“Tell her—” Ava began to interrupt, but was cut off.
“There are no secrets,” the woman said. And just before she hung up: “I’m here for you.”
Then Ava said, “I was afraid of this.”
“Women chasing me?”
“Your calling attention to yourself. That charade at the Wolfbeins’.”
“‘There are no secrets.’ That’s what she said.”
“That should worry you.”
Pretending to sort his papers, aligning his pens and pencils, squaring up a set of notepads, moving the tape recorder, he said nothing and hoped she would stop.
But she spoke into his face: “Because there’s nothing wrong with your eyes. You haven’t even been to the eye doctor. Out of some weird look-at-me bravado, you went to a Vineyard party pretending you were a blind sage and got the president of the United States to believe you.”
“It was worth it.”
“Because you had the best seat in the house to get the lowdown on Diana’s death trip?”
“No. The president. I saw into his soul.”
“Oh, please.”
Ava began to snort, jeering at his pomposity, the grand manner that seemed a posturing part of his blindness. The manner itself was another form of blindness.
But Steadman merely stared at her with his dead eyes and waited for her to stop, knowing that if he persisted in his scrutiny he could unnerve her by boring a hole into her skull with his blank patience. And he felt that maybe he had succeeded, that she was taken aback, because she stopped challenging him with mockery, and when she spoke again she did so in a more reasonable tone.
“When you say things like that I don’t know whether to laugh or start worrying about your sanity.”
“He’s tormented,” Steadman said. “I really pity him. A part of him is lost and he doesn’t want anyone to know it. Imagine the dilemma: the man with the secret is the most conspicuous person in the world.”
“What sort of secret?”
“Something forbidden, something that shames him, like being helpless, smitten.” Steadman’s blank gaze was still fixed on her. “Cunt-struck.”
Ava said, “I’m sure the president would be reassured to know that you care.”
“I agree, strangely enough. Everything matters to him. He’s very thinskinned. And very tenacious. He came from nowhere. And he wants to be a hero.”
“Maybe that’s what you have in common.”
The phone rang before Steadman could reply, and he snatched the receiver as he had all the other times, before Ava could intervene.
It was a different woman. She said, “You touched me,” and hung up.
“I hate this,” Ava said, seeing the expression on Steadman’s face. “You’re pathetic and they’re sad.”
She told him angrily that he was deluding himself in enjoying the phone calls from these strange women. Instead of being strengthened by his blindness, as he had maintained, he had the egotism of an invalid, demanding attention and wanting to be cosseted and needing for his infirmity to be noticed.
“‘Look at me — blind as a bat!’” Ava said, satirizing him. “You love it.”
He wondered if this was true. Yes, he had liked being noticed at the party. It had reminded him of the great days when he had been a celebrated prodigy.
“So I’m as vulgar and susceptible as everyone else — so what? Hey, what about the president?”
“You liked upstaging him.”
“Probably,” Steadman said. “Then Diana died and upstaged us both. What a night.”
He knew that Ava was still staring at him, still annoyed, from the way she breathed.
She said, “Not everyone wishes you well.”
“What does that mean?”
“I’m sure there are people who are glad you’ve been taken down a peg, and others who suspect you’re faking. Anyway, why haven’t you asked me to find you an eye doctor? I could refer you to a specialist.”
“You think I’m faking,” he said. “You’ve been cold.”
The party and all the gossip afterward, the fact of his having reappeared among all those people, this abrupt visibility, were jarring, and so their evenings were changed. The sexual masquerade at night, the delicious routine, was over for now. His being with Ava, blind, for the hours of that party, the president’s arm around him, had had a powerful effect — had sobered them, made them self-conscious, kept them from their usual intimacy. More than that, all this had let blinding light fall on them and exaggerate the space between them.
“I guess so. You’re someone different.”
“I’m writing again,” he said.
Until that night of visibility he had felt that this woman was also inhabiting his skin. He had loved the intensity of their seclusion, loved the shadows over them, the shadows within, the shadows they threw in the bedroom. But going public for the first time since arriving back from Ecuador, and being noticed, even praised for his handicap, had altered things. It was a change of air. Allowing other people into their lives, they had revealed Slade’s secret, the spectacle of his blindness, shocking everyone with the obvious ailment and keeping the deeper truth hidden.
“It’s a trick,” she said.
Not blindness at all, she went on, but a state of luminous euphoria brought on by a jungle potion. You reached for a bottle, you took a drink, and you were in a brighter, blazing room, and the room opened onto the world.
That last telephone call (“You touched me”) had exasperated Ava and left Steadman murmuring. They faced each other, seeing only the walls.
“Deny that it’s a trick,” Ava said.
But Steadman had no denial, nor anything else to say. Then, nagged by what he remembered, he said, “What do you mean, eye doctor? Why should I go to an eye doctor?”
“You have a condition without a name.”
“It’s called blindness.”
“Blindness is a result, an induced condition, because you’ve been taking that drug,” Ava said. “Or why else do you have it?”
Steadman turned away and stumbled slightly, hating his unsteadiness, resenting Ava’s accusations and wishing that he was dictating his book to her instead of listening to her. She was still talking!
“Blindness always has a cause. It has an etiology, a pathology. Do you want a lecture on the visual cortex and the neurological basis of visual imagery? Blind people are always experts on their condition. They lecture doctors about retinitis and macular degeneration, they know all about PET scans and functional MRIs. About cataracts, the various ways of operating, the recovery time, the risks of infection.”
“So what?”
“For you it’s metaphysical. It’s mystical. All you do is gloat over your blindness. You love the attention. You love people talking about you and calling you. Those sentimental women.”
“They don’t ask why I’m blind.”
“But the president did. I saw you squirming and evading the question. He wanted to help you. He wants to find you a doctor. You looked ridiculous in your hemming and hawing.”
“He understood that I’m blind. He also understood that I’m hypervisual, I’m prescient. I see more than anyone. I could smell his anxiety, I could hear it when he was talking about something completely unrelated — his mention of Chuck Berry. I could differentiate people at the party by their smell alone.”
“Do you want people to know that you got your blindness out of a bottle?”
Now he saw what she was hinting at. She was right: going to the party had exposed him to the possibility of questions he couldn’t answer truthfully. And there would be more questions. He needed a better explanation; he needed a story.
“They want to help you,” Ava said, and she laughed at the thought of it, but it was a shallow, wounded laugh.