Paul Theroux - Blinding Light

The moment the president entered the room, Steadman felt a change in the atmospheric pressure. Then some people turned; others were still talking. There was a rattle in the air, an anxiety, the president exposed, prowling yet seeming like prey. The hot concentrated gazes of the guests were all directed one way, making a crease in the room.

“I can’t believe he’s talking to Mike Nichols.”

“Roth,” Steadman said.

Philip Roth was chuckling. “Mike is saying, ‘I should have put you in my movie. You’re perfect. Why did I use John Travolta?’ See his face?” Then he clasped Steadman’s arm, a bit too tightly. “Oh, Jesus, Slade, I’m so sorry.”

But Steadman said, “I can see his face. He looks more complicated than I expected.”

The party became circular, electrified and orderly like a magnetic field, the whole house in motion, with the president at the center and the first lady at the periphery, another eddying motion, people wheeling around her.

Noticing that Steadman was carrying a white cane and wearing dark glasses, the unmistakable props of blindness, with his head alert, looking proud in his obvious posture of listening, the partygoers gave him a wide berth, which allowed him to slip nearer and nearer to the current of the force field, toward the president, whom he could make out as a warm pink smiling being, hyperattentive and talkative at the center of a large admiring group.

Likable, friendly, sexually obsessed, everyone knew his traits: charming, needy, subtly competitive, willing to woo, craving power and adulation in such a compulsive way, yet indifferent to personal wealth, not materialistic, funny, intelligent, eager to please. And because of all of this, especially his strange deflecting smile, he conveyed the strong impression of trying to live something down, that he was burdened by secrets.

To Steadman he was like a high school senior from an ambiguous background who fought desperately for influence, eager to charm everyone, to be the student-body president. He had the high school attitude toward money, too — the insight that money was not power, that only persuasiveness and approval were power, and the president craved approval.

The president was speaking in his easy unhesitating drawl to Mike Nichols, an enthusiastic assertion about a movie, but he was also speaking to his dazzled listeners. Steadman approached and at once the group parted for him, and the way the human heat was bulked in that opening conveyed to Steadman the physicality of the man, the confident way he was standing, gripping one man’s shoulder, holding a woman’s hand. He eased her against him for a photographer, all the while talking to Nichols about the movie, which was The Barefoot Contessa.

“I was fourteen, fifteen, just a kid, sitting there in the movie theater in Hot Springs and going like this!”

Steadman saw the self-mocking dumbfounded face and heard the grunt and the appreciative laughter. And then the president reached out and drew Steadman beside him, into the center of the circle of listeners.

“Slade Steadman, Mr. President,” a wheezy man said, stepping forward, cutting Steadman off, trying to be helpful.

This meddling was Steadman’s first experience of his blindness marking him out as a deaf lump of inert flesh, incapable of fending for himself.

“I know who this guy is,” the president said. “How’re you doing?”

“Changed a little but doing fine.”

“Harry told me you might be coming. I am really glad you could make it.”

Steadman replied to the president, but looked at the wheezy man as he said, “I see more than you might think.”

“You are one brave guy,” the president said.

“You mean these?” Steadman said, and tapped the black lenses of his glasses. “Like Ishmael says, darkness is indeed the proper element of our essences.”

He was going to say more, but the president interrupted him. “I mean Trespassing. I can’t tell you how much I admire it.”

“I know you’ve got taste, Mr. President. Friend of mine, Redmond O’Hanlon, was at Oxford with you and said you had a whole shelf of Graham Greene.”

The president touched Steadman again, and like the others at the party kept touching him, as if to reassure him. It was a gesture Steadman had begun to hate in bystanders, for the insult of its pity, for its patronage, its distrust, its intrusive fuss. And yet the president’s touch was different — revealing — giving so much away, the man’s anxiety and weakness and secrecy in the uneven pressure of his fingers, as though he were steadying himself, drawing off energy and finding his balance by holding on to Steadman.

“I had no idea your vision was impaired.”

Another person who did not dare to use the word “blind.”

“My vision is excellent,” Steadman said. “It’s my eyesight that’s a little faulty.”

“It’s not getting you down. That’s just great.”

“No, because, bad as it might be, it’s better than anyone else’s.”

The president, Steadman saw, needed to be looked at. He was the embodiment of self-consciousness. Every word he said had conviction in it and a suggestion of, Remember this. He had a wonderful please-love-me laugh. He had a way of exaggerating his facial expressions, as though to indicate, I am laughing, I am touched, I am intently listening, I share your feelings.

“I like that. You’ve got a real good attitude,” the president said.

He was all calculation. But beneath the surface of his confident facial expression was a shaky heart and trembly attention, an insecurity, the fear that someone might see what he really felt, what he actually knew — his woe, his close-to-despairing feeling that he might be found out. Standing next to him, Steadman felt these vibrations — that the president needed to keep his secret even more than he needed to be loved for his candor. He was at the core a watchful anxious man who had spent his life being observed, who could not bear unsympathetic scrutiny, who hated to be alone. There was something explosive in him, too, that he was keeping in check. And not one secret but many.

“I will get you the finest doctors,” the president said. “We can fix this thing.”

How can I help you? was his mantra, because helping people was the key to earning their gratitude, their respect, their support. Steadman liked the man for understanding that power was something that you had to earn, that people gave you, not something you snatched and squeezed from the unwary. The president had been poor. The long climb from poverty, a history of favors asked for and repaid, had given him a sharp memory. He still had aspirations. Even in this easy group of rich well-wishers he was campaigning. Everything about his social posture — his smile, his banter, his kindness, his generous nature — said he wanted your vote.

Someone — a woman, the same woman as before — took Steadman’s hand and placed a cold glass into it. Her perfume, the pressure of her fingers, the softness of her skin, the warmth of her hand, the way she brushed him, her soft skirt, her tight thigh — all this told Steadman she was slender and young and sure of herself. And she was aroused — so obvious to him now that he was blind — a hot humid tenderness to her skin, a sticky quality to her lips, and the close dampness of her breath that her perfume did not mask.

“I mean it,” the president said, speaking of his offer to help.

“That’s very gracious. Thank you, sir.”

But the president, who missed nothing, had noticed the woman too, and he was attracted. Steadman realized how other people’s reactions were helpful, and now, in these past few minutes, feeling the heated gaze of many people, he had become the center of attention.