He was more reclusive than ever, avoiding everyone. He knew what they thought. The blind were not scribblers; they were celebrated in their evasions as storytellers and talkers. People patronized the blind, tried to propitiate them for their gloomy emanations, tiptoed around them, sat at their feet, feared them, asked them for stories, tried not to stare at the stains and crumbs on their shirt fronts, were jittery listeners, fearing what might come next.
Grieving, Steadman remembered the story he had angrily begun in his head about the blind man and his wife. The ugly drama it portrayed seemed an expression of his hurt. He was repentant, self-accusing. He needed to invent, to ease his mind. The story of the weak, credulous man and the opportunistic lover was like a fable of his failure.
With nothing else to do, Steadman felt that resolving the elements of the story would help him live. Yet even in his imagination the story scared him. He made it out of the materials of pure horror, hoping that when it was done he might know more about himself. His familiarity with the facts of it did not make it less brutal, but he suspected that the act of creation would make it easier to bear.
And so he resumed, concentrating on the blind man, who was someone like himself, a traveler and writer and recluse. His house was near West Chop, in the lane on the bluff where the paved road ended and the steps to the beach began.
Before he lost his sight, before he met the woman, the man believed that the active part of his life was over. He accepted that no great event would befall him, that he would grow smaller, his life narrower, less accidental, and he would die here in obscurity. He imagined one of those small rainy funerals in an up-island cemetery of old chewed-looking gravestones and pitted crosses.
In his self-imposed retirement, he seldom ventured out. When he did he kept to the same safe walk. He was not seeking anyone, not looking for anything, just passing the time. He was supremely content, steadied by his indifference.
There had been one scare, but that was on his former route. A weteyed elderly pedestrian named Cubbage ambushed him, saying “You’re the writer,” and feebly bullied him into his house. “Got the plans out of Popular Mechanics.” Cubbage detained him. “Want to buy it? If you don’t, my idiot son will get it. It’d cost you less than a million. You could write a great book here.” The man seized a banjo off a tattered hassock. “This is a little thing called ‘Sleepy Time Gal.’” He strummed a bit and began to cry miserably. “It’s my wife,” he said, his face streaming with tears. “Cancer took her. Thirty years we were married. You can’t replace someone like that. Do you know what true love is?”
The man said he had no idea.
“Then make me an offer on the house.”
Cubbage watched him flee. The man changed his route. He believed that he was happy because he had conquered desire and was floating, having achieved some sort of Buddhist ideal of nonattachment, as he sometimes joked.
On good days he walked in the woods behind the lighthouse, loving the smell of the trees and flowers, the pitch pines, the chokecherries, the scrub oaks, the leaf mold, the squirrel-bitten acorns, the sun warming the long grass, hot clumps of timothy, and cushions of moss like dense velvet that made him feel weightless.
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.