Blinding Light

1

ONCE, NOT THAT LONG before, Ava had seemed just a face and figure, another woman, but loving, desirable, bright. Now she was the living embodiment of his ideal woman — a comforter, a partner, a protector, a helper, a healer, a friend; and she was hungrier than he was. He loved to think that she never said no, that she initiated sex. I am waiting for you. Come here.

She had become his life, his greatest friend, and his need was deeper than love. She was his companion, she was his mistress, she dominated him, she attended him, she was both his soothing submissive nurse and his bossy doctor. He depended on her for everything. She took orders, and in serving him she guided him, became part of his days and nights. Though she had said she would never do such a thing, she had vacated her Vineyard Haven house and moved in with him up-island. Now the whole estate was as much hers as his. She was his secretary, encouraging him in his dictation and operating the tape recorder. She was everything but his eyes — he had his own eyes. But she was in his work, helping him live it, helping him write it. She was half his book, as she put it: the blind man’s lover.

She still fought him, accusing him of pomposity, but the proof that he had been profoundly changed was evident in his work. He admitted to her that the moment he had felt the most liberated by his blindness was the moment he needed her the most, realizing that he could not live without her. He did not question this paradox. He could not separate those two contradictions. In his darkness he held out his eager hand to grope forward, and she grasped it with her uncertain hand and led him onward.

“I feel responsible for your blindness.”

“Now you’re the one who’s boasting.”

“Wasn’t it an awful shock?”

“No, I’m a new man.”

A year ago, it had been her idea to go to Ecuador, on the jungle drug tour. The blindness that resulted, Steadman said, was his good fortune. He had gone looking for an idea, anything to write; he had never thought he would have a second chance, another book, a real life. In the face of Steadman’s apparent irrationality Ava desired to take the blame. But there was no blame. He had seen into her heart, he needed her, he was only grateful.

“You’ve given me life,” he said.

“My life, unfortunately — I’m not working, I haven’t done any doctoring for months, and the hospital keeps calling to say they’re shorthanded,” she said. “But maybe that’s what love is, a kind of selfish sacrifice. The illusion that you’re giving someone your life.”

“Don’t call it love,” he said, and became extravagant. “You’re a shepherdess, a shaman, a priestess.”

She said, “Just don’t ask me to marry you.”

He laughed with surprise and relief.

“Because I never want to give you that power over me. And I don’t want any myself.”

“What do you want?”

“What you want — pleasant surprises. Go into the library and wait for me.”

He did as he was told, and saw that the stained-glass windows he had installed to protect his books from the sun were darkened by the gloomy afternoon, each color in each panel like a distinct aroma that was fading. He stood, not knowing what was in store, but savoring what he knew would be pleasurable. Facing the dim colors of the windows, he heard the library door open and shut.

She had changed her clothes: she wore a white blouse, a short skirt, high heels. She walked to the leather sofa in the corner of the room and sat on its far end, in the shadows.

“Touch me.”

He approached, trying to suppress his eagerness, and he knelt before her, sliding his hand between her thighs, plucking at her panties.

“You’re wet.”

“Not enough.” She guided his hand until it seemed to sink, and she sighed as he stroked her.

Then she leaned forward, unbuttoned the front of her blouse, and tugged his head forward as the dancer had done to her in Boston. She slapped his face with her breasts, holding them, one in each hand, manipulating her nipples.

“Touch me again.”

He did so, with his face cradled in the warmth of her breasts, and found that she was wetter, sweetened with moisture, her panties clinging, heavier. He lifted her skirt, parted her legs and began to mount her.

“No,” she said, and taking advantage of his getting to his feet, she gripped his cock and folded her breasts around it and chafed the hard thick thing between their softness, and when he began to pant she used her breasts to lift it to her mouth, and finished him off by sucking him slowly into her throat.

All this without removing her clothes. She passed her fingers over the slickness on her lips, swallowed again, and said, “That’s what I mean.”

She knew him so well, and she was able to say so in a mock-dramatic way, teasing him with her understanding. She could demonstrate, like that, the interlude in the library, that he needed her. Now he felt safe with her. He had never been so content, so stimulated, so greedy for more. He could depend on her, could share all his secrets.

Early on, the second time they had met, when she was just starting at the Vineyard hospital, delivering babies, setting bones, performing appendectomies, tying tubes, he had said, “Like everybody else, I’ve been married before.”

Her smile, her reckless eyes, made her seem strong, and so his expression softened. She said, “Generalizations are great. They show you’re impatient and not fussy.”

“You mean about everyone being married? But it’s true. It’s like everyone gets a driver’s license. And later you’re amazed you passed and that you didn’t have more accidents.”

“Some people need to be single,” she said, with a confidence that meant she was single. “And some people need to be smugly married.”

He made a pretense of thinking a moment, so that the delay, the silence, would help her remember. Then, eyeing her, he said, “And some people learn by doing.”

Steadman’s marriage had been brief and, from the beginning, bewildering. The wedding — ridiculous, expensive, a mockery — was just confusion, like a pretentious ritual before a bloody battle; and later, when arguing exhausted and confounded them both, and there was no obvious purpose in fault-finding except pettiness, he took refuge in a despairing silence. The silence that lay between his wife and himself he remembered as a true darkness.

Marriage seemed to him a sudden loneliness with someone familiar — maybe this happened all the time? — someone who by degrees turned into a stranger. They had met at a party, soon after he had arrived back from his two years of trespassing. Her name was Charlotte, “but please call me Charlie. Everyone does.” He said, “Then I’ll call you Charlotte.” She said she was in marketing, an account executive. He had no idea. She seemed intensely animated in the first weeks of their friendship. Sex made her desirable for her teasing elusiveness, and his infatuation blurred her even more. He had to have her no matter what. He told her he loved her, he promised her everything. Yes, I want to marry you! Her excitement made her beautiful, she said she would do anything to make him happy, and he promised her the same. But marriage made them first strangers and then quarrelers and finally enemies.

The confusing part for him was that her strangeness stimulated their sex life. The stumbling sense that he hardly knew her, that they did not share a common language, made her desirable. He did not know where to begin, so when she made a suggestion — and it was nearly always crude: “I am so horny,” yes, he understood that — he was immediately aroused, as though the foreign woman he had been staring at from across the room at a party approached him and, reading his mind, said, “Now,” and led him into a nearby bedroom and kicked the door shut.

Charlotte’s haste, her need, and her mood of anonymity were a pleasure to him — perhaps the only one — for she was more a stranger in bed than anywhere else. “Bed” was a euphemism for the various places they made love: the back seat of the car, the bathroom, the hidden pocket beach below West Chop lighthouse. He did not want sex as a gift; he wanted it as a command — and to take turns giving orders. Charlotte taught him that, or at least helped him realize what he wanted. As a stranger she had no inhibitions; she could demand anything of him, he could say anything to her, they could be irresponsible and reckless. She used him, he used her — those were their happiest days. He loved the fact that sexually she was hard to satisfy, always behaving badly, like a selfish person taking advantage of someone unsuspecting.

Early on, she had dropped hints. “Look at that,” she said of a lacy low-cut dress, “it’s real slutty.” And of a pair of stiletto-heeled shoes, “I want a pair of those hump-me pumps.”

Ordinarily she had little conversation, but when she was in the mood for sex she was like a cat, demanding, rubbing against him — or not like a cat at all, but like a predatory woman, a coke whore on a back street pleading for sex. Steadman liked her snatching him and insisting, “Go down on me — yes — more,” while she held his head with both her hands. “Use your finger, too. Yes, like that, harder, deeper, don’t stop, make me come.”

And after she came, convulsed, gagging and squealing, her body bucking, she could be even hungrier, more demanding, but in a pleading and submissive way, on his behalf. “Be rough with me. Call me a cocksucker. Go ahead, make me blow you.” When Steadman was tentative — Where do I begin? — she said, “Rougher, spank me, force me,” and then, as she kicked and he slapped her small hard buttocks, she growled against his cock and became noisily ecstatic, whinnying as she drank him.

Otherwise, most of the time, and always in public, she was a rather prim and passive woman.

She bought clothes, she had her nails done once a week, she read the Wall Street Journal. She was absorbed by her work. “I’ve got a marketing meeting in Cambridge with the salespeople, and I haven’t edited the pitches or read the spreadsheets.” What^? Her work was a mystery to him.

But this strangeness, this unexpectedness, made her combative, too, and he often wondered, Who are you? At last Steadman was indifferent. He worked on his book and was so absorbed in it he ended up not knowing her. Fighting with her was meaningless. Their house seemed emptier when they were both inside. He wanted her to go, but he was so exhausted that when he suggested that she go, his voice sounded lazy and detached — so hopeless and speculative he hardly cared.

“I think it’s over, Charlie.”

A year before, during their courtship, when she had become flustered by his excessive questioning, she had said to him, “What you see is what you get,” as though emphasizing her simplicity, almost boasting of her shallowness, primary colors in one dimension, a paper cutout, a little doll. Her facetious warning not to look deeper became her mantra: she had no subtleties, nor any inner meaning. “I’m in sales and marketing! Doesn’t that say it all?”

When he said he doubted that—“You’re not being fair to yourself. There’s always more”—she complained in a rueful wronged tone that she was not hiding anything and that he was the most complicated man she had ever met in her life. He was impractical, he had no savings, no real income, no investments. He had spent his money on a two-year trip around the world. How could you be both a writer and a traveler? Writers stayed home and drove people crazy; travelers didn’t sit long enough to write. But he did both, a profound mystery to her.

“I’ve got to read one of your books,” she had said soon after they met.

He did not tell her that there was only one, that it was not done yet, that he had no money left of his advance.

All this in the last months of his finishing Trespassing, when the manuscript was sitting on his desk. He was so tired from the physical effort of typing the book and imagining it at the same time that he could not look further ahead to its publication. He had never imagined the overwhelming success, the transforming miracle of it: the fame, the wealth, and then the celebrated seclusion that made him notorious and sought after.

But that was afterward, after his tentativeness with Charlotte, his believing that she would understand him only if she had read what he had written.

“I really want to read it,” she said.

The stack of paper, the Trespassing manuscript, was almost eight inches high. He had typed it himself on a manual machine, banging the keyboard with the claws of his hands, watching stiffened insect legs fly up from the oily basket and kick letters onto the page as the bruised ribbon fluttered. The book proceeded letter by jumping letter. He had sickened himself smoking cigarettes while doing it, his pores oozed with tar, his throat ached, he felt poisoned; and that was the end of his cigarette smoking.

She was not daunted by the size of the manuscript. She repeated that she was eager to read it. “Your book, look at it,” she said, in an overly patient, uncritical way, with a slightly affected smile, as though she were describing a puppy.

“There’s a lot of geography in it,” he said. “But I’ve got a set of maps — you won’t get lost.”

How often he remembered his innocence and self-deception in those days, seeing two people quietly talking, the stack of manuscript between them in ream-sized boxes, hopeful and happy, in a kind of paradise, before the whole world knew and began to intrude.

She was the book’s first reader. She buried herself in it. But she had a disconcerting habit of reading the manuscript with the TV on, glancing up from the pages to follow a sitcom, smiling at the show, frowning at his pages. At last she said, “I like it.” He wanted more from her — more praise, more detail, an extended rave, alluding to all the passages she particularly liked. Even though he was starved for praise after all those years of indifference, he managed to say this in a tactful whisper, or at least not seeming to be pleading.

“I liked all of it,” she said, protesting, surprised that he should want more than that.

“The typescript is almost seven hundred pages. Did you finish it?”

“I read practically all of it. What do you want me to say?”

He shrugged. He realized he was asking too much of her. After all, he was unable to evaluate the twenty or so pages of a marketing plan she sometimes showed him, though he was able to correct her spelling and grammar.

Following her simple verdict on the book, she had said, defending herself — and she never looked prettier, more bright-eyed, lovely lips, full breasts, delicate hands—“What you see is what you get.”

Don’t look for more or you’ll be disappointed, she was saying. I am only surfaces.

That was a complete lie, it turned out. Perhaps deliberate, perhaps an honest misunderstanding, but a lie he could no longer accept. “Crap,” Steadman raged. “Dog shit!” For later, as his wife, every day some new annoying aspect of Charlotte was revealed, always a shock to him because of her insistence in advance that there was nothing more to know. Wrong — there was everything!

She cried easily, she was hurt by the slightest word, she was insecure. She reacted hysterically to a chance remark or the wrong question — she saw questioning as a form of assault. “I don’t know the answer! I guess I’m just stupid!” She told defiant lies. Mention a book, any book, and she always said casually, “I read it so long ago I can’t remember much about it.” He stopped talking about books so as not to put her on the spot. She had not read anything except books about sales and marketing.

She, the businesswoman who said “As soon as you lose your temper you’ve lost the argument,” who had never raised her voice to him, who had seemed the soul of calmness, turned out to be a screamer, the veins in her neck standing out like blue twisted cords as she howled at him. And then, after all this noise, she would sulk and say nothing — she could sulk for days with a stubbornness that would have actually impressed him with its resolve had it not been such a maddening provocation.

“Say something,” he would plead at these times, trying to encourage her, and he would end up shouting at her, his frustration seeming to give her satisfaction in her spitefulness, for he had proved he was a brute.

“See, you’re raising your voice,” she said in a triumphant tone, having infuriated him. “You’re shouting. You’re swearing.”

What he had seen was not what he had gotten: he had married a placid, mildly agreeable woman and he had gotten a shrill, unpredictable woman who was impossible to please. It was as though he had taken the simple complacent face of a new clock to be the clock itself. He had not guessed its guts and workings could be so complex and unpredictable, with all the cogs and springs and teeth and noise that made it run, and sometimes it was just a clock face, a pretty dial with unreliable hands that did not run at all.

“It’s you,” she said, and she blamed him for being difficult. A writer, a traveler, the two selfish professions combined into a single act of egomania.

What could he say to that? His book was done but not yet published.

Charlotte’s objections to his behavior were precisely his objections to hers. And so they were equal adversaries. Still they made love, and sex took on a cruel unexpectedness with their underlying antagonism; while it lasted it was satisfying for being vicious. For a time, whenever they had an argument they were gripped by a passion that turned sexual, and they ended up on the floor or the sofa, her clothes torn and twisted aside, his pants at his ankles, while she clawed him and struggled, his body smacking hers in furious slaps. Afterward, lying motionless, with the fish-stink of sex on their skin, stuck together with sweat, all their anger burned away, the stalemate resumed.

At last he realized that he was an irritant to her and the whole relationship was unfixable, for she was unhappy, and she had been unhappy long before he’d met her. What she needed he could not offer her.

“It’s you but it’s not your fault.”

“Don’t patronize me.”

“Okay, I won’t. You’ve got a borderline personality disorder.”

“What about you?”

“Of course I do. Isn’t it the human condition?”

He had made her very unhappy. Her sadness was a great deal different from her anger. It was heavy and silent; it killed his desire. He did not think of making love to her now, not even in the drooling doggy way he had done just a week before. She was gloomy, and he left her to her unhappiness. It was either that or accommodate it.

Though she was still passive and low, she claimed she was angry, that she felt abandoned.

“You’re the same person,” he said. He meant: I don’t know you — you’re a stranger that emerged from the body of a friend whom I had found familiar and even beautiful. I was able to fuck the body but not the person inside it.

“You’re a bastard.”

Meaningless abuse; he was capable of the same. It was another stage in the disintegration.

But it seemed to him that she wanted to hold him responsible. It was almost as if she had been looking for a husband in order to find someone to take on the burden of misery within her, which had been part of her since childhood.

Dishonestly, he had wanted to sigh Women! as she had often shouted Men! But that was ridiculous. “We are not raccoons,” he had said to her one day. It was unfair to see her only as a woman, for she was different from any other woman he had ever known. She was Charlotte and sometimes Charlie. They had tried. They had failed.

Trying to analyze her didn’t help. The attempt made him insincerely sympathetic and seemed to obligate him. She talked about her parents, and it seemed like a weird parable of perverse and cruel people: hag of a mother, bully of a father, brute of a brother, who had done everything except love her. He hated listening, for whenever she talked of these people he saw damage. The worst of it was that since she really did not like herself very much, how could she love anyone else?

Yet she had friends, all of them women, none he knew well, for she kept them to herself and, he suspected, secretly complained about him to them. He could tell from the way they treated him — distantly, coolly, sometimes mocking, sometimes loudly contemptuous — that they were acting on her behalf.

Her closest friend was Vickie. In one of Charlotte’s low periods Vickie came to stay for a week. He suspected a week would be too long, that it might undo him, but he made attempts to be conversational.

“Have you ever been to the Vineyard before?”

“Years ago.”

“When was that?”

Vickie couldn’t remember. It had to be a lie. He asked her what sort of work she did.

“Depends on the day.”

She was being elusive. He knew Vickie was a marketing manager from Los Angeles. Charlotte had said so. They were both part of a business plan that was being written. Vickie had a long-term relationship with a man in New York. Steadman asked about him. “He’s delightfully eccentric.” Charlotte had told him the man was very wealthy and that Vickie was wealthy, too, but all Steadman saw was an aging sharp-faced woman who had a demented male friend and who had shown up empty-handed and contradicted nearly everything he said.

“Beautiful,” she said of a small santo on a pedestal, its gilt chipped. “I was going to buy one in Mexico.”

“This is from the Philippines.”

“Mexicans make the exact same things,” she said. “You’re limping.”

“Gout,” he said.

