Mortals

by Norman Rush

  It was so clear and so dumb, what was happening. He was being cast as the incarnation of Secrecy. It was inevitable because he worked for the agency and the agency was what, Secrecy Itself. And at the same time she was casting Morel as the dry light of the mind that goes everywhere, anywhere, as Truth with the bit between its teeth, the maypole of Truth she was traipsing around like a berserk Isadora Duncan, flinging her arms around like a jerk, naked, flutes and ribbons all over. That was the scene he was trapped in.

  But at least his costume was perfect. He was uncomfortably warm, a natural consequence of dressing himself in a daze, putting pajamas on without reference to what season it was. Black matched his mood. It was his fault that she kept giving him pocketless robes. The first robe she’d given him had been pocketless and he’d praised it. The absence of pockets had seemed to him like a fairly central objection, especially considering the effort she’d gone to, delegating her sister, transatlantic phone consultations. And it had been when they were starting out, when she was insecure about buying things for him. So now all he needed was a cocktail shaker and a Santos Dumont in a cigarette holder and it would be clear he had wandered in from an adjoining farce, a Noël Coward farce. In fact they were both costumed perfectly for the scene, layers and blackness for him, and for her … nudity, symbolizing fearless disclosure.

  Now she was sitting on the edge of the bed, her back three-quarters to him, examining the sole of her foot. The great aesthetic absolute, he thought.

  She caught him looking too raptly at her. “Why are you looking at me that way?” she asked.

  “I’m not looking at you, I’m beholding you.”

  “Well this is the wrong moment for it. By the way, I think you have mild priapism.”

  “That’s the best kind.”

  “Well don’t,” she said, smiling a little.

  She was going to sum up. He could tell. She held her mouth in a certain way.

  She said, “First, nothing is going to happen to us. Second, I’m going to go and be with Ellen and I’ll be back in six weeks and everything will be okay, I promise.”

  “When did we say six weeks?” he asked, not calmly enough.

  “Well six weeks at the outside.”

  Do not resist, he thought, saying, “Well six weeks then, although … it wracks and harrows me.” He was surprised at himself. Somehow he had decided to be slightly poetic just then. It was insane. She was looking at him with a certain heightened interest, he thought, although it might be concern and not interest. There were still moments in his life when he felt capable of poetry. When the impulse was there he was normally afraid of it, for the simple reason that he wasn’t a poet. The Irish, or some of them, felt free to burst out with it. But even in the case of the Irish talking gorgeously he knew they were working from a fixed menu of tropes and images and not engaging in individual invention. What was he doing? He wanted to send her away with an absolute knowledge of how lovely she was to him, was all. But this had been like a deacon suddenly breaking into a juggling routine. You can’t just wrench yourself into some new and cuter state, he thought. He was embarrassed. They were both going to ignore it. He thanked God.

  “I don’t think we should have sex tonight,” she said.

  He couldn’t agree more. Having sex would dishonor their differences.

  “I couldn’t agree more,” he said. His tone dissatisfied him and he added, “I mean that. I seriously do. And if you would slip into something less comfortable it would be a help.”

  She was amused. He went to the closet and got out his favorite robe of hers, a blue and white yakuta they had bought in Paris. He draped it over her shoulders and she got properly into it in a rather piecemeal if not exactly teasing manner, he thought. He was a little surprised to realize that the blue elements in the pattern were winged seeds, on the order of locust seeds, and not the Horus eyes they had been in his mental picture of the garment for years. Lately he was looking too closely at everything around her. It was fear. It felt valedictory.

  How could he tell that they weren’t, even now, through yet? It was in the eyes. What else there could be was beyond him. He was probably safe in assuming that they were down to odds and ends, that she’d started with the more offensive items and was working down, the way he would have. There was no guarantee about that, though. Now he was scaring himself.

  He said, “Look, the best thing now would be if you would just tell me everything that’s still on your mind, if anything is, because … because here we are.” In hell, he thought.

  “I don’t think there’s anything special,” she said. She was undecided, he could tell. Was she trying to gauge what he could take at one sitting?

  “This is truly minor,” she said.

  But it wasn’t. She could barely bring it out, which could mean that it was about what, their sex life, as in too much or too little …

  “I think I want to take a break from reading novels … by men. I don’t know why. I just feel like it. Don’t be so stunned. You know how grateful I am to you for your help and effort getting me good books. I’ve depended on your recommendations and they’ve been wonderful. Maybe it’s that I want to take a break from novels per se in general.”

  Injustice never sleeps, he thought. Finding decent and reasonably current reading for her in Africa had been a major task, a career. Help and effort was right, especially effort. It took work to develop literate social contacts, who inevitably got reassigned. Taste among the embassy people ran at the level of James Michener. The paperback leftovers that turned up in the jumble sales departing embassy officers gave were an embarrassment to the United States. The American Library had no budget and what it had it spent on Young Adult titles.

