Paul Theroux - Blinding Light

Then there came a loud knock, insistent knuckles on wood.

“I said, go look.” His voice was breathless, his jaw set in aggression. He hardly paused before he added, “Doctor.”

While Ava went to check the back door, Steadman touched the face of his watch, examined the hands, and turning he felt the warmth of a fierce sunset reddening the side of his face, the back of his hand. Great hot quilts of cloud spread across the sky, a broth of blue growing pinkish in a vast band of color, then quickening to fiery tatters, molten and purple — five seconds of that before sudden tumbled lambs appeared and gathered, were whipped into peaks to become a mountain range of gilded summits, subsiding slowly, pink again, just an orange stripe low in the distance. The whole stripe was simplified to a speckled egg, but a crimson one, and ultimately a blind eye.

He almost smiled to think that something might be wrong, that there might be an intruder. So much else had gone his way these past months that he was prepared to be thrown.

The glow was still in the sky, still on his cheek, and though the trees were cooling fast, the shade thickening in their boughs, some light and warmth remained in the western quadrant beyond the cove, like a lamp in the corner of a room, fading from pink to yellow-blue, the way embers go cold.

Ava entered the room holding something against her body — a package, a dense parcel, which she placed on the table. The way it settled told him the thing was heavy for its size.

“A woman,” Steadman said.

“Right.”

“Told you.” He was the assertive man again, speaking in his own voice.

Instead of answering that, she said, “FedEx. The latest transcript of the book.”

He saw it as Book. The manuscript was always capitalized in his mind, for he thought of it as The Book of Revelation.

That news pleased him — to think, after so many years, that he was embarked on a new book and was making progress. Even if he was just a name to some people, he had a large and appreciative public, eager for this book, and he was glad. For almost two decades he had struggled with this second book. And, writing steadily since his return from his trip downriver in Ecuador, he had finished perhaps a third of it. That trip had changed his view of almost everything in his life and in his writing, and had given him a sense of power.

“Shall we continue?”

Ava sat heavily in the chair. The way she dropped herself, making the cushion gasp, was emphatic, a whole blaming statement in the sound of her sitting down: You are putting me in the wrong for hesitating to go to the door.

Steadman felt her gaze as a shimmering light, as heat and reassurance, which said to him, You have never been safer.

“Yes, Doctor.”

He did not mind that she was annoyed. He was glad that his instincts had guided him: the foot-crunch in his gravel driveway spoke to him more clearly than a watchman or a sentry. Delivery people were also intruders, and the more familiar they tried to be (“Nice place you got here”), the worse their intrusion. But seeing his suspicions confirmed made Steadman calm enough to resume the dictation — or, rather, not resume but find fluency in a digression.

All he could think of was the woman waiting for him after the meal, Ava wrote, at Steadman’s talking speed, while watching the jumping columns of light indicating the stresses in his voice on the tape recorder. Waiting in the candlelit conservatory, wearing the black lingerie he had bought for her. As he entered the room, saying softly —

And he smiled, because this improvised collaboration was the best part of the day. He never wanted it to be spoiled by someone blundering in. When he came to the end of the day’s work he changed his tone; it became intimate, and a full day of fictional inspiration became a halting description of how he wanted the evening to end.

Helping him, Ava said in a muted voice, “Over here.”

Saying softly, “Over here.”

“And he obeyed,” Steadman said.

“Because he was in her power.”

Because he found pleasure in submitting to her will, obeying her demands.

Steadman loved Ava for the intensity of her confident suggestions, for her knowing how to dictate to him. I am yours. If you don’t tell me explicitly what to do, I’ll take charge, she had said in the beginning. Her assertiveness had surprised him. Their sexuality was based on trust, on invention, on surprise; making it fictional excited him.

Because he was in her power, Steadman repeated, and was helpless to do more than obey her. He faced her in the candlelight. The lingerie— “Loose panties of black silk that she had been saving for him,” Ava said, speaking slowly, watching him closely for a reaction.

Dictating his novel to Ava, Steadman was always reminded of the consolations of storytelling, and how it had never been much different from this, the people in ornate halls, and little huts, and around the fires at cave entrances, relating stories of desire and its consequences, whole tales for a single occasion, bright eyes fixed on the narrator, the storytelling explicit and simple, tales of travel and discovery, of startling encounters, of adultery and deceit, the satisfactions of revenge, the reverses of fantasy.

He was afraid of them, the clothes, Steadman dictated, for the way they transformed the body, like a mask or a blindfold or makeup. Afraid, too, because they excited him — the danger of that.

She picked this up, continuing, She realized that she had bought them for him, not herself, knowing that he wanted secretly to submit. Wearing them, she would tie his hands and slip off the black panties. She said firmly, “Put them on.” But he was helpless and so she did it for him, slowly, complimenting him on his prettiness. Then the lipstick. He would protest but be so aroused, she knew —

“That’s enough,” he said.

“Just as you were getting interested.”

“Whose book is this?”

His face was serene, for she had thought of something new — she was expert, she was full of suggestions. He was reminded of how he would have failed in Ecuador without her: she had made all the difference then in her doctoring; she was making all the difference now as his listener and his lover. They had approached this fantasy before but had never ventured further into its details, the mention of lingerie and makeup. Thinking out loud was one of the pleasures of dictation: you could say anything, you could rewind it and erase it; it was just a story, it was vapor.

But Ava was much more than someone taking notes as he talked into the tape recorder. She was truly the doctor, watching over the man in a drug trance. Steadman, the writer, more confident than he had ever been, was reassured by her presumption. His success had begun with his dictation. He had used a typewriter and his travel notes to write Trespassing, but that was the distant past. Now he never wrote. He drugged himself and talked instead, and his novel, The Book of Revelation, was lengthening, engrossing him, a truer expression of the world he knew than Trespassing had ever been. Though the words were his, he never touched a pen or a keyboard, never made a note — that was Ava’s work. He spoke his books in the dark, in his trance state. In the dark, words mattered so much more.

“How about a drink?” he asked.

There was no reply. Had Ava left the room? Their routine was such a fixed sequence he could not remember whether she had excused herself or announced the fact of her leaving. But it was the same most days, that break between the end of his writing day and the onset of night. The idea was that they would have something to think about before meeting again. Reflecting on the last of the dictation, he found it supremely pleasurable to sit in this twilit part of the day alone. Ava’s elusiveness excited him and made him curious.