Blinding Light (33 page)

Early on, she had dropped hints. “Look at that,” she said of a lacy low-cut dress, “it's real slutty.” And of a pair of stiletto-heeled shoes, “I want a pair of those hump-me pumps.”

Ordinarily she had little conversation, but when she was in the mood for sex she was like a cat, demanding, rubbing against him—or not like a cat at all, but like a predatory woman, a coke whore on a back street pleading for sex. Steadman liked her snatching him and insisting, “Go down on me—yes—more,” while she held his head with both her hands. “Use your finger, too. Yes, like that, harder, deeper, don't stop, make me come.”

And after she came, convulsed, gagging and squealing, her body bucking, she could be even hungrier, more demanding, but in a pleading and submissive way, on his behalf. “Be rough with me. Call me a cocksucker. Go ahead, make me blow you.” When Steadman was tentative—Where do I begin?—she said, “Rougher, spank me, force me,” and then, as she kicked and he slapped her small hard buttocks, she growled against his cock and became noisily ecstatic, whinnying as she drank him.

Otherwise, most of the time, and always in public, she was a rather prim and passive woman.

She bought clothes, she had her nails done once a week, she read the
Wall Street Journal.
She was absorbed by her work. “I've got a marketing meeting in Cambridge with the salespeople, and I haven't edited the pitches or read the spreadsheets.”
What
^?
Her work was a mystery to him.

But this strangeness, this unexpectedness, made her combative, too, and he often wondered, Who are you? At last Steadman was indifferent. He worked on his book and was so absorbed in it he ended up not knowing her. Fighting with her was meaningless. Their house seemed emptier when they were both inside. He wanted her to go, but he was so exhausted that when he suggested that she go, his voice sounded lazy and detached—so hopeless and speculative he hardly cared.

“I think it's over, Charlie.”

A year before, during their courtship, when she had become flustered by his excessive questioning, she had said to him, “What you see is what you get,” as though emphasizing her simplicity, almost boasting of her shallowness, primary colors in one dimension, a paper cutout, a little doll. Her facetious warning not to look deeper became her mantra: she had no subtleties, nor any inner meaning. “I'm in sales and marketing! Doesn't that say it all?”

When he said he doubted that—“You're not being fair to yourself. There's always more”—she complained in a rueful wronged tone that she was not hiding anything and that he was the most complicated man she had ever met in her life. He was impractical, he had no savings, no real income, no investments. He had spent his money on a two-year trip around the world. How could you be both a writer and a traveler? Writers stayed home and drove people crazy; travelers didn't sit long enough to write. But he did both, a profound mystery to her.

“I've got to read one of your books,” she had said soon after they met.

He did not tell her that there was only one, that it was not done yet, that he had no money left of his advance.

All this in the last months of his finishing
Trespassing,
when the manuscript was sitting on his desk. He was so tired from the physical effort of typing the book and imagining it at the same time that he could not look further ahead to its publication. He had never imagined the overwhelming success, the transforming miracle of it: the fame, the wealth, and then the celebrated seclusion that made him notorious and sought after.

But that was afterward, after his tentativeness with Charlotte, his believing that she would understand him only if she had read what he had written.

“I really want to read it,” she said.

The stack of paper, the
Trespassing
manuscript, was almost eight inches high. He had typed it himself on a manual machine, banging the keyboard with the claws of his hands, watching stiffened insect legs fly up from the oily basket and kick letters onto the page as the bruised ribbon fluttered. The book proceeded letter by jumping letter. He had sickened himself smoking cigarettes while doing it, his pores oozed with tar, his throat ached, he felt poisoned; and that was the end of his cigarette smoking.

She was not daunted by the size of the manuscript. She repeated that she was eager to read it. “Your book, look at it,” she said, in an overly patient, uncritical way, with a slightly affected smile, as though she were describing a puppy.

“There's a lot of geography in it,” he said. “But I've got a set of maps—you won't get lost.”

