by Paul Theroux
He stuck to West Chop because in Vineyard Haven he saw women he had known years ago, swollen shapeless creatures like big bosomy men, and he realized that he had slept with them in his early days of fame, after the appearance of his celebrated book. He was chastened, for now they had come to look like him—solitary, unexercised, asexual, faintly mustached. He felt guilty and apologetic, for one that he took to be a former lover, a misshapen woman in a familiar knit, was in fact a man he had never seen before and the sort of person he knew he would keep bumping into afterward at the post office and the market.
Everything changed for him one end-of-summer day on the bluff of West Chop near the lighthouse when he saw a lovely woman standing alone. She faced him, looking fascinated, and then turned away and walked toward the tennis courts. He felt panic, a kind of hunger. He needed this woman. She was the one person who had been missing from his long life.
Understanding this, he was briefly happy, then he was ashamed and finally sorrowful, knowing for the first time the despair of love. He would waste away and die without her; with her he would live. He now knew that the reason he had taken the same walk every day was to meet this woman.
That night he lay in bed and could not call up her face. Her beauty was too subtle to remember with any accuracy. The next day he found her at the same spot and she hurried away—her sudden rush like a flushed quail, calling attention to her flight—down the road at the set of mailboxes reading Loss, Titley, Ours, Levensohn, Lempe. Which was she? In the days that followed he saw her twice more.
Self-conscious, he was reduced to being stealthy, glancing sideways to stare at her, to satisfy himself; but staring only made him hungrier. He was reminded of his distant past, of being small and poor, rather young, ignored by more powerful people while he toiled at his book and felt fameless. His book’s bold title provoked his friends to patronize him, until the book was reckoned a masterpiece and was then the occasion of their envious jokes.
Now people said to him, “How are you, buddy?”
He said, “I’m miserable,” but misery made him truthful. Speaking bluntly released his feelings of frustration. In the past he had often said the opposite of what he meant: “You seem perky,” to distracted souls; “I’ll try to remember that,” to pedants.
Now he said, “People might call themselves perfectionists, but at the bottom of pedantry is an abiding laziness. Raise enough objections and you never have to accomplish anything.”
The next time he saw the beautiful woman at West Chop he said hello.
“I was looking at that sailboat,” she said.
The windjammer Shenandoah, out of Vineyard Haven.
“Isn’t she beautiful?”
Emboldened by her directness, he said, “I hadn’t noticed. I couldn’t take my eyes off you. You are so lovely.”
Her laughter told him he had made an impression. They talked inconsequentially about the ferry schedule. He said, “See you tomorrow.”
That night he thought, And I hate my saggy face.
He had fallen in love with her, and he knew it was love because it was agony, the sort you died from. He felt famished when he saw her—her bright eyes, her full lips, her clear skin. He sought her out and felt humiliated by his longing for her.
To his delight, he began to run into her everywhere—at the drugstore on Main Street, the beach below the lighthouse, walking along the ferry landing, in the bagel cafe, and in the camera store where he was buying a pair of binoculars. Melanie Ours was her name.
He wooed her in the open air, doing most of the talking. Melanie was unaffected, soft-spoken, appreciative, and loving. One day she was clutching a small dog in the crook of her arm, nuzzling it and cuddling it in a way that suggested: I could treat you like this.
“It’s not mine,” she said. “It’s a friend’s.”
Wondering what friend made him unhappy. But he saw Melanie Ours again and loved her more. He mentioned to her that he was older than she by twenty years. She said, “So?” He feared she might want children. She smiled and said, “I want you.”
Nothing could have been simpler. They married, she moved in with him, he was joyful. They lived together in his house on the bluff behind West Chop.
He sometimes mentioned the places where they had bumped into each other.
She said, “I knew you’d be there,” and explained that she had known his movements and had contrived deliberately to appear at these seemingly chance encounters. He laughed shyly, feeling desired. She said, “I found you fascinating.” What more was there to know? Perhaps nothing, except that he learned that she was devoted to him, responsive and loving, forgiving as only a friend can be.
“I’m sorry, darling,” he said, early on, in bed, feeling futile. She held him, kissed him, and he wanted to weep with gratitude.
Months of bliss. He sometimes became alarmed when she was out of his sight. Setting eyes on her, he blessed his luck. She was a light to him. “I thought I knew what happiness was.” He was reminded that in the early, active part of his life he had been deluded.
This clarity of vision—his life now—was figurative and philosophical, but a paradox, for he found that in fact his eyesight was failing. He had trouble reading, even with glasses. He could not drive at night without being dazzled by the headlights of oncoming cars.
He had his eyes tested. He failed the exam. “It’s to be expected at your age,” the doctor said. “But new glasses won’t help. You have cataracts.”
He regarded this as good news, the promise that after his operation he would see better and be bathed in the glow of his lovely wife. But why was he asked to sign the waiver?
The doctor said, “There’s less than a one percent chance of the procedure going wrong.”
After the operation, still bleary-eyed and groping, he was given drops for his eyes. Melanie helped him apply the drops, and his eyes became scorched and infected. He lost his corneas, he got a transplant, and then more drops. The transplant failed. He howled.
