Blinding Light

1

STEADMAN ASKED, “What’s that?”in a different tone, slipping into a small suspicious murmur and sucking air. He had interrupted himself in another voice, lost his fluency. His whole face went hot. He was reminded of his blindness only at times like this — the moment of intrusion by an unknown visitor, a dark noise, a sudden shadow he knew to be human.

You’re in full flow, the most intimate description, your last word “lingerie,” and now there’s a distant glimmering, the gulp of a quickening pulse, the chew-grind of trodden gravel, pebbles masticated by advancing footsoles. Until then it had been an average afternoon in his many-gabled house, on his estate up-island on Martha’s Vineyard. He was lying on the sofa with his back to Ava, dictating his novel — drugged, blinded. Then he heard the stranger’s heartbeat.

His voice was sharp: “The back door. It sounds like someone. A woman.”

“I don’t hear anything.”

“She hasn’t knocked yet. Go look.”

Narrating a sexually candid episode, he was unusually self-conscious; he had heard the sounds and felt like exposed prey. He lifted his head into the silence and moved like a listening animal, adjusting his body, tuned to danger, his alertness stiffening his neck, the whole room droning in his ears. He sensed that something was wrong. Anything unexpected here was like a threat to him.

“It’s nothing,” Ava said. She did not glance up — his back was still turned to her anyway. He preferred this paranoiac posture, especially in the more sensual episodes. Even so, he could feel the warmth of her body when she was near him, as she was now, waiting, glowing, radiating body heat.

Ava reversed the tape to play the last of Steadman’s dictation, where he had broken off: All he could think of was the woman waiting for him after the meal, the lingerie —

Still poised upright, startled, animal-like, gone rigid in attention, listening as though in a green clearing, he seemed to see the shrouded head, the suggestion of a uniform, the reaching hands, the broken fingernails of a meddler. The staring eyes, the big heavy feet. Only such a heedless intruder would make those sounds. Someone who did not belong always announced the fact in clumsy noises, or in the glare of meaningless silences. Even without knowing who owned it, strangers were often attracted to the big Gothic island house set in a meadow behind high stone walls, its cupola taller than its oldest oaks; but all strangers were unwelcome here.

Then there came a loud knock, insistent knuckles on wood.

“I said, go look.” His voice was breathless, his jaw set in aggression. He hardly paused before he added, “Doctor.”

While Ava went to check the back door, Steadman touched the face of his watch, examined the hands, and turning he felt the warmth of a fierce sunset reddening the side of his face, the back of his hand. Great hot quilts of cloud spread across the sky, a broth of blue growing pinkish in a vast band of color, then quickening to fiery tatters, molten and purple — five seconds of that before sudden tumbled lambs appeared and gathered, were whipped into peaks to become a mountain range of gilded summits, subsiding slowly, pink again, just an orange stripe low in the distance. The whole stripe was simplified to a speckled egg, but a crimson one, and ultimately a blind eye.

He almost smiled to think that something might be wrong, that there might be an intruder. So much else had gone his way these past months that he was prepared to be thrown.

The glow was still in the sky, still on his cheek, and though the trees were cooling fast, the shade thickening in their boughs, some light and warmth remained in the western quadrant beyond the cove, like a lamp in the corner of a room, fading from pink to yellow-blue, the way embers go cold.

Ava entered the room holding something against her body — a package, a dense parcel, which she placed on the table. The way it settled told him the thing was heavy for its size.

“A woman,” Steadman said.

“Right.”

“Told you.” He was the assertive man again, speaking in his own voice.

Instead of answering that, she said, “FedEx. The latest transcript of the book.”

He saw it as Book. The manuscript was always capitalized in his mind, for he thought of it as The Book of Revelation.

That news pleased him — to think, after so many years, that he was embarked on a new book and was making progress. Even if he was just a name to some people, he had a large and appreciative public, eager for this book, and he was glad. For almost two decades he had struggled with this second book. And, writing steadily since his return from his trip downriver in Ecuador, he had finished perhaps a third of it. That trip had changed his view of almost everything in his life and in his writing, and had given him a sense of power.

“Shall we continue?”

Ava sat heavily in the chair. The way she dropped herself, making the cushion gasp, was emphatic, a whole blaming statement in the sound of her sitting down: You are putting me in the wrong for hesitating to go to the door.

Steadman felt her gaze as a shimmering light, as heat and reassurance, which said to him, You have never been safer.

“Yes, Doctor.”

He did not mind that she was annoyed. He was glad that his instincts had guided him: the foot-crunch in his gravel driveway spoke to him more clearly than a watchman or a sentry. Delivery people were also intruders, and the more familiar they tried to be (“Nice place you got here”), the worse their intrusion. But seeing his suspicions confirmed made Steadman calm enough to resume the dictation — or, rather, not resume but find fluency in a digression.

All he could think of was the woman waiting for him after the meal, Ava wrote, at Steadman’s talking speed, while watching the jumping columns of light indicating the stresses in his voice on the tape recorder. Waiting in the candlelit conservatory, wearing the black lingerie he had bought for her. As he entered the room, saying softly —

And he smiled, because this improvised collaboration was the best part of the day. He never wanted it to be spoiled by someone blundering in. When he came to the end of the day’s work he changed his tone; it became intimate, and a full day of fictional inspiration became a halting description of how he wanted the evening to end.

Helping him, Ava said in a muted voice, “Over here.”

Saying softly, “Over here.”

“And he obeyed,” Steadman said.

“Because he was in her power.”

Because he found pleasure in submitting to her will, obeying her demands.

Steadman loved Ava for the intensity of her confident suggestions, for her knowing how to dictate to him. I am yours. If you don’t tell me explicitly what to do, I’ll take charge, she had said in the beginning. Her assertiveness had surprised him. Their sexuality was based on trust, on invention, on surprise; making it fictional excited him.

Because he was in her power, Steadman repeated, and was helpless to do more than obey her. He faced her in the candlelight. The lingerie— “Loose panties of black silk that she had been saving for him,” Ava said, speaking slowly, watching him closely for a reaction.

Dictating his novel to Ava, Steadman was always reminded of the consolations of storytelling, and how it had never been much different from this, the people in ornate halls, and little huts, and around the fires at cave entrances, relating stories of desire and its consequences, whole tales for a single occasion, bright eyes fixed on the narrator, the storytelling explicit and simple, tales of travel and discovery, of startling encounters, of adultery and deceit, the satisfactions of revenge, the reverses of fantasy.

He was afraid of them, the clothes, Steadman dictated, for the way they transformed the body, like a mask or a blindfold or makeup. Afraid, too, because they excited him — the danger of that.

She picked this up, continuing, She realized that she had bought them for him, not herself, knowing that he wanted secretly to submit. Wearing them, she would tie his hands and slip off the black panties. She said firmly, “Put them on.” But he was helpless and so she did it for him, slowly, complimenting him on his prettiness. Then the lipstick. He would protest but be so aroused, she knew —

“That’s enough,” he said.

“Just as you were getting interested.”

“Whose book is this?”

His face was serene, for she had thought of something new — she was expert, she was full of suggestions. He was reminded of how he would have failed in Ecuador without her: she had made all the difference then in her doctoring; she was making all the difference now as his listener and his lover. They had approached this fantasy before but had never ventured further into its details, the mention of lingerie and makeup. Thinking out loud was one of the pleasures of dictation: you could say anything, you could rewind it and erase it; it was just a story, it was vapor.

But Ava was much more than someone taking notes as he talked into the tape recorder. She was truly the doctor, watching over the man in a drug trance. Steadman, the writer, more confident than he had ever been, was reassured by her presumption. His success had begun with his dictation. He had used a typewriter and his travel notes to write Trespassing, but that was the distant past. Now he never wrote. He drugged himself and talked instead, and his novel, The Book of Revelation, was lengthening, engrossing him, a truer expression of the world he knew than Trespassing had ever been. Though the words were his, he never touched a pen or a keyboard, never made a note — that was Ava’s work. He spoke his books in the dark, in his trance state. In the dark, words mattered so much more.

“How about a drink?” he asked.

There was no reply. Had Ava left the room? Their routine was such a fixed sequence he could not remember whether she had excused herself or announced the fact of her leaving. But it was the same most days, that break between the end of his writing day and the onset of night. The idea was that they would have something to think about before meeting again. Reflecting on the last of the dictation, he found it supremely pleasurable to sit in this twilit part of the day alone. Ava’s elusiveness excited him and made him curious.

Deftly searching the coffee table where they kept the tape recorder, and using his hands like feelers, he discovered a cold bucket with a bottle of wine in it. Next to it was an empty glass on a tray.

He needed variation, for the day was so orderly. There was his work, and then the end of his work, this teasing incomplete fantasy, Ava taking notes and repeating them back to him. Ava’s vanishing and the appearance of the wine signaled the end of dictation. The glass of wine meant the suspension of all work, the day at an end. At daybreak or earlier — for he could see in the dark — work would start again.

In this solitude he sipped his wine, liking the solidity of the house, the smell of books and carpets, the whiff of wood smoke from the fire, the aromas from the kitchen, always lamb or fish stews and chowders, and bags of fresh salads sent up every morning from a restaurant in Vineyard Haven, grateful for the off-season business.

The pale yellow Chablis in his glass was so rich that when he tipped his glass to sip, and righted it, he saw it was viscous, showing its legs sliding on the side of the glass. He tasted its sunshine on his tongue, in his throat, and its warmth relaxed him.

Some evenings Ava helped him off with his clothes, like a mother undressing a child, her clothes brushing his nakedness, her sleeves against his bare skin, nannying him with expert hands.

“I like that.”

He could tell that she liked it, too, and though at these times there was no sexual pressure in her fingers, he could feel that she enjoyed touching him, her hands familiar and warm. This was especially so when she methodically shaved him, bringing a pinkness to his cheeks with the shaving brush and scented soap, lathering his stubble, sliding the razor and making a satisfying burr as the hairs were scraped away. And every two weeks she gave him a haircut, with clippers and a straight razor, standing quite close to him, leaning her slender thighs against him, her breasts brushing him. She was not just deft hands but a whole confident body, somewhat off balance.

Some nights she would wash his hair with a light touch, so gentle and yet with assured finger pressure. And then she would give Steadman a towel and help him into his robe. But tonight he bathed alone. The tub was full, the bathroom was fragrant with a scented candle. He could not eat until he had bathed and changed his clothes and had a drink or two. In clean clothes he was preparing himself for the next part of the day, and was a new man. It was all as deliberate as the ritual of dictating his book. He could not rush from his day of writing in his studio to Ava’s suite. It was important that he pause and savor the interval. He needed to think deeply about what was to follow.

He groped his way to the dining room and praised it to himself in a murmur: the flowers, the candles, the chair pulled out from the table, the serving dishes steaming, everything arranged so that it was within his reach — the food, the wine, the single place setting at the head of the table.

While he sat there eating he knew that Ava was preparing herself in her room. He had tried every combination at mealtime. Earlier on in his experiments in blindness they had eaten together, but after the meal and all their familiar talk he felt sated and weary. They talked, they drank, they were friendly. But Steadman found that such congeniality killed his desire. Besides, Ava said, she needed to be away from him, too; to be on her own a bit after being with him all day alone, taking dictation.

The soup tonight had been freshly made in town, pureed tomato soup with herbs, the tomatoes simmered in wine and basil and this red pulp with a pink froth and a mass of golden seeds bubbling on top, and blended, then pushed through a sieve, becoming crimson. That was one of the pleasures of the Vineyard, fresh food from gardens and greenhouses, the soft ripe tomatoes, the tender eggplant, the crisp green peppers, whole baskets of deep green basil.

After the soup, he found another dish and lifted the lid. A braised lamb shank lay on a bed of risotto on the thick platter, the tender meat resting on the thick buttery rice, with florets of broccoli. Steadman served himself and ate slowly, chewing the tender sinews of lamb, licking his lips. The whole meal stimulated him, the bite of garlic, the citrus notes of the wine. He brushed flecks of food from his cheeks. He felt big and warm and pink, slightly tipsy and content. From this mood to sex seemed a simple transition.

He loved eating and drinking alone in a dining room of flower-scented air. It was like celebrating his own sort of mass in which a sexual surprise was the final part of the ritual: meeting a willing stranger. After a day of food and talk he needed solitude, the bath, being touched, the promise of sex, the seclusion of his own large house with the high perimeter wall.

In the beginning there had always been dessert, usually chocolate mousse or ice cream, something sweet to counter the heat of the meal. But an ingredient in it, perhaps something as simple as its fat or sugar content, reacted with the datura and nauseated him, producing cramps with violent vomiting. If the portions were small, the food did not alter the effects of the drug. He searched impatiently for the cup of datura. Usually he made it himself, brewing it before breakfast. Ava had become expert at making it too, stewing the scrapings of the twigs broken from the framework of the Indian basket, then straining the liquid and letting it cool. Not much of the drug was needed to make an effective drink. The strength of it lay in the reduction, the simmering that thickened it to an earthy darkness. A jug stewed on Monday lasted most of the week. Steadman could see that if he was careful in cutting the basket and cooking the datura he would have a year’s supply of the drug, enough to finish the book.

He had been blind since morning, but in the evening his blindness seemed to lift, as though there were slashes in the fluttery veil before his eyes. Holding the cup in both hands, making a formal gesture of drinking the drug, he lifted the cup to his lips and swallowed it all. The taste was something he knew he would never get used to. It was the taste of the jungle — birds, vines, dark blossoms, the clammy scales of snakes, the sour tang of insects, the iridescence of beetles’ wings — and it enclosed him in a tight and luminous bandage, as if he had been caught in a subtle web and wrapped in a spider’s glowing spittle.

Tapping the finger pad of his cell phone, he sensed the heat of the number in its memory showing on the screen. He tapped again, and almost at once he heard a ring in the far end of the house, Ava’s wing. No one else used that line; the number was like an endearment.

“I am waiting for you,” she said in a summoning tone, authoritative, insistent, a doctor’s order.

Getting to his feet, Steadman had to grip the table to steady himself, and he realized how impatient he was. He staggered slightly.

He shuffled through the corridors, growing warmer, sensing the flesh around his eyes getting puffy, his breathing becoming labored, his nose partly blocked, his scalp tightening as though a cap were shrinking on his head. Becoming sexually aroused affected his whole body with a kind of jitters, giving him hot spots, making him stumble, thickening his fingers and toes, filling him with blood and light, while a dark curtain twitched across his brain, leaving him pleasantly semiconscious. The druggy confusions of lust, the numbed muscles and quickened nerves, which were so pleasurable.

Going to see the doctor—

Nothing to him was more exciting than being in this heightened state and moving forward, through the shadows of these back corridors to Ava’s suite. That was the best of it, the foreknowledge — assured of the general plan and seeking out the doctor to learn the specifics.

The doctor was waiting for him, naked beneath her white doctor’s coat—

He became excited, seeing the door ajar, the dim light, the glimpse of the woman’s long naked leg. She was standing at the far side of the dim candlelit room, not lying on the bed as she sometimes did. She held a glass of wine, and she had posed herself before a mirror, so he could see the back of her head. Tonight her hair was short, like a boy’s. She had a shapely head and slender neck.

She had transformed herself and become androgynous — another of her surprises. She looked so different he did not even try to make a connection between her and the woman who had been taking dictation all day. The white doctor’s coat was only superficially clinical, for it was raw silk, a fluttery robe, and underneath, easily visible when she lifted her leg and placed her black high-heeled shoe on a chair seat, the black panties.

“Doctor,” he said.

“Lock the door.”

The mirror caught the light. He preferred seeing her in the mirror; he knew her better, desired her most, from her reflection.

Even from the few words she spoke he could tell that she had been drinking. That too made her less familiar. It was important that she be a stranger. Ava taking dictation had no body, no allure, no perfume; but the boyish doctor in this room, with red lips and bright eyes, was primarily sensual.

“I need you to lie down,” she said.

Just before he obeyed, he pretended to resist, a second of delay that made Ava insistent, almost scolding, and he surrendered to her at once.

“Over here — none of that.”

Seeing that she held some straps she called restraints, he lay on the bed and allowed her to tie his hands to the uprights of the bedstead. He smelled the wine and saw her glazed and greedy eyes. He was pleased knowing that she had been drinking, for when drunk, she was impulsive. Their encounters worked best when she was enigmatic and unpredictable.

Ava unclasped the heavy buckle of his belt and eased it out of the loops of his pants. With a chafing sound, stiff cloth against skin, she slipped his blue jeans off, giving his swelling penis a little slap, affection and severity in a single gesture.

“This is a swap,” Ava said.

Knowing he was watching, his whole body alert, she used her thumbs to push down her panties, then let them slip to her ankles and stepped out of them, just a wisp of silk on the floor. Watching, he was overwhelmed, for what she had just done was an expression of power, not submission. She wrapped his leather belt around her waist and cinched it, jerking the end with one hand, against the buckle.

She climbed onto the bed and sat on him, facing away, and got the panties over his feet and up his legs.

“What are you doing?”

“You’re my dolly,” and she laughed, as if she were dressing a doll and did not have to answer back. And she gave him to understand that he was not any doll but an imposing one, a doll to cherish and play with, made to represent fantasies of her own. As soon as the panties were tightened on him he became aroused, and though she stroked him and he pleaded for more and tugged against his restraints, she would not touch him except through the silk, teasing him with her fingers.

“I’m going to give you a new face,” Ava said. “A pretty one.”

She placed a tray of bottles and jars on the bed and powdered his face, talking all the while, describing what she was doing. She rouged his cheeks, painted his lips with a small brush — lip gloss, she told him.

What had begun as play now seemed like a serious ritual, a sacrificial ceremony, for the body on the bed was like one on an operating table, and he was being worked on and transformed. He tried to imagine how he must look, terror in his eyes, a girl’s face, a clown’s mouth, a painted doll with bulging panties.

“You’re in my power. I can do whatever I want with you,” Ava said. “I am your doctor. Do exactly as I say.”

It occurred to Steadman that this was what brutes dictated to their victims when they had murder in mind, yet she also sounded like a physician, reminding him of his weakness, making him submit to a medical procedure. Only as her victim did he realize how badly he needed her, for she was at that moment the only other person on earth.

