Mortals

by Norman Rush

  “Ray, I want to talk to you forever. Can we?”

  “You know we can.”

  “But you didn’t ask for this expense with Ellen.”

  “It’s all right.” He was attracting her, which wasn’t the right word, still. He was getting something going …

  “Ray, how are you, are you eating decently?”

  He said, “I don’t have much appetite,” to his surprise, because it wasn’t true.

  “No appetite?” she said. “Why is that? Then go eat out …”

  He had committed a mistake. She felt criticized.

  “You don’t want Dimakatso to cook, so okay. She is perfectly adequate. I don’t want this on me. I don’t want to hear about how only one person can feed and nurture you the right way. I’m sorry. I’ll tell you what to do if you have no appetite. Don’t eat. Don’t eat for one day. I bet your appetite might come back. Do you have any idea of the insanity I am dealing with here, a tiny infant child, my sister, her friends, do you have the slightest idea? Wait, I’m sorry. I’m sorry. Oh God. I’m marginal. Oh Ray my darling. It’s stress. Pay no attention.”

  It was his fault. He had been tempted to go for sympathy by the stupid Ringnes. That was enough Ringnes. The pleasant feeling of having a little extra space in the top of the skull was declaring itself nicely. It was excellent beer, Norwegian. He liked Norwegians. Swedes he could take or leave.

  “Please forgive me,” she said.

  “Come on. Nothing to forgive.”

  “I have so much to tell you, Ray.”

  “Tell, then.”

  “I think it’s good my sister had this baby. I know it’s a mess with the father, but still. They love Ellen at the Montessori Institute. The job part of her life looks solid. She likes doing publicity. They pay pretty munificently. They think she’s brilliant.

  “She needed this child. She was volunteering to baby-sit for all her married friends and she was falling in love with their children. They could do no wrong. She would baby-sit for a twenty-one-month-old holy terror who would go through the apartment dismantling it. But after each depredation, like tearing the knobs off the stereo, he would toddle over to her holding out the thing he had torn off as a gift, giving this darling smile. Or he would go into the bathroom and grab a container of shampoo and come out and give it to you as another gift but leaving a trail of spilled shampoo all through your living room. Of course Ellen doesn’t keep the caps screwed on. But anyway the child would be picked up and she would slowly discern her apartment was in ruins. She had been in a dream. I met one of the children who pushed her over the edge, a darling little girl, just a toddler. When she came over to be baby-sat she brought along a whole menagerie of stuffed animals. Going to sleep meant collecting them into a heap and lying down on top of them. She had fantastic names for them. When I asked her about her animals she said, ‘I use them as friends.’ Ellen wrote the names down so she could refer to them correctly on the phone. They had a phone relationship. Look at this. I’m at her desk now and here’s a card with the names of the animals. Here they are … Snartz, Gwinty, Pobeel, Woot, Fard and Dardena. Don’t you love Dardena? How is St. James College?”

  He knew what he wanted from this conversation. He wanted to attract her and he wanted some evidence that he was succeeding. He wanted to hear that she was keeping her personal footing in all the upheaval around having a baby, particularly as the proposition might apply to her. He wanted her to miss Botswana, if that was possible. He wanted to hear what it felt like to be back in the States, if she liked it there. It was probably fortuitous that she had gone to Florida, which, if he was any judge, she was going to find boring and extreme, culturally. That was what he hoped. He had to say something about school. There was nothing attractive going on. The pigs were dead.

  “School is fine. No big changes.”

  “I think she’ll be a good mother. My fingers are crossed. Do you know what cradle cap is?”

  “Some type of bonnet for a child? No idea.”

  “No it’s a scalp condition. It’s like a crust. It’s unattractive. Newborns get it. You’re supposed to leave it alone, not be scrubbing it or oiling it every minute. Ellen can’t leave it alone.

  “She just has to calm down about this baby. I think she will. Her breasts are immense. She was never large-busted, Ray. She was like me …”

  So far, her attitude to the new baby wasn’t alarming. It was unromantic.

  “What is going to happen to this child? I suppose it’s a good thing it’s a girl. They say they’re easier. This child is not a good sleeper.”

  There was one other item he needed from this conversation. He needed to know if there was any chance that she had been in contact with Morel, any sign suggesting it.

  “Well, anyway. America. I have to say Davis was right about one thing, unless it’s just this particular neck of the woods. I think it’s all over. He was right about credulism reigning and spreading. That means religiosity …”

  “I figured,” Ray said.

  “Credulism,” she said. She seemed to love the word. “The country is in a religious frenzy of some kind. Everybody has Jesus bumperstickers saying one thing or another. Anybody who thinks religion is going the way of the goatee is in for a shock. I don’t know how happy Ellen is going to be, living around here. The local people have a feeling against single mothers, I gather, that she’s run into, because the day she put a sticker on her bumper saying God Is a Single Parent someone twisted her windshield wipers so that they had to be replaced. She sees a connection, but who knows. Also the kind of religion that’s around is kind of gruesome. One sticker has the image of a hand with a nail through it and the text says His Pain Your Gain. On Monday if you go someplace for fast food the cashier just automatically reaches out for your church bulletin so they can give you your ten percent off. Is anything happening at the embassy?”