“Gout’s terrible. Sometimes you can’t get out of bed. You get gout in every joint.”

“That’s not it. Have you ever had it?”

“No, but I know quite a bit about it.”

Wondering why he was going to the trouble, Steadman explained 216 that you never got gout in every joint. He had been severely dehydrated on his travels and had fainted one day in Assam, before trespassing into Bangladesh. The resulting kidney damage had produced the gout. Gout was nearly always limited to one joint, often the podagra of the large toe of one foot.

“It’s like having a broken toe.”

“Oh, is that all?” Vickie said, and turned to Charlotte. “I had a broken toe when I was a dancer. It didn’t hurt at all.”

“This hurts.”

“If you’d drunk more water,” Vickie said, “you wouldn’t have gotten dehydrated.”

Steadman smiled, raging within.

“This was in India.”

“They’re starving in India,” Vickie said.

“Have you been to India?”

She averted her eyes. “Years ago.”

She stayed in the guesthouse; she whispered with Charlotte, whom she called Charlie; they shopped in town. Steadman saw them only at mealtimes. Though she was a snob about food—“Avocados are really fattening,” “Fruit juice is all sugar,” “You don’t have any soy milk?”—she didn’t cook. Vickie wouldn’t swim in his pool — she hated pools, all those chemicals. When he offered her blueberries in a bowl she said she hated blueberries, and so he followed up with raspberries and she shrieked, saying she hated them even more. “They’re so hairy.” She said she wanted to give up business and be a masseuse. She often massaged Charlotte’s neck as she talked. “You’re all tight here. Why are you so tense, Charlie? These knots. Feel them? Let me work on those.” Steadman wondered why he had never massaged his wife’s neck. Vickie said her ambition was to live in a deluxe hotel, preferably in Europe, maybe in Vienna. She had been there once, it was so clean, better than Italy, where they threw trash everywhere.

“The narcissism of minor differences,” Steadman said.

He had become fascinated by her disagreeable opinions and ignorant evasions. She believed she was delightfully eccentric, like her New York boyfriend, while he knew she was simply annoying. He realized that it was a relief for Charlotte to see someone else battling him, but couldn’t she tell how pathetic the woman was?

She looked up, though her fingers still clutched at Charlotte’s neck.

“Freud,” Steadman said. “He was from Vienna.”

“Everyone knows that.”

“And the quote’s from Civilization and Its Discontents.”

“I know.”

“You read it?”

With a wave of her hand, “So long ago.”

Harmless affectations, white lies; and if she always surrounded herself with people like Charlotte, she would never be found out. More serious was her continual gossip. She had gotten close to a mutual friend, a man Steadman had met a few times but who was closer to Charlotte, a business associate to whom she had introduced Vickie. And Vickie, the passenger, the floater, was now a friend of the man. He saw her regularly, he confided in her.

“I shouldn’t be telling you this, Charlie,” Vickie said, and giggled, and then told them both the secrets the man had divulged to her: of his wife’s past, his children’s problems, his financial worries, his weaknesses as a businessman — weaknesses, she suggested, that she and Charlotte might easily exploit.

She spoke in the tone a person might use when offering a special gift to a lucky, much-valued friend, giving them the secrets and letting them share the information, which made them powerful, too. The confidences were beyond gossip: they had the effect of reducing and emasculating the man, and created the illusion — as some betrayals did — of making the listener stronger.

Charlotte was delighted, rapt, as Vickie went on leaking.

“The key to his marriage? He married his mother. She makes all the decisions. You gotta wonder about their sex life.”

Steadman found himself more interested than he should have been. But pondering what was being divulged, he became wary, for here was the indiscreet woman in his own household, a confidante of his secretive and dissatisfied wife. At some point in the future he would be talked about that way. You gotta wonder…

Seeing Charlotte with this woman friend, he perceived aspects of her personality that had been hidden from him before. She laughed hard at Vickie’s small smutty asides. She was delighted by her confidences, her betrayals, her gossip; she asked for more. Vickie brought out a dismissive, philistine side of Charlotte, one that was also tinged with mendacity. She was untruthful because she was snobbish, aggressive, competitive, mean.

And Steadman noticed that half the time he was either ignored or belittled by the woman, whom he had begun to dislike as much as he disliked the weak aspects of Charlotte’s personality that the woman patronized.

The days of Vickie’s visit went by slowly, but it served to show Steadman a different, much more dismaying Charlotte: heartier, cruder, easily won over, more comfortable with this woman than she had ever been with him, a woman he could never love and yet one that seemed more self-sufficient than he had previously imagined. Now, having seen her together with her friend, he knew for certain that their marriage was over — was surer than if Vickie had been a man enjoying his wife in a week of adultery. Charlotte would be all right; for her, the break would be painless.

He was hurt, humiliated by the failure, felt deceived, yet he knew that the failure was as much his fault as hers. His pride was injured; he knew he looked conspicuous, a bit of a fool, someone people pitied or tried to ignore.

The marriage had been a straightforward declaration, a contract, the binding part of the ceremony lasting minutes, a simple affirmation. The divorce was a lengthy agony strung out over many months, a set of legal questions with no clear answers, a tedious and painful disentangling that was like major surgery after a car crash, a messy amputation.

In the first remorseful months of his divorce, a bitter time of private pain, Trespassing was published, with its dedication (“To my wife”) withdrawn. No acknowledgments page was included, though there were many times just before publication when he had fantasized writing a dense paragraph of small print to be inserted at the end of the text, under the title “No Thanks”:

To my ex-wife, Charlotte, who was too busy to finish reading this book in draft, eat me! To the many foundations that turned down my requests for financial assistance, fuck you! To the MacArthur Foundation, which did not consider me a genius but saw genius in a thousand preening mediocrities and rewarded their tedious efforts with absurd sums of money, eat my dust! Up yours! to my editor, who seldom returned my phone calls, and Piss off! to my bank, when at a crucial stage of the writing it refused me a loan. To all the people who told me not to go on my journey, or said they could not see the point of this book, or belittled the title, or said the text was too long, go fuck yourself!…

He had had no help at all, had only obstacles and stupidities to contend with. “Be careful!” people said when he set off. Were any words more unhelpful or antagonistic? The difficulty of writing the book had reflected the difficulties he’d had in taking the long, dangerous trip. Sometimes the imagining of such a list of no-thanks late at night had soothed his mind and helped him get to sleep in his empty bed.

The reviews were good, approving, and numerous. “A new kind of travel book,” and as something different in a market that craved novelty, the book’s sales were brisk, the film and TV rights sought after and bid upon, as the book itself became more widely noticed. His idea of trespassing from country to country without a passport was the basis of a “major motion picture,” a board game, a ghostwritten sequel, a licensed book by another author from the point of view of a woman, and a popular television series, which inspired the merchandising. The Trespassing line of outdoor clothing became a bigger brand than The North Face and Patagonia, because the catalogue also retailed the TOG line of luxury accessories. The high-end items were the moneymakers — titanium sunglasses, watches, and knives. The knives alone occupied one division in the company and seven pages of the catalogue — folding knives, camp knives, bowie knives, some with staghorn or abalone shell or mastodon ivory handles (one or two designs with the rubric “Limited to 50 Pieces”), and each, in the hollow of the guard, embossed with the Trespassing logo. People who did not know Steadman’s name and who had never read his book coveted the sunglasses and watches and knives. And the unexpected profits, fabulous even to his wealthy Vineyard friends, allowed him to buy and expand the up-island house, giving it the size and look of a chateau, complete with perimeter walls and orchards and garden statuary.

Although he had been careful to exclude any mention of her, Charlotte was associated with the book, and many people believed she had been partly responsible for it. That she was given some credit for it angered Steadman more than anything else, for he had conceived and written the book alone. The fact was that she had hindered him; he had overcome that and ignored her dismissals. The success of the book was a relief and a pleasure. He told himself — and for a long time believed this was true — that if he never wrote anything else, he would be happy being a one-book wonder. It was a good book, big and solid, that inspired a new generation of risk-taking travelers.

After Charlotte left, after the divorce was final and the property apportioned, after the early part of his success was established and he had gone to ground on a remoter part of the Vineyard, she wrote him a letter. It was apologetic and humble: she was glad for him, she wished him happiness. She complimented him, said she was sorry she had helped him so little. She said she was living in New York, which was much more expensive than she had imagined, and “I guess you know what’s coming next.”

He agreed to give Charlotte the very amount of money that she had asked for. Steadman’s only condition was that before he handed anything over, she sign a paper waiving any further claims, demands, or requests. She did this gladly, by return mail, notarized and witnessed. Then he was rid of her. She took the money, and was perhaps thrilled initially, before thinking (Vickie would have egged her on): I should have asked for more.

For his book kept rising, there was more money, enough to support him for the rest of his life. The amount she had asked for, which had seemed so much at the time, was a pittance compared with what later accrued to him. When his lawyer complimented him on his savvy, he was not pleased — it was petty to feel vindictive or triumphant. He knew the No Thanks page that he had imagined was mean-spirited and unfunny.

Reflecting on Charlotte later, as his ex-wife, his former lover, he was remorseful. He could barely believe that he had once vowed to love and protect her for life; he was astonished that he had desired her, ashamed that he had broken solemn promises made so publicly. He could no longer remember the color of her eyes or the shape of her face. But the beautiful swell of her buttocks as she lay on her stomach, crying out to be penetrated; the curve of her thigh; the brownish birthmark in the shape of Madagascar at the small of her back; the way she sniffed and blinked like a rodent when she was anxious — he could call up these images at will.

She probably hated him now, but why? Because the marriage had not worked? But she had made promises, too, not that the marriage would be easy, but the awful lie that she was simple, no more than she seemed. Now he knew that no one was. People might believe their own words, but it could be fatal for you to believe them. He did not distrust her, or the next women he met. He deeply distrusted himself for believing that Charlotte would be happy to be his partner, and hated himself for thinking that he wanted no more than that, when in reality he had expected her to do housework, and be witty, and help him with his book, and love him for being intelligent and hardworking and a hero.

Preposterous expectations — he was better off alone. He said, “Never again.”

2

NO WOMAN WOULD EVER console him in his distrust, he felt. The one he wished for did not exist, for he wanted a woman to lay a healing hand on him, bind a blood-pressure cuff on his upper arm and cinch it, touch his forehead, take his temperature, use her fingertips to tap for clues on his back, peer into his throat, check his heart, perhaps only a tender physical examination, in a manner of speaking. But how could there be such a woman?

Years passed, girlfriends came and went. He shrank as his fame grew, that famous author of Trespassing resembling him less and less. Rather than leave his farm, he continued to enlarge it until it became an estate so vast, so productive, so valuable, that he would never need to leave.

The land was fertile. He grew much of the food he ate. The physical activity tired him and displaced his writing hours. He started stories, he sketched out ideas for novels, for plays, for an opera. The publishers wanted another Trespassing, but that book he knew was written and done, and he told them so: there would be no other. He took comfort in the fact that among his summer friends, the most secure and happiest were those who had done one thing well — a book, a movie, a play, a picture — the unique thing by which they were known.

Growing flowers, cultivating vegetables, gave him consolation and wearied him enough to ease the passage of time. Whatever he began to write on any given morning, doodling at his desk, he always ended up abandoning the effort and digging in his garden. And when he was not hoeing or watering, he would sit on the cast-iron love seat at the garden’s edge and peer at the plants and exult in their size, imagine that he was watching them grow. He put in a heated greenhouse, an enormous tent-shaped conservatory of glass, so the whole year was his for cultivation.

The labor of gardening was a gift. He spent days lifting heavy sacks of manure for his potato field, bending and straightening, heaving and slinging them over the high fence that kept out the deer and the rabbits. When that chore was done he lay inert in his bath, stewing his aching bones and muscles. And one day when he looked in the mirror he saw that his left eye was crimson where there had been white: the eye was full of blood, opaque and frightful.

What surprised him was that there was no pain in the bloody eye. Still, it shocked him enough that he overcame his hatred of hospitals. He drove himself to the Vineyard hospital, squinting, shutting the right eye, apparently using the gory but functioning left one. He registered, was told to wait — a Thursday night in early May, hardly anyone around. He found a mirror and marveled at his hideous eye.

A woman in white appeared. “Mr. Steadman, please come this way.”

He was friendly with the woman, wondering if she was the doctor. She was small, compact, efficient — those white silent shoes. She asked him if he was taking any medication, and was he allergic to antibiotics, and what exactly was the reason for his visit? After the woman recorded his answers, she smiled and asked him to wait. She was the nurse.

Another woman entered, older, bigger, dressed in white. She took his temperature, strapped his arm for his blood pressure, then jotted down the numbers. She led him to a small room and left. So it was a series of steps, a gaining admittance by degrees, wait here, now wait there, refining the questions, advancing toward the final room by passing through a set of subtle antechambers.

“Yes?”

Another nurse, probably, another stage of waiting, more questions. But she said, “I’m Dr. Katsina,” and shook his hand.

He was at first anxious and then inexpressibly relieved, for she was attractive — long-legged, thin-faced, lanky light hair, full lips, her lovely blue-gray eyes staying on him with a curious and intelligent gaze. He guessed she was in her mid to late thirties, athletic, brisk, with a bike rider’s calves, a good grip from handlebars and hand brakes.

As she washed her hands she said, “You’ve been doing some hard work.”

Steadman looked at his hands and wondered what she had seen.

“What have you been lifting?”

He loved her coming straight to the point, the swift deduction, the summing up.

She smiled and put her scrubbed pretty face close to his. She was warm and clean and her nearness was like a remedy for the yearning in him. Placing her thumb near his left eye and the other fingers at the back of his scalp and tilting his head, she looked into his eye as if through a keyhole, and then she used an instrument to peer.

“Any pain?”

“No.”

“Not too serious.”

“What is it?”

“A subconjunctival hemorrhage. A burst capillary. That’s real blood. You were bending, lifting something heavy.”

He smiled at the accuracy of her diagnosis. “Do I take anything for it?”

Dr. Katsina shook her head and, washing her hands again, said, “It looks scary, but you’re fine. It should subside in a week. If it doesn’t, come back. Was there anything else?”

Steadman was so relieved he felt excited, grateful, restored to health. He wanted to hug her. He said, “What can I do for you?”

“I’m okay,” she said, finding this funny.

Detecting a trace of unease, for he was staring at her with his bloody eye and looking eager, Steadman said, “How about a drink?”

“That’s against hospital rules — and unprofessional. I’m a doctor. You’re my patient. Anyway, I have a woman in labor. She’s due any minute but I have a feeling it will be two A.M. It always is.”

Dr. Katsina made a gesture of helplessness and departure that was also a signal of dismissal — time’s up.

“How do you deal with someone in labor?”

“I wait until I’m paged.”

“Maybe we could wait together.”

She equivocated with her shoulders. It was like a yes, but she said, “Not today.”

He didn’t insist, because he felt she was cooperating, and now that he knew her name, he was certain he wanted to see her again. Instead of phoning her, he wrote her a note, wondering when she would be free. She did not reply. He told himself that doctors were busy. He tried again, giving her his telephone number.

She called him a few days later, saying, “This is Ava Katsina,” and it took him a moment to recall who she was, for she hadn’t said “Doctor.”

He said, “I want to see you — please.”

“Okay,” she said, “but this means I can’t be your doctor.”

“I’ll agree to anything.”

Her laughter reassured him. She said she was free the following day. He waited by the emergency door of the hospital, gladly at ease, watching through the window, seeing her dress tighten against her body as she bent forward over the counter to sign out.

“I have to leave my pager on,” she said, getting into the car. “I have another woman in labor. I can’t go far.”

He drove to Oak Bluffs, parked at the Dockside Inn, and they climbed to a second-story bar overlooking the inner harbor. He was struck at once by its roughness, the sourness of spilled beer, the loud music. The place was a bit too busy for May, perhaps because there were so few other bars open, the drinkers not vacationers but islanders, an after-work crowd of shouting friends. The porch was chilly, damp, uncomfortable, noisy, and when the sun went down there wasn’t enough light to read a menu. The service was slow, and along with the discomfort and din was the chill in the air, one of those days in clammy procrastinating spring when people called out, “Not summer yet!” and the Vineyard felt more than ever like a remote island, detached and dark, the Cape hidden by low clouds, the north wind thrashing the water, making whitecaps on the ebbing tide and pushing corrugations of froth across the Sound.

Steadman had been so preoccupied with these distractions — he had hoped to find a quiet bar or cafe — he had turned away from Dr. Ava Katsina. He looked at her to apologize, to make a joke about the place being so awful, such a dive, and to smile at her.

She was crying. She saw his sudden concern, something like alarm, and she said, “I’m sorry. I can’t help it.”

He was always torn by tears, anyone’s tears, and a woman’s sobbing undid him. He had no reply, he was helpless. Please stop, he wanted to say.

“It’s just that I don’t believe it.” And she went on softly sniffing and swallowing, dabbing at her eyes with a ragged ball of tissue. “I am so happy.”

He smiled again, hoping to encourage a smile from her.

“You’re the writer,” she said. “ Trespassing.”

Steadman nodded, he clinked his glass against hers, he drank not knowing what to say.

“I was wondering if we’d meet. I knew you lived here.”

“Everyone lives here.”

“In the summer,” she said. Her tears made her look young and inexperienced, as unlike a doctor as it was possible to be. She blew her nose and wiped it, reddening the rims of her nostrils, becoming plainer, innocent, almost boyish. She sniffed. “I’m so sorry.”

