“Just the name of his newspaper. German.”
“Have you tried the Internet?”
“I’m blind. I am Steadman, the blind writer.”
“I’m sorry.”
“No you’re not.”
“I wish I could help.”
“No you don’t.”
No wonder some blind people could be so bitter, so angry, so selfish, for they were always encountering oafs who said things like that, who sounded secretly pleased that they were able to be obstructive or worse, encumbering the blind with their smug pity.
She was a flunky — a blind man deserved better. His indignation was a pretense but his annoyance with the woman was real. He had no second thoughts about his decision to go public as a blind man. That woman was an exception, because most of the time he was amused by the attention lavished on him for his supposed disability. Yet he was blind. His greatest satisfaction was that he was hardly handicapped at all, that he was superior in every important way to the incompetents and gropers and busybodies who claimed they wanted to help him.
Manfred’s contact number was all he needed. But as time passed even that seemed less urgent.
He began to go out alone, to Vineyard Haven to shop, to Oak Bluffs to have a drink at the Dockside bar where he had brought Ava on that first date, to restaurants in Edgartown. After so long in seclusion he loved being in public, enjoying the attention. A blind person was watched everywhere, like a fragile vase wobbling on a narrow shelf — what if it topples, what if it shatters? People hovered and held their hands out as though to break Steadman’s fall. To alarm them the more he walked faster when he knew he was being observed by someone very nervous, and he took long strides, defiant ones, swiping with his cane, like a man whipping at long grass.
Women were especially solicitous: he loved their whispers, their soft sidelong glances, their fumbling concern, their warm, well-intentioned hands. Up to a point he accepted their help, just to smell them. They were redolent with longing, saturated with emotion, moist with desire, tremulous with thwarted motherhood; they touched because they needed to be touched themselves. He allowed himself to be stroked. He went no further, though he could have possessed them completely.
Ava was taken care of, preoccupied at the hospital, but she was still in his life. When she arrived home and he asked her how her day had gone, she refused to describe it except in futile terms, as a series of pious ordeals: “We lost someone today,” or “A woman was medevaced to Boston.” There were fewer patients than in the summer, but the ailments were more serious. She made a point of ignoring the Christmas holiday, and worked on Christmas Day and New Year’s Eve, too, with her doctor’s martyred cry, “They need me.”
Everyone on the island said she was an angel, but Steadman knew that by taking on such responsibility at the hospital she had a free pass everywhere else — didn’t have to shop, or cook, or clean, or give presents, or socialize, and so Steadman felt abandoned. He couldn’t complain about being ditched by a doctor. No one would listen, for whose work was more important? From their commanding position on the moral high ground, doctors always had the last word.
Odd to think that she had been his reckless and sensual lover. But Steadman guessed that she looked back on their time together doing the book as frivolous. He wanted her to say this, so that he could reply, You are mistaken. It was revelation. What revelation is there in illness? The pathetic truth that people are frail and they sicken and die. Only the vitality of sex reveals the human essence.
But she was angry. He played the conversation in his head. He went for walks. He pondered what he had written of sexuality and risk, and one day the news came out — horribly, awkwardly, first as a rumor, then as a disputed denial — that the president had had a flirtation, perhaps an affair, with one of the young female interns at the White House.
The speculation was preposterous. The simplest version sounded bad enough. Steadman remembered how he had guessed at the poor man’s confusion months before.
I want to say one thing to the American people. I want you to listen to me. I’m going to say this again. I did not have sexual relations with that woman, Miss Lewinsky. I never told anybody to lie, not a single time. Never. These allegations are false. I never had sex with that woman.
The president spoke, beating the air with his finger. Seeing the pink and sleepless face, the humiliated and guilty mask of an adulterer, Steadman said, “Poor guy.”
But Ava was contemptuous. “How could he be such a fool?”
“He was smitten,” Steadman said.
Ava’s expression said, I don’t get it.
The revelation of the president’s waywardness overwhelmed everything else. It was all the talk on the Vineyard, and on the news-hungry earth. That the president of the United States had gotten blowjobs in the Oval Office from a chubby Jewish girl in her early twenties was world news.
Steadman watched closely as the messy story unfolded. He guessed that if Manfred was a foreign correspondent, he must be covering it for his newspaper. Steadman was provoked to do something he had avoided up to now. He typed “Manfred Steiger” into his computer and got seventeen hits: stories in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, all with a Washington dateline. But he did not attempt to get in touch with Manfred.
People who disliked the president before now hated him and were gleeful. His supporters faced the dilemma of explaining his behavior, or even justifying it. Most people’s marital embarrassments were minor compared to the president’s from late January onward.
What was he thinking? It was the only topic of conversation these days, the president’s face fixed in an expression of defiance and shame, looking like a fool.
Steadman was certain that his Book of Revelation would have greater resonance in a world bewildered by the fact that the most powerful man in the world had risked his whole reputation, his job, his marriage, the respect of his friends, in order to meet a pushy, privileged, fattish, and unappealing young woman and encourage her to fellate him while he sat glassy-eyed with lust in his White House office.
It wasn’t strange at all, really, though you could hardly blame the president for denying it. It was at the heart of Steadman’s book, for safe inside the White House, having his cock sucked, the president was briefly a happy boy.
With all the lies and evasions and half-truths he had told, the president was miserable, and yet he clung to power. He repeated that he would not give up, would not resign, would go on no matter how loud the mockery and the declarations of hatred. The hatred was not new, but the pity was something terrible. Steadman could tell that the president was chastened and weakened by the pity and that he found it hard to bear.
Seeing the man so embattled, Steadman took his side, but he knew in advance that the president’s disgrace offered other ways for Ava and him to pick on each other.
“He stepped on his dick, I grant you. He’s behaved like a fool. But what has he done wrong?”
“I’d be out on my ear if I did that,” Ava said. “If I were caught fucking an orderly in my office I would be fired, no questions asked.”
“No one is hurt by it. And he’ll have to endure the worst possible punishment — the whole world laughing at him and feeling superior. That’s a nightmare.”
“My father was in the Navy,” Ava said. But she spoke in a tone of resignation, not outrage. “If he had done that he would have been shit-canned or demoted and posted to Diego Garcia. The president is the commander in chief of the armed forces.”