Blinding Light

  In his disgusted impatience he lapsed into Teutonic consonants and became confused, saying sink and thame sing, sounding furious and vindictive and simple-minded in the accented present tense.

  “I see you with the dark eyeglasses and the shtick. I see the president viz his arm around you, all the press corps so impressed. This is the truth? I don’t think so.”

  Subtlety had not been a quality that Steadman associated with Manfred: he was bullheaded and self-absorbed in Ecuador, always reaching for another helping, searching for an advantage, querying, looking for more—his journalist’s traits, of which presumption was the most apparent. But his confident aggression was something new to Steadman, and it threw him, for he had become used to the gentle coddling of strangers confronted by blindness, feeling helpless, wishing only to propitiate him with their insistent “What can I do for you?” as they eased him forward and tried to make him comfortable.

  Manfred was in his face, bristling, shaking his finger as though Steadman were not blind at all. And so Steadman exaggerated his calmness, so as not to rouse Manfred further.

  “You pronounce that my father made a suicide.” He was shaking, stiffening, as he bore down on Steadman. “This is something painful for me. So you say, ‘Is the truth—too bad.’”

  “I don’t know how I knew, but I knew.” And Steadman thought, Like I know now that you’ve just eaten, you are sour with the smell of meat and mustard and beer.

  “Maybe I say something when I am taking the yaje. Or maybe asleep. Maybe you hear me. Okay.” He hammered the air with his head as he went on. “Is a secret for me. But you repeat it to the others. This I cannot stand.”

  Steadman wanted to say, It was spoken somehow, it must have been true, and so what? Manfred seemed to go limp with loathing, and there was a sneer in his breathing, a kind of clammy heat that bothered Steadman more than the butting head.

  “One thing I find curious.”

  He said sing, he said koorios. His voice was shrill. There was no arguing with Manfred, who had become much angrier. But when he spoke again he seemed to be smiling, as if he had just thought of something, addressing Steadman in the halting tone a person uses to tease someone with a contradiction.

  “I know some few blind people,” he said. “One thing about them. They always dress a certain special way. With special clothes. Beret. Cravat. Waistcoat. Colorful stockings, maybe yellow shoes, or boots. And why?”

  “Tell me.”

  “So you look at the clothes and not at the blindness.”

  It seemed to Steadman a shrewd observation, the way in which a blind man may affect to be a dandy, using the style of his clothes to divert strangers’ attention from his tormented eyes.

  “But not you,” Manfred said, needling him. “You want so much for people to look at your blindness. You need them to see you. You like their attention. Your clothes are nothing.”

  The truth of this stopped Steadman cold. And it was worse hearing this insight in a bad accent, as though the man were cutting him with a rusty knife.

  “What the fuck do you want?” Steadman said.

  “I’m sorry?” Manfred said. “You are speaking to me?”

  “I’ve just published a book. I’ve laid my heart bare. I’ve told the truth about myself—I’ve told everything. And you’re accusing me of being a hypocrite?”

  “You ask me what I want,” Manfred said.

  Steadman nodded slowly, knowing that Manfred was seeing his reflection in his dark glasses.

  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 an
d 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.

  Ask me about my book, he thought. Steadman’s reputation as a difficult, at times forbidding interviewee prevented him from attacking the tone of the question. Everyone patronized, no one inquired. Yet he tried to be helpful; he wanted to seem strong. Stifling his rage, he deflected even the crassest questions. And all he could think of was Manfred, who doubted him, showing up like a vindictive gnome in a folktale to undo the hero’s magic. I know your secret.

  By the time they got to the bookstore event at Politics and Prose, Steadman was hoarse with fatigue. Feeling frail, he spoke about his blindness, his overcoming almost twenty years of silence with this novel, to revisit the sexual life of his alter ego in The Book of Revelation. “I am a traveler, yet I discovered that the antipodes are within us, in the far continents of the mind,” he said, paraphrasing Aldous Huxley in The Doors of Perception. He chanted some lines from Thoreau:

  I hearing get, who had but ears,

  And sight, who had but eyes before.

  He commanded the attention of the crowd by describing the inner journey of his novel, so different from the stunt that Trespassing now seemed. And then he signed a hundred copies of his book.

  Afterward, breaking the silence in the car, Jerry said, “They ask really great questions.”

  Regarding this as a dig, Steadman said nothing for a while, and then, “What do people in D.C. make of the president’s problems?”

  “What do they ‘make’ of them? They make jokes,” Jerry said. “Notice how he’s playing the victim? First he denies everything, and then he gets other people to attack the press. He brought it all on himself and he’s blaming people for being interested. Hel-lo! Mr. Winkie is hanging out and you wonder why everyone’s staring.”