The more feminized he became, the more he belonged to her; she took possession of him by making him her dolly, creating the image of someone she wanted. The more completely he was made submissive, the clearer he saw her desire, and the more powerful he felt.

“Why are you smiling?” she said, but lightly, as though she knew the answer.

She wheeled the full-length mirror on its stand nearer the bed, and in the long oval of cheval glass she studied him, moved his head a little and contemplated it, touched his lips with the brush again, dabbed at his cheeks, fluffed his hair.

“You’ve never done this before,” she said, “but you’ve fantasized about it.”

Steadman lay helpless, still like a doll, a bit awkward because of his tied hands, excited under her confident gaze. He had needed her to dominate him tonight, so he could see her charged with desire.

She kissed his lips slowly, licking his mouth, licking his face and neck, then painting him again — painted his nipples then kissed and sucked them, painted his belly and licked it, rubbed her face against him. She put her mouth on his ear and, breathing warmth into it, whispered that she was wet between her legs.

She lay beside him on the bed, tracing her fingers over his body, down from his face and chest to his stomach, moving them to where the panties were binding him, scratched the texture of the panties, and the stiffness beneath them, his engorged cock, like a snake thickening in a silken purse.

She toyed with him, saying nothing, so single-minded and meticulous that it was ritual, not play. He found the pressure, the tracings of her fingers, unbearable, he wanted more, he pleaded for it, but she did not reply. At one crucial moment she stood up, slid off the bed, walked across the room, and watched him, sipping from her wineglass. She had positioned herself so he could see only her reflection in the mirror. She peered back at him from the glass, lowering one hand, touching herself, and he strained to see better as he murmured and sighed.

“Look at you.”

Her legs parted, she stroked herself with two fingers, watching his face. The room was hot, his face was damp, he could hardly breathe, now he was truly captive. After a while, teasing him from a little distance, she went nearer and put her damp fingers on his lips, ordered him to taste them, and then placed her hands on the panties, enclosing him, then clutching.

“Do you like it?”

“Please don’t ask me that,” he said.

He was fully aroused, his cock trapped in the tightened silk. And he had the sense that it was not his body she wanted. What she loved was touching her own panties on him, as though making love to herself again.

She lowered her face, nuzzled his thighs, pressed her lips and cheeks to the panties, groaning against him, speaking to his stiffness, murmuring into his crotch with a vibration that made him harder.

“Please,” he said, half lost in delirium.

She knew what he wanted. She was still moaning, her face against him, telling him a long, incoherent story, like a fable of regret, her lips working, making him moan.

“Please.” He could barely speak, his tongue was so heavy.

He longed for relief, he pleaded for her mouth. She delayed some more and then gave him what he wanted, and when she was on him she freed his cock from the panties and sucked it, holding it with her lips. Her mouth was hot, her fingers were stroking him through the silk.

But that was not the height of Steadman’s pleasure. Just before he came in her mouth he felt her two hands throttle him, pumping hard, making him cry out. She was eager, sighing and swallowing with pleasure.

He sank into sleep just afterward. He dreamed, tumbling into dark depths, and just before he drowned he woke, gasping and helpless, but unbound, his hands untied, and he was canted sideways, like a man washed ashore, dumped on a beach, almost lost, regaining consciousness, remembering. He could see Ava seated next to him, seeming demure, her legs crossed.

“It’s late. Work tomorrow.”

She was being stern again, but distant and prim. Her primness aroused him as much as her sensuality.

“Time for bed,” she said, and helped him to his feet.

As she propped him up, he muttered helplessly. All his vitality was gone, and drained of it he could hardly see anything at all — he never could in this state. Ava led him to his room. Again he slept. He hardly dreamed. He woke to a dimmer light, a different sunrise, another kind of wakefulness.

He had been blind. He had chosen to be blind. Now, on waking, he could see clearly, but was dissatisfied and impatient with the washed-out colors, the ugliness beyond the window, hideous midsummer with wind-tortured leaves, a sky like cat fur — the old world.

At breakfast, averting his eyes from the sickly light, he found the jug of datura tea. As he gagged — the concoction was clammy and cool, like a jungle in its darkest dripping hours — the day telescoped, all the sunlight flattened into shadow in just under a minute. He waited, knowing what was coming. Still at breakfast, his eyes dimmed, twilight fell, and he was ready for dictation, a blind man again.

2

FOR ALMOST EIGHT MONTHS he had prepared himself with the datura, the controlled blinding, a mask as exquisite as a falcon’s hood, keeping to his secluded house. That had been a typical day: a whole day, including night. Darkness was a zone Steadman entered in order to know his mind and advance the narrative of his book. Daylight was unhelpful and ambiguous for seeming to be true, yet it was shabby and misleading. He spent his days dictating the revelation of his nights, which were bright and long and Active. Engrossed in both sides of the day, dark and light, and both sides of his life, work and sex, he at last felt complete.

On this island he wanted no interruptions. He had never encouraged visitors to his house on the Vineyard. And few people came here in the bleak off-season months. For most mainlanders the island did not exist in the winter, nor even in the spring, which like the past one could be sleety and cold, the raw northwest wind scooping across Vineyard Sound and along the ponds and banks, flattening daffodils, tearing through his trees to claw at his windows. For Steadman it was writing weather.

In summer the island was full — more than full, spilling over, people clinging, harbors crammed with jostling boats, the roads dense with big slow cars. So in summer especially he had hid himself in his up-island house. And he had reflected that the Vineyard had not always been like this. He had fled to the island for solitude in the first years of his fame, when he had felt the need to hide, crouching like a hunter in a blind.

Time had passed and made the better places busier, and sometimes destroyed them. The Vineyard suffered, its beauties trampled for the very fact that they were beautiful — crowded and pawed by too many admirers. Even Steadman was sought out, like any other Vineyard curiosity. On his arrival he had announced that he was withdrawing, and the announcement had been like a challenge to the people who had pestered him. But the Vineyard was full of hiding places. He had found one in the green heart of the island, down a country road, behind a perimeter stone wall and high hedges.

Because he had bought the large estate with the merchandising and TV profits from Trespassing, the purchase was classified as celebrity news and reported in the newspaper columns listing hot properties. His scheme backfired. His very wish to be left alone made him a target. His taste for seclusion had singled him out, made him specific, a greater prize. It seemed the press was not interested in anyone who was accessible. A person who cooperated in publicity or agreed to be interviewed was regarded as a self-promoter and an easy mark. So reporters looking for a story tried to sniff him out because he was unwilling, a recluse.

To be first with the Steadman story would be a coup. No one succeeded, but that failure was a greater goad. Isolated, unwritten about, Steadman was more obvious, and was talked about more, speculated on, the subject of gossip. For some years his desire to remain out of the public eye became as much the basis of his fame as his book had, but the title Trespassing was like a dare to readers who wanted to know more about him. He was mentioned constantly, conspicuous by his absence, his name still attached to that one book.

Steadman did not in the least resemble the author of Trespassing. This was odd, for that person was falsely fixed in readers’ minds as only a one-book author can be, a monochrome in one dimension. This man, the trespasser, was his book. The book was all that was known. The mentions of him in the press described someone Steadman scarcely recognized, which was another reason that for years he had stayed at home.

His fame disgusted him, not because it was hollow and cheaply won — he had earned it, he had craved it — but because as more time passed he felt unworthy. There was just that one book, the chronicle of a reckless stunt, and where was his second? His self-disgust made him cynical and envious, his inaction shamed him. He collected the names and studied the lives of one-book Americans — Salinger gone to seed in New Hampshire, Ralph Ellison teaching literature in New Jersey, Jim Powers drunk and frail in Minnesota. Steadman understood their anger and bitterness. They were not forgotten, but they had been abandoned.

People hardly talked about them anymore. If you didn’t produce another book, you were as good as dead. That same sudden obscurity befell Steadman; he realized it when the phone stopped ringing and the talk ceased. Once he had pleaded to be left alone; then, years later, he had his wish and he was at sea. There was no need to hide, no one to hide from. Who cared? As the Vineyard had grown in popularity, his own fame had slipped, and it had gotten to the point where, though the title Trespassing was well known, his own name was not linked to it. The book was associated with the TV series, the bad film, the branding of the outdoor clothing line and the licensed accessories — waterproof watches, footwear, binoculars, sunglasses. His own name was forgotten, or perhaps — suggested by Sabra in Ecuador and her referring to him as a “legendary has-been”—Steadman was thought to be dead.

In old age most writers fell silent and existed without force, in a precious obscurity indistinguishable from death. Mute, aged, feeble, unremembered, they were little more than moth-eaten ornaments, wheeled out for prizes, for ceremonies, the indignities of being patronized for giving keynote speeches and getting honorary doctorates, the ridiculous robes and unwearable medals, the pompous tributes of philistines who served merely to remind an indifferent public that such forgotten fogies were still alive. You saw them looking like tramps or mad uncles, with wild hair, twitching fingers, baggy trousers. Old writers were uglier and crazier-looking and smellier than other civilians — shuffle-hurrying to the men’s room after the ceremony, and the next thing you knew they were actually dead.

In his first years of seclusion Steadman had wanted to write a novel as original and strange as his travel book. But all he wrote were magazine pieces, travel stories that were the opposite of Trespassing, the opposite of what he wished his writing to be. And he told himself that he had another writing life, which was more real to him for being his secret. He was confident in his own ideas — the unwritten books, the stories that were just jotted notes, the sheaf of false starts. There was time for them — why spoil a good idea by being hasty? He didn’t want to rush his book. He wrote nothing substantial.

So much of writing was pure silence, forethought, meditation, a kind of Zen, summoning the mood, achieving the mastery to begin; and writing poorly — the false start — was more damaging to an idea than not writing at all. So Steadman reasoned. He despised the vanity of writers who raced into print; he loathed looking at their clumsy sentences and upholstered paragraphs. He hated hearing them talk. “I’m doing a novel.” This paltry bookmaking merely repeated the banalities of the past; and Steadman swore that if he could not write something new — a novel so original as to be disturbing, in language coined for the purpose and ringing with reality, a book as powerful as Trespassing but an inner journey — well, then he would not write fiction at all and only volunteer for pieces if they interested him.

Then he stopped writing the pieces, and in the years before traveling to Ecuador he did nothing but live in obscurity, doodling at his desk on the Vineyard. He remained on the seasonal party list, a sought-after guest because he so seldom showed up. Parties and tennis and the water preoccupied the summer people, for whom the Vineyard was the greatest summer camp on earth. These people were cliquey and gossipy like campers, too. “How’s the book coming along?” he was sometimes asked, and he smiled and said, “Slowly. It’s only been twenty years.”

Publishing nothing because he refused to write badly conveyed the impression of virtue and made him self-important for a while. A writer’s obliquest boast was that he or she, so tormented and blocked, was not writing. But eventually people stopped inquiring. Much worse than their gauche questions about his work was their tactless not-asking, like people made awkward by a bereavement, pretending to demonstrate their concern by not commenting on the deceased. He avoided the parties for embarrassments like these. And he hated himself for his delay in writing another book. Or was delay the word? Perhaps he had nothing to write. He had had one book in him. He had been young, like Salinger and Ellison, and now he was middle-aged and depleted, perhaps kidding himself that he had anything more to give.

Yet he could not be calm, did not have the stomach for this. Not writing now seemed to him the crudest form of self-denial, a kind of mutilation.

He had changed, he was older, he was better read; he saw that Trespassing had been a marketable mythographic idea. It was a young man’s book, but now — he had never thought this would happen — he was neglected and ignored. To succeed in society you had to stay the same. That was also true of the most vulgar success in publishing: you had to stay true to the brand and repeat yourself. What had made him timid about writing the confessional novel he had planned for so many years was that it bore no relation to Trespassing; it was against the rules.

For years all he had ever heard from editors and publishers, and especially from the agency that sold merchandising rights, was “Give us another Trespassing.”

As time had passed he had become somewhat self-conscious about the success of his book — doubted its integrity precisely because it had been a success. What he had regarded as an achievement now seemed like a fluke. The only book they wanted was the very book he refused to write. So he did nothing, and he might as well have been dead.

The Vineyard was the perfect place to be dead. Except for the summer months it was an island of natives, exiles, and castaways. The off-season population was divided between millionaires and menials — the rich who were allowed to stay and the tenacious land-poor gentry who actually ran the island, through a network of obscure relationships, support systems, and productive rivalries. Being a wealthy summer resident on the Vineyard simply meant having a house on a piece of land; but the house was little more than a ticket to live there, and only a season ticket in most cases. On the Vineyard money was not a significant factor in acquiring power. Money didn’t even buy influence, because only influence mattered, and it could not be bought. An almost Asiatic system of loyalty and dependence, trust and cooperation, got things done, and without it life was impossible in any season. Your name mattered most. Everyone was known, or at least knowable. The oldest families, the most deferred to, the ones with power and influence, were by no means wealthy, though some still owned land. In every respect, as the years had passed, the Vineyard had become more and more like an island in the South Seas — inbred, enigmatic, with complex alliances and unsolvable issues of land and power — like many of the destinations in Trespassing.

The descent of the summer people overwhelmed the island. They were suffered for their revenue and their obedience. The crowds gathered in early June and the numbers swelled until just after Labor Day. Among the summer people were some of the island’s stalwarts — the celebrities, the money people, the fundraisers, the patrons, the ones for whom the Vineyard was a worthy cause, an art colony as well as a refuge. Most of them came to see each other and to glory in another golden summer. The village of Edgartown was house-proud and self-important and snobbish, attached to its history, and until just the other day was adamant in its tacit understanding of Whites Only and No Jews. Vineyard Haven was a working port and commercial center; Oak Bluffs, geographically in between, was upscale black; Aquinnah was Indian; Chappaquiddick, the most recently colonized, was New Yorkers and lawyers and trophy houses; South Beach was new money; Lambert’s Cove was old farmland and big houses. Scattered throughout, in the woodlots and among scrub oaks and bull briars and thickets of sumac, were the islanders, the old-timers, many of them living in hovels and bungalows, amid a clutter of pickup trucks and kids’ toys strewn on the lawn and, here and there, untidy stacks of lobster traps.

Up-island was harder to define, because there were so few solid landscape features. The presence of old families was one aspect — Mayhews here, Nortons and Athearns there — and so was the crossroads at West Tisbury. Squibnocket was another. Alley’s store and the old churches were landmarks. But most of up-island was hidden houses and steep meadows surrounded by high hedges and stone walls. One of those estates was Steadman’s, at the end of a gravel track that was more a country road than a driveway. For him the Vineyard did not grow smaller with time, and he did not get the “rock fever” others talked about. The longer he lived on the island the larger it appeared, and sometimes it seemed as vast as Australia. Yet it remained a place with no secrets.

For years Steadman believed he was hiding, and that he was being pursued and pestered. But at last, so thoroughly had he insisted on his privacy, people stopped seeking him out. The press stopped caring; there was no scandal and no new book. Steadman had had a succession of live-in girlfriends, but none of them had taken to the island. The winters were too quiet, the summers too loud, and Steadman never mentioned marriage. He was silent when asked “Where’s this thing going?” But the women knew that the very fact that they were asking the question meant the answer was “Nowhere.” Then he had married, but disastrously, the marriage shorter than the courtship. That was Charlotte — Charlie. Ava, whom he had first met at the Vineyard hospital, was more a wife to him than Charlie had ever been.

As one of the few doctors on the island, Ava was in demand; electricians, plumbers, housecleaners, carpenters, and handymen were also courted, because there were so few of them. Some were enticed from the Cape and flew over in the commuter jet from Hyannis to perform mundane tasks — mend a roof, stop a leak, rewire a house. When Ava took a leave of absence from the hospital to help Steadman with his novel, the hospital management screamed in frustration and begged her to come back.

The Vineyard was the real estate phenomenon of Steadman’s life. He had gone there from Boston as a child when it had been a hymn-singing island of fishermen and vegetable farmers, odd-jobbers and lobster — men. His mother had been a Mayhew; it was a return for her. Then the island became a version of America — a choice destination with an unflagging building boom, too many newcomers, mutual suspicion and class conflict, environmental battles, unsustainable development crowding areas of natural beauty, a dwindling labor pool, heavy traffic, drugs in the summer, race problems, angry Indians, and now and then a knifing in Oak Bluffs: Hometown USA.

Still, it was home for him, and for that reason, prettier than anywhere else. Old money built discreetly and dressed down and didn’t show off and was famously frugal. Old money fraternized with the locals, formed alliances, got things done — or, more often, managed to be quietly obstructive, meddling for the good of the island. What new money there was remained intimidated by the locals, gently browbeaten, never understanding that the gentry prided themselves on and gained self-esteem by knowing the workers, for the boat builders and the fishermen and the ferrymen and the police and the raggedest Wamponoags were the island’s true aristocrats.

“How long have you lived here?” Steadman was sometimes asked.

“I went to John Belushi’s funeral,” he said. “And my mother’s people, the Mayhews, have lived here for three hundred and sixty-five years.”

These days, as an addict — there was no other word — he often thought about Belushi’s drug habit. He knew enough about it to understand that it was the opposite of his own. Poor Belushi shot himself full of speedballs and was incoherent and out of control, comatose and futile. Steadman’s addiction was benign and enlightening, healthful and productive.

The blinding light bestowed by the datura inspired and strengthened him and gave him back the past; granted him something just short of omniscience; was revelation and remembrance. He had heard that blindness was sensory deprivation and had believed it to be something like a thick bag over the head of a doomed man in a noose. Never had he imagined that such blindness would grant him power, that he would be given such vision. Darkness was light, the world was turned inside out, he saw to the essence of things, and it was prophetic, for at the heart of it all was the future.

Blindness was his addiction and his obsession — his entire waking life was given to it; his whole world was transformed. No one knew what he knew. How deluded sighted people were, insects twitching in a stick-figure tango, animated by their feeble impulses, seeing so little.

Drinking the muddy mixture, Steadman was blinded and uplifted. In the glow of his sightlessness nothing was hidden; the world was vast and bright, and its vital odors filled his soul. The simplest touch roused him by the pressure of its tragic eloquence. He learned a whole narrative of smell, a grammar of sound, a syntax of touch.

