Blinding Light (36 page)

Then, after she had cared for him, searching his body in the most intimate way, she insisted that he please her—and he was unexpectedly gladdened as the moans crept from her throat, as she directed his hand or, opening her legs, seized his head with all her fingers and thrust it against her, smearing his face with her desire.

He loved his nights with her for her demands, and her fairness, for she encouraged him in his demands. Whole greedy nights of saying nothing, or muttering disconnected words in a darkness in which their hands spoke and everything was allowed, everything insisted upon. Or the opposite: talking all night, pressed together, kissing, telling each other their most elaborate fantasies. And the intensity of their singleminded desire kept them strangers to each other, communicating on the lowest frequencies, dwelling on their satisfactions, loving what they shared, and needing each other for their secrets.

Their secrets were safe—trust was what bound them together in the beginning, as they became ever more candid about their needs. At the same time, all this while, Ava remained a woman in white, the most skillful doctor at the hospital; and he began to work with greater confidence and with renewed imagination, the inaccessible writer in his up-island seclusion, smiling again. Yet still they remained strangers. Their lives were separate, only the act of sex joined them, they knew each other in the dark but nowhere else. They did not believe they had any future, and felt certain that all desire, fierce as it seemed, hot as it might burn, had an end in ashes that cooled and dispersed like the dust they were.

Steadman loved having her because he had so little else in his life. Charlotte was gone. He did not resent the divorce, but he questioned his own judgment: how could he have been so wrong about her? The girlfriends were gone, too. After his first struggles to be alone on the Vineyard, with his curt answers, his evasiveness, his lack of cooperation, he had actually succeeded in keeping people out of his life—and, at last, after the first years of his reclusiveness, keeping the press and interviewers away, they ceased to care. He had no new book. He slipped beneath the surface of events and seemed to sink. Except for the summer people who invited him to parties and were polite about his work, keeping their inquiries vague, there was no one. The summer people were his friends, though, and more than that: for a season they were his world. When they left around Labor Day he had remained on the Vineyard, wondering what to do with himself. Now he knew. He had Ava.

Of course everyone talked, for on the island, summer people and locals alike were passively nosy in the Vineyard manner, watchful while pretending not to care, and always alert for gossip. They were noted for their attention to detail and for their long and remorseless memories. They knew he was having an affair; they knew with whom. His car, her car, the groceries, his movements, even his moods, his happiness—it was all monitored and noted and whispered about. People were glad for him, for her too, for though she was a recent arrival and was hardly known, she was respected for her efficient doctoring. The islanders took an ignorant pleasure in commenting on how different the two people were, the wealthy risk-taking writer with local roots and the modest physician from off-island. Steadman was aware of those rumors and thought: If only they knew how reckless and greedy she was, how depraved and demanding, how lavish in bed, how she made a happy slave of him.

“Desire me,” she said. She was content, she almost crooned the words. “You don't have to love me. Love is a burden. It's a pain. It causes unhappiness. Just be my friend.”

He knew the deceptions of love and its meaningless language. He told her that it was also a delusion. It came, it went, and made you crazy. It was mainly about wanting to possess someone. Sex was something else: it promised nothing, it had no future, it was magic enacted entirely in the present. They did not expect the affair to last. They hardly met in the daytime, they made few plans, and Steadman assumed that the ashes of their desire, the useless fragments and residue of its end, were not far off.

She knew that without his saying so; she always seemed to know what he was thinking, and when he was sunk in silence, she knew what was in his mind.

“If I ever write anything more,” he said, “it will be about this—us—the feeling in the flesh, the two of us at our most monkey. How the truth can be drawn from sexual pleasure. Knowing that we are going to die. Everything that lies beyond love.”

The way he dismissed the delusions of hope and the self-deception of future plans and the farce of romance moved her. She said, “I'm glad we found each other. I want to be your friend. It's purer. It's much better. Friendship asks nothing, it gives everything, and friendship with desire is paradise.”

