Mortals

by Norman Rush

  And then there was

  A difficult woman from Charlotte

  Though married became quite a harlot

  But she had an excuse

  For being so loose

  Her husband, she claimed, was a varlet.

  The past is a forest of signs, he thought. The problem was that you could only read them when you turned around and looked back, unfortunately.

  “Do you want these?” he asked her.

  “No,” she said.

  “Then I’ll take them all.”

  There was something else he wanted but that he couldn’t ask for or wait for her to find. They had played a game. It had been her game. She had been seized with the conviction that she had ideas for cartoons that were as good as those that were showing up embodied in The New Yorker cartoons. And she knew there was a market for cartoon ideas. And she had gotten the name of the person at The New Yorker who, as she understood it, received cartoon ideas and presumably farmed them out to different artists, hired hands, so to speak. Undoubtedly hundreds of underemployed smart married women the world over had had the same conviction. But she had set out to prove to him that she was right. So she had sequestered copies of The New Yorker and transcribed actual cartoons into idea form and then shuffled them in among her own cartoon ideas, her own captions, and he had been asked to say which ones he thought were cleverer. And the truth was that he had more often rejected the New Yorker actual cartoons as silly than he had hers. Hers had, on the whole, been as good or better, just as ideas. But then somehow it hadn’t gone further. She had made her point and had let it rest there. Probably it could have been carried to the next level. She might have sold a few ideas. Somebody was selling ideas, here and there, to the art director at The New Yorker. But she had let it rest. She hadn’t pushed on it. One of her ideas that he remembered involved a centaur standing confused in front of two doors, one for an internist and one for a veterinarian. There was the court jester saying to the king, Thanks, you’ve been great. There was the wife saying, Fred, is there someone else? to the husband behind the open New York Times with a lady obviously sitting on his lap. There was the angry punk saying, Get a lifestyle. He decided not to ask for the four-by-six cards on which she had collected cartoon ideas. It was too pathetic. And it was getting late. He had to make the Tlokweng Gate crossing with time to spare. There might be a line of vehicles waiting to get through. The line moved quickly enough on the South African side, through the corresponding gate, Nietverdienst, but on the Botswana side it could be slow or fast. His bags were on the stoop. The rental car, a Beetle, was gassed and ready to go. His heart was beating raggedly. He worked on his breathing and that helped.

  He wanted to ask her if he looked okay, meaning okay for the world he was plunging into, the new world. He was used to being told he looked good and he was used to being warned when he needed to trim his nose hair and so on. He would have to adapt. She was acute about appearance. She had pointed out recently that the PolEcon officer at the embassy had gotten his hair cut inexpertly the last time, revealing for the first time to anyone with an eye to see that one of his ears stood off farther from his head than the other. Previously his barbering had been careful to leave more hair on one side than the other, the affected side. She had laughed over Boyle’s bothering to dye the few strands of hair he had left yellow.

  Iris asked, from the kitchen, “Have you seen my sunglasses?”

  “No,” he said. Why did she want her sunglasses, though?

  She was hurrying around. He listened.

  She said, “Never mind. I found them. I put them in my purse, unbeknownst to me.”

  She had been keeping the house nice, with displays of fresh-cut flowers in rooms where normally they wouldn’t have been, like the bathroom. But it had been partly a facade. Certain things were sliding. There were thrips in the kitchen, little clouds of them over the bowls of fruit.

  She came out and took a position in the archway of the living room that he read as declaratory. She was dressed sexily, he thought. She was jaunty, standing there. She had an overnight bag stuffed full next to her. She was wearing a tight short black skirt he had never seen before. She was wearing a denim jacket over a red satin blouse. She had washed her hair. She was wearing a plain black bandeau. She was made up, freshly made up. They were both losing weight.

  He knew what he was going to hear.

  “I’m coming with you on this trip,” she said.

  “No you are not.”

  “I am. I want to. I’m packed. It’s just for the trip. Then I’ll turn around and come back. I’ll return the car.”

  “I can turn the car in down there, in Joburg.”

  “I know you can. But they like it better at the car rental place if the car is returned there. They said so. There’s an extra charge if you turn it in across a national boundary, border I mean.”

  He was in turmoil. He was not going to consider her proposition. Or he was going to consider it for a couple of minutes. It was possible that it was a dodge, that she wanted an imbroglio that would drag on until it would be too late to make the Tlokweng Gate, which would give her another day with him to continue the exercise she was engaged in, whatever that was. He knew what it was. It was about pathos and love and fear. And it was about guilt. She didn’t comprehend that he had to get going, get out of Botswana. In the course of saying goodbye to his contacts, he had learned that Kerekang was indeed in Johannesburg. Boyle might have that news too, in time, days probably. You have to get going, Ray thought. Plainclothes members of the Gaborone Police Unit, the Criminal Investigation Division, were occasionally driving up and sitting around in their cars outside the house. You’re a person of interest now yourself, he thought.

  “I can share the driving,” Iris said.

  “Look it’s only four or five hours, depending on roadblocks. I can manage it alone.” He expected her to look crestfallen, but she surprised him. She was defiant. But driving together was a cruel idea. They had had only good times doing that in the past. She knew that.

