Mortals

by Norman Rush

  Just one of Joel’s virtues, not so far mentioned, that I want to touch on. He is kindness itself. A great graphic artist named Posada is from here, a nineteenth-century artist. There is a little museum and gallery devoted to him. Posada was a genius who did upwards of fifteen thousand engravings and woodcuts. But of the original plates and blocks only about four hundred and fifty survive. The bulk of the graphic work was in periodicals that were destroyed or that moldered away years ago. There is no record. My Joel got tears in his eyes when he heard all this.

  Why should I feel I want to humiliate this good, boyish man who seems to love me, almost? When you write me, give me any help you can, but also know that it has been helpful just to write this and know that you will be reading it.

  My regards to Ray, who, I know, would like to see me humiliated in any way possible. This is something he has always wanted and which was always as mysterious to me as my own feelings now about Joel are. It could be genetic but I don’t really believe that. Ray hates me because I’m not a True Man. I think he has always felt this way toward me. But if what he thinks is a True Man is a True Man, then he isn’t one either.

  Ray paused, thinking Ah, the True Men. Their mother had been an expert at discerning True Men, separating them from counterfeit True Men in the flux of male celebrity. Gary Cooper had been a True Man, as had Gene Tunney, General Douglas MacArthur, and, oddly, one singer, Robert Goulet …

  You may tell him I said this. I would love to hear any response he gives you. A True Man would never be gay like me, he thinks. What is a True Man? you ask. I’d say that at the heart of a True Man is a sort of hunger to get as close as possible to the act of obliterating some other True Man, either directly (war) or indirectly and symbolically (nowadays via sports … action-adventure fantasy products … killing animals as surrogates for killing other True Men and using the tally to show everyone how high you rank as a potential obliterator of actual men). You really have to distinguish between the voluntary and the involuntary contents of the mind of a True Man. True Men have to think about work and business, too, in order to eat. Fortunately there is scope for a lot of transferred aggression in economic life, especially at the entrepreneur level. So men have to think a lot about work and making it and turning their firms into killers of other competitor firms. Plenty of True Men are gay, by the way. But I’m not one, and neither is Ray, mon semblable, mon frère. Ask him. He was never in a war. He hates hunting. He would rather not be outdoors with the True Men. He’s not interested in sports. There’s a psychological thing called the Bem scale. Tell him to take it and see where he registers. I dare him. But I am willing to go on record as saying he will find some way never to do this. I know him.

  Ray stopped reading, not out of annoyance but because he was being watched.

  11. They Played Games

  Ray always knew when he was being watched. He was being watched now. It was a faculty he had and not a product of his connection with the agency.

  He saw who was watching him. It was Dimakatso. She was standing just within the extreme right edge of his field of view, just visible outside the frame of the breezeway window overlooking the front yard. She had come around that side of the house. She was in and out of sight, but mostly out. He had seen her without moving his head or looking up. He continued ostensibly reading. He had caught her without any movement, he was sure, that would have let her know he was aware of her. Now only her little paunch was showing. He wanted to know why she was behaving so furtively. He couldn’t remember her being furtive in any of her outdoor activities before. She was the opposite. There were times when you had to look away, in fact, like when she pulled up her skirts and rinsed her legs at the standpipe or when she was rubbing the soles of her feet against a piece of log she had, to get rid of calluses.

  Something was going on.

  He moved closer to the breezeway window. His view comprehended the drive forking from the gate and most of the gate. An overgrown rubber bush half obscured the gate. He was sure Dimakatso had gone back around the house and was now out there somewhere to his left.

  He moved even closer to the breezeway window, pretending to be reading with more absorption than before, moving only to get better light.

  He wanted to know why nothing, nothing, ever, was straightforward for him in the last year, say. Blame it on a guy named God, he thought.

  He thought, Okay! Because there she was, standing, waiting for something. He had caught her edging out from behind the garage. She was poised to go to the gate. She had already made one false start and drawn back, looking in his direction. He kept his head down, which was hard because he was looking into brightness without being able to shade his eyes.

  It was clear what this was. He could, of course, go out and see what she had to say. But there was no question about what this was. She was waiting to intercept Iris coming back from wherever she’d been, to warn her about what, though?

  It looked like the universal conspiracy of women, stanza nine billion, on the face of it. She was out there to signal to Iris that he was on the scene, contrary to what she expected at this time of day.

  He hated it.

  The question was whether she would try to signal from the wings or actually run out to give the message. It would be the second. There was something urgent about this business.

  Too much is enough, he thought, I have too much to deal with, I have Boyle, I have no more writing, I have my orders, my POI is not Morel, no, it’s whoever the most virtuous character in Pilgrim’s Progress is, Kerekang is his equivalent, my POI is, if you can believe that.

  Dimakatso made another false start.

  He thought, Then on top of that include the bastard my brother that no one has ever been able to do anything about: I have to do something, though, from Africa no less, but what?

