Paul Theroux - Blinding Light

In a few of the phone calls he heard something rueful, almost a lament, bordering on jealousy, for on this island of celebrities his sudden handicap contributed to his being a greater celebrity, as though blindness were not a sickness at all, not a defect, not a disability, but a sort of distinction conferred on him, something to be resented and envied.

He was indifferent. No one knew him well enough to understand the truth of his blindness or the prescience it allowed him. All that mattered was that when the fact of his blindness became common knowledge, as he knew it would, and his name as a writer became known again, he could honestly say that he was working on a book and that his blindness had helped him resume his work.

To be writing was to be alive, to wake up happy and to pick up where he left off. His thinly fictionalized narrative expressed the deepest part of himself, exploring the farthest recesses of his memory, his oldest and most enduring feelings, in the ultimate book of revelation. He knew many writers who had published whole shelves of half-truths and evasions, made-up tales, fables, and concoctions. Sometimes it seemed that was all that writers did — spin yarns. “I’m doing a novel.” “I’m working on a story.” “I’m trying to develop an idea.” But if you used your own blood for ink, and what you wrote was the truth, and your life was the subject, one novel was enough; there was nothing else to know, no more to see, a heart laid bare. So he believed.

What disconcerted Ava was that in the days following the party the callers were mainly women. First were the wives of Steadman’s male friends, inquiring in the kindest way, and then the women he had known for a while before Ava, more oblique than the others, summer women, the unattached, the available ones, the speculators, the still-pretty, the newly divorced. Finally, the urgent callers, women who were strangers to him, who kept to the fringes of the Wolfbeins’ circle, and these were the most insistent on seeing him soon.

“I want to help you.”

What one woman said one morning, demanding, offering everything — this mothering, rescuing, bossing — stood for all the long conversations. Steadman took the calls while Ava sat nearby, halted in her dictation, glaring into the middle distance where the tape recorder lay turned off, exasperated, in an accusing silence, resenting the calls, hating every second of his being on the phone. All this was the consequence of his showing up at the party.

“That’s very kind of you.”

“Anything.” Was this the woman who had touched him, embraced him, offered herself to him at the party? “What can I do?”

“I’m busy at the moment.”

“I know how tough it must be for you.”

She was kind but persistent, like so many of them. There was something awful in the tone of the pitying people he knew, who possessed the clinging manner, hectoring voice, and unstoppable intrusiveness of telemarketers.

She said, “I could meet you today — this afternoon. Or later. Tonight I am completely free.”

Not hearing the words but somehow knowing, Ava sighed, exhaling harshly, amplifying her breath through her wide-open mouth, almost loud enough to be heard over the phone, making Steadman self-conscious.

“I have to go,” he said. “I’m working.”

Yet before he could resume his dictation, before Ava could make an unanswerable remark in a tone of scolding pity, the phone rang again.

“Slade — I feel I know your work well enough to call you Slade.” Another woman. “I’ve had an enormous amount of experience with visually impaired people.”

She was young, sweet-voiced, solicitous. Steadman imagined beautiful skin, lips close to the receiver in her damp hand, her tense receptive body slightly canted to listen to him.

“My vision is not impaired,” he said.

“I could read to you. I’d love that.”

Ava wanted him to bang down the phone, he knew. But he could not move the phone away from his ear — he kept it clapped against his head. He was fascinated: the woman was offering herself, pleading Take me.

“Where did she get the number?” Ava said.

She knew the caller was a woman, knew what she was saying, knew everything, which was why she was angry at the intrusion.

“Tell your friend that I care about you”—the woman had heard Ava’s question and was answering it. “All telephone numbers are available if you know how to access them.”

“Tell her—” Ava began to interrupt, but was cut off.

“There are no secrets,” the woman said. And just before she hung up: “I’m here for you.”

Then Ava said, “I was afraid of this.”

“Women chasing me?”

“Your calling attention to yourself. That charade at the Wolfbeins’.”

“‘There are no secrets.’ That’s what she said.”

“That should worry you.”

Pretending to sort his papers, aligning his pens and pencils, squaring up a set of notepads, moving the tape recorder, he said nothing and hoped she would stop.

But she spoke into his face: “Because there’s nothing wrong with your eyes. You haven’t even been to the eye doctor. Out of some weird look-at-me bravado, you went to a Vineyard party pretending you were a blind sage and got the president of the United States to believe you.”

“It was worth it.”

“Because you had the best seat in the house to get the lowdown on Diana’s death trip?”

“No. The president. I saw into his soul.”

“Oh, please.”

Ava began to snort, jeering at his pomposity, the grand manner that seemed a posturing part of his blindness. The manner itself was another form of blindness.

But Steadman merely stared at her with his dead eyes and waited for her to stop, knowing that if he persisted in his scrutiny he could unnerve her by boring a hole into her skull with his blank patience. And he felt that maybe he had succeeded, that she was taken aback, because she stopped challenging him with mockery, and when she spoke again she did so in a more reasonable tone.

“When you say things like that I don’t know whether to laugh or start worrying about your sanity.”

“He’s tormented,” Steadman said. “I really pity him. A part of him is lost and he doesn’t want anyone to know it. Imagine the dilemma: the man with the secret is the most conspicuous person in the world.”

“What sort of secret?”

“Something forbidden, something that shames him, like being helpless, smitten.” Steadman’s blank gaze was still fixed on her. “Cunt-struck.”

Ava said, “I’m sure the president would be reassured to know that you care.”

“I agree, strangely enough. Everything matters to him. He’s very thinskinned. And very tenacious. He came from nowhere. And he wants to be a hero.”

“Maybe that’s what you have in common.”

The phone rang before Steadman could reply, and he snatched the receiver as he had all the other times, before Ava could intervene.

It was a different woman. She said, “You touched me,” and hung up.

“I hate this,” Ava said, seeing the expression on Steadman’s face. “You’re pathetic and they’re sad.”

She told him angrily that he was deluding himself in enjoying the phone calls from these strange women. Instead of being strengthened by his blindness, as he had maintained, he had the egotism of an invalid, demanding attention and wanting to be cosseted and needing for his infirmity to be noticed.

“‘Look at me — blind as a bat!’” Ava said, satirizing him. “You love it.”

He wondered if this was true. Yes, he had liked being noticed at the party. It had reminded him of the great days when he had been a celebrated prodigy.

“So I’m as vulgar and susceptible as everyone else — so what? Hey, what about the president?”