Mating

by Norman Rush

  A Fatal Proposition

  Let me not omit certain impurities in the man. Whole genera could get on his hate list if certain members of it did something antithetical to the cause. He was homophobic, or tended to be, because, he claimed, they had been overrepresented in Rhodesian information services during the liberation war. So that was it for homosexuals. I tried to point out that there was a logical error consisting of making the part stand for the whole, which he was committing. I drew back from trying to make headway against his anathematizing tendencies because that indirectly raised a question of why he was associating with me, an American whose CIA had told the South Africans where they could find Nelson Mandela when he was underground.

  My being American was a serious issue and came up also at one point when I asked him why he wasn’t proselytizing me more than he was. My feelings were a little hurt, frankly. I hated South Africa, which he didn’t dispute. But there was the fact that I had not done anything politically strong enough to suit him in my life to date. I had never been a member of anything that was specifically against apartheid. I asked him how many women there were available to him in Botswana who had done everything he demanded politically. It was no use. We and the West Germans and Israel were the worst. We had given the Boers the bomb, and so on. There would always be a coda waiving my responsibility for the actions of the American power elite when we had these malentendus, so we could get on with dinner or bed, but the strain was there.

  We could never close a certain gap. Everything I was doing in that direction, like fixing up his diet, raising the creature comfort level, I did innocently and because I didn’t think it would hurt anything for him to live a little less exigently. He, for instance, had no stereo. The house I was sitting did, a good one, and a good collection of tapes of Renaissance music. He started listening to them but then made himself stop, abruptly. One evening we were playing Albinoni and making sex—I won’t say making love—nice and protractedly. He couldn’t help turning on me afterward. Clearly the whole thing was too voluptuous for his image. He demanded I stop making custard for him, because it made him feel like a child. Blancmange was another thing I had just learned to make and had to stop making. I had been trying to find out what his favorite foods were and cooking them for him, not such an insidious thing to do. It took ingenuity because of the limits of what can be bought in Botswana: I made clever substitutions. I think I deserved appreciation, not what I got, which was an outburst against Americans for breeding a taste for luxury wherever they went. I tried to be more Spartan. I wanted to avoid fighting. It was too hot for it.

  Even if somehow I had been able to overcome being an American, being hypermaternal, being a few years older—which he was sensitive about—there would still have been the question of what discipline meant. I was fascinated by the concept of being under discipline. It took force to get him to discuss it at all, and even then everything was couched so cryptically it was agony.

  Martin was under discipline. He would never say whose, even though he knew I knew it had to be ANC. What he seemed perpetually unable to comprehend was that our relationship gave me the right to know something about this situation. I was also interested, in fact initially interested, from a social science angle. If he had been the least bit forthcoming when I first raised the matter we might have slipped past it. Over and over I told him I had no interest whatever in who it was he was under discipline to or what being under discipline was requiring him to do. I was curious about what it meant to be part of a social organism in the way I assumed he was. I wanted help conceptualizing it, was all. I knew his movements were to some extent controlled by orders he got. One reason he put in so much time at my place, I concluded, was because he could get and send phone messages there. There are no phones in Bontleng. But my questioning was never exquisite enough for him. If I asked something like Could you be a member of the movement against apartheid in a contributory way as opposed to the way you are now? he would fly into a rage and treat me like a spy.

  Could someone who was under discipline ever be an appropriate mate? This was of course the underlying question I wanted answered. I had serious feelings for Martin. Most of the obstacles between us were probably erodable. I wasn’t prepared to spend a life with him in permanent atonement for being American, but I was confident that if he loved me, it would denationalize my image. But I could never be hypothetical enough to have our discussion come off. I had long since given up asking naive—and, he thought, leading—questions like Do you have to have been born in South Africa to join the ANC? But a question like Suppose someone gave someone an order to kill someone he had nothing against except as a symbol? was also inadmissible. Being under discipline was something I may have reacted to too strongly, as a woman, and I told him that. But nothing helped.

  I think he needed our relationship to come apart nastily, to make it easier for both of us.

  We almost couldn’t break it off, because just when I’d made the decision someone killed his cat. He had adopted a stray. One night he went home and found it strangled on his kitchen table. The house had been locked. He was very shaken. Then letters to him started turning up with razor slits across the address, just that, the contents not touched. I was terrified, but I kept making mistakes. Here was my heinous suggestion: I thought he should get away for a while and I proposed he come with me to a game area. I had some contacts in the safari business in Maun and I knew how we could do this for next to nothing. I told him it was ridiculous of him to be in Botswana for whatever reason and never see the last and greatest unfenced game area in the world. He looked at me as though I were a criminal. I tried to argue him into it by saying he was missing a unique experience, because camping out in a game area was the only way you could get the frisson of what it must have been like to be a lone human being who was the subject of predation by stronger, bigger, and more numerous animals. This was deeply stupid, and he let me see it. He was already a prey. My heart was in the right place, but that was the end for us.