At first, preoccupied with dabbling in the datura, he had done no writing at all. He had sat big and bright as though enthroned, overwhelmed by the luminous warmth that blindness had kindled in him and by the insights it provoked — he was truly seeing the world for the first time. Writing could wait. He had fantasized that as a blind man he needed round-the-clock nursing. Well, it was partly true.

He did not begin writing immediately, but when he did he realized how incomplete Trespassing had been, how thinly imagined, and not a fluke but a failure. Yet even failures had the power to delude the reader. Once, he had wondered whether he would ever write anything again. Trespassing, for those who remembered that he wrote it, might be his only literary legacy. Now, with the datura, he could not see any end of creation. He could barely keep pace with the tumult of his visions, the record of his nights and days, in the god-like realm of the erotic, the doctor by his side, his dark dreams fulfilled and revealed.

On some days of dictation he felt that he had poisoned himself and died; that in death he had entered the shimmering chambers that some people had glimpsed but none had described, because unlike Steadman they were unable to come back from the dead. He died once a day and woke, delivered from death, freighted with revelation.

He worked alone, with Ava. No one else knew how he had been transformed. Steadman remained secluded as the bleaker seasons passed into the cold Vineyard spring, with its spells of frigid sunshine. He had no need to go anywhere. His writing was the one constant in his life, and he was content with the conceit that, blinded this way, he contained the world.

But late May brought warmth and color. After the clammy winter and the cold northwest wind there were some uncertain days, and then at last the Vineyard was enlarged with more assertive sunlight, and the rain diminished, and the wind swung around and blew from the southwest. He knew the island would be sunny and pleasant for the next four months. The first flowers were the biggest and brightest, the daffodils and early Asian daylilies, the azaleas, the rhododendrons, the white viburnum the locals called mayflowers, the blossoms he preferred for their fragrance, for the more extravagant the flower, the more modest its aroma. He was no longer tricked by his eye. One of the lessons of blindness was that night-blooming flowers had the most powerful perfume.

After the long winter up-island he prepared himself for summer — the pleasures of spring lasted just a few weeks. Steadman wondered what the season might bring. The winter for him had been perfect: safe and sexual, turning him into an imaginative animal. After his day’s work, he ate and rutted and then slept soundly. He woke and blinded himself first thing and resumed his dictation. He felt as confident as a prophet. He spoke his narrative as the book was revealed to him.

His writing was not work — it was his life, flesh made into words, the erotic novel rehearsed at night. He was like someone conducting an experiment on himself, then writing up the results. Blindness was his method and his memory; the drug created in his consciousness a miracle of remembering and invention.

He was most himself in his blindness, an eyeless worm on the move; most himself in his sexuality, and paired with Ava absolutely without inhibition. He was convinced that his sexual history was the essential truth that demanded to be written as fiction.

He was satisfied with his progress so far: enough had been transcribed and printed for him to begin calling it a book. The book contained his world; he inhabited the book. The act of creation became understandable to him: it was brilliant transformation, not making something from nothing, but giving order to his life, turning darkness into light. He knew now that the travel in Trespassing was a delusion. There was no travel on earth like the distances he was covering now, locked and blindfolded in his hidden house.

A satisfying solitude was returned to him, and he delighted in its stimulation. For years he had longed to write the fictional counterpart to Trespassing, a novel as an interior journey that would also be an erotic masterpiece, wandering across areas of human experience that had been regarded as forbidden — like the sort of fenced-off frontiers he had crossed in his travel book: sex as trespass in the realms of touch, taste, and smell; sex as memory, as fantasy, as prophecy. And fantasy, because it was ritualistic, became something like a sacrament that gave him access to the truth of his past.

He had been so hesitant to go to Ecuador; it had taken an effort of will to submit to the drugs; he had needed to be tempted; he knew it was his last bargain. But the datura had made all the difference, had revealed his book to him, and the months of productive seclusion he had spent since arriving back on the island were the happiest he had ever known.

And he had discovered through the drug’s blinding light that the truth was sexual: the source of truth was pleasure itself, fundamental and sensual. Everything else was a dishonest aspect of an elaborate and misleading surface — all lies.

He intended his book as a confession and a consolation. In a world full of desperate and bloody imagery, how could such a thing as sex be shocking? Yet he was interested in describing only the nightmarish intimacies of his sexuality. For the traveler who had gone everywhere else on earth, this was the undiscovered world of his mind and heart, the basis of his being, his inner life revealed, not anyone else’s. No one could say, “Not true!” when he knew it was his own truth, that he had risked blindness to understand.

One day in early summer he was with Ava in his library, working on the novel, when she handed a card to him. He framed the card in his hands, then smoothed it, touching the raised lettering with his fingertips, and said, “An invitation. I can just about read it. The Wallaces?”

Ava said, “The Wolfbeins. Party at their house.”

The noise Steadman made in his throat, adenoidal, approving, sounding interested, put Ava on the defensive.

Ava said, “You could do without going.”

She was the one who usually wanted to attend parties, and when they had stayed away she accused Steadman of being vain, of sniffing at his old friends, of being a prima donna. The Wolfbeins’ summer place was in Lambert’s Cove, which necessitated a long drive from Steadman’s up-island house, and for the past few summers Steadman had avoided such parties. Yet he was interested.

“I think I should go.”

“Are you serious?”

“My debut,” he said.

“What a word.”

“To show myself as I am.”

She laughed loudly. “You sound like such a fairy, saying that.”

“You don’t get it.” He was smiling, with his face in front of her, his blank gaze. “I mean go blind.”

He could hear Ava’s whole body react, seeming to stiffen in objection. “That’s just a stunt,” she said.

“I am most myself when I’m blind.”

“It’s a drug!” Ava said. “You are seeing phosphenes — they exist outside a light source. It’s a dazzling delusion, a kind of migraine. And what will you do when it wears off?”

Steadman turned away from her and said, “I have to go there.”

He was thinking of the future — his desire to move on, because he needed to distance himself from Trespassing and its youthful halftruths. And since taking the drug he had thought a great deal about death. He might die at any time. And the man he was now bore no resemblance to the man people thought they knew. He imagined them praising him in a eulogy, putting themselves in charge of his history, writing his obituary, speculating, for no one was more presumptuous or untruthful than an obituarist.

“No one knows me,” he said. “No one ever knew me.”

Ava was silent. She did not need to insist or even mention that she knew him, that she was the only one. She said, “Finish the book, if you want to reveal yourself.”

He shrugged, because that was obvious and it had always been his intention. He was obsessed with writing the one book that would say everything about him, disclose all his secrets. He would have to call it a novel, because the names would be changed, but the rest, the masquerade of fiction, would be true, for a man in a mask is most himself.

“I want people to see me like this,” he said. “My friends, anyway.”

“Going to the Wolfbeins’ is going public,” Ava said. “It’s always the A-list.”

He was silent again. He could see she wanted a fight. And anyway it was true — he wanted to go public.

“Your blindness is a lie,” she said. “It’s temporary. The phosphenes are in your brain and your optic nerve, caused by whatever shit is in the drug.”

“No,” he said.

“A game,” she said.

“A choice,” he said. “And I want to see these people.”

“See?”

“Know them,” he said.

3

STEADMAN WORE DARK GLASSES, he carried a narrow white cane. He did not need the cane, except as a prop and a boast. The insect eyes of his lenses and his thick pushed-back hair emphasized his sharp inquisitive face. Ava had chosen his clothes. He could have passed for a stroller at the West Chop Club — white slacks, yellow shirt, white espadrilles, a slender whisking cane.

“You putz,” Harry Wolfbein said. And to Ava: “What’s with him?”

Steadman said, “Relax, Harry. I’m blind.”

A rush of air was audible at the word, and in a vacuum of embarrassment that followed it Wolfbein breathed hard in apology.

Steadman wished only to state his blindness, not discuss it, not be clucked over and pitied. So, to cut him off, Steadman said, “There’s some sort of engine noise over there I’ve never heard before.” He gestured beyond the house, toward the big garage. “Transformer, generator — what is it?”

“Bug zapper,” Wolfbein said.

Steadman knew he was lying. He said, “Then what’s all the auxiliary power for?”

Before Wolfbein could recover and respond, a man entering behind him said, “Oh, God, another rat-fuck.”

Recognizing Bill Styron’s voice, Steadman greeted the writer and his wife, Rose. They said they were glad to see him. He did not announce his blindness; everyone would know soon enough. As for his dark glasses and cane, the Styrons just smiled in sympathy. In his nonwriting years, as a reaction to his obscurity, Steadman had affected odd habits of dress and behavior, as a defense, so that his raffish eccentricity would be noticed and not his silence.

“Rat-fuck” was the right expression for a party where a mob of people stood and drank and yelled in your face, looking past your head as you looked past theirs, for relief, for escape, for someone better known or wittier. At a certain point a party was just that: a loud room of coarse static, like a rookery of big frantic birds.

The moment he had arrived at the Wolfbeins’ house in Lambert’s Cove he knew the party was unlike any other summer thrash. He did not discern the contours of people; he understood their essence. He needed to be blind to feel the voltage, the pitch and whine of it, like the whir of a spinning ball of molecules. The furious hum beneath the chatter that drifted from the house kept Steadman listening and in that hum discerning the distinct character of people. If he had not been blind, would he have been aware of the woman — all eager atoms — who had begun to stare at him and stalk him from the moment he stepped onto the front porch?

He heard her heartbeat, he sensed the woman as a pulse in the air, as an odor, a hot eye, in the deepening shadow. And when he drew near her and was surrounded by other guests, she touched him, probably thinking that he would not be able to distinguish her from the others — stroked his arm, touched his mouth, left a taste on his lips. It was not her touch that lingered but an oily dampness, as if her salty sweat-warmed hair still clung to him and got into his nose and onto his tongue. He had caught the animal scent and kept sniffing it, the trail of it that curled from the woman’s body like a distinct invitation in all that noise.

As a younger man, Steadman had liked such party loudness for its concealment. The noise was like darkness and made your plea inaudible to everyone except the woman you were imploring. A party was an occasion for a dog-like mating ritual, for bottom-sniffing and innuendo. In a large noisy crowd in which anyone could be touched, a party was a liberating prelude to sex. A crowd became a sort of dance, in a room in which you paired up with someone and got her to agree to see you later, meet you secretly; it was an opportunity, a beginning, an abrupt courtship.

But this event at the Wolfbeins’ was not that at all. It was a gathering of older, milder, successful people, all of them friends, and well past the frenzied adulteries of their earlier lives. Steadman was a friend, too, but different in being a year-rounder on an island where summer people believed they mattered most.

The summer-camp atmosphere of the Vineyard in high season was so intense and infantilizing that Steadman hardly went to parties. Besides, when the summer people departed just before Labor Day, the year-rounders were on their own, and it was awkward for them to admit that in the off-season the islanders seldom met except at the supermarket, the post office, or the ferry landing.

“The guest of honor isn’t here yet.”

“Steadman thought he was the guest of honor.”

“Maybe he is, now,” Wolfbein said softly, with a new sort of reverence. “It was really nice of you to come, Slade.”

The gratitude in Wolfbeins chastened voice Steadman heard as piety — that Steadman, crippled and handicapped, was doing them all a favor by showing up, being brave. Like a limper dragging himself into daylight, the proud damaged man was going public.

If only they had known. Steadman believed himself to be gifted through his blindness, superior to them all, with the power of special insight. He had come just to be visible, to declare his blindness. He was Ishmael, believing that no man can ever know his own identity until his eyes are closed. Steadman thought: No one can ever claim to know me now.

And, as he had suspected, the fact of his blindness at the party gave him a kind of celebrity. The only way to reveal his secret was to present himself here, where most of his friends happened to be, none of them his confidants, since he had none. He was greeted by Mike and Mary Wallace, Beverly Sills and her daughter, Alan Dershowitz, Mike Nichols and Diane Sawyer, Mary Steenburgen, Walter and Betsy Cronkite, Skip Gates, Evelyn de Rothschild and Lynn Forester, Olga Hirshhorn, Ann and Vernon Jordan. He would either keep his blindness a secret or allow these people to know. He could not be selective in telling people on this island, where people talked — did nothing but talk.

“I feel like Zelig,” Dershowitz said, bumping into him, then profusely apologizing, before inquiring about the cause of his disability, as though appraising his condition in a bid for a possible personal-injury lawsuit.

“All my fault,” Steadman said.

“Our own Tiresias,” Styron said with his customary gallantry.

Steadman did not mind being seen as a tragic hero. The only alternative was to joke about his blindness, and he saw that as vulgar ingratiation — not beneath him, but a distortion of how he regarded his blindness. When his book appeared, his true responsibility would be known.

As though commiserating, Wolfbein was talking about someone he knew who had macular degeneration — how sad it was — and Steadman seemed to surprise him by saying, “That might be the best thing that ever happened to him. What’s his profession?”

“That’s the point,” Wolfbein said. “He’s a writer, like you. He needs his eyes.”

“He doesn’t. He’ll be a better writer,” Steadman said.

“I don’t get it.”

“Our eyes mislead us,” Steadman said.

“I hope you’re right.”

“You’re looking at me as though I’m a cripple,” Steadman said. “Your eyes deceive you.”

“What do I know?” Wolfbein said, insincerely, helplessly conceding it, as if deferring to a cripple, changing the subject.

Steadman said, “Harry, you’re not convinced. You’re thinking I am a poor bastard trying to make the best of it, putting a brave face on his handicap, saying, ‘Cripples have a lot to teach us!’ Because I’m a hopeless case, banging into walls, grinning into empty space, stumbling down stairs, with food on my chin.”

“I don’t think that,” Wolfbein said, but still he sounded insincere.

“‘The blind man shits on the roof and thinks that no one sees him,”’ Steadman said. “Arab wisdom.”

“Don’t be a putz.”

Steadman could sense the man’s uneasiness. Wolfbein was trying to be a friend. He was so overwhelmed by the sight of Steadman, transformed with dark glasses and a white cane, he did not know how to conceal his pity. And so, more than ever, Steadman was sure he had done the right thing in showing up here. He would never have known this otherwise.

But between his up-island house and this party — between the seclusion of his Gothic villa, with its long blind nights and sexual revelations, and the glare of this public appearance — there was nothing. Anyway, wasn’t that the point? He was glad to attend such a lavish party, because it allowed everyone he knew here to see at once what had happened to him.

When he had said that to Ava, she had replied, “They’re seeing what didn’t happen to you. Why are you misleading them? This is such crap. You can see perfectly well.”

“No. I can see better this way. Only they don’t know it.”

Ava cringed whenever the partygoers expressed their sympathy for him. And it was worse for her when they commiserated with her, confiding their fears. They clucked and urged him to be brave, and all the while Steadman was laughing and protesting, “I’m fine. I’m working again. I’m doing a book.”

Wolfbein said, “No reflection on Ava, but are you seeing a good doctor?”

“I am seeing what is not visible,” he said. “And I am seeing more of Ava than you will ever know.”

Wolfbein had been joined by his wife, Millie. She kissed him, her large soft breasts cushioning her embrace. She said, “I’m really glad you came.”

“So am I,” Steadman said. “I didn’t realize until I got here that it was such a big deal. Whom are you expecting?”

In the silence that ensued he could tell that she exchanged looks with her husband, hers a meaningful frown that mimed, Who told him?

“It’s someone important,” Steadman said, sure of himself.

“Whose mind have you been reading?”

“There are so many people here who don’t belong. I don’t mean guests. I mean lurking heavies, muttering men. The tension, too. Some people suspect, some don’t.”

He knew Millie was smiling, and he could hear the flutter of her heart.

“All this apprehension,” he said. “What are you waiting for?”

“POTUS.”

“What’s that?”

“Elvis.”

“I knew it.”

Millie squeezed his hand and left him, and a heavy breather he knew as Hanlon massaged his shoulder, said, “Great to see you”—the blind, Steadman now knew, were constantly being touched. Since arriving at the party he had been pinched, fingered, handled, steered, all by well-intentioned people.

Even Ava touched him when she reappeared. He said, “The president’s coming.”

“Cut it out,” she said, but he sensed her looking around and recognizing the oddities — the generator, the buzzing phones, the extras, who must have been security men.

The president was on the island — everyone knew that — and there was always a possibility of his appearing, since Wolfbein was a friend and a fundraiser. But of all the guests, Steadman alone knew with certainty that it would happen. He understood the voltage that seemed to run through the party, heard the scattered cell phone crackle, the awkwardness of the advance team.

The party guests saw only the people they knew; he saw everyone. The deck and the garden were full of people, but near the big garage and among the trees were the president’s support crew and the mute, watchful Secret Service people. Beyond this crowd was another crowd.

Before anyone else, before the Wolfbeins even, Steadman knew that the president’s car had drawn up at the front of the house, and after the president was greeted in the driveway by his hosts, Steadman was the first to know when he came near and presented himself. It was a pulsing in the air and a heartbeat — distinctly the president’s, distinctly quickening, an ugly flutter of embarrassment.

The moment the president entered the room, Steadman felt a change in the atmospheric pressure. Then some people turned; others were still talking. There was a rattle in the air, an anxiety, the president exposed, prowling yet seeming like prey. The hot concentrated gazes of the guests were all directed one way, making a crease in the room.

“I can’t believe he’s talking to Mike Nichols.”

“Roth,” Steadman said.

Philip Roth was chuckling. “Mike is saying, ‘I should have put you in my movie. You’re perfect. Why did I use John Travolta?’ See his face?” Then he clasped Steadman’s arm, a bit too tightly. “Oh, Jesus, Slade, I’m so sorry.”

But Steadman said, “I can see his face. He looks more complicated than I expected.”

The party became circular, electrified and orderly like a magnetic field, the whole house in motion, with the president at the center and the first lady at the periphery, another eddying motion, people wheeling around her.

Noticing that Steadman was carrying a white cane and wearing dark glasses, the unmistakable props of blindness, with his head alert, looking proud in his obvious posture of listening, the partygoers gave him a wide berth, which allowed him to slip nearer and nearer to the current of the force field, toward the president, whom he could make out as a warm pink smiling being, hyperattentive and talkative at the center of a large admiring group.

Likable, friendly, sexually obsessed, everyone knew his traits: charming, needy, subtly competitive, willing to woo, craving power and adulation in such a compulsive way, yet indifferent to personal wealth, not materialistic, funny, intelligent, eager to please. And because of all of this, especially his strange deflecting smile, he conveyed the strong impression of trying to live something down, that he was burdened by secrets.