Steadman took her hand and felt her gentle fingers; she let him comfort her. He could see she was shaken but happy, her tears like the glow of a rapture. He liked her emotion, the change in her face, the way she looked younger with tears on her cheeks. He was the doctor, she the ailing patient, needing reassurance, emotional, as though sobbing in relief.

“Take it easy.”

“No, I’m happy. Really.”

He could see she was, even with her wet eyes and dripping nose.

He was about to embrace her when her pager sounded — important, a dull repeated note, demanding to be noticed — and immediately she scooped the thing out of her leather bag and studied its message. In a clear efficient voice, scoured of tears, the tone of a timekeeper, she said, “I have to leave here right now to see to that delivery.”

Like that, in a flash; and now it was he who was impressed and helpless.

The waitress appeared — young, fresh-faced, with a beautiful smile and thick tumbling blond hair that she arranged with tosses of her head. She held a pen and a pad and said, “Some more drinks for you guys?”

“Just the check,” Dr. Katsina said.

Steadman watched the waitress leave, shimmying through the crowded bar, and then said, “I can tell you’re a really good doctor.”

“I know what I’m doing most of the time. And I can go on being your doctor — but that’s all,” she said.

“What’s the alternative?”

“Find another doctor. I’ll be your friend. I’m a good friend. You won’t need to make appointments.”

She spoke with an intensity that had to have come from her being so solitary, so hardworking. A sociable person would never have said it that way. He tried to take her hand, but she was already rooting in her bag for her car keys.

He hardly recognized her the next night. They had agreed to meet at a restaurant on the harbor in Edgartown, but when he was led to the table, reserved in his name, he did not see her. In Dr. Katsina’s place was a blonde in a red blouse, applying lipstick. Seeming to see Steadman behind her in the small mirror of her compact, she clapped it shut and looked up at him, fingering the ringlets of her hair, not smiling, looking intruded-upon.

“It is you,” he said, and sat down.

Then she smiled. “I saw you staring at that waitress in the bar last night and I thought, Why not? Anyway, I’m a doctor and we don’t do things like this, which is why I did it. It’s a wig. Want me to take it off?”

Amused and fascinated, he said, “Not now.”

It was another cold evening but a quieter place, and she told him how she had delivered the baby, a normal delivery, a little girl — happy mother, nervous father — just like that, eased a whole child into the world, dripping and squalling, and wiped its wet head. Her lipstick, her blond wig, made the clinical details of the childbirth story wonderful and slightly improbable.

“I can drink tonight,” she said. “My pager’s off.”

She was strong, she was confident, she alluded without apology to old boyfriends. (“This guy I used to date turned me on to your book.”) She told him stories of the operating room, and Steadman was fascinated by her conceit, for while there was something incomprehensible and mystical in it, there was also a mastery of anatomy, the ultimate in physical transformation — a cesarean section, cutting out an appendix, ridding a person of a diseased organ, setting a bone, snatching a sick person from the brink of an abyss. A patient staring horror-struck at death she was able to restore to health. She knew the chemistry of drugs, she had the authority to order them, she knifed open flesh, she sewed it together with stitches, made a healing seam in the skin. All of it a vigorous challenge of his belief that doctors caused illness.

He was so conscious of his skepticism that he said, “You’re like a shaman.”

She laughed at his hyperbole and denied it with a hint of insincerity — the medical doctor’s confidence, the surgeon’s arrogance: she knew her power. She was the only truly fulfilled person he had ever met.

“I’m glad you think so.”

But as though to deny it she told him how at medical school they had fooled with cadavers to take the curse off them — she and a boyfriend with a corpse. Or saying nothing during a long operation she performed jointly with that man, while dropping sexual hints, knowing that after the thing was done and the patient wheeled away they would hurry to his house — this was in Boston.

“The rush you get from a successful operation — I mean, working together, the tension, the efficiency, the body lying there on the table between us,” she said. “When it was all over we’d go and fuck.”

“The private life of a shaman,” he said, but he had been taken aback by her frankness. “Too bad you can’t be my doctor.”

“I can be other things.”

“My friend.”

What she said next was so memorable to him, he kept it to himself as a wicked secret, and never recalled it afterward without seeing the redness of her lips and tongue, the unsuspicious smiling Yankee with his tankard in the white blouse and the silly improbable hair on the Sam Adams beer sign, the slant of light and wooden threads on the screw bung of an ornamental wine cask, the saltshaker shape of the fat, squat Edgartown Harbor lighthouse, the outgoing tide swelling and chafing at the edge of the On Time Ferry plowing a dark furrow through the current near the Chappaquiddick side, a woman walking nearby on the beach with a cigarette in her mouth and a scarf twisted on her head — all of it fixed in his mind with her blunt statement.

“Statistically, only six percent of the women who give blowjobs get any real pleasure from it,” she said.

Steadman’s mouth was already dry; the words he had attempted had shriveled and blistered on it and were gone. He was looking helplessly at her lipsticked mouth, her damp swollen lips.

He anticipated what she was going to say next, and his ears were already ringing, all the louder because he could see she wasn’t smiling, only relating an established fact. Yet he was shocked. It was one of the boldest sentences he had ever heard from a woman — a taunt, a tease, a promise, the ultimate pickup line delivered as a statistic. She seemed to understand the effect it had on him and to desire him for being shockable, as he desired her for being able to shock him, Slade Steadman, reclusive author of the well-known book of surprises, Trespassing.

“I’m in that six percent.”

Except for his facetious response, which he delivered hoarsely and hopelessly—“So what’s in it for me?”—he did not remember the rest of the meal, only his urgency that they finish and hurry home, and she seemed as eager as he was.

That began the summer of hot nights in the walled compound of his up-island house — nights when she was not on duty, nights so dedicated to their desire that often they met in the dark and drank and touched and groped and uttered nothing but sighs, twitching and tearing at each other’s clothes and bodies. She held him off, she said, “Let me, let me, I like it”—holding him down, mothering him, sucking him — until he could not stand it anymore, and as the night grew darker, their bodies glowed. He loved it because it turned them into blameless animals, monkeys rutting for the play of it and the pleasure she took in arousing him. And when she was aware of the closeness of his panting, that he was seconds from exploding, she squirmed free and got down on him and held him in her mouth and pumped with her hand until he came with a roar while she squealed and licked it from her lips, her eyes rolling up as she became sightless, white-eyed in ecstasy.

“Do you love it?”

“I love it,” he said.

“Now do as I say.”

Then, after she had cared for him, searching his body in the most intimate way, she insisted that he please her — and he was unexpectedly gladdened as the moans crept from her throat, as she directed his hand or, opening her legs, seized his head with all her fingers and thrust it against her, smearing his face with her desire.

He loved his nights with her for her demands, and her fairness, for she encouraged him in his demands. Whole greedy nights of saying nothing, or muttering disconnected words in a darkness in which their hands spoke and everything was allowed, everything insisted upon. Or the opposite: talking all night, pressed together, kissing, telling each other their most elaborate fantasies. And the intensity of their singleminded desire kept them strangers to each other, communicating on the lowest frequencies, dwelling on their satisfactions, loving what they shared, and needing each other for their secrets.

Their secrets were safe — trust was what bound them together in the beginning, as they became ever more candid about their needs. At the same time, all this while, Ava remained a woman in white, the most skillful doctor at the hospital; and he began to work with greater confidence and with renewed imagination, the inaccessible writer in his up-island seclusion, smiling again. Yet still they remained strangers. Their lives were separate, only the act of sex joined them, they knew each other in the dark but nowhere else. They did not believe they had any future, and felt certain that all desire, fierce as it seemed, hot as it might burn, had an end in ashes that cooled and dispersed like the dust they were.

Steadman loved having her because he had so little else in his life. Charlotte was gone. He did not resent the divorce, but he questioned his own judgment: how could he have been so wrong about her? The girlfriends were gone, too. After his first struggles to be alone on the Vineyard, with his curt answers, his evasiveness, his lack of cooperation, he had actually succeeded in keeping people out of his life — and, at last, after the first years of his reclusiveness, keeping the press and interviewers away, they ceased to care. He had no new book. He slipped beneath the surface of events and seemed to sink. Except for the summer people who invited him to parties and were polite about his work, keeping their inquiries vague, there was no one. The summer people were his friends, though, and more than that: for a season they were his world. When they left around Labor Day he had remained on the Vineyard, wondering what to do with himself. Now he knew. He had Ava.

Of course everyone talked, for on the island, summer people and locals alike were passively nosy in the Vineyard manner, watchful while pretending not to care, and always alert for gossip. They were noted for their attention to detail and for their long and remorseless memories. They knew he was having an affair; they knew with whom. His car, her car, the groceries, his movements, even his moods, his happiness — it was all monitored and noted and whispered about. People were glad for him, for her too, for though she was a recent arrival and was hardly known, she was respected for her efficient doctoring. The islanders took an ignorant pleasure in commenting on how different the two people were, the wealthy risk-taking writer with local roots and the modest physician from off-island. Steadman was aware of those rumors and thought: If only they knew how reckless and greedy she was, how depraved and demanding, how lavish in bed, how she made a happy slave of him.

“Desire me,” she said. She was content, she almost crooned the words. “You don’t have to love me. Love is a burden. It’s a pain. It causes unhappiness. Just be my friend.”

He knew the deceptions of love and its meaningless language. He told her that it was also a delusion. It came, it went, and made you crazy. It was mainly about wanting to possess someone. Sex was something else: it promised nothing, it had no future, it was magic enacted entirely in the present. They did not expect the affair to last. They hardly met in the daytime, they made few plans, and Steadman assumed that the ashes of their desire, the useless fragments and residue of its end, were not far off.

She knew that without his saying so; she always seemed to know what he was thinking, and when he was sunk in silence, she knew what was in his mind.

“If I ever write anything more,” he said, “it will be about this — us — the feeling in the flesh, the two of us at our most monkey. How the truth can be drawn from sexual pleasure. Knowing that we are going to die. Everything that lies beyond love.”

The way he dismissed the delusions of hope and the self-deception of future plans and the farce of romance moved her. She said, “I’m glad we found each other. I want to be your friend. It’s purer. It’s much better. Friendship asks nothing, it gives everything, and friendship with desire is paradise.”

“I agree. Love doesn’t make you better. It excludes the whole world. For a brief period you have an adoring partner, and later an enemy. Love is like some horrible twisted religion the way it changes you. And afterward, when love ends, you’re lost.”

“Please don’t marry me,” she said one day outside the hospital, still smelling of disinfectant. She laughed with conviction: the words were like an aphrodisiac to them both.

“I promise. I will never marry you,” he said, and embraced her, kissed her, feeling beneath her loose clothes and her doctor’s smock, the girlishness of her eager body.

“Let’s be friends.”

“Yes, yes.”

“We have no future,” she said.

“None at all.”

From his marriage to Charlotte he had learned love, and you could not know love without knowing its opposite. He remembered now how his marriage had ended and the love soured and he had been cut loose — like one of those mute and damaged men released after a long spell in prison who find they cannot function in the crowded world of decent people, and turn to crime again, and get sent back to a cell to sulk. That was how dangerous he regarded loving. It was waywardness and weakness and failure.

“Friendship is so much better,” Ava was saying. “You have to love your lover, but you can be truthful to your friend. Love isn’t blind — it’s sickness, it’s surrender.”

The extravagant talk was the self-conscious reassurance of two people passionately attached and at pains to be kind to each other, aching for each workday to end, for night to fall so they could be together.

She, the stronger, more confident one, strengthened him. The manner in which she bucked him up made him long for her.

“This is what I want you to do to me tonight,” she would say, usually in public, a bar, a restaurant, the supermarket, a neutral place where they would hold hands, nothing more. And she would describe in the minutest detail where she wanted to be touched, and how, and what she would be wearing, and the way she wanted him to be dressed. It was her script for the evening, but it was not complete until she said, “And this is what I want to do to you.”

In these fevered dialogues, in her insistence on order and ritual, the stages of their lovemaking, she could be almost clinical, as if running through the phases of what would be a brilliant but tricky operation, the object of arousing her, bringing her to orgasm. But when the time came, what ensued was anything but tidy, and it was less like an operation than the rehearsal of a black mass.

“You have more germs in your mouth than in your ass, didn’t you know that?” she said, turning him over and tonguing him. And when she was done, she said, “Now it’s my turn for a black kiss.”

She challenged him to go further. “Deeper, deeper, deeper,” she would say. He had never known a woman to be so explicit in daring him. Theirs was nothing like the sort of courtship or love affair in which by degrees trust was gained and plans were made for a future together. Next month, next year, a vacation, children, a mortgage — none of that. They had no future; tonight was enough. They wrecked themselves on each other, and yet the following day they met again, like insatiable conspirators, for more.

She was able to surprise him as no other woman had ever done. One night she said, “I’ve got something for you,” and he expected exotic lingerie or Polaroids, as in the past. But if she promised something new, it was original, all hers, and certainly new to him. She did not disappoint.

That night she met him at the Dockside bar wearing a dark tailored suit and slacks, a wide tie, a felt fedora. He smiled — he had never seen this suit on her before. She looked like a decadent schoolboy. On the way home she told him to pull into a side road and park. “I want to make out with you,” she said, and kissed him, let him grope her, fondle her breasts, and she opened her knees and held his hand against her. He felt something hard, like a rubber truncheon, between her legs.

“A strap-on,” she said. “That’s for both of us.”

And when they set off again, Steadman became sweaty, anxious, eager, and fearful, as she described how she was going to use it on him. But in the house she would not go into the bedroom. She lazed on his sofa and pulled the thing out and played with it and refused to take any clothes off. “On your knees,” she said, “get me in the mood,” and forced his head down. Seeing how he was making her happy — she screeched with pleasure as she gagged him — he became aroused by the madness of her voluptuous laughter.

Again and again he had to remind himself that she was a physician, respected in the hospital and on the island. Yet how was it possible, knowing the most delicate surgery and all the anatomy — the name of every tissue, every muscle, every organ — that she could lose herself in the darkness of the body in which nothing had a name? A doctor was trained to see the body as something coherent, namable, dissectible, like a symmetrical cabinet of flesh and blood. But that was her daytime preoccupation; at night she stripped him naked and operated on him with her mouth and her fingers, devouring him, nameless part by nameless part, as though they were hardly human.

“You are my meat,” she said.

That summer passed. People saw them together, the writer and the doctor, but as Steadman and Ava always looked semidetached and distracted, like friends, never a couple, the people observing did not speculate unduly. They were glad to see Steadman at last out of his selfimposed captivity. His good mood seemed to indicate that he who had published nothing in years might have freed himself from his seclusion by finishing a book and would be publishing it soon.

There was no book, and now his silence was a virtue, for he was spending time with Ava and glorying in her paradoxes — the medical doctor who was a debauched sensualist. Summer faded into fall, and fall declined into winter, and the cold weather made them more companionable, allowing them to possess the darker, emptier island. Winter was perfect, their solitude complete. The Vineyard seemed to belong to them. The hospital was less busy, there were no parties, hardly any social events, no “Taking another trip?” no “How’s the book coming along?”

And there was nothing more exciting to him than Ava’s phoning him in midafternoon: “Tonight — a house call,” then click, and his anticipating her arrival in the early dark of winter, frost gleaming on the grass, and the approach of her car, the fat tires announcing her on the gravel driveway, and her kiss, her warm breath, her open mouth, “I want you,” and her taking off her laboratory smock or her ER scrubs and revealing herself in a pretty dress or lingerie. The great room of his house was so warm they were comfortable lying half naked on the sofa; the candle flames, the mirrors, her sighs, which became low howls of pleasure. Out here, in the winter, she could scream — and sometimes did, foulmouthed in uncontrollable desire, shocking him with men’s words — and no one would hear, for they were in the middle of a dark ice-bound island.

When they were done, drenched in sweat, panting for breath, they lay in each other’s arms.

“I hadn’t expected you to call.”

“I had to see you,” she might say. “We lost someone today, a nice old man. I needed to do something life-affirming.”

He smiled, he held her.

“Something human. Something perverted.”

But he would sometimes stare, seeing only the elderly blood-drained face of a patient yellowing on a pillow, open-mouthed, as though having died screaming.

“Now I’m better. You cured me. Gotta go.” Abrupt, all business, like a man on a mission, she was out the door and in her car, and at last two receding red lights.

Spring came, full of equivocating winds and low temperatures, dawdling promises, daffodils in April, drizzle and mud in May, reminders of the previous spring and their first meeting, and somehow giving a sense of repetition to their days and weeks. They had been together for a full year. In the second summer Ava was busier at the hospital, in greater demand, and he was the one who was made to wait. Waiting was hard for him, because he had no work. He wondered if there was someone else; he couldn’t ask — that was their agreement, proposed by her. “When we’re together we should possess each other. When we’re alone we have no claims.” Steadman had thought that was a good, enlightened idea, but as the summer passed and he saw less of her, he became insecure, suspicious, jealous.

“I think I have a rival,” he said one day, hating himself for even raising the subject.

“Two rivals,” she said. “A man with emphysema, on a ventilator, with pneumonia, whose family wants to pull the plug. And a man in constant pain, in a head and neck brace, who fell from a roof he was fixing and cracked three cervical vertebrae, whose heart is too weak to let us operate. Who just wants to die.”

