by Norman Rush
“I believe you and I love you. You don’t know how much more we love you than you love us, in general.”
“You mean, how much more women love their men than men love their women, how ridiculous. How unsupported can you get.”
“How many women know their husband’s Social Security number versus how many men know their wife’s? Venture a guess.”
“Fifty-fifty.”
“Wrong. About seventy percent of women know their husband’s. The figure for men is thirty percent.”
She would never know how tired he was of her facts and figures, courtesy of the good doctor. Now they were doing something interesting together, he and Iris. They were collaborating on a fiction. The fiction was that what had eventuated between them had been a very small thing and that all was well. It was remarkable about how few collaborations in making fiction worked out at all, Ford and Conrad excepted, and the two women who wrote novels about Irish country life. What she wanted from him was childish, on the face of it. She wanted, as he understood it, to see Morel and have fantasies about him and not have to feel guilty about it. That was on the face of it. But there was more going on. The more was a new Mode of Being, or, better, a New Mode of Relating, and his brother was right that there was a larger place for capitals in writing and expression generally than the times were permitting.
She said, “I didn’t mean to get into that and I’m sorry. It’s marginal. I want to say just two main things. I’m going to see him and nothing is going to happen. I love you and you’re my husband. But I’m going to go to him and when he’s helped me I’m going to stop. Helped me, to my satisfaction. But I just don’t want you sensing something you don’t like, suspecting something untrue, and my being forced to deny it over and over.”
He was going to say something he shouldn’t. “You’d tell me first if something was … was starting? You know what I mean. Not that this should be any kind of condition for your going to him, but you would, you would tell me?” He felt like a fool. She was silent.
He said, “I feel vacant. This is making me feel vacant.”
“I’m very sorry if it is. It shouldn’t.” He was hearing a tough tone that was new toughness.
I am nowhere, he thought.
She was brisk. “Nothing is going to happen. I am swearing this to you. I swear it.” She pressed her palm to her sternum, like a diva, but in all seriousness.
Nonsense was pushing its way into his mind. They began to begin to be gone, he thought, three times, making himself stop when he felt the phrase entrenching itself. He needed to steady himself. He had to keep in mind that she was going to be away in the States, which would postpone everything as well as giving him time to strike back at Morel.
She said, “I really want you to understand how helpful he’s been to me. In the smallest ways.
“For example. He taught me to spit, how to hock up mucus, rather. Everybody knows how to spit. But how to hock up mucus from the back of my throat, when my sinuses are going crazy.”
“Hawk, I think you mean.”
“No, it’s hock. He says hock. I think hawk must be a corruption of hock. Because it’s hock. He showed me in the OED.”
“Ah, lucky guy. He has the OED? Are we talking about the real Oxford English Dictionary, not the microscopic edition you read with a magnifier?”
It was the real OED. Ray could tell she was feeling sorry for him. She wanted him to have his own OED, the real one. He hated the microtext edition. He loved the OED. But it was a tool he could use at the university library if he needed to. And he rarely needed to these days. And the real OED was too massive a possession for people as mobile as they had to be prepared to be. He could afford an OED. That wasn’t the problem.
