Paul Theroux - Blinding Light

In other respects Ava seemed a completely different person from the one of the night before, his prom date, a perfect memory of a longing accomplished — fulfillment. Had she seemed the same woman, he would have found it hard to dictate his book to her. Even so, he felt awkward, not sure of how to greet her.

“Got a letter for you,” she said. She handed him a thick business-sized envelope.

Addressed to him through his publisher, it had been forwarded to his post office box. Steadman looked at the return address and saw Manfred Steiger scribbled in pen above the bold printed name of a German company. Using all his strength, Steadman tore the envelope in half and tossed it into the wastebasket as Ava looked on. She was smiling, but her smile was a question.

“No letter that long can possibly be interesting,” he said.

“Maybe it’s not a letter. Maybe it’s a manuscript.”

“Even worse,” he said, and then, “What’s that for?”

Ava had put her mug down and taken her stethoscope out of the bag.

“I’m wondering what that stuff is doing to you,” she said. “Have you drunk your dose today?”

“Not yet.”

He lifted his shirt and let her listen with her stethoscope. Then she cinched his arm with the black cuff and pumped the bulb and read his blood pressure, studying the gauge.

“How does it look?”

“A little above normal, but fine. Now have a drink. Keep that thing on your arm.”

“Give me a minute,” he said, and as Ava sipped her coffee he unscrewed the lid of the jar and poured half the mixture into a tumbler. Holding the tumbler in two hands, in self-conscious veneration, like a priest at an altar, he lifted it and drank the liquid slowly in a number of reverent swallows. And then he smiled and stumbled a bit as he went to the sofa, already cloudy-eyed, and when he sat a new day took shape around him — new colors and sounds, subtler ones, more birds, sharper odors, his mind fully engaged. Ava smelled of soap and talc, and her shampoo had given her hair a fruity aroma, and there was a hint, a tang, of freshly cut grass — green clippings on her shoes that were darkened by dew drops and a smack of mud.

“You’ve been out?” he said dreamily.

“Not far. A walk around the garden.”

She was kneeling, pumping the bulb, inflating the cuff. And then in stages, letting out the air, she read his blood pressure again.

“It’s a miracle drug. Your blood pressure is way down. Better than normal — a young man’s heart.” She took out a small pencil-shaped flashlight. “Look at me,” she said, and shone the light into his eyes, peering in.

“See anything?”

“Nothing.”

“Neither do I,” she said. “Your pupils stay dilated.”

Instead of the glimmer of the light, or any object, he saw her seriousness, and he smiled, feeling superior for being something of a riddle. Much as he was reassured by Ava’s concern, admiring her medical skill, her deftness in using her instruments and examining him, he liked her puzzlement much more, a doctor saying I don’t know. He enjoyed her confusion. On this one subject, at any rate, the effects of the datura, she was ignorant. So it was all still his secret.

She had put her instruments away and seated herself, had found her clipboard and pad, and was already clicking her ballpoint.

“Last night,” he said. “That was everything I wanted.”

Even so, praising her extravagantly, he was doubtful. He wanted her to deny what he said or to offer an insight. Maybe she, too, suspected an incompleteness.

“And you put your heart into it,” he said.

“I’m younger than you, but I went to high school, too,” she said. “I had a prom date.”

“Who with?”

“That would be Jeff Ziebert.” She smiled, saying the irrelevant name.

“And you went parking with him afterward?”

“Hey, this is your book, not mine.”

“So while I was hot for Rosie,” he persisted, “you were fantasizing about him.”

She said, “I was struck by something you said about desire being located in the past. I tried to see if that would work with me. I looked deep into my own.”

“And found Jeff.”

She smoothed the pad on her clipboard with the flat of her hand in a cleansing motion, as if wishing to brush away the question.

Steadman considered this phantom rival and concluded that he didn’t mind. He was liberated by not figuring in Ava’s fantasy. It was better that she used him as he used her. He wanted her to feel free to fantasize as she liked, to fulfill what mattered most to her. Otherwise it was all self-deception.

“Better that we should deceive each other than deceive ourselves,” he said.

With this reflection he began dictating the episode — the prom date, groping her in the car, the sudden policeman, the fluffy dress and the straps and stitches of all her underwear, the makeup, the final flourish. Ava helped him when he hesitated, and she gave him the right words for the cosmetics.

But he said, “I don’t want too much detail. No brand names. None of those ridiculous lipstick shades.”

And when he got to the point of describing his orgasm, saying “Not juice at all but a demon eel thrashing in his loins and swimming swiftly up his cock, one whole creature of live slime,” she frowned and interrupted.

“Do you want to know how it felt to me?”

“Go on.”

“That I was sucking the life out of you and that you were inert while I drank you. That I was in charge, draining you of your strength and swallowing it, to be strong myself.”

Her exactness and her poise made him thoughtful. He was reminded of how much he needed her, and that she was half that life of desire he was reliving, and so half his book had to be hers.

“I’m sorry if I shocked you,” she said. She changed her posture, recrossed her legs, and said, to encourage him to continue, “So time passed.”

“No, wait.” The experience last night had uncovered an earlier memory. That was the paradox. “There was something else.”

“Another woman?”

“Another me. A younger me.”

He was staring blindly at the window, beyond it, at the lifting seafog and slender dripping oaks and grizzled needles of the pitch pines, into the past, remembering.

“I grew up in the age before everyone had an electric clothes dryer,” he said. “You probably had one.”

Ava was listening.

“Let me see,” he said. “This matters. Everywhere I looked I saw clotheslines — women’s underwear on clotheslines, lifting with the breeze and fluttering beautifully, as beautiful to me as the nakedest woman. Those secret clothes were women to me, and the way the wind filled them made me gape.”

He was gaping frankly now and lost in his gaze, consumed by his vision of silken whiteness, like the whiteness of a body. And Ava was writing swiftly as he dictated; she had no memory of her own to match his vision and was somewhat surprised by how remote this seemed from his description of yesterday’s desire, the prom date, kissing and fondling in the back seat, an adolescent episode relived.

“I see clotheslines, and secrets on them — panties and slips and bras. Why so many? Did women need more underwear then? There seemed to have been more of it, or was it more elaborate — women perhaps making up for their outward modesty by covertly wearing seductive underwear.”

“Sometimes it peeked out,” Ava said.

“Yes.”

Underwear was never totally hidden; that was the excitement and the tease. The ghost of a bra seen through a gauzy blouse, the neat curve of panty line under tight slacks, the ambiguous straps and ribbons, the imprint of lace showing through a skirt — always pretty — the notion of the beauty, the idea of tiny pink bows hidden beneath a woman’s clothes.