Blinding Light (32 page)

He had been traveling—spending some of the fortune he had made from the merchandising and licensing of
Trespassing—
and had been in Hawaii. He had a residential address there, having leased a beach house for the winter. On a whim, he applied for a driver's license and, placing his chin on the metal rest for the eye exam, had looked into the chart and seen a blaze of light and faint, sketchy letters. He could not read a line, even with the glasses he sometimes used, and was failed by the apologetic clerk, who said, “Maybe you need new glasses.”

After trying many combinations of lenses on him, an eye doctor shone a light into his eyes and said he had severe cataracts. He would need immediate surgery.

“I was amazed. I said it was impossible. I was hardly fifty.”

But it was not unusual, he was told, especially given his extensive travel. Cataracts were sometimes hereditary, but there was also his exposure, in the years he spent outdoors, to ultraviolet rays. His father had worn thick glasses, the old inadequate remedy.

“It's an easy operation,” the doctor said. “A slam dunk.”

Everyone said that, though Steadman believed that the expression “slam dunk” had come to mean, for him, certain failure. And so it seemed, for Steadman had both eyes operated on, separately, six weeks apart. Not laser surgery, he explained, but a procedure under a blazing light, the scraping sound, the murmuring of the surgeon and her assistant, a knife in each eye, but such a small incision that no sutures were needed.

For a brief spell his vision was no longer yellow-hued but clear, bright as a Hawaiian lagoon, impressive in its depthless clarity. But he saw another blue, and for a brief period he enjoyed the piercing sight of crystalline imagery.

He followed all the post-op instructions. He used the drops, took the antibiotics, did not touch his eyes with his fingers, but still—was it the snorkeling? the sea water? the swimming?—the tiny incisions became infected. He was put on stronger antibiotics, to which he was allergic, and in the days he refrained from taking them, the infection got a grip. He went back to the doctor and was informed that he was losing his corneas.

He remained in Hawaii, he said, awaiting a cornea transplant, his eyes bandaged. Blindfolded in all that sunlight! The transplant was done and he flew back to Boston, only to be told that the operation was a failure.

“The doctor looks at me and says, ‘Your corneas are decompensating.'”

They tried again, this time with a world-class medical team: the waiting, the suspense, the exhaustion of the surgery. And those corneas, too, were rejected.

“I accepted this condition. Maybe someday I will get a healthy transplant that will take, and you'll see me reading on the beach. But that's out of my hands. I don't want to live on false hope.”

That was his story. Except for the mention of snorkeling in Hawaii, none of it was true. But it didn't matter, for with the datura he was truly blind. With his stick and his unhesitating gait he had emerged from seclusion to become a dramatic public figure on the Vineyard party circuit. There was renewed interest in his life and work. And somehow people knew that after years of silence he was working on a book.

It was easy for people to believe the fiction that he had been rendered blind from an infection and his cornea transplants had gone wrong. Medical mistakes were so common, everyone understood. Many people countered with a medical mishap of their own—misdiagnosis, wrong medication, unexpected side effects. “He went in for tonsillitis and they gave him a vasectomy.”

People agreed with him when he said, “Doctors make you sick.” And he was surprised that his explanation was so easily accepted, glad that he did not have to elaborate on his lies. It helped his story when Ava agreed that his doctors had been incompetent.

He knew that nothing would have been harder to explain than the drug he had happened upon in the Secoya village down the Aguarico River in the Oriente province of Ecuador, when he had been looking for ayahuasca and been introduced by Manfred to that rare datura, the ragged and attenuated clone of angel's trumpet; and how the blinding light had allowed him a downward transcendence into a new life, with a new vocabulary of sight.

“Phosphenes,” Ava said.

The word that science offered was inadequate for the visions that were now his.

At one time he had taken pleasure in the act of writing, had enjoyed filling a page, crossing out half of it, beginning again, adding improvements and variations in the margin, preparing a fair copy, like a monk scratching away on vellum. But now, with the prevision of his blindness, setting down the words seemed much less important than contriving a sequence of images in his head. Why write when such visions were so intense? And the fact was that the very writing of them seemed to diminish them.

