Manfred was hovering, casting a shadow, looking for a story. But Steadman knew there was no vast plot, no conspiracy. No one had laid a trap for him. It was his own fault that he was being punished for pretending to be blind, his poisonous pride. And now, without drugs, without trying to deceive — in fact, against his will and to his shame; perhaps his body was saturated with the dirty drug — he was blinder than it was possible to imagine, as all the idle speculators had described. His blindness was the blindness of every cliché. He was in darkness like a wilderness of wool, his head wrapped, mummified, bent down and suffering the black misery of a frightened panting creature who expects at any moment to be pounced on.
Lost in the seamless darkness of his despair, he was accused of faking. The news was out. People were talking. Even in his blindness and seclusion he was not spared. Somehow — was it self-punishing? he wondered — he was still able to tell when people he knew well were lying to him. He heard hesitations, as though they were trying to minimize the rumors, but the hesitations only made them seem worse.
“I’ve heard a few things,” Axelrod told him when Steadman asked, hoping to be reassured that there was nothing. “Pay no attention to them. They’re cheap shots.”
“Like what.”
“Cheesy items on Page Six in the Post. ‘Sightings.’ No one takes any notice of them.”
But Steadman knew that everyone read that column, and Axelrod’s saying “items” alarmed him.
“Probably on the Internet, too,” Steadman said, angling for a denial. “Who looks at that crap?”
So it was true: accused of faking on a Web site, or more than one. He said, “Why don’t we put out a statement — like a press release?”
“You mean a formal denial?”
“Why not?”
Axelrod hesitated so long, Steadman was demoralized before his editor finally replied.
“Overkill. It’ll provoke questions. It could sink your book.” Axelrod sounded as if he were trying to convince himself as well as Steadman. “Besides, why dignify this slander with a rebuttal? Take the high road.” “Take the high road” was worrying, too, for it meant a campaign had been mounted, and it always implied that, in the attempt to undermine him, some damage had already been done.
“The important thing is, how are you doing?”
“I’ve been better.”
“The writer Eric Hoffer— The True Believer? — he went blind as a child,” Axelrod said. “At the age of fifteen he suddenly got his sight back. Turned him into a reader.”
“I hate heartwarming stories,” Steadman said. “I went for a walk. I was mugged twice — lost my wallet and my watch. Couple of people swore at me.”
“That’s really horrible.”
“Someone else gave me money.”
“At least the sales are great,” Axelrod said. He clearly wanted to change the subject.
Steadman took no pleasure in the news of his book’s success. He saw his stumbling in the dark as punishment for it. Only now was he able to understand that he had not been blind before. He had been drugged. The condition that he had known was the opposite of this. He had to learn how to cope with his blindness, for instead of feeling liberated he was limited, he was diminished, and the pain was hard for him to bear.
Still he was accused of faking. He could not read the newspapers, nor would anyone read them to him. But he knew. One measure of the gossip was the number of requests for interviews, and they were incessant. Some were needling, others were meant to scrutinize or embarrass him. They used the seriousness of the gossip as the pretext for his breaking his silence.
“You’ll only lose by hiding from the press,” one woman told him. She said she was a journalist from a wire service; Steadman’s statement would reach millions of readers.
“I have no statement.”
“Give me a few minutes. Let me come over. It could help your credibility.”
The very suggestion that his credibility needed help saddened him.
Saying no to everyone and screening his calls, he was condemned for being uncooperative. His insistence on seclusion was like proof of his guilt.
In his favor, the presidential scandal was being played out. People were obsessed with the unconvincing explanations for the president’s behavior — talk of secret meetings and phone sex with the young woman, extravagant talk of trysts, the repetition of the expression “oral sex.” And the accusations of another woman as well, who said the president had once exposed himself to her in a hotel room. She claimed that she could accurately describe the president’s penis. This took up so much space in the papers that attention on Steadman was diminished, though several importuning journalists said, “You’re behaving just like the president.” The president, too, was saying nothing.
There had been a time when he had imagined that the president might become his protector, that his power might be useful to Steadman in some way — an asset, perhaps, that the president read him and recommended him and had invited him to the White House. That was no help now. The favor the president had done him was to become involved in such a steamy scandal of his own that the newspapers were crowded with stories of his duplicity, eclipsing the rumors about Steadman. Steadman imagined the rumors to be repeating that, far from being blind, he was a reckless fantasist who had experimented with a psychotropic drug that produced spells of blindness and a glow of hypersensitivity.
The basis for his imagining such details was that he knew the supposition to have been true. It was no longer. He was sightless, he was weak, and being in New York was like being in enemy territory. Even at the height of his fame as the author of Trespassing he had not been in greater demand. And it was all an agony to him.
He had given explicit instructions to the hotel that he was not to be bothered or phoned; no one was allowed to enter his room. And so the knock on his door early on the morning he was to leave for the Vineyard was unexpected. As always, he woke and felt like clawing his eyes when he realized that nothing had changed. He groped to the door and opened it, seeing nothing.
“No visitors,” he said.
“It’s me”—Ava. She thrust herself into the room and shut the door as he grasped at the air, flailing.
“I’m taking you home.”
But he was struggling, saying, “Who’s with you? There’s someone else. Who is it?” Finally he allowed her to hold him, and when the door was kicked shut he began to cry.
FIVE. The Blind Man’s Wife
1
FROM THE MOMENT he stepped off the clanking plates of the ferry ramp he was fearful. He stubbed his toe on the rim of the ramp’s steel lip and stumbled ashore, flapping his arms for balance, feeling foolish as he toppled forward. Fog had delayed the flight to Boston, so they missed their connection; Ava drove a rental car to Woods Hole, where they caught the Uncatena. And when he was on the island, tasting abandonment, he thought, with a castaway’s woe, What am I doing here?
There was something else on his mind, but it was unformed, a wordless worry, like a lowering cloud with a human smell. He was unable to work it out and frame it as a whole thought, because the Boston shuttle had so disoriented him. The fussing of flight attendants, the offers of a wheelchair, the unhelpful hands plucking at him, the puzzled fingers twitching on his arm, people jerking his sleeves, patting him in idiot attempts at consolation; the mutters of “Hang in there” and “Go for it, big guy” and “Right this way, sir”—the gauntlet of well-wishers every blind person ran into each day.