As Manfred leaned closer, the leather jacket tightened on his arms and across his back, like a belt being cinched and strained. Steadman could smell the worn and chafed leather, the damp corduroys, the long hair. Being frugal, leering at Steadman’s clothes and eyeing him sideways, insinuating himself into Steadman’s life — all that was a certain smell, too. And Steadman saw how similar he himself was, for all of Manfred’s traits marked him out as someone on the periphery, an ardent fantasist, a solitary eavesdropper, a lonely man, a writer.
Manfred said, “I want to know how it is happened that you are being blind.”
“An accident. A disease.”
“Which one, accident or disease?”
“Both. The disease was an accident. I lost my corneas.” He could tell that Manfred was still leaning, trying to see through the lenses for scars. “They got infected after I was hospitalized. The transplant surgery didn’t work. It was rejected. I have scar tissue. It sometimes happens.”
“When was this?”
“After Ecuador.”
Manfred’s smile of triumph was like a crease that ran the length of his body.
“I like your explanations. ‘Disease.’ ‘Hospital.’ ‘Transplant surgery.’ You know why I like them? Because of the words. ‘Corneas.’ ‘Rejected.’ ‘Scar tissue.’ I like them — they are scheiss. You tell me that you like the truth, so I ask you a question and what do you do? You lie to me.”
Steadman could not bear the man’s certainty, for he searched hard and saw that there was not a shred of doubt in Manfred’s mind.
“Like your president. He has done nothing wrong. He is blind too.”
Manfred had turned as he spoke, and Steadman realized that a TV set was on in the lounge and the president’s image obviously on it with a fragment of voice-over: “Sources in the White House confirm that the president assured them there was never any relationship…”
“You can ask my doctor.” Saying this, Steadman had a twisted picture in his mind of Ava howling.
Manfred said, “Your girlfriend doctor who says bad things about me also.”
His clumsiness made the accusation more hurtful somehow, and so Steadman merely faced him without emotion, hoping to confound him.
“I want for you to say the truth,” Manfred said.
“I’m not lying to you.”
“One word you are not saying.”
Steadman resolved not to let the man rile him, and he stared back, implacable in his dark glasses.
“It is the drug. Say that to me. ‘It is the drug.’”
“That was the beginning. The disease came afterward.”
“I don’t think so.” He wasn’t finished, but as he spoke, he turned and swallowed whatever he was going to say next. He looked in the direction of an approaching sound, not footsteps but the swish and flap of loose clothes.
“Mr. Steadman?”
A woman. He summed her up in just the saying of his name. She was slight, rather thin, with fragrant hair and a perfumed neck and a click of small finger joints and something in her throat — a stickiness, a tension that told him she was anxious and sexual.
“They said you were in here. I didn’t mean to interrupt, but would you please sign my book?”
Steadman was keenly aware of Manfred’s hostility, which was also a smell rising from his angry stiffened body.
“Be glad to.”
“Thanks so much,” she said, and held his wrist and placed the book in his hand. She kept a hand on his shoulder as he wrote his name with the usual flourish.
“Maybe I’ll see you later,” she said. “This is so kind of you.” And in an even voice to Manfred: “Sorry, mister.”
At that moment, as she retreated, Steadman felt a heaviness in his eyes, and then in a flicker of faint light he got an actual glimpse of the woman walking away — yes, she was small, in a fluttery pantsuit, but plumper than he had taken her to be. She glanced back with regret and longing, as though leaving with reluctance.
And Manfred, too, was apparent, but he was not the man Steadman had summed up in his blindness. He was a plainer and sadder approximation, not foreign at all but like a distant relative. Steadman realized how differently he had seen the man when he had stared blindly, and he wondered which one was the truth.
The whole experience of this glimpse lasted a few seconds, like a bad bulb flickering on and then failing, for no sooner had he seen Manfred, his features raked by a skeletal light, than he was eclipsed, as the drug took hold again and gripped him, possessing him, in the trance of its own blinding light.
“What were you saying?”
But in those seconds Manfred had stowed his broken tape recorder and gone.
6
THE MEMORY OF Manfred’s accusation gnawed at him. He headed into the remainder of his book tour feeling like a fugitive, his muscles slack with indecision. Because of his blindness he was treated like a celebrity, yet his low spirits killed his enjoyment, and the hearty welcomes he got — people always talking a bit too loudly, a bit too energetically, calling attention to themselves, as though he were not blind but deaf and dimwitted — made him listless and passive. He felt insulted when they yanked on his sleeve, vulnerable when they touched his body.
“I was so happy working on my book, so happy on the Vineyard,” he said to Ava from another hotel room. “Maybe I should have stayed home.”
“Maybe you should have stopped taking the drug.”
“There’s hardly any left.”
She sighed. She said, “How can you face these people?”
“That’s part of the punishment,” he said. “The anticlimax, the violation of being in the world, being observed as a freak.”
“You asked for it.” Without any sympathy she seemed to gloat.
“The thing is, here I am, publishing this personal novel that is not even an inch from the truth.”
“It’s a bestseller. What are you complaining about?”
“No one wants to talk about the book.”
“Then come home.”
“A few more days and I will.”
But the next time he called and spoke of returning home she said, “Why bother? I don’t want to see you in this mood.”
Ava was chilly, distant, back at work, busy: he had come to expect no consolation from her. She didn’t understand his need to continue as a blind man.
He told her that he had to go on taking the drug as long as some remained. When it was gone he would find a way of living without it.
“That’s what addicts always say. Sorry, I’m being paged.” And she hung up.
To Manfred it was his secret. Yet it had never occurred to Steadman that he had a secret. His blindness was something he had discovered as a cure for his silence, which was also his impotence, his frustrated attempts to write a novel. The accident of the drug he had exploited with effort, finding a reward in it when he might have found pain or obstruction or greater impotence. The drug was his virility, yet because of Manfred he found himself reacting defensively, behaving like a sneak, with a secret he went on swallowing, and always on guard against a leading question.
A day and a night in Washington, D.C., followed New York. Steadman took the train and was met at Union Station by the escort, “Everyone calls me Jerry,” an obliquely attentive man who used his deferential butler-like manner to be bossy, evasively insisting that it might be a good idea for Steadman to sign books in Rockville, Maryland. When that was done, they visited a radio station in Chevy Chase, seeming to surprise the interviewer.
“Your life must be so different now,” the interviewer said.
They never used the words “blind” or “blindness.” Were the words so shocking? Yet it was all that anyone wanted to talk about.