Paul Theroux - Blinding Light

She had changed her clothes: she wore a white blouse, a short skirt, high heels. She walked to the leather sofa in the corner of the room and sat on its far end, in the shadows.

“Touch me.”

He approached, trying to suppress his eagerness, and he knelt before her, sliding his hand between her thighs, plucking at her panties.

“You’re wet.”

“Not enough.” She guided his hand until it seemed to sink, and she sighed as he stroked her.

Then she leaned forward, unbuttoned the front of her blouse, and tugged his head forward as the dancer had done to her in Boston. She slapped his face with her breasts, holding them, one in each hand, manipulating her nipples.

“Touch me again.”

He did so, with his face cradled in the warmth of her breasts, and found that she was wetter, sweetened with moisture, her panties clinging, heavier. He lifted her skirt, parted her legs and began to mount her.

“No,” she said, and taking advantage of his getting to his feet, she gripped his cock and folded her breasts around it and chafed the hard thick thing between their softness, and when he began to pant she used her breasts to lift it to her mouth, and finished him off by sucking him slowly into her throat.

All this without removing her clothes. She passed her fingers over the slickness on her lips, swallowed again, and said, “That’s what I mean.”

She knew him so well, and she was able to say so in a mock-dramatic way, teasing him with her understanding. She could demonstrate, like that, the interlude in the library, that he needed her. Now he felt safe with her. He had never been so content, so stimulated, so greedy for more. He could depend on her, could share all his secrets.

Early on, the second time they had met, when she was just starting at the Vineyard hospital, delivering babies, setting bones, performing appendectomies, tying tubes, he had said, “Like everybody else, I’ve been married before.”

Her smile, her reckless eyes, made her seem strong, and so his expression softened. She said, “Generalizations are great. They show you’re impatient and not fussy.”

“You mean about everyone being married? But it’s true. It’s like everyone gets a driver’s license. And later you’re amazed you passed and that you didn’t have more accidents.”

“Some people need to be single,” she said, with a confidence that meant she was single. “And some people need to be smugly married.”

He made a pretense of thinking a moment, so that the delay, the silence, would help her remember. Then, eyeing her, he said, “And some people learn by doing.”

Steadman’s marriage had been brief and, from the beginning, bewildering. The wedding — ridiculous, expensive, a mockery — was just confusion, like a pretentious ritual before a bloody battle; and later, when arguing exhausted and confounded them both, and there was no obvious purpose in fault-finding except pettiness, he took refuge in a despairing silence. The silence that lay between his wife and himself he remembered as a true darkness.

Marriage seemed to him a sudden loneliness with someone familiar — maybe this happened all the time? — someone who by degrees turned into a stranger. They had met at a party, soon after he had arrived back from his two years of trespassing. Her name was Charlotte, “but please call me Charlie. Everyone does.” He said, “Then I’ll call you Charlotte.” She said she was in marketing, an account executive. He had no idea. She seemed intensely animated in the first weeks of their friendship. Sex made her desirable for her teasing elusiveness, and his infatuation blurred her even more. He had to have her no matter what. He told her he loved her, he promised her everything. Yes, I want to marry you! Her excitement made her beautiful, she said she would do anything to make him happy, and he promised her the same. But marriage made them first strangers and then quarrelers and finally enemies.

The confusing part for him was that her strangeness stimulated their sex life. The stumbling sense that he hardly knew her, that they did not share a common language, made her desirable. He did not know where to begin, so when she made a suggestion — and it was nearly always crude: “I am so horny,” yes, he understood that — he was immediately aroused, as though the foreign woman he had been staring at from across the room at a party approached him and, reading his mind, said, “Now,” and led him into a nearby bedroom and kicked the door shut.

Charlotte’s haste, her need, and her mood of anonymity were a pleasure to him — perhaps the only one — for she was more a stranger in bed than anywhere else. “Bed” was a euphemism for the various places they made love: the back seat of the car, the bathroom, the hidden pocket beach below West Chop lighthouse. He did not want sex as a gift; he wanted it as a command — and to take turns giving orders. Charlotte taught him that, or at least helped him realize what he wanted. As a stranger she had no inhibitions; she could demand anything of him, he could say anything to her, they could be irresponsible and reckless. She used him, he used her — those were their happiest days. He loved the fact that sexually she was hard to satisfy, always behaving badly, like a selfish person taking advantage of someone unsuspecting.

Early on, she had dropped hints. “Look at that,” she said of a lacy low-cut dress, “it’s real slutty.” And of a pair of stiletto-heeled shoes, “I want a pair of those hump-me pumps.”

Ordinarily she had little conversation, but when she was in the mood for sex she was like a cat, demanding, rubbing against him — or not like a cat at all, but like a predatory woman, a coke whore on a back street pleading for sex. Steadman liked her snatching him and insisting, “Go down on me — yes — more,” while she held his head with both her hands. “Use your finger, too. Yes, like that, harder, deeper, don’t stop, make me come.”

And after she came, convulsed, gagging and squealing, her body bucking, she could be even hungrier, more demanding, but in a pleading and submissive way, on his behalf. “Be rough with me. Call me a cocksucker. Go ahead, make me blow you.” When Steadman was tentative — Where do I begin? — she said, “Rougher, spank me, force me,” and then, as she kicked and he slapped her small hard buttocks, she growled against his cock and became noisily ecstatic, whinnying as she drank him.

Otherwise, most of the time, and always in public, she was a rather prim and passive woman.

She bought clothes, she had her nails done once a week, she read the Wall Street Journal. She was absorbed by her work. “I’ve got a marketing meeting in Cambridge with the salespeople, and I haven’t edited the pitches or read the spreadsheets.” What ?Her work was a mystery to him.

But this strangeness, this unexpectedness, made her combative, too, and he often wondered, Who are you? At last Steadman was indifferent. He worked on his book and was so absorbed in it he ended up not knowing her. Fighting with her was meaningless. Their house seemed emptier when they were both inside. He wanted her to go, but he was so exhausted that when he suggested that she go, his voice sounded lazy and detached — so hopeless and speculative he hardly cared.

“I think it’s over, Charlie.”

A year before, during their courtship, when she had become flustered by his excessive questioning, she had said to him, “What you see is what you get,” as though emphasizing her simplicity, almost boasting of her shallowness, primary colors in one dimension, a paper cutout, a little doll. Her facetious warning not to look deeper became her mantra: she had no subtleties, nor any inner meaning. “I’m in sales and marketing! Doesn’t that say it all?”