Blinding Light (64 page)

Steadman got to know the phrases by heart: “Questions about my private life, questions no American citizen would ever want to answer ... I did have a relationship ... a critical lapse in judgment and a personal failure on my part ... I misled people ... a desire to protect myself from the embarrassment of my own conduct ... It's nobody's business but ours ... Even presidents have private lives. It is time to stop the pursuit of personal destruction and the prying into private lives...”

Steadman did not hear sex in the president's message; he heard his own voice speaking of drugs and blindness. The president was acting out Steadman's own humiliation.

He was on his own. The story was all that he had written since his book, and as with the book, he had not touched a pen. He wrote in his head. When it was complete he would speak it into a tape recorder and find someone, not Ava, to transcribe it.

Ava had slipped away and lost herself in the hospital. She still lived in the house. She left meals for him, helped him find his clothes. But he knew her heart wasn't in it. Her concern was professional now, a matter of ethics; he was a patient, a case, and her motto was “First do no harm.” She had not been able to find a cure. He was waiting for a chance to say, “I need a referral.”

In the meantime, “The Blind Man's Wife” was all he had. He would use it like a man whittling a stick—rewrite it, improve it, polish it. Until it was done he would not have to think of anything else. The story was his patience and his consolation. Ava would have said “your dolly.”

In pitying him she had taught him that pity was useless. He needed to help himself.

Wolfbein called again, using the same tone of friendly bullying a nurse would use with a morose and bedridden patient.

“Something's come up. You're having lunch here today. The only question is, are you coming on your own or am I going over there to get you?”

“Harry, I'm useless.”

“I'll be right over.”

He arrived a half hour later, honking his horn, and after Steadman got into the car, he drove fast, hardly speaking.

“What's the hurry?”

“No hurry. Nice to see you,” Wolfbein said.

But the man was preoccupied, his hectic driving proved it, and he gabbled at the traffic. Although sunk in the depths of his blindness, Steadman understood the simple trip from his house to Lambert's Cove to be a matter of reckless urgency.

“I told them to start without us,” Wolfbein said. “It's all guys, by the way. The women have other plans.”

Then Steadman knew that Wolfbein's picking him up and driving him to lunch had been unforeseen. Yet Wolfbein, seriously inconvenienced, had acted out of friendship. They arrived in a flurry, Wolfbein whispering to other people. Steadman was too bewildered to hear anything clearly. The house on the bluff that he had known so well seemed unfamiliar to him—strange elevations, sudden steps, echoes.

Wolfbein guided him through the living room to the sliding screen doors, then across the terrace to the wide lawn. Steadman had expected just the two of them for lunch on the terrace, Millie serving sandwiches. But this was something formal and unreadable. Steadman heard the chatter without making any sense of what was obviously a sizable and organized event.

“These guys will take care of you,” Wolfbein said, and seated him at a table. “I'll be over there at the head table if you need me.”

Head table? Steadman's own table companions were murmuring men, sounding British and inconsequential, talking about people they knew, none of whose names Steadman recognized. He felt for his glass and, finding a water tumbler, sipped from it, but cautiously, guessing he was being observed. His fingers tested the table, then encircled a fork handle. He pushed some food around his plate but did not dare to raise any to his mouth, for fear he would make a mess of it and embarrass himself. He sat, he knew, with a look of consternation on his face, trying to listen.

After a while a diffident voice beside him said, “Are you still working on that?”

Probably the waiter, but because Steadman was unsure, he said nothing. What if it was one of those other men at the table?

Dessert was served, the same diffident man saying in a querying voice, “Tiramisu?” Steadman worked a spoon into it, then nudged it aside. Coffee came. He risked a sip but slopped some of it on his chin.

Most of the talk seemed to be generated by the other table, or tables; Steadman couldn't tell how many people were present. The voices were earnest, insistent, sounding strident at times; Steadman did not recognize any of them. The odd thing was that the men at his table, who had been murmuring about mutual friends, had stopped talking altogether and seemed to be listening to the conversations at the far tables, carrying across the lawn.

