Paul Theroux - Blinding Light

“I want to trust you,” she said.

Slade did not know what to say, but he thought, Test me, try me, I will do anything to earn your trust. The panties he wore were so flimsy he imagined that she could see through them, but when he looked down he saw he was covered.

“They’re mine. They’re silk,” she said. “Sometimes you have to improvise. Make do with what you have.”

He could not tell if she was smiling, but her voice was kinder than before.

“You’ll find that, as you get older,” she said. “What are you looking at?”

She touched her own shorts at a place where the side zipper had worked open, the gaping slot showing a blister of pink panties.

“Want to zip me?”

Eager to please her, he used two hands, one to pinch the zipper together, the other to lift the fastener into place, closing the gap, and as he worked on it, Tom’s mother touched his fingers, patting them, and then smoothed the seam when he finished.

“You’re good at that.”

He said nothing.

“Now unzip me.”

He was aware of being barefoot in damp panties, his head still wet from the shower, this woman in her sandals much taller than he was. But he obeyed, working the zipper open, and when it was down the woman plucked at a button and the shorts opened onto swelling pinkness. She tugged at them a little and they dropped to her ankles and she stepped out of them.

Feeling like a geek, he was looking away from the woman, toward the front door of the cabin, the blinding afternoon sunlight pouring through the squares of glass, when she stepped behind him. From the touch of the fabric on his shoulder it seemed as though she were draping him with a scarf.

“I think you need this.”

She lifted the soft cloth to his head and wrapped it, blindfolding him. And just as she knotted it, he sensed a slight effort of her hands and arms, and got a whiff of her body and with that, contradicting it, the odor of her perfume on the silken softness against his face.

“Can you see anything?”

He shook his head, hardly daring to breathe. Yet as soon as he was blindfolded she was gentler, even submissive.

“Nothing.”

“Don’t be frightened,” she said.

She must have noticed that his voice was thick with fear, because it was then that she touched him, holding him like a baby, and led him slowly across the smooth floorboards of the cabin to her bedroom. His feet shuffled, hardly leaving the floor, as he moved blindly, guided by her. He knew when they entered her bedroom from the sweetness in the air, the softness of the pillows. Then he was fearful, alone on the bed, but she had left him only to shut the door, and a moment later she was holding him again.

“Baby, baby, baby,” she said, her hands on him. “Isn’t that better?”

He lay slightly crouched in apprehension, not knowing what to say.

“I’m so lonely, baby.” She sighed and sounded small.

He had entered the cabin knowing nothing, but he was learning, liking the strangeness of it, and now he knew that “baby” meant something different, someone strong, a man. Her mouth was against his ear, heating it, moistening it with her breath.

“You can be my boyfriend,” she said. “Know what boyfriends do?”

He had no idea. He couldn’t see, he couldn’t speak. He thought, I am blind.

“I’m going to show you,” she said, and when she touched him where he was tender, he drew back. “No, no. Let me, let me, let me.”

Her hand was on him, but the heat that burned him was like a thickness of raw flesh after the skin has been peeled away, the warmth of blood and some throbbing, too. When he reached down to protect himself his hands found her head and became tangled in the hair of her loosened braid as she pushed her hot face against him, her tongue snaking, not devouring, not swallowing, but an audible ecstasy of the most rapturous tasting.

“Oh,” she said in a small voice when it was over.

She murmured again sweetly but sounded disappointed, though she continued to nuzzle him. She held him tightly for a long while, then sighed and removed his blindfold.

“What did you see?”

“Nothing,” he said.

“Good. Now get some of Tom’s clothes and run along,” she said. “This can be our secret.”

He stared at her. Though she was damp-faced, with tangled hair and a redness on her cheeks, looking chafed, she was still in her white bra and pink panties, and she lay like someone who had just woken from an afternoon nap. She smiled at him.

“The first time I saw you I thought: This kid loves secrets. I’m going to give him one to keep, all to himself. And if he’s good at keeping it, I’m going to give him some more secrets.”

Ava put her pen down and leaned back and stretched. She said, “Didn’t Tom ever find out?”

“He wasn’t interested. Anyway, he had an older friend. That man Kenny, with the boat.”

“But his mother was taking a risk.”

“His mother, I see now, was a beautiful sensual woman, starved for attention. Long before that day she dressed up for us. She put on fancy dresses at mealtimes in that plain summer cabin. Even now I don’t know the names for those clothes.”

Ava said, “Your adolescence coincided with the age when women dressed carefully, the last gasp of extravagant fashion. White gloves. Pillbox hats. Veils. Girdles. Garter belts. Angora sweaters. Dresses with pleats. Women took pains to look…”

“Lovely?”

“I was going to say edible.”

“Maybe that’s why nakedness doesn’t interest me.”

“Maybe you’re a woman’s dream. We’re so insecure about our bodies.

“I was so flattered that Tom’s mother wanted me.”

Ava was staring at him, and now she looked flustered and responsible, like Tom’s mother.

“What else did she want?”

Instead of answering that question, Slade said, “A life isn’t only about what you accomplished. It’s also about what you desired. What you dreamed. What was in your head. All those secrets.”

“Why are you smiling?”

“Because I realize that now”—all this time he had been sipping from a wineglass brimming with the muddy liquid of his dissolved drug—“I want to remember it all.”

Ava said, “There was more?”

“Much more.”

THE INTRIGUE between himself and Tom’s mother, Mrs. Bronster (he was too shy to speak her first name, which was Lily), was so inconvenient, so filled with secrecy, uncertainty and misunderstanding, so many agonies of waiting, fears of interruptions and being found out, such a misery of insecurities and whispers and obstructions, of hardly any privacy, Tom quacking, “Where have you been?” and Nita nagging, and just the feeble pretense that he was a houseguest and she was his whining friend’s kindly mother — so much nuisance and dissatisfaction, such confusion and thwarted pleasure — that he knew it could not possibly be love. He was thirteen years old. Only now, reliving it with Ava for his narrative, seeing it through the blaze of his drug, did Slade understand that all this pain and joy was the absolute proof that it was love.

Slade blinded himself to remember, blinded himself to write, blinded himself for desire; he was transfixed by the drug’s blindness most of the time. The days at the lakeshore cabin had haunted and informed his life as a lover.

“Because everything I need to know is in my own head,” he was saying on one of his dictating days after that, sitting to stare at Ava with blind eyes.

“She wanted me every day,” Slade said. “And I wanted her just as much. I loved the routine that became a delicious ritual. I longed for her to blindfold me. It excited me to hear her heels on the floorboards of the cabin coming toward me after she finished locking the doors.”