Mortals

by Norman Rush

  “Well in any case she was a Christian convert who had decided that all the cattle had to be killed because they had been reared by people who practiced witchcraft, as the Xhosas had for generations, which meant that the cattle were defiled because the Christian god hated witchcraft. They were in a period of stress at the time. I don’t know if it was drought or what. They were continually under pressure from the Zulus. So the prophetess promised that their tribulations would be over once they’d killed off all the cattle. He made the point, Davis did, that most people think of this act of destruction as something arising from primitive tribal craziness. But this was not a thing the pre-Christian tribes had ever done. It was Christianity that did it to them. Did you know that?”

  He hadn’t. He hadn’t known that Nongqawuse was a Christian convert. “I may have known that, once. Maybe not. No, I don’t think I did. No, I didn’t.”

  “Any last comments on my report?”

  “Impeccable, my dear girl. Impeccable, Iris.”

  They had reached the ring road. They turned up it. A quarter of a mile ahead of them on the far side of the road and occupying a site at the top of a long, slow rise was the Sun.

  “So that was all. Davis gave Kerekang a card and invited him to a lecture he’s planning to give. And then as a last afterthought he grabbed Kerekang before he could leave and made the point that it wasn’t only Christianity he was concerned about, it was all religions, all religious belief, in case that hadn’t been emphasized enough. And I believe Kerekang invited Davis to come have a look at the gleaner camp. And now I want something cold to drink.”

  He was full of gratitude toward her.

  A realization he had suppressed came back to him. He had almost done something unforgivable. It had almost happened. During her recital, he had unthinkingly reached toward his shirt pocket to activate his microrecorder. But he had caught himself. He would never tape her. The temptation to do it then was understandable. The impulse was an artifact of the intensity of his focus on his enemy, Boyle, his preposterous enemy. Someone forgive me, he thought. Priest could be his code name for Morel, if Boyle could be made to see reason.

  They were in sight of the hawker strip. Their approach galvanized the hawkers, who began heaving themselves up from the ground or struggling out from their cardboard and burlap hutments. The hawkers would mob them in a minute.

  A heavy, owl-faced woman with a withered leg, the hawker closest to them, was toiling painfully toward them, determined to be the first to present her goods.

  “That woman is crippled,” Iris said. “Oh God.”

  They had to buy something. It was distressing. Hawkers from farther up the line were racing at them, overtaking the crippled woman. He suspected that word had been passed along that Iris was wearing one of their products, which made her a serious prospect. The crippled woman was in desperate haste. As her competitors came past her, she began unfurling her goods, pitching them out toward Iris and Ray, trailing them through the dust as she forged forward.

  “Buy the biggest piece she has,” Ray said. “Buy the bedspread.” It was unlike him, but he was hot with gratitude toward Iris. He was usually careful with money.

  “You know how they overcharge for these,” she said.

  “Get the bedspread. The tablecloth.” It was blocked gratitude speaking. Of course they overcharged, for what they gave you. But he also knew that she’d get more pleasure buying this dubious object than she would buying something for herself that she really wanted.

  “You’re great,” she said.

  “Not yet,” he said.

  15. I Would Like to Reassure You About My Penis

  She was going to think he was perverse, getting into a hot bath on a hot night after a hot day … but sometimes there was a need. A scalding bath like this was for moments when everything hurts, from the soul outward, from the folds of your soul to the soles of your feet, and what the burning lake did was unify miscellaneous pains into a single physical one, briefly, which then turned into pleasure as the water temperature became bearable, something like that. Everything hurts, he thought, and there he was. But he could see the future. Iris would drift in, take note, say nothing, and convey everything by body language, as in rolling the eyes.

  She would roll her eyes. And with some justification. From her viewpoint, there he would be, a Dagwood in his bathtub, but in darkest Africa. She would react, because what he was doing was odd and because if she wanted to talk more, which she did, she would be physically uncomfortable there, she would think he was deliberately creating a milieu uncongenial to conversation, which he would be hard pressed to deny, although it wasn’t true. And what was the name of the actress who had been trapped into playing Blondie film after film by her physical appropriateness for the part, a good actress but never able to escape that one role? Singleton had been her name, Penny. And there had been others in her situation, including the poor fuck who’d fallen into playing Superman forever, on television and not even in the movies, and who’d finally shot himself to death, sick of it. And then in fact hadn’t something similar happened to the actor who’d played Zorro? He thought so. Money made them do it. I do nothing for money, at least, he thought. Sometimes he wondered if his affection for the Zorro movies had any connection with his attraction to the dual life he had ended up leading and enjoying, for the most part. He had loved Zorro. Or he had loved the Janus metaphor underneath Zorro and the others, the introvert who had an armed and dangerous alter ego who could hurt you but wouldn’t kill you, he would just tie you up and expose you to ridicule. He thought, We can never get down to the slurry of narratives we took in through our pores when we were growing up, and that sits in us, sloshing around in our foundations. Iris was coming in. She was nearby. He could sense it. And someday someone would come up with a process like psychoanalysis but devoted to ripping up the rotten subflooring of cultural junk in our depths, getting it up so it could be hawked up and spat out, genre, clichés, ads, commercials, formulas of all kinds, all of it. Women don’t spit, he thought. Men hawk and spit. Iris claimed not to know how to hawk. She suffered from postnasal drip from time to time seriously enough that he had tried to teach her how to clear out the back of her sinuses, just to help with keeping ahead of the flow, but she couldn’t do it. The process repelled her. He considered his legs, his lower self, in the faintly tawny water. If you like them lean, come to me, he thought. Iris was getting wider through the hips, fractionally, but it was happening. The water was perfect. Sweat crawled down his scalp. The concentration of chlorine in their tap water varied from day to day, and sometimes the odor could be distractingly strong, but tonight it was minimal, vaguely medicinal, like the ozone tinge produced by the electric coil in the geyser mounted high on the wall where it would crush his feet if it ever came down when he was in the tub. Every expatriate male he knew had talked about the damned menacing geysers and they all did what he did, which was to tug compulsively on the brackets that held the massive things in place whenever he was in the room. Africa, danger everywhere, he thought, mocking himself.