No doubt he had only himself to blame for this moment arriving. Although what he could have done differently at any point in his earthly life so far was a question he would love to thrash out with someone as sapient as the great all-seeing eye she was paying through the nose to visit, although in fact the fees were pretty low. On the other hand was it possible he should construe her confession of attraction slightly differently, as in its being a way of stopping herself, preempting herself by alerting herself and him too, something done as an act of love? Of course that was slightly too self-congratulatory to be true, probably. She was in a malaise, was what this was about. They both were. Maybe this was simple, florid feminism of some kind. Brute feminism, and with no way he could go into it, but was it something like an attempt to undo something she disliked that was a fixture of regular life, such as the truth that men feel more threatened when their mates show interest in another male than women do when men partake in the more or less general reflexive sizing up of the world of women? some impulse like that, such as wanting to make everyone suffer equally? But he had never much gone beyond the golden mean in noticing other women … Although when he had, she had been quick enough to object, in fact. What was he supposed to do? In his work it was important to blend in. His work was in the male world. Was he supposed to walk around at gatherings like a parson? The sexes are different, he thought. Seeing someone you’re interested in naked for the first time would be an example of how it was different for women and men. For men it was the act of getting inside the mystery, the secret that clothing hides, the package, the getting to see, and then if what you see is splendid, then so much the better. But his guess was that with women it was different and revolved around the fact that a particular man wanted passionately for them to take their clothes off. Urgently. That was what they loved. What they loved was men wanting them to the point of begging them to strip now. Of course what they saw when the importuner himself took his clothes off had to fall within a certain range, physical qualities did go into it, had to go into it, but with a woman a short leg would be nothing if the male had counterbalancing stuff, like power … or intellect. Women who talked about buns and dick size were to an extent faking and going along with the male model, which might truly be triggered by bigness in the shoulders and so on, but it was essentially like claiming they liked to watch football on TV as much as their mates did. Where am I? he thought. He had no idea.
She said, “Anyway, he has been concretely useful with problems I had. Or have. I told you about the hypoadrenia. Another thing, and something you may not know about, is how routine it is for me to get mild cystitis after we have sex. Not every time, I don’t mean that. But it’s a thing to deal with and he had a suggestion which I haven’t really had a chance to discuss with you … but now I will. I just lived with it because it wasn’t much and it went away. But. Anyway, he thinks if you were careful to wash yourself with mild soap just prior, just before … it could be that. It’s variable. It may be that when I don’t have the reaction it’s because you were by happenstance very clean at that time, just out of the shower. And this is not to say you’re not a clean person, Ray. It’s just that there may be certain salts on the body, something like that. And also I didn’t want to mention it because it goes against spontaneity. I don’t know, maybe there’s a scintilla of urine or something I’m sensitive to.”
“My God,” he said. “I will certainly … hear and obey. Good God. Who knew?”
He was enraged at Morel.
“You’re not offended, Ray?”
“No, I’m delighted,” he said, but very fast. He should be feeling guilt, obviously, but why was he hearing about this only now? I am apparently foul, he thought.
“It’s just an example of something practical, another example.”
“No, live and learn. So what kind of soap should I use. How mild is mild. I want to get it right.”
“Oatmeal soap. I have some for you.”
“Oatmeal soap it is, then.”
“It fades pretty fast if I drink a lot of water, so I’m not trying to say it was the end of the world.”
“Say no more. We can do without it.” He thought, Crush him: Find a way.
“God I love you,” she said. In a minute she was going to offer to wash him with this corr
ect soap, he thought. He was picking up slight shifts toward softness. She might not even be aware she was tending that way. It would be instinctual to wrap something as bitter as she was handing him in sweet sex, coat it. She was idly touching her breasts.
She said, “About cleanliness, this is interesting, since so much in religion is about ritual purity, getting clean, being clean before God …”
So I am foul, apparently, he thought.
“I’m trying to reproduce what Davis says on this. Yes, it’s why ritual purity is so universal in religions, which is because the father, the generic father, won’t handle the child or baby if it’s soiled, nasty. God is a stand-in for the father figure. By the way do you know that the Peace Corps had to let their messenger go because he refused to carry stool samples from the Peace Corps nurse to the laboratory?”
“I hadn’t heard.”
“Men here will not handle feces. Women have to collect the cow dung they use to plaster the floors with in their huts, in the countryside. Of course the men are completely willing to walk up and down on it.