To Steadman he was like a high school senior from an ambiguous background who fought desperately for influence, eager to charm everyone, to be the student-body president. He had the high school attitude toward money, too — the insight that money was not power, that only persuasiveness and approval were power, and the president craved approval.

The president was speaking in his easy unhesitating drawl to Mike Nichols, an enthusiastic assertion about a movie, but he was also speaking to his dazzled listeners. Steadman approached and at once the group parted for him, and the way the human heat was bulked in that opening conveyed to Steadman the physicality of the man, the confident way he was standing, gripping one man’s shoulder, holding a woman’s hand. He eased her against him for a photographer, all the while talking to Nichols about the movie, which was The Barefoot Contessa.

“I was fourteen, fifteen, just a kid, sitting there in the movie theater in Hot Springs and going like this!”

Steadman saw the self-mocking dumbfounded face and heard the grunt and the appreciative laughter. And then the president reached out and drew Steadman beside him, into the center of the circle of listeners.

“Slade Steadman, Mr. President,” a wheezy man said, stepping forward, cutting Steadman off, trying to be helpful.

This meddling was Steadman’s first experience of his blindness marking him out as a deaf lump of inert flesh, incapable of fending for himself.

“I know who this guy is,” the president said. “How’re you doing?”

“Changed a little but doing fine.”

“Harry told me you might be coming. I am really glad you could make it.”

Steadman replied to the president, but looked at the wheezy man as he said, “I see more than you might think.”

“You are one brave guy,” the president said.

“You mean these?” Steadman said, and tapped the black lenses of his glasses. “Like Ishmael says, darkness is indeed the proper element of our essences.”

He was going to say more, but the president interrupted him. “I mean Trespassing. I can’t tell you how much I admire it.”

“I know you’ve got taste, Mr. President. Friend of mine, Redmond O’Hanlon, was at Oxford with you and said you had a whole shelf of Graham Greene.”

The president touched Steadman again, and like the others at the party kept touching him, as if to reassure him. It was a gesture Steadman had begun to hate in bystanders, for the insult of its pity, for its patronage, its distrust, its intrusive fuss. And yet the president’s touch was different — revealing — giving so much away, the man’s anxiety and weakness and secrecy in the uneven pressure of his fingers, as though he were steadying himself, drawing off energy and finding his balance by holding on to Steadman.

“I had no idea your vision was impaired.”

Another person who did not dare to use the word “blind.”

“My vision is excellent,” Steadman said. “It’s my eyesight that’s a little faulty.”

“It’s not getting you down. That’s just great.”

“No, because, bad as it might be, it’s better than anyone else’s.”

The president, Steadman saw, needed to be looked at. He was the embodiment of self-consciousness. Every word he said had conviction in it and a suggestion of, Remember this. He had a wonderful please-love-me laugh. He had a way of exaggerating his facial expressions, as though to indicate, I am laughing, I am touched, I am intently listening, I share your feelings.

“I like that. You’ve got a real good attitude,” the president said.

He was all calculation. But beneath the surface of his confident facial expression was a shaky heart and trembly attention, an insecurity, the fear that someone might see what he really felt, what he actually knew — his woe, his close-to-despairing feeling that he might be found out. Standing next to him, Steadman felt these vibrations — that the president needed to keep his secret even more than he needed to be loved for his candor. He was at the core a watchful anxious man who had spent his life being observed, who could not bear unsympathetic scrutiny, who hated to be alone. There was something explosive in him, too, that he was keeping in check. And not one secret but many.

“I will get you the finest doctors,” the president said. “We can fix this thing.”

How can I help you? was his mantra, because helping people was the key to earning their gratitude, their respect, their support. Steadman liked the man for understanding that power was something that you had to earn, that people gave you, not something you snatched and squeezed from the unwary. The president had been poor. The long climb from poverty, a history of favors asked for and repaid, had given him a sharp memory. He still had aspirations. Even in this easy group of rich well-wishers he was campaigning. Everything about his social posture — his smile, his banter, his kindness, his generous nature — said he wanted your vote.

Someone — a woman, the same woman as before — took Steadman’s hand and placed a cold glass into it. Her perfume, the pressure of her fingers, the softness of her skin, the warmth of her hand, the way she brushed him, her soft skirt, her tight thigh — all this told Steadman she was slender and young and sure of herself. And she was aroused — so obvious to him now that he was blind — a hot humid tenderness to her skin, a sticky quality to her lips, and the close dampness of her breath that her perfume did not mask.

“I mean it,” the president said, speaking of his offer to help.

“That’s very gracious. Thank you, sir.”

But the president, who missed nothing, had noticed the woman too, and he was attracted. Steadman realized how other people’s reactions were helpful, and now, in these past few minutes, feeling the heated gaze of many people, he had become the center of attention.

Because Steadman had become the most conspicuous person in the room, the president hung on, began needing him — Steadman could sense that, for by being next to him, he was peculiarly visible. That vanity in the president was mingled in a paradox of conceit with sympathy and kindness.

The others’ shock was apparent: no one had expected Steadman to show up blind. People who had found him arrogant or distant or offhand now pitied him, and faced him more squarely, emboldened by the strength, a swagger of wellbeing, that onlookers feel in the company of someone frail. For in their judgment Steadman was powerless and lame as a blind man, needing to be steered around by his elbow, no longer a threat or a source of sarcasm; he was impotent, he was pitiable, a cripple, and without help he would trip over chairs and bump into walls.

Steadman smiled at the thought of this, for the truth these people did not know was that he was perhaps a greater threat to their privacy now. He could gain access to and probe any of their secrets, was nimbler and more acute and virile than ever. Nothing was hidden from him.

Holding on to his arm, as much a new pal as a helper, restraining him a little, the president seemed to understand Steadman’s insightfulness. He introduced him to a few people — men and women whom Steadman already knew — and in doing so, the president was claiming him as his own, possessing him for his aura, his power to command attention.

The blindness fascinated the president, like a peculiar gift, a unique asset, a signature trait. Which it is, Steadman thought, all of that and more.

Still holding on to him, more tightly now, the president moved him through the party. Steadman understood the president as blind in a simple and old-fashioned way, fearing exposure. The poor man could not see himself at all. He was desperate in clinging to his secrets — secrets that to Steadman were obvious in his whole demeanor. Never mind what the secrets were — they smoldered like half-smothered fires in the president’s soul and shone in his fragile and easily readable face.

The president wanted everything, but most of all he wanted to be needed. And so he took charge of Steadman, possessed him and seemed proud, as though he’d captured a country or successfully wooed a woman — he had what he wanted.

He kept touching Steadman with deft slender fingers, and when Wolfbein appeared and introduced people to the president—“Mr. President, I want you to meet an old friend”—the president deflected him, and with Steadman on his arm said, “This is Slade Steadman. I’m sure you know his work.”

Steadman had become his prop, his cause, and though the president had put himself in charge, and was big and busy on his behalf, Steadman could see how wounded he was. The man was next to him, holding him, kneading his shoulder. Steadman could feel the warmth, which was more than warmth — the scorching heat and life of his eagerness and something like shame. He was fully alive, but what had he done that had made him so hot with guilt?

His pulse, his touch, told Steadman how appearances mattered to him, how surfaces meant everything, though he was the most watchful human imaginable. Perhaps he recognized this trait he shared with Steadman. He seemed like someone who was forever stalking, with an insatiable appetite, his hunger beyond the hunger of anyone else.

Also, what looked like guilt or shame was neither of those — they did not cut deep enough; it was undiluted embarrassment. He was brave in his secrets, not sorry for them but only fearful of being found out. His need to be fully visible was at odds with his need to conceal, and made him an active and distracting presence for his furtive alertness, and had given his smiling and much too reliable face a profound pinkness.

So he latched on to Steadman, because it proved that he had sympathy and altruism and charity. He was here at a party, not carousing — he hardly seemed to drink anyway, had barely touched his glass — but propping up a blind man, though Steadman was aware that it was really the other way around.

Ava joined them, was embraced by the president—“You’re a lucky gal”—and she took Steadman aside to say that she had been talking to the first lady.

“She’s amazing — she’s lovely,” Ava said. “She looks straight at you and tells you exactly what she thinks.”

“I saw her when they came in.”

Whenever Steadman referred to his seeing something, Ava reacted, made a gesture, not quite doubting, but impatient.

“And what did you notice about her?”

“The snot in her nostril,” Steadman said.

As though he had spoken the truth, Ava became defensive. “She’s beautiful. She’s strong. She really knows him. It’s a real team.”

But another glance in the direction of the first lady told Steadman that there was almost nothing there except a chill between the husband and wife. She was much poorer at pretending than he was.

“She’s his prisoner,” Steadman said.

He walked outside, down the stone steps to the lawn. Many of the guests had gone out to enjoy the fragrance of the evening. They were drinking, laughing gently, reminding each other of what a lovely summer it was. “We’ve been on the island since July Fourth,” Wolfbein was saying. Through the slender scrub oaks the Sound was glowing in the last of the sunset.

In the luminous half-dark of dusk on the lawn, a little apart from the other guests, he felt euphoric, seeing everything clearly while unseen and unknown himself. He was reminded of how, in this euphoria, he resembled the celebrated novelist he wished to become, a narrator among his characters. He was convinced of the purposeful insight of his blindness, his apparent blindness, and that at last his novel would be the book he had longed to write.

Sensing someone behind him, Steadman tilted his head to listen. He was touched on the hand by soft, damp, imploring fingers, and his arm groped too, each touch an appeal, a plea, an invitation, the clutching of slender bones. The people who had touched him at the party believed they were unseen, unknown — and they were, except by Steadman, who saw each one, the big bold woman, the sidling blonde, the dark foxfaced woman with searching hands who had crept over and stroked him, announcing herself when he had arrived. She was small — smaller than Ava — and she had touched him without Ava’s knowing. And she was back, on the lawn, grazing him again with her hand, her heart beating like mad as she moved quickly away.

Sunset had come fast, a deepening shadow in the sky, a dampness of light dew gathering on the grass. Being touched, in his memory, was like being brushed by the low boughs of leaning trees, by the leaves of bushes next to the path, tumbled thickets and groves growing at the edge of the bluff, its sea grass and sand still holding the dry hum of the day’s heat.

And with the darkness, the smoke-stink of flares and torches was more apparent — orangy flames, flat and ragged, on head-high bamboo poles jammed into the ground.

“Down this way!” Wolfbein called out. Looking like a cop in traffic, one arm raised, he directed the guests toward the narrow stony path where, in the flapping light of the kerosene torches, handsome young men in white shirts, employees of the catering company, as orderly and solemn as soldiers, escorted people along the path to the lip of the bluff, where a flight of steps led down to the beach.

“I’m all right,” Steadman said when one of the young men reached for him.

Steadman tapped his stick on the wooden treads and looked down, deliberately holding up the other guests, who paused and watched the blind man’s slow descent, talking as he stepped slowly.

“Nobska lighthouse,” he said, waving his stick at the flickering light across the Sound. Then he looked down. “Checkered tablecloths. Lots of tables. Lanterns. Crimson lobsters stacked on seaweed. A washtub of steamed clams. Buckets of corn. A tureen of chowder. A basin of chopped salad greens. More torches. And the water lapping the table legs.”

“That’s amazing,” someone said, hearing him, and there were supporting murmurs.

“I was at this clambake a few years ago,” Steadman said.

“It’s still amazing. I hadn’t recognized all that stuff until you started describing it.”

“Memory is vision,” Steadman said, still descending the stairs, and as he spoke he heard Ava groan.

At the bottom of the stairs, Ava said in a low scolding tone, “Why are you calling attention to yourself?”

“That’s why I came.”

“How can you be so fucking pompous? ‘Memory is vision.’ Jesus!”

But he was smiling, feeling his way forward. He brushed the piece of paper Ava held in her hand.

“What are you reading?”

“The seating plan.”

“Where am I sitting?” he asked.

“You tell me,” she said, challenging him. “You can see in the dark, right?”

All this in whispers.

He knew Wolfbein as a friend who would have assured him a good seat — and everyone was extra-nice to the blind. He said, “I’m sitting with the president.”

Containing her fury, Ava’s body convulsed: he had guessed right. And then he heard her shoes treading the stones on the foreshore as she stalked off to her own table.

And a woman’s hand rested on his lower back, a woman unseen by Ava.

Steadman said, “Who are you?”

The woman touching him turned quickly and stumbled slightly on the shingly beach, leaving a wisp of fragrance at the level of his head.

He was the first to sit, and so when the others joined him they spoke to Steadman, positioning themselves in front of his face to address him. Although they were friends, and he knew them as soon as they spoke, they said their names, as though he were feeble — Walter and Betsy Cronkite, Olga Hirshhorn, Bill Styron, Millie Wolfbein, and finally the president, who was finishing a conversation with Vernon Jordan.

“You’re going to be fine, man,” Vernon said, looming over Steadman, bestowing his blessing before walking on.

“Hello, girl,” the president said to Millie, and gave her a hug. Then he said, “Slade’s doing good. I think he sees more than we do.”

It was true, and he knew it. The president was uncomfortable, Steadman could tell, which was another reason he wanted to possess the blind man and disarm him. He feared the blank stare behind the dark glasses, he feared Steadman guessing his secret. Steadman did not know the details of the secret, only that it was a woman, and because it was sexual the president was both embarrassed and eager. He was happy, he was pink with confusion, rendered younger and more readable — all the grinning traits of being smitten.

So when the drinks were served and the talk turned to movies, the president reminisced about himself as a boy — the interrupted conversation he had begun earlier in the house, about The Barefoot Contessa.

Styron said, “I went to high school with Ava Gardner. She was a lovely simple girl, just a farm girl. Came over the state line to Newport News from North Carolina. We called her a Tar Heel.”

Steadman said, “You could have taken her to the prom.”

“Well, she was a year behind me. But, yes, I could have,” Styron said, and he stroked his face as he did when he was self-conscious, and gave his deep appreciative laugh.

The president said, “In that scene where she drops her dress and it just falls. Oh, my.”

Everyone at the table was watching the president with pleasure.

He said, “I couldn’t breathe!”

The laughter exploded as soon as he spoke, but Steadman saw the truth of the revelation. It was distinctly confessional, and it was also a dream of yearning and power in a crowded movie theater in Hot Springs. Steadman saw a boy in a seat, wide-eyed and with his mouth open, wanting the world.

As the clambake progressed and the food was distributed, the waiters bringing plates piled with corn and lobster and steamers, a group of young men lined up, a dozen or more in identical red shirts. They paid their respects to the president and greeted the diners. One of them, announcing that they were the Tiger Tones from Princeton, took out a pitch pipe and blew a note, and they began to sing. They sang one song after another, old tunes, “Chattanooga Choo Choo” and “Hey, There” and “What’ll I Do?”

The president watched attentively, smiling appreciatively, and sang along. He was an unspontaneous man who knew that people were constantly looking at him, and he was at pains to demonstrate that he was just what he seemed, an open and benevolent person who had nothing to hide.

The Tiger Tones’ spokesman came to the table and asked the president for his requests — any song he liked.

“You go ahead. You’re doing just fine,” the president said, which was shrewd, because a request was also a giveaway.

Steadman said, “Do you know Chuck Berry songs? How about ‘Maybelline’?”

“Sorry,” the young man said, and repeated it more loudly when he noticed Steadman’s dark glasses and the white cane propped against the table.

They sang “Up on the Roof.”

The president said, “I had Chuck Berry at the White House.”

“That’s great.”

“I could get him for you.”

Steadman was touched — not by the offer but by the spirit of it, the sense he had noticed earlier, that the president was saying not “love me” but “please need me.”

He was mouthing the words of the songs, appearing to know that everyone was looking at him and he was doing the right thing for them. He would never want to be seen doing the wrong thing, which was why his secret was engrossing to him, and it had to be a forbidden woman, for what else could have made him so pink?

The president was so much there, so willing to respond, so quick to read reactions, so present, that he had to be hiding something. Evasion and calculated secrecy were important to him, for he was both puppet and puppet master. But he searched with such close attention, charmed so completely, he took possession.

Only Steadman saw through him, and he was fascinated, as though watching a man balancing on a high wire, while the others at the table spoke to him in such a respectful way. The aged Cronkite, so courtly as he leaned forward, said, “Mr. President, forgive me for wondering, yet I can’t help…” And the president nailed the question with an even more courteous reply.

The man had something on his mind. He was always a fraction late in his responses, as if the lapse were another voice in his head, distracting him and demanding to be heard. What was he thinking about? Perhaps a matter of national importance, yet Steadman felt deeply that it was something else — an embarrassment, a source of shame and strength.

“Is that the ferry out there?”

Aware that he was being observed by Steadman — uncomfortable under his blind gaze — he seemed to be struggling for relief.

“That’s the big ferry,” Olga said.

“Might be the Uncatena,” Betsy Cronkite said.

“Crossing the Sound with a bone in its teeth,” Walter said.

Steadman said, “To Woods Hole, just to the left of the flashing light. That’s Nobska.”

The people at the table stared at him, and the president hitched his chair back on the sand to have a view of Steadman and the things that Steadman described.

“The lights to the west are the Elizabeth Islands. The scoop of darkness is Tarpaulin Cove. To the east, past Nobska, the Falmouth shore, Falmouth Harbor, Falmouth Heights, East Falmouth, Green Pond Harbor entrance, Waquoit, and Cotuit around that flung-out arm of lights.”

The president was relaxed and grateful, for scrutiny had been suspended, all eyes off him at the moment.

He said, “That’s wonderful. That’s amazing.”

Steadman then named some of the stars in the northwest sky.

“I don’t see a thing!” Olga said.

“Light pollution,” Steadman said.

Walter said, “Slade knows these waters well. I like having him on board when we take the Wyntje out.”

Steadman said to the president, “The white line just offshore is the standing wave in the chop on Middle Ground Shoal. Sort of foaming in the moonlight. Great fishing spot.”

The president, seeming to be lost in this conversation, said, “We had a real nice sail yesterday in James Taylor’s boat.”

Just then a weak blade of light crossed the president’s body, and a man looking official, perhaps someone on security detail, dressed in a dark uniform and swiping the ground with his flashlight, crept to the president’s elbow and shone the light on a piece of paper that was crumbly and insubstantial. It had to be a fax, for the way it crinkled and did not lie flat.