As though rehearsing his defense in a malpractice suit, the doctor sternly reminded him of the odds: “Someone had to be in that one percent.”
Because he had signed the waiver, he could not sue and was not compensated. He did not need money anyway. He wanted his eyesight back, even the feeblest sort, as on the days when he had said, “I can see your face, sort of dark, but not your features.” He would have settled for that. He was the blind man now.
And, blind, he could not bear to be away from Melanie. Yet even when she was with him he was not consoled. He spoke to her, but she did not seem to hear him. Something wintry in her manner—why? He had never sensed it before, perhaps because her adoring eyes, her face, and her luminous skin had always overwhelmed him. Now he was aware of her as a different presence—her thumping clumsy footsteps, the sharp odor of her body, her harsh voice.
When she touched him her hands chilled him; her fingers felt reptilian. He was appalled even as she said, “Of course I love you.”
He was now confined to his house. He was bewildered in it, in rooms like obstacles. He tripped over his own furniture. He could not go anywhere without her, yet more and more she was absent.
“I need to shop. Everything takes longer when you come along.”
Shop for what? She had never shopped before. He began to ask her where she had been.
“Getting my nails done,” or “Having my hair colored,” or “At the dressmaker’s.”
But why?—since he could not see the nails, or the hair color, or her clothes.
“It’s for me,” she said.
He was confused by the mingled smells of her perfume, her nail polish, her shampoo, her new clothes. His blindness had wakened his other senses—he was hyperalert, sensitive to all stimuli. “I smell onions,” or “Smoke—tobacco smoke—in your hair.”
He smelled a man, he smelled sex, something humid and dog-like, and a roughness like razor burn on her chin. He was too sad to kill her. Instead I’ll kill myself.
&
nbsp; What kept him from it was that she was sadder, and tense, as if she had received some bad news.
“What’s wrong?”
“Please, leave me alone.”
“You’re never home.”
“I was sick! You don’t care!”
After all that time, their first argument. She insisted that she loved him but was like someone else, someone cruel, a stranger. She returned with a new smell on her. These odors overwhelmed all other impressions and became like colors and shapes, some of them as layered and complex as unanswered questions.
Was he missing something because he was blind, or was he seeing her as she really was? There was that voice. Sometimes, speaking to him, she seemed a little formal and overinformative, as though she were also addressing someone else, as though she had a listener she was teasing with irrelevant detail and a sort of mocking pomposity.
“I certainly would not expect someone like you to understand the priorities of a woman whose primary goal is to find some sort of focus to give balance to her life.”
“What’s that noise?”
He was stifled by unfamiliar creaks in distant parts of the house.
“I didn’t hear anything.”
One evening at a party he felt awkward and lost in the host’s house, so he stood to the side, out of the way of guests, waiting for Melanie to bring him a drink. Brushed by a stranger, he inhaled a familiar odor.
“You’ve been sleeping with my wife,” he said without thinking.
He was surprised when a woman snorted and pinched his arm and said, “You’re imagining things!”
Guilty people in farces often used that platitude, but farce was so near to tragedy. He saw that he was becoming shrewder; he had a clear vision of that woman’s drunken face, purple, putty-like, with weepy reddened eyes.
He was nimbler in his own house. Melanie stumbled in the dark, banged doors, fuddled with simple things like the telephone and the bath plug, and faltered in corridors where now, to his astonishment, he was completely at home.
There was someone else lurking, he knew it clearly one night, in the big cluttered front room that looked out on the Sound. He had become accustomed to the dark. The other person was lost in it and made an uncertain canine shimmy, a backing up: someone making way for him.
“Who’s there?”
“Who do you think?” And she laughed in a rehearsed way, as though she had an audience and was laughing on someone else’s behalf.
“A man.”
She jeered much too loudly, attempting a convincing denial, a bit of theater.
Using his fingertips, he traced his way through the room, surprised by how well he knew the route, and went upstairs, where he paused and heard the front door click shut. Then he heard his wife unsteadily on the stairs.
“It was a woman. That’s why you laughed that way.”
Memory helped, desperation helped, blindness did the rest. He could see with his teeth, his tongue, his lips, his face, his whole body. He knew later that the two must have been making love—an unmistakable vibrato, the specific sounds irregular, like a lapse from ordinary life. Not like sex between a man and a woman, a pattern of slaps he knew, a familiar rhythm, a top and bottom, an act writhingly echoic, but instead a tussle of equals, the percussive kisses, the whappity-whap of two women: a sudden sapphic sandwich with no filling.
From believing that he was always alone, he began to understand that he was never alone. Even when there was no conversation he was aware of another presence, a muffled physicality that filled a space in the room and blunted the sounds he made, something molecular and cloth-like. No darkness at all, only light that was loosely or tightly woven, always revealing a coarse or helpful light. What people called darkness, and feared, for him had a face and features: he now knew the whir of human atoms.
Smells, too, perfumes that pierced his eyes, duskier aromas in his nostrils, a further fleshier suggestion that he tasted on his tongue, the distinct earthiness of swallowed food. Another person—had to be a woman; a man would have been less circumspect.