  “Look, my function has been to cultivate my contacts to get you things that are current and good and that you wouldn’t be able to get very easily on your own. Or things that you asked for specifically. You know what the public library is like. I doubt I’ve been biasing my selections toward male authors. Have I? I get you every Iris Murdoch as it falls crashing from the press. I think the last novel I got you was by A. N. Wilson, a man, unfortunately, but you liked it a lot, I thought. I think you wanted more by him. I got you every Barbara Pym there is, somehow.”

  “I love A. N. Wilson. But I think I don’t want to be worrying about the problems of male narrators anymore. I do not want to be worrying about the problems of men, sad as they may be. It’s similar to not wanting to read novels about the drug life or other kinds of self-destructiveness. I’ve read them. And I don’t care how sensitive they are, I don’t want to read about drunks.”

  “Hey, fine,” he said. He could tell it was distressing her to do this. She was in the grip of something.

  “You don’t think it’s fine.”

  “I do. I guess maybe you’ve had enough of the Male Gaze, as they call it. I can understand that.”

  “I have no idea what the Male Gaze you’re talking about is. I don’t know if …”

  He interrupted. “It’s not complicated. It’s feminist. It’s a concept that says, sees, that in the arts, especially the movies but also books, everything, even by women, gets expressed in the male viewpoint, in what interests the male psyche.”

  “That seems too simple. It may be the novel per se …”

  But he knew what it was. He thought, So much for my syllabus: Her new one is from a darker hand.

  She said, “I think all it may be is this. I think I’ve gotten too automatic when it comes to novels. I think I have a dependence. I get panicky when I don’t have a good one on hand. You know. Maybe it’s novels by anybody. Don’t stand over me like that. Come sit here.” She patted his place in the bed.

  He took her hand. Why was it he was absolutely sure there was something more? There had to be, because her breathing was still tight.

  “Ray, I love you and I want to be completely fair with you.

  “About Davis, maybe you already know this. It’s a problem with you. I don’t know what you
know.

  “But I think I do need to mention this last thing. About him. I gather from things he says that a main reason he left the U.S. and came here is because of objections he has to the CIA. As a citizen.

  “It seems like everything I’m saying to you tonight is causing you pain, and I am so sorry, but I can’t help it. He thinks the agency does terrible things and operates with impunity. Or has done them. It’s historical, but of course it would have to be historical because whatever the agency is doing now is secret. I sound stupid. You see what I’m saying.”

  Beware, he thought. He spoke evenly. “Please. He knows nothing.”

  “You’re probably right. It’s mainly the agency in Central America he objects to.”

  Ray said, “He thinks he knows something he doesn’t.”

  “Well. Guatemala and Nicaragua, specifically, if that’s any comfort.”

  “I don’t need any comfort.”

  “I know. It’s the contras, most of all, and the fact nobody cares that sixty thousand Nicaraguans died, paid for by us, and nobody was punished. He makes a case. It’s my fault for bringing it up, or causing it to be brought up, rather. I was naturally curious about why he came here and wants citizenship. He plans to be here forever, if he can, can you believe that? I got off the subject immediately when I saw what he was saying, believe me, Ray. I just listen and nod when the subject comes up, which is rare anyway. This is not something that’s going to get any kind of response from me. You know you can trust me about it. You do know that. I’m sorry it came up.”

  “What he thinks he knows hardly matters, Iris. You know me and you know whether I would ever do anything dishonorable.” He felt false. He had said this before. Of course Nicaragua had been wrong and brutal and no way would he have been part of it. But this was Africa.

  She said, “Don’t hate me.”

  It was odd. Twice in the past when he was undertaking critical operations that had turned out to be mortally dangerous for him he had gotten a distinctive feeling in his hands and here it was again.

  “What’s wrong?” He didn’t know what she meant.

  “You’re wringing your hands,” she said. He stopped.

  She was not the villain here. Nothing was her fault. He had to keep her from regretting doing this.

  She said, “I never want to hurt you, Ray, my good love. I’m just so sorry if any of this has. Please don’t worry. And about my reading, I think I’m in a phase. Reading novels is … I feel like … it’s like waiting, a form of waiting.”

  “I understand everything,” he said.

  “I don’t know what we’re doing, Ray, that’s all. I don’t know what we’re doing but I want to stop.”

  When had she been this unhappy? He couldn’t remember a time.

  They embraced, trembling equally.

  16. Milton, We Are Surrounded

  Iris was sleeping in. He would be alone at breakfast, which was for the best. He was never precisely himself early in the morning, but today he was particularly off, still raggedly adjusting to last night’s announcements. He felt frail.

  The thin orange drapes on the yardside window had been closed against the sun. He disliked the hell-flush they imparted to the atmosphere of the room, but not enough to do anything about it. He looked into the kitchen before taking his seat. Dimakatso was at the stove, muttering. He knew he should run through the formal greetings, but he decided to let himself skip it. She seemed to have her hands full. This was not a standard compilation she was working on. Obviously, Iris had left instructions for her to prepare something more elaborate than the usual. It was a gesture.

