Blinding Light (63 page)

“It was a woman. That's why you laughed that way.”

Memory helped, desperation helped, blindness did the rest. He could see with his teeth, his tongue, his lips, his face, his whole body. He knew later that the two must have been making love—an unmistakable vibrato, the specific sounds irregular, like a lapse from ordinary life. Not like sex between a man and a woman, a pattern of slaps he knew, a familiar rhythm, a top and bottom, an act writhingly echoic, but instead a tussle of equals, the percussive kisses, the whappity-whap of two women: a sudden sapphic sandwich with no filling.

From believing that he was always alone, he began to understand that he was never alone. Even when there was no conversation he was aware of another presence, a muffled physicality that filled a space in the room and blunted the sounds he made, something molecular and cloth-like. No darkness at all, only light that was loosely or tightly woven, always revealing a coarse or helpful light. What people called darkness, and feared, for him had a face and features: he now knew the whir of human atoms.

Smells, too, perfumes that pierced his eyes, duskier aromas in his nostrils, a further fleshier suggestion that he tasted on his tongue, the distinct earthiness of swallowed food. Another person—had to be a woman; a man would have been less circumspect.

He tried to follow these smells, to account for them.

“I don't smell anything.”

If she believed that betraying him before his blind eyes was working, she was wrong.

“It was a man last week, but this week it's a woman.”

She laughed again, the conspiratorial, informing laugh, and her laughter roused an unmistakable movement that jarred the room.

“Or two women”—guessing that was why she laughed.

Sometimes the sound of kissing was like a certain sort of secret eating, furtive snacking on dripping overripe fruit. At other times the lovemaking resembled two soft bodies plopping through heavy clouds, encountering turbulence, or was like the thrashing of a single person sleeping poorly. They were bold in daylight, but even bolder in the dark, believing that because they could not see, they could not be seen. The eroticism of their solitude was the opposite of the crackly randomness of ordinary life.

People held in the rapture of sexuality were trapped animals. He shamefully remembered,
I'm sorry, darling.

“I know what you're doing.”

To test her sympathy, he pleaded for help and found himself alone. It was a ruse: he knew his way around the house, but he could expect nothing from her. In daylight he understood much; at night he understood almost everything. He was not confused by shadows: he thought of night as a friend, blindness as a gift.

His dead eyes made his wife reckless. He was not fooled. He knew her better, knew that she had taken lovers, thieved his money. His blindness was her opportunity, but he was not deceived.

There was worse to come. At another party he sniffed at a vase of flowers and said, “That water smells like my eye medicine.”

“You wouldn't want to put that in your eyes,” the hostess said, and she explained that the chlorine in the water kept the flowers fresh longer by killing the bacteria.

Now he understood exactly who Melanie was and what she had done to him. She was the one who sounded lost and said in the dark, “Who's there?” The woman was simple, greedy, and obvious. She had blinded him. He knew her and pitied her; he knew himself with a fatal disappointment.

All the beauty he had once known was false; he conceded that the world was an illusion. His book was false, history was false, what you saw was false. His life was not a tragedy but a revelation of unanswerable facts. He now knew what it was like to be dead, to be a specter, to see everything without being seen. What did you do with this enlightenment? You became obnoxious, truthful, stubborn.

A man said, “I've been on a diet.”

He replied, “You've got a long way to go.”

The editor of a magazine introduced herself. He said, “Not at the top of my reading list, I'm afraid.”

“That is hateful,” he said to a boy in Oak Bluffs who was listening to rap music in a convertible.

Explanations were pointless; understanding was like torture. It did not help that he now saw clearly his wife's crime—not the dallying but her stratagem, her blinding him. How the woman who had plotted to marry him, whom he had loved, had substituted another solution for the one that had been prescribed to counter his eye infection. She had blinded him with the drops. He had lived through a mystery. He had solved a crime. Would anyone believe him? He interested a lawyer in the case, demanding secrecy, and rid himself of Melanie Ours.

The man Cubbage, who had accosted him and played the banjo and wept over his wife? The blind man met him again on the road and Cubbage was happy, pitying the man for his blindness, no longer bereaved. He had remarried, and was delighted that he had not sold his house. “We're sitting on a fortune here.” The old misshapen women friends that the blind man had shrunk from before he now saw as contented souls, healthier than he was. “I am so sorry,” they said.

He sometimes wished for his sight back, so he could be calm, generous, and deluded. He was not pathetic, he was powerful, another life was beginning, but a harder one—he had no faith. He read nothing. He did not believe the lies of written history, the daily news, or the consolation of friends. His own book he regarded as little more than a lunatic fiction. Every written word was fiction or a half-truth. The worst of the visible world was bearable only because of its deceits and the way its truth was always hidden. But as a blind man liberated by a selfish woman he saw everything, and so he suffered, not from blindness but from clear-sightedness. Love was a dirty drug with hideous side effects.

He had no answer: He could not leave the island and live in a place where people identified him as blind. He knew with sorrow that all that awaited him was a sort of undeserved fame that was no different from failure. The paradoxes of his recent past exhausted him.

How did this thing end?

As Steadman went on imagining the story, he felt he had rescued something from his situation, like someone who finds meaning in a personal tragedy. And as long as the story remained unfinished, he felt he was not lost.

A
LTHOUGH HE HAD
not written a word of it, although it was all still stewing in his head, he was buoyant, possessed by the fable, with the sense of wellbeing he always felt at having imagined something whole. His pride in the plain facts of it matched his faith in his extravagant invention.

But his happiness didn't last. The story made him secretive, for the woman in it was the villain and Ava had usually been kind, and even in her infidelity had been solicitous toward him. He was reproached by her kindness. And she went on indulging him, urging him to be upbeat, reminding him that she admired his work and that she would go on looking for a medical solution for him, more tests, another specialist.

