Mortals

by Norman Rush

  Be yourself, he thought. That was an all-purpose thing he had heard from his mother ten thousand times in completely disparate situations. It was a bromide. It was the answer to how to get through any conceivable situation. He should be more charitable toward his mother. She was suffering over Rex, her favorite.

  “What do you think of Iris?” Ray asked. He’d wanted it to sound like a different question than the one he’d been asking so far. But it sounded like a repetition.

  “I think she’s doing fine. Medically she’s excellent. But there are, or there were, rather, certain areas I helped her with that I don’t feel I can go into. But as of right now, she’s fine. I mean it.”

  Ray found this enraging. He controlled his rage.

  He said, “You mean because of doctor-patient rules? That’s why you can’t say, exactly.” He knew he was sounding hostile.

  “That’s right.”

  “But I’m her husband.”

  “Of course. But that’s not relevant.”

  “Don’t give me that, man.”

  “That’s the way it is.”

  “Let me put it this way to you, in case you don’t know. She tells me everything anyway. If there was something she neglected to tell me, it was by accident, something that got away because of circumstances. I guarantee you that. Anything she told you is something she would’ve told me, I guarantee you. We told, I mean we tell, each other everything.”

  “You’re getting excited. Don’t get excited.”

  “I’m not excited, I’m just trying to get you to understand something.

  “Anything going on with Iris, physical things, anything, I knew all about. So, okay. That was our history. That’s our history. Same with me telling her about my problems, my ailments.

  “So okay.

  “So okay the only thing I can think of, kind of thing I can think of, kind of thing there might be a case for keeping secret, would be sexual things.

  “Sexual, and I don’t even know what I mean, unless I mean something like a sexual disease she got someplace she didn’t want me to know about. Or catch from her. I’m using my imagination here.

  “What else, a miscarriage she didn’t want me to know about. An abortion. I don’t know how that would ever happen. She wanted children. She always did. But I’m using my imagination, and let’s say the father was an insignificant other not myself. I am exhausting my creative powers.”

  Ray felt himself doing something stupid, and sensing it was bringing him close to panic. He was referring to Iris and their life together as past, over with, past tense. That was impossible. He was giving away the barn. It was destroying his strategy for getting the whole truth, not that he had a strategy worth the name. He had some ideas about how to proceed. But he was putting their relationship in the past tense too much, which was tipping his hand. There was a way to do successful interrogations.

  He waited as long as he could for Morel to respond. He had no patience. He went ahead.

  “So I can imagine situations it would be legitimate to keep confidential. Of course they’re fantasy situations, if I know anything about my wife, and I know a great deal about my wife. But I can imagine them and I don’t contest that it would be legitimate to be confidential about them. I’m repeating myself, I see.

  “So you can do me a huge favor and just tell me yes or no, was it, is it, something like that, something she would legitimately need to keep private. I can imagine similar cases for myself, similar fantasies, which is what they would be. But … and I know I’m straining the limits of your professional oaths and all that, no doubt, but just tell me if what you’re talking about that you can’t elucidate was something in that category, that’s all, just that. You can do that.”

  Now he was skirting another abyss he had to avoid.

  Imploring was the abyss, or rather it was right next to it, the real abyss being begging, sheer begging. He could see himself falling into that as a last resort, if his interrogation strategy failed, which it couldn’t. He was a professional. He had been trained in unusual subjects. He had to remember that. Be yourself, he thought.

  Morel was being intolerably dignified. Ray felt he couldn’t take much more of it.

  He had to go on. “Look, can you do me the favor of saying yes or not, I mean no, no it wasn’t anything sexual, some sexual thing, accident, misstep, what have you, or yes unfortunately it was, whichever is the truth.”

  He had kept himself from saying please, by a hair. He was glad. But he seemed to be in a maze, with every step, every turn, taking him back to the beast at the heart of the maze, the beast with two backs, in fact.

  “Don’t put me in this position,” Morel said.

  “I don’t mean to. But look at it this way. This will be medication for me, sort of.”

  Ray had something he wanted to communicate about sex before he forgot it, lost his grip on it. The thought was important. But Morel was hardly the correct recipient. And Ray wanted to remember it, for later. And it was an insight he was having about the sex act with a beloved, and the insight was that the poets were wrong and that sex was not a metaphor for loving, a good metaphor for love, for entering a beloved, unifying with her, making a unity. It was difficult to put clearly. But sex was not a good metaphor for loving because there was a form of connection between real lovers that made sex look like an approximation of it. People like Lawrence were responsible for getting the less important thing moved up to the head of the line where it didn’t belong. It was possible he was making this up so good sex between Iris and Morel wouldn’t be so painful. Iris would understand what he meant, or she would have. And there was the rub, so to speak. Of course it was possible that his insights were commonplace and uninteresting. That was why he needed Iris. Because not only would she know if they were, no, the fact was that just framing a way to set something in front of her mind would cause him to think twice, see it for what it was, dump it or postpone it, or improve it enough to go with. That was then, he thought. It was something he had to get used to.

