Paul Theroux - Blinding Light

“You look great.”

“Thank you,” she said in a small voice, seeming more uncertain than shy.

In the car, she said, “Are we going dancing?”

He said nothing. He hadn’t thought of that. He only wanted to be alone and to hold her.

“I know a place,” he said.

They went by the unpaved back roads to the beach at the harbor entrance to Tashmoo, where they parked, hidden amid the high rose bushes, facing the Sound. Satisfied that they were alone, Steadman took out his hip flask and drank two large swallows. He then sat quietly, feeling the drug course in his blood and rise into the bulb of his head and warm his brain.

“This does amazing things to your pulse,” Ava said, her fingers on his wrist.

But he was smiling, he was blind, he got out of the car and went to her side and slipped off her shoes. Then, hearing music from a house in the woods they could not see, they danced slowly on the sand. He held her close, felt her frilly dress, the silks beneath it, all the layers against him, her body too, her sinuous dancing in his hands. He could hardly bear it.

He touched her, let his fingers slip to her buttocks and clutched them. Ava murmured but said nothing. He felt for her breasts in the crispness of all that cloth. She seemed to pull away, a tug of modesty, yet she allowed it.

They kissed. She kissed his ear, his neck, and he thought how holding her and kissing was a form of dancing.

“Not here.”

They went back to the car, which was fragrant with her perfume, something sensual in its stuffy heat, all the windows closed. He helped her into the back seat and kissed her again, sucked on her lips, groped at the bodice of her dress and found her breasts and put his face between them and kissed and nuzzled her cleavage.

“Long ago the answer was always ‘Please, stop.’”

Ava said, “Please, don’t stop.”

She sighed as he slipped his hand beneath her dress, all those layers, snagging his fingers on her petticoats, and found her panties. He extended his fingers to touch the lace trim and slid them under the tight elastic to the slick hair and soft lips, and as he slipped a thick finger into her, she moved her legs together and clasped his hand between her thighs and moaned and rode him.

Parting her legs again for him, she reached down and clawed at the crotch of her panties where they were binding his hand, and with her other hand she grasped the bodice of her dress and eased it down, baring her breasts. Then she clutched the back of his head and guided his mouth to a nipple.

Her breath against his ear was hot as she licked him, panting, squirming against his hand, saying, “Suck me, bite my nipple, finger-fuck me harder,” and she reached again and took his hand like something inanimate and pumped it against herself, frantically using it.

He submitted to her grip on his hand. He loved feeling the hot silk of her sex lips, which pulsed in a rosy glow beneath the lacy shadows of her clothes, the ripeness rising and mingling with the aroma of flowers, so that he could not distinguish her perfume from the hum of her sex, her satiny skin from the smoothness of her lingerie. The heavy odors saturated his eyes and excited his hunger and made him dumb with desire.

“Lots of times,” she said slowly, “I touch myself like this, dreaming of you,” and lifted herself slightly from the seat cushion to free his hand and give him more room.

Touching her vulva was like fumbling with dripping peach slices, covering his fingers in warm syrup, and her flesh was warm under her stiff petticoats. Her soft breasts propped in the brocade of her dress were like fruit, too, pressed against his face as he sucked the tender stem.

“We’ve got all night, baby,” she crooned to him as she held him to her breast. “And when you’re through with me, I’m going to take this”—she found the bulge in his pants and traced it with her fingers and squeezed.

She let go with a gasp, twisting away from him and snatching at her dress, just as a pair of headlights slashed the air. Above them the blazing blue gelatinous light atop a police cruiser flashed like a spaceship that had just settled to Earth.

Behind an overbright flashlight with a querying beam came a steady wide-awake voice.

“There’s no parking on the dune, folks.”

The flashlight swept across Ava’s face — the smudged lipstick, the wisps of dangling hair — and briefly Steadman’s. They were disheveled but dressed, and both of them so formal. In a tidying motion the beam lighted the empty front seat.

“You the owner of this vehicle, sir?”

Keeping his head down, hiding his hands, Steadman said yes, the car was his.

“Good. Now I want you to get out of the vehicle very slowly and show me your license and registration.”

“What for?” Ava said.

“Please do as I say.”

Steadman did not object. He flicked his wallet and found his license in a plastic sleeve, but as he swung the car door open and stepped out, he stumbled, and in a defensive reflex the cop jumped backward in what seemed a practiced move, clasping the handle of his pistol and directing his flashlight at Steadman’s face and gaping white eyes.

“He’s blind, Officer.”

As Steadman’s dead eyes accused him, the cop seemed unsure now, and he was startled into ignoring the license. He turned his flashlight from Steadman’s face to Ava’s. “You okay, ma’am?”

“This is a special occasion, Officer.” In the interval of the policeman’s confusion, she had adjusted her dress and smoothed her hair, though she looked more than ever like a prom date, rumpled, demure.

“You look kind of familiar. I’ve seen you.”

“The hospital.”

“Right. Emergency. You’re the doctor.” With each statement he became more polite. “And you’re the writer. I’ve heard about you.”

Steadman simply stared, looking ghoulish.

The policeman switched off his flashlight, another mark of respect, and said, “Sorry, folks, I thought you were summer people.”

After he had gone, Ava said, “That was perfect. Now let’s go home.”

“No,” Steadman said, touching her as he spoke, and with his touch finding a fragrance.

Sliding one hand beneath the hem of her gown, embracing her and delving into her bodice, fingering her cupped breast, he knew what she wanted from her sighs of encouragement. And when he found her warm damp panties he parted them, and clasped the wetness of her folds, stroked those lips, all the while kissing her face and murmuring into her mouth.

“Oh, yes,” she said, reaching down to guide his fingers, steadying them and chafing herself with them once again. Then through her teeth she spoke into his mouth, insisting, “Fuck me, fuck me, fuck me,” and seemed to thrash inside her dress as she gripped his hand, and the rustling of the cloth aroused him as much as her voice.

A scratching on the metal of the car, the stiff leaves and thorns of a rosebush nudged by the night breeze, was strangely rhythmic — maybe the car was rocking against it? The sound was like a cat’s claws. Then it was gone, lost in Ava’s choking, as she came with a great grunt and gasp, as though, thrusting the orgasm from her body, she were giving birth to it.

They lay there breathless for a while. The claw-scratch returned on the car door. Steadman lifted himself to the window to make sure it was no more than a rose bush. The mass of blossoms was blue in the fluorescence of moonlight.

Ava, too, was luminous. She lay as if ravished, and blue-white like a fresh corpse in her soft dress, her hair tangled, her lipstick smeared around her mouth, her dress yanked down, one breast lifted from the bra cup and its own weight giving it an odd sideways twist of lovely plumpness.