“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.”