Ava was sometimes Ava and sometimes Dr. Katsina, depending on the time of day, and their nighttime relationship was the more passionate for their daytime detachment. Needing her so badly in order to get on with his book, he was grateful for her being there, but he was so dependent he was at times resentful—not toward her but toward the whole scheme of creation. He wanted to be a beacon, a prophet. And the fact was that without her he would have been nothing but a harmless paranoiac, a secret king, living in seclusion, impotently, frivolously fantasizing to a whirring machine.
THREE
The Book of Revelation
1
ONCE, NOT THAT LONG before, Ava had seemed just a face and figure, another woman, but loving, desirable, bright. Now she was the living embodiment of his ideal woman—a comforter, a partner, a protector, a helper, a healer, a friend; and she was hungrier than he was. He loved to think that she never said no, that she initiated sex. I am waiting for you. Come here.
She had become his life, his greatest friend, and his need was deeper than love. She was his companion, she was his mistress, she dominated him, she attended him, she was both his soothing submissive nurse and his bossy doctor. He depended on her for everything. She took orders, and in serving him she guided him, became part of his days and nights. Though she had said she would never do such a thing, she had vacated her Vineyard Haven house and moved in with him up-island. Now the whole estate was as much hers as his. She was his secretary, encouraging him in his dictation and operating the tape recorder. She was everything but his eyes—he had his own eyes. But she was in his work, helping him live it, helping him write it. She was half his book, as she put it: the blind man’s lover.
She still fought him, accusing him of pomposity, but the proof that he had been profoundly changed was evident in his work. He admitted to her that the moment he had felt the most liberated by his blindness was the moment he needed her the most, realizing that he could not live without her. He did not question this paradox. He could not separate those two contradictions. In his darkness he held out his eager hand to grope forward, and she grasped it with her uncertain hand and led him onward.
“I feel responsible for your blindness.”
“Now you’re the one who’s boasting.”
“Wasn’t it an awful shock?”
“No, I’m a new man.”
A year ago, it had been her idea to go to Ecuador, on the jungle drug tour. The blindness that resulted, Steadman said, was his good fortune. He had gone looking for an idea, anything to write; he had never thought he would have a second chance, another book, a real life. In the face of Steadman’s apparent irrationality Ava desired to take the blame. But there was no blame. He had seen into her heart, he needed her, he was only grateful.
“You’ve given me life,” he said.
“My life, unfortunately—I’m not working, I haven’t done any doctoring for months, and the hospital keeps calling to say they’re shorthanded,” she said. “But maybe that’s what love is, a kind of selfish sacrifice. The illusion that you’re giving someone your life.”
“Don’t call it love,” he said, and became extravagant. “You’re a shepherdess, a shaman, a priestess.”
She said, “Just don’t ask me to marry you.”
He laughed with surprise and relief.
“Because I never want to give you that power over me. And I don’t want any myself.”
“What do you want?”
“What you want—pleasant surprises. Go into the library and wait for me.”
He did as he was told, and saw that the stained-glass windows he had installed to protect his books from the sun were darkened by the gloomy afternoon, each color in each panel like a distinct aroma that was fading. He stood, not knowing what was in store, but savoring what he knew would be pleasurable. Facing the dim colors of the windows, he heard the library door open and shut.
She had changed her clothes: she wore a white blouse, a short skirt, high heels. She walked to the leather sofa in the corner of the room and sat on its far end, in the shadows.
“Touch me.”
He approached, trying to suppress his eagerness, and he knelt before her, sliding his hand between her thighs, plucking at her panties.
“You’re wet.”
“Not enough.” She guided his hand until it seemed to sink, and she sighed as he stroked her.
Then she leaned forward, unbuttoned the front of her blouse, and tugged his head forward as the dancer had done to her in Boston. She slapped his face with her breasts, holding them, one in each hand, manipulating her nipples.
“Touch me again.”
He did so, with his face cradled in the warmth of her breasts, and found that she was wetter, sweetened with moisture, her panties clinging, heavier. He lifted her skirt, parted her legs and began to mount her.
“No,” she said, and taking advantage of his getting to his feet, she gripped his cock and folded her breasts around it and chafed the hard thick thing between their softness, and when he began to pant she used her breasts to lift it to her mouth, and finished him off by sucking him slowly into her throat.
All this without removing her clothes. She passed her fingers over the slickness on her lips, swallowed again, and said, “That’s what I mean.”
She knew him so well, and she was able to say so in a mock-dramatic way, teasing him with her understanding. She could demonstrate, like that, the interlude in the library, that he needed her. Now he felt safe with her. He had never been so content, so stimulated, so greedy for more. He could depend on her, could share all his secrets.
Early on, the second time they had met, when she was just starting at the Vineyard hospital, delivering babies, setting bones, performing appendectomies, tying tubes, he had said, “Like everybody else, I’ve been married before.”
Her smile, her reckless eyes, made her seem strong, and so his expression softened. She said, “Generalizations are great. They show you’re impatient and not fussy.”
“You mean about everyone being married? But it’s true. It’s like everyone gets a driver’s license. And later you’re amazed you passed and that you didn’t have more accidents.”
