Blinding Light (24 page)

“Our own Tiresias,” Styron said with his customary gallantry.

Steadman did not mind being seen as a tragic hero. The only alternative was to joke about his blindness, and he saw that as vulgar ingratiation—not beneath him, but a distortion of how he regarded his blindness. When his book appeared, his true responsibility would be known.

As though commiserating, Wolfbein was talking about someone he knew who had macular degeneration—how sad it was—and Steadman seemed to surprise him by saying, “That might be the best thing that ever happened to him. What's his profession?”

“That's the point,” Wolfbein said. “He's a writer, like you. He needs his eyes.”

“He doesn't. He'll be a better writer,” Steadman said.

“I don't get it.”

“Our eyes mislead us,” Steadman said.

“I hope you're right.”

“You're looking at me as though I'm a cripple,” Steadman said. “Your eyes deceive you.”

“What do I know?” Wolfbein said, insincerely, helplessly conceding it, as if deferring to a cripple, changing the subject.

Steadman said, “Harry, you're not convinced. You're thinking I am a poor bastard trying to make the best of it, putting a brave face on his handicap, saying, ‘Cripples have a lot to teach us!' Because I'm a hopeless case, banging into walls, grinning into empty space, stumbling down stairs, with food on my chin.”

“I don't think that,” Wolfbein said, but still he sounded insincere.

“‘The blind man shits on the roof and thinks that no one sees him,”' Steadman said. “Arab wisdom.”

“Don't be a putz.”

Steadman could sense the man's uneasiness. Wolfbein was trying to be a friend. He was so overwhelmed by the sight of Steadman, transformed with dark glasses and a white cane, he did not know how to conceal his pity. And so, more than ever, Steadman was sure he had done the right thing in showing up here. He would never have known this otherwise.

But between his up-island house and this party—between the seclusion of his Gothic villa, with its long blind nights and sexual revelations, and the glare of this public appearance—there was nothing. Anyway, wasn't that the point? He was glad to attend such a lavish party, because it allowed everyone he knew here to see at once what had happened to him.

When he had said that to Ava, she had replied, “They're seeing what
didn't
happen to you. Why are you misleading them? This is such crap. You can see perfectly well.”

“No. I can see better this way. Only they don't know it.”

Ava cringed whenever the partygoers expressed their sympathy for him. And it was worse for her when they commiserated with her, confiding their fears. They clucked and urged him to be brave, and all the while Steadman was laughing and protesting, “I'm fine. I'm working again. I'm doing a book.”

Wolfbein said, “No reflection on Ava, but are you seeing a good doctor?”

“I am seeing what is not visible,” he said. “And I am seeing more of Ava than you will ever know.”

Wolfbein had been joined by his wife, Millie. She kissed him, her large soft breasts cushioning her embrace. She said, “I'm really glad you came.”

“So am I,” Steadman said. “I didn't realize until I got here that it was such a big deal. Whom are you expecting?”

In the silence that ensued he could tell that she exchanged looks with her husband, hers a meaningful frown that mimed, Who told him?

“It's someone important,” Steadman said, sure of himself.

“Whose mind have you been reading?”

“There are so many people here who don't belong. I don't mean guests. I mean lurking heavies, muttering men. The tension, too. Some people suspect, some don't.”

He knew Millie was smiling, and he could hear the flutter of her heart.

“All this apprehension,” he said. “What are you waiting for?”

“
POTUS
.”

“What's that?”

“Elvis.”

“I knew it.”

Millie squeezed his hand and left him, and a heavy breather he knew as Hanlon massaged his shoulder, said, “Great to see you”—the blind, Steadman now knew, were constantly being touched. Since arriving at the party he had been pinched, fingered, handled, steered, all by well-intentioned people.

Even Ava touched him when she reappeared. He said, “The president's coming.”

“Cut it out,” she said, but he sensed her looking around and recognizing the oddities—the generator, the buzzing phones, the extras, who must have been security men.