  Nothing happened to him, finally. People I met glancingly through him were ultimately killed by the South Africans, not in Botswana but in Angola or Zimbabwe, where they had gone for safety. He got to England. The ANC has a choir, which he has something to do with.

  The British Spy

  My last relationship before Nelson Denoon rose in the skies of my life was with a spy, Z. Z is for zed, meaning the last in a series of things of a certain kind. It took me awhile to get him to admit it, but the reason he initially sought me out was because his information was that I was going with Martin Wade, in whom the British High Commission had an interest. I was no longer seeing Martin but I was still trying to keep track of him, see how he was doing, regretting things. It even occurred to me that I could use Z’s attentions to me as a way to get back with Martin by offering to disinform Z, if that was appropriate.

  Z didn’t know that thanks to Martin, I knew Z was a spy. I felt I had enormous leverage, for once. Everything I do is so overdetermined. I was moved by the feeling that this was just what I deserved—a spy. He pulled up beside me in a black Peugeot as I was walking home with a netbag of groceries over my shoulder and offered me a lift. Whites do that for one another. I hated to accept free lifts from fellow whites: the Batswana notice it and I empathize with them standing waiting forever for jammed taxis or vans while the whites slide off into the sunset. But I got in. I got in because I had some dairy products I needed to rush to my refrigerator, but I got in even more because Z was a spy.

  He must have been mid-fifties. I found him attractive. I don’t despise people for fighting old age tooth and nail, which he was. I like the impulse more in men than I do in women, though, which I should probably explore sometime. He was still well built but showing a little gynecomastia, which didn’t really go with his rectilinear, almost columnar midsection. Later, his first evasion on that subject would be that he was wearing a truss. Then it came out that it was a girdle. He was wearing the usual safari shirt and shorts, and
I noticed he had touched up a couple of varicosities with something pink. He was a leading-man type who was just over the line into paterfamilias roles and hating it. He had gray hair worn long on one side and carefully articulated and spray-fixed over his bald crown. His eyebrows were like ledges. I wondered if wanting to be sexually plausible, which he clearly did, had anything to do with needing to be able to do his job, id est extracting confidences. He seemed very tan, but there was something off about the hue, which was another secret of his I ultimately extracted.

  What would a spy be like personally? Would a spy compensate, say, for the duplicity of his working day by being the opposite in his free time with his loved ones or one? What kind of spy was Z, in the sense of how far he was expected to go in corruption or surveilling or whatever his job description required? Just as a feat, how much that I wasn’t supposed to know might I be able to get him to tell me? I was getting ahead of myself, but I could tell Z was in a state of appreciation toward me. I gave him a couple of minutes to arrange himself before he stepped out of the car at my place. I had invited him to come in for iced tea.

  A little breeze had sprung up, and it did a cruel thing to him, lifting the lattice of hair up from his head like a lid. I know he noticed it, but he was stoical and ignored it, which went to my heart.

  He had an intelligent line. All the vital statistics were delivered in passing, while he was ostensibly talking about other things. He was divorced. He was lonely. He found the anthropology of the country fascinating but unfortunately in his circles there was no one of like mind, perhaps it was just a British failing. Here he was showing me that he was atypical and not imperialistic. Nota bene: he liked to eat out but he hated eating alone. Nothing interested him more than anthropology. He was virtually an amateur anthropologist. All this was like marbling as he talked cynically about the economics of the country. I saw him pick up that I liked a slightly cynical approach to social reality, and he went more with that. There were some clichés. He missed West Africa, which is what everybody says who was ever posted there—the Gambia, the color, the markets, the people so happy they’re practically giddy. I couldn’t tell him enough about my time in Keteng and the Tswapong Hills.

  The only thing he did that I didn’t like was to try to strum a little on my possible fear of being alone in the house. He went on about break-ins increasing, until he saw he was in the wrong pew. I told him I positively enjoyed living alone and the single thing I didn’t like about it was stepping on millipedes coiled up like coasters on the kitchen floor. There were a lot of them getting indoors somehow. Re the break-ins, I assumed he was trying to cast himself as a protector type I could count on.