“Once you look at it, almost everything people do in religion fits one way or another with the attempt to recapture a moment when there was an all-powerful protector-lawgiver figure in our lives, and we go through motions in this regressed state that deep down we believe are the kind that ought to attract the corrective attention of this all-powerful person. This comes from neoteny, the long period of dependency human infants have. When we get into a crisis, we want to regress into the power of a fatherlike entity, a patrimorph is what Davis calls it. Then we recapture the endorphins we got from being taken care of or attended to, historically. It’s a theory. It’s partly from Freud except that Davis doesn’t think this collapsing back is sick, a pathology, the way Freud did. He thinks it’s normal, and even, in a way, healthy. But it’s also a joke, and silly. Everything really fits with this. Confession. All the kinds of self-mortification, to make yourself more like a deserving injured or perfect child, all that. All the born-again symbology. Purity and obedience. Making yourself either pathetic or into the simulacrum of a deserving child covers just about everything from fasting and rending your garments to all the thousands of mortifications of the flesh, to being celibate, meaning you’re making yourself into a simulated presexual being, like a baby.”
She was intoxicated with this stuff. He needed to be respectful, or not disrespectful. Of course there were any number of retorts to such a simpleminded view of religion, there must be. “And then, and this is the last thing I’m going to mention, his theory is that the contradictory and absurd notions we embrace when we’re religious amount to a variation of the same thing. When we embrace the absurd we are doing something the equivalent of mutilating our common sense, as a sort of goodwill offering. The most ridiculous varieties of religion, the fundamentalist ones, seem to be thriving right now. Davis thinks that things are happening, societal things, that are making people regress.”
This too shall pass, he thought. He grunted.
He guessed it was a good sign that she was adding fresh hot water to the stew they were in. She wanted to be with him. That was real.
He needed to remember that there had been previous enthusiasms of hers to deal with, for example when she’d decided that Ken Russell movies were supreme examples of something or other and she’d made him sit through The Devils twice, at the Capitol Cinema.
This was different.
He gripped her shoulders and began kneading her trapezius muscles with his thumbs, which brought back Richard Chamberlain as Tchaikovsky doing the same thing for his new wife and then, when his wife says Yes to the question You’ll stay with me forever, won’t you? converting the massage into an attempt to strangle her, until he comes to his senses not a moment too soon. Iris and he had laughed afterward and had replayed the scene for laughs themselves how many times?
She said, “Never forget how truly grateful I am to you. I never want you to think I’m not.”
He didn’t much like the tone of what she was saying, since it had faretheewell written all over it whether she was aware of it or not.
“Here’s an example why. I feel like a parasite on your knowledge sometimes, which doesn’t mean I’m not grateful. But as an example. Your knowledge of Greek. In Crete. Remember?”
She had no idea how marginal his command of Greek was, at least at this stage, after years of disuse.
“You have no idea what I’m talking about, is that possible?”
“No, say more.”
“This goes back to our Crete vacation in ’83, the incident … When we went to see the pornographic movies in Heraklion?”
He concentrated. He did remember generally, and elements of the evening came back to him, but only in step with her retelling. He remembered the torso of the event, so to speak. They had gone, purely on impulse, as a lark, to see what a pornographic movie would be like in Greece, in Crete. Pornography had been legalized fairly recently, they had gathered. They had walked in on the last tenth of a movie about a licentious Orthodox priest, which the audience was watching in total, fixated silence. Apparently it was a genre. He remembered the priest hanging himself at the end. And then he remembered clearly the suddenly different, rowdy, raucous response to the second feature, a piece of French pornography. The premise of the French film, beautifully photographed, as he recalled, had been odd. It was about a superbly beautiful matron, possibly a widow, who would only allow her lovers and suitors to perform cunnilingus on her. All of them were willing to do it, but they also, naturally, wanted to have follow-up regular intercourse. But all she would permit was the other, and there was no reciprocation from her, oddly enough for a pornographic movie. She rejects all the penises aimed her way. That was his recollection. He was remembering more. The woman was not a widow. Her husband was a society dentist who relieved his frustrations via other female characters who had more reasonable attitudes toward the penis. The dentist was getting it from the other sluts but not from his maddeningly spectacular creamy blond wife. He remembered thinking it was a slightly off-center premise for a pornographic movie. But the main thing she was reminding him had happened was that there had been a claque of young guys in the audience shouting out, at each instance of cunnilingus, Mathe, Vassilios! Mathe, Vassilios! Now he remembered that. And each bout of yelling had been followed by roars of laughter. And he remembered translating what they were saying, for Iris, when she asked. That he remembered. And the next thing he could remember was being back at the Cretan Sun and having memorable sex with Iris, in their freezing room.