  “Not a thing.”

  “Have they found Dwight Wemberg?”

  “No.” That was a true statement.

  “I think about him. I wish you could find him.”

  “What would I do if I did?”

  “Well, help him. Put him up. I don’t know.”

  “Concretely, though …”

  “Find out what he needed you to do. Intervene for him.”

  “Well, it’s a fantasy.”

  “It’s so pitiful, love coming to an end that way, the way it does. This separation from you is so painful, Ray, because it brings up … you know what I mean. It’s like a rehearsal.” She was insanely truthful.

  He was in pain. He said, “You mean the final separation. I know, I know. Look, don’t talk about it. I want you back here, my good girl, my love …” An odd sound came out of him.

  “Stop, I’m crying,” she said. “Wait a minute till I find some Kleenices … I know I had some, a new packet.”

  The love of a woman with a funny mind is the definition of paradise, he thought. The word Kleenices was, of course, plural for Kleenex. It was an old item between them, but he hadn’t heard it for a while.

  “Here we are,” she said. “I knew I had some. I put them in my purse, unbeknownst to me. This is what I want. If I die first, this is what I want you to do. Take my ashes and put them in an urn on the coffee table and then every now and then lift the lid and shout the latest down into it, whatever is going on.”

  “Then you do the same.”

  “Don’t say it. I can’t stand it if you die first. It’s worse if you die than if I do.”

  “Please don’t say that and please let’s not have this conversation when you’re there where I can’t hold you.” Save you, was what he meant.

  “I’m wretched without you,” she said, her voice very low.

  His breathing was easier, distinctly.

  She was irreplaceable. That was the problem. She was uniquely funny. Now his mind was flooding with moments and episodes that proved it. They had stayed overnight at the Tshwaragano Hotel in Serowe where the management was bell-mad and ra
ng a ship’s bell for every meal, including breakfast at seven. And they had dragged in dead tired at three in the morning and gotten to bed and then for no reason someone had begun banging the bell at five-thirty, waking them, and he had asked why in hell they were doing that and she had said, “They’re practicing.” And when he had noticed in the paper that Belfast and Beirut had become sister cities, she had said, “What do they do, exchange rubble?” He remembered being with her in a diner when they were dating, before he’d had any notion about how funny she was, and when she was being offered a second cup of coffee by the waitress she’d said, “Oh no thanks, if I drink that I’ll be up all day,” making the woman laugh. And when he’d wondered aloud what the correct name for a male ballet dancer was, she had said ballerino. And then when he’d mentioned that physicist who had concluded that the universe was made up of just three kinds of matter, she’d said, “Yes, I know, ether, phlogiston, and ectoplasm.” She liked to deny that she ever farted. And when he’d been passing by the bathroom when she was in the tub and he’d heard something suspicious and said, “Did you fart?” she’d said, “Certainly not. I was just submerging my head to belch.” And when he’d once remarked, “Wasn’t that a particularly virtuous lunch we had,” she’d said, “It was more than just virtuous, it was actually unpleasant.” And then she’d said one morning, “If I make us stop drinking coffee and only make tea, will you start hating me?” and he had said no and then she had said, “Well then, if I keep making us coffee and forget about tea, will you stop hating me?” That one was slightly ineffable. They had an idiom together. That was it. She was the author of it. He was never funny. Except that she had laughed when he described her chest as the Globe Theatre, a literary nothing, his pinnacle. He had to escape this.

  He said, “Before I forget, we can get fennel now. They have fennel at Notwane Gardens.”

  “I lost you. We can get what?”

  He raised his voice. “Fennel. Fennel.” This was not what he wanted, to be shouting fennel to his darling girl. And she was a girl. He was forty-eight.

  “Well, eat some,” she said.

  His hunger was coming back.

  “Are you eating okay, not too much meat and potatoes without end? And you’re keeping up with the garlic capsules. If you don’t take anything else, take those. Let me see if I can put Ellen on for just a sec. I think she’s still asleep. Let me check. She sleeps more than the baby.”

  He waited.