  He took me to dinner a few times. It was all liberal arts. And anthropology. He represented himself as a voracious reader and he went out of his way to read a couple of things I recommended. He took me to a place I didn’t even know existed, a deluxe restaurant connected to the golf club. It was run by Portuguese who had owned a sumptuous place in Beira before the liberation. Z was not boring, or rather his footwork was not boring. He stopped flashing his avuncular side bit by bit. He started me out reading Arnold Bennett, which I’m grateful to him for. The whole thing was very much like synchronized swimming. We wanted something from each other but we kept going elegantly side by side, not saying what we wanted. He still thought I was seeing Martin, which I had somewhat led him to assume. Finally it was all too leisurely for me, and I struck.

  Gratitude Is a Drug

  I was after his secrets. I had some already, but so far they were all in the category of personal vanity. The girdle was one. His tan was another. He took a carotene product you can get in South Africa. It gives you a terra cotta appearance and makes your excreta gaudy. He used alum on the backs of his hands for age spots. I was finding myself in a game. It was like deciding to have an obsession. The game was roughly that I would get more out of him than he wanted to tell me—but not in exchange for what he wanted from me, which was yet to reveal itself but which probably meant tidbits about Martin and his friends. From me he would get nothing, not even fabrications on that score, although it might be necessary to start the game with fabrications. I would trade sex, if I had to, but I would get more points, the game would be more consummate, if I got his secrets by trading something else, something that hadn’t defined itself yet. I was greedy for his secrets, and I construed secrets as embracing everything he would rather not tell me—personal, political, what have you. I’m willing to call this decadent. The fact that spying is an execrable and stupid thing had nothing to do with why I wanted to play this game with Z.

  I feel putrid when I go over my nexus with Z, but so be it. What I did, I did. Greed misrepresents my motives, which were complex, but is what you would come up with as an outside observer, because of the wining and dining that continued, the entrée into upper echelon white teas and potlatches. Overhanging me from the breakup with Martin were heroine fantasies, my somehow starring unexpectedly in the struggle against apartheid. Breaking with Martin meant losing someone who had something important, which was significance. I felt deprived and retrograde. I had begun letting my eating inch up. When I was with Martin I was almost never hungry, partly out of involuntary corporeal sympathy with what he was and partly because there was a limit to how disparate from my skeletal boyfriend I could stand to be. When it ended with Martin it was like a spring being released, evidently. I was in the Star Bakery and suddenly the bread available in Gaborone was intolerable. In the Star you could almost imagine you were in a bread museum, the display of types of bread was so broad—baguettes, braided loaves, rolls. But interiorly everything was made from the same spongeous cement-colored stuff. I had to bake. And what you bake you eat. I was eating too much and felt like a zero because of it, or a doughnut, rather. Here came Z, a worse bread maven than even I was, someone even more famished for good bread. We fit. Moreover, when the time came for me to regroup on my weight, the odd physical relationship that had evolved between us was perfect for that too—because of the quantum of sheer exercise in it.

  We’d had some minor postprandial necking in the car, in the course of which I’d wondered if he was uncomfortable kissing in a sitting position. Or there might or might not be a goodnight kiss at the door as he left following a nightcap ceremony during which he had not been insistent on accelerating the physical pace, far from it. In retrospect I think the kissing was more a recurring declaration that in spite of the continued decorousness of our relationship, he was not unsexual toward me. He would occasionally get mild erections, nothing full-blown, though.

  But once I’d faced what I wanted, I knew it was time to stop skirmishing so much. His back was his Achilles’ heel. One night as he was coming in I insisted he bring his back pillow. He was chagrined that I’d even noticed it. It was an orthopedic pillow he always tried to twitch out of sight into the backseat before I could spot it if I was getting into the car. I put it that since he had to know I knew about it he should bring it in and use it, because then he might be disposed to stay longer. I think he said You notice everything, and I said Oh you’ve noticed, so we laughed and he brought the thing in. This is how reduced I was: I took his You notice everything as a compliment conceivably containing the suggestion that he thought I might somehow make a good spy. This is how much, at our lowest, we suck after the male imprimatur for some completely congenital quality we might have. This is how I know I was on the plain of the abyss.

  I said Your back is a mess, am I right? He couldn’t agree more and was prone on a sheepskin in front of the fireplace almost before I asked if he would let me see what I could do. I acted knowing in the area and that was all it took. I sat on my hams next to him and said I can’t do this through cloth, and he, in a sort of frenzy, said Yes, yes, and violently worked his shirt up to his neck like an escape artist, not even getting up to do it. Then with just the heel of my hand running lightly once up his spine I said I think this isn’t from parachuting, to which he burst back with No, it’s
scoliosis, oh god—just as I was saying It’s scoliosis, isn’t it? He torqued around to look at me as though I was extraordinary.