by Paul Theroux
“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.”
6
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.”
Then she would be next to him, and he could hear her sighing, smell her perfume, feel her body brush against him, the rub of the older looser skin of her arm or her belly.
“Don’t move,” she would say. “Keep your arms to your sides.”
He stood like a small soldier, obedient and blindfolded in the middle of the wooden floor, its rough-cut timbers still so new they held the tang of the saw blade. Even blinded he knew that Tom’s mother was standing in her shorts and bra, and could see her long legs rising into her loose shorts. Damp wisps of hair framed her face, which was bright with the blush from the day’s heat. With gentle attentive hands she undressed him, helped him to put on the panties, reminding him that they were her best ones, expensive ones, and how lucky he was, as she brushed her fingers across the loose silk.
His mouth was gummed shut in panic and pleasure, for there were just the two of them in the house, and he knew that he was part of something illicit—his very desire was a proof of it. In the pistol imagery he associated with desire, he sensed the hammer was cocked on his libido in those hot afternoons with Tom’s mother.
“I have to change,” she said. “I have to get ready. You can help me. It’ll keep you out of trouble, won’t it?”
He could tell from her voice that she was bending over. He heard her shoes drop, and then the plop of her shorts, and the tearing sound of her panties skidding down her long legs, and the soft lisp and release of her bra; how her voice changed and strained as she reached behind her to unhook it.
“I need a shower,” she said, and he heard her bare feet on the planks as she walked past him to the shower stall. He listened to the water coursing over her body. She was back in the room moments later, drying herself with a towel, gasping a little from the exertion, and he could hear the towel chafing her skin.
“Help me,” she said, and put the damp towel into his hands.
His head rang as he pressed the towel on her smoothness, feeling her curves give, a new sensation to him, soft flesh. And all the odors—her perfumed soap, the sawn planks, the fragrance of the bedroom, the humid afternoon air still holding the lunchtime aromas of hot dogs and mustard—mingled with the distant yelling of children.
“Do you like doing that to me?”
Unable to think of a reply, he concentrated within the darkness of his blindfold and dabbed gently with the towel, loving the heat of her skin.
“Because you’re so good at it you must have done it before.”
“No,” Slade whispered, wiping blindly at the woman’s body.
“You’re a fast learner,” she said. “Can you see me?”
Slade made a solemn sound of denial in his nose that was more negative than the word “no.”
“And don’t peek. Peeking’s against the rules.”
Her voice was receding slightly. She had moved away from him and he stood still, holding the damp towel and listening hard. From the sounds, the same on every occasion, he took her to be kneeling and bending, sliding drawers, clattering coat hangers, and he gathered that she was looking in the
dresser and in the closet, choosing clothes.
“Come here.”
He went gladly, to please her, to please himself, but he stumbled, twisting the towel, as though for balance.
“Careful,” Tom’s mother said. “Over here.”
The same game every time, one he loved. She was moving, there was laughter in her voice, and he could hear the throb of her desire in that laugh.
“You can’t find me.”
She spoke in such a teasing way that he laughed, too, and was aroused. He relaxed and in this mood of pleasure seemed to see Tom’s mother as a big warm upright glow, giving off heat from across the room. He went forward with his arms extended, following the wisps of her fragrance, the creak of a floorboard, discovering that every perfume had its own heat.
“You’re no good at hide and seek.”
“Yes sah,” he said, as though responding to a playmate, though a bit short of breath from shyness. “I’m wicked good.”
“Then find me,” she said.
“Why should I?” he said, so that he could hear her voice again.
She said, “If you find me, you can dress me.”
He loved this game with his whole body. The blindfold over his eyes was silken, soft, fragrant, the odor of this woman’s skin. He loved the darkness on his face, the soft weightlessness of her panties stroking his cock—that, and the summer afternoon of sunshine and pillowy heat in the small cabin bedroom, the hot tang of the wood planks, the whiffs of nakedness and perfume, the teasing girlish voice. It was all warm on his skin, and the blood in his head seemed to gag him with its heat.
He smiled, realizing that the blindfold helped him know so much: he could see, hear, and smell the whole enclosed room. In a silence that was rich with odors he turned his head and reached with his fingers. She had freed him and made him blameless by blindfolding him.
He touched warm smooth silk and moved his hands to the edge and raked his fingers across the stitched ribbon of elastic that lay tight against her flesh. He let his finger pads graze the length of the narrow band of lace that fringed it, caressing its netting, the fretted texture of its line, the lip of elastic, the scoop of loose silk. He felt there and found her hip, where her panties fitted her closely. She sighed and canted her body and thrust herself into his fingers, offering him a whole handful of soft silk, her warm body beneath it.
“French knickers,” she said softly, keeping the words in her mouth and making them gummy as she savored them.
Her panties were warmer, more slippery than her skin, and when he touched her with his other hand he understood the little miracle that each part of her body was a different temperature. Had he not been wearing a blindfold, he would not have known that. And another revelation of his darkness was that she was breathing harder than was audible—he could feel the pulses of blood and air in the smallest muscles beneath her skin.
“I guess you found me,” she said.
Encouraged by the smile in her voice, he traced with his fingers again and followed the strap binding her bra to the little clasp, played with it, and then found her breasts. He cupped them as he had imagined when he had first seen them and lifted slightly, feeling their weight in the thickness of stitches and ribbing, until his thumbs discovered them plumper where they swelled above the cups.
His face was so close to her bare stomach, her breathing was a repeated sweetness of soft pressure on his cheek, and when she spoke the words purred in her body.
“Want to help me get dressed now?”
Slade nodded, his nose nudging her skin.
“First we have to get some stockings on.”