  Dimakatso was in motion, rigidly sauntering up to the gate. As a piece of acting, it was pathetic. Iris had to be coming.

  He went out onto the patio, still holding the letter, trying to look idly okay.

  Dimakatso met Iris at the gate. He had been right. The point had been to alert her, and it could be completely innocent, the reason being a considerate desire that her mistress not be taken off guard. Iris liked the incredibly sour Dimakatso. Or the reason could be sinister, for want of a better word, except that the word had never applied to anything Iris did and couldn’t. Iris saw him.

  Iris struck a pose of comic surprise, hands up to shoulder level, palms out. Dimakatso sidled briskly off, looking at the ground. He heard the kitchen door bang.

  He loved his wife, shimmering there all in white. She was dressed up, he would say, that is, dressed up for her, dressed up a little more than usual for going downtown. She was wearing a long white rough linen skirt he particularly liked her in, a longsleeved white silk blouse with shoulder tabs they both thought were funny, her best sandals, but with stockings, which was unusual, and one of her conical Lesotho sun hats, one of the extreme ones with a sort of raffia sphere sitting on the peak. They were ungainly objects and she had to keep this one on her head with cords run through a slip bead and cinched under her chin. The cords left faint, transient grooves in the flesh of her jaw that he liked to press away. Generally, she was well covered up for the sun, as she was supposed to be, except that she wasn’t wearing her sunglasses, which he ought to upbraid her about at some point. A line of brass buttons closed her skirt along one leg. He wanted to unbutton her and tell her everything, which was impossible. Now would be a good time for one of the imaginary crude pickup lines she used to laugh at, whatever they were, like Gee I bet you look tremendous naked, or Let’s go take each other’s pants off.

  She came up to him, looking concerned. They were going to talk first about him, about why he was there, at home, and that would leave the delicate question of whether or not she was going to volunteer anything about where she’d been. Or would it be up to him to ask? Questions of her whereabouts had never been an issue, but now that he thought of it, her wher
eabouts were a gray area, something like opening mail addressed to her before she got to it. Neither of them ever opened letters addressed to the other, although either could read any mail opened and left around. Of course they were both aware he belonged to an organization that gave him access to diabolical machines that could flush out and print whatever was inside an envelope and never leave a sign.

  “Is anything wrong?” she asked.

  He said that he had felt lightheaded after leaving one of his meetings at the embassy, so he’d come home instead of going back to St. James, and that once he had gotten home there had been an episode of diarrhea, that he was feeling better, now, but Curwen had told him to take the rest of the day off. It was almost identical to what he’d told Curwen. Her breathing was a little rapid, he felt, even allowing for exertion, for hurrying.

  She looked somber. She undid the chin cord tie and took her hat off. There were the marks in her jaw flesh. She was wearing her hair straight back, unparted, held by a white bandeau he didn’t think he’d ever seen.

  He said, “I feel okay, now. It was quick. Whatever it was.”

  “Are you sure? You look a little green. God, I wish I’d been here. I was out walking. Why wasn’t I here? Did you think of calling me to come for you?”

  “No, I just hoofed it. I’m fine, Iris, fine, nothing to worry about.”

  She touched his forehead with the back of her hand. She was lying.

  At least it was possible she was. The way she had tried to slide across what she’d been doing and over onto an adjoining subject was bad. And she was wearing stockings, she would never wear stockings to take a walk. Now this, he thought.

  “Come inside,” she said.

  If it was a lie, he was entering a new world here, a cold place. He hated this place. He shivered, and she noticed it.

  “You aren’t well. Look at you shivering.”

  He knew he was putting her through something, but there was no way he could avoid it. What he was putting her through was the generic fear of falling ill in Africa, where small things turned fatal because the medical system was what it was, so full of gaps, and because if you started shaking it could as easily be malaria or sleeping sickness as some kind of minor electrolyte imbalance.

  He was, now, actually beginning to feel unwell, obviously in sympathy with the story he had told. You could call it a talent, he thought. But of course he hadn’t eaten since breakfast, so that was part of it. Undoubtedly stress was pouring buckets of acid into his stomach. Her lie was the worst thing, it was the worst. He had been okay until she lied, physically okay.

  There was no proof she had lied. But he wanted to know since when was she taking walks in the middle of the day, for example? If they walked, they walked in the cool of the evening. If she was out in the midday sun wearing stockings it stood to reason it wasn’t for exercise or for the breeze. There was no breeze. She wasn’t carrying anything, which would fit with walking for its own sake. She had her waist pack on, twisted around to the back, the way she preferred to wear it despite the fact that it was less secure than wearing it on the side. But she wouldn’t wear it on the side because she didn’t want to bulk out the line her hips made. She was entirely deluded about her hips. She was womanly, was all. She was so obstinate, in ways. My hips fill the universe, she liked to murmur as she was getting undressed. And then he would reassure her. It was a routine.