  He realized that a funny thing had been going on recently, involving the issue of the International Herald Tribune that Iris had been reading or pretending to read last night. She had been subtly flourishing the damned thing in front of him for a few days. It was here, on the table opposite him, where Iris would normally be sitting, folded to the width of one column and doubled under in order to expose some particular article. He knew his wife. There was something in the paper that he needed to know about that was likely to displease or depress him. She preferred not to be seen as bringing it directly to his attention for fear of seeming to endorse it or to be taken as wielding it against him, especially in these tense days. And clearly she had been gathering that since he hadn’t mentioned whatever this was, he hadn’t seen it, which was right. She had her ways. All this was the fruit of her tenderness.

  Dimakatso was at his shoulder, carrying the tray with his breakfast on it. She stood there while his meal cooled. He knew what she wanted. He got to his feet.

  He said “Dumela, mma. O tsogile?”

  “Dumela, rra. Ke tsogile sentle. Wena o tsogile?”

  “Ke tsogile sentle.”

  “Gosiame.”

  “Gosiame.” He could sit down. The Batswana were so exacting about etiquette. Maybe it was admirable. It was better than the reverse, which Iris was going to not enjoy in the land of the free soon enough.

  His breakfast was royal. There was streaky bacon, the only cut in that part of the world at all like normal American bacon, two strips of it cooked as crisp as it could ever be gotten to be. There was an egg over easy, and two heated buns. He had switched from sunnyside up to over easy earlier during their time in Botswana as a way of lessening the starkness of the daily encounter with the unnatural amber color of the yolks of the local eggs. There was a ramekin of chopped parsley he was expected to strew on his eggs. That was Iris’s idea. She admitted it was notional. She’d awakened from a dream with the absolute conviction that eating parsley at every meal would guarantee extreme longevity. They had laughed over it together. But parsley was making suspiciously frequent appearances as a garnish. There was a tumbler of pear nectar, not chilled. There was a lump of leftover potato rissole. There was brewed coffee.

  He ate for a while, then reached for the paper. He was meant to read a review of a new book on Milton. Christopher Lehmann-Haupt was the reviewer and the author was a woman, Marianne Wormser, whose work he remembered seeing and dismissing years ago. Now apparently she had produced the book that would change forever the way Milton should be read. He steeled himself. The word magisterial would no doubt show up. So, Milton was the laureate of obedience, generic obedience. He had to get through this rapidly, because it was going to be painful in every way possible. At the heart of Western culture was this unfortunate epic of obedience deified, disobedience condemned. Milton was the subjugator of women in his own family, which no one disagreed with, although some allowance for the demands of a disabled genius frantic to complete his masterpieces might have been granted. Reading on, he thought: The old refrain: Milton says, “Service to God is perfect freedom,” and since God is male, need we say more … Women hate Milton because of Eve, the portrait of Eve, which they misunderstand, especially where her first thought on biting the apple is that she might someday be Adam’s equal and her second is that she might be his actual superior. What they fail to see in Milton would fill a book … Ah here it is, of course … Women are to blame for both sin and death, because a female, Sin, was born from Satan’s brain in the thought of rebelling against God, and seductive Sin was raped by Satan, and she gave birth to Death, so women are to blame for both Sin and Death … Ah she thinks Death is also a daughter, a female?… This has to be wrong … It’s absurd, a reading so tortured. Could Wormser be right that Death was female? He would have to check. It was something he should know like the back of his hand. How could he not love Iris, who was trying to arm him against his colleagues in case he had missed this? But he had no colleagues. Their minds were elsewhere. Little did she know.

  He read more. Wormser restating the obvious … It was Satan’s rebellion against God’s appointing his Son as his vice-regent that had started the whole human ball of doom rolling. That was the premise, of course. He thought, Regurgito Ergo Sum, we have heard it before, goodbye. Next it will be the angel Raphael lecturing Adam and Eve against speculative thought … and
here it is! The book had won prizes. The pillars of Milton studies were being shaken. Paradise Lost was reduced to symbolic recantation for Milton’s participation in regicide and republicanism plus fear and hatred and vilification of the female. Christian civilization was a galley ship, poor blind Milton was beating the drum for the galley slaves. Calumny never sleeps, he thought.

  It was intolerable and it was wrong and, worst of all, it was shallow. Where had Marianne Wormser been publishing? What he would give to have time to rebut this shit! It was important that Iris not accept this cartoon as having anything to be said for it. He had to find time for that before she left. He had to. He could see where she thought Lehmann-Haupt had placed him in yet another category of error.

  He thought, There are two Miltons, they only see one … Empson saw them both … The true man, the suffering man, is both rebellion and obedience, the ecstasy of apostasy and the hell of inevitable compliance … We are all of us Milton, rebelling and complying and rebelling and complying until we die exhausted.

  I saw this thing, he wrote across the top of the review.

  He got up. Milton, we are surrounded, he thought. Sometime he wanted to write a short story beginning with the sentence Day fell.

  17. So, My Boy, Now You Have Him

  He was in awe over Marion doing this for him, with some awe left over for himself, his temerity in reaching out to Marion and asking for this help, his own ingenuity in setting up everything on the technical side of this secure connection. It was going to happen.