Just her mention of knickers and stockings filled him with a desire to taste her clothes, to have them in his mouth, but the thought was so extravagant he was too shy to tell her. He could not imagine overpowering her, and though he was aroused he had no idea of penetrating her but only of holding her. He wanted to nuzzle her, to smell her body through her clothes, to nibble her and nip them with his teeth—so near to him now, so delicious in her underwear, she seemed edible. He licked the edge of her panties with his tongue and then sucked on the silk.
One word from her and he would have stopped. But there was nothing, only her shallow breathing, her tightened muscles, the encouragement of her sighs, her fingers in his hair. He knelt like an acolyte before a decadent priestess, blindly, his mouth against her.
She pressed the stockings to his cheek and eased his face away.
“This is a garter belt,” she said. She encircled her waist with it and hooked it. “Now you’re going to snap my stockings on.”
There was a catch in her throat as she bent over, and then came the faintest burr of silk on her leg as she drew up one stocking and then the other. She showed him, holding his hands, how to fasten the stockings to the clips. He loved fumbling at her thighs and failing, his knuckles against the textures and temperatures, as though creating a lover out of skin, elastic, and silk.
“Tighter,” she said. “Yes, that’s nice.”
Still his face was against her, still he knelt, half naked himself in her panties, in a posture of adoration. He was excited that she was so much taller than he was, and that even when he stood, as he did when he finished clipping her stockings, his face was level with her breasts.
“What shall we wear?”
She led him to the other side of the room and opened a closet door. He groped a little until she took his hand and let his fingers roam through the dresses.
“Chiffon,” she said. “And that’s watered silk. Taffeta. Feel them—aren’t they delicious? You choose better if you’re blindfolded.”
His inquiring fingers moved through the closet. He hesitated and began stroking slowly one hanging garment.
“This one,” he said.
“That’s a pleated skirt,” she said, sounding doubtful. “But okay, if you like it I’ll wear it for you.”
Rattling the hanger off the rod, she shook the skirt as she removed it and then spun the hanger out of its waistband. She lifted the skirt over her head, tangling herself in it, then worked it down and shimmied into it.
“Now zip me.”
He used two hands to squeeze the zipper seam together, to lift the slider and inch it upward, sensing the skirt fitting closely, letting his fingers glide through the deep pleats.
“That’s nice. You did that so well you can help me pick out a blouse.”
Already he was touching the clothes, tugging at sleeves, guessing which ones were blouses. A fold of sliding cloth fell across his hands, so cool and smooth it felt like liquid in his fingers. He raised it to his face and inhaled, saying, “This.”
“I love this blouse,” she said, and lifted it. From the way she spoke, straining a little, he could tell she was slipping the blouse on. “But it has very small buttons.”
He touched them. They were small and fixed tightly to the blouse. They were cool, too.
“Seed pearls.” She turned away and knelt down now and let him lean over her. “Button me up.”
His blindfold was no hindrance; it made the game luxurious. He aligned the edge of the open blouse against the groove of her spine and worked from her neck down, fitting button to buttonhole. The seed pearls were tiny but his fingers were deft—more than deft, they were knowing, taking their time with each patient insertion. This sensual challenge enthralled him, all of it, for he had loved cupping her breasts in his much smaller hands, and he had adored the suffocation of his face against her panties. But buttoning the silk blouse, tugging each pearl and fixing it into a hole, this was the most pleasurable duty of all, for the tumbling of her hair over his fingers, the fragrance of her nape, the warmth of her shoulders at his palms, the way the buttons matched the pretty bones that ran down her back.
“You’re a doll,” she said. “You know that?”
He was smiling. And after that he chose her shoes, picking them for their slender heels, and when she stepped into them she was even taller, a warm giantess, her voice altere
d by her height. Still he stood close to her pleats and silks.
“Want to take your blindfold off?”
He shook his head. He could not say why he wanted it on—perhaps to prolong the intensity of her odors, to feel the fabrics more keenly, or to be blameless, for he felt no shame in the delirious in-between dream state where darkness was so revealing.
“Isn’t this fun?”
Fun was not his word; for him it was unimaginable rapture. Having all this time to touch her, to attend to her, serving her. Yet he couldn’t describe it, and he could only thank her by being ever more willing. He wanted to tell her through his obedience: I will do anything you ask.
“Have a seat, honey,” she said gently, and helped him in the right direction.
But it was not a chair. It was much softer than a seat cushion, and springier. It was the edge of the bed, he guessed, but before he could be sure, her arms were around him, the soft white giantess enclosing him, her body against him. He was wooden, blind, inert, yet joyous from the crush of her clothes, the blouse he had chosen, the pleated skirt, the straps and softness of her lingerie, and her skin so damp where his fingers clung.
“Baby,” she was saying, “baby.”
He allowed himself to be stifled in all the textures of her embrace.
“Hold me, baby.”
He did so, limply at first, testing her, then fiercely.
Her hungry mouth and soft lips were on his face. He had never imagined being been kissed like this—urgently licked, her flower-scented saliva on his lips and tongue, the heat from her nostrils on his cheek as she breathed and kissed him again. Her loose blouse slipped against her curves. He could feel her flesh beneath the cloth, her tight bra and the stiff cups of her enclosed breasts. He knew every stitch of her now, the skirt, the stockings, the panties, the garter clips he had fastened, the fringe of lace he had explored with his fingers.
She took his hand and eased it between her thighs, guiding it to the heat beneath all those tangled pleats, the pleasing roughness of lace, the straps and clasps. Everything he touched counted as her body, all the clothes, the silky hair, and, at its deepest, delighting him even as his wrist ached from the angle of his reaching under her, he knew he had found her secret self. This part of her body was not dark at all but highly colored, blood red and gleaming, a squashy pocket of lace and flesh, with something warm and damp alive inside it, like the secret of life.