“Good Lord, is that the time?” the man next to him said, a lazy genteel voice. “I must push off.”

Some others said the same. Steadman had a sense that he was being acknowledged and thanked. One man said, “I'm so sorry we didn't get a chance to talk.” Then a creaking of wooden folding chairs and all the voices shifting, becoming like whispers as the men moved off, up to the terrace, the lunch party ending, just like that.

Steadman sat, wondering if he was alone. He heard the wind chafing the trees, the chirp of birds, the trill of insects, a distant dog, a far-off ship's horn skimming across the water. He was happier left like this, and in the sudden solitude he wondered what had been the point in coming? What he had taken to be Wolfbein's impulsive lunch invitation had been something semiformal, a catered affair with rented tables and creaky chairs. He heard Wolfbein squawk from the terrace.

“Sorry, sorry,” Wolfbein called out as he approached. “I thought someone had come to get you.”

“I'm okay.” Saying that, he sounded feeble.

“The thing is, there were lots of people I wanted you to meet, but they all had to leave in a hurry.” Wolfbein had grasped Steadman's arm and was helping him up. “These are strange times, my friend.”

“Who were all the other people?”

“You were sitting with Prince Andrew and Evelyn de Rothschild. I was with the president. Like I said, it was spur of the moment. He's on the island to escape the press. He's putting on a brave face, but believe me, you do not want his problems.”

Then Steadman knew: he had seen nothing. Apart from the story he was trying to write, he hardly existed.

 

On a fragrant morning in late August, his wide bank of lilies sweetening the breeze, at an hour when he was certain that Ava was gone, he called Information and ordered a taxi from Vineyard Haven.

“I need to get to West Chop.”

“Street and number?”

“Just the lighthouse.”

Setting off, he was less than a child. He took so little with him—that was a measure of his futility. No pen or paper, no tape recorder, no camera, nothing but his cane. He had money but could not tell one bill from another; a one could be a fifty. He could easily have been cheated. Yet he was going out in search of factual detail to relieve the starkness of his story.

He would carry everything in his head, but for all his bravado he was unconfident. His head was clouded with fear. He had sat like a wraith at Wolfbeins, and here he was trying to be a writer again. He was making a narrative using the simplest tools, like a tribal storyteller squatting on his haunches before a fire.

He felt undermined by not having any idea of the route the taxi was taking, and he was too proud to ask the driver. The turns made him queasy. He guessed the stop-and-go traffic was Old County Road, but it could have been Main Street. His blindness made him carsick. This man was in a rush. He was reminded of Wolfbeins speeding and swerving. A long straight stretch of slight ups and downs he took to be West Chop Road.

When the taxi stopped the driver said, “You sure you're going to be all right?”

People said that because they didn't care and didn't want to be responsible for him. Everyone blamed him for being helpless.

“What are you suggesting?” he said, to confuse the man.

“You're the boss.” He chose some bills from Steadman's hand and cranked the door open to let him out.

“Just point me in the right direction.”

“Where would that be?”

“See some wooden steps leading down to the water?”

“Right over here, sir.”

The man's hands were careless, only approximating the direction—he was in a hurry to get back into his taxi. But as he led him toward the stairs, Steadman could hear the sea slopping and splashing, like a vast tub filling, far below the lighthouse at the corner of the Chop.

The man's loose grip was like rejection and made Steadman stumble. He said, “I'm okay now. Thanks.”

Without another word the man left him. Steadman told himself that he was glad for such lessons in indifference: he needed to be reminded that he was on his own.

The notion that this was literary work pleased him. He was walking in the setting of his story and would be grateful for any details—a smell, a sound, the texture of a leaf or a boulder. The age cracks in the weathered handrail that he felt now, the smooth split wood—that. He was looking for authenticity, for writing about a known place, he tended to take too much for granted.

“Hello.”

His first stab of fear today—not the voice alone but the fact that he had not known he was being observed. He could not tell whether the person on the stairs was going up or down. It sounded like an old woman.

