Mating

by Norman Rush

  I wish I knew why I keep worrying the question of Nelson’s innocence in this. Partly it may be a kind of mental body language against his having to go through what finally transpired. I considered it a Götterdämmerung for him, even if he didn’t. In a way I would have preferred his project to have been a conscious assault on his injurious parents. That would at least have made it slightly more bearable to relive. So I fixated on data like Nelson’s mentioning that one thing he had disliked about his father from an early age was the man being a precisian about which libations go into which kinds of glasses, id est champagne only into champagne flutes, brandy into snifters, and so on, which had led to the necessity of maintaining what seemed like an infinite repertory of drinkware, in which one glass was only minutely different from the next but which when one type of glass ran out through breakage or mislaying would produce violent complaints and blaming scenes involving his mother. I established that this was something he had feelings on long before he created his, as he called them, bottlements. He admitted these were painful scenes. He admitted that, in retrospect, possibly there was some disparity in having a collection of wineglasses appropriate for a marquis and a family car whose running board trailed in the road and gave off sparks. But his father had no interest in cars, was all. The bottle project was a disjunct thing. It was the art impulse, the automatic elaboration of available objects into more and more complex and recognizably aesthetic structures tout court. I asked him what it had been like when he broke wineglasses from time to time, as he must have, doing the dishes. Terrible, he said, until he got expert at handling them and it ceased to happen.

  So out in a clear space in a madrone thicket sat his concretion. I think his brother was at select times permitted to visit this holy of older brother holies. His father’s bottle dump was much closer to the house, in an arroyo. Nelson’s site is safe, he assumes, because both his parents are so demonstrably indoor-oriented. If his mother goes out, it’s out the front door to shop or go to church or to the doctor. Nelson’s father has a den and uses it.

  It’s early evening. Nelson has evolved the custom of going out and lighting up his bottle structure and looking at it for a while before dinner. He has latitude, because dinner is usually late because his father has important things to do in his den before dinner—id est drinking, in fact—which usually enormously protracts things. Nelson accepts but hates dinner being late, because he and his brother have to do the dishes, which he had no objection to except that there was never a fixed time he could look forward to when he would be free, done. Sometimes dinner is even brought to his father at his desk.

  I wanted to know what his father had been doing, ostensibly, in his solitude. There were two things. One was keeping up with his important reading, meaning in those days the Socialist Call, which he subscribed to, and the Militant and the Weekly People, which he brought home with him and all of which he gave Nelson in a bundle once a week to burn for him. He also got somewhere the Despatcher, a publication of the longshoremen’s union, which was then an organization terribly feared by the powers that were. In those days, Nelson said, this is how left San Francisco was: you could get the Militant and the Weekly People on newsstands the same as you got the Chronicle or the vicious Examiner. Nelson saw his father as a fan of the left, generically. His father belonged to nothing, did nothing left—either of which might have been dangerous. Nelson’s explanation for his father’s having become a passive admirer of the left had to do with his heart’s having been broken when something called the End Poverty in California Campaign had been defeated through chicanery and vile propaganda tricks orchestrated by the movie industry, this in the thirties. Also he hated Stalin for what he had done to the good part of the left. When he could finally have adult discussions about socialism with his father, it emerged that the idea of joining anything openly had been impossible because he had a wife and children. Nelson believed him. The other thing he was doing was working on charts supposed to predict when the next depression would come. This entailed heavy use of an adding machine, whose noise, I pointed out, would also serve to remind the family that serious business was taking place.

  In any case here is Nelson squatting down in the gloaming contemplating his creation. The dimensions of the object were considerable, with a bottom tier about five feet across and the pinnacle reaching four feet. The one not purely aesthetic impulse he conceded might have gotten admixed into his project was what he called cathedralism, the impression osmosing to him from his church-mad mother that the most significant human creation of all time is the cathedral.

  Nelson hears someone coming furtively up.

  It’s his father, drunk, and, as he gets close enough to really discern the thing Nelson has built, incredulous, and then affronted, and then enraged by it.

  Clearly he instantly categorizes this thing as a mockery of his drinking: all his hidden fifths have been retrieved and refilled and lit up for all the world to see. Nelson cringes, but his father turns on his heel and strides back into the darkness toward the house. But this is not the end. Nelson knows it and stays there, frozen. No words have been spoken.

  Nelson’s father returns, this time carrying a Stillson wrench and a pickax. Nelson’s heart clenches. He has never been physically afraid of his father. In fact his father has always been principled against corporal punishment, and Nelson has seen his mother reprimanded by him over her lapses in this regard.

  Denoon’s father was on the small side, faircomplected, with a blond toothbrush mustache, not threatening. Nelson had his mother’s dark complexion, although she was rather slightly built, so where Nelson’s bearlike form came from is unclear. She had a dead brother Nelson was supposed to be the image of.

