Blinding Light Read Online Free PDF Page B

mask.
    â€œThat sort of scares me,” Ava said, sounding stern. He knew that severe tone: she meant what she said. He took the mask off.
    The hotel was the Colon. Ava said she had imagined it to be smaller and simpler, but checking in, Steadman reminded her that it was supposed to be only one night.
    â€œStill no message from Nestor.”
    â€œWhy do they all have names like that?” Ava said.
    â€œHe was recommended. Supposed to be an ethnobotanist.”
    â€œA nice name for ‘drug man.’”
    â€œYou found him.”
    Their corner room faced a large park out one window, and out the other was the long steep side of the volcano. A cloud was flattened and raveling on the volcano’s peak, and its slopes were dotted with houses. Steadman felt that up close they were hovels, but at this distance, in dim early morning, their lights still twinkling, they represented to his ignorant eyes the magic of a new place.
    Ava had pulled off her T-shirt and was searching her bag for something. Her skin was luminous and blue in the gray daylight. Across the room, Steadman saw her as a strange woman who had materialized here, silent, careless, half naked, paying no attention to him. He was fascinated by her indifference, her naked breasts, the impersonal room, the sight of the huts out the window. It was as if he did not know her, that he just happened to find himself in this room with an attractive preoccupied woman. He watched her take off the rest of her clothes: her slacks first, which she folded; her panties, which she slid down with two thumbs and stepped out of, tossing them with one toe. She was headed for the bathroom, preparing for a shower.
    Moving quickly toward her, Steadman touched her waist, just grazing her skin with his fingertips, as though stroking and steadying a cat, and then slipped the cat mask over her face, all the while staying behind her. She hardly reacted, except to straighten the fastening cord. He liked that; he could tell she was cooperating. And the mask and her willingness and this strange room in Ecuador aroused him more than love had ever done. Love had made him gentle, and love’s querulous concern killed his desire.
    This way she seemed his equal, a match for him, a black mask on her white body. He held her. He could not kiss her lips while she was masked, and that tantalized him the more—she seemed to like his frustration. Her mask dared him. She went to the bed and knelt, holding her hand between her legs while he watched, and then she opened her legs and, splaying her fingers, parted the dewy gills of her pinkness, and all the while her mask was impassive.
    Watching her, Steadman roughly pushed off his clothes and was on her, slipping inside her, frantic. She murmured softly from beneath her mask, but when he leaned over and attempted to kiss the satin lips of the mask she moved her head away and arched her back, lifting her chin to expose her throat and the tightened cords of her neck. She seemed to exist in some blind private rapture of her own reckless anonymity.
    Even when he was finished and on his back, blind himself and gasping, she did not take the mask off. She lay there beside him, so distant she could have been in another country, drawing the droplets through the hair between her legs, making this slickness seem like another mask, her parted legs showing at her vulva the image of a tarantula. And when she turned toward him, still masked and enigmatic, he thought that not she but he was the whore.
    Â 
    Over breakfast afterward—and it was Ava who remarked that it was still unbelievably only nine-thirty that same morning—they said nothing about what had just happened. The sudden wordless episode, the snatched sex in the room, seemed as remote as the long disruptive flight, the annoying passengers, the unhelpful taxi driver, the fiesta and its masks and costumes.
    All that Ava said was “It’s a real city. I was expecting something