Blinding Light (62 page)

He was more reclusive than ever, avoiding everyone. He knew what they thought. The blind were not scribblers; they were celebrated in their evasions as storytellers and talkers. People patronized the blind, tried to propitiate them for their gloomy emanations, tiptoed around them, sat at their feet, feared them, asked them for stories, tried not to stare at the stains and crumbs on their shirt fronts, were jittery listeners, fearing what might come next.

Grieving, Steadman remembered the story he had angrily begun in his head about the blind man and his wife. The ugly drama it portrayed seemed an expression of his hurt. He was repentant, self-accusing. He needed to invent, to ease his mind. The story of the weak, credulous man and the opportunistic lover was like a fable of his failure.

With nothing else to do, Steadman felt that resolving the elements of the story would help him live. Yet even in his imagination the story scared him. He made it out of the materials of pure horror, hoping that when it was done he might know more about himself. His familiarity with the facts of it did not make it less brutal, but he suspected that the act of creation would make it easier to bear.

And so he resumed, concentrating on the blind man, who was someone like himself, a traveler and writer and recluse. His house was near West Chop, in the lane on the bluff where the paved road ended and the steps to the beach began.

Before he lost his sight, before he met the woman, the man believed that the active part of his life was over. He accepted that no great event would befall him, that he would grow smaller, his life narrower, less accidental, and he would die here in obscurity. He imagined one of those small rainy funerals in an up-island cemetery of old chewed-looking gravestones and pitted crosses.

In his self-imposed retirement, he seldom ventured out. When he did he kept to the same safe walk. He was not seeking anyone, not looking for anything, just passing the time. He was supremely content, steadied by his indifference.

There had been one scare, but that was on his former route. A weteyed elderly pedestrian named Cubbage ambushed him, saying “You're the writer,” and feebly bullied him into his house. “Got the plans out of
Popular Mechanics
.” Cubbage detained him. “Want to buy it? If you don't, my idiot son will get it. It'd cost you less than a million. You could write a great book here.” The man seized a banjo off a tattered hassock. “This is a little thing called ‘Sleepy Time Gal.'” He strummed a bit and began to cry miserably. “It's my wife,” he said, his face streaming with tears. “Cancer took her. Thirty years we were married. You can't replace someone like that. Do you know what true love is?”

The man said he had no idea.

“Then make me an offer on the house.”

Cubbage watched him flee. The man changed his route. He believed that he was happy because he had conquered desire and was floating, having achieved some sort of Buddhist ideal of nonattachment, as he sometimes joked.

On good days he walked in the woods behind the lighthouse, loving the smell of the trees and flowers, the pitch pines, the chokecherries, the scrub oaks, the leaf mold, the squirrel-bitten acorns, the sun warming the long grass, hot clumps of timothy, and cushions of moss like dense velvet that made him feel weightless.

He stuck to West Chop because in Vineyard Haven he saw women he had known years ago, swollen shapeless creatures like big bosomy men, and he realized that he had slept with them in his early days of fame, after the appearance of his celebrated book. He was chastened, for now they had come to look like him—solitary, unexercised, asexual, faintly mustached. He felt guilty and apologetic, for one that he took to be a former lover, a misshapen woman in a familiar knit, was in fact a man he had never seen before and the sort of person he knew he would keep bumping into afterward at the post office and the market.

Everything changed for him one end-of-summer day on the bluff of West Chop near the lighthouse when he saw a lovely woman standing alone. She faced him, looking fascinated, and then turned away and walked toward the tennis courts. He felt panic, a kind of hunger. He needed this woman. She was the one person who had been missing from his long life.

Understanding this, he was briefly happy, then he was ashamed and finally sorrowful, knowing for the first time the despair of love. He would waste away and die without her; with her he would live. He now knew that the reason he had taken the same walk every day was to meet this woman.