She was the strong one, and understanding this he was ashamed of himself. He felt more like one of her patients than her lover, but a fatuous and fussing patient, whining for her attention. He sometimes wished that there really had been something wrong with him, so he could justify seeing her more often. She had a busy life that was determined by the urgencies of medical procedures. She was sometimes so reflective that she fell silent when she was with him, and he knew she was thinking of a critical case, someone at the hospital.

Her work was full of life and death — rescue and cure, real flesh, real blood. What had he to offer in return? Blank pages and complaints, the insubstantial fictions of someone who had forgotten how to write, who might have nothing to write. By the end of the summer she was polite but preoccupied, and though they remained sex partners — the blunt, unsentimental expression was hers; she often described previous lovers that way — the passion was gone, and with it the sexual innovation. She was a good doctor; he did not feel let down, but he knew she was caring for him.

“I’m still very fond of you,” she said, and he laughed, because the expression was empty of desire. It was like a way of saying goodbye.

He knew it was over. “Fond” said it all. “Fond” was the opposite of her teeth and lips, her torn panties, her stabbing finger, his flogging her smeared face with his cock as she teased him with her tongue.

They made a ritual one night of burning their Polaroids. In their solemnity they were so reproached by what they saw, they hardly recognized their own bodies. They spoke of needing to find a way to end the affair, to formally seal it somehow.

As lovers they had talked of going to South America. Maybe following through with that was the answer. Ava had found the Ecuador tour on the Internet while searching the ethnobotany Web sites, especially the ones that were obvious drug tours dressed up as culture quests. It was all her idea — the river trip, the yaje, the Secoya village — a possible journey for Steadman to find a subject to write about. It had everything: Indians, rain forest, drugs, difficulty, exoticism. She had contacted Nestor and bought the tickets, because she felt certain that it was their last trip, an innovative goodbye, “a ceremony of farewell” was how she put it, like the despedida, a word she was to learn later. He agreed. Months before, they had stopped making love. That coincided with his abandoning his writing, as though writer’s block was another expression of impotence. Neither of them imagined that the trip would keep their relationship together — blind him, inspire him as Burroughs had been inspired, arouse him, fire him with the idea for a book.

How were they to know that the farewell would become its opposite — the way home, truth-seeking, a renewal that was a kind of betrothal? They now saw that the trip to Ecuador had been a revelation, for from the moment he was overwhelmed, fearing he was lost, Ava took charge. At the onset of his darkness she gave him light and propped him up, so he hardly knew the terror of blindness — or, more precisely (for he wanted to be precise), what he knew of it, the descent of blackness had so terrified him that he was not even aware how long it lasted. In that seemingly endless loop in the hazy time-scheme of a dream, just before he woke from his datura trance and she was holding his hand, he understood that it was not blackness at all but rather a bedazzlement, a blinding light of revelation, more than he could bear by himself.

Ava promised not to leave him. She left the hospital instead. She asked for a leave of absence. “I need a break. I’m tyrannized by my pager.”

She moved onto the estate with him, and he began his book. Writing occupied his whole day now. He talked, she recorded it, she took notes; she played his words back to him. She was full of suggestions; he needed her encouragement and approval. And his prose always sounded better to him, with a ghostwritten concision, when she repeated it.

He was living at the margin, trespassing again, and delighting in being on the frontier. The shadows had always given him a clear view of the world. He had Ava’s word on this. The man in the book was him. The women, all of them, were Ava.

She repeated that his taking the blinding datura was an indulgence — his conceit, his arrogance — but in the same breath would admit how fluent and observant he became in his blindness.

Saying “Now let’s finish it,” she praised him for noticing particularities, for remembering so much.

All the rooms he had known as a sensualist, their odors like reeking ghosts, and every disfigurement of their ceilings; the peripheral sounds of birdsong, wisps of music, muttered remarks, far-off voices — these and more. One entire chapter was background, no foreground, although all that was implied — a love scene, in fact. The man on the floor, the woman kneeling astride him, facing his feet — this was suggested by the movement in the mirror, the tugging of the carpet, the frantic cheeping of the caged bird, the shapes they cast on the wall, like Javanese shadow puppets — more subtle for being elongated — and the way it all sounded to a thirteen-year-old girl named Flora passing in the street outside, walking her dog. It was the dog that first noticed, frisky at the almost inaudible sounds. Then the young girl looked up at the jumping shadows and the fluttering candlelight, and she stopped to watch and remember a scene that might not make complete sense to her for years.

“And what did Flora say?”

“Flora just watched.”

Flora just watched, she wrote, saying, “But Flora was mumbling to herself, as if seeing into a cloudy aquarium.”

“She doesn’t know what she’s watching, but we do. And so we are seeing it through her eyes, understanding it, though she doesn’t.”

“That’s nice. Details, please.”

Every detail was in his description except the sight of the two people on the floor, the man hovering, holding the woman’s ankles as he penetrated her, but in the way Steadman dictated it the whole room was suffused by the sexual act, the lamplight, the wallpaper, the flowers, the reflections from the wineglasses, the half-heard murmurs vibrating in furniture, the walls glimpsed incompletely from outside, so much of it a play of warm lopsided light on the ceiling and finally filling the imagination of the young girl in the street.

When he was done he told Ava he loved being alone with her, spinning his story.

“You’re not making it up,” she said. “You’re remembering it.”

He wondered at her certainty. He saw it all so clearly, peering within himself, his life so vivid in recollection it did not matter to him whether it was real or invented. He could see so distinctly into his early youth, memories of yearning and discovery, of the satisfying approximations of desire, when to his boy’s lust, sex was everything, in the far-off country of the flesh.

“I want you to look at me like I am a piece of meat,” Ava said, and laughed, and he could tell she meant it. “Salivate and then take me. I want to watch you eat me.”

He was aware in his blindness that Ava closely observed him, remembering his reactions and using them to please him. Early on, his glance at the waitress’s blond hair was one of her insights, inspiring her to wear the blond wig — a simple thing, but on her straight-haired and serious doctor’s head it was a wild promise. In the first flush of his love affair with Charlotte she had done that — studied him in order to please him. When another woman flirted and he responded, Charlotte didn’t scold but instead flirted with him and aroused him. It hadn’t lasted. He had forgotten it until the memories were all returned to him in his blindness. And his blindness allowed Ava to explore his curiosity, giving her access to the hungry man within him who hardly had words for what he wanted but was obsessed by imagery.

Another summer day he chose to drive blind, walk blind, shop blind, get money blindly from an ATM machine, tap his cane near the ferry and take pleasure in the way he could part a crowd, cutting a swath through it like a prophet in a hurry. Men became anxious and helpless when they saw him; women lingered to watch, wishing to touch him. What was it about his blindness that roused women and made them protective, maternal, calm, sexual, all at once? Seeing him, it seemed they would do anything for him.

He tapped his way into a health food store on a side street in Vineyard Haven. He rummaged and by smell alone found a box of herbal tea bags and a jar of honey and a bag of garlic-flavored croutons and a package of sun-dried tomatoes, placing them in the basket that Ava carried. The shop’s sections were defined and made logical by their delicious fragrances. But these too were memories. He had been there many times before. Years of being solitary had made him obsessive and turned him into a food crank. A preoccupation with health and the body was one of the consequences of isolation. Another was its opposite, disdaining health and order, damaging yourself. There was nothing in between. It was either self-denial or gluttonous indulgence; lonely people were either health nuts or chain smokers. He had told Ava that. He had told Ava everything. He repeated it that day as they left the place.

Ava said, “Now I know why you’re a writer, because you’re so sure of yourself even when you’re wrong. Especially when you’re wrong.”

“And I know who waited on you,” he said.

“You smell these women.”

“That one for sure,” he said, “in her white top, slightly torn sleeves, and her tumbled curly hair. She’s hardly more than twenty. I liked her last year, when she was blond. She’s dark-haired now.”

He knew that Ava was staring at him as they walked through the parking lot to his car.

“Cutoff blue jeans and that halter top without a bra and those long legs.” He slipped into the passenger seat, still talking, and handed Ava the keys. “What I liked most was that she was wearing that hillbilly getup with high heels. I loved hearing her walk back and forth, stretching to the upper shelves to get things for you.”

“It’s all true. What else do you remember?”

“The shoes are red. They have a teasing sound.”

“What else?”

“She’s Daisy Mae,” Steadman said.

Back at the house, he needed to sit quietly to contain and enjoy the image — did not want to move or talk or eat. He was possessed by the thought of the busy girl in the ragged shorts and skimpy top, walking smartly back and forth — the breasts, the buttocks, the pretty hair and lips, the slender legs, the local girl playing at being a country girl, Daisy Mae, perhaps without knowing the innocent original, whose simple cartoon image had stirred him as a boy.

Steadman was so absorbed he did not bother to wonder where Ava had gone. He had had a good morning of dictation. The trip to Vineyard Haven had taken most of the afternoon.

Then, the sound of the shoes, the heels hammering, was unmistakable — the walking in the house, not toward him but back and forth, tantalizing him. He listened. They receded. They returned, rapping. He was on the porch, in the heat, and then she was with him, brushing past him, tidying the coffee table or, more likely, pretending she was doing so. Passing him again, she turned away and he reached out and touched her shorts, ran his hands over her, felt the softness and the rivets and the cutoff fringe and her warm thigh, and tugged her closer, slipped his hands up to her halter top, her shoulders, her curls. Her back was turned. He went on kissing her, touching her, her clothes, her skin, her shoes.

“Say something.”

But the voice came from the far end of the porch, Ava’s voice: “She’s not paid to talk.”

The woman he held began to laugh and, laughing, she relaxed and turned to kiss him, though he was unprepared — startled that the woman embracing him, groping him, was not Ava; shocked that he had not known; touching her breasts with his dumb fingers. He released her, but she lingered to lick his face.

“You can go now, sweetie,” Ava said. “I told you, he’s blind.”

And with that the girl let go and laughed shyly, and as they heard the car departing up the gravel driveway, Ava led Steadman into the house, saying, “Now you’re all mine.”

3

CERTAIN ITEMS of women’s clothing unfailingly raised his lust,” Steadman said in his dictating voice, with a cadence that helped him remember the narrative line. “The soft hand of silk, the open weave of lace, the tug of elastic, the neat cut of pleats in a short skirt, the way that satin smoothly bulked over skin — and particular loose combinations, warmed by a warm body. Much more than a woman’s nakedness, the clothes were powerful aphrodisiacs. They were veils of enticement.”

“Nakedness,” Ava said, still writing, and in the tone that he was using, to let him know where she was in the middle of a sentence.

“Because a naked woman was someone stripped bare,” Steadman said when she glanced up. “And he had never seen a naked woman his own age, only older ones, or pictures of them, looking so much like meat he wasn’t interested.”

Writing fast, her thumb driving the ballpoint, Ava muttered, “These are abstractions.”

“To his terror-struck mind,” he said, “such women seemed unattainable and far-fetched. And he was so young, the gaping straightforwardness of nudity seemed artless and demanding — nerve without guile, all flesh and hair. And where were the naked girls? He looked for young ones but he never saw them.”

“Talk a little about his reaction to their nakedness.”

“A naked woman was raw pork,” Steadman said, talking over her mutter. “The word he used for ‘naked’ when he was growing up was ‘bollocky.’ It didn’t apply to girls — they didn’t have bollocks, but boys did. ‘Swimming bollocky.’ He didn’t have a word for ‘naked girl’ and in a sense could not imagine what a skinny girl with no clothes on would look like. But clothed ones were everywhere.”

“Go on,” Ava said, encouraging him.

He turned to her and said in a sharp voice, “Why did you do that to me yesterday with that young woman?”

“Just having fun,” she said.

He had no reply, because the object of his own life these days was his pleasure in his book. He said, “It was strange. I didn’t realize. Those clothes threw me.”

“Clothes,” she said. “That is today’s topic.”

He resumed his dictation, saying, “Different clothes, the subtlety of styles, each one resonating with a year, a season in his life. He loved reading women’s bodies through their clothes.”

“Fetishism?” Ava said. “Role-play?”

“Semiotics,” he said.

“Oh, please.”

“Don’t write that word. Write: red lips, tight sweaters, tight blue jeans, bare feet in high heels. Capri pants were popular when he was fifteen. Tight shorts, shaping the ass and giving it a smirk. There was so much expressiveness he saw that aroused him — the face in the crotch, the manner in which a girl’s ass seemed to respond with a wobble in hot pants, silver lamé, ignescence from buttock to buttock as she walked.”

“Delete ‘ignescence,’ I’m begging you.”

“Okay. ‘Sparkling.’ More of the body showed because it was clothed, and it all beckoned because it was highlighted.” He paused, then said, “One girl he remembered.”

Ava’s murmur now was both laughter and affirmation, but Steadman was staring, solemn, his voice croaky, dry with desire.

“It was madness. He watched her and thought, Your lips are a cunt. Your cleavage is a cunt. Your neck. Your ass. Your eager hands are fuckable. He wanted to come on her fingers and watch her lick them. It was more than madness.”

He was sitting forward, upright, blindly seeing every detail he described, speaking in a scorching whisper as he listened to her writing as fast as the tape recorder was turning. The pad was in her lap and her exertion was audible, not just the rustle of paper but a peculiar sighing of her chair legs that was somehow plaintive, even sad, a loosening and sometimes a creak, like the complaint of a tight knuckle joint. It could have been her body, but it was always her chair.

“He loved it all. He wanted more.”

He had drunk a pint of the datura and at the same moment he was dazzled. He saw a woman’s face and other, separate elements at the margin of his sight — shoes, painted fingernails, breasts lifted against the filled bodice of an evening gown, a glimpse of lace, a bra strap showing, a full skirt pressed against crushable buttocks, a black veil over staring eyes — images from old magazines, fragments of drawings, memories of women he had seen and never forgotten, the wonderful covers of old paperbacks — the titles, too, The Revolt of Mamie Stover and The Wayward Bus, Nana and I, the Jury — depicting reckless women half dressed and dressed up. They had been the icons of his education.

“‘All dressed up’ was the expression that excited him then, much more than ‘stripped naked,’” Steadman said. “He loved the drama of the event — the preparation, the clothes, the costume. He was possessed by the word ‘girlie,’ the word ‘panties,’ the word ‘bra.’”

He was looking past Ava at a young girl in a gown, framed in a doorway, backlit by a bright lamp inside a house on a warm night, her hair piled up, knowing she was beautiful, realizing she was desired.

“How far back are we going?”

“Way back,” Steadman said, and resumed, “Sex was the past, deep inside him, smoldering. Desire was mostly a memory.”

The best sex was a second chance at something he had longed for and had never outgrown — datura had helped him understand that. Sex for him was not a foray into the fast lane. It was the recognition and recapture of a moment of intense longing in the past — reliving it, using it, completing it. And the best of it was that even then the longing was not exhausted of its pleasure.

“He was so happy and horny as a boy,” Steadman said. “It was beautiful, but he wanted more. He burned and burned, wanting it all again. He renounced God for it, he turned his back on salvation, and if there was a hell he was willing to risk it for the luxury of enjoying a woman’s hungry embrace. What is the greatest pleasure in life?”

Ava was writing, wondering whether she was being asked to suggest the answer.

“Pure happiness is the fulfillment in middle age of a childhood fantasy. Freud at his finest. Having now what you wanted then. At last the blind man could revisit the past and use what he saw.”

“And what did he see?”

“He saw everything, and he could have any of it, any conquest, any moment. His special sight gave him access to the past.” Steadman raised his hand to signal that he was delivering an aside. “I want you to know how serious I am when I say that the past is incomplete, unfinished. Certain occasions.”

Ava had stopped writing, stopped moving. “The helpful cliché ‘You’re never too old to have a happy childhood,”’ she said, and then there was only her breathing, like the softest swing of air. “Name an occasion.”

“Prom night,” he said. He wasn’t dictating. He was tense with eagerness. “The thrill of it.”

“There’s the whole world to choose from and you choose a prom queen.”

“Not a queen. A skinny girl!”

“For most high school kids of your generation wasn’t the prom a letdown?”

“Of course. That’s why it never went away.” He sat forward. He said, “It was a golden moment that ended in frustration. What a thrill it was for him to uncover a yearning he had in the past, a tremendous sexual longing, and pick it up and complete it.”

She resumed writing fast, to catch up, and remained attentive, snatching at the pages of her pad and flipping them.

“He wanted now what had been denied to him. He desired only what had been thwarted. What had been withheld, he hungered for.”

He heard Ava’s chair responding to her body as she wrote, and the chair sounded as though she were riding it.

“He wanted Rosemarie Fredella in a blue low-cut prom dress — bare shoulders, bare neck, her breasts crushed together and her hair swept up beautifully as he had never seen it before. And white high-heeled shoes and a pearl necklace.”

“Pearl choker.”

“Yes. And dangling earrings. Pink lips, pink nails. Mascara. A new face. He had never seen her look this way before. She had gone to a lot of trouble to change from a pretty smiling girl into a seductive young woman. And now he understood — in his blindness, from his experience as a traveler — that this was like a tribal rite of sex play, in which the choicest virgins in the village were dressed up in elaborate costumes, their whole being made more beautiful, for the sole purpose of exciting desire in potential lovers. A kind of betrothal, for their initiation.”

The girl in the lovely dress, glowing with eagerness, his girl for the night, waiting alone for him at her doorway, looking fresh, looking willing, her smile and her whole posture saying, “I am ready. I am yours. Take me.”