  Morel said, “Okay look you can stop worrying about that kind of thing.” He said it rapidly and Ray knew why. He was speeding through it because it made him feel false. He was affirming that there hadn’t been some kind of precursory sexual situation with Iris, which he could do with a clear conscience. And at the same time he was skating past the fact that he was having an affair in the present, right at present, if affair was the right word for it. He was skating past a sex situation that was worse, more monumental.

  “Thank you,” Ray said.

  “My pleasure,” Morel answered. Ray resented Morel’s choice of language.

  “So then can you just go a little further for me, on what it is you feel you have to be confidential about? I mean, narrow it down in some way.”

  “Okay, let me see. Well, very generally, it was for therapy.”

  “As in psychotherapy.”

  “Yes.”

  “She was … what?”

  “She was in need of therapy. Oh fuck it, man, she was depressed. That’s it.”

  “And now she isn’t.”

  “Right, she isn’t.”

  “Now she’s happy.”

  “I didn’t say she’s happy. What I am saying is that she isn’t depressed.”

  “Clinically depressed, you’re saying she was?”

  “I don’t know what that is. It’s a label. She was unhappy enough to want to talk about it and do something about it.”

  Don’t make me kill you, Ray thought. The fact was he had some respect for Morel’s ethics so far. He was holding back information he knew would be painful to Ray, holding it back as well as he could. And he was couching everything he did say so that nothing would be a lie direct when they got to the heart of the labyrinth and met the beast, the one with two backs. Because they were going to get there. On the other hand the man was intolerable and it was intolerable that what he was saying without actually saying it was that Iris was much happier now that she was receiving the docto
r’s mighty affection, the doctor’s love and care with the emphasis on love, the clouds lifting, landscapes of joy by Maxfield Parrish springing into view, paradise, O paradise. And she was a paradise … a portable one, apparently. No, Morel was smart and tough, but he was going to have to let everything out. It was coming. The man was intelligent. He had to know.

  Ray was ready for Morel to be adamant in denial, but this was probably the best moment to go in for the truth. The Adamant Penis would be a good title for a porn thing. It could go with the titles of unwritten books in his brother’s olla podrida. The Butcher Elf was one of those. He had to get Strange News back from the bastards who had it now. It was urgent. He had to try.

  “You admire my wife,” Ray said, which was wrong, which would remind Morel of her legal status. It would put his back up. He was going to stick strictly to Iris for the foreseeable future.

  “Of course,” Morel said.

  Ray felt he needed to switch his angle of attack.

  He said, “By the way, I don’t know if this is the right question but what, um, school of therapy are you in, or from? That is, who do you follow? I’m curious.”

  Ray waited. There were a number of ludicrous or exploded names he could think of that might be mentioned, like Jung, like the Englishman whose name he couldn’t remember who had encouraged people to go nuts as a form of liberation. And of course Freud himself was in a certain amount of bad odor. It was too much to hope for that Morel would mention somebody Ray knew was an established fool. We live in hope, Ray thought.

  Morel said, “No particular school. I took the basic courses for qualifying in psychiatry but I never got a certificate. I read a lot and I rejected a lot and I came up with my own mix.”

  “Your own mix.”

  “Yes. Well, I like the work of Erich Fromm, The Fear of Freedom, do you know it?”

  The name was a name he knew and that was all he knew. But he didn’t necessarily like the title of the book Morel had mentioned. And he did realize he had made a mistake, opening up an avenue to a discussion of different schools of therapy instead of getting to the subject matter. He had to retreat so he could attack properly, reculer pour mieux sauter, was the phrase. We live out phrases we barely remember, he thought.

  Suddenly something intrusive was going on outside, at a distance. There were cries. He and Morel tried to listen seriously together. The cries stopped. Ray realized that his injuries had come back to life, hurting, all at once. They had been fine when he had been concentrating on the subject matter. Something terrible was going on in what it was fair to call the outside world, but he wanted it to stop mainly so he could continue going where he had been going with Morel. He couldn’t help it.

  Morel wanted to keep on listening to the fracas or whatever it was. He wanted Ray to listen with him and that was unacceptable because the subject matter had to be gotten through. Nothing would be normal until that was accomplished.

  Ray said, “You find Iris attractive.”

  Morel made a show of reluctance in turning his attention back to Ray, to the subject matter.

  “When did I say that?” Morel asked.

  “But do you or don’t you?”

  “She’s an attractive woman. Yes.”

  “So you find her attractive?”

  “What is this?”

  “She’s staying at your place, isn’t she? Can we establish that?”

  “She came to the intensive, yes.”

  “And she’s still staying there now.” It stands to reason, Ray thought. He was guessing, but he was sure it was the case.

  Morel was hesitant. He was contemplating the possibility that word of the arrangement had somehow reached Ray in the depths of the Kalahari.

  “You’re right. She’s at my place, looking after things. After we decided I should come up here it seemed to make sense. She’s been helpful around the place, in the office, in the clinic.”

  “She’s helpful to you.”

  “She is, really. In fact we talked about a position.”

  “A position there, with you.” Words are cruel, Ray thought.

  “Part-time.”