  “Aren’t you suffering in there?” Iris asked from the hall.

  “In a good way,” he answered. “I like it.”

  “It can’t be good for you.”

  But she didn’t pursue it when he didn’t reply. He heard her withdraw … toward the bedroom, he thought.

  If she wanted to join him in the tub room, there was a problem. There was no place for her to sit, except the uncomfortable rim of the tub. There was nothing in this cubicle but the tub and the washbasin. The toilet sat in its own cubicle, if a cubicle could be taller in the vertical dimension. If she was determined to come in and chat she could drag in the hamper from the toilet room, or bring in a chair, though she had never done that. He ran fresh hot water into the tub.

  He thought, All hail the monster bathtub, the one true good thing the British left in Africa: Oversized because the imperial classes were so large in stature they hated to be hunched up when it came to b
ath time and time to relish their conquests that day.

  Iris was back. He turned to look at her in the doorway. She was down to her bra and panties now, fanning herself. She still wanted to talk. We have talked our extinction to death was the one line he remembered from the whole corpus of Robert Lowell. He thought, Nobody talks about Lowell these days. The fading of great reputations was a hazard for people doing English … He was lucky with Milton. She wanted to talk about Morel and so did he, as much as you could want something to happen that you simultaneously dreaded, for no good reason.

  “How long might you be in there?” she asked.

  “I don’t know. This is a treatment, I.” She was going to be surprised at that. The use of I as a nickname for her, or a diminutive, one or the other, had fallen away years ago. It had been his earliest nickname for her. She’d never liked it much, actually.

  “Treatment for what?” she asked.

  “For what ails me.”

  “You’re going to dissolve.”

  “That would be okay,” he said, reaching for a tone that would suggest to her that he was midway in a process of some importance to him that he wanted to continue with, but that wouldn’t sound unfriendly. They were going to talk. Of course she was already paying someone else to talk to her, if he wanted to be childish about it. He was certain she was well into some sort of talk therapy with Morel. He thought, Every man whose wife goes out to get help of this sort from a male, another male, feels something like this. He knew he was being a cartoon, but it made a difference that the therapist was male, whether it should or not. It was a stupid fact, but a fact. She was getting therapy, but therapy for what? What was the subject matter? His guess was that a certain proportion of what he was paying for was what could be called general conversation or general thoughts on how difficult life was, that kind of thing, and why couldn’t she get that at home? But no, she wanted to warm her hams at the fire of another intellect, Morel’s intellect and not his … This is a good place to have unworthy thoughts, he thought.

  Silently Iris entered the bathroom, carrying a camp stool. She had put on a dark green silk kimono, his favorite out of the four or five kimonos she owned. These costume changes were about something. She was very deliberate in the way she opened and lowered the camp stool, setting it down at the foot of the tub. By being so delicate about it she was giving him space to object, he supposed. It was comical.

  He arranged his washcloth over his genitals, for no reason. Apparently this was going to begin.

  But instead of seating herself, Iris went to the basin, posted herself there, and proceeded with brushing her teeth. After a moment she said something that sounded to him like “I can’t stand the world.” Then she left the room, still brushing.

  She was one of those people who have a need to walk around while they brush their teeth, in whom the act of brushing sets up a tension over the basic nullity and boringness of the procedure that they have to release by strolling while they do it, holding one hand cupped under the chin as they go. People in that category were always assiduous brushers. More nominal brushers like himself could stay in one place until they finished.

  She passed by the doorway and said something unintelligible, completely unintelligible this time. She was under the delusion that she could say whatever she wanted while she was brushing her teeth and that it would be comprehensible to him because of the care with which she enunciated. It was his fault, because during their life together, since he had usually been able to divine what she was trying to say, he had never revealed his true feeling about it, which was that it was annoying and uncouth, like talking with your mouth full of food. So he had led her to believe she was being normal. He was unable to translate what she had just said.

  At the basin again, she concluded by brushing her tongue.