That night he lay in bed and could not call up her face. Her beauty was too subtle to remember with any accuracy. The next day he found her at the same spot and she hurried away—her sudden rush like a flushed quail, calling attention to her flight—down the road at the set of mailboxes reading
Loss, Titley, Ours, Levensohn, Lempe.
Which was she? In the days that followed he saw her twice more.

Self-conscious, he was reduced to being stealthy, glancing sideways to stare at her, to satisfy himself; but staring only made him hungrier. He was reminded of his distant past, of being small and poor, rather young, ignored by more powerful people while he toiled at his book and felt fameless. His book's bold title provoked his friends to patronize him, until the book was reckoned a masterpiece and was then the occasion of their envious jokes.

Now people said to him, “How are you, buddy?”

He said, “I'm miserable,” but misery made him truthful. Speaking bluntly released his feelings of frustration. In the past he had often said the opposite of what he meant: “You seem perky,” to distracted souls; “I'll try to remember that,” to pedants.

Now he said, “People might call themselves perfectionists, but at the bottom of pedantry is an abiding laziness. Raise enough objections and you never have to accomplish anything.”

The next time he saw the beautiful woman at West Chop he said hello.

“I was looking at that sailboat,” she said.

The windjammer
Shenandoah,
out of Vineyard Haven.

“Isn't she beautiful?”

Emboldened by her directness, he said, “I hadn't noticed. I couldn't take my eyes off you. You are so lovely.”

Her laughter told him he had made an impression. They talked inconsequentially about the ferry schedule. He said, “See you tomorrow.”

That night he thought, And I hate my saggy face.

He had fallen in love with her, and he knew it was love because it was agony, the sort you died from. He felt famished when he saw her—her bright eyes, her full lips, her clear skin. He sought her out and felt humiliated by his longing for her.

To his delight, he began to run into her everywhere—at the drugstore on Main Street, the beach below the lighthouse, walking along the ferry landing, in the bagel cafe, and in the camera store where he was buying a pair of binoculars. Melanie Ours was her name.

He wooed her in the open air, doing most of the talking. Melanie was unaffected, soft-spoken, appreciative, and loving. One day she was clutching a small dog in the crook of her arm, nuzzling it and cuddling it in a way that suggested: I could treat you like this.

“It's not mine,” she said. “It's a friend's.”

Wondering what friend made him unhappy. But he saw Melanie Ours again and loved her more. He mentioned to her that he was older than she by twenty years. She said, “So?” He feared she might want children. She smiled and said, “I want you.”

Nothing could have been simpler. They married, she moved in with him, he was joyful. They lived together in his house on the bluff behind West Chop.

He sometimes mentioned the places where they had bumped into each other.

She said, “I knew you'd be there,” and explained that she had known his movements and had contrived deliberately to appear at these seemingly chance encounters. He laughed shyly, feeling desired. She said, “I found you fascinating.” What more was there to know? Perhaps nothing, except that he learned that she was devoted to him, responsive and loving, forgiving as only a friend can be.

“I'm sorry, darling,” he said, early on, in bed, feeling futile. She held him, kissed him, and he wanted to weep with gratitude.

Months of bliss. He sometimes became alarmed when she was out of his sight. Setting eyes on her, he blessed his luck. She was a light to him. “I thought I knew what happiness was.” He was reminded that in the early, active part of his life he had been deluded.

This clarity of vision—his life now—was figurative and philosophical, but a paradox, for he found that in fact his eyesight was failing. He had trouble reading, even with glasses. He could not drive at night without being dazzled by the headlights of oncoming cars.

He had his eyes tested. He failed the exam. “It's to be expected at your age,” the doctor said. “But new glasses won't help. You have cataracts.”

He regarded this as good news, the promise that after his operation he would see better and be bathed in the glow of his lovely wife. But why was he asked to sign the waiver?

The doctor said, “There's less than a one percent chance of the procedure going wrong.”

After the operation, still bleary-eyed and groping, he was given drops for his eyes. Melanie helped him apply the drops, and his eyes became scorched and infected. He lost his corneas, he got a transplant, and then more drops. The transplant failed. He howled.

