But late May brought warmth and color. After the clammy winter and the cold northwest wind there were some uncertain days, and then at last the Vineyard was enlarged with more assertive sunlight, and the rain diminished, and the wind swung around and blew from the southwest. He knew the island would be sunny and pleasant for the next four months. The first flowers were the biggest and brightest, the daffodils and early Asian daylilies, the azaleas, the rhododendrons, the white viburnum the locals called mayflowers, the blossoms he preferred for their fragrance, for the more extravagant the flower, the more modest its aroma. He was no longer tricked by his eye. One of the lessons of blindness was that night-blooming flowers had the most powerful perfume.
After the long winter up-island he prepared himself for summer — the pleasures of spring lasted just a few weeks. Steadman wondered what the season might bring. The winter for him had been perfect: safe and sexual, turning him into an imaginative animal. After his day’s work, he ate and rutted and then slept soundly. He woke and blinded himself first thing and resumed his dictation. He felt as confident as a prophet. He spoke his narrative as the book was revealed to him.
His writing was not work — it was his life, flesh made into words, the erotic novel rehearsed at night. He was like someone conducting an experiment on himself, then writing up the results. Blindness was his method and his memory; the drug created in his consciousness a miracle of remembering and invention.
He was most himself in his blindness, an eyeless worm on the move; most himself in his sexuality, and paired with Ava absolutely without inhibition. He was convinced that his sexual history was the essential truth that demanded to be written as fiction.
He was satisfied with his progress so far: enough had been transcribed and printed for him to begin calling it a book. The book contained his world; he inhabited the book. The act of creation became understandable to him: it was brilliant transformation, not making something from nothing, but giving order to his life, turning darkness into light. He knew now that the travel in Trespassing was a delusion. There was no travel on earth like the distances he was covering now, locked and blindfolded in his hidden house.
A satisfying solitude was returned to him, and he delighted in its stimulation. For years he had longed to write the fictional counterpart to Trespassing, a novel as an interior journey that would also be an erotic masterpiece, wandering across areas of human experience that had been regarded as forbidden — like the sort of fenced-off frontiers he had crossed in his travel book: sex as trespass in the realms of touch, taste, and smell; sex as memory, as fantasy, as prophecy. And fantasy, because it was ritualistic, became something like a sacrament that gave him access to the truth of his past.
He had been so hesitant to go to Ecuador; it had taken an effort of will to submit to the drugs; he had needed to be tempted; he knew it was his last bargain. But the datura had made all the difference, had revealed his book to him, and the months of productive seclusion he had spent since arriving back on the island were the happiest he had ever known.
And he had discovered through the drug’s blinding light that the truth was sexuaclass="underline" the source of truth was pleasure itself, fundamental and sensual. Everything else was a dishonest aspect of an elaborate and misleading surface — all lies.
He intended his book as a confession and a consolation. In a world full of desperate and bloody imagery, how could such a thing as sex be shocking? Yet he was interested in describing only the nightmarish intimacies of his sexuality. For the traveler who had gone everywhere else on earth, this was the undiscovered world of his mind and heart, the basis of his being, his inner life revealed, not anyone else’s. No one could say, “Not true!” when he knew it was his own truth, that he had risked blindness to understand.
One day in early summer he was with Ava in his library, working on the novel, when she handed a card to him. He framed the card in his hands, then smoothed it, touching the raised lettering with his fingertips, and said, “An invitation. I can just about read it. The Wallaces?”
Ava said, “The Wolfbeins. Party at their house.”
The noise Steadman made in his throat, adenoidal, approving, sounding interested, put Ava on the defensive.
Ava said, “You could do without going.”
She was the one who usually wanted to attend parties, and when they had stayed away she accused Steadman of being vain, of sniffing at his old friends, of being a prima donna. The Wolfbeins’ summer place was in Lambert’s Cove, which necessitated a long drive from Steadman’s up-island house, and for the past few summers Steadman had avoided such parties. Yet he was interested.
“I think I should go.”
“Are you serious?”
“My debut,” he said.
“What a word.”
“To show myself as I am.”
She laughed loudly. “You sound like such a fairy, saying that.”
“You don’t get it.” He was smiling, with his face in front of her, his blank gaze. “I mean go blind.”
He could hear Ava’s whole body react, seeming to stiffen in objection. “That’s just a stunt,” she said.
“I am most myself when I’m blind.”
“It’s a drug!” Ava said. “You are seeing phosphenes — they exist outside a light source. It’s a dazzling delusion, a kind of migraine. And what will you do when it wears off?”
Steadman turned away from her and said, “I have to go there.”
He was thinking of the future — his desire to move on, because he needed to distance himself from Trespassing and its youthful halftruths. And since taking the drug he had thought a great deal about death. He might die at any time. And the man he was now bore no resemblance to the man people thought they knew. He imagined them praising him in a eulogy, putting themselves in charge of his history, writing his obituary, speculating, for no one was more presumptuous or untruthful than an obituarist.
“No one knows me,” he said. “No one ever knew me.”
Ava was silent. She did not need to insist or even mention that she knew him, that she was the only one. She said, “Finish the book, if you want to reveal yourself.”
He shrugged, because that was obvious and it had always been his intention. He was obsessed with writing the one book that would say everything about him, disclose all his secrets. He would have to call it a novel, because the names would be changed, but the rest, the masquerade of fiction, would be true, for a man in a mask is most himself.
“I want people to see me like this,” he said. “My friends, anyway.”
“Going to the Wolfbeins’ is going public,” Ava said. “It’s always the A-list.”
He was silent again. He could see she wanted a fight. And anyway it was true — he wanted to go public.
“Your blindness is a lie,” she said. “It’s temporary. The phosphenes are in your brain and your optic nerve, caused by whatever shit is in the drug.”
“No,” he said.
“A game,” she said.
“A choice,” he said. “And I want to see these people.”
“See?”
“Know them,” he said.
3
STEADMAN WORE DARK GLASSES, he carried a narrow white cane. He did not need the cane, except as a prop and a boast. The insect eyes of his lenses and his thick pushed-back hair emphasized his sharp inquisitive face. Ava had chosen his clothes. He could have passed for a stroller at the West Chop Club — white slacks, yellow shirt, white espadrilles, a slender whisking cane.