Mortals

by Norman Rush

  “Look how you dig me,” she said.

  “I think someone could see us here,” he said.

  “Not unless they put their face against the screen.” But she closed the door to her room.

  Her voice was another thing that went against her type, because it was too clear and strong or unregulated, sometimes. Her clowning went against it, too.

  She pressed against him. He moved her away, saying “May I?” and pulling the yoke of her dress out so that he could look down at her small, plump breasts. They disagreed about her breasts, but she was wrong. She had never nursed. They had no children. Small breasts are best for the long haul. Even if it was nobody’s fault that there were no children he felt guilty because not having them had left her perfect for him. Their sex had zeal in it. He didn’t mean zeal, he meant something else. Their life together was erotic in a longitudinal way, he meant. The erotic was always there, not sporadically there in little segments set aside. At least that was the way it was for him, and unless it was an incredible act, it was that way for her too. But why should it be an act?

  “Are you up to something?” she asked, and then fell against him, ending the episode.

  Nobody knows who I am, he thought.

  They were together in the kitchen. He was being companionable while she got the food onto the table. The lights were on in Dimakatso’s quarters. Ray had a feeling the meal tonight might be vegetarian. They seemed to be drifting that way, which was ironic in a country with the healthiest, best-tasting grass-fed and cheapest beef in the entire world. Botswana beef had an odd taste. It was sweet.

  The light in the kitchen was a trial for both of them. The room was lit by a fluorescent donut that belonged in an industrial museum. The house was all-electric. The fluorescent fixture emitted a fizzing sound from time to time that suggested it was about to malfunction. It would capture their attention and then the sound would quit and life would go on.

  Iris said, “Everything spoils so fast in Africa, I hate it.” She made a face as she unscrewed the lid of a mayonnaise jar she’d just taken out of the refrigerator.

  “This needs to go directly to the Mayo Clinic,” she said.

  “Haha,” Ray said, stating the laugh to show he was less than amused.

  She looked at him for an explanation.

  God damn me, he thought.

  “What do you mean by that Haha?”

  “Nothing.”

  “What, though?”

  “Well I just wondered if you’re trying to be funnier than usual for my benefit. I mean are you trying to be funnier?

  “You don’t have to, you know.” God damn me, he thought.

  “What are you talking about, Ray?”

  “I don’t know, I felt for a minute that maybe you were trying to mimic my brother. I mean he presents himself as such a wit. His letters to you are all about what a wit he is. What I’m saying is you don’t need to be more amusing than you already naturally are. You can relax. You don’t need to keep me amused.” He thought, Anyone would hate this, I have no right to do this, But I had years of his wit to live with and that was enough.

  She stared at him. Plainly he had hurt her in several ways.

  “Oh boy. I’m sorry. I think this is what it is. I think I’m aggravated about Rex’s sudden interest in writing to you all the time. His sudden desire to be your pen pal. You don’t know him. You may think he’s clever but there is, believe me, nothing there, he’s useless, he …”

  She broke in. “Well, you remember the potato salad I made last week that you praised to high heaven?”

  He was in the pantry, searching for a new jar of mayonnaise.

  “Can you hear me? That salad was made with baked potatoes instead of boiled potatoes.”

  Ray emerged from the pantry with the new jar of mayonnaise, which he handed to her.

  “You mean now Rex is sending you recipes?”

  “It isn’t a recipe just to comment on a potato salad he had at a fancy buffet somewhere. He thought it was delicious so he asked the host what there was about it, that’s all, and he passed that along, and you enjoyed it, I’m pointing out.”

  Dinner tonight would be deviled eggs, rice salad, Swiss chard, and slices of grilled daikon radish with some indecipherable toppings on them.

  “I’m careful about the sun,” she said.

  If all was well he would normally pour his predinner Castle lager into a glass and drink it sitting in a chair, watching his wife cook, like James Joyce, sipping. He was restricting his alcohol intake. Tonight he drank from the can, standing up. She understood these things. She was no fool.

