A taxi was waiting by the front entrance of the hospital. The driver got out to help but Steadman waved him away and snatched the door open.
The driver said, “Where to?”
“You know the Two O’Clock Lounge?”
“It’s not called that anymore.”
“Does it matter?” He could tell that Ava was staring at him. He said, “I need something life-affirming.”
The place was called Pinky’s, at the same address on Washington Street where the Two O’Clock Lounge had once been. Leaving the hot sidewalk, they entered the darkened doorway into a room of loud music that was cool and poorly lit and dirty, smelling of spilled beer. He sniffed again: naked flesh, two women dancing slowly on a mirrored floor, a pair of long-legged nudes, seeming to ignore the beckoning men.
“I hate places like this,” Ava said. “I’m a doctor. I don’t need it.”
“You need it because you’re a doctor.”
“Please not down front.”
But Steadman insisted, and she followed him through the darkness to the edge of the stage, where they sat holding hands among men in attitudes of intense concentration, almost worship. One woman, wholly naked, twirling in a slow dance in high heels, approached. She smiled at Ava, looking curious when she saw Steadman’s dark glasses and white cane, so confident in his blindness, not seeing her and yet smiling.
“Now she’s squatting,” he said.
“I see some pretty tortured labia. Some warts.”
“Please stop being a doctor.”
When Ava fell silent and he felt her fingers, warm and moving in his hand, he was aroused, sensing her sudden awkward interest.
She said, “I’ve never been in one of these places before.”
“Think of it as an examining room,” Steadman said. “Slip a five-dollar bill into her garter and you can give her a physical.”
She let go of his hand, groped in the shadow beneath her, and fished in her bag. He loved the furtiveness of her movement, tipping the naked dancer with a self-conscious gesture of concealment, woman to woman. He savored the silence as the other woman came near and squatted and opened her legs, and Ava said, “Such pretty girls, such beautiful bodies — what are they doing here? Is it that they have low self-esteem?”
“How is this different from a hospital?” Steadman said. “Look at the interns at work.”
The solemnity of the men whose heads rested between the knees of the naked women, the attentive way they studied what they saw, a complex pinkness, like a live blossom — yes, they could have been the most serious medical students.
“Or like boys playing doctor.”
“It’s also like a temple,” Steadman said, and he explained: a bit of magic, some mirrors, ritual glimpses of the forbidden. “They’re not weak — these women are in charge. They’re priestesses. The men are helpless worshipers.”
That squatting woman, seeing Ava smile, had pursed her lips and made a kissing sound when Ava rewarded her with a folded and tucked-in five-dollar bill.
And then the kneeling woman leaned slightly and reached behind Ava and drew her head closer, placing it between her naked breasts. Ava laughed a little, then realizing she was caught, her mouth against the cleavage, she became flustered as the woman moved quickly from side to side, slapping Ava’s face and cheeks with the weight of her loose breasts and laughing in triumph.
Steadman had heard it all, no single word but the beat of it, the smack of flesh on flesh, and he was aroused by the fact that his lover had been surprised that way by the naked woman.
Ava’s eyes were shining, her mouth slightly agape, as though she had changed places with him, and she was stunned by the slap of the breasts on her face.
“If you like, we can stay,” he said.
“I have a much better idea.” She kissed him, her eyes still glittering, as the naked dancer looked on approvingly and winked.
They left Pinky’s and flew back to the Vineyard in the dark — much simpler at night, and an easier landing, a lot less traffic on the nighttime road. They were home in twenty minutes, Ava driving.
He kissed her inside the house. He held her. He said, “Now let me see.”
7
RISING FROM DARKNESS to light, abruptly dazzled, Steadman understood how religions caught fire, for what was revealed to him was not just the ardent power that blindness had granted him but the deception of sight. Where others saw opaque blobs, he saw symmetrical flames illuminating the passage of time, like a torchlit path, giving continuity and coherence to his memory. Not hallucinations and fantastic visions but the plainest, most persuasive reality, what he took to be truth: a lit-upness of his life.
He whispered to Ava, “Everyone I see is naked.”
“You’re boasting again,” Ava said. She challenged him with denials and evasions, because of his extravagance.
“No, you don’t understand. Nakedness is a kind of concealment, the most misleading kind. It subverts fantasy.”
Yesterday in Boston, at Pinky’s, he had been reflective, for nakedness was like defiance. The dancers had been girlish and coy, playful, teasing, protected by their nudity. Even the barest woman in the place looked peeled and raw, just feeble startled limbs, going through the motions, and others seemed more like pork to him now. Because he saw too much, something important was missing. The essential woman was hidden inside all that naked flesh.
Though the trip to Boston had been exhausting, it had been worth it for the sight of Ava in the bar, face forward, her cheeks slapped by the fat breasts of the dancer, her eyes alight.
“You liked it,” he said.
Ava said, “Couldn’t you tell — I wanted to go home with her. But I’m trying to keep you honest. The women who’ve been calling you up don’t care about your writing. And if you think you’re preternaturally prescient, then you’re a freak.”
His rattle of laughter disturbed her even more than his white sightless eyes.
To give herself confidence, she mocked him. “You’re like the kid who always wins at Pin the Tail on the Donkey. After a while everyone suspects that he’s peeking over his blindfold.”
“They’ll read my book and see that my power is real.”
“What happens when you lose it?”
“Sight and blindness are the same to me. Blindness is special sight.”
“You can’t keep up this pretense forever. Someone will find out and expose you.”
He laughed. Her challenges excited him by keeping him alert; he enjoyed repelling her attacks. He wanted her to fight him, or else later, embracing her, there would be nothing left to believe in. He smiled and said softly that he was not afraid, that the book would vindicate him and — as books seemed to do, as Trespassing had done — displace him.
“Ask Dr. Budberg. She was baffled. I told her I’m a medical miracle.”
“Oh, please.”
Ava seemed to think that her defiance might stimulate his humility. She kept at him, accusing him of being absurdly proud of going back and forth from blindness to sight. “You think you’re better, not because you’re blind but because you’re both, that the ability to switch makes you superior. You’re drinking flower juice from the jungle. That’s all.”
“Some people drink it and nothing happens. Remember Manfred?”
“That creep,” she said. “He was the one who got you into this.”
Because the drug was so effective on Steadman, he felt singled out, not lucky but chosen. He could see that Ava was weakening, but he relished her antagonism. Her doubt was necessary; he did not want a slave, he wanted an active partner; he needed her doctor’s skepticism.
“By the way, you’ve got wine stains all over your shirt,” she said sharply.