  “So you find her attractive and maybe she could have a job in your establishment.”

  “I don’t get this.”

  “Sure you do. But let me ask you a different question. Which is this. Assume something happened to me, say. This is hypothetical. Something happened to take me away. A misadventure. You would help her. You’d see that she was fine.”

  “Don’t you have insurance?”

  “Sure. But say she’s distraught. She needs help. She wants to stay in Africa. Her family in America, forget it. She’s at her wit’s end. You’d help her, take over and help her, orient her. This huge venue you live in, plenty of room. You take people in, you have. She told me about that. It’s something you do. And this is a woman you’ve helped to get on her feet from something that was bothering her, whatever that was. How would I know? But you’ve gotten her out of depression, an episode. She depends on you.”

  “Well of course. But …”

  “But nothing. You’ve formed an attachment. You’d see that she was all right. Her family is a zero, her mother. She has a sister, you may know about her, a basket case with a child, and we even thought, mainly Iris thought, we should consider taking her in …”

  “Oh hey God damn me, man, I forgot. I have news about Ellen Iris wanted me to give you. The news about your brother drowned it out, I guess. Sorry.

  “Anyway, Ellen met someone. I have to be sure I have this right. She teaches in a Montessori school and what was it, she ran the music program. And she ran a recorder consort, as part of that. And a parent of one of the students, a widower, young widower, joined the recorder consort. Well, young. He was fifty. But in any case they came together and he fell in love with her. He’s an attorney, very, as she tells it, well fixed.

  “There’s more to the story. At some point after some stumbling attempt of his to participate correctly in the recital she went up to him and told him she loved him, like that, just announced it …”

  “It runs in the family, being very direct. Iris was direct with me. She wasn’t what I was used to,” Ray said.

  I have to escape this, he thought. Scenes from his courtship of Iris were the last things he needed to descend on his ass, her straight pure declarations, how little jockeying there had been, the shocks of straight truth, her pure face, her face so graphic.

  “So you know all about her family.”

  “Oh yeah, pretty much.” He had the decency to say it lightly, but still it stabbed, bit. Everything he says hurts, Ray thought.

  Morel kept on. “The main thing is that they’re married. He adores her and the child. So it looks fine. Just between us, I have to say keep your fingers crossed. But Iris is looking on the bright side. She’s very relieved.”

  I am plunging into something, falling down, sinking, Ray thought. He wanted to know what it was, why it was, because it was terrible, worse than anything.

  I know what it is, he thought. It was Iris needing no help being Atlas, and holding up the world the way it had taken two of them to do. She had only been able to do it with his help, up to now. On the one hand there had been her sister and on the other had been his brother and now there was nothing, the mist leaving the trees. What it reminded him of was the brilliant cover on the magazine Impreccor that the Communist International had distributed around the world in the thirties and forties, not to mention the twenties, with the graphic of the muscular worker raising his sledgehammer for yet another blow against the chained-up globe, the world, the chains breaking but also the underlying world fracturing, incidentally. It was all there. He had studied those pages like a madman in the days when communism was going to be a permanent half or three-quarters of the world, including China, and there was going to be destruction, machines of destruction, created in those dark precincts and then it had all turned into mist stuck in the trees on Orcas Island until the sun came out. His b
rother was gone and her sister was fine. All their thinking of what to do was over and he was unnecessary. Morel had money, like a thick soft cloud and pillow under anything he wanted to do, enough for two of them, enough for her to develop causes and projects of her own. The truth of the matter was that she could begin to think differently about what she wanted to do in the world now that money in larger magnitudes was heaving into view. He couldn’t help but wonder if this hadn’t occurred to her. It was a truth. He was giving her situation a Marxist analysis, which was to say a cui bono analysis. And there was nothing wrong with Marxist analysis, only with Marxist prescriptions. He was not saying she was mercenary, because she wasn’t, as God was his witness. But she would have what, scope, more scope, scope was the word, with Morel. He had intimate knowledge of Morel’s financial status. It was impressive. No, she could think up any number of causes she might want to throw herself into. Or she might want to join the good doctor in his great crusades against circumcision and Christianity, turning back the tide of Christian belief, like Canute. Be yourself, he wanted to tell her. He wanted her to do anything she wanted to. It was only fair. Wife is unfair, John F. Kennedy should have said. In Uruguay there had been a radical group he had read about in training, Grupo los Canuteros, and it was odd that it was only now he realized the deliberate irony in what they had called themselves. They had identified with King Canute and his broom and sweeping back the waves. They were long gone. Irony weakens, he thought. Morel lacked irony, which was why he was strong and attractive to her and up for a few more runs at the brick wall constituted by everything that was the case.

  He said, “Well, that’s good news. Genuinely, Ellen was pretty unstable. We didn’t know what to do. We talked about it a lot.”

  Ray got up. It was time to go head-on with the subject matter. He had to be on his feet for that. He wanted his shoes, not that there was anything he could do about it. He wanted to be on the same footing as his rival his betrayer, so to speak. It was unfair that Morel had gotten his shoes back and that he had to proceed with his performance in stocking feet.