, delivered from death, freighted with revelation.

He worked alone, with Ava. No one else knew how he had been transformed. Steadman remained secluded as the bleaker seasons passed into the cold Vineyard spring, with its spells of frigid sunshine. He had no need to go anywhere. His writing was the one constant in his life, and he was content with the conceit that, blinded this way, he contained the world.

But late May brought warmth and color. After the clammy winter and the cold northwest wind there were some uncertain days, and then at last the Vineyard was enlarged with more assertive sunlight, and the rain diminished, and the wind swung around and blew from the southwest. He knew the island would be sunny and pleasant for the next four months. The first flowers were the biggest and brightest, the daffodils and early Asian daylilies, the azaleas, the rhododendrons, the white viburnum the locals called mayflowers, the blossoms he preferred for their fragrance, for the more extravagant the flower, the more modest its aroma. He was no longer tricked by his eye. One of the lessons of blindness was that night-blooming flowers had the most powerful perfume.

After the long winter up-island he prepared himself for summer—the pleasures of spring lasted just a few weeks. Steadman wondered what the season might bring. The winter for him had been perfect: safe and sexual, turning him into an imaginative animal. After his day's work, he ate and rutted and then slept soundly. He woke and blinded himself first thing and resumed his dictation. He felt as confident as a prophet. He spoke his narrative as the book was revealed to him.

His writing was not work—it was his life, flesh made into words, the erotic novel rehearsed at night. He was like someone conducting an experiment on himself, then writing up the results. Blindness was his method and his memory; the drug created in his consciousness a miracle of remembering and invention.

He was most himself in his blindness, an eyeless worm on the move; most himself in his sexuality, and paired with Ava absolutely without inhibition. He was convinced that his sexual history was the essential truth that demanded to be written as fiction.

He was satisfied with his progress so far: enough had been transcribed and printed for him to begin calling it a book. The book contained his world; he inhabited the book. The act of creation became understandable to him: it was brilliant transformation, not making something from nothing, but giving order to his life, turning darkness into light. He knew now that the travel in
Trespassing
was a delusion. There was no travel on earth like the distances he was covering now, locked and blindfolded in his hidden house.

A satisfying solitude was returned to him, and he delighted in its stimulation. For years he had longed to write the fictional counterpart to
Trespassing,
a novel as an interior journey that would also be an erotic masterpiece, wandering across areas of human experience that had been regarded as forbidden—like the sort of fenced-off frontiers he had crossed in his travel book: sex as trespass in the realms of touch, taste, and smell; sex as memory, as fantasy, as prophecy. And fantasy, because it was ritualistic, became something like a sacrament that gave him access to the truth of his past.

He had been so hesitant to go to Ecuador; it had taken an effort of will to submit to the drugs; he had needed to be tempted; he knew it was his last bargain. But the datura had made all the difference, had revealed his book to him, and the months of productive seclusion he had spent since arriving back on the island were the happiest he had ever known.

And he had discovered through the drug's blinding light that the truth was sexual: the source of truth was pleasure itself, fundamental and sensual. Everything else was a dishonest aspect of an elaborate and misleading surface—all lies.

He intended his book as a confession and a consolation. In a world full of desperate and bloody imagery, how could such a thing as sex be shocking? Yet he was interested in describing only the nightmarish intimacies of his sexuality. For the traveler who had gone everywhere else on earth, this was the undiscovered world of his mind and heart, the basis of his being, his inner life revealed, not anyone else's. No one could say, “Not true!” when he knew it was his own truth, that he had risked blindness to understand.

 

One day in early summer he was with Ava in his library, working on the novel, when she handed a card to him. He framed the card in his hands, then smoothed it, touching the raised lettering with his fingertips, and said, “An invitation. I can just about read it. The Wallaces?”

Ava said, “The Wolfbeins. Party at their house.”

The noise Steadman made in his throat, adenoidal, approving, sounding interested, put Ava on the defensive.