The president was on the island—everyone knew that—and there was always a possibility of his appearing, since Wolfbein was a friend and a fundraiser. But of all the guests, Steadman alone knew with certainty that it would happen. He understood the voltage that seemed to run through the party, heard the scattered cell phone crackle, the awkwardness of the advance team.

The party guests saw only the people they knew; he saw everyone. The deck and the garden were full of people, but near the big garage and among the trees were the president's support crew and the mute, watchful Secret Service people. Beyond this crowd was another crowd.

Before anyone else, before the Wolfbeins even, Steadman knew that the president's car had drawn up at the front of the house, and after the president was greeted in the driveway by his hosts, Steadman was the first to know when he came near and presented himself. It was a pulsing in the air and a heartbeat—distinctly the president's, distinctly quickening, an ugly flutter of embarrassment.

The moment the president entered the room, Steadman felt a change in the atmospheric pressure. Then some people turned; others were still talking. There was a rattle in the air, an anxiety, the president exposed, prowling yet seeming like prey. The hot concentrated gazes of the guests were all directed one way, making a crease in the room.

“I can't believe he's talking to Mike Nichols.”

“Roth,” Steadman said.

Philip Roth was chuckling. “Mike is saying, ‘I should have put you in my movie. You're perfect. Why did I use John Travolta?' See his face?” Then he clasped Steadman's arm, a bit too tightly. “Oh, Jesus, Slade, I'm so sorry.”

But Steadman said, “I can see his face. He looks more complicated than I expected.”

The party became circular, electrified and orderly like a magnetic field, the whole house in motion, with the president at the center and the first lady at the periphery, another eddying motion, people wheeling around her.

Noticing that Steadman was carrying a white cane and wearing dark glasses, the unmistakable props of blindness, with his head alert, looking proud in his obvious posture of listening, the partygoers gave him a wide berth, which allowed him to slip nearer and nearer to the current of the force field, toward the president, whom he could make out as a warm pink smiling being, hyperattentive and talkative at the center of a large admiring group.

Likable, friendly, sexually obsessed, everyone knew his traits: charming, needy, subtly competitive, willing to woo, craving power and adulation in such a compulsive way, yet indifferent to personal wealth, not materialistic, funny, intelligent, eager to please. And because of all of this, especially his strange deflecting smile, he conveyed the strong impression of trying to live something down, that he was burdened by secrets.

To Steadman he was like a high school senior from an ambiguous background who fought desperately for influence, eager to charm everyone, to be the student-body president. He had the high school attitude toward money, too—the insight that money was not power, that only persuasiveness and approval were power, and the president craved approval.

The president was speaking in his easy unhesitating drawl to Mike Nichols, an enthusiastic assertion about a movie, but he was also speaking to his dazzled listeners. Steadman approached and at once the group parted for him, and the way the human heat was bulked in that opening conveyed to Steadman the physicality of the man, the confident way he was standing, gripping one man's shoulder, holding a woman's hand. He eased her against him for a photographer, all the while talking to Nichols about the movie, which was
The Barefoot Contessa.

“I was fourteen, fifteen, just a kid, sitting there in the movie theater in Hot Springs and going like this!”

Steadman saw the self-mocking dumbfounded face and heard the grunt and the appreciative laughter. And then the president reached out and drew Steadman beside him, into the center of the circle of listeners.

“Slade Steadman, Mr. President,” a wheezy man said, stepping forward, cutting Steadman off, trying to be helpful.

This meddling was Steadman's first experience of his blindness marking him out as a deaf lump of inert flesh, incapable of fending for himself.

“I know who this guy is,” the president said. “How're you doing?”

“Changed a little but doing fine.”

“Harry told me you might be coming. I am really glad you could make it.”

Steadman replied to the president, but looked at the wheezy man as he said, “I see more than you might think.”

“You are one brave guy,” the president said.

