“Isn’t this fun?”
Fun was not his word; for him it was unimaginable rapture. Having all this time to touch her, to attend to her, serving her. Yet he couldn’t describe it, and he could only thank her by being ever more willing. He wanted to tell her through his obedience: I will do anything you ask.
“Have a seat, honey,” she said gently, and helped him in the right direction.
But it was not a chair. It was much softer than a seat cushion, and springier. It was the edge of the bed, he guessed, but before he could be sure, her arms were around him, the soft white giantess enclosing him, her body against him. He was wooden, blind, inert, yet joyous from the crush of her clothes, the blouse he had chosen, the pleated skirt, the straps and softness of her lingerie, and her skin so damp where his fingers clung.
“Baby,” she was saying, “baby.”
He allowed himself to be stifled in all the textures of her embrace.
“Hold me, baby.”
He did so, limply at first, testing her, then fiercely.
Her hungry mouth and soft lips were on his face. He had never imagined being been kissed like this — urgently licked, her flower-scented saliva on his lips and tongue, the heat from her nostrils on his cheek as she breathed and kissed him again. Her loose blouse slipped against her curves. He could feel her flesh beneath the cloth, her tight bra and the stiff cups of her enclosed breasts. He knew every stitch of her now, the skirt, the stockings, the panties, the garter clips he had fastened, the fringe of lace he had explored with his fingers.
She took his hand and eased it between her thighs, guiding it to the heat beneath all those tangled pleats, the pleasing roughness of lace, the straps and clasps. Everything he touched counted as her body, all the clothes, the silky hair, and, at its deepest, delighting him even as his wrist ached from the angle of his reaching under her, he knew he had found her secret self. This part of her body was not dark at all but highly colored, blood red and gleaming, a squashy pocket of lace and flesh, with something warm and damp alive inside it, like the secret of life.
She began to cry, at least it seemed as though she were sobbing, as she pressed her body against his face, rumpling his blindfold, so that he felt the silk and stitching against his lips. He remembered — not in words but as a yearning — how he had wanted to chew on her beautiful clothes, almost frightening himself with his memory of how he had wanted to eat her.
“Let me, let me,” she said.
He did not know what she meant until he sensed the panties go loose on him, and she worked them free of his legs with her long arms.
Then he was naked, blindfolded, climbing on her as she toppled backward onto the bed. She pulled him nearer, balancing him and finally opening her legs for him, and as she snatched at her tumbling clothes to receive him, he marveled at how they fitted, his body on hers.
He was not raw anymore. Her cool fingers had enclosed him, and there was the cooler sensation of her silks as she stroked him and used him to push more deeply inside, to the hottest part of her body. She tightened on him until he could not stand it and could only whimper, as if among all the lips, silks, and flesh he were penetrating a flower, scattering rose petals. And after it ceased, the last petal falling, and he shivered and gasped and went cold, she was howling into his mouth for more.
He slept a little and woke drooling on her breast. His blindfold was off but the room was in darkness. He couldn’t see, he had no idea where he was, he didn’t know his own name. The woman’s body was an island where he had washed ashore, cast up and saved by a furious wave.
He remained perfectly still, trying to remember, afraid to speak.
She said, “Playing isn’t wrong.”
The kindness in her voice gladdened him.
She said, “We can do this every day.”
He wanted to say yes, but did not dare to say anything, fearful of how his voice would sound, for she had turned him inside out, and now he was at his nakedest.
“This is our secret,” she said. “You can dress me. You’re not going to tell anyone, are you?”
“No,” he said, obeying her, hearing a note of urgency in her voice, needing him to say no.
“Will you let me make you happy?” she asked.
He said yes with his body, and she asked him again.
“Yes, Mrs. Bronster.”
Then she let go of him. She pleaded with him, seeming to beg him with the heavy flesh of her own struggling body: “If you tell anyone, I’ll harm you.”
He turned away, reaching for his blindfold, but after the room went quiet there was no need for the blindfold. She was gone.
At dinner she was still wearing the clothes he had chosen. He loved sitting at the table with quacking Tom and cranky Nita, talking about everything except that. The clothes meant everything — that he possessed her, that she possessed him: that was their secret. She had made him her blind and willing lover. She had made him a man.
“First love,” he said in a whisper to Ava, and she slipped off his silken blindfold.
Everything he had seen in his mind’s eye, everything the datura made possible, that he had remembered and relived of his hidden life, of his sexual history, all that and more he had dictated to Ava. There was so much of it, for the larger part of his life he had lived in secret. He was gratified by the symmetry of it, its reality, its oddness, and he reflected that the rarest thing in books or movies, in which decapitation and rape and outrage were commonplace, was the simple joyous act of two lovers fucking.
In his interior narrative he had taken a longer and more difficult journey than the one he had described in Trespassing. There was frailty and failure, too, embarrassments and risk. Yet he never felt more powerful than he had on those nights and days, blindly revisiting his past. That power vitalized his belief in the chronicle of second chances that he had relived with Ava as every passion he had ever known.
Long ago, as a solitary boy, he had not understood the meaning of his desires. Now, enacted in the blinding light of the drug, they were coherent. The fulfilled yearning of youth was the only passion that mattered. He told himself that what he imagined was also real. What he had wanted and never gotten had made him who he was; what had lain buried in his memory was dragged out of the darkness and given life. And nothing was more sexual than the forbidden glimpses of his past, nothing truer than his fantasies. He called it fiction because every written thing was fiction.
So his work was done. The past made sense. At last he had his novel, The Book of Revelation, and he could face the world again.
FOUR. Book Tour
1
HE WAS EUPHORIC at having finished his book, relieved of a burden he had carried like an uncomplaining drudge for so long it had cut and wounded him, enfeebling his body. All that suspense, the thing not done and tentative, the fragment of a promise kept in a stack of notes and tapes, had made him feel incomplete. His shattered sense of having been injured, of needing to heal, was nothing glorious — not the secret agony that was said to be the source of art. The dull pain had made him feel like a lower animal in the slow process of regenerating a limb from a broken stump. Now his work done, he was active again, whole and happy.
Except for some tidying up — the last transcripts and edits — Steadman had his book. This reward for all the years of silence, something at last his own, was a sexual confession in the form of a novel. He was at first so lightheaded he did not miss the datura tea he had drunk every working day in order to find the thread of his narrative. He was jubilant, with the exquisite thrill of his past revealed and understood.