Paul Theroux - Blinding Light

“You’re the same person,” he said. He meant: I don’t know you — you’re a stranger that emerged from the body of a friend whom I had found familiar and even beautiful. I was able to fuck the body but not the person inside it.

“You’re a bastard.”

Meaningless abuse; he was capable of the same. It was another stage in the disintegration.

But it seemed to him that she wanted to hold him responsible. It was almost as if she had been looking for a husband in order to find someone to take on the burden of misery within her, which had been part of her since childhood.

Dishonestly, he had wanted to sigh Women! as she had often shouted Men! But that was ridiculous. “We are not raccoons,” he had said to her one day. It was unfair to see her only as a woman, for she was different from any other woman he had ever known. She was Charlotte and sometimes Charlie. They had tried. They had failed.

Trying to analyze her didn’t help. The attempt made him insincerely sympathetic and seemed to obligate him. She talked about her parents, and it seemed like a weird parable of perverse and cruel people: hag of a mother, bully of a father, brute of a brother, who had done everything except love her. He hated listening, for whenever she talked of these people he saw damage. The worst of it was that since she really did not like herself very much, how could she love anyone else?

Yet she had friends, all of them women, none he knew well, for she kept them to herself and, he suspected, secretly complained about him to them. He could tell from the way they treated him — distantly, coolly, sometimes mocking, sometimes loudly contemptuous — that they were acting on her behalf.

Her closest friend was Vickie. In one of Charlotte’s low periods Vickie came to stay for a week. He suspected a week would be too long, that it might undo him, but he made attempts to be conversational.

“Have you ever been to the Vineyard before?”

“Years ago.”

“When was that?”

Vickie couldn’t remember. It had to be a lie. He asked her what sort of work she did.

“Depends on the day.”

She was being elusive. He knew Vickie was a marketing manager from Los Angeles. Charlotte had said so. They were both part of a business plan that was being written. Vickie had a long-term relationship with a man in New York. Steadman asked about him. “He’s delightfully eccentric.” Charlotte had told him the man was very wealthy and that Vickie was wealthy, too, but all Steadman saw was an aging sharp-faced woman who had a demented male friend and who had shown up empty-handed and contradicted nearly everything he said.

“Beautiful,” she said of a small santo on a pedestal, its gilt chipped. “I was going to buy one in Mexico.”

“This is from the Philippines.”

“Mexicans make the exact same things,” she said. “You’re limping.”

“Gout,” he said.

“Gout’s terrible. Sometimes you can’t get out of bed. You get gout in every joint.”

“That’s not it. Have you ever had it?”

“No, but I know quite a bit about it.”

Wondering why he was going to the trouble, Steadman explained 216 that you never got gout in every joint. He had been severely dehydrated on his travels and had fainted one day in Assam, before trespassing into Bangladesh. The resulting kidney damage had produced the gout. Gout was nearly always limited to one joint, often the podagra of the large toe of one foot.

“It’s like having a broken toe.”

“Oh, is that all?” Vickie said, and turned to Charlotte. “I had a broken toe when I was a dancer. It didn’t hurt at all.”

“This hurts.”

“If you’d drunk more water,” Vickie said, “you wouldn’t have gotten dehydrated.”

Steadman smiled, raging within.

“This was in India.”

“They’re starving in India,” Vickie said.

“Have you been to India?”

She averted her eyes. “Years ago.”

She stayed in the guesthouse; she whispered with Charlotte, whom she called Charlie; they shopped in town. Steadman saw them only at mealtimes. Though she was a snob about food—“Avocados are really fattening,” “Fruit juice is all sugar,” “You don’t have any soy milk?”—she didn’t cook. Vickie wouldn’t swim in his pool — she hated pools, all those chemicals. When he offered her blueberries in a bowl she said she hated blueberries, and so he followed up with raspberries and she shrieked, saying she hated them even more. “They’re so hairy.” She said she wanted to give up business and be a masseuse. She often massaged Charlotte’s neck as she talked. “You’re all tight here. Why are you so tense, Charlie? These knots. Feel them? Let me work on those.” Steadman wondered why he had never massaged his wife’s neck. Vickie said her ambition was to live in a deluxe hotel, preferably in Europe, maybe in Vienna. She had been there once, it was so clean, better than Italy, where they threw trash everywhere.

“The narcissism of minor differences,” Steadman said.

He had become fascinated by her disagreeable opinions and ignorant evasions. She believed she was delightfully eccentric, like her New York boyfriend, while he knew she was simply annoying. He realized that it was a relief for Charlotte to see someone else battling him, but couldn’t she tell how pathetic the woman was?

She looked up, though her fingers still clutched at Charlotte’s neck.

“Freud,” Steadman said. “He was from Vienna.”

“Everyone knows that.”

“And the quote’s from Civilization and Its Discontents .”

“I know.”

“You read it?”

With a wave of her hand, “So long ago.”

Harmless affectations, white lies; and if she always surrounded herself with people like Charlotte, she would never be found out. More serious was her continual gossip. She had gotten close to a mutual friend, a man Steadman had met a few times but who was closer to Charlotte, a business associate to whom she had introduced Vickie. And Vickie, the passenger, the floater, was now a friend of the man. He saw her regularly, he confided in her.

“I shouldn’t be telling you this, Charlie,” Vickie said, and giggled, and then told them both the secrets the man had divulged to her: of his wife’s past, his children’s problems, his financial worries, his weaknesses as a businessman — weaknesses, she suggested, that she and Charlotte might easily exploit.

She spoke in the tone a person might use when offering a special gift to a lucky, much-valued friend, giving them the secrets and letting them share the information, which made them powerful, too. The confidences were beyond gossip: they had the effect of reducing and emasculating the man, and created the illusion — as some betrayals did — of making the listener stronger.

Charlotte was delighted, rapt, as Vickie went on leaking.

“The key to his marriage? He married his mother. She makes all the decisions. You gotta wonder about their sex life.”

Steadman found himself more interested than he should have been. But pondering what was being divulged, he became wary, for here was the indiscreet woman in his own household, a confidante of his secretive and dissatisfied wife. At some point in the future he would be talked about that way. You gotta wonder…

Seeing Charlotte with this woman friend, he perceived aspects of her personality that had been hidden from him before. She laughed hard at Vickie’s small smutty asides. She was delighted by her confidences, her betrayals, her gossip; she asked for more. Vickie brought out a dismissive, philistine side of Charlotte, one that was also tinged with mendacity. She was untruthful because she was snobbish, aggressive, competitive, mean.