He was grateful to her for her words; they were sincerely meant, but they were still only words. All praise these days sounded to him like the hollow pieties of a premature obituary. He was soon low again and unsure and as incomplete as his story. Maybe Melanie personified the blinding drug that had a feminine name—datura.

The simplest things reminded him of his helplessness. One day Ava said, “The mailman asked whether we have a red Corolla convertible. Apparently there's one that's often parked in our driveway.”

“It's got to be a rental. Some tourist.”

“That's just what I said.”

“So who's the busybody, the mailman or the tourist?”

“You're yelling at me,” she said, stating a fact.

Angry and hot-faced, he shouted again, “What do you expect me to do about it?”

“I just thought you'd like to know.”

“Why are you telling me? Tell the cops!”

She never shouted at him; it was always doctor and patient. Faced with his howling, she said softly, “I'll deal with it. Now why don't you let me take you out to dinner?”

Food was meaningless to him, yet he did not say no, did not say that a restaurant for him was just a charade, that he could hardly use a fork without stabbing his lips, that people would stare.

He said, “Maybe.”

“Or anything you want.”

“Anything” sounded like a sexual invitation, so he said, “If you mean your friend,” and didn't finish.

“It's up to you.”

The very thought of the three of them again overwhelmed him with sadness: being sat on and fondled, all that seething. Sex was an expression of health and optimism, and he was a pessimistic wreck with an unreliable libido.

“I'd do anything to help you. I care about you.”

He heard that as a note of farewell, different from caring
for
him. She wanted him healthy so she could leave him. They were back to where they had been in the weeks before Ecuador, the trip they had taken as a means of splitting up. They had no life together now, nothing to hold them together except his disability. They didn't talk about the future or of love.

They had never used the word “love.” They avoided it as some people avoided red meat or refined sugar, and for the same reason, that abstaining from the word would make them healthier and stronger. They believed in love but hated the word, and loathed the moth-eaten expression
I love you,
which had been diminished and become so meaningless it had been reduced to a casual salutation. “I love you,” people said at the end of a casual phone call. It had taken the place of “See you later” and “Have a nice day.” It mattered less than his father's farewell at the end of a phone call: “Be good.” His father had never used the word “love” either, yet he knew that the man had adored him.

Housebound among memories of his arrogance, Steadman said, “I think about only one thing. Getting back my eyesight.”

“I'm working on it,” Ava said. “And at least you have your book.”

He didn't say what he felt—it was too melancholy. The book was pointless; it was incomplete. His life was not the sequence of his sexual history, it was everything that had led to its rediscovery, its periphery, all the circumstances, the landscape of his search, from the flight to Ecuador onward, how he had written it, the book tour, the president's duplicity, the delusion of the drug, his failure, even the subsequent revelation, Ava's dallying with her woman friend as he lay blindly supine. The sadness he was living through was the truest part, and yet it was not suggested in his book. His book was the narrative he knew now—this, the raggedness of reality, all of this.

But he said, “Right. I've got my book.”

The Book of Revelation
was over, though. Good or bad, it was not his anymore. What preoccupied him now was the story of the blind man's wife, the fable of his blindness.

Ava did not ask him how he spent his days. He knew she hated hearing that he did nothing but sit and brood. Asking him anything was like challenging him, and would have implicated her, made her feel partly responsible for his apparent indolence. He had no helpful reply. At least he had his short story. He clung to that with the tenuous hope of improving that fragment, looking to fiction for a solution to his dilemma, as he had once looked to travel for solace. Going away had always helped.

But if Ava had asked him what he was doing during the day, he would not have told her. What he was thinking was his business. The story was his secret, and anyway, the fictional lover was wicked. What would Ava make of that? Writing the story showed him how he wanted to blame Ava for his own trespassing, because he resented her freedom and her health.

He took some comfort in being able to recognize the changes in the weather. Some days he sweltered, the Vineyard afternoons when the wind dropped and there was no air, the long summer days of humidity, bright sunshine at seven in the evening, and some nights could seem suffocating. But then the wind would rise, the air cooled, and within a short time, hours sometimes, he would fumble in drawers for his sweater. These simple perceptions seemed to him necessary victories.

Weather was missing from his story, so was the physical texture of the island. The narrative hovered between being a mystery and a fable. He wanted it to be both more concrete and allusive, more of Borges in it, some sparkle, some magic. Not a pandering moral—that was just shabby—but persuasiveness, a greater sense of place, so that a reader would at the end find it the more disturbing for being familiar and unexplainable.

Perhaps that was what was also lacking in
The Book of Revelation,
a sense of place. As erotica its problem was its preoccupation with foreplay and foreground: interiors. Apart from the long gothic shadows, the role-playing in the chateau—wild nights, wild nights—there was no visible island.

Yet if his novel was a failure, his story had saved him. His secret inventions had always sustained him. He was more inclined to laugh at anyone who questioned how he spent his time and to ask other people how they could bear living without writing. The fact that he had published very little of it did not matter. He had been engaged in some sort of writing every day of his adult life. He loved the title “The Blind Man's Wife.” He liked the way the story was full of intrusions.

How do I spend my days?
he could have replied to Ava.
I ponder my story
.

Fearing that he might hear his own name, he avoided listening to the news. The scandal of the president's affair, and his hiding and denying it, seemed to be the only topic, always speculating on the most vulgar details of the concealment. Every detail put Steadman on the defensive. He imagined being hounded in the same way, challenged and humiliated.

The president's lame denial had alarmed him, but months later, in the period when Steadman was pondering his short story, the president admitted his mistake. His apology was horrifying, and though Steadman did not hear it the first time, it was replayed again and again, for it was not an apology at all but a statement of wounded defiance.