Now Steadman was more aware than ever of the president’s slender, almost feminine hands and long, delicate fingers, his small wrists, his tremulous touch. The fax paper rattled softly as the president read it, looking grave, all his attention on it.

“Keep me informed,” he said to the man, who nodded and slipped away.

“There’s been an accident,” he said, his self-conscious solemnity commanding the attention of the table with its drama — and all around them, on the shore-side tables of the clambake, there was a gaiety that gave this single table the look of a seance. “Princess Diana was hurt in a car crash. Her friend has been killed.”

As Steadman touched his watch face — it was a little past ten o’clock — the president was answering questions: “Paris… that very night… in the hospital… No other news.”

The president seemed to relax, not in an idle way but with great solid confidence, like a man in an important chair, at the center of things, directing operations, like a captain taking command in uncertain weather and setting a course. And because he was in control of this serious business of leading, no one questioned him or scrutinized him. He was accepted, trusted, needed — he had what he wanted.

Steadman perceived the man’s secret through the man’s relief; yet the relief was temporary and the secret was a scar on the man’s soul, an obsession that had become a wound.

“Do any of you have memories of Princess Diana?” he asked, as chairman of the table. “Some of you must have met her.”

This was brilliant — easing the pain of worrying about her injury by remembering the good days, as a whole, healthy memory of something hopeful.

Walter Cronkite said, “There was a rumor going around that she was staying with us in Edgartown and was seen sailing with me on the Wyntje, sunbathing on the deck as I steered. My goodness, how I wish that had been true.”

“She was supposed to visit the island this summer,” Styron said. “Rose said something about it.”

The president said, “She had been in touch with me. She wanted to come to the States. She was very concerned about land mines.”

Millie said, “I met her in London at a movie premiere. She was really sweet. There was no sign that anything was wrong in her marriage. She might have had a lover. I certainly would have if I had been married to that twerp Charles.”

The president smiled. “She came to the White House. She was so beautiful.”

Betsy Cronkite said, “And did you dance with her?”

“I wouldn’t have missed that for anything.”

“Let’s toast her health,” Styron said.

Millie said, “It would be so horrible if she died.”

“But if she did,” Steadman said, “my advice is, don’t die tonight.”

“I had no plans to do that, thank you very much,” Olga said.

“But if any of us did, no one would know. It wouldn’t be news,” Steadman said, realizing that his sightless eyes gave him an importance that transfixed the table. “The papers tomorrow will be full of this story.”

“So what if we did die?” Millie said.

Steadman smiled at her and leaned over. “When did Aldous Huxley die?”

No one knew. Steadman could see that the president hated to be asked a question to which he did not have the answer — and by a blind man, who was now the center of attention.

“I have no idea,” Olga said, and giggled a little.

The others murmured, but Steadman waited until they had gone silent again and were staring at him. He had begun to enjoy this reverence for his blindness, like the veneration of believers before a mute statue of a deity.

He said, “November 22,1963.”

“The day JFK was killed,” the president said.

“And stole the headlines — the whole paper.”

“Don’t die tonight, dear,” Betsy said to Walter.

The president was impressed and pleased, not because Steadman’s challenge had given the table more drama and depth, but because the diversion was a relief, obscuring the president’s secret.

While the others fretted, Steadman stared at the president and saw him stripped to his nerves. Did he suspect this? He was so sensitive, so quick to know, it was possible. It was clear to Steadman that he was upstaging the president, at the same time as the president closed in on him and held on to him for a photographer, who was passing the table. On the face of it he was making Steadman a poster boy for blindness — Give generously, so this man might see again! — but the reality was that he needed Steadman badly, his sudden celebrity, his inner light, as a cover for his secret passion.

The president became strangely possessive and familiar. All his life he had advanced himself with his knack of making important friends. He remembered everything, less like a politician than like the greatest friend, or a desperate and fearful animal.

Now he had risen from the table and was telling the Diana story to a larger group of party guests, and he had assumed an air of calm authority, in contrast with the misery and panic on the faces of the listeners. The story had already become polished as he spoke to them.

“Just a horrible crash, apparently. And we’ll just have to wait and see.

While Steadman listened, the woman returned and touched him again. Steadman sensed that the president saw her. But she was not the only one. Women seemed to be fascinated by Steadman’s blindness, for it licensed them to touch him, hold him, steer him, take him in their arms. His sightless face seemed to have a sexual attraction — the women felt freer, almost maternal, liberated from a man’s scrutiny of their bodies and their clothes. They were reassuring voices and eager hands.

In what he had called his debut, being visible, his blindness known and gaped at, he began to understand how the women were eager to mother him. More than that, they wished to be seen as mothers in the drama of a pieta, holding his wounded body so they would be judged on their altruism and sympathy, not on how they were dressed.

But he could feel the heat in their desire. They were aroused. They wanted to possess him. He could smell the ripeness of their lust, like raw salty flesh, as they touched him, kissed him like an idol, something inanimate that might be given life through their hands.

The president’s back was turned. He was still delivering the Diana news — not much news, but even this small amount had the weight and value of tragedy.

“Can I borrow Mr. Steadman for a minute?”

Steadman knew that touch, those fingers. He listened for Ava, but she was nowhere — the party had broken up in the wake of the Diana revelation. Many people had gone up the stairs from the beach to the house, to see what was on CNN.

The woman guided Steadman into the darkness along the shore, away from the glare of the kerosene torches, nearer the lap of the water and the low hooting of a foghorn. The damp breeze off the Sound was against his face.

“If it weren’t for the light pollution, you’d be able to see Buzzards Bay,” he said.

The woman was not listening. She took his hand in a commanding way and lifted her dress and touched herself between her legs with his fingers. Her wetness had the slippery feel of a sea creature, a small warm squid, like the fish salad he had poked his fingers into earlier, but warmer, wetter, softer.

Then she lifted his hand and helped him taste it and, still holding him, led him back to where the torches still blazed and the president was still speaking to the people, being reasonable and reassuring.

“She’s a fine woman.”

But as the president spoke — and he could only have been referring to the woman who had led him away — the woman vanished.

The president led Steadman up the stairs to the house, and the remaining guests followed. Clutching him like this, the president was still revealing himself. He was wounded, carrying this secret inside him, and the secret made him clumsy.

But he said, “Does Harry Wolfbein know how to get hold of you?”

“Oh, yes,” Steadman said.

And then, seeing Ava approach, the president let go, and embraced her, and told her again how lucky she was.

The president was hoarse and still talking to a group of people as Steadman and Ava left. Waiting in the driveway for the valets to bring his car around, Steadman was approached by Wolfbein.

“I think you’ve made a new friend,” Harry said.

4

AFTERWARD — as early as the next morning, when he woke to squirm in bed and squint in the dirty slanting daylight — the whispers began. So distinct and so insistent were they, he could hear them from his seclusion: the words, the tone, even the hot breath, the beat and glee of the gossips. Was it the timing — the awful event, the shocking news? Steadman believed he got greater sympathy for clinging to life, or seeming to, because the world was in mourning for Princess Diana, while he stood uncomplaining at the periphery of that tragedy.

Steadman’s blindness seemed to make him another object of that outpouring of grief and pity. He was brave, wounded, still alive, a limping survivor, staring at the world with dead eyes. He seemed to represent hope, for there was defiant life in his damaged body, and people were kinder, clinging to him, because of the awful news of this sudden bereavement, the car crash in Paris, which was overwhelmingly the topic in all the newspapers. On the Vineyard everyone was talking about Steadman, too. He drank the datura and the shadow fell over him and he heard them clearly.

The whispers said, Slade Steadman is blind, and some went further, explaining, Slade Steadman, the writer— Trespassing —just like that, lost his sight, as though he had reappeared after many years’ absence. Not just showed up but magically materialized, descended from the heavens, covered in glory, his blind eyes blazing like a luminous sky over Buzzards Bay late on a summer afternoon from a profusion of scudding smoke that was a ballooning jumble of gray-bellied clouds and pink plumes and feathers slipping from a great flock of molting flamingos with green-yellow highlights — appropriately lurid for a wounded artist to burst through and step forth from volumes of smoke backlit by fire, a whole sky of it, and pure gold slipping behind all of it, and in the crucible of rising darkness only the gold remaining to drain into the bedazzled sea.

Those were Steadman’s images, fanciful, because that is what he imagined they saw, a heroic visitation: the ideal way to show up after all that time. People seemed so glad to see him. And Princess Diana’s messy death helped give contrast, for her departure — the public sacrifice of a cheated wife, a slighted heroine, a sidelined royal, a celebrated risk taker — had made him seem a survivor against the odds.

Fearing his affliction, the whisperers wanted to care about his life, they wanted to help, they were manipulative and bossy, they knew eye doctors, they had heard of miracle cures, and they mentioned the possible causes — infected cataracts, macular degeneration, diabetes. Their caring was part of a ritual of warding off the evil of the misfortune. They were so relieved that the shocking ailment was his and not theirs.

The whispering was not all praise, not only amazement. Some of the whisperers were oddly gladdened — because they had been spared, gloating over their good fortune — others were appalled. Some whispers were dark, some blaming, mocking his foppishness, his hat, his cane, his arrogance — his spelling out what he saw in the Sound, like a deaf man whistling Mozart. Some envious guests exaggerated his conceits, for Steadman had been sitting with the president, and what they knew about him they had learned secondhand or had glimpsed in the twilight at the clambake.

The whispers made him a marvel, a freak, a figure of obscure power, somewhat remote even to his friends, known for his arrogance, who was both pitied and feared. He knew that on the Vineyard he was celebrated less for his book than for his being a multimillionaire as a result of the clothing catalogue. So it often happens with such tragedies: in their panic and ignorance people look more closely at each other and notice how frail they are, how damaged and failing, and give thanks for being alive in the shadow of death. Alert to his blindness, saddened by the death of Diana in the mangled car, people went on whispering.

In the succeeding days of gossip Steadman relived the fame he had known as a new resident of the Vineyard, when he had been in the headlines and had kept himself hidden. He was reminded of his notoriety, the fatness of it, his pleasure in the enigma of being satisfied, seeking nothing. Yet there was a great difference, for he was aware that the renewed interest in his work contained a deeper respect, and his writing was now a larger achievement because it was an aspect of his blindness. The handicap he had surmounted was now seen as a strange gift, and in his sad eyes a sort of holiness.

All this in less than a week. Steadman heard the whispers before anyone actually called. He knew that something amazing had occurred, his coincidental link to the death of Princess Diana by his having been sitting at a Wolfbein clambake with the president when the flunky appeared with the fax and the flashlight. The people at the president’s table had been among the first in the entire world to learn the terrible news. These few people were the earliest whisperers, and they approximated the curious admonition of the blinded Steadman, saying to the president and others: Don’t die today. No one will remember.

At last the phone rang, acquaintances called — he had no close friends. Most were the people from the Wolfbeins’ party, the inner circle of celebrities, who lived at such a remove from the ordinary, and kept to themselves, that Steadman was sure the news of his blindness would not travel far, at least for the time being. But because of their celebrity these people would eventually carry the news to the wider world. Soon everyone would know.

In some of the commiserating calls there was a note of concern, less for Steadman than for the speaker, who nearly always sounded fearful and somewhat vulnerable. Steadman wondered if what they feared was the insight granted to him by the crisis of his serious condition — how losing his sight made him especially watchful and alert. He was no longer the aloof and arrogant money man. He was an extraordinary victim. And what could these helpless people say to console him? The truth of the world of mortals is that people fall ill and weaken and die. As a wounded man Steadman was nearer to death than to life, and was reminded of his fate, and so life meant more to him, and he knew more of it and was a hero.

In a few of the phone calls he heard something rueful, almost a lament, bordering on jealousy, for on this island of celebrities his sudden handicap contributed to his being a greater celebrity, as though blindness were not a sickness at all, not a defect, not a disability, but a sort of distinction conferred on him, something to be resented and envied.

He was indifferent. No one knew him well enough to understand the truth of his blindness or the prescience it allowed him. All that mattered was that when the fact of his blindness became common knowledge, as he knew it would, and his name as a writer became known again, he could honestly say that he was working on a book and that his blindness had helped him resume his work.

To be writing was to be alive, to wake up happy and to pick up where he left off. His thinly fictionalized narrative expressed the deepest part of himself, exploring the farthest recesses of his memory, his oldest and most enduring feelings, in the ultimate book of revelation. He knew many writers who had published whole shelves of half-truths and evasions, made-up tales, fables, and concoctions. Sometimes it seemed that was all that writers did — spin yarns. “I’m doing a novel.” “I’m working on a story.” “I’m trying to develop an idea.” But if you used your own blood for ink, and what you wrote was the truth, and your life was the subject, one novel was enough; there was nothing else to know, no more to see, a heart laid bare. So he believed.

What disconcerted Ava was that in the days following the party the callers were mainly women. First were the wives of Steadman’s male friends, inquiring in the kindest way, and then the women he had known for a while before Ava, more oblique than the others, summer women, the unattached, the available ones, the speculators, the still-pretty, the newly divorced. Finally, the urgent callers, women who were strangers to him, who kept to the fringes of the Wolfbeins’ circle, and these were the most insistent on seeing him soon.

“I want to help you.”

What one woman said one morning, demanding, offering everything — this mothering, rescuing, bossing — stood for all the long conversations. Steadman took the calls while Ava sat nearby, halted in her dictation, glaring into the middle distance where the tape recorder lay turned off, exasperated, in an accusing silence, resenting the calls, hating every second of his being on the phone. All this was the consequence of his showing up at the party.

“That’s very kind of you.”

“Anything.” Was this the woman who had touched him, embraced him, offered herself to him at the party? “What can I do?”

“I’m busy at the moment.”

“I know how tough it must be for you.”

She was kind but persistent, like so many of them. There was something awful in the tone of the pitying people he knew, who possessed the clinging manner, hectoring voice, and unstoppable intrusiveness of telemarketers.

She said, “I could meet you today — this afternoon. Or later. Tonight I am completely free.”

Not hearing the words but somehow knowing, Ava sighed, exhaling harshly, amplifying her breath through her wide-open mouth, almost loud enough to be heard over the phone, making Steadman self-conscious.

“I have to go,” he said. “I’m working.”

Yet before he could resume his dictation, before Ava could make an unanswerable remark in a tone of scolding pity, the phone rang again.

“Slade — I feel I know your work well enough to call you Slade.” Another woman. “I’ve had an enormous amount of experience with visually impaired people.”

She was young, sweet-voiced, solicitous. Steadman imagined beautiful skin, lips close to the receiver in her damp hand, her tense receptive body slightly canted to listen to him.

“My vision is not impaired,” he said.

“I could read to you. I’d love that.”

Ava wanted him to bang down the phone, he knew. But he could not move the phone away from his ear — he kept it clapped against his head. He was fascinated: the woman was offering herself, pleading Take me.

“Where did she get the number?” Ava said.

She knew the caller was a woman, knew what she was saying, knew everything, which was why she was angry at the intrusion.

“Tell your friend that I care about you”—the woman had heard Ava’s question and was answering it. “All telephone numbers are available if you know how to access them.”

“Tell her—” Ava began to interrupt, but was cut off.

“There are no secrets,” the woman said. And just before she hung up: “I’m here for you.”

Then Ava said, “I was afraid of this.”

“Women chasing me?”

“Your calling attention to yourself. That charade at the Wolfbeins’.”

“‘There are no secrets.’ That’s what she said.”

“That should worry you.”

Pretending to sort his papers, aligning his pens and pencils, squaring up a set of notepads, moving the tape recorder, he said nothing and hoped she would stop.

But she spoke into his face: “Because there’s nothing wrong with your eyes. You haven’t even been to the eye doctor. Out of some weird look-at-me bravado, you went to a Vineyard party pretending you were a blind sage and got the president of the United States to believe you.”

“It was worth it.”

“Because you had the best seat in the house to get the lowdown on Diana’s death trip?”

“No. The president. I saw into his soul.”

“Oh, please.”

Ava began to snort, jeering at his pomposity, the grand manner that seemed a posturing part of his blindness. The manner itself was another form of blindness.

But Steadman merely stared at her with his dead eyes and waited for her to stop, knowing that if he persisted in his scrutiny he could unnerve her by boring a hole into her skull with his blank patience. And he felt that maybe he had succeeded, that she was taken aback, because she stopped challenging him with mockery, and when she spoke again she did so in a more reasonable tone.

“When you say things like that I don’t know whether to laugh or start worrying about your sanity.”

“He’s tormented,” Steadman said. “I really pity him. A part of him is lost and he doesn’t want anyone to know it. Imagine the dilemma: the man with the secret is the most conspicuous person in the world.”

“What sort of secret?”

“Something forbidden, something that shames him, like being helpless, smitten.” Steadman’s blank gaze was still fixed on her. “Cunt-struck.”

Ava said, “I’m sure the president would be reassured to know that you care.”

“I agree, strangely enough. Everything matters to him. He’s very thinskinned. And very tenacious. He came from nowhere. And he wants to be a hero.”

“Maybe that’s what you have in common.”

The phone rang before Steadman could reply, and he snatched the receiver as he had all the other times, before Ava could intervene.

It was a different woman. She said, “You touched me,” and hung up.

“I hate this,” Ava said, seeing the expression on Steadman’s face. “You’re pathetic and they’re sad.”

She told him angrily that he was deluding himself in enjoying the phone calls from these strange women. Instead of being strengthened by his blindness, as he had maintained, he had the egotism of an invalid, demanding attention and wanting to be cosseted and needing for his infirmity to be noticed.

“‘Look at me — blind as a bat!’” Ava said, satirizing him. “You love it.”

He wondered if this was true. Yes, he had liked being noticed at the party. It had reminded him of the great days when he had been a celebrated prodigy.

“So I’m as vulgar and susceptible as everyone else — so what? Hey, what about the president?”

“You liked upstaging him.”

“Probably,” Steadman said. “Then Diana died and upstaged us both. What a night.”

He knew that Ava was still staring at him, still annoyed, from the way she breathed.

She said, “Not everyone wishes you well.”

“What does that mean?”

