“I want to talk about it.”
“You’ll just interrogate me. I hate your writer’s questions.” As she spoke she got up and busied herself in the kitchen. “I’m happy. Therefore, there’s nothing to discuss.”
He didn’t pursue her, but he was sorry. He had wanted to explain that fear had robbed him of his libido.
A few days later he slipped into bed and was embraced. He did not know at first that it was the other woman until she kissed him and sighed. Bodies could seem almost identical, but a voice, a murmur, a kiss, they were a person’s uniqueness. And there was an odor — of breath, of skin and hair — that was singular, too.
He let himself be embraced and caressed, and he almost apologized for his futility when Ava slid into the bed behind him and snuggled up to him. Though she was against his back, everything about her was familiar. He was in the middle. He knew that he was somehow necessary to them, yet from their gropings that they were more interested in each other than in him. And so they lay tangled, but he knew that only he was in darkness.
The next morning, finding himself alone, he called Ava on her cell phone and left a message saying that they had to talk, and how about a drink somewhere? Ava returned the call later and said that she had reserved a table at the Dockside, overlooking the harbor in Oak Bluffs. She would pick him up after work. He took this as a good sign, something sentimental; it was the place he had brought her on their first date, where she had wept, realizing that he was the author of Trespassing.
“Your table is outside, as you requested,” the waitress said. She led them to it and took their order, two glasses of Merlot.
When she was gone, Ava said, “I love to see the island people waiting to meet the ferry. The bossy posture. The way they stand on the pier with their arms folded, searching for their friends on the boat. They seem so confident. ‘Here I am. I belong here. I’m going to take care of you.’”
She was not looking at him. Was she glancing down the pier where the Island Queen had just docked?
“What are you talking about?” Steadman said. She was speaking like a woman in a play, not listening, just making a superfluous pronouncement, pleased with herself, thinking she was giving information.
“Ah, here’s our drinks,” Ava said. This was also spoken like a line in a play.
Steadman sulked, thinking of his unwritten story, while the glasses of wine were set down. When he was sure the waitress had left, he said, “Can’t you see I’m miserable?”
Ava said, “It’s a beautiful evening. The harbor is full of sailboats. You’ve got a drink. We’re together. Why don’t we simply enjoy what we have?”
“What is this?” he said. She was haughty and enigmatic, and everything she said sounded stilted and fictional, as though she were not talking to him but merely reciting lines. “I don’t want to hear about the boats. I can’t see a thing.”
“I’ll be your eyes for a while.”
“I can’t read or write. I can barely think straight. Find me that specialist. Why don’t you help me?”
He meant to challenge her, but she surprised him, saying with amused detachment and with an archness he had never heard her use before, “Maybe what we’re doing with my friend will help you.”
It was the sort of thing he might have said before: sex as a cure, sex as vision, sex as blinding light, sex as a miracle drug.
He said, “Maybe you’re just using me.”
“This is an opportunity. Don’t ask me to explain it, but I know I won’t have another chance like this again.”
Women were usually spoken about by men — and by other women — as casualties of indecision, fretful, always on the hook, helpless, forever trifled with. But that had not been his experience at all. Men were the ditherers, the smilers, the feckless triflers. Men were fritterers, too: they took their time, because they had plenty of time. But women were remorseless timekeepers, ruthlessly so sometimes — certainly the women he had known in his life. They had given the impression of being passive and submissive, but they were not indifferent, far from it. They were watchful, perhaps silent, but obsessively alert, like raptors awaiting their chance.
And when the opportunity arose they knew it, and they pounced and gave it everything they had. He admired that, the way they singled out a choice and went for it.
“You like that other woman,” he said.
“You can’t imagine.”
Ava was smiling, he was sure of it, but he could not say how he knew — something in her tone.
Ava was another raptor. She had found someone else, and it so happened the lover was a woman. He was in between and felt weirdly privileged and perverse. He had never seen this ferocity in Ava, and he took it to be love.
“How was that Merlot?” the waitress said when Ava asked for the check.
“Very nice,” Ava said.
“Fine,” Steadman said.
“And how about that frozen daiquiri?”
What frozen daiquiri? Steadman thought.
“It was fabulous.” A woman’s voice at the same table — how was that possible? But as soon as he asked himself the question, he knew the answer.
And that night was another night with the other woman.
4
SUMMER NIGHTS on the Vineyard, thick with humidity, saturated with the rush of the tide, its lift and splash, its ebb that left bubbling mudflats, and the warmed blossoms of Rosa rugosa, a dustiness of daylilies and the sweet decay of leaf piles and pinched acorns under the scrub oaks: he knew every detail and still felt that he was trespassing. The sociable people on the island for the season rushed from party to party. Even Ava was on the circuit, perhaps with her woman friend — how was he to know? His friends called — Wolfbein was persistent — but Steadman made excuses and stayed home. He had discovered that going out was dangerous.
The seamless dark turned him into a pedantic clown in a gloomy farce, intending to be serious as he stumbled and fell. He was so lost he began to question whether he had been blind before. He repeated to himself with disbelief that this was like nothing he had ever known.
Even those times years ago on the Trespassing trip when he had woken in a reeking room in the middle of the night, gasping and swallowing black air and the shit stink of a rural village, not the slightest idea where he was. Burma? Bangladesh? Assam? That simple confusion, which cleared up at daybreak, was better by far than this. What he knew now was trespassing with the direst consequences. No way out. He seemed to exist in a deep hole, with all the stifling cushions of night stacked upon him, making him very small.
How could he beg for pity? Yet he wanted sympathy. Ava had a bystander’s slack attention. Would she listen to him? The curse of his involuntary blindness she seemed to regard as no more than another distraction, hardly amounting to an event, more like the continuation of his extended and episodic egotism as the famous recluse. He was another patient clamoring to be seen — at least that was how she made him feel. Her cold gaze held him in an unsubtle way as merely disabled, rather inconvenienced, somewhat bothered. And he felt he was dying.