  He was waiting for her in the living room. He was on the sofa, his feet up on their vast glass coffee table. Somebody had made an error in allocating this coffee table to them. Glass coffee tables like it were standard government issue for expatriate houses, but their table was larger than any he’d encountered anywhere, larger than the one in the ambassador’s residence. The stupidest thing in this house was the pleated ivory Naugahyde room divider mounted in the archway between the living room and the dining room, which they kept belted to one side, permanently out of use.

  “Are you ever coming in here?” he asked loudly toward the back of the house. She had left the kitchen for the bathroom and closed the bathroom door. There had been a time when he’d occasionally helped her shave her legs. But that had been on the impractical side because of what it inexorably resulted in. It was too provocative. It had turned him into a nuisance rather than a help. Her hair was true black. She covered the little bit of gray that was coming in with a rinse. She could be a fountain of gray if she wanted, as far as he was concerned. He considered his own hair to be midpoint intermediate between blond and gray, a noncolor, which was fine. Here she was.

  She was bringing in a pitcher, their best green glass pitcher, of iced bush tea. She sat it down and hauled the armchair around to her side of the coffee table, opposite him. She wasn’t going to be joining him on the hard, rouge-red sofa as she normally would. Her expression was less than open. It was too pleasant. He thought, Hell is that expression.

  She sat down but immediately got up to correct the setting. She turned out the light in the dining room and adjusted the floor lamp at the end of the sofa to its dimmest setting. When they were relaxing in the evening they both liked there to be only one light source in the room, and a mild one. She sat opposite him, with some finality this time, put her feet up on the coffee table, and pushed the lap of her sundress down hard between her thighs as she settled.

  “Would you mind if we talked about Rex?” she asked.

  “God no, it’s fine.”

  “You don’t mean it.”

  “Oh God. Yes I do!”

  “Really, what’s all this God this and God that all of a sudden if it’s so perfectly okay with you as a topic?”

  “You don’t understand. I want to talk about the man because I know you love him. You love him! His wit, his … whatever you love in the man. You love his letters. You know nothing about him except what he prepares for you. Concocts for you. Well, go ahead, Iris.”

  He could see her getting more composed by the second. She drew her feet off the coffee table. She sat up straighter.

  “Look, I enjoy your brother. His letters.”

  “But you don’t know the first thing about him. You have no framework for him. None.”

  “You two never got along, I know that.”

  “That isn’t quite right. First we did and then we didn’t, due to him.”

  “Could you say what happened?”

  “This is the way the week ends for me. Hell. Too bad I don’t drink scotch anymore.”

  “Well, you can, as you know. Go to the bottle store and get something and come back and let me watch you drink yourself to a point where nothing you say makes sense. Where I ask a question and you take an hour to answer it simply because you’re contemplating what the best possible answer would be, naturally, and I deserve only the best, you’re only
being sagacious, you ———.”

  “Forget I said that. I’m sorry, Iris. Truly and no kidding.”

  “All right.”

  “Okay, when I say you don’t know anything about Rex let me be concrete. Here’s what his favorite reply to something you asked him to do was—Nokay. That gives you a hint. Nokay, and he would look at you I guess in order to see whether you thought he’d said yes or no. I guess that was a moment he enjoyed.”

  “That’s so trivial, Ray.”