“I’m sure there are people who are glad you’ve been taken down a peg, and others who suspect you’re faking. Anyway, why haven’t you asked me to find you an eye doctor? I could refer you to a specialist.”

“You think I’m faking,” he said. “You’ve been cold.”

The party and all the gossip afterward, the fact of his having reappeared among all those people, this abrupt visibility, were jarring, and so their evenings were changed. The sexual masquerade at night, the delicious routine, was over for now. His being with Ava, blind, for the hours of that party, the president’s arm around him, had had a powerful effect — had sobered them, made them self-conscious, kept them from their usual intimacy. More than that, all this had let blinding light fall on them and exaggerate the space between them.

“I guess so. You’re someone different.”

“I’m writing again,” he said.

Until that night of visibility he had felt that this woman was also inhabiting his skin. He had loved the intensity of their seclusion, loved the shadows over them, the shadows within, the shadows they threw in the bedroom. But going public for the first time since arriving back from Ecuador, and being noticed, even praised for his handicap, had altered things. It was a change of air. Allowing other people into their lives, they had revealed Slade’s secret, the spectacle of his blindness, shocking everyone with the obvious ailment and keeping the deeper truth hidden.

“It’s a trick,” she said.

Not blindness at all, she went on, but a state of luminous euphoria brought on by a jungle potion. You reached for a bottle, you took a drink, and you were in a brighter, blazing room, and the room opened onto the world.

That last telephone call (“You touched me”) had exasperated Ava and left Steadman murmuring. They faced each other, seeing only the walls.

“Deny that it’s a trick,” Ava said.

But Steadman had no denial, nor anything else to say. Then, nagged by what he remembered, he said, “What do you mean, eye doctor? Why should I go to an eye doctor?”

“You have a condition without a name.”

“It’s called blindness.”

“Blindness is a result, an induced condition, because you’ve been taking that drug,” Ava said. “Or why else do you have it?”

Steadman turned away and stumbled slightly, hating his unsteadiness, resenting Ava’s accusations and wishing that he was dictating his book to her instead of listening to her. She was still talking!

“Blindness always has a cause. It has an etiology, a pathology. Do you want a lecture on the visual cortex and the neurological basis of visual imagery? Blind people are always experts on their condition. They lecture doctors about retinitis and macular degeneration, they know all about PET scans and functional MRIs. About cataracts, the various ways of operating, the recovery time, the risks of infection.”

“So what?”

“For you it’s metaphysical. It’s mystical. All you do is gloat over your blindness. You love the attention. You love people talking about you and calling you. Those sentimental women.”

“They don’t ask why I’m blind.”

“But the president did. I saw you squirming and evading the question. He wanted to help you. He wants to find you a doctor. You looked ridiculous in your hemming and hawing.”

“He understood that I’m blind. He also understood that I’m hypervisual, I’m prescient. I see more than anyone. I could smell his anxiety, I could hear it when he was talking about something completely unrelated — his mention of Chuck Berry. I could differentiate people at the party by their smell alone.”

“Do you want people to know that you got your blindness out of a bottle?”

Now he saw what she was hinting at. She was right: going to the party had exposed him to the possibility of questions he couldn’t answer truthfully. And there would be more questions. He needed a better explanation; he needed a story.

“They want to help you,” Ava said, and she laughed at the thought of it, but it was a shallow, wounded laugh.

“What would be the point of seeing a doctor?”

“So that you can say you’ve seen a doctor.”

“You’re a doctor.”

“I’m the blind man’s lover.”

5

HE WOKE much too early, seeing the whole day ahead in Boston and feeling cross, thinking of how he loathed medical doctors, their absurd authority, their bossy arrogance, their airs — you were familiar, they were formal; you were small, they were large; “Wait here, Slade, the doctor is busy at the moment.” A doctor posed as a figure of power and wisdom, knowing how to ease pain and cure sickness and save lives. Those skills were like a higher form of plumbing, mastered by earnest drudges, yet they regarded themselves as shamans and did not want to be judged like ordinary mortals. They hated their learning to be called into question, and they never listened.

Ava was different from every doctor he had ever known. She read books for pleasure, she did not advertise herself as a doctor, and she did not disagree with him when he declared that doctors caused illnesses, that hospitals were disease factories, that most new drugs were poorly tested and overprescribed. Doctors made people sick with dirty drugs. The ideal doctor-patient relationship was his love affair with Ava, or the Secoya shaman’s with his ayahuasca-taker. To be humbled by the chanting shaman and granted visions by his drug — that was the purest healing.

That week of revelation on the Aguarico River reminded Steadman that they had not left the Vineyard since arriving back from Ecuador last November — had been buried alive all winter and spring and into the summer, those dazzling months of work and sex. And then at nine, starting for the airport, Ava at the wheel, Steadman furious in the passenger seat, scowling at an impenetrable line of traffic they were trying to join, they came to a dead stop at the junction of his country lane and the main road.

Summer people in crawling cars, sunburned and squinting in impatience, children’s bored bobbing faces at the windows — an unbroken line of cars going nowhere. Disgusted by all these intrusive strangers in their Jeeps and minivans and truck-like vehicles with big wheels and bumpers and bike racks, only ten minutes into the trip, Steadman regretted agreeing to the eye appointment in Boston.

“Take the shortcut.” He was staring at her leg, praying for it to articulate her gas-pedal foot.

“I can’t even get into the traffic.”

Trying to force a space for herself, Ava eased the car forward, but when a Range Rover hesitated and a space opened, a man on a moped darted into it, as though sucked into a vacuum, and after him a procession of bikes — dad, mom, wobbling kids, and another adult in skintight spandex on two wheels towing a bike trailer. Then the urgent inching cars closed the gap. A red-faced woman in the passenger seat of a convertible peered at Steadman, and with her arms folded and her head forward she opened her mouth wide, her nose pinched white, and yawned irritably, with a coarse goose-hiss that he could hear.

“Go home!” he called out.

The woman smacked her lips and blinked and calmly mouthed the words “Fuck you.”

Ava sighed at the slowly moving line of cars and headed into them, forcing open a space angled sideways, in the path of oncoming cars, but still only half inserted, for the traffic had stopped again in what was a two-mile backup into Vineyard Haven. The shortcut to the airport was still almost a mile away.

Mopeds veered in and out of the stopped cars, cyclists bumped along the side of the road, and two women jogged ostentatiously past, sweat-soaked in their scanty clothes — a dog barked at them, thrusting its loose spittle-flecked jaws out of a car window, sounding outraged. Someone’s radio — the convertible in front? — was very loud, and among the unmoving cars in the still summer air someone’s cigar smoke reached Steadman and Ava.

“The president was puffing a cigar at Wolfbein’s, did you see?” Ava said, just to make conversation, because the delay was so serious and she wanted to calm Steadman’s anxiety about the plane they had to catch.

“What the fuck is this traffic all about?”

Steadman’s anger was a gumminess in his mouth and grit in his eyes and his guts churning with frustration. He felt like an innocent loosed upon a mobbed and noisy world. He was upset and angrier for the way that Ava, with that pointless cigar remark, was trying to distract him from the bikes, smoke, noise, strangers, New York license plates, joggers, the leafy road blocked with cars — and the most annoying thing about slow traffic was the visibility of bumper stickers on the SUVs. The more expensive the vehicle, the more frivolous the message.

“Look at the size of them. They’re made for jungles and deserts.”

Ava said, “That reminds me. The agency wants you to sign off on a proposal from Jeep for some kind of Trespassing Limited Edition. Like the Eddie Bauer Ford Explorer.”

He imagined the vehicle in the Trespassing style, the safari look, the earth tones, the sturdy seats, the loops and brush guards and compartments, the compass, the altimeter, the gear bags, the khaki, the canvas patches, the leather details. All this because he had written a book. He went sad and silent.

Ava said, “Anyway, there’s another flight at noon,” and kept on, sounding hopeful, offering consolation, until she became aware of the silence from Steadman.

Gazing straight ahead, smiling slightly, licking his lips, Steadman held a small bottle in his hands that Ava could tell was empty.

“What did you just go and do?”

Instead of replying to that, he said, “The traffic’s moving”—though it wasn’t — so he added, “A mile down the road,” for he was blind again, in another dimension of understanding, relaxed, seeing past the jammed-up cars and the bikes, and calculating that they would easily make the flight.

At the airport, Steadman was smiling behind his dark glasses as they checked in.

“Just carry-ons,” Ava said to the woman behind the counter tapping the computer keyboard.

Steadman said softly, as though to himself, “That traffic was in my head.”

Swishing his white cane, he loped confidently toward the small plane, ahead of Ava but following the other boarding passengers.

“Brother Steadman, how’re you doing?” a man said from one of the forward seats.

“Bill,” Steadman said, recognizing Styron’s voice and, sensing him begin to rise from his seat, “Please don’t get up.”

“You’re doing just fine,” Styron said. “Wasn’t that a great party at the Wolfbeins’?”

“A historic occasion.”

“You made it so. You’re a brave guy.”

“Cut it out.”

“No, you’re a trouper. I was fetched by the sight of you talking to the president. He was mighty impressed, too.”

Ava’s embarrassment was visceral — Steadman sensed it powerfully, feeling what she felt, tightening like a cramp, reproaching him, and he said, “Please don’t say that, Bill. I’m the same as always, maybe a little brighter.”

“You’re right here, sir,” a woman said — the flight attendant, Steadman knew, directing him to a seat on the aisle. Ava took the window seat.

Steadman was aware of being close to Styron, just behind him, an odor, a mutter, the crunch of Styron’s folding a thick newspaper, the sense of his fragile fingers, his knuckles on the crease.

“You going to Boston, Bill?”

“Just to change planes,” Styron said. “Susanna’s filming Shadrach in North Carolina. She invited me down.”

“I’m seeing a doctor at the Mass. Eye and Ear Infirmary.”

“I hope it’s good news.”

“Whatever. I’m happy.”

“That’s what I mean by brave.”

And again the contraction, the cramp of shame from Ava beside him, though they were not even touching. But he resented her reaction now, like an intrusion into his serenity.

“I’m working on a book.”

“That means everything,” Styron said.

They taxied, the small plane’s wheels bumping; they took off, as though suddenly caught and lifted by a sling of wind, and the aircraft twisted and vibrated, the engine noise filling the compartment until they were well aloft and cruising, bumped by hidden angles of clouds and gulps of air.

“I could fly this thing.”

“Sure you could,” Styron said, with magnanimous authority and a little chuckle.

Steadman threw off his seat belt. He hoisted himself from his seat and walked to the cockpit door, which was propped open.

“Hi, Captain.”

The noise was loudest here, the pile-driver racket of pistons and propellers, but one of the pilots sensed him standing at the door. He smiled when he saw the white slender cane and the dark glasses, the Panama hat, the elbows out, head upright, face forward, ears cocked, in a blind man’s alert posture, a listening animal.

“Why are you flying along the canal? That’s not your usual flight path.”

“Incoming traffic’s stacked up to the west because of weather. We’ve been given a slot on the south-facing runway, so we’ll make an easterly approach. Hey, how did you know our bearing?”

“Sunshine,” Steadman said. “The canal entrance is down there. The Sandwich power plant. The harbor. The marsh. The dunes to the east. Scusset to the west — and now we’re banking toward Plymouth. Duxbury coming up, and we’re hitting the headwind, northwesterly today—”

“Better take your seat, sir.”

“Let me spell you at the controls.”

Shortening his neck in apprehension, one pilot hunched forward, gripping his wheel protectively, while the other pilot kept his gaze on Steadman, looking alarmed at this smiling talkative blind man offering to fly the plane.

“Move over,” Steadman said, nudging the man with his cane.

“I’m going to have to insist that you return to your assigned seat and fasten your seat belt,” the man said, seeing himself and the copilot reflected on the mirror lenses of Steadman’s glasses.

“You think I can’t fly blind? I can fly better blind.”

“We’ll be landing in just a few minutes, sir,” the pilot said, as though to a madman.

“I knew that,” Steadman said, and tapped his cane again. “Marshfield, North River—”

“Step away from the controls!”

At last, Ava touched his arm and said, “Please, Slade.”

Returning to his seat, he brushed the terrified and anxious body of the flight attendant, who asked Ava in a murmur whether he was all right.

Ava was too embarrassed to mention any of this in front of Bill Styron, and was relieved when they had landed and said their goodbyes and were in a cab a few minutes later. She was about to raise the subject of his bizarre behavior in the cockpit when, going through the Sumner Tunnel, Steadman took charge, saying, “Take a hard right after the exit. We’re going to Quincy Market. I’ll tell you where.”

“Nothing wrong with your eyes, sir,” the cab driver said. His own dark eyes and big nose and part of his smile filled the smeared oblong of the rearview mirror.

“Right here,” Steadman said, and then, as if reading the signs but without looking at them, “Martignetti Liquors. La Rosa Deli. Mama’s Pizza. The Big Dig labyrinth.”

Silenced by Steadman’s talk, the cab driver began to frown, as though he were being mocked.

“Stop here. We’ll walk.”

“You said Quincy Market.”

“But you’re not moving. The Union Oyster House is on a one-way street. It’s quicker to walk.”

Then he was out of the car and Ava was paying the fare. The driver was nodding at the side mirror and saying, “Where’s the fire?” Steadman had hurried ahead, and when Ava caught up with him he was striding, slashing his cane at the sidewalk.

“Why are you doing this?”

He didn’t answer, he walked ahead of her, whipping his cane, scattering the other strollers, who, noticing that he was blind, seemed to regard him with a mixture of fear and awe. Farther on, he reached toward the bow window of the Union Oyster House and felt along the single panes, the thick cracked paint, and tapped his way into the entrance.

A man and woman leaving the restaurant stepped back at the sight of this tall blind man — dark glasses, one arm outstretched, the other swishing a white cane, digging its ferrule into the threshold. A young waiter swept by him and bowed, almost genuflected, and said, “Right this way, sir.” Steadman followed the ingratiating voice to a side booth. A dangerous-looking man was always “sir.”

Ava was sliding into the seat as Steadman said, “Too near the bar.”

“The bar is empty, sir.”

“I don’t want all those stools and bottles in my face.”

The waiter was probably thinking, But you’re blind!

“What about there?” Steadman’s white cane swung like a compass needle to indicate an empty table.

“Reserved, I’m afraid.”

Steadman peered at him and said, “Has it escaped your notice that I’m blind?”

“I think we can accommodate you, sir,” the young man said, clearing two of the four place settings from the table in a clatter of silverware. “I’m Kevin. I’ll be your waiter today. May I offer you a cocktail?”

Ava was tense, silent, fearful of what Steadman might say next, for he had an unsettling habit of joshing waiters, being amiable and ironic and overfriendly, which was worse than being stern, for it threw them off and sometimes insulted them. But he tapped the menu without looking at it.

“No cocktails,” he said. “I’ll have a dozen oysters and a bowl of chowder.”

“The lobster chowder is my personal favorite.”

“Then why don’t you order it, Kevin? I’m having the clam chowder.”

Ava said, “Lobster salad and a glass of iced tea,” and when the waiter had gone, “Slade, I wish you would calm down.”

“I’m blind. I’m in another world from you. Maybe you shouldn’t have come.”

She considered this. It was true that he had noticed things she had missed, but he seemed not to notice much that was obvious. He was especially sensitive to textures, odors, and voices.

“I hate it when people talk on cell phones in restaurants.”

After scanning the room, Ava finally located a man holding a cell phone to his ear at a far table; but she could not hear him.

“And those people in that booth are whispering about me.”

As soon as the oysters on the half shell were served, Steadman ran his fingers around the plate, counting the shells, and without hesitating selected the bottle of Tabasco sauce from the cluster of condiments and sauces at the side of the table. He shook drops on each oyster and then, squeezing a lemon wedge, passed it over the plate in a circular motion. His hands, held high, fussing a little, exaggerated the act, calling attention — and it was true, those women in the nearby booth (how did he know they were in a booth?) were whispering and commenting on Steadman’s precise gestures.

“You’re showing off,” Ava said.

“I’m in Boston.”

“I like you better at home.”

“Do you really?”

He could tell she was trying to humor him. She ate quickly and nervously, feeling observed, apprehensive because of Steadman’s impulsive behavior. His blindness made him an extrovert, excited him, gave him a look of stealth and adroitness. He glided like an animal with night vision, even sniffed and held his head like a hypersensitive animal. Blindness sharpened his senses, but it also seemed to change his manner of walking and moving. He had a clear recollection of seeing a Secoya man emerge from the jungle on the banks of the Aguarico and thinking: I have never seen a man walk like that. Then, he had not been able to say what made the man’s walk so unusual, but now he knew it was a gait of total alertness.

Hurrying from the cab to the restaurant, Steadman had had a similar skating walk, though his posture was straighter — his blind gestures were less tentative, more assertive and fluid, his gaze steadier and more intense, his head angled to hear better, for his eyes were empty. He seemed to see with his face, his lips, the surface of his skin, his fingertips, receiving pulses from the air.

“I’ve never been to Boston as a blind man.”

He hated Ava’s taunt—“showing off”—as though he needed to perform! He could see her so clearly now with his tongue, with his teeth, with his forehead, with his nose.

“The city’s the same,” she said.

“It’s different for me. I see more, so I’m responding differently. Why are you making me say this? I hate to explain things. It smells of building in progress — the stink of destruction, diesel oil and pulverized cement. All that and the discontent of tourists, the way they prowl, so uncertain. Most of them are lost. This restaurant, filled with strangers. It’s disconcerting. Because I’m not lost.”

“We should have taken a later plane. Your appointment isn’t until two.”

“I like having the spare time. You’re in a different city from me at the moment,” he said. “You’re sleepwalking.”

“See what I mean? Bullshit.”

“I am fully awake.”

“You’re wired.”

“Because of all the talk. I hear too much. Blindness bothers bystanders. They want to help, they don’t know how, they’re worried I’ll fall on my face. I heard someone say, ‘Look at that blind man, how fast he’s walking.’”

“I think you were doing it on purpose.”

That was partly true, he knew, but he objected to the onlookers because they gaped without any comprehension; did not know enough, didn’t see how clever he was. He wanted to be noticed, perhaps feared, or at least be seen as someone powerful. He felt deserving of praise, not pity; he saw more than any of them.

Ava said, “I think you’re secretly enjoying yourself.”