  Still carrying Rex’s letter, he followed her into the house. She had noticed the letter in his hand but, obviously, had decided not to mention it at this juncture. He thought that must be because she didn’t want to go down any byways right now. She was thinking. He could tell. She needed time to think her way into her lie. If it was a lie. She needed him not to engage with her for a while. I know you so well, he thought. She would try to stow him away while she thought. That would be next.

  “You need to get off your feet,” she said. “And let me get you some cold tea. Also your pulse, I want to take your pulse. We’re sure this is something you ate, right? That would be the best thing for it to be …” Now she was looking pale herself. Before she had been flushed, in fact. It was happening. He was frightening her.

  “Excuse me a second,” he said, and stepped into the bathroom. He ran water for a moment, then stood immobile while the water ran. He did it not to deepen his act but to get more time to think, himself. He was in turmoil. Lying is murder, he thought, she is killing me, she has a lover.

  Iris insisted that he lie down in the darkened bedroom, which he did. She began naming the teas he could have.

  “Give me anything. Give me orange pekoe, then. Or Earl Grey. And tepid is fine. I don’t need it to be freezing.”

  She was in favor of an herb tea.

  “You gave me a choice and I chose. Orange pekoe is what I want.”

  “All right, all right.” She signaled to Dimakatso, who was in the doorway, waiting for instructions.

  “Are you angry at me?” Iris asked him.

  “No, no I’m just not feeling that great.”

  “Did you get something at one of the takeaways? King’s?”

  “A drumstick, in effect. I had some chicken peri-peri at King’s before my meeting. I didn’t finish it. It tasted all right.”

  “Usually the takeaways are safe. They overcook everything so drastically.”

  “I know.”

  He declined a warm compress.

  She sat next to him on the bed and took his hand. Tea came. He drank some, then lay back, closing his eyes, trying to drive the word whore, which was unfair, out of his thought-stream.

  She got up carefully. “Stay here,” she said, leaving.

  He wanted to sleep, not that it was conceivable. Dreaming of dreamless sleep was somebody’s line and not bad. An interval of blankness might help him. He had to get through this. Nothing was going to be right until she admitted she’d lied. She had gone someplace she didn’t want him to know about and then she had lied about it.

  He didn’t know how he was going to be able to sound normal when he talked to her until this was cleared up. She had seemed guilty, or evasive, at least, out on the stoop.

  So, had all her unhappiness and discontent lately come to a point in sex with someone else? Or had the sex not happened yet, which would be something, anyway. It could be in the preliminary stages, in the flirtation stage.

  But why would she do it if there was nothing the matter with their own sex life?

  The last time, she had asked him, Do you want to know what it feels like to a woman when … What it feels like when you come really hard? And she just had. And he had said of course he wanted to know. And she had said, Well, part of what it feels like is like this, that you’re just a drop of oil on a white tablecloth, just a tiny, still drop of oil, and then in a flash you’re expanding outward in every direction, evenly, turning into a stain, a little drop expanding into a bright stain that covers the universe, the process of that, the expanding … that’s part of it …

  Anyone in his right mind would take that as a compliment from his wife.

  Of course, she was unusual. She had an appetite for sex that was probably unusual. She liked it about herself. She was humorous on the subject. When he had said, and this was a compliment or at least an appreciation, when he had said Don’t you think you let yourself be felt up more than the average woman does without complaining? she had answered I have no idea how much the average woman complains.

  What was he supposed to do? What?

  He was accommodating, also, in his opinion. They did what she wanted. They played games. They had fun. There were so many examples. What was her problem? There were so many examples, even recently. The last game, how had it started? He couldn’t remember, but there had been a discussion of what it would be like to have sex with someone who was in the hospital. Now he remembered. It had come up because someone they knew had done it. They had speculated about the mechanics of it and she had gotten mildly aroused and what with one thing and another she had asked him
if he could imagine himself making love to her when he was in the hospital, when of course there was no lock on the door to his room. And he had described himself doing it to her when she came to visit him in the hospital during this imaginary convalescence. And then to amuse her he had gone into the bathroom and wound gauze rather obscenely around his naked torso and then come back to her, and it had amused her, and she had gotten into the spirit of the game, though afterward she had teased him for the gauze, for being so literal.

  One last thought and then he would stop thinking along these lines, but the fact was that at thirty-eight the conventional wisdom was that she was at her peak, or just getting there, and she had always been sexually lively. And then the last thought was that, of course, the point of some of the games was for one partner or the other to be somebody else, so maybe games led to an appetite for a real somebody else, which would constitute an argument against too many games.

  Where had she been? Who was there for her in walking distance? But since anything could be a lie, it was possible she had been picked up anywhere and dropped off down at the corner. Or she could have walked one way and been driven back afterward and dropped off. Or was it conceivable the whole thing was to trick him into thinking she had done something she hadn’t, make him jealous so that she could dissolve the whole thing by proving that she’d been someplace innocent? But that was ridiculous because she’d had no idea he would come home early and find her gone.