How often he remembered his innocence and self-deception in those days, seeing two people quietly talking, the stack of manuscript between them in ream-sized boxes, hopeful and happy, in a kind of paradise, before the whole world knew and began to intrude.

She was the book's first reader. She buried herself in it. But she had a disconcerting habit of reading the manuscript with the TV on, glancing up from the pages to follow a sitcom, smiling at the show, frowning at his pages. At last she said, “I like it.” He wanted more from her—more praise, more detail, an extended rave, alluding to all the passages she particularly liked. Even though he was starved for praise after all those years of indifference, he managed to say this in a tactful whisper, or at least not seeming to be pleading.

“I liked all of it,” she said, protesting, surprised that he should want more than that.

“The typescript is almost seven hundred pages. Did you finish it?”

“I read practically all of it. What do you want me to say?”

He shrugged. He realized he was asking too much of her. After all, he was unable to evaluate the twenty or so pages of a marketing plan she sometimes showed him, though he was able to correct her spelling and grammar.

Following her simple verdict on the book, she had said, defending herself—and she never looked prettier, more bright-eyed, lovely lips, full breasts, delicate hands—“What you see is what you get.”

Don't look for more or you'll be disappointed, she was saying. I am only surfaces.

That was a complete lie, it turned out. Perhaps deliberate, perhaps an honest misunderstanding, but a lie he could no longer accept. “Crap,” Steadman raged. “Dog shit!” For later, as his wife, every day some new annoying aspect of Charlotte was revealed, always a shock to him because of her insistence in advance that there was nothing more to know. Wrong—there was everything!

She cried easily, she was hurt by the slightest word, she was insecure.
She reacted hysterically to a chance remark or the wrong question—she saw questioning as a form of assault. “I don't know the answer! I guess I'm just stupid!” She told defiant lies. Mention a book, any book, and she always said casually, “I read it so long ago I can't remember much about it.” He stopped talking about books so as not to put her on the spot. She had not read anything except books about sales and marketing.

She, the businesswoman who said “As soon as you lose your temper you've lost the argument,” who had never raised her voice to him, who had seemed the soul of calmness, turned out to be a screamer, the veins in her neck standing out like blue twisted cords as she howled at him. And then, after all this noise, she would sulk and say nothing—she could sulk for days with a stubbornness that would have actually impressed him with its resolve had it not been such a maddening provocation.

“Say something,” he would plead at these times, trying to encourage her, and he would end up shouting at her, his frustration seeming to give her satisfaction in her spitefulness, for he had proved he was a brute.

“See, you're raising your voice,” she said in a triumphant tone, having infuriated him. “You're shouting. You're swearing.”

What he had seen was not what he had gotten: he had married a placid, mildly agreeable woman and he had gotten a shrill, unpredictable woman who was impossible to please. It was as though he had taken the simple complacent face of a new clock to be the clock itself. He had not guessed its guts and workings could be so complex and unpredictable, with all the cogs and springs and teeth and noise that made it run, and sometimes it was just a clock face, a pretty dial with unreliable hands that did not run at all.

“It's you,” she said, and she blamed him for being difficult. A writer, a traveler, the two selfish professions combined into a single act of egomania.

What could he say to that? His book was done but not yet published.

Charlotte's objections to his behavior were precisely his objections to hers. And so they were equal adversaries. Still they made love, and sex took on a cruel unexpectedness with their underlying antagonism; while it lasted it was satisfying for being vicious. For a time, whenever they had an argument they were gripped by a passion that turned sexual, and they ended up on the floor or the sofa, her clothes torn and twisted aside, his pants at his ankles, while she clawed him and struggled, his body smacking hers in furious slaps. Afterward, lying motionless, with the fish-stink of sex on their skin, stuck together with sweat, all their anger burned away, the stalemate resumed.