“I went to school in this city,” he said. “Scollay Square and the Old Howard used to be right up the street. Burlesque, strip shows, Irish saloons. Two streets away from here at the market I remember horses and pushcarts and vegetable sellers. My father used to take me, not for local color but to buy fresh fish.” He moved his plate away. “Fresher than this.”

“You’ve got two oysters left.”

“Bad ones.”

“They look all right.”

“That’s the trouble. But they’re poison.” He turned aside, for the waiter had appeared with the dessert menu and he knew the man had heard his last words. He pointed to the plate and said, “They’re dead. Give them a decent burial.”

After lunch, with an hour more to kill and Steadman still restless, inquisitive, needing to move, they crossed City Hall Plaza to Cambridge Street—“It’s heartless. It’s a cheat. It’s a stage set”—and walked all the way to Charles. They passed the turnoff to the Mass. Eye and Ear Infirmary, threading their way among the taxis and ambulances and waiting people — some of the people looking damaged and newly mended, with bright white bandages taped over their eyes. Steadman hurried ahead of her.

“Where are you going?”

Saying nothing, making a show of his blind man’s ability to move quickly, he picked up his pace, crossed the main road, kept walking, found the Fiedler Footbridge ramp with his cane. He moved swiftly on the arch, over Storrow Drive, toward the sound of splashing and a racket of eager screamy voices. Without hesitating, he made a shortcut across the lawn to the chainlink fence at the perimeter of the public swimming pool. He stood there, his arms high, his fingers hooked to the fence.

“I used to come here as a little kid, before we moved back to the Vineyard,” he said as Ava caught up and was next to him. He was gratified, feeling superior when he sensed Ava was out of breath.

The swimming pool was a confusion of caged-in shrieks and chattering laughter, the slap of bare feet running on the cement apron of the pool, the explosive plunges — the noise and water and youthful exuberance, high spirits amounting almost to frenzy — and amid the howling the occasional shrill tweet of the lifeguard’s whistle, the smack and rap of the diving board stuttering on its chocks whenever anyone prepared to dive. In the heat and the sunshine and the full-throated screams, there was pushing and shoving — no serious swimmers, only jumpers and splashers, kids fooling.

“They excited me,” Steadman said, seeing the past, “all those skinny flat-chested girls in tight, too small bathing suits, with pruny fingers and blue lips, running and shrieking. I could see that they weren’t afraid to take risks.”

A thin pale-legged girl exactly matching Steadman’s description loudly dared a boy to push her off the edge of the pool.

“They were the nakedest girls I knew. I used to squeeze them and touch them underwater. When they laughed I knew they wanted me to fondle them. One of them reached into my bathing suit and touched me and I was in heaven. Her little fingers finding me in all that water.”

Still hanging on the fence, he smiled at the splashing and the howls, boys shouting like monkeys, girls’ meaningless shrieks and joyous objections, the free-for-all.

Then Steadman’s tone hardened, and in a flat urgent voice he said, “There’s a kid in trouble. Over there. He’s going under. You see him?”

At first Ava saw nothing but the mass of heads, the wet hair and beating arms in the pool, but one boy was saying nothing in the churning water, was not even struggling, just sinking at the deep end and — his mouth was open — giving a barely audible groan of surrender that was like a helpless and sorrowful farewell.

“Help him!” Steadman called out, in a demand so loud he silenced the cluster of boys and girls on the other side of the chainlink fence.

In the brief silence, the groan came again as a watery solemnity, a softer whisper of goodbye, and now Ava yelled, and when she caught the lifeguard’s eye, she pointed toward the struggling swimmer.

The lifeguard threw off his baseball cap, vaulted from his high chair, and leaped behind the drowning boy. In the same movement he seized him and boosted him to the edge. The boy, all loose arms and legs, looking indignant and in shock, resisting the help in his bewilderment, began to choke and weep, miserably spewing water.

“We’re done here,” Steadman said, and turned, hurrying ahead of Ava, tapping his stick toward the hospital.

6

PEOPLE PUSHING CANES and shuffling behind him, wearing eye patches and dark glasses, circulated in the hospital lobby, looking just like Steadman. But every one of them had a guide, moving slowly on the tucked-in arm of a spouse or nurse. “This way.” “Over here.” “Be careful.” They seemed so feeble that Steadman was determined to keep walking alone among them, ahead of Ava. And now Ava let him lead.

She was appalled and impressed, seeing how he moved with conviction, commanding the space in front of him by sweeping it with his cane and taking long strides, shouldering through the crowd, half of it aimless casualties. The blind and near-blind kept close to the walls, out of the way, and Steadman’s only collision was with a fully sighted man laughing into a cell phone. Steadman spoke the word “asshole” and raised his elbows and walked on, ignoring the man’s apologies.

They reported to the reception desk, summoned by a woman at a computer terminal. Ava took the folder of forms and began filling them out.

“He’s here for his physical.”

“Are you family, ma’am?”

Ava kept writing, did not look up. She said, “You can call me Dr. Katsina.”

“Just take a seat,” the woman at the computer said when the completed papers were handed over.

The doctor kept them waiting. They sat in awkward, unwilling postures among magazines that were wrinkled and damp, having been picked through by so many anxious fingers. Hearing their names, people got slowly to their feet and entered small rooms to be examined. Steadman saw them as poor, weak, naked flesh, struggling to stay whole, flunking their tests, humiliated in their failure.

“I don’t even know why I bothered to come here,” Steadman said. “I know what the verdict will be.”

“I wish I knew.”

“That’s what I’m saying. They won’t have the slightest idea.”

Saying this, he stood — he was being summoned by a stammering receptionist. He was aware of the voice a fraction of a second before Ava heard anything.

“Follow me, please,” the receptionist said. And to Ava: “If you don’t mind waiting.”

Steadman was shown to a room where a woman wearing white was seated. She was the doctor. She was heavy, inert, her body as pale and dense as cheese, the swags of flesh on her slack arms squashed against her sides, her gaze fixed on a computer screen. Her smell of antiseptic and talc put Steadman in mind of plastic flowers, of disguise and decay. Her ankles were swollen, overflowing her shoes. A wall clock behind her was ticking, and the face of the clock resembled hers. He detected a sadness in her but, offended by her officious manner, rejected the thought.

She did not rise or look at Steadman when he entered. Instead, she leaned away from him and shifted her heaviness onto the hams of her thickened thighs. When she picked up a pencil and clipboard her body filled the tight white uniform, binding it. She seemed to him like a keeper in a madhouse, chosen for her bulk. She had a bully’s body, and was probably a bit mad herself for her airless days in this sorry room, sitting in judgment on the sick. He disliked her for not greeting him — he a cripple, a blunderer, a blind man measuring his steps in the room with the tip of his cane.

Without engaging him in conversation, she watched his progress as he tapped with his stick and found a chair to sit in.

“When was your last complete physical?”

“Does it matter?”

“Lift your shirt for me,” she said, and he heard the squeak of her chair’s casters, the tug of her crepe soles, as she rolled toward him with more orders, abbreviated ones: “Sleeves up. Mouth open. Lift your tongue.”

She took his blood pressure and temperature without commenting, but all the while she breathed through her nose with a rasp of the bristly hair inside her snout.

Scratching with her pencil, her plump hand chafing across the paper, she entered numbers as though carving them with the chisel of her pencil point.

“What sort of work do you do?”

He could hardly believe that the doctor, staring at his name, did not know this simple, well-known fact; that she was swollen and slow did not explain it. Everyone knew his name, which often annoyed him when someone recognized it and greeted him. In the past it had been like a mockery of him, for what he was not doing.

“I’m Slade Steadman.”

The pencil lead trembled against the paper, then began paring at the page like a knife point. No other sound came from the doctor except the bump of her bare forearm on her desktop, like the skid of raw meat, a fat rind of cold pork slapped onto a butcher’s block.

As she began to write, and it sounded like an indictment, her scraping the paper with her pencil point, Steadman inwardly objected again: another doctor dominating him, behaving as pompously as a priestess, hinting that she had power over life and death, knew the diagnosis for all mortal ills, if not the cure, protective of the special language of illness, the code words of doom, a superstitious idiolect, a lingo that was all about fear and flesh. He was supine; there was no sympathy here.

He had come to believe that many doctors caused disease. Ava was a notable exception, yet he sometimes looked at her and thought, But you never know. He could rant on the subject of physician-assisted illness. Gnawing in secret like the canniest rats, worrying your confidence and good feeling with their arrogance and secrecy, doctors were at the bottom of it all. Steadman was certain that doctors brought healthy people down by uttering dire warnings and attaching the most grotesque meaning to the commonest and least harmful symptoms. “Your headache might be a brain tumor,” and “Your cough might be more serious than you think,” and “That skin blotch might be melanoma,” and “What you think is just bad eyesight is macular degeneration — you are going blind.” They were the bearers of fearsome news that made sick people sicker.

Or they told you nothing at all, treated you like a pickled specimen, a sample ailment, a case number. Then they squinted and scrutinized, frowned and scribbled, as this fat uncommunicative harridan was doing now. They were drug dealers with the dirtiest drugs, which cleared up some symptoms but gave you others: dizziness, nausea, insomnia, anxiety, impotence, skin rash, hair loss, depression, renal failure, the shakes, and you were incapacitated by these side effects, or died. A few doses of a vaguely named antipsychotic drug and you ended up palsied, with all the outward symptoms of Parkinson’s disease. Check into a hospital to fix a painful rotator cuff and you picked up bacteria that triggered arthritis so crippling you couldn’t get out of bed. Hospital air was soupy with germs. Shot-happy doctors made people ill, as this woman had already begun trying to do to Steadman, demoralizing him by ignoring him, by breathing hard, a kind of poisonous exhalation. But he knew better.

“What is your name?”

“Dr. Budberg,” she said in a panting breath, surprised by the sudden question, but not so startled that she forgot to give him her title.

He wanted to remind her that all ignorance needs a name. She was really no better than a Vineyard lout doing yard work, who smiled resentfully at words like “threadbare” and “profusion” and “extricate,” and was insulted when Steadman used them, saying with aggression, “I guess I’ll have to write that down, Mr. Steadman.”

He said to Dr. Budberg, “I do the same work as Herr Grass and Dr. Canetti and Mr. Wolcott.” When she did not react, nor even raise her head, he added, “Señor García Márquez, Mr. White, Mr. Milosz, and Mrs. Gordimer.”

Her hesitation showed him he had rung no bells — her head still down, her pencil motionless, poised over the blank line headed Occupation.

“They won the Nobel Prize for literature,” Steadman said, and wondered what she would say. She said nothing. “I haven’t so far, but may I say you have a strange scotoma?”

She looked at him and — given her specialty, this seemed odd — blinked in confusion.

“Writer,” he said.

Just last week the president of the United States met me, he wanted to say. And: How is it that this exalted man knew my name and work, and you, arrogant lump that you are, did not?

Dr. Budberg was wearing what he took to be her game face. Doctors learned early how not to look fazed. She was proof of such scientific posturing, busying herself with an eye chart, shifting in her chair, rolling it on its casters as she skidded and stumped with her lisping crepe-soled infirmary shoes. She adjusted the viewing hood, and Steadman knew he was no more than a pair of goggling eyes attached to an insurance policy.

But in the studied scorn of her indifference, a bit too contrived, she lost her poise and knocked her pencil to the floor. Before she could retrieve it, Steadman stood and walked four steps and snatched it, played with it a little, fingered its lettering, made her wait for it, then handed it over and sat down again, all unhesitatingly and without using his cane.

“Put your head in here. Use the chin rest,” she said, fitting the metal viewer bracket onto his face and staring at his eyes.

“Can you read anything?”

“What do you want?”

“How about the top line?”

Steadman read the top line.

“Can you read the next line?”

Steadman read the smaller letters, the whole line.

“Can you see anything else?”

Without pausing, Steadman read four more lines.

“The last line you read isn’t on the chart,” the doctor said, as though Steadman had uttered something fatuous.

“Move the chart up,” he said.

She did so, making the yellow projection of the lighted rectangle jump, and the newly exposed bottom line was the line he had recited.

“How did you know that?”

“Because I’m not reading it,” he said.

The heavy woman shunted her weight and became clumsy in her confusion, heavier-seeming, not liking what she heard, fussed by the illogic of it, snatching at the arms of her chair. She was still fussing, swinging the binocular mask of the viewer bracket away from his eyes.

“What do you see now?”

“Nothing,” he said.

“So you can’t read anything?”

“I can read everything.” He kept his chin on the metal rest and stared straight ahead. “I’ve seen all those lines before. Why don’t you people get new eye charts?”

She leaned and shone a light into his eyes and peered into his skull — the warmth of the light brushed his cornea like a feather. He could smell the doctor’s sour body. She said nothing, but he could tell that she was disturbed. He was reminded of his first impression, how sadness penetrated her flesh and was eating at it from within.

“You’re getting no response. My pupils are still dilated and you don’t know why,” he said. His chin hard on the chin rest restricted him from easily opening his mouth and made his voice sound mocking and robotic, a tone he instantly became fond of and exploited. “No sign of trauma. You’re bewildered.”

“I am not bewildered,” she said too loudly. “It could be neurological.” “You say ‘could be’—so you don’t know.”

“Are you presently taking any medication?”

He said no, but warily, using the chin rest to disguise the unease in his voice.

Fixing and clamping his head again, the doctor swung a new arm out of the apparatus and leveled it, like a small pistol aimed at his right eye, and she fired a bullet of air into his cornea. She repeated it with his left eye.

“My pressure’s normal,” Steadman said. “Why don’t you tell me these things.”

She was briefly abashed and then she recovered and became formal again. She said, “This is a little unusual.”

“Are you suggesting I am a little blind?”

“I didn’t say that.”

He could tell he was annoying her, and he was at last happy. He lifted his head from the hollow of the viewing stand and smiled at her.

“I am totally blind,” he said. “Now you know.”

His teasing made her obstinate. She said, “You read the chart perfectly.”

“No. I remembered it. I’ve had eye tests my whole life.”

The doctor became insistent. “You didn’t see the chart? You saw darkness?”

“There is no darkness. Have you heard of a man named Shakespeare? A writer. I now know that his most inaccurate line is ‘Looking on darkness which the blind do see.’ Black is the one color I can’t see.”

“You can see colors?”

“I am like Jorge Luis Borges, who made that observation. A writer. He was blind. ‘I live in a world of colors,”’ Steadman said, and still in his quoting tone, ‘“The world of the blind is not the night that you imagine.’”

“What sort of colors?” She was holding the pencil again in her stubby fingers.

He faced her and said, “Monkey-ass purple, clitoral pink, venous blue, nipple umber.”

But Dr. Budberg had turned away, her jaw set hard, swelling her jowls. She interrupted him, saying, “So you were unable to read the eye chart.”

“My reader’s and writer’s sight is gone,” Steadman said. “When something ends, something else begins. There are all sorts of vision, not all of them measurable.”

Working her legs and feet, the doctor rolled herself to her desk. She said, “You’ll have to come back. We’ll schedule a PET scan and an MRI. Make an appointment with the receptionist.”

“You didn’t even know I’m stone blind,” Steadman said. He began to laugh, poking his face at her.

“This examination is over.”

“Now you know I’m blind, but you don’t know why,” he said. “Why not admit it?”

She was insulted, he could tell. Doctors might be habitually hearty, but that was a distracting ruse to josh you; they refused to be teased themselves.

“I’m a medical miracle,” Steadman said.

“Really,” the doctor said in an uneasy murmur, hardly parting her lips.

“I see more than you do,” Steadman said. “Who knows more than a blind man?”

“Then why did you bother to come here?” she said. Her voice, intending insult, went shrill.

“Maybe for verification,” he said. “Maybe to give you some timely medical advice.”

She drew back from him. It was what strangers had been doing all this day in Boston, reacting to him, stifling their feelings, looking fearful, because they saw he was blind — the pilot, the flight attendant, the cabbie, the waiter at the Union Oyster House, people on the sidewalk and in the elevator. He went closer to the doctor, putting on his dark glasses, lifting his cane, looking fierce, like a swordsman.

“If you can’t do anything to control your weight,” Steadman said, “how do you expect me to trust you with my precious eyes?”

That was too much for Dr. Budberg. She rose awkwardly, stumbling a little, snatching papers and folders from her desk. She hurried out of the examining room, leaving Steadman to find his own way to the door.

But now that she was gone he saw her clearly, as he had suspected at the outset, and was alarmed, for at the moment of the doctor’s abrupt departure, when she was in motion, Steadman realized his error. Dr. Budberg was in mourning. He had been too severe with her. He had not understood. The way she walked, slightly lopsided, her head tucked into her shoulders, holding one arm crooked — her whole posture of grief — told him that she was miserable, bereaved, and he had hurt her a little more, made her sadder, kicked her. Feeling sorry for her didn’t help. Someone close to her had died. Grieving had deprived her of sleep and made her inattentive and unintentionally remote and slow and officious.

“What did you say to piss her off?” Ava asked when Steadman entered the waiting room — and he knew that the doctor had preceded him.

Steadman wanted that twenty minutes back; with shame he recalled his rudeness. He went to the reception counter and handed in his file folder to a woman in a white smock sitting at a computer.

“Want to schedule an appointment?”

In a low voice, Steadman said, “Dr. Budberg — someone died in her family.”

“Daughter,” the woman said, narrowing her eyes, her face crumpling. “Terrible to lose a child.”

He did not want to know more than that. Details would only make him feel worse.

“What’s wrong? You act like you got some bad news,” Ava said.

“I was a little hard on that doctor,” he said, touching the face of his watch. “We’ve got two hours before our flight. Let’s find a cab.”

A taxi was waiting by the front entrance of the hospital. The driver got out to help but Steadman waved him away and snatched the door open.

The driver said, “Where to?”

“You know the Two O’Clock Lounge?”

“It’s not called that anymore.”

“Does it matter?” He could tell that Ava was staring at him. He said, “I need something life-affirming.”

The place was called Pinky’s, at the same address on Washington Street where the Two O’Clock Lounge had once been. Leaving the hot sidewalk, they entered the darkened doorway into a room of loud music that was cool and poorly lit and dirty, smelling of spilled beer. He sniffed again: naked flesh, two women dancing slowly on a mirrored floor, a pair of long-legged nudes, seeming to ignore the beckoning men.

