Paul Theroux: Blinding Light

To travel in separate rows, to pretend not to know each other, would have been ridiculous — they had discussed these strategies. They still needed each other, needed most of all to be let down gently, to part without drama. They still liked being together, even if they were no longer in love. The finality — the peculiarity of nothingness, no hope, no future — affected their sex life, gave it a vicious push. The night before they left they made love as though they were strangers, meeting by chance, emboldened by their anonymity to be selfish, even brutal, seeming to use each other. But the rough grappling in the dark room surprised and delighted them, afterward leaving them gasping, sprawling naked on the carpet, looking beaten and broken, as though they had fallen to the floor from a great height.

“I liked that,” Ava had said. She knew that Steadman had too. It had reminded her of the first time, the blind recklessness of it, when they had just met and knew only each other’s first name. “That was nice.”

Ava had not been put off by the coldness of it, Steadman’s apparent indifference to her, his concentrating on his pleasure. He probably had not noticed that she was using him, that only her pleasure mattered to her. And it proved that they were finished, it was over, she could say anything to him now, even tell him she didn’t like what he was writing. They were strangers again in the dark room. She slipped her hand between his thighs and touched him and told him she wanted him again. She shocked him, she aroused him with her demand, her saying, “And if you can’t get it up, what good are you?”

Afterward she had said in a teasing, greedy way, “Maybe we’ll meet other people on the trip.”

Blindfolded, he remembered everything.

Two hours into the second leg of the flight, and even taking into account the delay in Miami, the only people they had met were the talkative travelers who called themselves the Gang of Four, the Hacklers and the Wilmutts: big, loud Marshall Hackler — Hack — his English wife, Janey, the overly tidy reader, Sabra, and her husband, the competitor named Wood. The dark, bug-eyed German, Manfred Steiger, had hovered, wanting to enter the conversation, squinting, grinning, showing his teeth in a what’s-going-on? face.

Here was the odd thing. Steadman felt he had met another person, too, and what fascinated him was that it was Ava, someone he thought he knew well, the woman he had once believed he would marry. She was someone else, someone new, a woman he both feared and desired. It was not just her lovemaking, her selfish sensualism that turned him into a voyeur, like a man watching a woman masturbate — that was how it seemed, and he had liked it. There was her frankness, too, her telling him his work was pretentious, her air of independence, and a toughness that made her seem strong. Most of all, her dealing with the other travelers, snapping “eco-porn” and “Jonquil J. Christ” and any other insulting thing that came into her head. He wondered if the fact that she was a doctor, used to giving reassurance and help, made it all the more thrilling for her to abuse these people.

Under his blindfold Steadman fell asleep, and the vibration of the plane, the engine howl, his damp palms on the armrests, and the smell of the dinner trays and dusty carpet and reheated food — it all entered his dream. He toppled and, still toppling, realized that he had lost his balance in an anatomical landscape. The valleys were the creases in a woman’s body, and that discovery woke him. The plane was bright and stank of warm plastic and it was dawn, the just-risen sun blazing on the left side of the plane. Coffee was being served.

“Ever been to Ecuador?” he heard. It was the man named Wood, blowing on his coffee, speaking across the aisle.

Ava said, “Hey, that sounds like an invitation.”

That was another aspect of the new Ava — her teasing, her mockery, the way she deflected questions like a child, like a coquette, being impossible and domineering, as though these people were trying to woo her.

“It’s where this aircraft is going,” the man said, maintaining his composure.

“Right. We’re getting off at the next stop.”

“How long are you guys going to be there?”

That “guys” again, and it seemed to Steadman that the man was preparing to ask what they were planning to do there, and Steadman hoped that Ava would resist answering the question.

She pleased him by saying, “That’s kind of up in the air. How about you guys?”

“Three weeks. We’ve got a full program.” He was boasting again. He said, “I bet everyone on this plane has to be back at work next Monday.”

That was worth a note — that all these young well-off Americans were heading to Ecuador as though it were a holiday in Maine. They were probably on a tour of some kind, one of those expensive ones where someone else did all the arranging. Except for the Ecuadorians and a few missionaries and some obvious businessmen in wilted suits, most of the passengers looked like weary and apprehensive tourists. Steadman was glad that he was headed for Lago Agrio and Rio Aguarico and the darkest, most distant downriver village in the Oriente. As Ava had said, they would never run into these people again.

“Wood Wilmutt,” the man said, introducing himself. “You here on business?”

Ava said, “No.”

“Pleasure then?”

“Probably not.”

“What else is there?”

“A wet dream,” Ava said.

The man’s eyes went sharp and serious as his mouth became small. “A leap in the dark,” she went on, and Steadman wanted to hug her for quoting him. It was something he had thought, but he had studiously said nothing. He did not want to disclose that he was a writer on assignment. That kind of revelation always provoked questions and cast a shadow over a conversation, made some people inquisitive and bumptious, and others wary. At the very least it turned most people, including the writer on assignment, into bores.

“So you’re on vacation,” Ava said.

“If you will,” Wood said, and Steadman made a note.

“And you’re retired.”

“For want of a better word,” Wood said, and Steadman made another note.

“Meaning?”

“I said I sold my company, I didn’t say I’d retired,” Wood said. “I’ve been pretty lucky. Anyway, Sabra’s still got her dental practice.”

Steadman wondered whether Ava would divulge the fact that she was a doctor, and he thought she might, less for information than as a doctor upstaging a dentist; but she said nothing.

“ Was tun Sie, Fritz? " Sabra said.

“Ich bin Schriftsteller Manfred said. His eyes were dancing in anger. “Aber mein Name istManfred, nicht Fritz, danke. Sprechen Sie Deutsch ?”

“Kind of. I mean, I speak Yiddish.”

“You are wrong if you think Yiddish is German. Yiddish is meaning Jewish,” Manfred said. Then he spoke to the others. “ Schriftsteller— writer.”

“My husband wrote a book,” Sabra said.

But Manfred was still talking. “My family is dealing in medical supplies, but I said no to the business. You are knowing Steiger Medical Fabrik?”

“Drugs?” Wood asked.

“Some. But rare varieties. Also uniforms. Glassware. Sterilizing appliances. Disinfecting agents. Rubber goods. Tubing. Syringes.” He leaned forward. “Government contracts. We make good business.”

“U.S. government?”

“German government.”

That killed the conversation — and sigh-ringes had the others exchanging glances — until Manfred remembered something. He knelt down and pulled a thick book from his carry-on bag. He showed it to the passengers in nearby seats. It was A Guide to the Medicinal Plants of Upper Amazonia.