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.”