“And you don’t remember my begging you to wait a second and wanting to wait around in the lobby?”
“No. But I remember it was freezing.”
“And you don’t remember being with me in the lobby, unwillingly, but waiting there with me, anything about that?”
“No.”
“And you don’t remember when finally after everybody else had left, after they were turning out the lights, dragging himself out was a poor physically fucked-up person, one leg dragging, this pitiful man with very white skin, an obvious sort of outcast, dragging himself out past us?”
“No, what I remember is the next act, same night.”
“Which was?”
“Well, back at the Cretan Sun. Making love there. Our room overlooked the market and we were right above the spice vendors.”
“And you don’t remember we exchanged looks when we saw this poor devil, this physically unfortunate man, or neighborhood idiot, or whatever he was? And we were sure he was Vassilios?”
What he remembered was hating the Cretan Sun, the cheapest hotel they had ever stayed in, the poster of Delphi above the bed with the line Il y a des poux dans cette chambre penciled neatly along the bottom margin, the miserable shower that gave two minutes of warm water.
“And you don’t remember we exchanged glances … And by the way, when you tell people about our adventures in Crete I would appreciate it if you’d leave out the n
ote on the poster about lice being in our room.”
He was obviously blocking out what should have been cognized as the main event, apparently, of that night. Sex was the reason. Somehow getting aroused, which he had, at the movies, had arced over to the sexual event, events, back at the Cretan Sun, and obliterated the interim for him. It had been that night at the Cretan Sun when he had come up with the affectionate term nethers for her pudenda, which had come from Netherlands, and which he still used from time to time.
He said, “We didn’t discuss this at the time, that night?” She shook her head.
“And we didn’t discuss it the next day, either, did we? That is, we never got into a discourse about it.”
“No, we were too stunned, I thought.”
“I remember noticing an oddlooking guy. But that’s all.”
He thought, Here it is, a thing that has never been an issue: But here it is courtesy of the female mind for which there is nothing dead that can’t be made to live again. He had failed to recognize the situation at the theater as the burning emblem of man’s inhumanity to man it obviously was for her. Then it hadn’t come up the next day due to their katastrofi, when she stepped into a hole in the pavement and cracked her ankle and then the nightmare come true of trying to get medical help in Crete had begun. He remembered every detail of that. He loved her, that was why. But here it was again, the past that lives forever, in detail, with women, like the women in Joyce, “The Dead,” ruining everything. Then at the museum in Heraklion they had been unable to see the murals because the galleries were closed due to a recent katastrofi. And then there had been the katastrofi of the side trip to Anoja in the White Mountains where the insane monster winds had blown his pitiful, hobbling wife flat into the sides of buildings and walls time after time.
She pushed herself to a standing position and got slowly out of the tub, distractedly, not punitively abandoning him, apparently. She was through. She was keeping her back to him, which could be just accidental.
He got out of the tub and dried himself off very thoroughly. He followed her damp footmarks into the bedroom. Once there, he malingered, dragging out finding the right pajamas and selecting a bathrobe from his oversupply. He had four, all gifts from Iris and all too expensive and all more appropriate for some rich parasite than for him. Why she kept buying him bathrobes that lacked pockets was a mystery. He settled on a black silk robe he thought he looked pretty good in. He combed his hair. Iris was in bed. Still naked, looking at a copy of the International Herald Tribune he knew was at least a week old.