“You mean these?” Steadman said, and tapped the black lenses of his glasses. “Like Ishmael says, darkness is indeed the proper element of our essences.”

He was going to say more, but the president interrupted him. “I mean
Trespassing.
I can't tell you how much I admire it.”

“I know you've got taste, Mr. President. Friend of mine, Redmond O'Hanlon, was at Oxford with you and said you had a whole shelf of Graham Greene.”

The president touched Steadman again, and like the others at the party kept touching him, as if to reassure him. It was a gesture Steadman had begun to hate in bystanders, for the insult of its pity, for its patronage, its distrust, its intrusive fuss. And yet the president's touch was different—revealing—giving so much away, the man's anxiety and weakness and secrecy in the uneven pressure of his fingers, as though he were steadying himself, drawing off energy and finding his balance by holding on to Steadman.

“I had no idea your vision was impaired.”

Another person who did not dare to use the word “blind.”

“My vision is excellent,” Steadman said. “It's my eyesight that's a little faulty.”

“It's not getting you down. That's just great.”

“No, because, bad as it might be, it's better than anyone else's.”

The president, Steadman saw, needed to be looked at. He was the embodiment of self-consciousness. Every word he said had conviction in it and a suggestion of, Remember this. He had a wonderful please-love-me laugh. He had a way of exaggerating his facial expressions, as though to indicate, I am laughing, I am touched, I am intently listening, I share your feelings.

“I like that. You've got a real good attitude,” the president said.

He was all calculation. But beneath the surface of his confident facial expression was a shaky heart and trembly attention, an insecurity, the fear that someone might see what he really felt, what he actually knew—his woe, his close-to-despairing feeling that he might be found out. Standing next to him, Steadman felt these vibrations—that the president needed to keep his secret even more than he needed to be loved for his candor. He was at the core a watchful anxious man who had spent his life being observed, who could not bear unsympathetic scrutiny, who hated to be alone. There was something explosive in him, too, that he was keeping in check. And not one secret but many.

“I will get you the finest doctors,” the president said. “We can fix this thing.”

How can I help you? was his mantra, because helping people was the key to earning their gratitude, their respect, their support. Steadman liked the man for understanding that power was something that you had to earn, that people gave you, not something you snatched and squeezed from the unwary. The president had been poor. The long climb from poverty, a history of favors asked for and repaid, had given him a sharp memory. He still had aspirations. Even in this easy group of rich well-wishers he was campaigning. Everything about his social posture—his smile, his banter, his kindness, his generous nature—said he wanted your vote.

Someone—a woman, the same woman as before—took Steadman's hand and placed a cold glass into it. Her perfume, the pressure of her fingers, the softness of her skin, the warmth of her hand, the way she brushed him, her soft skirt, her tight thigh—all this told Steadman she was slender and young and sure of herself. And she was aroused—so obvious to him now that he was blind—a hot humid tenderness to her skin, a sticky quality to her lips, and the close dampness of her breath that her perfume did not mask.

“I mean it,” the president said, speaking of his offer to help.

“That's very gracious. Thank you, sir.”

But the president, who missed nothing, had noticed the woman too, and he was attracted. Steadman realized how other people's reactions were helpful, and now, in these past few minutes, feeling the heated gaze of many people, he had become the center of attention.

Because Steadman had become the most conspicuous person in the room, the president hung on, began needing him—Steadman could sense that, for by being next to him, he was peculiarly visible. That vanity in the president was mingled in a paradox of conceit with sympathy and kindness.

The others' shock was apparent: no one had expected Steadman to show up blind. People who had found him arrogant or distant or offhand now pitied him, and faced him more squarely, emboldened by the strength, a swagger of wellbeing, that onlookers feel in the company of someone frail. For in their judgment Steadman was powerless and lame as a blind man, needing to be steered around by his elbow, no longer a threat or a source of sarcasm; he was impotent, he was pitiable, a cripple, and without help he would trip over chairs and bump into walls.