The whispering was not all praise, not only amazement. Some of the whisperers were oddly gladdened — because they had been spared, gloating over their good fortune — others were appalled. Some whispers were dark, some blaming, mocking his foppishness, his hat, his cane, his arrogance — his spelling out what he saw in the Sound, like a deaf man whistling Mozart. Some envious guests exaggerated his conceits, for Steadman had been sitting with the president, and what they knew about him they had learned secondhand or had glimpsed in the twilight at the clambake.
The whispers made him a marvel, a freak, a figure of obscure power, somewhat remote even to his friends, known for his arrogance, who was both pitied and feared. He knew that on the Vineyard he was celebrated less for his book than for his being a multimillionaire as a result of the clothing catalogue. So it often happens with such tragedies: in their panic and ignorance people look more closely at each other and notice how frail they are, how damaged and failing, and give thanks for being alive in the shadow of death. Alert to his blindness, saddened by the death of Diana in the mangled car, people went on whispering.
In the succeeding days of gossip Steadman relived the fame he had known as a new resident of the Vineyard, when he had been in the headlines and had kept himself hidden. He was reminded of his notoriety, the fatness of it, his pleasure in the enigma of being satisfied, seeking nothing. Yet there was a great difference, for he was aware that the renewed interest in his work contained a deeper respect, and his writing was now a larger achievement because it was an aspect of his blindness. The handicap he had surmounted was now seen as a strange gift, and in his sad eyes a sort of holiness.
All this in less than a week. Steadman heard the whispers before anyone actually called. He knew that something amazing had occurred, his coincidental link to the death of Princess Diana by his having been sitting at a Wolfbein clambake with the president when the flunky appeared with the fax and the flashlight. The people at the president’s table had been among the first in the entire world to learn the terrible news. These few people were the earliest whisperers, and they approximated the curious admonition of the blinded Steadman, saying to the president and others: Don’t die today. No one will remember.
At last the phone rang, acquaintances called — he had no close friends. Most were the people from the Wolfbeins’ party, the inner circle of celebrities, who lived at such a remove from the ordinary, and kept to themselves, that Steadman was sure the news of his blindness would not travel far, at least for the time being. But because of their celebrity these people would eventually carry the news to the wider world. Soon everyone would know.
In some of the commiserating calls there was a note of concern, less for Steadman than for the speaker, who nearly always sounded fearful and somewhat vulnerable. Steadman wondered if what they feared was the insight granted to him by the crisis of his serious condition — how losing his sight made him especially watchful and alert. He was no longer the aloof and arrogant money man. He was an extraordinary victim. And what could these helpless people say to console him? The truth of the world of mortals is that people fall ill and weaken and die. As a wounded man Steadman was nearer to death than to life, and was reminded of his fate, and so life meant more to him, and he knew more of it and was a hero.
In a few of the phone calls he heard something rueful, almost a lament, bordering on jealousy, for on this island of celebrities his sudden handicap contributed to his being a greater celebrity, as though blindness were not a sickness at all, not a defect, not a disability, but a sort of distinction conferred on him, something to be resented and envied.
He was indifferent. No one knew him well enough to understand the truth of his blindness or the prescience it allowed him. All that mattered was that when the fact of his blindness became common knowledge, as he knew it would, and his name as a writer became known again, he could honestly say that he was working on a book and that his blindness had helped him resume his work.
To be writing was to be alive, to wake up happy and to pick up where he left off. His thinly fictionalized narrative expressed the deepest part of himself, exploring the farthest recesses of his memory, his oldest and most enduring feelings, in the ultimate book of revelation. He knew many writers who had published whole shelves of half-truths and evasions, made-up tales, fables, and concoctions. Sometimes it seemed that was all that writers did — spin yarns. “I’m doing a novel.” “I’m working on a story.” “I’m trying to develop an idea.” But if you used your own blood for ink, and what you wrote was the truth, and your life was the subject, one novel was enough; there was nothing else to know, no more to see, a heart laid bare. So he believed.
What disconcerted Ava was that in the days following the party the callers were mainly women. First were the wives of Steadman’s male friends, inquiring in the kindest way, and then the women he had known for a while before Ava, more oblique than the others, summer women, the unattached, the available ones, the speculators, the still-pretty, the newly divorced. Finally, the urgent callers, women who were strangers to him, who kept to the fringes of the Wolfbeins’ circle, and these were the most insistent on seeing him soon.
“I want to help you.”
What one woman said one morning, demanding, offering everything — this mothering, rescuing, bossing — stood for all the long conversations. Steadman took the calls while Ava sat nearby, halted in her dictation, glaring into the middle distance where the tape recorder lay turned off, exasperated, in an accusing silence, resenting the calls, hating every second of his being on the phone. All this was the consequence of his showing up at the party.
“That’s very kind of you.”
“Anything.” Was this the woman who had touched him, embraced him, offered herself to him at the party? “What can I do?”
“I’m busy at the moment.”
“I know how tough it must be for you.”
She was kind but persistent, like so many of them. There was something awful in the tone of the pitying people he knew, who possessed the clinging manner, hectoring voice, and unstoppable intrusiveness of telemarketers.
She said, “I could meet you today — this afternoon. Or later. Tonight I am completely free.”
Not hearing the words but somehow knowing, Ava sighed, exhaling harshly, amplifying her breath through her wide-open mouth, almost loud enough to be heard over the phone, making Steadman self-conscious.
“I have to go,” he said. “I’m working.”
Yet before he could resume his dictation, before Ava could make an unanswerable remark in a tone of scolding pity, the phone rang again.
“Slade — I feel I know your work well enough to call you Slade.” Another woman. “I’ve had an enormous amount of experience with visually impaired people.”
She was young, sweet-voiced, solicitous. Steadman imagined beautiful skin, lips close to the receiver in her damp hand, her tense receptive body slightly canted to listen to him.
“My vision is not impaired,” he said.
“I could read to you. I’d love that.”
Ava wanted him to bang down the phone, he knew. But he could not move the phone away from his ear — he kept it clapped against his head. He was fascinated: the woman was offering herself, pleading Take me.
“Where did she get the number?” Ava said.
She knew the caller was a woman, knew what she was saying, knew everything, which was why she was angry at the intrusion.
“Tell your friend that I care about you”—the woman had heard Ava’s question and was answering it. “All telephone numbers are available if you know how to access them.”