Ava’s chair legs were murmuring, so he knew she was still writing. He said nothing more, even when she finished. He knew she was looking over the page, surmising what it was cuing her to do. An instruction was always implied in his narrative, implicit directions. She was glad. He needed her. Without her he was alone. With her his fantasy could live. There was no point to his blindness if his fantasy could not be activated. It had to be lived first and described afterward. The acting out of the fantasy contained the revelation.

He could trust her to be faithful to him, but he knew when he was being teased. She had tricked him yesterday, but playfully, proving that he was not as strong or as knowing as he thought. But he had liked the touch of the strange girl, and he had loved Ava’s stratagem, how she had taken the girl’s place, dressed as she was. He loved her for liking the game.

Now Ava said, “I need a little time.”

“Then go now.”

“Promise me you won’t drive blind.”

“It’s wearing off. Don’t worry.”

She left the room, she left the house, he heard her car on the driveway gravel. He knew she would call and he hoped soon. She was serious, and always more alluring when the episode was formal, perhaps a result of her medical training — her instinct for order? Even though she sometimes rebelled against it, she found it awkward to be casual, took pride in preparation, and seldom explained what it was she was doing. Putting herself in charge — more medical doctor traits.

He found the right clothes for himself, the tuxedo he seldom wore, the black shoes, the stiff shirt. He set them out, the tux over a chair, buffed the shoes, and found himself pacing.

Without being conscious of it at first — for almost two hours had passed and he had not received Ava’s call — he was impatient. Then he felt sure he was being kept waiting deliberately. The doctor is busy. There was absolutely nothing he could do except wait: could not read or write, or distract himself, or stray far from the telephone.

Such an old tormenting feeling, the impatience he had felt as a boy, wanting so badly to act on his own and hating the feeling that he needed permission, that he had to be summoned. Those were among the sharpest pains of his youth, impatience and delay, and they had created such yearning in him: his passion to vanish that he called travel.

All this was recreated in his mind without his having planned it. And how could she have known how much it had mattered to him, that delay itself made his desire greater and brought it to a pitch of lust? Almost five hours had passed.

His faltering blindness had turned to twilight, matching the actual twilight at the window, for he had been pacing in the house sightlessly, without switching any lights on.

When the phone rang, his blindness had moderated to the point that on the second ring he actually saw the telephone by the window in the last light of the waning day, almost eight o’clock this August night.

“It’s me.”

“Who?”

“Rosemarie, your prom date,” she said, and gave him her address.

He dressed quickly and considered a swig of the datura while he did so. But though he rued the fact that his blindness — his lightness — was completely gone, and he squinted at the confusing harshness of the lamps, it meant that he could keep his promise not to drive blind. He brought some of the mixture with him in a hip flask that had once held his whiskey.

The address she gave him was a house number he did not know, on a side road off Franklin Street — probably a friend’s place — but when he found it he could see it was perfect: a frame house with an open porch, a light burning on the porch, a lantern on a post beside the brick-paved front path.

As he approached the house, the front door opened and she stepped out in a blue prom gown, her hair upswept, white high-heeled shoes, white gloves. She wore lipstick and blue eye shadow, and he marveled at her resourcefulness. There was more detail in her appearance than he had suggested in his dictation: everything that he had remembered, and more, from the half-buried memory of his boyish desire.

“You look great.”

“Thank you,” she said in a small voice, seeming more uncertain than shy.

In the car, she said, “Are we going dancing?”

He said nothing. He hadn’t thought of that. He only wanted to be alone and to hold her.

“I know a place,” he said.

They went by the unpaved back roads to the beach at the harbor entrance to Tashmoo, where they parked, hidden amid the high rose bushes, facing the Sound. Satisfied that they were alone, Steadman took out his hip flask and drank two large swallows. He then sat quietly, feeling the drug course in his blood and rise into the bulb of his head and warm his brain.

“This does amazing things to your pulse,” Ava said, her fingers on his wrist.

But he was smiling, he was blind, he got out of the car and went to her side and slipped off her shoes. Then, hearing music from a house in the woods they could not see, they danced slowly on the sand. He held her close, felt her frilly dress, the silks beneath it, all the layers against him, her body too, her sinuous dancing in his hands. He could hardly bear it.

He touched her, let his fingers slip to her buttocks and clutched them. Ava murmured but said nothing. He felt for her breasts in the crispness of all that cloth. She seemed to pull away, a tug of modesty, yet she allowed it.

They kissed. She kissed his ear, his neck, and he thought how holding her and kissing was a form of dancing.

“Not here.”

They went back to the car, which was fragrant with her perfume, something sensual in its stuffy heat, all the windows closed. He helped her into the back seat and kissed her again, sucked on her lips, groped at the bodice of her dress and found her breasts and put his face between them and kissed and nuzzled her cleavage.

“Long ago the answer was always ‘Please, stop.’”

Ava said, “Please, don’t stop.”

She sighed as he slipped his hand beneath her dress, all those layers, snagging his fingers on her petticoats, and found her panties. He extended his fingers to touch the lace trim and slid them under the tight elastic to the slick hair and soft lips, and as he slipped a thick finger into her, she moved her legs together and clasped his hand between her thighs and moaned and rode him.

Parting her legs again for him, she reached down and clawed at the crotch of her panties where they were binding his hand, and with her other hand she grasped the bodice of her dress and eased it down, baring her breasts. Then she clutched the back of his head and guided his mouth to a nipple.

Her breath against his ear was hot as she licked him, panting, squirming against his hand, saying, “Suck me, bite my nipple, finger-fuck me harder,” and she reached again and took his hand like something inanimate and pumped it against herself, frantically using it.

He submitted to her grip on his hand. He loved feeling the hot silk of her sex lips, which pulsed in a rosy glow beneath the lacy shadows of her clothes, the ripeness rising and mingling with the aroma of flowers, so that he could not distinguish her perfume from the hum of her sex, her satiny skin from the smoothness of her lingerie. The heavy odors saturated his eyes and excited his hunger and made him dumb with desire.

“Lots of times,” she said slowly, “I touch myself like this, dreaming of you,” and lifted herself slightly from the seat cushion to free his hand and give him more room.

Touching her vulva was like fumbling with dripping peach slices, covering his fingers in warm syrup, and her flesh was warm under her stiff petticoats. Her soft breasts propped in the brocade of her dress were like fruit, too, pressed against his face as he sucked the tender stem.

“We’ve got all night, baby,” she crooned to him as she held him to her breast. “And when you’re through with me, I’m going to take this”—she found the bulge in his pants and traced it with her fingers and squeezed.

She let go with a gasp, twisting away from him and snatching at her dress, just as a pair of headlights slashed the air. Above them the blazing blue gelatinous light atop a police cruiser flashed like a spaceship that had just settled to Earth.

Behind an overbright flashlight with a querying beam came a steady wide-awake voice.

“There’s no parking on the dune, folks.”

The flashlight swept across Ava’s face — the smudged lipstick, the wisps of dangling hair — and briefly Steadman’s. They were disheveled but dressed, and both of them so formal. In a tidying motion the beam lighted the empty front seat.

“You the owner of this vehicle, sir?”

Keeping his head down, hiding his hands, Steadman said yes, the car was his.

“Good. Now I want you to get out of the vehicle very slowly and show me your license and registration.”

“What for?” Ava said.

“Please do as I say.”

Steadman did not object. He flicked his wallet and found his license in a plastic sleeve, but as he swung the car door open and stepped out, he stumbled, and in a defensive reflex the cop jumped backward in what seemed a practiced move, clasping the handle of his pistol and directing his flashlight at Steadman’s face and gaping white eyes.

“He’s blind, Officer.”

As Steadman’s dead eyes accused him, the cop seemed unsure now, and he was startled into ignoring the license. He turned his flashlight from Steadman’s face to Ava’s. “You okay, ma’am?”

“This is a special occasion, Officer.” In the interval of the policeman’s confusion, she had adjusted her dress and smoothed her hair, though she looked more than ever like a prom date, rumpled, demure.

“You look kind of familiar. I’ve seen you.”

“The hospital.”

“Right. Emergency. You’re the doctor.” With each statement he became more polite. “And you’re the writer. I’ve heard about you.”

Steadman simply stared, looking ghoulish.

The policeman switched off his flashlight, another mark of respect, and said, “Sorry, folks, I thought you were summer people.”

After he had gone, Ava said, “That was perfect. Now let’s go home.”

“No,” Steadman said, touching her as he spoke, and with his touch finding a fragrance.

Sliding one hand beneath the hem of her gown, embracing her and delving into her bodice, fingering her cupped breast, he knew what she wanted from her sighs of encouragement. And when he found her warm damp panties he parted them, and clasped the wetness of her folds, stroked those lips, all the while kissing her face and murmuring into her mouth.

“Oh, yes,” she said, reaching down to guide his fingers, steadying them and chafing herself with them once again. Then through her teeth she spoke into his mouth, insisting, “Fuck me, fuck me, fuck me,” and seemed to thrash inside her dress as she gripped his hand, and the rustling of the cloth aroused him as much as her voice.

A scratching on the metal of the car, the stiff leaves and thorns of a rosebush nudged by the night breeze, was strangely rhythmic — maybe the car was rocking against it? The sound was like a cat’s claws. Then it was gone, lost in Ava’s choking, as she came with a great grunt and gasp, as though, thrusting the orgasm from her body, she were giving birth to it.

They lay there breathless for a while. The claw-scratch returned on the car door. Steadman lifted himself to the window to make sure it was no more than a rose bush. The mass of blossoms was blue in the fluorescence of moonlight.

Ava, too, was luminous. She lay as if ravished, and blue-white like a fresh corpse in her soft dress, her hair tangled, her lipstick smeared around her mouth, her dress yanked down, one breast lifted from the bra cup and its own weight giving it an odd sideways twist of lovely plumpness.

She woke as he watched her, back from the dead, tucking her breast into her bra, lifting her gown to cover it, pushing down her skirt, leaning into the front seat to switch on the overhead light, and then studying her face, touching her hair, smiling, remembering.

“I look fucked.”

Still smiling and peering intently into the mirror of her compact, she wiped the smears of lipstick from her face, dabbed at her eyes, combed her hair. And just as Steadman thought she had finished, she took out a pouch of cosmetics and applied mascara and thickened her eyelashes — slowly, paying no attention to Steadman, who watched with fascination as she prettied her face. She rouged her cheeks, reddened her lips again using a brush and lip gloss, made herself a new face, a mask of desire.

Only when she was done, having put herself back together and now looking again as she had in the doorway, did she turn away from the mirror and snap her compact shut, lingering in the light a bit before switching it off. She faced him. The dusty moonlight deepened the texture of her makeup and softened the planes of her face, and what had seemed an innocently questioning smile in the small mirror was now lust lit by moonbeams.

She leaned toward Steadman and her lowering arm crushed her gown as she reached down and slid her hand along his thigh. She touched his cock and kissed him, thrusting her tongue into his mouth and moving her fingers, playing with him through the cloth of his trousers. She unzipped him and slipped her hand inside, her warm hand clutching him, as though gripping a knife handle, until it thickened. Then she pumped it, driving it downward against his groin, again and again, thrusting hard, as if she had a dagger she was using against him. And still she embraced him, held tight to him, kissing his lips and his face as she held him, not stopping, not even hesitating. She had risen, and she hovered over him so urgently hers was a posture of assault, possessing him and pounding his cock with a murdering motion.

The sound of his pleasure came slanting from deep within his lungs and seemed like an echo of a softer sighing in her throat. Her breasts were in his hands, his thumbs grazing her nipples. Her touch was surer and so finely judged that she seemed to feel in the throb of his cock the spasm of his juice rising — knew even before he did that he was about to come. Then he knew, his body began to convulse, and as he cried “No”—because she had let go — she pushed him backward onto the seat and pressed her face down, lapping his cock into her mouth, curling her tongue around it, and the suddenness of it, the snaking of her tongue, the pressure of her lips, the hot grip of her mouth, triggered his orgasm, which was not juice at all but a demon eel thrashing in his loins and swimming swiftly up his cock, one whole creature of live slime fighting the stiffness as it rose and bulged at the tip and darted into her mouth.

Holding him with one hand, she devoured it and was still swallowing as he went limp and slipped out of her mouth. When she looked up at him with her smeared face and smudged eyes, she was still greedily gulping, licking droplets from her gleaming lips.

The car was warm and sour with the mingled odors of perfume and sweat and the fish glue of his semen. Ava was silent. The world was old. The moon looked brittle and barnacled, and down below in the Sound a breadbox of a ferry chugged through the greasy waves. He knew his blindness had worn off.

4

IN THE SALLOW morning light of glaucous summer seafog he could not tell whether he was blind or sighted. His uncertainty made him impatient to resume his book. He had woken alone, clearheaded, fixated on the notion that writing and sex were disappearing acts. Wrung out, too, as though, smaller and simpler, he had lost one of his limbs in an ecstatic ritual of eroticism.

Sex was a form of departure, a passionate sacrifice of farewell, and even his writing these days had the unanswerable finality of a suicide note. Take that! he thought with grim pleasure. He wanted to write everything down so there would be nothing more to say and no more to remember, to burn out his self so he could vanish.

Opening the drawer of his filing cabinet, he smiled at the large glass jar that held the dark tea of the datura. He wagged it slowly, stopping at intervals to examine how well the residue had dissolved, and this mechanical motion helped him look ahead to the morning of work.

He needed to think aloud in the form of dictation, because he was troubled by a paradox he did not fully understand. The act of sex, so well planned as an end in itself, seemed to suggest a sequel, by giving you courage, by helping to uncover a related desire, something else, a particular image — last night the glimpse of a pretty garter of lace on the moonlit skin of her thigh, her gown hiked up in a hurry. This enhancement was an invitation: certain clothes seemed to beckon. And he, who had imagined that sex with Rosemarie Fredella on that prom night had been his earliest sexual ambition, the origin of his desire, saw something deeper. This flimsy scrap of lace stirred him again like a fetish object, and he wondered what it meant and where it led.

Two other details also unexpectedly aroused him. He believed he had thought of everything, but no. The interruption of the policeman — the surprise, the drama, the suspenseful moonglow after he had gone — was one. And then, without having been told anything, the way that Ava had further tantalized him by pausing, switching on the overhead light in the car, and turning away with the coy hauteur of a high school coquette. Forcing him to watch and wait, she had put on makeup. He had sat back sighing, loving the chance to see her face change. He was transfixed by her vivid mask, the sharp symmetry of lips and cheeks picked out of the humid shadows of greens and reds in the highlights of her eyes. As though she were saying to his reflection in the mirror, knowing what she could stir in his guts, I am making my face look fuckable.

That was going into the book today, as soon as Ava appeared and he could levitate himself with a dose of his drug and begin dictation. His book would be the last word, something for people who had lived a lot — not a beginner’s book, not even a book for those who praised Trespassing, not for children or schools, not to be studied but to be lived. The book’s subjects were blindness and lust, offering no moral, nothing except the peculiar reality of one man’s transgressions, the way back, as a sort of atonement for having been silent for so long.

How he hated the books people praised and recommended to him. Blindness had shown him what a sham they were. Blindness had shown him the folly of such praise. Blindness allowed him to hear the nonsense that people uttered. Blindness had rid him of his faith and all his sentimentality and had led him here, to contemplate his sexual history. And blindness had given him the strength to reenact it, for his book. There could be no other books.

“What would be the point of learning Braille?” he had said to a well-meaning woman. “What on earth would I want to read?”

He remembered everything he had ever read. There was too much. A great deal of it he wished to forget. He raised the jar of muddy liquid and, seeing a ring of residue darkening the bottom, the grainy dregs of datura, gave it another shake.

“Look who’s wide awake,” Ava said, entering the room looking aloof and casually efficient in a T-shirt and shorts. She was barefoot, carrying a mug of coffee in one hand, her doctor’s bag in the other. Her face was scrubbed, a slight redness where his stubble had chafed her cheek and a small swollen serration on her upper lip where he might have bitten her — he liked to think of the bruise as showing his teeth marks.

In other respects Ava seemed a completely different person from the one of the night before, his prom date, a perfect memory of a longing accomplished — fulfillment. Had she seemed the same woman, he would have found it hard to dictate his book to her. Even so, he felt awkward, not sure of how to greet her.

“Got a letter for you,” she said. She handed him a thick business-sized envelope.

Addressed to him through his publisher, it had been forwarded to his post office box. Steadman looked at the return address and saw Manfred Steiger scribbled in pen above the bold printed name of a German company. Using all his strength, Steadman tore the envelope in half and tossed it into the wastebasket as Ava looked on. She was smiling, but her smile was a question.

“No letter that long can possibly be interesting,” he said.

“Maybe it’s not a letter. Maybe it’s a manuscript.”

“Even worse,” he said, and then, “What’s that for?”

Ava had put her mug down and taken her stethoscope out of the bag.

“I’m wondering what that stuff is doing to you,” she said. “Have you drunk your dose today?”

“Not yet.”

He lifted his shirt and let her listen with her stethoscope. Then she cinched his arm with the black cuff and pumped the bulb and read his blood pressure, studying the gauge.

“How does it look?”

“A little above normal, but fine. Now have a drink. Keep that thing on your arm.”

