When he had said that to Ava, she had replied, “They’re seeing what didn’t happen to you. Why are you misleading them? This is such crap. You can see perfectly well.”
“No. I can see better this way. Only they don’t know it.”
Ava cringed whenever the partygoers expressed their sympathy for him. And it was worse for her when they commiserated with her, confiding their fears. They clucked and urged him to be brave, and all the while Steadman was laughing and protesting, “I’m fine. I’m working again. I’m doing a book.”
Wolfbein said, “No reflection on Ava, but are you seeing a good doctor?”
“I am seeing what is not visible,” he said. “And I am seeing more of Ava than you will ever know.”
Wolfbein had been joined by his wife, Millie. She kissed him, her large soft breasts cushioning her embrace. She said, “I’m really glad you came.”
“So am I,” Steadman said. “I didn’t realize until I got here that it was such a big deal. Whom are you expecting?”
In the silence that ensued he could tell that she exchanged looks with her husband, hers a meaningful frown that mimed, Who told him?
“It’s someone important,” Steadman said, sure of himself.
“Whose mind have you been reading?”
“There are so many people here who don’t belong. I don’t mean guests. I mean lurking heavies, muttering men. The tension, too. Some people suspect, some don’t.”
He knew Millie was smiling, and he could hear the flutter of her heart.
“All this apprehension,” he said. “What are you waiting for?”
“POTUS.”
“What’s that?”
“Elvis.”
“I knew it.”
Millie squeezed his hand and left him, and a heavy breather he knew as Hanlon massaged his shoulder, said, “Great to see you”—the blind, Steadman now knew, were constantly being touched. Since arriving at the party he had been pinched, fingered, handled, steered, all by well-intentioned people.
Even Ava touched him when she reappeared. He said, “The president’s coming.”
“Cut it out,” she said, but he sensed her looking around and recognizing the oddities — the generator, the buzzing phones, the extras, who must have been security men.
The president was on the island — everyone knew that — and there was always a possibility of his appearing, since Wolfbein was a friend and a fundraiser. But of all the guests, Steadman alone knew with certainty that it would happen. He understood the voltage that seemed to run through the party, heard the scattered cell phone crackle, the awkwardness of the advance team.
The party guests saw only the people they knew; he saw everyone. The deck and the garden were full of people, but near the big garage and among the trees were the president’s support crew and the mute, watchful Secret Service people. Beyond this crowd was another crowd.
Before anyone else, before the Wolfbeins even, Steadman knew that the president’s car had drawn up at the front of the house, and after the president was greeted in the driveway by his hosts, Steadman was the first to know when he came near and presented himself. It was a pulsing in the air and a heartbeat — distinctly the president’s, distinctly quickening, an ugly flutter of embarrassment.
The moment the president entered the room, Steadman felt a change in the atmospheric pressure. Then some people turned; others were still talking. There was a rattle in the air, an anxiety, the president exposed, prowling yet seeming like prey. The hot concentrated gazes of the guests were all directed one way, making a crease in the room.
“I can’t believe he’s talking to Mike Nichols.”
“Roth,” Steadman said.
Philip Roth was chuckling. “Mike is saying, ‘I should have put you in my movie. You’re perfect. Why did I use John Travolta?’ See his face?” Then he clasped Steadman’s arm, a bit too tightly. “Oh, Jesus, Slade, I’m so sorry.”
But Steadman said, “I can see his face. He looks more complicated than I expected.”
The party became circular, electrified and orderly like a magnetic field, the whole house in motion, with the president at the center and the first lady at the periphery, another eddying motion, people wheeling around her.
Noticing that Steadman was carrying a white cane and wearing dark glasses, the unmistakable props of blindness, with his head alert, looking proud in his obvious posture of listening, the partygoers gave him a wide berth, which allowed him to slip nearer and nearer to the current of the force field, toward the president, whom he could make out as a warm pink smiling being, hyperattentive and talkative at the center of a large admiring group.
Likable, friendly, sexually obsessed, everyone knew his traits: charming, needy, subtly competitive, willing to woo, craving power and adulation in such a compulsive way, yet indifferent to personal wealth, not materialistic, funny, intelligent, eager to please. And because of all of this, especially his strange deflecting smile, he conveyed the strong impression of trying to live something down, that he was burdened by secrets.
To Steadman he was like a high school senior from an ambiguous background who fought desperately for influence, eager to charm everyone, to be the student-body president. He had the high school attitude toward money, too — the insight that money was not power, that only persuasiveness and approval were power, and the president craved approval.
The president was speaking in his easy unhesitating drawl to Mike Nichols, an enthusiastic assertion about a movie, but he was also speaking to his dazzled listeners. Steadman approached and at once the group parted for him, and the way the human heat was bulked in that opening conveyed to Steadman the physicality of the man, the confident way he was standing, gripping one man’s shoulder, holding a woman’s hand. He eased her against him for a photographer, all the while talking to Nichols about the movie, which was The Barefoot Contessa.
“I was fourteen, fifteen, just a kid, sitting there in the movie theater in Hot Springs and going like this!”
Steadman saw the self-mocking dumbfounded face and heard the grunt and the appreciative laughter. And then the president reached out and drew Steadman beside him, into the center of the circle of listeners.
“Slade Steadman, Mr. President,” a wheezy man said, stepping forward, cutting Steadman off, trying to be helpful.
This meddling was Steadman’s first experience of his blindness marking him out as a deaf lump of inert flesh, incapable of fending for himself.
“I know who this guy is,” the president said. “How’re you doing?”
“Changed a little but doing fine.”
“Harry told me you might be coming. I am really glad you could make it.”
Steadman replied to the president, but looked at the wheezy man as he said, “I see more than you might think.”
“You are one brave guy,” the president said.
“You mean these?” Steadman said, and tapped the black lenses of his glasses. “Like Ishmael says, darkness is indeed the proper element of our essences.”
He was going to say more, but the president interrupted him. “I mean Trespassing. I can’t tell you how much I admire it.”
“I know you’ve got taste, Mr. President. Friend of mine, Redmond O’Hanlon, was at Oxford with you and said you had a whole shelf of Graham Greene.”
The president touched Steadman again, and like the others at the party kept touching him, as if to reassure him. It was a gesture Steadman had begun to hate in bystanders, for the insult of its pity, for its patronage, its distrust, its intrusive fuss. And yet the president’s touch was different — revealing — giving so much away, the man’s anxiety and weakness and secrecy in the uneven pressure of his fingers, as though he were steadying himself, drawing off energy and finding his balance by holding on to Steadman.