“I agree. Love doesn't make you better. It excludes the whole world. For a brief period you have an adoring partner, and later an enemy. Love is like some horrible twisted religion the way it changes you. And afterward, when love ends, you're lost.”

“Please don't marry me,” she said one day outside the hospital, still smelling of disinfectant. She laughed with conviction: the words were like an aphrodisiac to them both.

“I promise. I will never marry you,” he said, and embraced her, kissed her, feeling beneath her loose clothes and her doctor's smock, the girlishness of her eager body.

“Let's be friends.”

“Yes, yes.”

“We have no future,” she said.

“None at all.”

From his marriage to Charlotte he had learned love, and you could not know love without knowing its opposite. He remembered now how his marriage had ended and the love soured and he had been cut loose—like one of those mute and damaged men released after a long spell in prison who find they cannot function in the crowded world of decent people, and turn to crime again, and get sent back to a cell to sulk. That was how dangerous he regarded loving. It was waywardness and weakness and failure.

“Friendship is so much better,” Ava was saying. “You have to love your lover, but you can be truthful to your friend. Love isn't blind—it's sickness, it's surrender.”

The extravagant talk was the self-conscious reassurance of two people passionately attached and at pains to be kind to each other, aching for each workday to end, for night to fall so they could be together.

She, the stronger, more confident one, strengthened him. The manner in which she bucked him up made him long for her.

“This is what I want you to do to me tonight,” she would say, usually in public, a bar, a restaurant, the supermarket, a neutral place where they would hold hands, nothing more. And she would describe in the minutest detail where she wanted to be touched, and how, and what she would be wearing, and the way she wanted him to be dressed. It was her script for the evening, but it was not complete until she said, “And this is what I want to do to you.”

In these fevered dialogues, in her insistence on order and ritual, the stages of their lovemaking, she could be almost clinical, as if running through the phases of what would be a brilliant but tricky operation, the object of arousing her, bringing her to orgasm. But when the time came, what ensued was anything but tidy, and it was less like an operation than the rehearsal of a black mass.

“You have more germs in your mouth than in your ass, didn't you know that?” she said, turning him over and tonguing him. And when she was done, she said, “Now it's my turn for a black kiss.”

She challenged him to go further. “Deeper, deeper, deeper,” she would say. He had never known a woman to be so explicit in daring him. Theirs was nothing like the sort of courtship or love affair in which by degrees trust was gained and plans were made for a future together. Next month, next year, a vacation, children, a mortgage—none of that. They had no future; tonight was enough. They wrecked themselves on each other, and yet the following day they met again, like insatiable conspirators, for more.

She was able to surprise him as no other woman had ever done. One night she said, “I've got something for you,” and he expected exotic lingerie or Polaroids, as in the past. But if she promised something new, it was original, all hers, and certainly new to him. She did not disappoint.

That night she met him at the Dockside bar wearing a dark tailored suit and slacks, a wide tie, a felt fedora. He smiled—he had never seen this suit on her before. She looked like a decadent schoolboy. On the way home she told him to pull into a side road and park. “I want to make out with you,” she said, and kissed him, let him grope her, fondle her breasts, and she opened her knees and held his hand against her. He felt something hard, like a rubber truncheon, between her legs.

“A strap-on,” she said. “That's for both of us.”

And when they set off again, Steadman became sweaty, anxious, eager, and fearful, as she described how she was going to use it on him. But in the house she would not go into the bedroom. She lazed on his sofa and pulled the thing out and played with it and refused to take any clothes off. “On your knees,” she said, “get me in the mood,” and forced his head down. Seeing how he was making her happy—she screeched with pleasure as she gagged him—he became aroused by the madness of her voluptuous laughter.