“Give me a minute,” he said, and as Ava sipped her coffee he unscrewed the lid of the jar and poured half the mixture into a tumbler. Holding the tumbler in two hands, in self-conscious veneration, like a priest at an altar, he lifted it and drank the liquid slowly in a number of reverent swallows. And then he smiled and stumbled a bit as he went to the sofa, already cloudy-eyed, and when he sat a new day took shape around him — new colors and sounds, subtler ones, more birds, sharper odors, his mind fully engaged. Ava smelled of soap and talc, and her shampoo had given her hair a fruity aroma, and there was a hint, a tang, of freshly cut grass — green clippings on her shoes that were darkened by dew drops and a smack of mud.

“You’ve been out?” he said dreamily.

“Not far. A walk around the garden.”

She was kneeling, pumping the bulb, inflating the cuff. And then in stages, letting out the air, she read his blood pressure again.

“It’s a miracle drug. Your blood pressure is way down. Better than normal — a young man’s heart.” She took out a small pencil-shaped flashlight. “Look at me,” she said, and shone the light into his eyes, peering in.

“See anything?”

“Nothing.”

“Neither do I,” she said. “Your pupils stay dilated.”

Instead of the glimmer of the light, or any object, he saw her seriousness, and he smiled, feeling superior for being something of a riddle. Much as he was reassured by Ava’s concern, admiring her medical skill, her deftness in using her instruments and examining him, he liked her puzzlement much more, a doctor saying I don’t know. He enjoyed her confusion. On this one subject, at any rate, the effects of the datura, she was ignorant. So it was all still his secret.

She had put her instruments away and seated herself, had found her clipboard and pad, and was already clicking her ballpoint.

“Last night,” he said. “That was everything I wanted.”

Even so, praising her extravagantly, he was doubtful. He wanted her to deny what he said or to offer an insight. Maybe she, too, suspected an incompleteness.

“And you put your heart into it,” he said.

“I’m younger than you, but I went to high school, too,” she said. “I had a prom date.”

“Who with?”

“That would be Jeff Ziebert.” She smiled, saying the irrelevant name.

“And you went parking with him afterward?”

“Hey, this is your book, not mine.”

“So while I was hot for Rosie,” he persisted, “you were fantasizing about him.”

She said, “I was struck by something you said about desire being located in the past. I tried to see if that would work with me. I looked deep into my own.”

“And found Jeff.”

She smoothed the pad on her clipboard with the flat of her hand in a cleansing motion, as if wishing to brush away the question.

Steadman considered this phantom rival and concluded that he didn’t mind. He was liberated by not figuring in Ava’s fantasy. It was better that she used him as he used her. He wanted her to feel free to fantasize as she liked, to fulfill what mattered most to her. Otherwise it was all self-deception.

“Better that we should deceive each other than deceive ourselves,” he said.

With this reflection he began dictating the episode — the prom date, groping her in the car, the sudden policeman, the fluffy dress and the straps and stitches of all her underwear, the makeup, the final flourish. Ava helped him when he hesitated, and she gave him the right words for the cosmetics.

But he said, “I don’t want too much detail. No brand names. None of those ridiculous lipstick shades.”

And when he got to the point of describing his orgasm, saying “Not juice at all but a demon eel thrashing in his loins and swimming swiftly up his cock, one whole creature of live slime,” she frowned and interrupted.

“Do you want to know how it felt to me?”

“Go on.”

“That I was sucking the life out of you and that you were inert while I drank you. That I was in charge, draining you of your strength and swallowing it, to be strong myself.”

Her exactness and her poise made him thoughtful. He was reminded of how much he needed her, and that she was half that life of desire he was reliving, and so half his book had to be hers.

“I’m sorry if I shocked you,” she said. She changed her posture, recrossed her legs, and said, to encourage him to continue, “So time passed.”

“No, wait.” The experience last night had uncovered an earlier memory. That was the paradox. “There was something else.”

“Another woman?”

“Another me. A younger me.”

He was staring blindly at the window, beyond it, at the lifting seafog and slender dripping oaks and grizzled needles of the pitch pines, into the past, remembering.

“I grew up in the age before everyone had an electric clothes dryer,” he said. “You probably had one.”

Ava was listening.

“Let me see,” he said. “This matters. Everywhere I looked I saw clotheslines — women’s underwear on clotheslines, lifting with the breeze and fluttering beautifully, as beautiful to me as the nakedest woman. Those secret clothes were women to me, and the way the wind filled them made me gape.”

He was gaping frankly now and lost in his gaze, consumed by his vision of silken whiteness, like the whiteness of a body. And Ava was writing swiftly as he dictated; she had no memory of her own to match his vision and was somewhat surprised by how remote this seemed from his description of yesterday’s desire, the prom date, kissing and fondling in the back seat, an adolescent episode relived.

“I see clotheslines, and secrets on them — panties and slips and bras. Why so many? Did women need more underwear then? There seemed to have been more of it, or was it more elaborate — women perhaps making up for their outward modesty by covertly wearing seductive underwear.”

“Sometimes it peeked out,” Ava said.

“Yes.”

Underwear was never totally hidden; that was the excitement and the tease. The ghost of a bra seen through a gauzy blouse, the neat curve of panty line under tight slacks, the ambiguous straps and ribbons, the imprint of lace showing through a skirt — always pretty — the notion of the beauty, the idea of tiny pink bows hidden beneath a woman’s clothes.

“And so it seemed that underwear was a distinct and evocative form of nakedness. A woman in a slip or panties was the object of desire that a naked woman is now.” Steadman pressed his temples with his fingertips. “But only the past matters to me. Underwear was an invitation, and a greater temptation than nakedness. I can see it clearly.”

As though peering from overhead, past rooftops and telephone poles, he saw himself as a hurrying boy cutting through back yards to get to Carol Lumley’s house. The boy passed clotheslines and ducked behind them, recognizing the women’s underwear from the Sears catalogue and the Sunday newspapers. The Cronins’ daughter was a nurse, but even a nurse’s white uniform seemed like a version of underwear, and so did a man’s bathing suit.

A great fluttering whiteness on this warm day in early summer. The wind lifting the underwear also lifted the forsythia and the lilacs, the irises and the two-tone leaves of the poplars that went on spinning, the sun-struck laundry, bluish white in the deep green.

Hurrying under the clotheslines, he felt the flimsy silken things fluttering against his face, the warmth of them, their fragile beauty. He was fascinated by the variety, the shapes and sizes, some of them pink or fringed in lace, their softly rubbed seams, the stitches on bras, and the way some pieces were perfectly matched — the pairs of them in silk or satin pegged up together, the revelation of the back yards of his childhood.

Needing courage, though he had nothing else to do — school had ended for the summer — he had waited until late afternoon. Carol had said, “If you want to come over and sit on my porch I’ll probably be around. My parents might have to go out.”

The casual way she had said this was a greater inducement than if she had made a formal invitation. They were tentative exploratory words, but each one suggested a promise. The danger was that the more specific you were, the greater the blame, and the worse the sin. Vagueness was the tone of innocence, and though he was attracted to Carol Lumley he had no idea what lay beyond this attraction. He wanted to kiss her, he wanted to touch her, he wanted her to let him and for her to like it. He was fourteen years old.

He moved, hunched and watchful, like an intruder, from back yard to back yard — the Cronins’, the Halls’, the Fasullos’, the Flahertys’—on this hot bright breezy day, what his mother called a good drying day. In one yard Mrs. Fasullo was clothespinning her voluminous panties, and in another Mrs. Finn was harvesting her slips, and elsewhere the underwear flapped like flags or swelled with the wind, as if with the curves of a woman’s body.

Ducking through the last back yard, he came to the Lumleys’, and what stopped him was not Carol’s underwear — though he saw lots of it on the line amid the whole family’s underwear, from her mother’s bloomers and her father’s boxers down to the tiniest bras, the smallest panties, the half-slips, and the slips — what a small body she had. He caught sight of her blue nightgown, the kind he knew as a baby doll, and he paused and looked closely.

Trimmed with lace and pink bows, wooden clothespins holding its straps, the lovely thing hung and swayed as though Carol had just slipped out of it. He touched it and held it to his face, the blue satin warmed by the summer afternoon. And beside it, just out of reach, the matching blue panties. White satin ribbons were threaded at the shoulders, and the wide strip of lace at the hem was picked out with bows. It seemed to him both a gown and underwear, but it was designed for bed, and what mattered most to him was that it was meant to be admired by someone else.

“What the heck are you supposed to be doing?”

He was too startled to speak, and even when he saw Carol laughing at the window he was not calmed. He looked away. He felt he had revealed himself. Had she seen him clutch the baby doll and press it to his face? If so, he counted on the fact that what he had done was so absurd she would not understand it.

Anyway, she was gone from the window when he looked again, and a moment later, answering the front door, all she said was “What did you bring me?”

“Nothing.”

“And I bet you want some lemonade and all kinds of stuff.”

He shrugged and smiled and Carol made a disapproving face, what he thought of as a woman’s expression. She wore a pink blouse and white shorts, and though she was fourteen, as he was, she seemed much younger. She was thin and slight, with small breasts and fragile wrists and fingers, a body so slender it was like a young boy’s, a compact bum and skinny legs. But she had blue eyes, full lips, light curly hair — an angel’s face.

“You might as well sit over there,” she said, pointing to the porch swing, and she vanished from the doorway. She was gone some minutes, but he knew why when she returned with the glasses of lemonade and redder lips.

“You’ve got lipstick on.”

“Big deal,” she said, and pressed her lips together as if to make her lip color emphatic.

They sat apart, at either end of the porch swing. They held their glasses, and the only sound was the clink of the ice when they raised them to sip the lemonade.

“So, guess what, my parents just went out.”

He was gladdened by her saying that, and sipped again from his glass, and looked off the porch to the house opposite — the Martellos’—to scrutinize the sky above its roof. He wanted dusk to fall, he wanted shadows, he wanted to be insubstantial himself, smaller and less obvious in the dark, his face in shadow, his eyes hidden.

“Did you tell them I was coming over?”

“I forgot to.”

He laughed a little and saw that she noticed and got fierce.

“But I’m going to tell them,” she said, “that you came over looking for trouble.”

Horrified by the truth of what she said, he accidentally chinked the glass against his front teeth.

“Where did you tell your parents you were going?”

“Up the park. Softball game.”

The park was not far, two streets over, behind a tall fence, the game in progress and audible — shouts, cheers, the sometime slap of bat and ball meeting in a solid hit. Their revelations were like complicity, like an admission they were doing something wrong, and knew it, and were glad of it. But because he could hear the sounds of the softball game it seemed to make sitting on Carol’s porch with her less of a lie.

“What if they find out where you really are?”

“I don’t care,” he said. “I would have snuck out anyway.”

She seemed to like that. She sat back, shoving herself against the cushion, and said, “So why were you trying to steal my stuff off the clothesline?”

He shifted on the swing and said, “I wasn’t even looking at it.”

Her blue eyes narrowed on him. He could not tell what she was thinking, for the lower part of her face was in shadow. As long as there were shadows he did not care what she was thinking. And anyway, he liked her giggly teasing voice and her pretense of scolding, even her threats — they seemed to show that she liked him and wanted him to stay.

“I bet you want more lemonade.”

“I don’t care,” he said, although he did. But he was choking with desire and confusion and did not know what else to say.

She went for the lemonade and took longer than before, and when she returned he immediately smelled the perfume, stronger in the smoky dark of dusk on the porch. He loved the fragrance; he had never smelled such flowers; the odor pricked his eyes.

He thanked her for the lemonade. She tossed her curly hair. They rocked on the porch swing.

Finally she said, “My father says you’re smart.”

He turned to her. At the far end of the swing she was now mostly in shadow, except for her bright white shorts, so small on her body.

“I think you’re a sneak,” she said.

“No sah.”

“Yes sah. So why are you sneaking over here to sit on my front porch and drink lemonade?” she said. She had hitched forward and was kicking the porch floor, propelling the swing back and forth with each kick and accusation. “You know my parents are out.”

He felt guiltily that because this was so, he was a conspirator. His silence made her sharper.

“Or else you wouldn’t be here,” she said. She kicked again, a skid-squeak of her rubber sole. “And you were sneaking around the clothesline.”

This was also true, and so accurate in its blame he said, “No I wasn’t. What do I care about all that old washing? I was just taking a shortcut.”

Instead of replying, she leaned so that he could see her smiling. She kicked the floor again, hard, and sent the porch swing backward, and he felt all her insistence in the movement.

“Please don’t tell them.”

“I’m going to,” she said, and it sounded like gunnah. “I’m going to blab everything.”

Now he wanted to go, but he could not rise from the moving swing, and when he finally got a grip on the arm of it and tried to hoist himself, she was talking again in that same teasing tone.

“I bet you want to come right into my house.”

“No,” he said, his voice breaking, and turned the small word into a squawk. He just wanted to leave. The day had gone dark, though he hadn’t noticed it until now.

“Then why did you come all the way over here?” And seeing that he was flustered and at a loss for a reply, she laughed softly.

The lights had gone on in the park, illuminating the treetops, and he still heard the sounds of the softball game, the cries of the spectators, the shouts of the players — easy to tell apart. He was thinking of all that passion and noise, just a game being played, so innocent, so blameless, an honest ball game under the lights. And he knew that he was doing something wrong, enacting a secret in the shadows he could never explain or justify.

“So why didn’t you bring me anything?”

He was silent. Another ball was smacked, another cheer: the players were harmless and happy and he was wicked.

“Because I got something for you. Want to see it?” She did not wait for a reply. “Stay here.”

She went inside and closed the doors — the screen door, the solid inner door, and he heard the thunk of the bolt. He remained sitting, wondering whether anyone could see him. He felt conspicuous and impatient and sensed he should go home. After a few minutes he rang the doorbell to tell Carol he was leaving. The bell was loud, but even so, there was no answer, not even footsteps. He waited, feeling trapped by the silence. Like a gasp, an expelled breath, a light inside went off.

And then came the metallic swallowing of the door bolt and a movement of the inner door. He could not see past the screen — only the outline of the doorframe, the darkness within. He plucked open the screen door and saw nothing but the dim hallway.

“Go in there,” she spoke from behind the door. He could see only her bare arm pointing to the living room. “Wait a little while. Then you have to find me.”

As soon as his back was turned she hurried away. He did as he was told, continued into the living room, his heart pounding, excited by the suspense. The living room was shadowy, lit by the street. He sat, and fumbled, then stood and listened, tremulous, his hands damp.

Her muffled voice came from somewhere upstairs in the house. “I’m ready.”

He went to the stairway and listened, and hearing nothing more, he climbed the stairs, looked into one room and then another, all in darkness, but he could make out the shapes of chairs, the lumps of beds, the glint of mirrors.

He entered a room at the front of the house, and though there was more light here from the street lamps, he did not see Carol at first because she was motionless, standing upright, almost posing. But he could see what she was wearing: short blue baby-doll pajamas and a pair of fluffy slippers. Her hair was fixed in two high bobbing brush-like ponytails, her shoulders were bare, her skin so pale as to be almost ghostly. The diaphanous blue cloth shimmered in the scanty, slanted light.

“Do you like it?” she said. “I dressed up just for you. I bet you don’t even care.”

She twirled before him and set the baby doll in motion, and then approached him and took his hand and brought him close to her, so close he could feel her but hardly see her, as if she were embarrassed to be stared at. And liking the darkness he clutched her, the silken cloth in his fingers, the warmth of her body, the odd warm saltiness of her damp flesh in the room that was like the promise of sex, the burnt perfume on her skin. She began to kiss him in a way that was new to him, sucking on his lips.

She moved from his mouth and said, “You better not tell anybody.”

Then, before he could say anything, she kissed him again, her kisses like promises. And as he returned her kisses, answering back, he opened his eyes and saw the room beyond her more clearly — the chair, the small bed, the neat row of costumed dolls on the dresser. He led her a few steps to the bed and pushed a cloth doll out of the way and sat down, hugging her, still kissing her, tasting the saltiness of her moist neck, the lemonade in her saliva.

“Lie down.”

“No,” she said, in a tone of caution that was almost fear.

But she did not stop kissing him, and a moment later, when he took her free hand and pressed it against his lap, she let him guide her fingers. Then all the initiative was hers, as she touched him, rubbed him with her small hand and finally unzipped him and took hold of him, pumping, her whole hand enclosing him. The thought came to him that she knew a great deal and was unafraid.

She certainly knew more than he did — he could tell that from her grip, her confident fingers wrapped around his stiffened cock. And her other hand, too. Her boldness startled him, for he had hardly touched her body. He knew with a kind of dread that he was trespassing. He had entered a new country that was strange and dark and sinful and pleasurable, full of shadows and delights, and he was here for good, was possessed, was changed, would never return. Being here with Carol, kissing the lemony taste of her lips, her skinny hands bewitching him, was not a choice — there was no alternative. He loved it and knew he was damned.

She sighed when he touched her, slipping his hand onto her thigh, and fondled the lace of her baby doll, which was like part of her nakedness. She sighed again, and he knew her sigh meant yes. She parted her legs and allowed his hand to rise. Groping there, fumbling in the dark, was for him like uncovering a secret being, another person, a hidden woman, her scalp and cheeks, her lips, her mouth — everything but eyes — and when his fingers traced and hesitated at the tiny mouth of this damp-faced creature, she opened her legs wider.

“Put it inside,” she said, as she kissed him. He slipped one fingertip in, and she said, “More.”

Even unseen he could feel the lip-like folds glisten as his finger dipped into the slick pocket mouth of flesh. Sliding closer to him, crushing her nightgown against him, she kissed him harder, put her tongue into his mouth, showing him how, until he did the same to her.