Ava said, “You could do without going.”

She was the one who usually wanted to attend parties, and when they had stayed away she accused Steadman of being vain, of sniffing at his old friends, of being a prima donna. The Wolfbeins' summer place was in Lambert's Cove, which necessitated a long drive from Steadman's up-island house, and for the past few summers Steadman had avoided such parties. Yet he was interested.

“I think I should go.”

“Are you serious?”

“My debut,” he said.

“What a word.”

“To show myself as I am.”

She laughed loudly. “You sound like such a fairy, saying that.”

“You don't get it.” He was smiling, with his face in front of her, his blank gaze. “I mean go blind.”

He could hear Ava's whole body react, seeming to stiffen in objection. “That's just a stunt,” she said.

“I am most myself when I'm blind.”

“It's a drug!” Ava said. “You are seeing phosphenes—they exist outside a light source. It's a dazzling delusion, a kind of migraine. And what will you do when it wears off?”

Steadman turned away from her and said, “I have to go there.”

He was thinking of the future—his desire to move on, because he needed to distance himself from
Trespassing
and its youthful halftruths. And since taking the drug he had thought a great deal about death. He might die at any time. And the man he was now bore no resemblance to the man people thought they knew. He imagined them praising him in a eulogy, putting themselves in charge of his history, writing his obituary, speculating, for no one was more presumptuous or untruthful than an obituarist.

“No one knows me,” he said. “No one ever knew me.”

Ava was silent. She did not need to insist or even mention that she knew him, that she was the only one. She said, “Finish the book, if you want to reveal yourself.”

He shrugged, because that was obvious and it had always been his intention. He was obsessed with writing the one book that would say everything about him, disclose all his secrets. He would have to call it a novel, because the names would be changed, but the rest, the masquerade of fiction, would be true, for a man in a mask is most himself.

“I want people to see me like this,” he said. “My friends, anyway.”

“Going to the Wolfbeins' is going public,” Ava said. “It's always the A-list.”

He was silent again. He could see she wanted a fight. And anyway it was true—he wanted to go public.

“Your blindness is a lie,” she said. “It's temporary. The phosphenes are in your brain and your optic nerve, caused by whatever shit is in the drug.”

“No,” he said.

“A game,” she said.

“A choice,” he said. “And I want to see these people.”

“See?”

“Know them,” he said.

S
TEADMAN WORE DARK GLASSES,
he carried a narrow white cane. He did not need the cane, except as a prop and a boast. The insect eyes of his lenses and his thick pushed-back hair emphasized his sharp inquisitive face. Ava had chosen his clothes. He could have passed for a stroller at the West Chop Club—white slacks, yellow shirt, white espadrilles, a slender whisking cane.

“You putz,” Harry Wolfbein said. And to Ava: “What's with him?”

Steadman said, “Relax, Harry. I'm blind.”

A rush of air was audible at the word, and in a vacuum of embarrassment that followed it Wolfbein breathed hard in apology.

Steadman wished only to state his blindness, not discuss it, not be clucked over and pitied. So, to cut him off, Steadman said, “There's some sort of engine noise over there I've never heard before.” He gestured beyond the house, toward the big garage. “Transformer, generator—what is it?”

“Bug zapper,” Wolfbein said.

Steadman knew he was lying. He said, “Then what's all the auxiliary power for?”

Before Wolfbein could recover and respond, a man entering behind him said, “Oh, God, another rat-fuck.”

Recognizing Bill Styron's voice, Steadman greeted the writer and his wife, Rose. They said they were glad to see him. He did not announce his blindness; everyone would know soon enough. As for his dark glasses and cane, the Styrons just smiled in sympathy. In his nonwriting years, as a reaction to his obscurity, Steadman had affected odd habits of dress and behavior, as a defense, so that his raffish eccentricity would be noticed and not his silence.

