“You putz,” Harry Wolfbein said. And to Ava: “What’s with him?”
Steadman said, “Relax, Harry. I’m blind.”
A rush of air was audible at the word, and in a vacuum of embarrassment that followed it Wolfbein breathed hard in apology.
Steadman wished only to state his blindness, not discuss it, not be clucked over and pitied. So, to cut him off, Steadman said, “There’s some sort of engine noise over there I’ve never heard before.” He gestured beyond the house, toward the big garage. “Transformer, generator — what is it?”
“Bug zapper,” Wolfbein said.
Steadman knew he was lying. He said, “Then what’s all the auxiliary power for?”
Before Wolfbein could recover and respond, a man entering behind him said, “Oh, God, another rat-fuck.”
Recognizing Bill Styron’s voice, Steadman greeted the writer and his wife, Rose. They said they were glad to see him. He did not announce his blindness; everyone would know soon enough. As for his dark glasses and cane, the Styrons just smiled in sympathy. In his nonwriting years, as a reaction to his obscurity, Steadman had affected odd habits of dress and behavior, as a defense, so that his raffish eccentricity would be noticed and not his silence.
“Rat-fuck” was the right expression for a party where a mob of people stood and drank and yelled in your face, looking past your head as you looked past theirs, for relief, for escape, for someone better known or wittier. At a certain point a party was just that: a loud room of coarse static, like a rookery of big frantic birds.
The moment he had arrived at the Wolfbeins’ house in Lambert’s Cove he knew the party was unlike any other summer thrash. He did not discern the contours of people; he understood their essence. He needed to be blind to feel the voltage, the pitch and whine of it, like the whir of a spinning ball of molecules. The furious hum beneath the chatter that drifted from the house kept Steadman listening and in that hum discerning the distinct character of people. If he had not been blind, would he have been aware of the woman — all eager atoms — who had begun to stare at him and stalk him from the moment he stepped onto the front porch?
He heard her heartbeat, he sensed the woman as a pulse in the air, as an odor, a hot eye, in the deepening shadow. And when he drew near her and was surrounded by other guests, she touched him, probably thinking that he would not be able to distinguish her from the others — stroked his arm, touched his mouth, left a taste on his lips. It was not her touch that lingered but an oily dampness, as if her salty sweat-warmed hair still clung to him and got into his nose and onto his tongue. He had caught the animal scent and kept sniffing it, the trail of it that curled from the woman’s body like a distinct invitation in all that noise.
As a younger man, Steadman had liked such party loudness for its concealment. The noise was like darkness and made your plea inaudible to everyone except the woman you were imploring. A party was an occasion for a dog-like mating ritual, for bottom-sniffing and innuendo. In a large noisy crowd in which anyone could be touched, a party was a liberating prelude to sex. A crowd became a sort of dance, in a room in which you paired up with someone and got her to agree to see you later, meet you secretly; it was an opportunity, a beginning, an abrupt courtship.
But this event at the Wolfbeins’ was not that at all. It was a gathering of older, milder, successful people, all of them friends, and well past the frenzied adulteries of their earlier lives. Steadman was a friend, too, but different in being a year-rounder on an island where summer people believed they mattered most.
The summer-camp atmosphere of the Vineyard in high season was so intense and infantilizing that Steadman hardly went to parties. Besides, when the summer people departed just before Labor Day, the year-rounders were on their own, and it was awkward for them to admit that in the off-season the islanders seldom met except at the supermarket, the post office, or the ferry landing.
“The guest of honor isn’t here yet.”
“Steadman thought he was the guest of honor.”
“Maybe he is, now,” Wolfbein said softly, with a new sort of reverence. “It was really nice of you to come, Slade.”
The gratitude in Wolfbeins chastened voice Steadman heard as piety — that Steadman, crippled and handicapped, was doing them all a favor by showing up, being brave. Like a limper dragging himself into daylight, the proud damaged man was going public.
If only they had known. Steadman believed himself to be gifted through his blindness, superior to them all, with the power of special insight. He had come just to be visible, to declare his blindness. He was Ishmael, believing that no man can ever know his own identity until his eyes are closed. Steadman thought: No one can ever claim to know me now.
And, as he had suspected, the fact of his blindness at the party gave him a kind of celebrity. The only way to reveal his secret was to present himself here, where most of his friends happened to be, none of them his confidants, since he had none. He was greeted by Mike and Mary Wallace, Beverly Sills and her daughter, Alan Dershowitz, Mike Nichols and Diane Sawyer, Mary Steenburgen, Walter and Betsy Cronkite, Skip Gates, Evelyn de Rothschild and Lynn Forester, Olga Hirshhorn, Ann and Vernon Jordan. He would either keep his blindness a secret or allow these people to know. He could not be selective in telling people on this island, where people talked — did nothing but talk.
“I feel like Zelig,” Dershowitz said, bumping into him, then profusely apologizing, before inquiring about the cause of his disability, as though appraising his condition in a bid for a possible personal-injury lawsuit.
“All my fault,” Steadman said.
“Our own Tiresias,” Styron said with his customary gallantry.
Steadman did not mind being seen as a tragic hero. The only alternative was to joke about his blindness, and he saw that as vulgar ingratiation — not beneath him, but a distortion of how he regarded his blindness. When his book appeared, his true responsibility would be known.
As though commiserating, Wolfbein was talking about someone he knew who had macular degeneration — how sad it was — and Steadman seemed to surprise him by saying, “That might be the best thing that ever happened to him. What’s his profession?”
“That’s the point,” Wolfbein said. “He’s a writer, like you. He needs his eyes.”
“He doesn’t. He’ll be a better writer,” Steadman said.
“I don’t get it.”
“Our eyes mislead us,” Steadman said.
“I hope you’re right.”
“You’re looking at me as though I’m a cripple,” Steadman said. “Your eyes deceive you.”
“What do I know?” Wolfbein said, insincerely, helplessly conceding it, as if deferring to a cripple, changing the subject.
Steadman said, “Harry, you’re not convinced. You’re thinking I am a poor bastard trying to make the best of it, putting a brave face on his handicap, saying, ‘Cripples have a lot to teach us!’ Because I’m a hopeless case, banging into walls, grinning into empty space, stumbling down stairs, with food on my chin.”
“I don’t think that,” Wolfbein said, but still he sounded insincere.
“‘The blind man shits on the roof and thinks that no one sees him,”’ Steadman said. “Arab wisdom.”
“Don’t be a putz.”
Steadman could sense the man’s uneasiness. Wolfbein was trying to be a friend. He was so overwhelmed by the sight of Steadman, transformed with dark glasses and a white cane, he did not know how to conceal his pity. And so, more than ever, Steadman was sure he had done the right thing in showing up here. He would never have known this otherwise.
But between his up-island house and this party — between the seclusion of his Gothic villa, with its long blind nights and sexual revelations, and the glare of this public appearance — there was nothing. Anyway, wasn’t that the point? He was glad to attend such a lavish party, because it allowed everyone he knew here to see at once what had happened to him.