  “Maybe it is, but it’s indicative. He was unremitting with stuff like that. You know the song with the line The guy behind you won’t leave you alone? That’s what it was like. Or here, relate to this. He became a master at pronouncing disgusting or insulting words so that they sounded so much like an innocent word you couldn’t be sure whether you were being insulted or not. You had to concentrate when you didn’t feel like it. At mealtime, he might say, Oh this is excrement!, smiling, his facial expression all full of appreciation, making excrement sound like excellent. He would make it seem as though it was the fact that he was chewing something that was responsible for your misunderstanding what he was saying. Good evening, labia genital was a line he got away with because he said it so fast when he was the toastmaster at his senior dinner. Heil there, he used to say to a gym coach he hated. Some of his little pals tried to copy him but, not being so expert, they got caught out. He was relentless. Anyone could be the target, he was no respecter of persons, just so he could keep his game going. You can smile but you didn’t have to live with it. Our poor mother. Who was someone he loved, insofar as he loved anybody. But the poor woman. She liked to play the piano and sing for us in the evenings. He’d say Mom—he had this way of dragging the word out to make himself sound plaintive … Mom … can’t you play Old Fucks at Home for us? He’d use a fake breathless rapid-fire delivery for camouflage. I’ll think of more examples, now that you’ve got me started. And by the way he liked to make a big deal of my mother agreeing to play a couple of songs out of the Golden Treasury of Old Favorites, or whatever it was called, and he would excitedly go and inform my father about the treat we were all about to have, who of course had to pretend he loved it whenever she would do this. It was not a great experience. The woman was self-taught. So Rex would rush to wherever my father was, doing paperwork or reading his antiques magazines, and force him to come and listen. I say my father, but I mean our father, obviously. The more I look back on it the more harassed I can see my father was, in general. I’ve told you about his antiques business. The fiasco that was.”

  Iris nodded.

  “Oh, also for mealtimes … Is the soup dung yet? Or, This soup is really swill, for swell, obviously. But sometimes Rex wanted to be understood. Say we were having franks and beans for dinner, and I noticed that Rex was finding a lot of excuses to refer to what we were eating as frank and beans, so I asked him. Oh that was just because he had observed that my mother had only cut up one frankfurter for the whole dish, so the dish should be called frank and beans. So he was just being precise and in the process reminding all of us that the family was eating like the poor, yet again. He projected innocence but he kept everybody off balance in an unpleasant way. So, for him, everything was perfect. We were pretty frugal. The entrée we ate most when I was growing up was creamed tuna on toast, which I loved, in fact.”

  “I could make that,” Iris said. “But no doubt she put butter in the cream sauce and that’s why it tasted so good.”

  “Who knows? By the way, what is butter?”

  She waited for him to resume.

  He said, “Wait, I had something else about Rex that fits in here. Let me think for a second.

  “I know what it was. Tell me this wasn’t diabolical. He goes to any kind of performance, the gamut, from school assemblies to recitals, what have you. What he loved to do and what you could count on him trying to do was to start a half-assed standing ovation whenever he could. He would stand up and begin clapping maniacally like someone overcome with the dance or the accordion solo or the talk or whatever. And then he would stare around in disappointment at the rest of the audience. And then he would subside, looking crushed on behalf of the performer. Sometimes he’d get a handful of other people to join him and the effect would be even worse. The point was to show that the audience didn’t really like the performer all that much, except for Rex. I hated to sit next to him at anything. And I’d grab his knee to try to force him to stay when I thought he was about to erupt. And of course if I left a bruise it’d be displayed later to my father. And I would be in the spot he loved me to be in. How could you explain using force against someone who had merely wanted to jump up in a moment of enthusiasm? He bruises very easily. You grab him with ordinary force and in fifteen minutes his skin looks like paisley.

  “And Rex was always doing cartoons. One I remember showed a guy supposed to be me rushing downstairs his arms spread and shouting Dad’s dead! And sitting there in the living room with his back to the stairway, reading, this character who’s Rex, who says I’ll say!”

  Iris said, “But didn’t you find any of this amusing, at all?”

  Ray thought, This is a mistake: She thinks he’s funny: One person can destroy a family: You can destroy a family through the exercise of your sovereign wit, she doesn’t get it: I was his enemy, I was the traitor, I was in the Scouts, I was a traffic monitor …

  “But all these things happened when you were still children. We’re talking about a child, here.”