“Going down to the beach?”

No, it was a small boy.

“Yes, I am,” Steadman said, trying to sound confident. And he heard the boy pass him, going up, the stair treads creaking, the boy climbing too fast.

“Take your time, Brett. You're going to trip!”

A man's voice beneath him on the steps. And then he addressed Steadman, talking a little too loudly. “Can I help you?”

“Can I help you?” was the typical Vineyarder's rebuff when confronted by strangers—trespassers, all of them—and was the local equivalent of “Go away.”

Steadman ignored him, but the man persisted. “Visiting the island?”

“Never mind.”

“Manage all right?”

“Doing fine,” Steadman said, his anger rising. He had come here to be alone.

“Watch your step.”

This was too much, “Watch
your
fucking step!”—and he swiped with his cane as though swatting a fly, slashing twice and catching something hard, a protrusion he thought was the handrail, until a moment later the man uttered a strangled cry.

Then the man called out, “Daddy's all right, Brett! Go back, son!”—warning the child who had preceded him up the stairs.

Steadman imagined the panting boy with red eyes and sweaty cheeks blushing with terror at seeing his father thrashed by a crazed blind man wheeling on the stairs. He had a glimpse of Blind Pew tottering on the road and snatching at Jim Hawkins, and he smiled at the confusion, father and son trying to reassure each other.

“Get the fuck out of my way!” Steadman said, and jabbed his stick at the man's murmuring.

“Are you nuts?” The man was still gasping, probably nursing a wound, a welt somewhere the width of Steadman's cane.

He slashed again, cutting the air with the sound of a whip and stepping to a lower tread on the stairs.

“Brett, be careful!” the man cried, his shriek turning womanish in panic. “Don't come down here!”

And as Steadman raised his stick to strike once more, he was bumped again but softly, and sensed that the man was pushing past him, shaking the wooden stairs with his stamping feet, climbing up toward the road, hauling himself with desperate pulls on the handrail.

The angry energy of the confrontation still shivered in his muscles. He was exhilarated by his sudden aggression. And when he collected himself and resumed his descent, picking his way down, he thought, I can use that. It was why he had come, to collect such asides for his story, to verify impressions. He wanted to prove to himself that he could find his own way.

He wondered whether there was anyone else on the beach. He had been down here only a few times. He knew it was a narrow pocket beach, bouldery, with patches of sand, at the foot of a high vertical bluff, north-facing, of crumbled stone and loose gravel. The secluded spot was approachable only by the long wooden stairway that was like an old-fashioned fire escape at the rear of a tall tenement.

The water crashed and collapsed, the continuous slosh of Vineyard Sound, small lumpy waves that nagged at the shore. Steadman listened for voices and almost tripped when he got to the bottom of the stairs and stepped onto a pillow shape of soft sand. Then he let go of the rail and tapped his cane, whacking rock, poking pebbles, making his way along the wall of the bluff.

“Hello?”

Hearing no reply, he turned to the right, where he knew the widest beach was, but even so, after a few steps he strayed into the water and wet his shoes and trouser cuffs. He stopped again to listen for voices and thought he heard the stairs creak, trodden by weight from high up at the cliff face. He concentrated hard: nothing.

Seeing a blind man, a stranger would say, as all the others had done, “Want a hand?” and would encumber him with insincere assistance. He hated being asked, hated being noticed, being visibly crippled, with a perpetual frown of consternation. He smiled remembering his fury:
Get the fuck out of my way!
   _

“Who is it?” he called out, because the wash of the sea at the shore obscured all other sounds,

He was alone. He had to be, or what was the point? He crawled onward like a dog, using his hands on a stretch of sand, and soon found himself bumping his way through waist-high boulders. They were set in a slope, like a revetment against the bluff. Touching them he was able to trace veins and cracks in the granite, and moving slowly he noticed with his slick fingers that many of them had bunches of kelp pinched between them, or swags of sea-rotted rope.