Again and again he had to remind himself that she was a physician, respected in the hospital and on the island. Yet how was it possible, knowing the most delicate surgery and all the anatomy—the name of every tissue, every muscle, every organ—that she could lose herself in the darkness of the body in which nothing had a name? A doctor was trained to see the body as something coherent, namable, dissectible, like a symmetrical cabinet of flesh and blood. But that was her daytime preoccupation; at night she stripped him naked and operated on him with her mouth and her fingers, devouring him, nameless part by nameless part, as though they were hardly human.

“You are my meat,” she said.

 

That summer passed. People saw them together, the writer and the doctor, but as Steadman and Ava always looked semidetached and distracted, like friends, never a couple, the people observing did not speculate unduly. They were glad to see Steadman at last out of his selfimposed captivity. His good mood seemed to indicate that he who had published nothing in years might have freed himself from his seclusion by finishing a book and would be publishing it soon.

There was no book, and now his silence was a virtue, for he was spending time with Ava and glorying in her paradoxes—the medical doctor who was a debauched sensualist. Summer faded into fall, and fall declined into winter, and the cold weather made them more companionable, allowing them to possess the darker, emptier island. Winter was perfect, their solitude complete. The Vineyard seemed to belong to them. The hospital was less busy, there were no parties, hardly any social events, no “Taking another trip?” no “How's the book coming along?”

And there was nothing more exciting to him than Ava's phoning him in midafternoon: “Tonight—a house call,” then
click,
and his anticipating her arrival in the early dark of winter, frost gleaming on the grass, and the approach of her car, the fat tires announcing her on the gravel driveway, and her kiss, her warm breath, her open mouth, “I want you,” and her taking off her laboratory smock or her ER scrubs and revealing herself in a pretty dress or lingerie. The great room of his house was so warm they were comfortable lying half naked on the sofa; the candle flames, the mirrors, her sighs, which became low howls of pleasure. Out here, in the winter, she could scream—and sometimes did, foulmouthed in uncontrollable desire, shocking him with men's words—and no one would hear, for they were in the middle of a dark ice-bound island.

When they were done, drenched in sweat, panting for breath, they lay in each other's arms.

“I hadn't expected you to call.”

“I had to see you,” she might say. “We lost someone today, a nice old man. I needed to do something life-affirming.”

He smiled, he held her.

“Something human. Something perverted.”

But he would sometimes stare, seeing only the elderly blood-drained face of a patient yellowing on a pillow, open-mouthed, as though having died screaming.

“Now I'm better. You cured me. Gotta go.” Abrupt, all business, like a man on a mission, she was out the door and in her car, and at last two receding red lights.

Spring came, full of equivocating winds and low temperatures, dawdling promises, daffodils in April, drizzle and mud in May, reminders of the previous spring and their first meeting, and somehow giving a sense of repetition to their days and weeks. They had been together for a full year. In the second summer Ava was busier at the hospital, in greater demand, and he was the one who was made to wait. Waiting was hard for him, because he had no work. He wondered if there was someone else; he couldn't ask—that was their agreement, proposed by her. “When we're together we should possess each other. When we're alone we have no claims.” Steadman had thought that was a good, enlightened idea, but as the summer passed and he saw less of her, he became insecure, suspicious, jealous.

“I think I have a rival,” he said one day, hating himself for even raising the subject.

“Two rivals,” she said. “A man with emphysema, on a ventilator, with pneumonia, whose family wants to pull the plug. And a man in constant pain, in a head and neck brace, who fell from a roof he was fixing and cracked three cervical vertebrae, whose heart is too weak to let us operate. Who just wants to die.”

She was the strong one, and understanding this he was ashamed of himself. He felt more like one of her patients than her lover, but a fatuous and fussing patient, whining for her attention. He sometimes wished that there really had been something wrong with him, so he could justify seeing her more often. She had a busy life that was determined by the urgencies of medical procedures. She was sometimes so reflective that she fell silent when she was with him, and he knew she was thinking of a critical case, someone at the hospital.