Ava went to him and helped him up. Steadman whispered with feeling, “I can’t live without you.”
He had never needed her more. He felt woeful, as though lost on a muddy star.
TWO. Blinding Light
1
STEADMAN ASKED, “What’s that?”in a different tone, slipping into a small suspicious murmur and sucking air. He had interrupted himself in another voice, lost his fluency. His whole face went hot. He was reminded of his blindness only at times like this — the moment of intrusion by an unknown visitor, a dark noise, a sudden shadow he knew to be human.
You’re in full flow, the most intimate description, your last word “lingerie,” and now there’s a distant glimmering, the gulp of a quickening pulse, the chew-grind of trodden gravel, pebbles masticated by advancing footsoles. Until then it had been an average afternoon in his many-gabled house, on his estate up-island on Martha’s Vineyard. He was lying on the sofa with his back to Ava, dictating his novel — drugged, blinded. Then he heard the stranger’s heartbeat.
His voice was sharp: “The back door. It sounds like someone. A woman.”
“I don’t hear anything.”
“She hasn’t knocked yet. Go look.”
Narrating a sexually candid episode, he was unusually self-conscious; he had heard the sounds and felt like exposed prey. He lifted his head into the silence and moved like a listening animal, adjusting his body, tuned to danger, his alertness stiffening his neck, the whole room droning in his ears. He sensed that something was wrong. Anything unexpected here was like a threat to him.
“It’s nothing,” Ava said. She did not glance up — his back was still turned to her anyway. He preferred this paranoiac posture, especially in the more sensual episodes. Even so, he could feel the warmth of her body when she was near him, as she was now, waiting, glowing, radiating body heat.
Ava reversed the tape to play the last of Steadman’s dictation, where he had broken off: All he could think of was the woman waiting for him after the meal, the lingerie —
Still poised upright, startled, animal-like, gone rigid in attention, listening as though in a green clearing, he seemed to see the shrouded head, the suggestion of a uniform, the reaching hands, the broken fingernails of a meddler. The staring eyes, the big heavy feet. Only such a heedless intruder would make those sounds. Someone who did not belong always announced the fact in clumsy noises, or in the glare of meaningless silences. Even without knowing who owned it, strangers were often attracted to the big Gothic island house set in a meadow behind high stone walls, its cupola taller than its oldest oaks; but all strangers were unwelcome here.
Then there came a loud knock, insistent knuckles on wood.
“I said, go look.” His voice was breathless, his jaw set in aggression. He hardly paused before he added, “Doctor.”
While Ava went to check the back door, Steadman touched the face of his watch, examined the hands, and turning he felt the warmth of a fierce sunset reddening the side of his face, the back of his hand. Great hot quilts of cloud spread across the sky, a broth of blue growing pinkish in a vast band of color, then quickening to fiery tatters, molten and purple — five seconds of that before sudden tumbled lambs appeared and gathered, were whipped into peaks to become a mountain range of gilded summits, subsiding slowly, pink again, just an orange stripe low in the distance. The whole stripe was simplified to a speckled egg, but a crimson one, and ultimately a blind eye.
He almost smiled to think that something might be wrong, that there might be an intruder. So much else had gone his way these past months that he was prepared to be thrown.
The glow was still in the sky, still on his cheek, and though the trees were cooling fast, the shade thickening in their boughs, some light and warmth remained in the western quadrant beyond the cove, like a lamp in the corner of a room, fading from pink to yellow-blue, the way embers go cold.
Ava entered the room holding something against her body — a package, a dense parcel, which she placed on the table. The way it settled told him the thing was heavy for its size.
“A woman,” Steadman said.
“Right.”
“Told you.” He was the assertive man again, speaking in his own voice.
Instead of answering that, she said, “FedEx. The latest transcript of the book.”
He saw it as Book. The manuscript was always capitalized in his mind, for he thought of it as The Book of Revelation.
That news pleased him — to think, after so many years, that he was embarked on a new book and was making progress. Even if he was just a name to some people, he had a large and appreciative public, eager for this book, and he was glad. For almost two decades he had struggled with this second book. And, writing steadily since his return from his trip downriver in Ecuador, he had finished perhaps a third of it. That trip had changed his view of almost everything in his life and in his writing, and had given him a sense of power.
“Shall we continue?”
Ava sat heavily in the chair. The way she dropped herself, making the cushion gasp, was emphatic, a whole blaming statement in the sound of her sitting down: You are putting me in the wrong for hesitating to go to the door.
Steadman felt her gaze as a shimmering light, as heat and reassurance, which said to him, You have never been safer.
“Yes, Doctor.”
He did not mind that she was annoyed. He was glad that his instincts had guided him: the foot-crunch in his gravel driveway spoke to him more clearly than a watchman or a sentry. Delivery people were also intruders, and the more familiar they tried to be (“Nice place you got here”), the worse their intrusion. But seeing his suspicions confirmed made Steadman calm enough to resume the dictation — or, rather, not resume but find fluency in a digression.
All he could think of was the woman waiting for him after the meal, Ava wrote, at Steadman’s talking speed, while watching the jumping columns of light indicating the stresses in his voice on the tape recorder. Waiting in the candlelit conservatory, wearing the black lingerie he had bought for her. As he entered the room, saying softly —
And he smiled, because this improvised collaboration was the best part of the day. He never wanted it to be spoiled by someone blundering in. When he came to the end of the day’s work he changed his tone; it became intimate, and a full day of fictional inspiration became a halting description of how he wanted the evening to end.
Helping him, Ava said in a muted voice, “Over here.”
Saying softly, “Over here.”
“And he obeyed,” Steadman said.
“Because he was in her power.”
Because he found pleasure in submitting to her will, obeying her demands.
Steadman loved Ava for the intensity of her confident suggestions, for her knowing how to dictate to him. I am yours. If you don’t tell me explicitly what to do, I’ll take charge, she had said in the beginning. Her assertiveness had surprised him. Their sexuality was based on trust, on invention, on surprise; making it fictional excited him.
Because he was in her power, Steadman repeated, and was helpless to do more than obey her. He faced her in the candlelight. The lingerie— “Loose panties of black silk that she had been saving for him,” Ava said, speaking slowly, watching him closely for a reaction.