“Rat-fuck” was the right expression for a party where a mob of people stood and drank and yelled in your face, looking past your head as you looked past theirs, for relief, for escape, for someone better known or wittier. At a certain point a party was just that: a loud room of coarse static, like a rookery of big frantic birds.

The moment he had arrived at the Wolfbeins' house in Lambert's Cove he knew the party was unlike any other summer thrash. He did not discern the contours of people; he understood their essence. He needed to be blind to feel the voltage, the pitch and whine of it, like the whir of a spinning ball of molecules. The furious hum beneath the chatter that drifted from the house kept Steadman listening and in that hum discerning the distinct character of people. If he had not been blind, would he have been aware of the woman—all eager atoms—who had begun to stare at him and stalk him from the moment he stepped onto the front porch?

He heard her heartbeat, he sensed the woman as a pulse in the air, as an odor, a hot eye, in the deepening shadow. And when he drew near her and was surrounded by other guests, she touched him, probably thinking that he would not be able to distinguish her from the others—stroked his arm, touched his mouth, left a taste on his lips. It was not her touch that lingered but an oily dampness, as if her salty sweat-warmed hair still clung to him and got into his nose and onto his tongue. He had caught the animal scent and kept sniffing it, the trail of it that curled from the woman's body like a distinct invitation in all that noise.

As a younger man, Steadman had liked such party loudness for its concealment. The noise was like darkness and made your plea inaudible to everyone except the woman you were imploring. A party was an occasion for a dog-like mating ritual, for bottom-sniffing and innuendo. In a large noisy crowd in which anyone could be touched, a party was a liberating prelude to sex. A crowd became a sort of dance, in a room in which you paired up with someone and got her to agree to see you later, meet you secretly; it was an opportunity, a beginning, an abrupt courtship.

But this event at the Wolfbeins' was not that at all. It was a gathering of older, milder, successful people, all of them friends, and well past the frenzied adulteries of their earlier lives. Steadman was a friend, too, but different in being a year-rounder on an island where summer people believed they mattered most.

The summer-camp atmosphere of the Vineyard in high season was so intense and infantilizing that Steadman hardly went to parties. Besides, when the summer people departed just before Labor Day, the year-rounders were on their own, and it was awkward for them to admit that in the off-season the islanders seldom met except at the supermarket, the post office, or the ferry landing.

“The guest of honor isn't here yet.”

“Steadman thought he was the guest of honor.”

“Maybe he is, now,” Wolfbein said softly, with a new sort of reverence. “It was really nice of you to come, Slade.”

The gratitude in Wolfbeins chastened voice Steadman heard as piety—that Steadman, crippled and handicapped, was doing them all a favor by showing up, being brave. Like a limper dragging himself into daylight, the proud damaged man was going public.

If only they had known. Steadman believed himself to be gifted through his blindness, superior to them all, with the power of special insight. He had come just to be visible, to declare his blindness. He was Ishmael, believing that no man can ever know his own identity until his eyes are closed. Steadman thought: No one can ever claim to know me now.

And, as he had suspected, the fact of his blindness at the party gave him a kind of celebrity. The only way to reveal his secret was to present himself here, where most of his friends happened to be, none of them his confidants, since he had none. He was greeted by Mike and Mary Wallace, Beverly Sills and her daughter, Alan Dershowitz, Mike Nichols and Diane Sawyer, Mary Steenburgen, Walter and Betsy Cronkite, Skip Gates, Evelyn de Rothschild and Lynn Forester, Olga Hirshhorn, Ann and Vernon Jordan. He would either keep his blindness a secret or allow these people to know. He could not be selective in telling people on this island, where people talked—did nothing but talk.

“I feel like Zelig,” Dershowitz said, bumping into him, then profusely apologizing, before inquiring about the cause of his disability, as though appraising his condition in a bid for a possible personal-injury lawsuit.

“All my fault,” Steadman said.