Paul Theroux - Blinding Light

“And I know who waited on you,” he said.

“You smell these women.”

“That one for sure,” he said, “in her white top, slightly torn sleeves, and her tumbled curly hair. She’s hardly more than twenty. I liked her last year, when she was blond. She’s dark-haired now.”

He knew that Ava was staring at him as they walked through the parking lot to his car.

“Cutoff blue jeans and that halter top without a bra and those long legs.” He slipped into the passenger seat, still talking, and handed Ava the keys. “What I liked most was that she was wearing that hillbilly getup with high heels. I loved hearing her walk back and forth, stretching to the upper shelves to get things for you.”

“It’s all true. What else do you remember?”

“The shoes are red. They have a teasing sound.”

“What else?”

“She’s Daisy Mae,” Steadman said.

Back at the house, he needed to sit quietly to contain and enjoy the image — did not want to move or talk or eat. He was possessed by the thought of the busy girl in the ragged shorts and skimpy top, walking smartly back and forth — the breasts, the buttocks, the pretty hair and lips, the slender legs, the local girl playing at being a country girl, Daisy Mae, perhaps without knowing the innocent original, whose simple cartoon image had stirred him as a boy.

Steadman was so absorbed he did not bother to wonder where Ava had gone. He had had a good morning of dictation. The trip to Vineyard Haven had taken most of the afternoon.

Then, the sound of the shoes, the heels hammering, was unmistakable — the walking in the house, not toward him but back and forth, tantalizing him. He listened. They receded. They returned, rapping. He was on the porch, in the heat, and then she was with him, brushing past him, tidying the coffee table or, more likely, pretending she was doing so. Passing him again, she turned away and he reached out and touched her shorts, ran his hands over her, felt the softness and the rivets and the cutoff fringe and her warm thigh, and tugged her closer, slipped his hands up to her halter top, her shoulders, her curls. Her back was turned. He went on kissing her, touching her, her clothes, her skin, her shoes.

“Say something.”

But the voice came from the far end of the porch, Ava’s voice: “She’s not paid to talk.”

The woman he held began to laugh and, laughing, she relaxed and turned to kiss him, though he was unprepared — startled that the woman embracing him, groping him, was not Ava; shocked that he had not known; touching her breasts with his dumb fingers. He released her, but she lingered to lick his face.

“You can go now, sweetie,” Ava said. “I told you, he’s blind.”

And with that the girl let go and laughed shyly, and as they heard the car departing up the gravel driveway, Ava led Steadman into the house, saying, “Now you’re all mine.”

CERTAIN ITEMS of women’s clothing unfailingly raised his lust,” Steadman said in his dictating voice, with a cadence that helped him remember the narrative line. “The soft hand of silk, the open weave of lace, the tug of elastic, the neat cut of pleats in a short skirt, the way that satin smoothly bulked over skin — and particular loose combinations, warmed by a warm body. Much more than a woman’s nakedness, the clothes were powerful aphrodisiacs. They were veils of enticement.”

“Nakedness,” Ava said, still writing, and in the tone that he was using, to let him know where she was in the middle of a sentence.

“Because a naked woman was someone stripped bare,” Steadman said when she glanced up. “And he had never seen a naked woman his own age, only older ones, or pictures of them, looking so much like meat he wasn’t interested.”

Writing fast, her thumb driving the ballpoint, Ava muttered, “These are abstractions.”

“To his terror-struck mind,” he said, “such women seemed unattainable and far-fetched. And he was so young, the gaping straightforwardness of nudity seemed artless and demanding — nerve without guile, all flesh and hair. And where were the naked girls? He looked for young ones but he never saw them.”

“Talk a little about his reaction to their nakedness.”

“A naked woman was raw pork,” Steadman said, talking over her mutter. “The word he used for ‘naked’ when he was growing up was ‘bollocky.’ It didn’t apply to girls — they didn’t have bollocks, but boys did. ‘Swimming bollocky.’ He didn’t have a word for ‘naked girl’ and in a sense could not imagine what a skinny girl with no clothes on would look like. But clothed ones were everywhere.”

“Go on,” Ava said, encouraging him.

He turned to her and said in a sharp voice, “Why did you do that to me yesterday with that young woman?”

“Just having fun,” she said.

He had no reply, because the object of his own life these days was his pleasure in his book. He said, “It was strange. I didn’t realize. Those clothes threw me.”

“Clothes,” she said. “That is today’s topic.”

He resumed his dictation, saying, “Different clothes, the subtlety of styles, each one resonating with a year, a season in his life. He loved reading women’s bodies through their clothes.”

“Fetishism?” Ava said. “Role-play?”

“Semiotics,” he said.

“Oh, please.”

“Don’t write that word. Write: red lips, tight sweaters, tight blue jeans, bare feet in high heels. Capri pants were popular when he was fifteen. Tight shorts, shaping the ass and giving it a smirk. There was so much expressiveness he saw that aroused him — the face in the crotch, the manner in which a girl’s ass seemed to respond with a wobble in hot pants, silver lamé, ignescence from buttock to buttock as she walked.”

“Delete ‘ignescence,’ I’m begging you.”

“Okay. ‘Sparkling.’ More of the body showed because it was clothed, and it all beckoned because it was highlighted.” He paused, then said, “One girl he remembered.”

Ava’s murmur now was both laughter and affirmation, but Steadman was staring, solemn, his voice croaky, dry with desire.

“It was madness. He watched her and thought, Your lips are a cunt. Your cleavage is a cunt. Your neck. Your ass. Your eager hands are fuckable. He wanted to come on her fingers and watch her lick them. It was more than madness.”

He was sitting forward, upright, blindly seeing every detail he described, speaking in a scorching whisper as he listened to her writing as fast as the tape recorder was turning. The pad was in her lap and her exertion was audible, not just the rustle of paper but a peculiar sighing of her chair legs that was somehow plaintive, even sad, a loosening and sometimes a creak, like the complaint of a tight knuckle joint. It could have been her body, but it was always her chair.

“He loved it all. He wanted more.”

He had drunk a pint of the datura and at the same moment he was dazzled. He saw a woman’s face and other, separate elements at the margin of his sight — shoes, painted fingernails, breasts lifted against the filled bodice of an evening gown, a glimpse of lace, a bra strap showing, a full skirt pressed against crushable buttocks, a black veil over staring eyes — images from old magazines, fragments of drawings, memories of women he had seen and never forgotten, the wonderful covers of old paperbacks — the titles, too, The Revolt of Mamie Stover and The Wayward Bus, Nana and I, the Jury — depicting reckless women half dressed and dressed up. They had been the icons of his education.

“‘All dressed up’ was the expression that excited him then, much more than ‘stripped naked,’” Steadman said. “He loved the drama of the event — the preparation, the clothes, the costume. He was possessed by the word ‘girlie,’ the word ‘panties,’ the word ‘bra.’”