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.