Paul Theroux - Blinding Light

“It’s just that I don’t believe it.” And she went on softly sniffing and swallowing, dabbing at her eyes with a ragged ball of tissue. “I am so happy.”

He smiled again, hoping to encourage a smile from her.

“You’re the writer,” she said. “ Trespassing .”

Steadman nodded, he clinked his glass against hers, he drank not knowing what to say.

“I was wondering if we’d meet. I knew you lived here.”

“Everyone lives here.”

“In the summer,” she said. Her tears made her look young and inexperienced, as unlike a doctor as it was possible to be. She blew her nose and wiped it, reddening the rims of her nostrils, becoming plainer, innocent, almost boyish. She sniffed. “I’m so sorry.”

Steadman took her hand and felt her gentle fingers; she let him comfort her. He could see she was shaken but happy, her tears like the glow of a rapture. He liked her emotion, the change in her face, the way she looked younger with tears on her cheeks. He was the doctor, she the ailing patient, needing reassurance, emotional, as though sobbing in relief.

“Take it easy.”

“No, I’m happy. Really.”

He could see she was, even with her wet eyes and dripping nose.

He was about to embrace her when her pager sounded — important, a dull repeated note, demanding to be noticed — and immediately she scooped the thing out of her leather bag and studied its message. In a clear efficient voice, scoured of tears, the tone of a timekeeper, she said, “I have to leave here right now to see to that delivery.”

Like that, in a flash; and now it was he who was impressed and helpless.

The waitress appeared — young, fresh-faced, with a beautiful smile and thick tumbling blond hair that she arranged with tosses of her head. She held a pen and a pad and said, “Some more drinks for you guys?”

“Just the check,” Dr. Katsina said.

Steadman watched the waitress leave, shimmying through the crowded bar, and then said, “I can tell you’re a really good doctor.”

“I know what I’m doing most of the time. And I can go on being your doctor — but that’s all,” she said.

“What’s the alternative?”

“Find another doctor. I’ll be your friend. I’m a good friend. You won’t need to make appointments.”

She spoke with an intensity that had to have come from her being so solitary, so hardworking. A sociable person would never have said it that way. He tried to take her hand, but she was already rooting in her bag for her car keys.

He hardly recognized her the next night. They had agreed to meet at a restaurant on the harbor in Edgartown, but when he was led to the table, reserved in his name, he did not see her. In Dr. Katsina’s place was a blonde in a red blouse, applying lipstick. Seeming to see Steadman behind her in the small mirror of her compact, she clapped it shut and looked up at him, fingering the ringlets of her hair, not smiling, looking intruded-upon.

“It is you,” he said, and sat down.

Then she smiled. “I saw you staring at that waitress in the bar last night and I thought, Why not? Anyway, I’m a doctor and we don’t do things like this, which is why I did it. It’s a wig. Want me to take it off?”

Amused and fascinated, he said, “Not now.”

It was another cold evening but a quieter place, and she told him how she had delivered the baby, a normal delivery, a little girl — happy mother, nervous father — just like that, eased a whole child into the world, dripping and squalling, and wiped its wet head. Her lipstick, her blond wig, made the clinical details of the childbirth story wonderful and slightly improbable.

“I can drink tonight,” she said. “My pager’s off.”

She was strong, she was confident, she alluded without apology to old boyfriends. (“This guy I used to date turned me on to your book.”) She told him stories of the operating room, and Steadman was fascinated by her conceit, for while there was something incomprehensible and mystical in it, there was also a mastery of anatomy, the ultimate in physical transformation — a cesarean section, cutting out an appendix, ridding a person of a diseased organ, setting a bone, snatching a sick person from the brink of an abyss. A patient staring horror-struck at death she was able to restore to health. She knew the chemistry of drugs, she had the authority to order them, she knifed open flesh, she sewed it together with stitches, made a healing seam in the skin. All of it a vigorous challenge of his belief that doctors caused illness.

He was so conscious of his skepticism that he said, “You’re like a shaman.”

She laughed at his hyperbole and denied it with a hint of insincerity — the medical doctor’s confidence, the surgeon’s arrogance: she knew her power. She was the only truly fulfilled person he had ever met.

“I’m glad you think so.”

But as though to deny it she told him how at medical school they had fooled with cadavers to take the curse off them — she and a boyfriend with a corpse. Or saying nothing during a long operation she performed jointly with that man, while dropping sexual hints, knowing that after the thing was done and the patient wheeled away they would hurry to his house — this was in Boston.

“The rush you get from a successful operation — I mean, working together, the tension, the efficiency, the body lying there on the table between us,” she said. “When it was all over we’d go and fuck.”

“The private life of a shaman,” he said, but he had been taken aback by her frankness. “Too bad you can’t be my doctor.”

“I can be other things.”

“My friend.”

What she said next was so memorable to him, he kept it to himself as a wicked secret, and never recalled it afterward without seeing the redness of her lips and tongue, the unsuspicious smiling Yankee with his tankard in the white blouse and the silly improbable hair on the Sam Adams beer sign, the slant of light and wooden threads on the screw bung of an ornamental wine cask, the saltshaker shape of the fat, squat Edgartown Harbor lighthouse, the outgoing tide swelling and chafing at the edge of the On Time Ferry plowing a dark furrow through the current near the Chappaquiddick side, a woman walking nearby on the beach with a cigarette in her mouth and a scarf twisted on her head — all of it fixed in his mind with her blunt statement.

“Statistically, only six percent of the women who give blowjobs get any real pleasure from it,” she said.

Steadman’s mouth was already dry; the words he had attempted had shriveled and blistered on it and were gone. He was looking helplessly at her lipsticked mouth, her damp swollen lips.

He anticipated what she was going to say next, and his ears were already ringing, all the louder because he could see she wasn’t smiling, only relating an established fact. Yet he was shocked. It was one of the boldest sentences he had ever heard from a woman — a taunt, a tease, a promise, the ultimate pickup line delivered as a statistic. She seemed to understand the effect it had on him and to desire him for being shockable, as he desired her for being able to shock him, Slade Steadman, reclusive author of the well-known book of surprises, Trespassing.

“I’m in that six percent.”

Except for his facetious response, which he delivered hoarsely and hopelessly—“So what’s in it for me?”—he did not remember the rest of the meal, only his urgency that they finish and hurry home, and she seemed as eager as he was.

That began the summer of hot nights in the walled compound of his up-island house — nights when she was not on duty, nights so dedicated to their desire that often they met in the dark and drank and touched and groped and uttered nothing but sighs, twitching and tearing at each other’s clothes and bodies. She held him off, she said, “Let me, let me, I like it”—holding him down, mothering him, sucking him — until he could not stand it anymore, and as the night grew darker, their bodies glowed. He loved it because it turned them into blameless animals, monkeys rutting for the play of it and the pleasure she took in arousing him. And when she was aware of the closeness of his panting, that he was seconds from exploding, she squirmed free and got down on him and held him in her mouth and pumped with her hand until he came with a roar while she squealed and licked it from her lips, her eyes rolling up as she became sightless, white-eyed in ecstasy.