  He said, “But you couldn’t just turn around. You’d have to stay in Joburg and come back tomorrow.”

  “That’s okay. Don’t worry, I won’t bother you. I can sleep on a couch, a chair, it’s okay.”

  “Don’t be silly. We’ve been sleeping in the same bed since I got back.”

  “Anyway, I’m coming with you.”

  He had to consider it, he supposed. There were things she wanted to say. Their exchanges had been difficult and some subjects had been aborted and others had been covered superficially. They had been going a little better in the last couple of days. It had been difficult on both sides. And probably she had a right to more from him than he’d been able to give on the really hard subjects, like what had gone wrong in the past. And it would make the time pass quickly. And then there was the matter of saying goodbye in some adequate way, something that matched what they had been to each other, for years. They had said only formal goodbyes, half-goodbyes, so far, feeble ones.

  He stood up. She came over to him and reached under his jacket and seized his belt. He pushed at her but she held her grasp.

  “What’re you doing?” he asked. She was trembling. It was cool in the house but she was flushed and warm. She had some kind of scent on. She rarely wore perfume, cologne, any of that, almost never. He wondered if Morel liked his women scented.

  “You’ll have to hit me,” she said. He loved her breath. He had always thought of it as delectable.

  “All right then. I don’t think this is a great idea, but I guess it’ll be all right.”

  “It will be,” she said. She went to get her overnight case.

  “Bring a jersey, it’s getting cold,” he said after her.

  So far they were traveling together in what the Batswana would call boiling silence. He forgot what the Setswana phrase was. It was evening and it was cool, but they had the front windows cranked down. He felt he had to have cold air flowing over him, blasting over him, and
so did she, although pretty soon it would be too uncomfortable and they would have to live together with the windows closed. But that was ahead of them. The car was a metal shell full of boiling feeling. He was driving faster than was normal for him. She wasn’t objecting. The gale they were in undid the possibility of conversation, which was what he wanted until he was calmer. He had gotten angrier, without provocation, since crossing the border, where things had gone smoothly, which had been a relief. He had felt there was a faint chance that his name might have turned up on a watch list on the Botswana side, in which case the game would have been over before it began and he would have been going back to Kgari Close with Iris.

  The light was fading over the low, repetitive, stony hills they were passing through. This region, the Groot Marico, was thinly settled. Most of the farmsteads were set far back from the road. Somehow farming went on in this dry terrain, on the flatland between the hills. From a distance the occasional isolated settlements of the black farmworkers looked like dice. You could only get a glimpse of them from an elevation, because the cement cubes provided for them to live in were packed together behind sheet-metal fencing which was always maintained on the side of the settlement fronting the road, randomly maintained around to the back. It was undoubtedly a cosmetic thing. There were no shade trees in the locations, as they were called. The Boer farm homes were uniformly bracketed with plantings of silver oak and eucalyptus.

  The roads were broad and hard and smooth. The bridges spanning the dry creeks and gullies were unusually monumental. The agency theory was that they had all been reinforced to a standard that would support the weight of tanks. There were intermittent stretches where the road broadened to four lanes for no apparent reason, the true reason being that these were intended to function as landing places for light aircraft in an emergency. Certainly segments of roadway were densely lined with sturdy metal light poles. The road system had been militarized. Electric lines were buried safely away. Brush had been scoured back to deny cover to anyone out to injure the roads or the traffic they carried. It had all been futile, a preparation for the civil war that was not now going to be fought.

  A petrol plaza appeared ahead of them. Everything within the double ring of security fencing was brilliant and clean. He could see shops, the petrol pumps, a restaurant. All the buildings were new-looking, constructed of brightly colored glazed brick. Stadium lights blazed down. Iris put her sunglasses on.

  She said, “I saw a shooting star back there. This is a funny thing. My father was interested in comets. Something about comets interested him, but he had no interest whatever in astronomy, the surrounding discipline. It was just comets.”

  “Some people are like that,” Ray said.

  …

  They had picked up Simba chips, bananas, and Appletiser at the service plaza. Iris was preparing to hand-feed him, as they would normally do on the road, but he couldn’t bear it. He didn’t want to hurt her, but the fact was that he couldn’t bear it.

  “I can’t eat,” he said.

  “But you need to. You said you were hungry.”

  “I am, but I can’t eat. Later on, maybe. But you eat, take care of yourself. Next time we stop I’ll have something. But right now I can’t.”

  She opened a packet of Simba chips and began to eat them, but softly, in small mouthfuls, moistening each chip in her mouth before she started chewing, following some impulse, as he saw it, to shrink and mute her presence. She was full of guilt. This maneuver was somehow appropriate to that, for her. She loved Simba chips and would only let herself eat them infrequently because they were so fattening. He was sorry for her but there was nothing he could do.

  He said, “Did you let your boyfriend know you were leaving town for this?” He was being too hard. He was too angry.

  “He’s not my boyfriend.”

  “Sure he is. What is he, then?”

  “Not my boyfriend.”

  “Your lover, then. Your lover.”

  “I haven’t been with him since you both got back.”