  The man seemed triumphant and even drove his car that way, his head crooked in defiance.

  “Power here is a zero-sum game,” he said, because Steadman had not replied. “A lot of people are glad to see the president diminished by all his pretense. More power for them.”

  “How does his private life figure as pretense?”

  “He lied,” Jerry said. “He pretended to be someone he’s not. People won’t forget that.” His lips were twisted in irony, and it seemed as though he were tasting it deeply, because he giggled a little and said, “I mean, Lordy, have you seen her?”

  Steadman felt a surge of glee. He said, “How could I?”

  It seemed so unreasonable for Steadman to say it—the woman’s face was everywhere—the man took his eyes off the road and turned to look at him.

  “I’m blind, pal.”

  “I keep forgetting,” the man said, fussing rather than apologizing. “You are so damned on the ball.”

  The president was undergoing the sort of scrutiny Steadman dreaded being turned upon him for his blindness. Manfred’s questions seemed like intimations of this intrusion. Under pressure, the president had begun to appear tricky and defensive, his denials hollow. It was obvious that he had dispatched his aides to attack his accusers. They had spoken of a campaign to discredit the president—it was all a right-wing conspiracy. Yet the president seemed guilty and hunted and sleepless, more and more like a man under a strong light of scrutiny, looking pale and insubstantial.

  As the days and weeks passed, Steadman had watched closely the man who had appeared to him, when they first met, not a paragon of suavity and power, but a sheepish and needy boy, craving listeners, wishing to be a big brother, nursing old grievances, and hiding his secret life.

  A ringing startled Steadman from his reverie. Jerry handed him a cell phone. “For you.”

  Axelrod again: “I just spoke with the manager of Politics and Prose. She was really pleased with the turnout. I hear the interviews went well, too.”

  “All they want to talk about is my blindness.”

  “The book’s selling. We are going back for another printing.”

  “I’m being treated like a cripple.”

  “They don’t like to think they’re advertising your book.”

  “And some of them treat me like a freak.”

  “Slade, don’t you see they’re looking for a headline?”

  Steadman hung up. He was tired, and Jerry wore him out just sitting there attitudinizing, doubting him, jeering at the president. The president had become the butt of all jokes and now wore a shamed cringing look, like someone brutally mocked and still trying to maintain his dignity.

  “I feel for him,” Steadman said.

  “The smart money says he’ll resign.”

  “Why should he?”

  “For disgracing the office of president. For being a chubby-chaser. Listen, toots, I was in the service. If a senior officer was caught doing that, he’d have to resign.”

  Steadman said, “Would you lik
e someone checking up on what you do in your spare time?” and felt he had struck a nerve.

  Then they were rolling up the driveway of the Ritz-Carlton. Jerry stopped the car and got out quickly to dash to the passenger side and help Steadman. But Steadman had already gotten out, provoked by the man’s fussy certainty. Wishing to be away from him, he swept with his cane, found the curb, and moved on.

  “Can I help you?” A strange voice in his face.

  “Yes, get out of my way.”

  As soon as Steadman entered the hotel lobby he felt lonely, his feet unsteady, as though the floor were aslant, for loneliness was also a sorry flutter in his inner ear, a loss of balance.

  He went to the bar and eased his way through the drinkers, who cleared a path for him. Feeling for a stool (“Right here,” someone said), he found one that had just been vacated, the cushion still warm. The acute perception of temperature had also become part of his blindness.

  “What’ll it be?”

  He ordered a glass of wine. It was put into his hand. He was careful to sip without spilling: people were watching.

  A warm body next to him kept him wondering at its softness. He knew women by their obscure sounds, of chafing silks, tightening undergarments, the clatter of bangles as they slipped to a narrow wrist. This woman’s body spoke, and her breath, that fragrance. She stayed at his elbow, and she too was drinking wine—he knew by her sips and sighs.

  He was thinking: Then don’t come home. I don’t want to see you in this mood.

  “What’s your name?”

  “Dewy Fourier.”

  “That's an interesting name.”

  “It’s French. Can I order you another cocktail?”

  He was trying not to smile. “No thanks. One is my limit. But you can help me find the elevator.”

  “I’d love to.”

  She guided his elbow, crowding him, jostling him, because he knew the way out of the bar. At the elevator, she pressed the button before he could and was saying, “Where to?” as he tapped his way in beside her.

  “Mind pressing fourteen?” The doors sucked shut, and when they were alone he said, “You only pressed one button.”