  She returned. She said, “Still out. Which gives me a chance to tell you something else I don’t want her to hear. Her friends around here. They’re mostly arts and crafts, and some who consider themselves artists. There’s a little antiques store and art gallery enclave where they all love her. She buys so much crap, is why, crap of theirs. I won’t ever complain about the embassynians again, I promise. We went to a couple of openings and at one of them I got into an argument in a flash with a woman who got a certain disappointed expression on her face when we were introduced and she understood that I was using my husband’s last name. This was a big disappointment to her since I was Ellen’s sister, Ellen being a paragon of freeness, being unmarried and having this baby and all. This woman’s given last name was Johnson, paternal last name. So I merely observed that she was choosing to privilege, that’s a very popular term with them, privilege, the name of a male, her biological father, over the name of her presumably beloved chosen husband, accident over choice. And of course her dumb name also incorporated somebody being the son of some ancient John. It was hardly as though she had dumped all her nomenclature in favor of something completely invented, like Dora Violin Moon-leaf or something. By the way, all the people in this milieu have the most blinding white teeth. Everyone over a certain income is getting bonding and capping like crazy. Even my sister bleaches her teeth at night, every night. Even in the hospital. So that was round one. Round two was an artist whose work was on display under gigantic lenses. In the catalog she was described as a micromuralist, which does not mean that she was a very-small-in-stature muralist. I pray God Ellen can’t hear this. No this was a person, you will not believe this, who inscribed little primitive scenes on pebbles and in a couple of instances on actual lima beans, dried limas. And I couldn’t help but wonder out loud why anyone would say mural in connection with these little … scratchments on pebbles. I wanted to know what they had in common with murals, with big, broadly executed, jammed, huge wall pictures. Now if the artist had carved a tiny figure with its back to us at the bottom edge of these scratchments, as though the figure were looking at the image, there might have been a case. I didn’t make a big scene. I just asked one or two people, but it got around. They make you want to act philistine.

  “I’m going on like this not because it’s interesting but because I can’t let you go. You’ll be gone when I stop telling you things. So I’m telling you everything I can think of.”

  “I love it,” he said.

  “I love you, Ray, meboy. Oh do I. I miss you. How’s your penis? How’s your trusty penis?”

  “My rusty penis? That it is.”

  “You heard me.”

  “I think this is phone sex.”

  “I know. We’d better stop. It isn’t fair to Ellen. What if she heard? Okay, so what else can I tell you. Well. Thinking. Even around here there are homeless. And another thing you see is people laying out displays of belongings, clothing and personal items, on the sidewalk. It has to be done quick, before the cops come. And this is not a poor neighborhood, either.

  “And I have to tell you that Davis was right about something else in this country. It’s not his idea but it’s true. He gave me an article about the exteriorization of the self. It’s pretty self-explanatory. You see it everywhere. People advertise what they are, young people especially, by sign-age, essentially. People advertise what they are, their affiliations. They wear tee shirts with messages instead of plain, like we wore. They wear violent personal ornaments and tattoos. The idea is that when people dressed more or less all the same, within the same middle-class spectrum, you demonstrated who you were in the things you revealed when you talked to people, what you read, what you knew. Now nobody knows anything different than the next guy. It’s all music and media boilerplate on the inside. So therefore why not get wondrously overmuscled or put metal studs in your eyelids? This I’ve seen. This article calls it a panic over differentiation. And it’s true. Well.

  “I love you I love you. And speaking of Davis, Ray, could you do me a favor and call him?”

  Now this. Ray had been about to take a surreptitious bite of steak. He put his fork down.

  “Call him?”

  “Yes, would you?”

  “Call him and say what?”

  “I’m about to tell you. Call him and say I don’t think I’m going to get much homework done on this trip.”

  “What kind of homework are you talking about?”

  “Well, a journal I was supposed to keep. And also a book I’m supposed to read when I have a free moment, Homo Hierarchicus, by an anthropologist. It’s something you might be interested in, but it has absolutely nothing to do with me. It’s about the caste system in India.”

  “Couldn’t you send him a card? I’m sure he’d love to hear from you, not me. Or you could call him.”

  “A card takes too long and I don’t want him to think I’m doing something I’m not doing. And I feel awkward calling. I don’t think this rises to the importance of a phone call, and I don’t want to spend the money for that when you can just give him a ring. This is already costing a fortune, this trip. I don’t like to think about it.”

  “I will, then. Tomorrow.”

  “Ray, it’s only partly that I have no time, to tell you the truth. When I start writing in my journal it turns into reams of hysterical stuff I already know and don’t want to think about, mainly regarding my mother and also Ellen, who has a sneaky side to her personality. And I write about you. I write things about you you wouldn’t mind reading. But I just don
’t want to be doing this now. My job is to keep my act together. I have to cope. But I said I would do this stuff and now I’m not going to.”

  She was in anxiety. Why was Morel back in this conversation, he wanted to know. It was bitter. It was bitter.

  He didn’t want to talk anymore. She disliked the silence he was making. He could sense it.

  She said, “What about the CODESA talks, Ray? Where the ANC walked out? Is this very bad news?”

  He was a little startled. He said, “No it’s only going to be temporary. Don’t worry about it.” But he felt it was odd that she had brought it up. It just happened recently. She wasn’t getting the New York Times, there in Florida. It was big news in Botswana and the Republic, of course, but it was odd that she had heard about it, or was it? Of course she was always nervous about the chance that things would go badly in South Africa and that danger and disruption would come back across the border to Botswana. He didn’t like what he was suspecting, which was that she had in fact just been in touch with Morel and that everything she had said in that connection had been a deception, which would explain asking him to do something that was, in the circumstances, going to be unpleasant for him, calling a man she knew he had negative feelings about, contriving to show, by that, how minor a presence Morel was for both of them, how unthreatening Ray ought to find him, to desensitize, to desensitize. His thoughts were racing. He hated this.

  “Where did you hear about it, Iris? Are they covering it on TV?”

  “No, not really. In the paper.”