“I hate places like this,” Ava said. “I’m a doctor. I don’t need it.”

“You need it because you’re a doctor.”

“Please not down front.”

But Steadman insisted, and she followed him through the darkness to the edge of the stage, where they sat holding hands among men in attitudes of intense concentration, almost worship. One woman, wholly naked, twirling in a slow dance in high heels, approached. She smiled at Ava, looking curious when she saw Steadman’s dark glasses and white cane, so confident in his blindness, not seeing her and yet smiling.

“Now she’s squatting,” he said.

“I see some pretty tortured labia. Some warts.”

“Please stop being a doctor.”

When Ava fell silent and he felt her fingers, warm and moving in his hand, he was aroused, sensing her sudden awkward interest.

She said, “I’ve never been in one of these places before.”

“Think of it as an examining room,” Steadman said. “Slip a five-dollar bill into her garter and you can give her a physical.”

She let go of his hand, groped in the shadow beneath her, and fished in her bag. He loved the furtiveness of her movement, tipping the naked dancer with a self-conscious gesture of concealment, woman to woman. He savored the silence as the other woman came near and squatted and opened her legs, and Ava said, “Such pretty girls, such beautiful bodies — what are they doing here? Is it that they have low self-esteem?”

“How is this different from a hospital?” Steadman said. “Look at the interns at work.”

The solemnity of the men whose heads rested between the knees of the naked women, the attentive way they studied what they saw, a complex pinkness, like a live blossom — yes, they could have been the most serious medical students.

“Or like boys playing doctor.”

“It’s also like a temple,” Steadman said, and he explained: a bit of magic, some mirrors, ritual glimpses of the forbidden. “They’re not weak — these women are in charge. They’re priestesses. The men are helpless worshipers.”

That squatting woman, seeing Ava smile, had pursed her lips and made a kissing sound when Ava rewarded her with a folded and tucked-in five-dollar bill.

And then the kneeling woman leaned slightly and reached behind Ava and drew her head closer, placing it between her naked breasts. Ava laughed a little, then realizing she was caught, her mouth against the cleavage, she became flustered as the woman moved quickly from side to side, slapping Ava’s face and cheeks with the weight of her loose breasts and laughing in triumph.

Steadman had heard it all, no single word but the beat of it, the smack of flesh on flesh, and he was aroused by the fact that his lover had been surprised that way by the naked woman.

Ava’s eyes were shining, her mouth slightly agape, as though she had changed places with him, and she was stunned by the slap of the breasts on her face.

“If you like, we can stay,” he said.

“I have a much better idea.” She kissed him, her eyes still glittering, as the naked dancer looked on approvingly and winked.

They left Pinky’s and flew back to the Vineyard in the dark — much simpler at night, and an easier landing, a lot less traffic on the nighttime road. They were home in twenty minutes, Ava driving.

He kissed her inside the house. He held her. He said, “Now let me see.”

7

RISING FROM DARKNESS to light, abruptly dazzled, Steadman understood how religions caught fire, for what was revealed to him was not just the ardent power that blindness had granted him but the deception of sight. Where others saw opaque blobs, he saw symmetrical flames illuminating the passage of time, like a torchlit path, giving continuity and coherence to his memory. Not hallucinations and fantastic visions but the plainest, most persuasive reality, what he took to be truth: a lit-upness of his life.

He whispered to Ava, “Everyone I see is naked.”

“You’re boasting again,” Ava said. She challenged him with denials and evasions, because of his extravagance.

“No, you don’t understand. Nakedness is a kind of concealment, the most misleading kind. It subverts fantasy.”

Yesterday in Boston, at Pinky’s, he had been reflective, for nakedness was like defiance. The dancers had been girlish and coy, playful, teasing, protected by their nudity. Even the barest woman in the place looked peeled and raw, just feeble startled limbs, going through the motions, and others seemed more like pork to him now. Because he saw too much, something important was missing. The essential woman was hidden inside all that naked flesh.

Though the trip to Boston had been exhausting, it had been worth it for the sight of Ava in the bar, face forward, her cheeks slapped by the fat breasts of the dancer, her eyes alight.

“You liked it,” he said.

Ava said, “Couldn’t you tell — I wanted to go home with her. But I’m trying to keep you honest. The women who’ve been calling you up don’t care about your writing. And if you think you’re preternaturally prescient, then you’re a freak.”

His rattle of laughter disturbed her even more than his white sightless eyes.

To give herself confidence, she mocked him. “You’re like the kid who always wins at Pin the Tail on the Donkey. After a while everyone suspects that he’s peeking over his blindfold.”

“They’ll read my book and see that my power is real.”

“What happens when you lose it?”

“Sight and blindness are the same to me. Blindness is special sight.”

“You can’t keep up this pretense forever. Someone will find out and expose you.”

He laughed. Her challenges excited him by keeping him alert; he enjoyed repelling her attacks. He wanted her to fight him, or else later, embracing her, there would be nothing left to believe in. He smiled and said softly that he was not afraid, that the book would vindicate him and — as books seemed to do, as Trespassing had done — displace him.

“Ask Dr. Budberg. She was baffled. I told her I’m a medical miracle.”

“Oh, please.”

Ava seemed to think that her defiance might stimulate his humility. She kept at him, accusing him of being absurdly proud of going back and forth from blindness to sight. “You think you’re better, not because you’re blind but because you’re both, that the ability to switch makes you superior. You’re drinking flower juice from the jungle. That’s all.”

“Some people drink it and nothing happens. Remember Manfred?”

“That creep,” she said. “He was the one who got you into this.”

Because the drug was so effective on Steadman, he felt singled out, not lucky but chosen. He could see that Ava was weakening, but he relished her antagonism. Her doubt was necessary; he did not want a slave, he wanted an active partner; he needed her doctor’s skepticism.

“By the way, you’ve got wine stains all over your shirt,” she said sharply.

“And you’re having your period.”

“No,” she said, and then lamely added, “It just started.”

“Isn’t that what I said?”

He was like a goblin, but he was writing; he was living for his new novel. Only he and Ava knew that its wildest parts were the facts of his life, the most outrageous of his conceits the plain truth.

The many-sided trip to Boston that humid summer day, his stumble-strutting like a proud cripple and slashing his bone-white cane, finding his way, raising the alarm for the drowning boy, reading the doctor’s grief, understanding the implications of nakedness, had vitalized him and made him greedy for more. Being among strangers had always made him impatient and alert, and his blindness electrified him and endowed everyone he saw with a blue aura of revelation.

“Borges is right. Blindness is a gift.”

Still resisting, Ava said, “My worst patients are always the ones trying to prove they’re not sick.”

“I’m not your fucking patient!”

She shrugged and switched on the tape recorder and took dictation. He blinded himself and continued his book, speaking fluently, the storyteller reclining on his sofa. He came to see that the trip to Boston had been an interruption — necessary to preserve the appearance of having seen a specialist for his condition, but a disturbance of a routine on the island that he had found satisfying and productive.

Strange women still called, offering themselves to him. I know how you must feel. I’m sure I can help. Ava laughed insincerely at these anonymous calls, which were more frequent after dark.

Steadman teased her into taking him to see Titanic, at the Island Theater in Oak Bluffs, and he blinded himself in the dark, gulping his tonic covertly like a habitual user. Ava mocked the movie, but gaping at the screen, Steadman found it both melodramatic and upsetting. As he was watching, he was aware that across the road from the theater the harbor brimmed with a high tide, and far-off children’s voices, carrying across it with the sound of the sea, saddened him.

Afterward, in the night air, walking the streets of Oak Bluffs, blind among restless youths, many of them black, he felt even worse, and murmured, “They are prowling here. They have absolutely nothing to do. All these stalkers going in circles, looking for risks to take.” Their lazy muscularity terrified him, and their watchfulness alarmed him. They had such hunger. He said, “You have no idea how they glow.”

“Are you turning into a racist?”

“Some of these kids are angrier than you think.”

“They seem to be having a good time.”

“You have no idea.”

He said that what Ava took to be their taunting humor was really rage and envy and rivalry. They were too oblique to be observed in the normal way, but he saw their essence with his third eye; their appetite and energy were a set of readable odors. Where she saw boys in baggy pants with their caps on backward and girls in tight shorts, he saw a scrum of people trying to claim a place for themselves.

Another day they went to South Beach, using the fading of his blindness — had the dose been too small? — as an excuse to take the afternoon off from dictation. But the harsh distorting daylight pained his eyes, and daring himself in the wind that was filled with pelting sand grains, he blinded himself again. He was so daunted by the greater brightness, he ran headlong through the dunes before he leaped into the surf. Much more buoyant in blindness, he let himself be borne by the waves for a long time and then tossed into the rim of wet sand at the tidemark.

“Are you all right, Mr. Steadman?”

Leaning over him was a young woman with hot skin and an aroma of slippery kelp on her soft thighs, like a dripping mermaid with damp twisted hair and fish lips.

“He’s learning to hold his breath underwater,” Ava said, and the young woman shimmered into the sea and danced across a wave.

“She was offering herself,” Steadman said.

He shopped blind, he walked blind, he sailed his catboat blind, he drove blind to Squibnocket. He never lost his confidence, did not waver. But in spite of the authority of his gestures, he sometimes bobbled a line or dropped things; and though he did not falter himself, he made others falter — Ava especially was wrong-footed by him again and again.

The nighttime drive to Squibnocket was a cautious charade, a much shorter distance than Steadman realized or admitted. Ava meant it when she praised him, though she was overly sincere, a little too insistent, as if humoring a drunk or a madman.

In the street, dogs barked at him, and when children stared he screeched, “I’m a bat!”

On the day of the sail he handled the boat expertly, but did not know the tide had turned and was ebbing west, sweeping his small boat on its beam through the harbor to the lighthouse until, jerking on the main sheet, he found himself rocked in the troughs of West Chop. Ava took the tiller and guided them into the harbor entrance to Tashmoo Pond, because they couldn’t buck the outgoing tide at Vineyard Haven.

“You sailed the hard part,” Ava said.

Steadman knew he was being patronized by her, but didn’t mind her tone because she was in the dark, not he. He was compulsive, he needed to be blind, it was liberation to him.

This was his year of blinding light. He hoped for many more of them, light-years ahead. He had turned his life around. He was writing again. He hated to use the word “blind.” Blind meant struck down and helpless, and he had been elevated and inspired. The decision was his, the secret too — datura was not blindness but a mask in a play of revelation. He loved putting it on, he was reluctant to take it off, and when he did, it was an act of will, like throwing his head back and stabbing his eyes with needles.

He did not miss the irony in the image of needles, for he had become like an addict, needing the visions granted him in the darkness he brought on himself. Datura was a paradox, blindfolding him, giving him sight. Until then, all he had ever seen was a one-dimensional world, shabby and insubstantial in its shallowness. He realized on leaving it, borne by the drug, that he had spent his whole life truly blind, seeing only one plane, one surface.

Datura gave him night vision, like the superior sight and heightened senses of a nocturnal animal, one of the big yellow-eyed cats that dozed by day and prowled at night. He saw himself as the feline prophet of a new religion and his writing as revelation. What Nestor had called la venda de tigre, the tiger’s blindfold, had admitted him to a world of visions — the gauzy light, the luminous shapes, the peculiar phosphorescence all around him, the way black light was active, and most of all the smells, the touch, the taste of darkness. But the experience was also deeply physical. Nothing stirred him more sexually than this palpable darkness.

Dr. Budberg wrote him a brief blunt memo in which she confirmed his blindness. It was “of unknown origin.” She encouraged him to seek a second opinion and to consider more tests.

Ava said, “It would have helped if she had suggested a cause. Then we would have some sort of description for your blindness.”

Steadman said, “She’s the blind one!”—still annoyed that she had never heard of him, or at least pretended not to know his name. But she had problems of her own, her grief like a disease, bloating her and making her slow and sour.

“She was highly recommended. She comes to the island sometimes.”

In a list of scribbled notes on the “Additional Comments” page, she stated that he had no apparent vision, had failed all the tests, nothing registered, all the measuring instruments said so. He was a mystery, a problem, his sight was zero, and she had neither hope nor any remedy except a referral.

In the report it was as if Steadman’s eyes had been gouged out and the sockets sewn shut. No one was blinder — that was the story. But his cheerfulness and wit, his emergence from his solitude, had given him fame on the island — an island that was connected to the greater world. People on the Vineyard who knew him admired him; he was envied rather than pitied. In the island talk, which was constant, he was becoming a hero of handicap.

No one but Ava knew the truth, that his blindness was his choice, and reversible; his own decision. The effects lasted six or seven hours and then wore off, leaving a residue of craving, a longing for what had just ended, a memory of light, of commanding power.

He no longer questioned the datura but was only grateful for its being part of his life. He could see more clearly than ever, could feel, too, with intense sensitivity; his skin, his muscles, his nerves were electric. Sex seldom satisfied him completely; it made him greedier. It was something tactile that convulsed him, but was more than ever a brilliant spectacle, something ruthless and sudden even when it was anticipated.

“Because sex is the truth.”

The summer was passing. He dictated a portion of the book every day to Ava, and his dictation, which was taped and later transcribed, was often a dramatic episode, a set of instructions for a sexual encounter with her in her nighttime role as a seductress, Dr. Katsina. Summer days, summer nights, living and writing the erotic narrative that was his book. Blinding light, exquisite heat.

There were more parties, and — though Ava objected — Steadman was frequently the center of attention. When someone asked him what had happened to his sight, he explained that he had been blinded in such a simple way that he was amazed it had not happened more often. Why weren’t more people blind? Eyes were just blobs of jelly, like a pair of trembling oysters, the softest, most vulnerable parts of the body. Nothing violent had befallen him, just a series of preventable errors, so he said.

He had been traveling — spending some of the fortune he had made from the merchandising and licensing of Trespassing— and had been in Hawaii. He had a residential address there, having leased a beach house for the winter. On a whim, he applied for a driver’s license and, placing his chin on the metal rest for the eye exam, had looked into the chart and seen a blaze of light and faint, sketchy letters. He could not read a line, even with the glasses he sometimes used, and was failed by the apologetic clerk, who said, “Maybe you need new glasses.”

After trying many combinations of lenses on him, an eye doctor shone a light into his eyes and said he had severe cataracts. He would need immediate surgery.

“I was amazed. I said it was impossible. I was hardly fifty.”

But it was not unusual, he was told, especially given his extensive travel. Cataracts were sometimes hereditary, but there was also his exposure, in the years he spent outdoors, to ultraviolet rays. His father had worn thick glasses, the old inadequate remedy.

“It’s an easy operation,” the doctor said. “A slam dunk.”

Everyone said that, though Steadman believed that the expression “slam dunk” had come to mean, for him, certain failure. And so it seemed, for Steadman had both eyes operated on, separately, six weeks apart. Not laser surgery, he explained, but a procedure under a blazing light, the scraping sound, the murmuring of the surgeon and her assistant, a knife in each eye, but such a small incision that no sutures were needed.

For a brief spell his vision was no longer yellow-hued but clear, bright as a Hawaiian lagoon, impressive in its depthless clarity. But he saw another blue, and for a brief period he enjoyed the piercing sight of crystalline imagery.

He followed all the post-op instructions. He used the drops, took the antibiotics, did not touch his eyes with his fingers, but still — was it the snorkeling? the sea water? the swimming? — the tiny incisions became infected. He was put on stronger antibiotics, to which he was allergic, and in the days he refrained from taking them, the infection got a grip. He went back to the doctor and was informed that he was losing his corneas.

He remained in Hawaii, he said, awaiting a cornea transplant, his eyes bandaged. Blindfolded in all that sunlight! The transplant was done and he flew back to Boston, only to be told that the operation was a failure.

“The doctor looks at me and says, ‘Your corneas are decompensating.’”

They tried again, this time with a world-class medical team: the waiting, the suspense, the exhaustion of the surgery. And those corneas, too, were rejected.

“I accepted this condition. Maybe someday I will get a healthy transplant that will take, and you’ll see me reading on the beach. But that’s out of my hands. I don’t want to live on false hope.”

That was his story. Except for the mention of snorkeling in Hawaii, none of it was true. But it didn’t matter, for with the datura he was truly blind. With his stick and his unhesitating gait he had emerged from seclusion to become a dramatic public figure on the Vineyard party circuit. There was renewed interest in his life and work. And somehow people knew that after years of silence he was working on a book.

It was easy for people to believe the fiction that he had been rendered blind from an infection and his cornea transplants had gone wrong. Medical mistakes were so common, everyone understood. Many people countered with a medical mishap of their own — misdiagnosis, wrong medication, unexpected side effects. “He went in for tonsillitis and they gave him a vasectomy.”

People agreed with him when he said, “Doctors make you sick.” And he was surprised that his explanation was so easily accepted, glad that he did not have to elaborate on his lies. It helped his story when Ava agreed that his doctors had been incompetent.

He knew that nothing would have been harder to explain than the drug he had happened upon in the Secoya village down the Aguarico River in the Oriente province of Ecuador, when he had been looking for ayahuasca and been introduced by Manfred to that rare datura, the ragged and attenuated clone of angel’s trumpet; and how the blinding light had allowed him a downward transcendence into a new life, with a new vocabulary of sight.

“Phosphenes,” Ava said.

The word that science offered was inadequate for the visions that were now his.

At one time he had taken pleasure in the act of writing, had enjoyed filling a page, crossing out half of it, beginning again, adding improvements and variations in the margin, preparing a fair copy, like a monk scratching away on vellum. But now, with the prevision of his blindness, setting down the words seemed much less important than contriving a sequence of images in his head. Why write when such visions were so intense? And the fact was that the very writing of them seemed to diminish them.

And when the moment came, using a pen was out of the question, and he had no use for a keyboard. He needed a tape recorder, needed a woman to stimulate him — not any woman but someone he desired, and now there was only one. He was so enraptured, so possessed by his vision, and given such fluency, that he needed to speak his book and for Ava to set it down as well as record it. His book was an exuberance, an intense erotic prayer; her writing it was not submissive but a form of interrogation. The act of his dictating and her murmuring and saying “Yes, yes” or “Wait” was sexual, too, because she was an essential and active partner in it, just as obsessed.

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.