As though rehearsing his defense in a malpractice suit, the doctor sternly reminded him of the odds: “Someone had to be in that one percent.”

Because he had signed the waiver, he could not sue and was not compensated. He did not need money anyway. He wanted his eyesight back, even the feeblest sort, as on the days when he had said, “I can see your face, sort of dark, but not your features.” He would have settled for that. He was the blind man now.

And, blind, he could not bear to be away from Melanie. Yet even when she was with him he was not consoled. He spoke to her, but she did not seem to hear him. Something wintry in her manner—why? He had never sensed it before, perhaps because her adoring eyes, her face, and her luminous skin had always overwhelmed him. Now he was aware of her as a different presence—her thumping clumsy footsteps, the sharp odor of her body, her harsh voice.

When she touched him her hands chilled him; her fingers felt reptilian. He was appalled even as she said, “Of course I love you.”

He was now confined to his house. He was bewildered in it, in rooms like obstacles. He tripped over his own furniture. He could not go anywhere without her, yet more and more she was absent.

“I need to shop. Everything takes longer when you come along.”

Shop for what? She had never shopped before. He began to ask her where she had been.

“Getting my nails done,” or “Having my hair colored,” or “At the dressmaker's.”

But why?—since he could not see the nails, or the hair color, or her clothes.

“It's for me,” she said.

He was confused by the mingled smells of her perfume, her nail polish, her shampoo, her new clothes. His blindness had wakened his other senses—he was hyperalert, sensitive to all stimuli. “I smell onions,” or “Smoke—tobacco smoke—in your hair.”

He smelled a man, he smelled sex, something humid and dog-like, and a roughness like razor burn on her chin. He was too sad to kill her.
Instead I'll kill myself.

What kept him from it was that she was sadder, and tense, as if she had received some bad news.

“What's wrong?”

“Please, leave me alone.”

“You're never home.”

“I was sick! You don't care!”

After all that time, their first argument. She insisted that she loved him but was like someone else, someone cruel, a stranger. She returned with a new smell on her. These odors overwhelmed all other impressions and became like colors and shapes, some of them as layered and complex as unanswered questions.

Was he missing something because he was blind, or was he seeing her as she really was? There was that voice. Sometimes, speaking to him, she seemed a little formal and overinformative, as though she were also addressing someone else, as though she had a listener she was teasing with irrelevant detail and a sort of mocking pomposity.

“I certainly would not expect someone like you to understand the priorities of a woman whose primary goal is to find some sort of focus to give balance to her life.”

“What's that noise?”

He was stifled by unfamiliar creaks in distant parts of the house.

“I didn't hear anything.”

One evening at a party he felt awkward and lost in the host's house, so he stood to the side, out of the way of guests, waiting for Melanie to bring him a drink. Brushed by a stranger, he inhaled a familiar odor.

“You've been sleeping with my wife,” he said without thinking.

He was surprised when a woman snorted and pinched his arm and said, “You're imagining things!”

Guilty people in farces often used that platitude, but farce was so near to tragedy. He saw that he was becoming shrewder; he had a clear vision of that woman's drunken face, purple, putty-like, with weepy reddened eyes.

He was nimbler in his own house. Melanie stumbled in the dark, banged doors, fuddled with simple things like the telephone and the bath plug, and faltered in corridors where now, to his astonishment, he was completely at home.

There was someone else lurking, he knew it clearly one night, in the big cluttered front room that looked out on the Sound. He had become accustomed to the dark. The other person was lost in it and made an uncertain canine shimmy, a backing up: someone making way for him.

“Who's there?”

“Who do you think?” And she laughed in a rehearsed way, as though she had an audience and was laughing on someone else's behalf.

“A man.”

She jeered much too loudly, attempting a convincing denial, a bit of theater.

Using his fingertips, he traced his way through the room, surprised by how well he knew the route, and went upstairs, where he paused and heard the front door click shut. Then he heard his wife unsteadily on the stairs.