And when the moment came, using a pen was out of the question, and he had no use for a keyboard. He needed a tape recorder, needed a woman to stimulate him—not any woman but someone he desired, and now there was only one. He was so enraptured, so possessed by his vision, and given such fluency, that he needed to speak his book and for Ava to set it down as well as record it. His book was an exuberance, an intense erotic prayer; her writing it was not submissive but a form of interrogation. The act of his dictating and her murmuring and saying “Yes, yes” or “Wait” was sexual, too, because she was an essential and active partner in it, just as obsessed.

Ava was sometimes Ava and sometimes Dr. Katsina, depending on the time of day, and their nighttime relationship was the more passionate for their daytime detachment. Needing her so badly in order to get on with his book, he was grateful for her being there, but he was so dependent he was at times resentful—not toward her but toward the whole scheme of creation. He wanted to be a beacon, a prophet. And the fact was that without her he would have been nothing but a harmless paranoiac, a secret king, living in seclusion, impotently, frivolously fantasizing to a whirring machine.

O
NCE, NOT THAT LONG
before, Ava had seemed just a face and figure, another woman, but loving, desirable, bright. Now she was the living embodiment of his ideal woman—a comforter, a partner, a protector, a helper, a healer, a friend; and she was hungrier than he was. He loved to think that she never said no, that she initiated sex.
I am waiting for you. Come here.

She had become his life, his greatest friend, and his need was deeper than love. She was his companion, she was his mistress, she dominated him, she attended him, she was both his soothing submissive nurse and his bossy doctor. He depended on her for everything. She took orders, and in serving him she guided him, became part of his days and nights. Though she had said she would never do such a thing, she had vacated her Vineyard Haven house and moved in with him up-island. Now the whole estate was as much hers as his. She was his secretary, encouraging him in his dictation and operating the tape recorder. She was everything but his eyes—he had his own eyes. But she was in his work, helping him live it, helping him write it. She was half his book, as she put it: the blind man's lover.

She still fought him, accusing him of pomposity, but the proof that he had been profoundly changed was evident in his work. He admitted to her that the moment he had felt the most liberated by his blindness was the moment he needed her the most, realizing that he could not live without her. He did not question this paradox. He could not separate those two contradictions. In his darkness he held out his eager hand to grope forward, and she grasped it with her uncertain hand and led him onward.

“I feel responsible for your blindness.”

“Now you're the one who's boasting.”

“Wasn't it an awful shock?”

“No, I'm a new man.”

 

A year ago, it had been her idea to go to Ecuador, on the jungle drug tour. The blindness that resulted, Steadman said, was his good fortune. He had gone looking for an idea, anything to write; he had never thought he would have a second chance, another book, a real life. In the face of Steadman's apparent irrationality Ava desired to take the blame. But there was no blame. He had seen into her heart, he needed her, he was only grateful.

“You've given me life,” he said.

“My life, unfortunately—I'm not working, I haven't done any doctoring for months, and the hospital keeps calling to say they're shorthanded,” she said. “But maybe that's what love is, a kind of selfish sacrifice. The illusion that you're giving someone your life.”

“Don't call it love,” he said, and became extravagant. “You're a shepherdess, a shaman, a priestess.”

She said, “Just don't ask me to marry you.”

He laughed with surprise and relief.

“Because I never want to give you that power over me. And I don't want any myself.”

“What do you want?”

“What you want—pleasant surprises. Go into the library and wait for me.”

He did as he was told, and saw that the stained-glass windows he had installed to protect his books from the sun were darkened by the gloomy afternoon, each color in each panel like a distinct aroma that was fading. He stood, not knowing what was in store, but savoring what he knew would be pleasurable. Facing the dim colors of the windows, he heard the library door open and shut.

She had changed her clothes: she wore a white blouse, a short skirt, high heels. She walked to the leather sofa in the corner of the room and sat on its far end, in the shadows.

“Touch me.”

He approached, trying to suppress his eagerness, and he knelt before her, sliding his hand between her thighs, plucking at her panties.