“Some people need to be single,” she said, with a confidence that meant she was single. “And some people need to be smugly married.”
He made a pretense of thinking a moment, so that the delay, the silence, would help her remember. Then, eyeing her, he said, “And some people learn by doing.”
Steadman’s marriage had been brief and, from the beginning, bewildering. The wedding—ridiculous, expensive, a mockery—was just confusion, like a pretentious ritual before a bloody battle; and later, when arguing exhausted and confounded them both, and there was no obvious purpose in fault-finding except pettiness, he took refuge in a despairing silence. The silence that lay between his wife and himself he remembered as a true darkness.
Marriage seemed to him a sudden loneliness with someone familiar—maybe this happened all the time?—someone who by degrees turned into a stranger. They had met at a party, soon after he had arrived back from his two years of trespassing. Her name was Charlotte, “but please call me Charlie. Everyone does.” He said, “Then I’ll call you Charlotte.” She said she was in marketing, an account executive. He had no idea. She seemed intensely animated in the first weeks of their friendship. Sex made her desirable for her teasing elusiveness, and his infatuation blurred her even more. He had to have her no matter what. He told her he loved her, he promised her everything. Yes, I want to marry you! Her excitement made her beautiful, she said she would do anything to make him happy, and he promised her the same. But marriage made them first strangers and then quarrelers and finally enemies.
The confusing part for him was that her strangeness stimulated their sex life. The stumbling sense that he hardly knew her, that they did not share a common language, made her desirable. He did not know where to begin, so when she made a suggestion—and it was nearly always crude: “I am so horny,” y
es, he understood that—he was immediately aroused, as though the foreign woman he had been staring at from across the room at a party approached him and, reading his mind, said, “Now,” and led him into a nearby bedroom and kicked the door shut.
Charlotte’s haste, her need, and her mood of anonymity were a pleasure to him—perhaps the only one—for she was more a stranger in bed than anywhere else. “Bed” was a euphemism for the various places they made love: the back seat of the car, the bathroom, the hidden pocket beach below West Chop lighthouse. He did not want sex as a gift; he wanted it as a command—and to take turns giving orders. Charlotte taught him that, or at least helped him realize what he wanted. As a stranger she had no inhibitions; she could demand anything of him, he could say anything to her, they could be irresponsible and reckless. She used him, he used her—those were their happiest days. He loved the fact that sexually she was hard to satisfy, always behaving badly, like a selfish person taking advantage of someone unsuspecting.
Early on, she had dropped hints. “Look at that,” she said of a lacy low-cut dress, “it’s real slutty.” And of a pair of stiletto-heeled shoes, “I want a pair of those hump-me pumps.”
Ordinarily she had little conversation, but when she was in the mood for sex she was like a cat, demanding, rubbing against him—or not like a cat at all, but like a predatory woman, a coke whore on a back street pleading for sex. Steadman liked her snatching him and insisting, “Go down on me—yes—more,” while she held his head with both her hands. “Use your finger, too. Yes, like that, harder, deeper, don’t stop, make me come.”
And after she came, convulsed, gagging and squealing, her body bucking, she could be even hungrier, more demanding, but in a pleading and submissive way, on his behalf. “Be rough with me. Call me a cocksucker. Go ahead, make me blow you.” When Steadman was tentative—Where do I begin?—she said, “Rougher, spank me, force me,” and then, as she kicked and he slapped her small hard buttocks, she growled against his cock and became noisily ecstatic, whinnying as she drank him.
Otherwise, most of the time, and always in public, she was a rather prim and passive woman.
She bought clothes, she had her nails done once a week, she read the Wall Street Journal. She was absorbed by her work. “I’ve got a marketing meeting in Cambridge with the salespeople, and I haven’t edited the pitches or read the spreadsheets.” What? Her work was a mystery to him.
But this strangeness, this unexpectedness, made her combative, too, and he often wondered, Who are you? At last Steadman was indifferent. He worked on his book and was so absorbed in it he ended up not knowing her. Fighting with her was meaningless. Their house seemed emptier when they were both inside. He wanted her to go, but he was so exhausted that when he suggested that she go, his voice sounded lazy and detached—so hopeless and speculative he hardly cared.
“I think it’s over, Charlie.”
A year before, during their courtship, when she had become flustered by his excessive questioning, she had said to him, “What you see is what you get,” as though emphasizing her simplicity, almost boasting of her shallowness, primary colors in one dimension, a paper cutout, a little doll. Her facetious warning not to look deeper became her mantra: she had no subtleties, nor any inner meaning. “I’m in sales and marketing! Doesn’t that say it all?”
When he said he doubted that—“You’re not being fair to yourself. There’s always more”—she complained in a rueful wronged tone that she was not hiding anything and that he was the most complicated man she had ever met in her life. He was impractical, he had no savings, no real income, no investments. He had spent his money on a two-year trip around the world. How could you be both a writer and a traveler? Writers stayed home and drove people crazy; travelers didn’t sit long enough to write. But he did both, a profound mystery to her.
“I’ve got to read one of your books,” she had said soon after they met.