She was leading him, teaching him. He used his tongue as he stroked her with his hand, in the same motion as she was stroking him. She was rocking, helping his hand, and in this fierce syncopation of desire he could feel her small damp body squirming beneath the satin, like a captive animal, a mewing cat trapped and twisted in silk. The lights from the street made the cloth glow. The bedroom, not so dark now, was fragrant with her perfume and her dolls.

He was looking at one of her Barbie dolls sitting flat on the dresser, its long legs straight out and slightly parted to keep it upright, when, pumping him and taking light skimming breaths, Carol gripped him, seeming to sense his whole body go rigid, as though concentrating. Then a sweet wound within him swelled and burst in a single stroke, and when he convulsed and clutched himself he also clutched her sticky searching hands.

“I can feel it,” she said, and became girlish and curious and almost jubilant.

He groaned, for he had emptied quickly and now there was a void where all that heat and muscle had been.

“Let me see it,” she said.

“No.” He was bent over, slashed in half, reduced to a crouching guilty boy.

“It’s on my fingers, it’s all over my nightie,” she said. “Look what you did.”

He was sorrowful, ashamed, exhausted, almost feverish, and he watched with drowsy surprise as she dabbed her fingers, smelled them, put the tip of her tongue on them, and wagged her tongue at him. Then, seeing that he was shocked, she became assertive and shocked him further by snatching his hand and choosing his wettest finger and sucking it. She lay back and trapped him with her laugh.

With a slight catch in her throat from being overeager, Carol Lumley whispered, “Touch me some more.”

Touch me some more, Ava was saying, in a mass of blue silk and ribbons and lace. More.

5

THE TWANGING MUSIC he heard as he approached on the whitish dust of the summer path made the solitary cabin more solitary, yet gave it life. It was a small, rough-wood bungalow with a song coming out of the side porch. Had Tom’s mother left the radio on and gone out? It seemed impossible that she could be inside listening to something so loud, stammering and delirious music that knifed the steamy air like hot metal. Listening to it he seemed to see the sunlight glittering on sharp silver, and he walked faster, toward the melody. The music also seemed to give the cabin a face — eye-like windows, porch nose, door mouth.

“We’re going out with Kenny,” Tom had said at the lake, holding his sister Nita’s hand.

Kenny was a fisherman, Kenny had a boat, Kenny was Tom Bronster’s older friend. Tom talked about him all the time. “Kenny’s got a gun. He’s going to let me shoot it.” Today, Tom’s tone suggested that Slade was not welcome, or at least that he would be in the way. Kenny’s boat was a small skiff with an outboard motor.

Nita was vexed: she wanted to stay with Slade, and yet Tom was responsible for her. That morning on the beach she had said to Slade, “I could be your girlfriend.” She was ten, he was thirteen. Slade was glad to see her go.

“Never mind, I’ll stick around here,” Slade said, knowing he was lying.

As soon as Kenny’s boat sped across the lake, tipping up and plowing white water aside, Slade turned and walked through the pines and up the dusty path by the margin of the meadow where a cow sometimes followed them along the fence. Nearer the cabin — as soon as he saw it — he heard the music, and now he was glad he was alone. Tom was his friend, but when Tom was with him, Slade was distracted. Slade was dreamy, he preferred to be alone with his reveries, he found more pleasure in them than in noisy games. Tom was a talkative, active boy with an exhausting shrieky voice.

Agreeing to spend this week at the lake with Tom and his family meant that he, the visiting friend, was obliged to accompany Tom every waking minute. So he was happy on the path; he liked having a break from the burden of this raucous boy who was always chasing his dog or challenging Slade to bike races or boasting about Kenny.

Through the side window of the cabin Slade saw a flash of white, Tom’s mother in a bra, her thick hair plaited into one braid and fixed by a ribbon. He thought even then how no white was whiter than a woman’s white underwear. She was playing a steel guitar, a table-like instrument resembling an ironing board with strings, plucking it and moving a wooden spindle at one end to create a quavering sound, a sweet hungering he knew to be Hawaiian music. Yearning melodies troubled the fretwork of the amplifier, a black boxy suitcase with a hole on one side.

Tom’s mother, who was always dressed up at night, looked naked to Slade now. He was fascinated by each thing she wore: a bra that made her breasts into two white cones on a harness, loose shorts — her navel showing in her pale flat stomach — and wedge-heeled shoes with fake cherries attached to the straps, painted toenails, her thick braid sliding across her spine as, looking tall, she concentrated hard on her pressed-down fingers, making music.

Had she not been playing the instrument she would have seen Slade at once. Carelessly dressed, her braid swinging, she seemed playful, younger, like a very big girl. Steadman stayed at the window, looking at her bare legs and her white shapely breasts. She was half faced away from him, but she looked so lovely he found himself staring. He was dizzy with meaningless heat and numb fingers. He loved looking, but as minutes passed she became less and less Tom’s mother and more and more like someone whom he knew a little and had never seen like this.

Imagining himself touching her eased his mind. She had sallow skin and green eyes. Mentally he placed his hands over the cups of her breasts and stroked them slowly. The thought so possessed him that he stepped away, ducked beneath the cabin window, and went back to the lake to wait for Tom and Nita to return from the fishing trip. Still, even sitting on the grassy bank with his feet propped on the exposed roots of a tree, hidden by bushes, he felt guilty and excited.

“You missed it!” Tom called out from the skiff when he saw Slade on the embankment. Tom held up a dripping foot-long fish.

That night, Tom’s mother wore a pink pleated dress with short sleeves and white sandals. Her long hair was unbraided, combed out, hiding her neck. Each night she dressed differently. He loved her clothes, their color and variety, and he saw in her joy in dressing up how attractive she was. But it pleased him to know that he had seen her that afternoon in her bra and shorts. She was kind to Slade. She watched him eat and complimented him on his manners.

“And what a good appetite.” She said to Tom, “I wish you’d eat like Slade.”

“You’re a good cook,” Slade said, and saw the effect of his praise — the way she smiled, the way she leaned over and asked him if he wanted more. He averted his eyes from her neckline, but he got a glimpse of the bra.

Nita whispered to her and then clapped her hand over her mouth.

“And you’ve got a secret admirer,” Tom’s mother said.

In the bunk beds that night, almost pained by the thought of the woman and needing to talk about her, Slade whispered in the darkness from the top bunk, “Tom. You awake?”

“Yeah.”

“Your mother’s nice.”

“Bull.”

“No. She really is.”

Slade wanted to have a conversation about Tom’s mother, find out more about her, or at least just talk to console himself.

“She’s horrible. She’s a wicked nag. Always making me babysit Nita.”

Tom wouldn’t say any more. Soon he was asleep, and Slade saw how Tom was selfish and immature, no fun to talk to, a disappointment who was a burden as a friend.

The routine was the same every day. Up at seven, and after breakfast, the lake. Hot dogs and milk at the cabin for lunch, then bike riding or back to the lake in the afternoon. Supper at six, the meal Slade looked forward to, because Tom’s mother would be dressed up. They played in the meadow until the mosquitoes started biting. Then to bed. The house smelled of its pine floors and newly sawn timber, and at night there was always a radio playing, Tom’s mother downstairs alone, leafing through a magazine, Collier’s or the Saturday Evening Post.

The next afternoon, Slade left Tom at the beach.

“I have to go to the bathroom.”

He returned to the cabin, delighted when he heard the familiar music. He crept toward it, his head down, and he took up his place at the window to watch the woman in her white bra and shorts, to listen to her playing. He had been there only a minute or less when Nita stepped from behind the side porch. She had obviously followed him from the lake.

Fearful of revealing his secret interest, feeling discovered, Slade started to walk away.

Nita said in a whisper, “You’re spying on my mom.”

“No I’m not.”

“Don’t believe you.” She squinted at him and smiled and in a wheedling voice said, “Want to see my special house?”

“Sure,” he said, to humor her and avoid any more questions, and as he agreed it occurred to him that Nita looked just like a monkey.

Nita bent over and slipped under the porch, duck-walking into the crawl space. Slade followed her, hearing the mother’s music, like bright light blazing through the cracks in the floorboards. The crawl space was cool and smelled of cat shit and sour dust; the shadows were thick with cobwebs. At its edge was a banner of sunlight, for the cabin was on blocks, no basement, only the crawl space and the splintery wooden underpart. Slade felt disoriented by stepping under the house and hearing the music from the room above, and by the insistent beckoning girl among the shadows and the smells. He was dizzy and distinctly felt that he was doing something wrong.

“This is my kitchen. I could fix you a meal. This is my living room.” She had a hoarse husky voice. “Bedroom’s over there.”

The places she named were just sun-striped portions of dust and cat shit, littered with stones and blown leaves, an overturned bucket serving as a stool.

“And this is my bathroom,” she said.

Slade was half kneeling because he was so much taller than she was and there was so little headroom.

“You can use it if you want,” she said.

“Use it like how?”

“Like what do you think, silly.”

She slid her panties to her knees and squatted, defying him with her mother’s green eyes, seeming to hold her breath while he watched and listened. He stared at her, the little bare-assed monkey with the wicked look squatting in the dust, but all he heard was her mother’s music slashing through the floor from the cabin just over their heads.

Even crouching, Slade could see nothing more of Nita than her bulgy small-girl knees, for she was compact and squatting. But when she stood up and straightened, with the same defiant look, leaving her panties at her ankles, he got a glimpse of sunshine through her legs, but little else, and it seemed a mystery. What was she hiding? When he went closer he saw the subtle, slightly parted mouth of what seemed a secret incomplete face, a simple frowning mask at her crotch. Only then did she tug up her panties, as though as an afterthought.

“Your turn now,” she said, and hiked the panties up tightly.

He found he could not speak at first. He had a reply but couldn’t utter it while transfixed by the way the slit-like frown under her belly showed through the panties. At last he said, “You didn’t do anything.”

“At least I tried.” She was irritable. “Go ahead, fraidy cat, no one’s looking.”

The demanding sharpness in her tone aroused him and worried him at the same time. He wanted to linger, he wanted more of her. To be alone in the shadows of a summer cabin with a willing wicked girl was like a dream. But her body was skinny and incomplete, she was too small, she was reckless. The danger of her recklessness excited him but made him afraid, and in the seconds of trembling there he felt only panic. What if someone saw or heard them? He bent over and tried to rush out of the crawl space, but not bending over far enough, he cracked his head against a low board under the cabin floor, and then was on his hands and knees in the sunshine, his head ringing.

His sensation of having been deafened by the knock on the head was heightened by something else that was wrong: the music had stopped. In the instant he realized this, still groggy, he saw a pair of sandals approaching. They were trimmed with fake cherries. He struggled to his feet and came face to face with Tom’s mother, who was bent over — she was taller than he was.

“What’s going on here?” she said, and the mother’s demand had an echo of the daughter’s scolding voice.

“Nothing,” Slade said, but he glanced behind him and saw Nita climbing out from under the porch.

“Aren’t you supposed to be at the beach?”

But Tom’s mother was not speaking to him; she was addressing the little girl, who sulked and walked away. When Slade started after her, Tom’s mother said, “Not you. You’re staying right here where I can see you.”

Slade went hot with blame, and looked away from the woman’s face, and dropped his gaze to her shoes, the wedge-heeled sandals. The fake cherries on the straps were chipped, but her toes were lovely with pink polish.

“What would your mother say if she knew you were misbehaving?

“I don’t know,” Slade said miserably. He could not keep the tone of guilty pleading out of his voice. “I wasn’t doing anything.”

“Under the house with Nita,” she said. “I think you were being fresh.”

Slade was terrified. He knew he had no control over what Tom’s mother was saying. He could not contradict her, and he hated the little monkey girl for tempting him.

“Come in here,” Tom’s mother said, and she stood aside. “Do you hear me?”

“Yes, Mrs. Bronster.”

Only then did Slade notice that Tom’s mother was dressed as she had been the day before, in a white bra and loose shorts, the same blue ribbon on her braid, her winking navel in the sallow skin of her bare midriff. The steel guitar was set up where she had left it, the amplifier like a battered suitcase, the sheet music on a metal stand.

“I guess I’ll have to keep an eye on you,” she said. “I don’t think I can trust you.”

“You can trust me,” he said in his pleading voice. “I didn’t do anything.”

In her thick-heeled sandals she loomed over him, and she turned on him and said sharply, “Your knees are filthy. Look at your hands. You need a good shower. Get over here.”

She beckoned him to the back of the cabin where, on a slatted platform, there was a shower stall — a plastic curtain, an overhead pipe and nozzle. She turned on the shower and the water spattered and splashed on the boards.

“Go ahead.”

Slade wanted to please her yet he hesitated, his hands on his shorts.

“I suppose you think I’ve never seen a naked man.”

When she said “man,” Slade did not think of himself; he thought of Tom’s father, who was never there.

“Now make it snappy.”

He turned away and slipped off his T-shirt and dropped his shorts. He entered the pouring shower, hiding in the torrent, his back to the streaming shower curtain.

But he could tell from the way the water splashed that Tom’s mother was watching, crowding the shower stall entrance. Then she stepped away and the water fell straighten Slade soaped himself, still trying to please her, and after he had rinsed off he saw her at the bathroom door, holding a towel.

“Here,” she said, and dangled it, but when he walked toward her, naked, she held on to the towel, gripping its corner as he dried off.

“You’re certainly not putting those dirty clothes back on,” she said, and kicked his shorts away as he reached for them. She gave him a small limp handful of soft silk.

“Put those on.”

He was uncertain, almost afraid.

“Do as I say.”

He drew them on, black lace panties, consoled that his nakedness was covered yet feeling foolish. But the woman’s seriousness helped him. She was matter-of-fact; she could have teased him but didn’t.

“I want to trust you,” she said.

Slade did not know what to say, but he thought, Test me, try me, I will do anything to earn your trust. The panties he wore were so flimsy he imagined that she could see through them, but when he looked down he saw he was covered.

“They’re mine. They’re silk,” she said. “Sometimes you have to improvise. Make do with what you have.”

He could not tell if she was smiling, but her voice was kinder than before.

“You’ll find that, as you get older,” she said. “What are you looking at?”

She touched her own shorts at a place where the side zipper had worked open, the gaping slot showing a blister of pink panties.

“Want to zip me?”

Eager to please her, he used two hands, one to pinch the zipper together, the other to lift the fastener into place, closing the gap, and as he worked on it, Tom’s mother touched his fingers, patting them, and then smoothed the seam when he finished.

“You’re good at that.”

He said nothing.

“Now unzip me.”

He was aware of being barefoot in damp panties, his head still wet from the shower, this woman in her sandals much taller than he was. But he obeyed, working the zipper open, and when it was down the woman plucked at a button and the shorts opened onto swelling pinkness. She tugged at them a little and they dropped to her ankles and she stepped out of them.

Feeling like a geek, he was looking away from the woman, toward the front door of the cabin, the blinding afternoon sunlight pouring through the squares of glass, when she stepped behind him. From the touch of the fabric on his shoulder it seemed as though she were draping him with a scarf.

“I think you need this.”

She lifted the soft cloth to his head and wrapped it, blindfolding him. And just as she knotted it, he sensed a slight effort of her hands and arms, and got a whiff of her body and with that, contradicting it, the odor of her perfume on the silken softness against his face.

“Can you see anything?”

He shook his head, hardly daring to breathe. Yet as soon as he was blindfolded she was gentler, even submissive.

“Nothing.”

“Don’t be frightened,” she said.

She must have noticed that his voice was thick with fear, because it was then that she touched him, holding him like a baby, and led him slowly across the smooth floorboards of the cabin to her bedroom. His feet shuffled, hardly leaving the floor, as he moved blindly, guided by her. He knew when they entered her bedroom from the sweetness in the air, the softness of the pillows. Then he was fearful, alone on the bed, but she had left him only to shut the door, and a moment later she was holding him again.

“Baby, baby, baby,” she said, her hands on him. “Isn’t that better?”

He lay slightly crouched in apprehension, not knowing what to say.

“I’m so lonely, baby.” She sighed and sounded small.

He had entered the cabin knowing nothing, but he was learning, liking the strangeness of it, and now he knew that “baby” meant something different, someone strong, a man. Her mouth was against his ear, heating it, moistening it with her breath.

“You can be my boyfriend,” she said. “Know what boyfriends do?”

He had no idea. He couldn’t see, he couldn’t speak. He thought, I am blind.

“I’m going to show you,” she said, and when she touched him where he was tender, he drew back. “No, no. Let me, let me, let me.”

Her hand was on him, but the heat that burned him was like a thickness of raw flesh after the skin has been peeled away, the warmth of blood and some throbbing, too. When he reached down to protect himself his hands found her head and became tangled in the hair of her loosened braid as she pushed her hot face against him, her tongue snaking, not devouring, not swallowing, but an audible ecstasy of the most rapturous tasting.

“Oh,” she said in a small voice when it was over.

She murmured again sweetly but sounded disappointed, though she continued to nuzzle him. She held him tightly for a long while, then sighed and removed his blindfold.

“What did you see?”

“Nothing,” he said.

“Good. Now get some of Tom’s clothes and run along,” she said. “This can be our secret.”

He stared at her. Though she was damp-faced, with tangled hair and a redness on her cheeks, looking chafed, she was still in her white bra and pink panties, and she lay like someone who had just woken from an afternoon nap. She smiled at him.

“The first time I saw you I thought: This kid loves secrets. I’m going to give him one to keep, all to himself. And if he’s good at keeping it, I’m going to give him some more secrets.”