“You're wet.”

“Not enough.” She guided his hand until it seemed to sink, and she sighed as he stroked her.

Then she leaned forward, unbuttoned the front of her blouse, and tugged his head forward as the dancer had done to her in Boston. She slapped his face with her breasts, holding them, one in each hand, manipulating her nipples.

“Touch me again.”

He did so, with his face cradled in the warmth of her breasts, and found that she was wetter, sweetened with moisture, her panties clinging, heavier. He lifted her skirt, parted her legs and began to mount her.

“No,” she said, and taking advantage of his getting to his feet, she gripped his cock and folded her breasts around it and chafed the hard thick thing between their softness, and when he began to pant she used her breasts to lift it to her mouth, and finished him off by sucking him slowly into her throat.

All this without removing her clothes. She passed her fingers over the slickness on her lips, swallowed again, and said, “That's what I mean.”

She knew him so well, and she was able to say so in a mock-dramatic way, teasing him with her understanding. She could demonstrate, like that, the interlude in the library, that he needed her. Now he felt safe with her. He had never been so content, so stimulated, so greedy for more. He could depend on her, could share all his secrets.

Early on, the second time they had met, when she was just starting at the Vineyard hospital, delivering babies, setting bones, performing appendectomies, tying tubes, he had said, “Like everybody else, I've been married before.”

Her smile, her reckless eyes, made her seem strong, and so his expression softened. She said, “Generalizations are great. They show you're impatient and not fussy.”

“You mean about everyone being married? But it's true. It's like everyone gets a driver's license. And later you're amazed you passed and that you didn't have more accidents.”

“Some people need to be single,” she said, with a confidence that meant she was single. “And some people need to be smugly married.”

He made a pretense of thinking a moment, so that the delay, the silence, would help her remember. Then, eyeing her, he said, “And some people learn by doing.”

 

Steadman's marriage had been brief and, from the beginning, bewildering. The wedding—ridiculous, expensive, a mockery—was just confusion, like a pretentious ritual before a bloody battle; and later, when arguing exhausted and confounded them both, and there was no obvious purpose in fault-finding except pettiness, he took refuge in a despairing silence. The silence that lay between his wife and himself he remembered as a true darkness.

Marriage seemed to him a sudden loneliness with someone familiar—maybe this happened all the time?—someone who by degrees turned into a stranger. They had met at a party, soon after he had arrived back from his two years of trespassing. Her name was Charlotte, “but please call me Charlie. Everyone does.” He said, “Then I'll call you Charlotte.” She said she was in marketing, an account executive. He had no idea. She seemed intensely animated in the first weeks of their friendship. Sex made her desirable for her teasing elusiveness, and his infatuation blurred her even more. He had to have her no matter what. He told her he loved her, he promised her everything. Yes, I want to marry you! Her excitement made her beautiful, she said she would do anything to make him happy, and he promised her the same. But marriage made them first strangers and then quarrelers and finally enemies.

The confusing part for him was that her strangeness stimulated their sex life. The stumbling sense that he hardly knew her, that they did not share a common language, made her desirable. He did not know where to begin, so when she made a suggestion—and it was nearly always crude: “I am so horny,” yes, he understood that—he was immediately aroused, as though the foreign woman he had been staring at from across the room at a party approached him and, reading his mind, said, “Now,” and led him into a nearby bedroom and kicked the door shut.

Charlotte's haste, her need, and her mood of anonymity were a pleasure to him—perhaps the only one—for she was more a stranger in bed than anywhere else. “Bed” was a euphemism for the various places they made love: the back seat of the car, the bathroom, the hidden pocket beach below West Chop lighthouse. He did not want sex as a gift; he wanted it as a command—and to take turns giving orders. Charlotte taught him that, or at least helped him realize what he wanted. As a stranger she had no inhibitions; she could demand anything of him, he could say anything to her, they could be irresponsible and reckless. She used him, he used her—those were their happiest days. He loved the fact that sexually she was hard to satisfy, always behaving badly, like a selfish person taking advantage of someone unsuspecting.