Paul Theroux - Blinding Light

He was looking at one of her Barbie dolls sitting flat on the dresser, its long legs straight out and slightly parted to keep it upright, when, pumping him and taking light skimming breaths, Carol gripped him, seeming to sense his whole body go rigid, as though concentrating. Then a sweet wound within him swelled and burst in a single stroke, and when he convulsed and clutched himself he also clutched her sticky searching hands.

“I can feel it,” she said, and became girlish and curious and almost jubilant.

He groaned, for he had emptied quickly and now there was a void where all that heat and muscle had been.

“Let me see it,” she said.

“No.” He was bent over, slashed in half, reduced to a crouching guilty boy.

“It’s on my fingers, it’s all over my nightie,” she said. “Look what you did.”

He was sorrowful, ashamed, exhausted, almost feverish, and he watched with drowsy surprise as she dabbed her fingers, smelled them, put the tip of her tongue on them, and wagged her tongue at him. Then, seeing that he was shocked, she became assertive and shocked him further by snatching his hand and choosing his wettest finger and sucking it. She lay back and trapped him with her laugh.

With a slight catch in her throat from being overeager, Carol Lumley whispered, “Touch me some more.”

Touch me some more, Ava was saying, in a mass of blue silk and ribbons and lace. More.

THE TWANGING MUSIC he heard as he approached on the whitish dust of the summer path made the solitary cabin more solitary, yet gave it life. It was a small, rough-wood bungalow with a song coming out of the side porch. Had Tom’s mother left the radio on and gone out? It seemed impossible that she could be inside listening to something so loud, stammering and delirious music that knifed the steamy air like hot metal. Listening to it he seemed to see the sunlight glittering on sharp silver, and he walked faster, toward the melody. The music also seemed to give the cabin a face — eye-like windows, porch nose, door mouth.

“We’re going out with Kenny,” Tom had said at the lake, holding his sister Nita’s hand.

Kenny was a fisherman, Kenny had a boat, Kenny was Tom Bronster’s older friend. Tom talked about him all the time. “Kenny’s got a gun. He’s going to let me shoot it.” Today, Tom’s tone suggested that Slade was not welcome, or at least that he would be in the way. Kenny’s boat was a small skiff with an outboard motor.

Nita was vexed: she wanted to stay with Slade, and yet Tom was responsible for her. That morning on the beach she had said to Slade, “I could be your girlfriend.” She was ten, he was thirteen. Slade was glad to see her go.

“Never mind, I’ll stick around here,” Slade said, knowing he was lying.

As soon as Kenny’s boat sped across the lake, tipping up and plowing white water aside, Slade turned and walked through the pines and up the dusty path by the margin of the meadow where a cow sometimes followed them along the fence. Nearer the cabin — as soon as he saw it — he heard the music, and now he was glad he was alone. Tom was his friend, but when Tom was with him, Slade was distracted. Slade was dreamy, he preferred to be alone with his reveries, he found more pleasure in them than in noisy games. Tom was a talkative, active boy with an exhausting shrieky voice.

Agreeing to spend this week at the lake with Tom and his family meant that he, the visiting friend, was obliged to accompany Tom every waking minute. So he was happy on the path; he liked having a break from the burden of this raucous boy who was always chasing his dog or challenging Slade to bike races or boasting about Kenny.

Through the side window of the cabin Slade saw a flash of white, Tom’s mother in a bra, her thick hair plaited into one braid and fixed by a ribbon. He thought even then how no white was whiter than a woman’s white underwear. She was playing a steel guitar, a table-like instrument resembling an ironing board with strings, plucking it and moving a wooden spindle at one end to create a quavering sound, a sweet hungering he knew to be Hawaiian music. Yearning melodies troubled the fretwork of the amplifier, a black boxy suitcase with a hole on one side.

Tom’s mother, who was always dressed up at night, looked naked to Slade now. He was fascinated by each thing she wore: a bra that made her breasts into two white cones on a harness, loose shorts — her navel showing in her pale flat stomach — and wedge-heeled shoes with fake cherries attached to the straps, painted toenails, her thick braid sliding across her spine as, looking tall, she concentrated hard on her pressed-down fingers, making music.

Had she not been playing the instrument she would have seen Slade at once. Carelessly dressed, her braid swinging, she seemed playful, younger, like a very big girl. Steadman stayed at the window, looking at her bare legs and her white shapely breasts. She was half faced away from him, but she looked so lovely he found himself staring. He was dizzy with meaningless heat and numb fingers. He loved looking, but as minutes passed she became less and less Tom’s mother and more and more like someone whom he knew a little and had never seen like this.

Imagining himself touching her eased his mind. She had sallow skin and green eyes. Mentally he placed his hands over the cups of her breasts and stroked them slowly. The thought so possessed him that he stepped away, ducked beneath the cabin window, and went back to the lake to wait for Tom and Nita to return from the fishing trip. Still, even sitting on the grassy bank with his feet propped on the exposed roots of a tree, hidden by bushes, he felt guilty and excited.

“You missed it!” Tom called out from the skiff when he saw Slade on the embankment. Tom held up a dripping foot-long fish.

That night, Tom’s mother wore a pink pleated dress with short sleeves and white sandals. Her long hair was unbraided, combed out, hiding her neck. Each night she dressed differently. He loved her clothes, their color and variety, and he saw in her joy in dressing up how attractive she was. But it pleased him to know that he had seen her that afternoon in her bra and shorts. She was kind to Slade. She watched him eat and complimented him on his manners.

“And what a good appetite.” She said to Tom, “I wish you’d eat like Slade.”

“You’re a good cook,” Slade said, and saw the effect of his praise — the way she smiled, the way she leaned over and asked him if he wanted more. He averted his eyes from her neckline, but he got a glimpse of the bra.

Nita whispered to her and then clapped her hand over her mouth.

“And you’ve got a secret admirer,” Tom’s mother said.

In the bunk beds that night, almost pained by the thought of the woman and needing to talk about her, Slade whispered in the darkness from the top bunk, “Tom. You awake?”

“Yeah.”

“Your mother’s nice.”

“Bull.”

“No. She really is.”

Slade wanted to have a conversation about Tom’s mother, find out more about her, or at least just talk to console himself.

“She’s horrible. She’s a wicked nag. Always making me babysit Nita.”

Tom wouldn’t say any more. Soon he was asleep, and Slade saw how Tom was selfish and immature, no fun to talk to, a disappointment who was a burden as a friend.

The routine was the same every day. Up at seven, and after breakfast, the lake. Hot dogs and milk at the cabin for lunch, then bike riding or back to the lake in the afternoon. Supper at six, the meal Slade looked forward to, because Tom’s mother would be dressed up. They played in the meadow until the mosquitoes started biting. Then to bed. The house smelled of its pine floors and newly sawn timber, and at night there was always a radio playing, Tom’s mother downstairs alone, leafing through a magazine, Collier’s or the Saturday Evening Post.