Sex was a form of departure, a passionate sacrifice of farewell, and even his writing these days had the unanswerable finality of a suicide note. Take that! he thought with grim pleasure. He wanted to write everything down so there would be nothing more to say and no more to remember, to burn out his self so he could vanish.
Opening the drawer of his filing cabinet, he smiled at the large glass jar that held the dark tea of the datura. He wagged it slowly, stopping at intervals to examine how well the residue had dissolved, and this mechanical motion helped him look ahead to the morning of work.
He needed to think aloud in the form of dictation, because he was troubled by a paradox he did not fully understand. The act of sex, so well planned as an end in itself, seemed to suggest a sequel, by giving you courage, by helping to uncover a related desire, something else, a particular image — last night the glimpse of a pretty garter of lace on the moonlit skin of her thigh, her gown hiked up in a hurry. This enhancement was an invitation: certain clothes seemed to beckon. And he, who had imagined that sex with Rosemarie Fredella on that prom night had been his earliest sexual ambition, the origin of his desire, saw something deeper. This flimsy scrap of lace stirred him again like a fetish object, and he wondered what it meant and where it led.
Two other details also unexpectedly aroused him. He believed he had thought of everything, but no. The interruption of the policeman — the surprise, the drama, the suspenseful moonglow after he had gone — was one. And then, without having been told anything, the way that Ava had further tantalized him by pausing, switching on the overhead light in the car, and turning away with the coy hauteur of a high school coquette. Forcing him to watch and wait, she had put on makeup. He had sat back sighing, loving the chance to see her face change. He was transfixed by her vivid mask, the sharp symmetry of lips and cheeks picked out of the humid shadows of greens and reds in the highlights of her eyes. As though she were saying to his reflection in the mirror, knowing what she could stir in his guts, I am making my face look fuckable.
That was going into the book today, as soon as Ava appeared and he could levitate himself with a dose of his drug and begin dictation. His book would be the last word, something for people who had lived a lot — not a beginner’s book, not even a book for those who praised Trespassing, not for children or schools, not to be studied but to be lived. The book’s subjects were blindness and lust, offering no moral, nothing except the peculiar reality of one man’s transgressions, the way back, as a sort of atonement for having been silent for so long.
How he hated the books people praised and recommended to him. Blindness had shown him what a sham they were. Blindness had shown him the folly of such praise. Blindness allowed him to hear the nonsense that people uttered. Blindness had rid him of his faith and all his sentimentality and had led him here, to contemplate his sexual history. And blindness had given him the strength to reenact it, for his book. There could be no other books.
“What would be the point of learning Braille?” he had said to a well-meaning woman. “What on earth would I want to read?”
He remembered everything he had ever read. There was too much. A great deal of it he wished to forget. He raised the jar of muddy liquid and, seeing a ring of residue darkening the bottom, the grainy dregs of datura, gave it another shake.
“Look who’s wide awake,” Ava said, entering the room looking aloof and casually efficient in a T-shirt and shorts. She was barefoot, carrying a mug of coffee in one hand, her doctor’s bag in the other. Her face was scrubbed, a slight redness where his stubble had chafed her cheek and a small swollen serration on her upper lip where he might have bitten her — he liked to think of the bruise as showing his teeth marks.
In other respects Ava seemed a completely different person from the one of the night before, his prom date, a perfect memory of a longing accomplished — fulfillment. Had she seemed the same woman, he would have found it hard to dictate his book to her. Even so, he felt awkward, not sure of how to greet her.
“Got a letter for you,” she said. She handed him a thick business-sized envelope.
Addressed to him through his publisher, it had been forwarded to his post office box. Steadman looked at the return address and saw Manfred Steiger scribbled in pen above the bold printed name of a German company. Using all his strength, Steadman tore the envelope in half and tossed it into the wastebasket as Ava looked on. She was smiling, but her smile was a question.
“No letter that long can possibly be interesting,” he said.
“Maybe it’s not a letter. Maybe it’s a manuscript.”
“Even worse,” he said, and then, “What’s that for?”
Ava had put her mug down and taken her stethoscope out of the bag.
“I’m wondering what that stuff is doing to you,” she said. “Have you drunk your dose today?”
“Not yet.”
He lifted his shirt and let her listen with her stethoscope. Then she cinched his arm with the black cuff and pumped the bulb and read his blood pressure, studying the gauge.
“How does it look?”
“A little above normal, but fine. Now have a drink. Keep that thing on your arm.”
“Give me a minute,” he said, and as Ava sipped her coffee he unscrewed the lid of the jar and poured half the mixture into a tumbler. Holding the tumbler in two hands, in self-conscious veneration, like a priest at an altar, he lifted it and drank the liquid slowly in a number of reverent swallows. And then he smiled and stumbled a bit as he went to the sofa, already cloudy-eyed, and when he sat a new day took shape around him — new colors and sounds, subtler ones, more birds, sharper odors, his mind fully engaged. Ava smelled of soap and talc, and her shampoo had given her hair a fruity aroma, and there was a hint, a tang, of freshly cut grass — green clippings on her shoes that were darkened by dew drops and a smack of mud.
“You’ve been out?” he said dreamily.
“Not far. A walk around the garden.”
She was kneeling, pumping the bulb, inflating the cuff. And then in stages, letting out the air, she read his blood pressure again.
“It’s a miracle drug. Your blood pressure is way down. Better than normal — a young man’s heart.” She took out a small pencil-shaped flashlight. “Look at me,” she said, and shone the light into his eyes, peering in.
“See anything?”
“Nothing.”
“Neither do I,” she said. “Your pupils stay dilated.”
Instead of the glimmer of the light, or any object, he saw her seriousness, and he smiled, feeling superior for being something of a riddle. Much as he was reassured by Ava’s concern, admiring her medical skill, her deftness in using her instruments and examining him, he liked her puzzlement much more, a doctor saying I don’t know. He enjoyed her confusion. On this one subject, at any rate, the effects of the datura, she was ignorant. So it was all still his secret.
She had put her instruments away and seated herself, had found her clipboard and pad, and was already clicking her ballpoint.
“Last night,” he said. “That was everything I wanted.”
Even so, praising her extravagantly, he was doubtful. He wanted her to deny what he said or to offer an insight. Maybe she, too, suspected an incompleteness.
“And you put your heart into it,” he said.
“I’m younger than you, but I went to high school, too,” she said. “I had a prom date.”
“Who with?”
“That would be Jeff Ziebert.” She smiled, saying the irrelevant name.