  “I couldn’t make out what you said, your last thing,” he said, when she was done.

  “Just as well.” She extended her tongue and studied it in the mirror.

  It would be hostile to add more hot water to his bath at this point. He asked her to sit down if she wanted to.

  His offer went unacknowledged. She said, “I do everything I’m supposed to …” The tone of grievance was there. He waited.

  “I read somewhere that it’s good hygiene to brush the back of your tongue when you do your teeth, so I do that. I sterilize my toothbrush, same reason. Nobody we know does that. The same with our diet. Whatever, if you’re supposed to do it, I do it.”

  “I don’t exactly follow you,” he said, but in fact he had an idea where this was going. What was unstated was the conclusion her declarations implied, something along the lines of “I do all this and what does it get me?” she meant, get her in general. She was all over the place with her declarations of dissatisfaction, which was what this amounted to. Not that she would put her dissatisfaction as nakedly as he had.

  She sighed, turned, and said musingly, “Do you know that I don’t know if your penis is particularly large or not?”

  It is, by God, he thought, outraged. But what was this? It was pure provocation.

  She said, “You claim it is, but how do I know, really? I’m almost a virgin, I mean I was almost a virgin when I met you.”

  He was agitated. He had to keep himself under control. The tone had to be light. This was new. He could say “Gulp he said,” but that was witless. Anxiety was doing this to her. She was flailing. She was being random.

  She left the room, which was not possible.

  “Iris, come and sit down,” he called after her.

  “It’s so hot in there.”

  “Please, though. Please.”

  “The heat is too much.”

  “It’s cooling down,” he called. He wasn’t going to give his treatment up. He needed it. “Please,” he said. “I would like to reassure you about my penis. I think that’s important.”

  “I have to come and sit in that steambath? All right, I will.”

  He listened intently. She was doing something.

  She came in naked, and sat on the camp stool. “I hope you don’t mind,” she said.

  He thought, on the contrary. But somehow it was completely apposite that the discussion they were going to have would be conducted with both of them stark naked. She was comfortable naked. Maybe that should worry him. Her breasts were small and full. She had never nursed, of course, but her nipples were on the tan or darker side, away from pink, which he assumed went with her coloring. And she had larger areolas than you would expect for someone who had never nursed, he thought. He was glad she was sitting down. The body of a naked woman standing in front of you could be a face looking at you, the breasts, the navel, the pudendum. He needed to be serious. She was intelligent about her nudity. She rationed it. She kept it a treat. She always wore something to bed. That was strategy, it was smart, and he loved her for it. But this just now was nudity for political reasons. It was coercive, to show what she had to put up with in order to come to grips with him. Sometimes after a bath his cleanness would provoke her into immediately sucking him off.

  She said, “You know that was just kidding, about your penis. Just to get your attention.”

  “I know,” he said. And he did know.

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Don’t be. There is the fact of your limited exposure, due to marrying me when you were a child bride. That’s real.”

  “Well, and I also never saw my father naked. And of course I had no brothers, and then I was in girls’ schools. Men have endless opportunities to check the full range of breasts and everything else in the movies, and magazines, and nudes in paintings. There’s no parity. And of course in pornography the men they select would represent an extreme. So. And nude paintings are mostly females … and of course if it’s a male, it’s a flaccid male …”

  “Men are shy,” he said.

  “I was just stirring things up.”

  “No, forget it,” he said. He knew he was fine. He was better than fine. He had observed en
ough to know that. The men in his family happened to be well endowed. He had seen his father’s penis. And when his brother reached puberty, it became clear he was going to be in the money too. She could write Rex and ask him, if she wanted to, they were so close. Or he could get a medical book and let her look him up, measure him and look him up. There was a sexy idea.

  Now they were going to talk about Morel. Somehow the die was cast. He felt it. She felt it.

  But she got up, yet again, and said, “I have to do something about the light if I’m going to stay here. I’ll get a couple of candles, if that’s all right.”

  He nodded vigorously. She left the room and he added a little more hot water to the bath. The geyser rumbled the way it did when a new demand was placed on it. Crush me, he commanded it.

  She was sensitive to lighting. She hated the overhead light in this room. He was sorry for her. He wanted to help. She had a way of making things worse. Now the idea that he was going to hear something much worse than he’d expected was growing. She was in love with Morel. Or she was falling in love with Morel. Or they’d done it and now she was sorry. Never, he thought. He was being extreme. Or they’d done it and she wasn’t sorry. It had been wonderful and now she didn’t know what to do. He would have to help her. That was going to be his role. All her preambling was making things worse.

  She brought in two tall candles in a candelabrum, a wobbly craft object from Uganda. She tried different floor placements for the candelabrum, finally settling on a spot to his right, near the wall. She turned out the ceiling light.

  They sighed together. “This is mysterious,” he said. The new lighting tended to make the scene more extreme. She was mainly a shape to him. Half her face was in shadow. Her hair looked wild, as though it were swelling outward as he looked at her. She had taken her bandeau off. The Medusa effect he was seeing had to be an optical illusion or a consequence of the steamy atmosphere.