Paul Theroux - Blinding Light

She woke as he watched her, back from the dead, tucking her breast into her bra, lifting her gown to cover it, pushing down her skirt, leaning into the front seat to switch on the overhead light, and then studying her face, touching her hair, smiling, remembering.

“I look fucked.”

Still smiling and peering intently into the mirror of her compact, she wiped the smears of lipstick from her face, dabbed at her eyes, combed her hair. And just as Steadman thought she had finished, she took out a pouch of cosmetics and applied mascara and thickened her eyelashes — slowly, paying no attention to Steadman, who watched with fascination as she prettied her face. She rouged her cheeks, reddened her lips again using a brush and lip gloss, made herself a new face, a mask of desire.

Only when she was done, having put herself back together and now looking again as she had in the doorway, did she turn away from the mirror and snap her compact shut, lingering in the light a bit before switching it off. She faced him. The dusty moonlight deepened the texture of her makeup and softened the planes of her face, and what had seemed an innocently questioning smile in the small mirror was now lust lit by moonbeams.

She leaned toward Steadman and her lowering arm crushed her gown as she reached down and slid her hand along his thigh. She touched his cock and kissed him, thrusting her tongue into his mouth and moving her fingers, playing with him through the cloth of his trousers. She unzipped him and slipped her hand inside, her warm hand clutching him, as though gripping a knife handle, until it thickened. Then she pumped it, driving it downward against his groin, again and again, thrusting hard, as if she had a dagger she was using against him. And still she embraced him, held tight to him, kissing his lips and his face as she held him, not stopping, not even hesitating. She had risen, and she hovered over him so urgently hers was a posture of assault, possessing him and pounding his cock with a murdering motion.

The sound of his pleasure came slanting from deep within his lungs and seemed like an echo of a softer sighing in her throat. Her breasts were in his hands, his thumbs grazing her nipples. Her touch was surer and so finely judged that she seemed to feel in the throb of his cock the spasm of his juice rising — knew even before he did that he was about to come. Then he knew, his body began to convulse, and as he cried “No”—because she had let go — she pushed him backward onto the seat and pressed her face down, lapping his cock into her mouth, curling her tongue around it, and the suddenness of it, the snaking of her tongue, the pressure of her lips, the hot grip of her mouth, triggered his orgasm, which was not juice at all but a demon eel thrashing in his loins and swimming swiftly up his cock, one whole creature of live slime fighting the stiffness as it rose and bulged at the tip and darted into her mouth.

Holding him with one hand, she devoured it and was still swallowing as he went limp and slipped out of her mouth. When she looked up at him with her smeared face and smudged eyes, she was still greedily gulping, licking droplets from her gleaming lips.

The car was warm and sour with the mingled odors of perfume and sweat and the fish glue of his semen. Ava was silent. The world was old. The moon looked brittle and barnacled, and down below in the Sound a breadbox of a ferry chugged through the greasy waves. He knew his blindness had worn off.

IN THE SALLOW morning light of glaucous summer seafog he could not tell whether he was blind or sighted. His uncertainty made him impatient to resume his book. He had woken alone, clearheaded, fixated on the notion that writing and sex were disappearing acts. Wrung out, too, as though, smaller and simpler, he had lost one of his limbs in an ecstatic ritual of eroticism.

Sex was a form of departure, a passionate sacrifice of farewell, and even his writing these days had the unanswerable finality of a suicide note. Take that! he thought with grim pleasure. He wanted to write everything down so there would be nothing more to say and no more to remember, to burn out his self so he could vanish.

Opening the drawer of his filing cabinet, he smiled at the large glass jar that held the dark tea of the datura. He wagged it slowly, stopping at intervals to examine how well the residue had dissolved, and this mechanical motion helped him look ahead to the morning of work.

He needed to think aloud in the form of dictation, because he was troubled by a paradox he did not fully understand. The act of sex, so well planned as an end in itself, seemed to suggest a sequel, by giving you courage, by helping to uncover a related desire, something else, a particular image — last night the glimpse of a pretty garter of lace on the moonlit skin of her thigh, her gown hiked up in a hurry. This enhancement was an invitation: certain clothes seemed to beckon. And he, who had imagined that sex with Rosemarie Fredella on that prom night had been his earliest sexual ambition, the origin of his desire, saw something deeper. This flimsy scrap of lace stirred him again like a fetish object, and he wondered what it meant and where it led.

Two other details also unexpectedly aroused him. He believed he had thought of everything, but no. The interruption of the policeman — the surprise, the drama, the suspenseful moonglow after he had gone — was one. And then, without having been told anything, the way that Ava had further tantalized him by pausing, switching on the overhead light in the car, and turning away with the coy hauteur of a high school coquette. Forcing him to watch and wait, she had put on makeup. He had sat back sighing, loving the chance to see her face change. He was transfixed by her vivid mask, the sharp symmetry of lips and cheeks picked out of the humid shadows of greens and reds in the highlights of her eyes. As though she were saying to his reflection in the mirror, knowing what she could stir in his guts, I am making my face look fuckable.

That was going into the book today, as soon as Ava appeared and he could levitate himself with a dose of his drug and begin dictation. His book would be the last word, something for people who had lived a lot — not a beginner’s book, not even a book for those who praised Trespassing, not for children or schools, not to be studied but to be lived. The book’s subjects were blindness and lust, offering no moral, nothing except the peculiar reality of one man’s transgressions, the way back, as a sort of atonement for having been silent for so long.

How he hated the books people praised and recommended to him. Blindness had shown him what a sham they were. Blindness had shown him the folly of such praise. Blindness allowed him to hear the nonsense that people uttered. Blindness had rid him of his faith and all his sentimentality and had led him here, to contemplate his sexual history. And blindness had given him the strength to reenact it, for his book. There could be no other books.

“What would be the point of learning Braille?” he had said to a well-meaning woman. “What on earth would I want to read?”

He remembered everything he had ever read. There was too much. A great deal of it he wished to forget. He raised the jar of muddy liquid and, seeing a ring of residue darkening the bottom, the grainy dregs of datura, gave it another shake.

“Look who’s wide awake,” Ava said, entering the room looking aloof and casually efficient in a T-shirt and shorts. She was barefoot, carrying a mug of coffee in one hand, her doctor’s bag in the other. Her face was scrubbed, a slight redness where his stubble had chafed her cheek and a small swollen serration on her upper lip where he might have bitten her — he liked to think of the bruise as showing his teeth marks.