He tried to follow these smells, to account for them.
“I don’t smell anything.”
If she believed that betraying him before his blind eyes was working, she was wrong.
“It was a man last week, but this week it’s a woman.”
She laughed again, the conspiratorial, informing laugh, and her laughter roused an unmistakable movement that jarred the room.
“Or two women”—guessing that was why she laughed.
Sometimes the sound of kissing was like a certain sort of secret eating, furtive snacking on dripping overripe fruit. At other times the lovemaking resembled two soft bodies plopping through heavy clouds, encountering turbulence, or was like the thrashing of a single person sleeping poorly. They were bold in daylight, but even bolder in the dark, believing that because they could not see, they could not be seen. The eroticism of their solitude was the opposite of the crackly randomness of ordinary life.
People held in the rapture of sexuality were trapped animals. He shamefully remembered, I’m sorry, darling.
“I know what you’re doing.”
To test her sympathy, he pleaded for help and found himself alone. It was a ruse: he knew his way around the house, but he could expect nothing from her. In daylight he understood much; at night he understood almost everything. He was not confused by shadows: he thought of night as a friend, blindness as a gift.
His dead eyes made his wife reckless. He was not fooled. He knew her better, knew that she had taken lovers, thieved his money. His blindness was her opportunity, but he was not deceived.
There was worse to come. At another party he sniffed at a vase of flowers and said, “That water smells like my eye medicine.”
“You wouldn’t want to put that in your eyes,” the hostess said, and she explained that the chlorine in the water kept the flowers fresh longer by killing the bacteria.
Now he understood exactly who Melanie was and what she had done to him. She was the one who sounded lost and said in the dark, “Who’s there?” The woman was simple, greedy, and obvious. She had blinded him. He knew her and pitied her; he knew himself with a fatal disappointment.
All the beauty he had once known was false; he conceded that the world was an illusion. His book was false, history was false, what you saw was false. His life was not a tragedy but a revelation of unanswerable facts. He now knew what it was like to be dead, to be a specter, to see everything without being seen. What did you do with this enlightenment? You became obnoxious, truthful, stubborn.
A man said, “I’ve been on a diet.”
He replied, “You’ve got a long way to go.”
The editor of a magazine introduced herself. He said, “Not at the top of my reading list, I’m afraid.”
“That is hateful,” he said to a boy in Oak Bluffs who was listening to rap music in a convertible.
Explanations were pointless; understanding was like torture. It did not help that he now saw clearly his wife’s crime—not the dallying but her stratagem, her blinding him. How the woman who had plotted to marry him, whom he had loved, had substituted another solution for the one that had been prescribed to counter his eye infection. She had blinded him with the drops. He had lived through a mystery. He had solved a crime. Would anyone believe him? He interested a lawyer in the case, demanding secrecy, and rid himself of Melanie Ours.
The man Cubbage, who had accosted him and played the banjo and wept over his wife? The blind man met him again on the road and Cubbage was happy, pitying the man for his blindness, no longer bereaved. He had remarried, and was delighted that he had not sold his house. “We’re sitting on a fortune here.” The old misshapen women friends that the blind man had shrunk from before he now saw as contented souls, healthier than he was. “I am so sorry,” they said.
He sometimes wished for his sight back, so he could be calm, generous, and deluded. He was not pathetic, he was powerful, another life was beginnin
g, but a harder one—he had no faith. He read nothing. He did not believe the lies of written history, the daily news, or the consolation of friends. His own book he regarded as little more than a lunatic fiction. Every written word was fiction or a half-truth. The worst of the visible world was bearable only because of its deceits and the way its truth was always hidden. But as a blind man liberated by a selfish woman he saw everything, and so he suffered, not from blindness but from clear-sightedness. Love was a dirty drug with hideous side effects.
He had no answer: He could not leave the island and live in a place where people identified him as blind. He knew with sorrow that all that awaited him was a sort of undeserved fame that was no different from failure. The paradoxes of his recent past exhausted him.
How did this thing end?
As Steadman went on imagining the story, he felt he had rescued something from his situation, like someone who finds meaning in a personal tragedy. And as long as the story remained unfinished, he felt he was not lost.
6
ALTHOUGH HE HAD not written a word of it, although it was all still stewing in his head, he was buoyant, possessed by the fable, with the sense of wellbeing he always felt at having imagined something whole. His pride in the plain facts of it matched his faith in his extravagant invention.
But his happiness didn’t last. The story made him secretive, for the woman in it was the villain and Ava had usually been kind, and even in her infidelity had been solicitous toward him. He was reproached by her kindness. And she went on indulging him, urging him to be upbeat, reminding him that she admired his work and that she would go on looking for a medical solution for him, more tests, another specialist.
He was grateful to her for her words; they were sincerely meant, but they were still only words. All praise these days sounded to him like the hollow pieties of a premature obituary. He was soon low again and unsure and as incomplete as his story. Maybe Melanie personified the blinding drug that had a feminine name—datura.
The simplest things reminded him of his helplessness. One day Ava said, “The mailman asked whether we have a red Corolla convertible. Apparently there’s one that’s often parked in our driveway.”