They had never used the word “love.” They avoided it as some people avoided red meat or refined sugar, and for the same reason, that abstaining from the word would make them healthier and stronger. They believed in love but hated the word, and loathed the moth-eaten expression I love you, which had been diminished and become so meaningless it had been reduced to a casual salutation. “I love you,” people said at the end of a casual phone call. It had taken the place of “See you later” and “Have a nice day.” It mattered less than his father’s farewell at the end of a phone calclass="underline" “Be good.” His father had never used the word “love” either, yet he knew that the man had adored him.
Housebound among memories of his arrogance, Steadman said, “I think about only one thing. Getting back my eyesight.”
“I’m working on it,” Ava said. “And at least you have your book.”
He didn’t say what he felt — it was too melancholy. The book was pointless; it was incomplete. His life was not the sequence of his sexual history, it was everything that had led to its rediscovery, its periphery, all the circumstances, the landscape of his search, from the flight to Ecuador onward, how he had written it, the book tour, the president’s duplicity, the delusion of the drug, his failure, even the subsequent revelation, Ava’s dallying with her woman friend as he lay blindly supine. The sadness he was living through was the truest part, and yet it was not suggested in his book. His book was the narrative he knew now — this, the raggedness of reality, all of this.
But he said, “Right. I’ve got my book.”
The Book of Revelation was over, though. Good or bad, it was not his anymore. What preoccupied him now was the story of the blind man’s wife, the fable of his blindness.
Ava did not ask him how he spent his days. He knew she hated hearing that he did nothing but sit and brood. Asking him anything was like challenging him, and would have implicated her, made her feel partly responsible for his apparent indolence. He had no helpful reply. At least he had his short story. He clung to that with the tenuous hope of improving that fragment, looking to fiction for a solution to his dilemma, as he had once looked to travel for solace. Going away had always helped.
But if Ava had asked him what he was doing during the day, he would not have told her. What he was thinking was his business. The story was his secret, and anyway, the fictional lover was wicked. What would Ava make of that? Writing the story showed him how he wanted to blame Ava for his own trespassing, because he resented her freedom and her health.
He took some comfort in being able to recognize the changes in the weather. Some days he sweltered, the Vineyard afternoons when the wind dropped and there was no air, the long summer days of humidity, bright sunshine at seven in the evening, and some nights could seem suffocating. But then the wind would rise, the air cooled, and within a short time, hours sometimes, he would fumble in drawers for his sweater. These simple perceptions seemed to him necessary victories.
Weather was missing from his story, so was the physical texture of the island. The narrative hovered between being a mystery and a fable. He wanted it to be both more concrete and allusive, more of Borges in it, some sparkle, some magic. Not a pandering moral — that was just shabby — but persuasiveness, a greater sense of place, so that a reader would at the end find it the more disturbing for being familiar and unexplainable.
Perhaps that was what was also lacking in The Book of Revelation, a sense of place. As erotica its problem was its preoccupation with foreplay and foreground: interiors. Apart from the long gothic shadows, the role-playing in the chateau — wild nights, wild nights — there was no visible island.
Yet if his novel was a failure, his story had saved him. His secret inventions had always sustained him. He was more inclined to laugh at anyone who questioned how he spent his time and to ask other people how they could bear living without writing. The fact that he had published very little of it did not matter. He had been engaged in some sort of writing every day of his adult life. He loved the title “The Blind Man’s Wife.” He liked the way the story was full of intrusions.
How do I spend my days? he could have replied to Ava. I ponder my story.
Fearing that he might hear his own name, he avoided listening to the news. The scandal of the president’s affair, and his hiding and denying it, seemed to be the only topic, always speculating on the most vulgar details of the concealment. Every detail put Steadman on the defensive. He imagined being hounded in the same way, challenged and humiliated.
The president’s lame denial had alarmed him, but months later, in the period when Steadman was pondering his short story, the president admitted his mistake. His apology was horrifying, and though Steadman did not hear it the first time, it was replayed again and again, for it was not an apology at all but a statement of wounded defiance.
Steadman got to know the phrases by heart: “Questions about my private life, questions no American citizen would ever want to answer… I did have a relationship… a critical lapse in judgment and a personal failure on my part… I misled people… a desire to protect myself from the embarrassment of my own conduct… It’s nobody’s business but ours… Even presidents have private lives. It is time to stop the pursuit of personal destruction and the prying into private lives…”
Steadman did not hear sex in the president’s message; he heard his own voice speaking of drugs and blindness. The president was acting out Steadman’s own humiliation.
He was on his own. The story was all that he had written since his book, and as with the book, he had not touched a pen. He wrote in his head. When it was complete he would speak it into a tape recorder and find someone, not Ava, to transcribe it.
Ava had slipped away and lost herself in the hospital. She still lived in the house. She left meals for him, helped him find his clothes. But he knew her heart wasn’t in it. Her concern was professional now, a matter of ethics; he was a patient, a case, and her motto was “First do no harm.” She had not been able to find a cure. He was waiting for a chance to say, “I need a referral.”
In the meantime, “The Blind Man’s Wife” was all he had. He would use it like a man whittling a stick — rewrite it, improve it, polish it. Until it was done he would not have to think of anything else. The story was his patience and his consolation. Ava would have said “your dolly.”
In pitying him she had taught him that pity was useless. He needed to help himself.
Wolfbein called again, using the same tone of friendly bullying a nurse would use with a morose and bedridden patient.
“Something’s come up. You’re having lunch here today. The only question is, are you coming on your own or am I going over there to get you?”
“Harry, I’m useless.”
“I’ll be right over.”
He arrived a half hour later, honking his horn, and after Steadman got into the car, he drove fast, hardly speaking.
“What’s the hurry?”
“No hurry. Nice to see you,” Wolfbein said.
But the man was preoccupied, his hectic driving proved it, and he gabbled at the traffic. Although sunk in the depths of his blindness, Steadman understood the simple trip from his house to Lambert’s Cove to be a matter of reckless urgency.
“I told them to start without us,” Wolfbein said. “It’s all guys, by the way. The women have other plans.”
Then Steadman knew that Wolfbein’s picking him up and driving him to lunch had been unforeseen. Yet Wolfbein, seriously inconvenienced, had acted out of friendship. They arrived in a flurry, Wolfbein whispering to other people. Steadman was too bewildered to hear anything clearly. The house on the bluff that he had known so well seemed unfamiliar to him — strange elevations, sudden steps, echoes.