  “But not every child sets out to torment his family members to the brink of distraction. I didn’t. There was something wrong with him. He was younger than I, but he sure wasn’t following in my footsteps. In Rex you’re dealing with a person with an absolutely gargantuan ability to resent things. Such as that I was named after our father. Rex thought there was something unfair about it.”

  “Oh, so were you Ray junior? I didn’t know that.”

  “No, I wasn’t. I’m not. I was Ray, my father was Raymond, simple as that. But my brother’s sense of injustice was so exquisite he actually complained about the situation.”

  “It can be sort of strange with children and names. I knew a family there were four girls in and their names were Ruby, Pearl, Opal, and Doreen.”

  “Why do I think that sounds like something from Rex’s cabinet of stupid marvels?”

  “It isn’t. It’s mine. They lived in our neighborhood in Seattle.”

  “Maybe the parents couldn’t think of another mainstream precious stone to name the fourth girl after.”

  “In case you’re interested, your brother is house-sitting in Marin County. Talking about names reminded me of what he said about children’s names around there. It seems the boys have lastname firstnames like Foster or Tuttle, like companies. The girls have romantic firstnames. He knows a little girl named Sunset and one named Autumn. He’s house-sitting with a new boyfriend. You’d enjoy his letters. You would.”

  “Are you trying to convince me that I have no power to communicate with you whatsoever? Something critical is not coming across. I don’t know what it is that I’m leaving out. When he was tiny but old enough to be in the bathtub by himself what he loved to do when his hair was lathered with shampoo was twist up his hair into two horns. In itself it’s nothing. Like everything. This is nothing—he’d take a very fine crowquill pen and draw escaping pubic hair in bathing suit or underwear ads in my mother’s women’s magazines. Or axillary hair. But he would do it so faintly you might almost miss it. You notice the sexual angle here. He also drew fly vents on women’s panties. His favorite comeback when he was mad at you was Oh eat hair! I know I’m all over the map. But that’s because all this is pointing toward something that turned out to be ruinous for us, ruinous …”

  She was pensive. “You mean something I know nothing about?”

  “Right. Something I’ve never brought up, I guess partly because it has his trademark of making you seem stupid when you try to describe any event he precipitates. Ev
erything reduces to Rex being an innocent surrounded by bullies and fools. But I promise I’ll tell you about it sometime. I have to gear up for it.”

  It was evident to him that she wanted to hear about it now, but that because she loved him and could sense his upset she was going to let him postpone it. He had to postpone it. He needed to be at a lower emotional register before he began that story. Rex was fascinating her. It was revenge, more revenge on him. Of course all he was was friendly Rex keeping her cheered up in weird yet boring Botswana, as she would construe it. But the idea would be to disaffect her. Ray was absolutely certain about it. The point was to disaffect her in her African captivity.

  Any second she was going to say he didn’t have to tell the story now if he couldn’t bear to. Why was she still so transparent? He remembered saying to her, at some point, You give everything away with your face and you need to learn to take a couple of beats before you judge something or commit yourself or confess you don’t know something. Look around, he’d said. Realize that sometimes you know more than you think you do, he’d said, so don’t be so immediate about confessing ignorance. He’d given examples of her being premature on matters he proved to her she knew something about many times. The line from her ear, down her neck, to the point where her shoulder was cut by the sundress strap, was an example of the bodily sublime, in this amber light. He hated the memorializing impulse, or rather what it meant that he was having it so often. He thought, Foreboding comes into your life in your forties, if you let it … comes into your thought like a stain, if you love your mate, especially: Abandon hope, all ye who enter a happy marriage … The foreboding getting stronger if you let it, like guys who take naked pictures of their wives, I understand it, poor bastards, Let me take a picture of your neck, your knee, your foot … She mocks me when I freeze in mid-act when she asks me something or says something, I freeze so I don’t miss a syllable, I can’t help it, “Close the refrigerator! You can listen to me and close the refrigerator at the same time,” “Come in or go out!”