He did not tell her that there was only one, that it was not done yet, that he had no money left of his advance.
All this in the last months of his finishing Trespassing, when the manuscript was sitting on his desk. He was so tired from the physical effort of typing the book and imagining it at the same time that he could not look further ahead to its publication. He had never imagined the overwhelming success, the transforming miracle of it: the fame, the wealth, and then the celebrated seclusion that made him notorious and sought after.
But that was afterward, after his tentativeness with Charlotte, his believing that she would understand him only if she had read what he had written.
“I really want to read it,” she said.
The stack of paper, the Trespassing manuscript, was almost eight inches high. He had typed it himself on a manual machine, banging the keyboard with the claws of his hands, watching stiffened insect legs fly up from the oily basket and kick letters onto the page as the bruised ribbon fluttered. The book proceeded letter by jumping letter. He had sickened himself smoking cigarettes while doing it, his pores oozed with tar, his throat ached, he felt poisoned; and that was the end of his cigarette smoking.
She was not daunted by the size of the manuscript. She repeated that she was eager to read it. “Your book, look at it,” she said, in an overly patient, uncritical way, with a slightly affected smile, as though she were describing a puppy.
“There’s a lot of geography in it,” he said. “But I’ve got a set of maps—you won’t get lost.”
How often he remembered his innocence and self-deception in those days, seeing two people quietly talking, the stack of manuscript between them in ream-sized boxes, hopeful and happy, in a kind of paradise, before the whole world knew and began to intrude.
She was the book’s first reader. She buried herself in it. But she had a disconcerting habit of reading the manuscript with the TV on, glancing up from the pages to follow a sitcom, smiling at the show, frowning at his pages. At last she said, “I like it.” He wanted more from her—more praise, more detail, an extended rave, alluding to all the passages she particularly liked. Even though he was starved for praise after all those years of indifference, he managed to say this in a tactful whisper, or at least not seeming to be pleading.
“I liked all of it,” she said, protesting, surprised that he should want more than that.
“The typescript is almost seven hundred pages. Did you finish it?”
“I read practically all of it. What do you want me to say?”
He shrugged. He realized he was asking too much of her. After all, he was unable to evaluate the twenty or so pages of a marketing plan she sometimes showed him, though he was able to correct her spelling and grammar.
Following her simple verdict on the book, she had said, defending herself—and she never looked prettier, more bright-eyed, lovely lips, full breasts, delicate hands—“What you see is what you get.”
Don’t look for more or you’ll be disappointed, she was saying. I am only surfaces.
That was a complete lie, it turned out. Perhaps deliberate, perhaps an honest misunderstanding, but a lie he could no longer accept. “Crap,” Steadman raged. “Dog shit!” For later, as his wife, every day some new annoying aspect of Charlotte was revealed, always a shock to him because of her insistence in advance that there was nothing more to know. Wrong—there was everything!
She cried easily, she was hurt by the slightest word, she was insecure. She reacted hysterically to a chance remark or the wrong question—she saw questioning as a form of assault. “I don’t know the answer! I guess I’m just stupid!” She told defiant lies. Mention a book, any book, and she always said casually, “I read it so long ago I can’t remember much about it.” He stopped talking about books so as not to put her on the spot. She had not read anything except books about sales and marketing.
She, the businesswoman who said “As soon as you lose your temper you’ve lost the argument,” who had never raised her voice to him, who had seemed the soul of calmness, turned out to be a screamer, the ve
ins in her neck standing out like blue twisted cords as she howled at him. And then, after all this noise, she would sulk and say nothing—she could sulk for days with a stubbornness that would have actually impressed him with its resolve had it not been such a maddening provocation.
“Say something,” he would plead at these times, trying to encourage her, and he would end up shouting at her, his frustration seeming to give her satisfaction in her spitefulness, for he had proved he was a brute.
“See, you’re raising your voice,” she said in a triumphant tone, having infuriated him. “You’re shouting. You’re swearing.”
What he had seen was not what he had gotten: he had married a placid, mildly agreeable woman and he had gotten a shrill, unpredictable woman who was impossible to please. It was as though he had taken the simple complacent face of a new clock to be the clock itself. He had not guessed its guts and workings could be so complex and unpredictable, with all the cogs and springs and teeth and noise that made it run, and sometimes it was just a clock face, a pretty dial with unreliable hands that did not run at all.
“It’s you,” she said, and she blamed him for being difficult. A writer, a traveler, the two selfish professions combined into a single act of egomania.
What could he say to that? His book was done but not yet published.
Charlotte’s objections to his behavior were precisely his objections to hers. And so they were equal adversaries. Still they made love, and sex took on a cruel unexpectedness with their underlying antagonism; while it lasted it was satisfying for being vicious. For a time, whenever they had an argument they were gripped by a passion that turned sexual, and they ended up on the floor or the sofa, her clothes torn and twisted aside, his pants at his ankles, while she clawed him and struggled, his body smacking hers in furious slaps. Afterward, lying motionless, with the fish-stink of sex on their skin, stuck together with sweat, all their anger burned away, the stalemate resumed.