Paul Theroux - Blinding Light

Exasperated, needing relief at the end of the day, Steadman drank a measure of the drug, blinding himself so he could stare white-eyed at Ava when she got home, scowl at her and say, “You’re mad at me. You’ve had an awful day. You’ve been operating on someone. Eight hours of invasive surgery! Massive trauma to the brain! Insult to the cerebral cortex!”

“You’re thinking of yourself and that stuff,” she said — he was still holding the cup he had emptied of the datura. “I was suturing a scalp wound.”

“I can smell the blood.”

“No blood on me.”

“Buzzing molecules of blood.”

He grumbled and accused her this way because he did not know how to tell her about Manfred. He guessed that she would say, “Your friend. Your fault.”

Manfred had made no secret of being a writer. He had told Steadman he was a journalist. But so what? Steadman assumed he was based in the United States, maybe in Washington, but more likely in New York City. Steadman wanted to talk to him, find out his intentions. And I know your secret. Why had he put it that way? Sometimes it sounded coy, at other times a threat. Steadman was not afraid; he was insulted at being blindsided by the whisper. He imagined his phone call, or even better his confronting Manfred again, saying, as he had wanted to say in the Rose Garden, “Obviously it’s not a secret!”

He had called the White House press office and announced who he was. The woman at the other end did not recognize his name. At an earlier time he would have said, “ Trespassing ? That book, that TV show, that movie? I’m the person responsible.”

But he said, “I was a guest at the White House dinner a month ago.” “Do you know how many dinners we have?” was her putdown.

Who hired these people? But he knew: grovelers and climbers who dealt with rich meddling businessmen demanding personal repayment for their campaign contributions.

“The dinner for the chancellor of Germany,” Steadman said. “I doubt you were invited.”

He had silenced her, though he heard what sounded like steam coming out of her ears.

“I need the address of a reporter who was at the press conference.” “We can’t disclose personal information.”

“Just the name of his newspaper. German.”

“Have you tried the Internet?”

“I’m blind. I am Steadman, the blind writer.”

“I’m sorry.”

“No you’re not.”

“I wish I could help.”

“No you don’t.”

No wonder some blind people could be so bitter, so angry, so selfish, for they were always encountering oafs who said things like that, who sounded secretly pleased that they were able to be obstructive or worse, encumbering the blind with their smug pity.

She was a flunky — a blind man deserved better. His indignation was a pretense but his annoyance with the woman was real. He had no second thoughts about his decision to go public as a blind man. That woman was an exception, because most of the time he was amused by the attention lavished on him for his supposed disability. Yet he was blind. His greatest satisfaction was that he was hardly handicapped at all, that he was superior in every important way to the incompetents and gropers and busybodies who claimed they wanted to help him.

Manfred’s contact number was all he needed. But as time passed even that seemed less urgent.

He began to go out alone, to Vineyard Haven to shop, to Oak Bluffs to have a drink at the Dockside bar where he had brought Ava on that first date, to restaurants in Edgartown. After so long in seclusion he loved being in public, enjoying the attention. A blind person was watched everywhere, like a fragile vase wobbling on a narrow shelf — what if it topples, what if it shatters? People hovered and held their hands out as though to break Steadman’s fall. To alarm them the more he walked faster when he knew he was being observed by someone very nervous, and he took long strides, defiant ones, swiping with his cane, like a man whipping at long grass.

Women were especially solicitous: he loved their whispers, their soft sidelong glances, their fumbling concern, their warm, well-intentioned hands. Up to a point he accepted their help, just to smell them. They were redolent with longing, saturated with emotion, moist with desire, tremulous with thwarted motherhood; they touched because they needed to be touched themselves. He allowed himself to be stroked. He went no further, though he could have possessed them completely.

Ava was taken care of, preoccupied at the hospital, but she was still in his life. When she arrived home and he asked her how her day had gone, she refused to describe it except in futile terms, as a series of pious ordeals: “We lost someone today,” or “A woman was medevaced to Boston.” There were fewer patients than in the summer, but the ailments were more serious. She made a point of ignoring the Christmas holiday, and worked on Christmas Day and New Year’s Eve, too, with her doctor’s martyred cry, “They need me.”

Everyone on the island said she was an angel, but Steadman knew that by taking on such responsibility at the hospital she had a free pass everywhere else — didn’t have to shop, or cook, or clean, or give presents, or socialize, and so Steadman felt abandoned. He couldn’t complain about being ditched by a doctor. No one would listen, for whose work was more important? From their commanding position on the moral high ground, doctors always had the last word.

Odd to think that she had been his reckless and sensual lover. But Steadman guessed that she looked back on their time together doing the book as frivolous. He wanted her to say this, so that he could reply, You are mistaken. It was revelation. What revelation is there in illness? The pathetic truth that people are frail and they sicken and die. Only the vitality of sex reveals the human essence.

But she was angry. He played the conversation in his head. He went for walks. He pondered what he had written of sexuality and risk, and one day the news came out — horribly, awkwardly, first as a rumor, then as a disputed denial — that the president had had a flirtation, perhaps an affair, with one of the young female interns at the White House.

The speculation was preposterous. The simplest version sounded bad enough. Steadman remembered how he had guessed at the poor man’s confusion months before.

I want to say one thing to the American people. I want you to listen to me. I’m going to say this again. I did not have sexual relations with that woman, Miss Lewinsky. I never told anybody to lie, not a single time. Never. These allegations are false. I never had sex with that woman.

The president spoke, beating the air with his finger. Seeing the pink and sleepless face, the humiliated and guilty mask of an adulterer, Steadman said, “Poor guy.”

But Ava was contemptuous. “How could he be such a fool?”

“He was smitten,” Steadman said.

Ava’s expression said, I don’t get it.

The revelation of the president’s waywardness overwhelmed everything else. It was all the talk on the Vineyard, and on the news-hungry earth. That the president of the United States had gotten blowjobs in the Oval Office from a chubby Jewish girl in her early twenties was world news.

Steadman watched closely as the messy story unfolded. He guessed that if Manfred was a foreign correspondent, he must be covering it for his newspaper. Steadman was provoked to do something he had avoided up to now. He typed “Manfred Steiger” into his computer and got seventeen hits: stories in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, all with a Washington dateline. But he did not attempt to get in touch with Manfred.

People who disliked the president before now hated him and were gleeful. His supporters faced the dilemma of explaining his behavior, or even justifying it. Most people’s marital embarrassments were minor compared to the president’s from late January onward.