Ava put her pen down and leaned back and stretched. She said, “Didn’t Tom ever find out?”

“He wasn’t interested. Anyway, he had an older friend. That man Kenny, with the boat.”

“But his mother was taking a risk.”

“His mother, I see now, was a beautiful sensual woman, starved for attention. Long before that day she dressed up for us. She put on fancy dresses at mealtimes in that plain summer cabin. Even now I don’t know the names for those clothes.”

Ava said, “Your adolescence coincided with the age when women dressed carefully, the last gasp of extravagant fashion. White gloves. Pillbox hats. Veils. Girdles. Garter belts. Angora sweaters. Dresses with pleats. Women took pains to look…”

“Lovely?”

“I was going to say edible.”

“Maybe that’s why nakedness doesn’t interest me.”

“Maybe you’re a woman’s dream. We’re so insecure about our bodies.

“I was so flattered that Tom’s mother wanted me.”

Ava was staring at him, and now she looked flustered and responsible, like Tom’s mother.

“What else did she want?”

Instead of answering that question, Slade said, “A life isn’t only about what you accomplished. It’s also about what you desired. What you dreamed. What was in your head. All those secrets.”

“Why are you smiling?”

“Because I realize that now”—all this time he had been sipping from a wineglass brimming with the muddy liquid of his dissolved drug—“I want to remember it all.”

Ava said, “There was more?”

“Much more.”

6

THE INTRIGUE between himself and Tom’s mother, Mrs. Bronster (he was too shy to speak her first name, which was Lily), was so inconvenient, so filled with secrecy, uncertainty and misunderstanding, so many agonies of waiting, fears of interruptions and being found out, such a misery of insecurities and whispers and obstructions, of hardly any privacy, Tom quacking, “Where have you been?” and Nita nagging, and just the feeble pretense that he was a houseguest and she was his whining friend’s kindly mother — so much nuisance and dissatisfaction, such confusion and thwarted pleasure — that he knew it could not possibly be love. He was thirteen years old. Only now, reliving it with Ava for his narrative, seeing it through the blaze of his drug, did Slade understand that all this pain and joy was the absolute proof that it was love.

Slade blinded himself to remember, blinded himself to write, blinded himself for desire; he was transfixed by the drug’s blindness most of the time. The days at the lakeshore cabin had haunted and informed his life as a lover.

“Because everything I need to know is in my own head,” he was saying on one of his dictating days after that, sitting to stare at Ava with blind eyes.

“She wanted me every day,” Slade said. “And I wanted her just as much. I loved the routine that became a delicious ritual. I longed for her to blindfold me. It excited me to hear her heels on the floorboards of the cabin coming toward me after she finished locking the doors.”

Then she would be next to him, and he could hear her sighing, smell her perfume, feel her body brush against him, the rub of the older looser skin of her arm or her belly.

“Don’t move,” she would say. “Keep your arms to your sides.”

He stood like a small soldier, obedient and blindfolded in the middle of the wooden floor, its rough-cut timbers still so new they held the tang of the saw blade. Even blinded he knew that Tom’s mother was standing in her shorts and bra, and could see her long legs rising into her loose shorts. Damp wisps of hair framed her face, which was bright with the blush from the day’s heat. With gentle attentive hands she undressed him, helped him to put on the panties, reminding him that they were her best ones, expensive ones, and how lucky he was, as she brushed her fingers across the loose silk.

His mouth was gummed shut in panic and pleasure, for there were just the two of them in the house, and he knew that he was part of something illicit — his very desire was a proof of it. In the pistol imagery he associated with desire, he sensed the hammer was cocked on his libido in those hot afternoons with Tom’s mother.

“I have to change,” she said. “I have to get ready. You can help me. It’ll keep you out of trouble, won’t it?”

He could tell from her voice that she was bending over. He heard her shoes drop, and then the plop of her shorts, and the tearing sound of her panties skidding down her long legs, and the soft lisp and release of her bra; how her voice changed and strained as she reached behind her to unhook it.

“I need a shower,” she said, and he heard her bare feet on the planks as she walked past him to the shower stall. He listened to the water coursing over her body. She was back in the room moments later, drying herself with a towel, gasping a little from the exertion, and he could hear the towel chafing her skin.

“Help me,” she said, and put the damp towel into his hands.

His head rang as he pressed the towel on her smoothness, feeling her curves give, a new sensation to him, soft flesh. And all the odors — her perfumed soap, the sawn planks, the fragrance of the bedroom, the humid afternoon air still holding the lunchtime aromas of hot dogs and mustard — mingled with the distant yelling of children.

“Do you like doing that to me?”

Unable to think of a reply, he concentrated within the darkness of his blindfold and dabbed gently with the towel, loving the heat of her skin.

“Because you’re so good at it you must have done it before.”

“No,” Slade whispered, wiping blindly at the woman’s body.

“You’re a fast learner,” she said. “Can you see me?”

Slade made a solemn sound of denial in his nose that was more negative than the word “no.”

“And don’t peek. Peeking’s against the rules.”

Her voice was receding slightly. She had moved away from him and he stood still, holding the damp towel and listening hard. From the sounds, the same on every occasion, he took her to be kneeling and bending, sliding drawers, clattering coat hangers, and he gathered that she was looking in the dresser and in the closet, choosing clothes.

“Come here.”

He went gladly, to please her, to please himself, but he stumbled, twisting the towel, as though for balance.

“Careful,” Tom’s mother said. “Over here.”

The same game every time, one he loved. She was moving, there was laughter in her voice, and he could hear the throb of her desire in that laugh.

“You can’t find me.”

She spoke in such a teasing way that he laughed, too, and was aroused. He relaxed and in this mood of pleasure seemed to see Tom’s mother as a big warm upright glow, giving off heat from across the room. He went forward with his arms extended, following the wisps of her fragrance, the creak of a floorboard, discovering that every perfume had its own heat.

“You’re no good at hide and seek.”

“Yes sah,” he said, as though responding to a playmate, though a bit short of breath from shyness. “I’m wicked good.”

“Then find me,” she said.

“Why should I?” he said, so that he could hear her voice again.

She said, “If you find me, you can dress me.”

He loved this game with his whole body. The blindfold over his eyes was silken, soft, fragrant, the odor of this woman’s skin. He loved the darkness on his face, the soft weightlessness of her panties stroking his cock — that, and the summer afternoon of sunshine and pillowy heat in the small cabin bedroom, the hot tang of the wood planks, the whiffs of nakedness and perfume, the teasing girlish voice. It was all warm on his skin, and the blood in his head seemed to gag him with its heat.

He smiled, realizing that the blindfold helped him know so much: he could see, hear, and smell the whole enclosed room. In a silence that was rich with odors he turned his head and reached with his fingers. She had freed him and made him blameless by blindfolding him.

He touched warm smooth silk and moved his hands to the edge and raked his fingers across the stitched ribbon of elastic that lay tight against her flesh. He let his finger pads graze the length of the narrow band of lace that fringed it, caressing its netting, the fretted texture of its line, the lip of elastic, the scoop of loose silk. He felt there and found her hip, where her panties fitted her closely. She sighed and canted her body and thrust herself into his fingers, offering him a whole handful of soft silk, her warm body beneath it.

“French knickers,” she said softly, keeping the words in her mouth and making them gummy as she savored them.

Her panties were warmer, more slippery than her skin, and when he touched her with his other hand he understood the little miracle that each part of her body was a different temperature. Had he not been wearing a blindfold, he would not have known that. And another revelation of his darkness was that she was breathing harder than was audible — he could feel the pulses of blood and air in the smallest muscles beneath her skin.

“I guess you found me,” she said.

Encouraged by the smile in her voice, he traced with his fingers again and followed the strap binding her bra to the little clasp, played with it, and then found her breasts. He cupped them as he had imagined when he had first seen them and lifted slightly, feeling their weight in the thickness of stitches and ribbing, until his thumbs discovered them plumper where they swelled above the cups.

His face was so close to her bare stomach, her breathing was a repeated sweetness of soft pressure on his cheek, and when she spoke the words purred in her body.

“Want to help me get dressed now?”

Slade nodded, his nose nudging her skin.

“First we have to get some stockings on.”

Just her mention of knickers and stockings filled him with a desire to taste her clothes, to have them in his mouth, but the thought was so extravagant he was too shy to tell her. He could not imagine overpowering her, and though he was aroused he had no idea of penetrating her but only of holding her. He wanted to nuzzle her, to smell her body through her clothes, to nibble her and nip them with his teeth — so near to him now, so delicious in her underwear, she seemed edible. He licked the edge of her panties with his tongue and then sucked on the silk.

One word from her and he would have stopped. But there was nothing, only her shallow breathing, her tightened muscles, the encouragement of her sighs, her fingers in his hair. He knelt like an acolyte before a decadent priestess, blindly, his mouth against her.

She pressed the stockings to his cheek and eased his face away.

“This is a garter belt,” she said. She encircled her waist with it and hooked it. “Now you’re going to snap my stockings on.”

There was a catch in her throat as she bent over, and then came the faintest burr of silk on her leg as she drew up one stocking and then the other. She showed him, holding his hands, how to fasten the stockings to the clips. He loved fumbling at her thighs and failing, his knuckles against the textures and temperatures, as though creating a lover out of skin, elastic, and silk.

“Tighter,” she said. “Yes, that’s nice.”

Still his face was against her, still he knelt, half naked himself in her panties, in a posture of adoration. He was excited that she was so much taller than he was, and that even when he stood, as he did when he finished clipping her stockings, his face was level with her breasts.

“What shall we wear?”

She led him to the other side of the room and opened a closet door. He groped a little until she took his hand and let his fingers roam through the dresses.

“Chiffon,” she said. “And that’s watered silk. Taffeta. Feel them — aren’t they delicious? You choose better if you’re blindfolded.”

His inquiring fingers moved through the closet. He hesitated and began stroking slowly one hanging garment.

“This one,” he said.

“That’s a pleated skirt,” she said, sounding doubtful. “But okay, if you like it I’ll wear it for you.”

Rattling the hanger off the rod, she shook the skirt as she removed it and then spun the hanger out of its waistband. She lifted the skirt over her head, tangling herself in it, then worked it down and shimmied into it.

“Now zip me.”

He used two hands to squeeze the zipper seam together, to lift the slider and inch it upward, sensing the skirt fitting closely, letting his fingers glide through the deep pleats.

“That’s nice. You did that so well you can help me pick out a blouse.”

Already he was touching the clothes, tugging at sleeves, guessing which ones were blouses. A fold of sliding cloth fell across his hands, so cool and smooth it felt like liquid in his fingers. He raised it to his face and inhaled, saying, “This.”

“I love this blouse,” she said, and lifted it. From the way she spoke, straining a little, he could tell she was slipping the blouse on. “But it has very small buttons.”

He touched them. They were small and fixed tightly to the blouse. They were cool, too.

“Seed pearls.” She turned away and knelt down now and let him lean over her. “Button me up.”

His blindfold was no hindrance; it made the game luxurious. He aligned the edge of the open blouse against the groove of her spine and worked from her neck down, fitting button to buttonhole. The seed pearls were tiny but his fingers were deft — more than deft, they were knowing, taking their time with each patient insertion. This sensual challenge enthralled him, all of it, for he had loved cupping her breasts in his much smaller hands, and he had adored the suffocation of his face against her panties. But buttoning the silk blouse, tugging each pearl and fixing it into a hole, this was the most pleasurable duty of all, for the tumbling of her hair over his fingers, the fragrance of her nape, the warmth of her shoulders at his palms, the way the buttons matched the pretty bones that ran down her back.

“You’re a doll,” she said. “You know that?”

He was smiling. And after that he chose her shoes, picking them for their slender heels, and when she stepped into them she was even taller, a warm giantess, her voice altered by her height. Still he stood close to her pleats and silks.

“Want to take your blindfold off?”

He shook his head. He could not say why he wanted it on — perhaps to prolong the intensity of her odors, to feel the fabrics more keenly, or to be blameless, for he felt no shame in the delirious in-between dream state where darkness was so revealing.

“Isn’t this fun?”

Fun was not his word; for him it was unimaginable rapture. Having all this time to touch her, to attend to her, serving her. Yet he couldn’t describe it, and he could only thank her by being ever more willing. He wanted to tell her through his obedience: I will do anything you ask.

“Have a seat, honey,” she said gently, and helped him in the right direction.

But it was not a chair. It was much softer than a seat cushion, and springier. It was the edge of the bed, he guessed, but before he could be sure, her arms were around him, the soft white giantess enclosing him, her body against him. He was wooden, blind, inert, yet joyous from the crush of her clothes, the blouse he had chosen, the pleated skirt, the straps and softness of her lingerie, and her skin so damp where his fingers clung.

“Baby,” she was saying, “baby.”

He allowed himself to be stifled in all the textures of her embrace.

“Hold me, baby.”

He did so, limply at first, testing her, then fiercely.

Her hungry mouth and soft lips were on his face. He had never imagined being been kissed like this — urgently licked, her flower-scented saliva on his lips and tongue, the heat from her nostrils on his cheek as she breathed and kissed him again. Her loose blouse slipped against her curves. He could feel her flesh beneath the cloth, her tight bra and the stiff cups of her enclosed breasts. He knew every stitch of her now, the skirt, the stockings, the panties, the garter clips he had fastened, the fringe of lace he had explored with his fingers.

She took his hand and eased it between her thighs, guiding it to the heat beneath all those tangled pleats, the pleasing roughness of lace, the straps and clasps. Everything he touched counted as her body, all the clothes, the silky hair, and, at its deepest, delighting him even as his wrist ached from the angle of his reaching under her, he knew he had found her secret self. This part of her body was not dark at all but highly colored, blood red and gleaming, a squashy pocket of lace and flesh, with something warm and damp alive inside it, like the secret of life.

She began to cry, at least it seemed as though she were sobbing, as she pressed her body against his face, rumpling his blindfold, so that he felt the silk and stitching against his lips. He remembered — not in words but as a yearning — how he had wanted to chew on her beautiful clothes, almost frightening himself with his memory of how he had wanted to eat her.

“Let me, let me,” she said.

He did not know what she meant until he sensed the panties go loose on him, and she worked them free of his legs with her long arms.

Then he was naked, blindfolded, climbing on her as she toppled backward onto the bed. She pulled him nearer, balancing him and finally opening her legs for him, and as she snatched at her tumbling clothes to receive him, he marveled at how they fitted, his body on hers.

He was not raw anymore. Her cool fingers had enclosed him, and there was the cooler sensation of her silks as she stroked him and used him to push more deeply inside, to the hottest part of her body. She tightened on him until he could not stand it and could only whimper, as if among all the lips, silks, and flesh he were penetrating a flower, scattering rose petals. And after it ceased, the last petal falling, and he shivered and gasped and went cold, she was howling into his mouth for more.

He slept a little and woke drooling on her breast. His blindfold was off but the room was in darkness. He couldn’t see, he had no idea where he was, he didn’t know his own name. The woman’s body was an island where he had washed ashore, cast up and saved by a furious wave.

He remained perfectly still, trying to remember, afraid to speak.

She said, “Playing isn’t wrong.”

The kindness in her voice gladdened him.

She said, “We can do this every day.”

He wanted to say yes, but did not dare to say anything, fearful of how his voice would sound, for she had turned him inside out, and now he was at his nakedest.

“This is our secret,” she said. “You can dress me. You’re not going to tell anyone, are you?”

“No,” he said, obeying her, hearing a note of urgency in her voice, needing him to say no.

“Will you let me make you happy?” she asked.

He said yes with his body, and she asked him again.

“Yes, Mrs. Bronster.”

Then she let go of him. She pleaded with him, seeming to beg him with the heavy flesh of her own struggling body: “If you tell anyone, I’ll harm you.”

He turned away, reaching for his blindfold, but after the room went quiet there was no need for the blindfold. She was gone.

At dinner she was still wearing the clothes he had chosen. He loved sitting at the table with quacking Tom and cranky Nita, talking about everything except that. The clothes meant everything — that he possessed her, that she possessed him: that was their secret. She had made him her blind and willing lover. She had made him a man.

“First love,” he said in a whisper to Ava, and she slipped off his silken blindfold.

Everything he had seen in his mind’s eye, everything the datura made possible, that he had remembered and relived of his hidden life, of his sexual history, all that and more he had dictated to Ava. There was so much of it, for the larger part of his life he had lived in secret. He was gratified by the symmetry of it, its reality, its oddness, and he reflected that the rarest thing in books or movies, in which decapitation and rape and outrage were commonplace, was the simple joyous act of two lovers fucking.

In his interior narrative he had taken a longer and more difficult journey than the one he had described in Trespassing. There was frailty and failure, too, embarrassments and risk. Yet he never felt more powerful than he had on those nights and days, blindly revisiting his past. That power vitalized his belief in the chronicle of second chances that he had relived with Ava as every passion he had ever known.

Long ago, as a solitary boy, he had not understood the meaning of his desires. Now, enacted in the blinding light of the drug, they were coherent. The fulfilled yearning of youth was the only passion that mattered. He told himself that what he imagined was also real. What he had wanted and never gotten had made him who he was; what had lain buried in his memory was dragged out of the darkness and given life. And nothing was more sexual than the forbidden glimpses of his past, nothing truer than his fantasies. He called it fiction because every written thing was fiction.

So his work was done. The past made sense. At last he had his novel, The Book of Revelation, and he could face the world again.