At last he realized that he was an irritant to her and the whole relationship was unfixable, for she was unhappy, and she had been unhappy long before he'd met her. What she needed he could not offer her.

“It's you but it's not your fault.”

“Don't patronize me.”

“Okay, I won't. You've got a borderline personality disorder.”

“What about you?”

“Of course I do. Isn't it the human condition?”

He had made her very unhappy. Her sadness was a great deal different from her anger. It was heavy and silent; it killed his desire. He did not think of making love to her now, not even in the drooling doggy way he had done just a week before. She was gloomy, and he left her to her unhappiness. It was either that or accommodate it.

Though she was still passive and low, she claimed she was angry, that she felt abandoned.

“You're the same person,” he said. He meant: I don't know you—you're a stranger that emerged from the body of a friend whom I had found familiar and even beautiful. I was able to fuck the body but not the person inside it.

“You're a bastard.”

Meaningless abuse; he was capable of the same. It was another stage in the disintegration.

But it seemed to him that she wanted to hold him responsible. It was almost as if she had been looking for a husband in order to find someone to take on the burden of misery within her, which had been part of her since childhood.

Dishonestly, he had wanted to sigh
Women!
as she had often shouted
Men!
But that was ridiculous. “We are not raccoons,” he had said to her one day. It was unfair to see her only as a woman, for she was different from any other woman he had ever known. She was Charlotte and sometimes Charlie. They had tried. They had failed.

Trying to analyze her didn't help. The attempt made him insincerely sympathetic and seemed to obligate him. She talked about her parents, and it seemed like a weird parable of perverse and cruel people: hag of a mother, bully of a father, brute of a brother, who had done everything except love her. He hated listening, for whenever she talked of these people he saw damage. The worst of it was that since she really did not like herself very much, how could she love anyone else?

Yet she had friends, all of them women, none he knew well, for she kept them to herself and, he suspected, secretly complained about him to them. He could tell from the way they treated him—distantly, coolly, sometimes mocking, sometimes loudly contemptuous—that they were acting on her behalf.

Her closest friend was Vickie. In one of Charlotte's low periods Vickie came to stay for a week. He suspected a week would be too long, that it might undo him, but he made attempts to be conversational.

“Have you ever been to the Vineyard before?”

“Years ago.”

“When was that?”

Vickie couldn't remember. It had to be a lie. He asked her what sort of work she did.

“Depends on the day.”

She was being elusive. He knew Vickie was a marketing manager from Los Angeles. Charlotte had said so. They were both part of a business plan that was being written. Vickie had a long-term relationship with a man in New York. Steadman asked about him. “He's delightfully eccentric.” Charlotte had told him the man was very wealthy and that Vickie was wealthy, too, but all Steadman saw was an aging sharp-faced woman who had a demented male friend and who had shown up empty-handed and contradicted nearly everything he said.

“Beautiful,” she said of a small
santo
on a pedestal, its gilt chipped. “I was going to buy one in Mexico.”

“This is from the Philippines.”

“Mexicans make the exact same things,” she said. “You're limping.”

“Gout,” he said.

“Gout's terrible. Sometimes you can't get out of bed. You get gout in every joint.”

“That's not it. Have you ever had it?”

“No, but I know quite a bit about it.”

Wondering why he was going to the trouble, Steadman explained 216
that you never got gout in every joint. He had been severely dehydrated on his travels and had fainted one day in Assam, before trespassing into Bangladesh. The resulting kidney damage had produced the gout. Gout was nearly always limited to one joint, often the podagra of the large toe of one foot.

“It's like having a broken toe.”

“Oh, is that all?” Vickie said, and turned to Charlotte. “I had a broken toe when I was a dancer. It didn't hurt at all.”

“This hurts.”

“If you'd drunk more water,” Vickie said, “you wouldn't have gotten dehydrated.”

Steadman smiled, raging within.

“This was in India.”

“They're starving in India,” Vickie said.