  “Well I hope you dropped him a line. He might wonder. Okay, so, okay. It hasn’t resumed yet. But you are in fact lovers and as far as that goes you still love him. Is that unfair?”

  She was breathing rapidly. She said, “I don’t know. I don’t know how I feel, exactly …”

  He sighed heavily at her. “Well let’s figure it out, if we can.”

  “Right,” she said.

  “Look, I need to get everything straight. It’s like this. You weren’t supposed to do what you did. You weren’t supposed to fuck anyone else, and if you were going to, if it felt like you were moving that way, you were supposed to tell me, warn me. You were supposed to give me a chance. That was the understanding. And it was the same for me. It was the understanding between us.”

  She was anguished. She said, “I know I know. But try to understand. The thing is that our deal, our understanding, wasn’t exactly what it seemed. What it was was a guarantee that it could never happen. It made it unreal. Because it would have led to a talk opera and you making declarations and promising changes here and there and I would have had to believe you and be the decent kind of person I’m supposed to be. And then time would pass and lo and behold the whole thing would become moot because I was too old, imagine that. And time would have passed and then I would be old, and possibly nothing would have changed, truly, between us. Reality. You always talk about being in reality …”

  “That last road sign was Willowpark, did you see it?”

  “It was. It’s Swartruggens where you have to be careful. We’re fine.”

  “Go ahead.”

  “Also, you were away when this was developing. I mean when it got serious, got this serious. That’s no excuse, I know. But the truth is I wanted to do it. I wanted that. I was attracted to Davis. I was in a state of temptation that turned intense sooner than I was prepared for, and you were away. It turned intense. What I thought was that I could do it and then see, see how I felt … and I think, I think maybe I was assuming that the chances were okay that it wasn’t going to be the greatest thing in the world and that I would conclude that, finally, but in the meantime I would have gotten something out of my system. I know this is crude, me being crude. I think it’s the kind of thing men do and …”

  “You have to stop for a minute. This is hard for me, my girl, my girl. Ah Jesus.”

  “And I don’t know if maybe I thought once I had been through it, through something forbidden, that it would be over and we could be back together.”

  That enraged him. He had plunged from a place where she had been creating a little sympathy in him, down into this. She was a fool.

  “Don’t patronize me, Iris. I’m not a fool. You say that? You destroy everything and you say that? So it was just about forbidden fruit? We have to speak the truth, here. What you’re saying is cheap. My throat is dry. Jesus Christ.”

  She handed him the bottle of Appletiser she had been drinking from.

  “Don’t make me stop, Ray, even if I say something you despise me saying. I don’t know how many times I can go over this, so I have to do my best. You’re not going to like any of it. Of course you aren’t. Anyway, a part of it was that I was tired of being good. At that moment, I was. It was weakness and self-pity all mixed together. There. But I was tired of being good. Being good had gotten me a life that had so much wrong with it. In a way I wanted to stop being good almost out of curiosity. And this is a confession, I’m well aware. I look hideous to myself when I say it, but it’s true. I wanted to see what I was like on the other side of a certain line. Nothing I’m telling you is about getting sympathy out of you.”

  “Of course.”

  “Also he didn’t want to do it, at first, at all. This may surprise you.”

  “It does and it doesn’t.” He couldn’t swallow.

  She went on. “Well it surprised me. I made it clear enough to him. I was the initiator and I had certain expectations about the target, about men. So I was
pretty surprised when he resisted. When he turned me down. Like that. If he had yielded right away, I don’t know …”

  “I’m not following this.”

  “No it roused me. It galvanized something. I felt worse when he turned me down than I had before. I didn’t like that. It was the worst outcome. You think I’m shallow.”

  He didn’t know what he believed or thought. He remembered vividly one of her post-coitum triste moments when she’d answered his question about what was troubling her, because she had an odd look, and she’d answered with the strange assertion that she was sad that sex was about the greatest thing she could give him and that sex wasn’t enough because she loved him so much. It was hard to credit, but it had really happened. He had felt what, ennobled.

  “And there’s this, Ray. There had been some incidents with you, not recent, but still … I was dwelling on them. You wanted certain women. You did. Oh yes you did. I’m not saying you represented an extreme of the way married men are, or men generically. I’m not a child. But I …”

  “This is too much, really Iris. It’s insane. I mean in the present circumstance, really. I have been utterly one hundred percent faithful to you and you know it. I do represent an extreme, a good one. This is too fucking much.”

  “Ray, I told you you wouldn’t like this. I know you’ve been faithful. I utterly do know it. I believe it. I believe you never acted. That’s what I believe. But I also believe that you wanted to act, because you’ve humiliated me more than once.”

  “Humiliated you?”

  “Yes, exactly. Staring at that woman on the train, Rhodesian Railways, at that particular young woman in the dining car, even after I asked you to stop it. Turning around in your chair to stare at her like all the other men, doing it all through dinner, it was absolutely humiliating.”

  “That one again. I have apologized for that, I believe. Let me count the times.”

  “And there were other lovely moments. But I do believe you never acted. But I believe you wanted to.”

  “Never, not once … No.”