Blinding Light

by Paul Theroux

  Parting her legs again for him, she reached down and clawed at the crotch of her panties where they were binding his hand, and with her other hand she grasped the bodice of her dress and eased it down, baring her breasts. Then she clutched the back of his head and guided his mouth to a nipple.

  Her breath against his ear was hot as she licked him, panting, squirming against his hand, saying, “Suck me, bite my nipple, finger-fuck me harder,” and she reached again and took his hand like something inanimate and pumped it against herself, frantically using it.

  He submitted to her grip on his hand. He loved feeling the hot silk of her sex lips, which pulsed in a rosy glow beneath the lacy shadows of her clothes, the ripeness rising and mingling with the aroma of flowers, so that he could not distinguish her perfume from the hum of her sex, her satiny skin from the smoothness of her lingerie. The heavy odors saturated his eyes and excited his hunger and made him dumb with desire.

  “Lots of times,” she said slowly, “I touch myself like this, dreaming of you,” and lifted herself slightly from the seat cushion to free his hand and give him more room.

  Touching her vulva was like fumbling with dripping peach slices, covering his fingers in warm syrup, and her flesh was warm under her stiff petticoats. Her soft breasts propped in the brocade of her dress were like fruit, too, pressed against his face as he sucked the tender stem.

  “We’ve got all night, baby,” she crooned to him as she held him to her breast. “And when you’re through with me, I’m going to take this”—she found the bulge in his pants and traced it with her fingers and squeezed.

  She let go with a gasp, twisting away from him and snatching at her dress, just as a pair of headlights slashed the air. Above them the blazing blue gelatinous light atop a police cruiser flashed like a spaceship that had just settled to Earth.

  Behind an overbright flashlight with a querying beam came a steady wide-awake voice.

  “There’s no parking on the dune, folks.”

  The flashlight swept across Ava’s face—the smudged lipstick, the wisps of dangling hair—and briefly Steadman’s. They were disheveled but dressed, and both of them so formal. In a tidying motion the beam lighted the empty front seat.

  “You the owner of this vehicle, sir?”

  Keeping his head down, hiding his hands, Steadman said yes, the car was his.

  “Good. Now I want you to get out of the vehicle very slowly and show me your license and registration.”

  “What for?” Ava said.

  “Please do as I say.”

  Steadman did not object. He flicked his wallet and found his license in a plastic sleeve, but as he swung the car door open and stepped out, he stumbled, and in a defensive reflex the cop jumped backward in what seemed a practiced move, clasping the handle of his pistol and directing his flashlight at Steadman’s face and gaping white eyes.

  “He’s blind, Officer.”

  As Steadman’s dead eyes accused him, the cop seemed unsure now, and he was startled into ignoring the license. He turned his flashlight from Steadman’s face to Ava’s. “You okay, ma’am?”

  “This is a special occasion, Officer.” In the interval of the policeman’s confusion, she had adjusted her dress and smoothed her hair, though she looked more than ever like a prom date, rumpled, demure.

  “You look kind of familiar. I’ve seen you.”

  “The hospital.”

  “Right. Emergency. You’re the doctor.” With each statement he became more polite. “And you’re the writer. I’ve heard about you.”

  Steadman simply stared, looking ghoulish.

  The policeman switched off his flashlight, another mark of respect, and said, “Sorry, folks, I thought you were summer people.”

  After he had gone, Ava said, “That was perfect. Now let’s go home.”

  “No,” Steadman said, touching her as he spoke, and with his touch finding a fragrance.

  Sliding one hand beneath the hem of her gown, embracing her and delving into her bodice, fingering her cupped breast, he knew what she wanted from her sighs of encouragement. And when he found her warm damp panties he parted them, and clasped the wetness of her folds, stroked those lips, all the while kissing her face and murmuring into her mouth.

  “Oh, yes,” she said, reaching down to guide his fingers, steadying them and chafing herself with them once again. Then through her teeth she spoke into his mouth, insisting, “Fuck me, fuck me, fuck me,” and seemed to thrash inside her dress as she gripped his hand, and the rustling of the cloth aroused him as much as her voice.

  A scratching on the metal of the car, the stiff leaves and thorns of a rosebush nudged by the night breeze, was strangely rhythmic—maybe the car was rocking against it? The sound was like a cat’s claws. Then it was gone, lost in Ava’s choking, as she came with a great grunt and gasp, as though, thrusting the orgasm from her body, she were giving birth to it.

  They lay there breathless for a while. The claw-scratch returned on the car door. Steadman lifted himself to the window to make sure it was no more than a rose bush. The mass of blossoms was blue in the fluorescence of moonlight.

  Ava, too, was luminous. She lay as if ravished, and blue-white like a fresh corpse in her soft dress, her hair tangled, her lipstick smeared around her mouth, her dress yanked down, one breast lifted from the bra cup and its own weight giving it an odd sideways twist of lovely plumpness.

  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 an
d 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.

  4

  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.

  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.