  Nelson hears the word cocksucker for the first time in his life.

  His father slings the wrench at the bottlements.

  Some damage is done, but the wrench has been badly aimed. The flashlight or candle is still burning, so there is still this illuminated statement.

  Nelson was given no chance to explain his structure.

  In any case the wrench has smashed through the bottles in the outer part of the lowest tier, but the heart of the insult is still glowing.

  So now comes the time to wield the second weapon, the pickax.

  Nelson is in agony, dancing around the perimeter but being careful to be ready to dodge when pater monster lets fly for the second time.

  He said something to try to get his father to stop, but he has no memory of what it was. His father begins to swing the pickax around in the air.

  All I could think the first time I heard this story was If you marry you will regret it, If you fail to marry you will regret it. This was one of the few things I was able to bring to Denoon’s already topheavy intellectual armamentarium. He had somehow missed reading the great Either/Or of Kierkegaard, which is an ordeal except for the one small section whose name I forget that contains that gem. And what I was thinking, of course, was if you have a father you will regret it, If you have no father you will regret it: I was thinking of myself. This became one of Nelson’s favorite quotes, somewhat to my chagrin as to what it meant vis-à-vis being with me. But if we had I would have gotten an agreement out of him not to use it in public when I was around. He always used the aphorism in the most general or comic sense as a way of saying nothing ever works out, but still it stung me slightly. There was a period when we were in effect married, by most criteria.

  Did you scream or cry? I asked him. How did you feel seeing he was about to destroy this thing without showing even for an instant that he knew it was remarkable?

  What adds to the pathos of this is that Nelson knew stories about his father’s deprived early life—he was fostered to a farm family, for example, where he was told he had to drink the water for the animals as opposed to the water that was for the family—and that once he knew these stories a consuming fantasy of his was to go back in time and appear at his father’s side, as a buddy, and to fight the injustices he was e
nduring, get him out of things.

  Did you beg, did you plead? I asked him. He had protested, but he couldn’t say how exactly.

  Did he show any sign he appreciated even just the industriousness behind your creation, which is exactly the kind of creative thing you presumably want your children to do, if only to keep out of mischief? He was drunk, Nelson said.

  His father whirls the pickax awkwardly around his head like someone tossing the caber but he is in fact so drunk that when he lets go, the pickax flies off, missing the bottlements altogether, through the madrones, down a slope into long grass where it is lost.

  The detail is horrible.

  Get me it, Nelson’s father says or screams, meaning the lost pickax. Clearly this would be so he can have another try. And clearly he knows he is too wobbly with drink to go and find the thing himself.

  Couldn’t you have gone to get your mother? was my question. This is what we’re for, I said. But he claimed it never occurred to him, which makes me suspect that his father’s praxis toward Nelson’s mother was cruel enough, whatever Nelson says, to make him want to leave her out of this, that it might be dangerous for her.

  Nelson refuses to retrieve the pickax.

  All right, his father says, then I’ll do it with the wrench. At which his father begins reeling toward the partly shattered structure to pluck the wrench out of the shards it’s lying in.

  What drenches Nelson’s consciousness is that his father could stumble and be hurt or killed, impaled on the spires of broken bottles—and he, Nelson, will have been responsible for it as the builder of the injuring structure.

  He sees his only choice as being to go and find the pickax rapidly and give it to his father to use in the final destruction of his creation, which is in fact the outcome.

  God leads him directly to the pickax in the blackness.

  He furnishes the pickax to his father, who smashes the bottle sculpture into nothingness, drenching himself and wrecking a good suit in the process.

  Never could I really convince him that his retrospective fatalism about this incident was false somehow and worth pursuing. Why is it, I asked him more than once, that when I hear this story I feel worse than you do? He once went so far as to say that it might have been worse: his father might have made him demolish the structure himself. So it goes among the males.

  I don’t know how many different ways I told him This is not just one incident among others in your life as a boy—this is formative. I might get a Maybe so out of him. Although once he did say, rather passionately before changing the subject, How many times can you imagine that it would happen that someone who is still basically a child could be in the position of saving his father from serious injury or death? I think this is when I gave up on the subject.

  TSAU

  The Prospect of Rescue Undoes You

  The prospect of rescue undoes you.

  The closer I got to Tsau the more I decompensated. The eight miles felt interminable. I was feeling much worse. I lost all patience with my animal and abandoned him a mile from the gateway into Tsau. I wanted to run. I tried to, a little.

  There was an actual gateway. The path I was on led straight to a crude square wooden arch about twenty feet high. It was a gateless structure like a torii, painted in alternating red and black bands like a coral snake and fringed across the top with bigger and better wind chimes. It was carnivalesque. Dark green waist-high rubber hedges straggled away from the arch to the left and right as far as I could see. In a yard to the right of the arch was a compound in which were two very tidy rondavels with peculiarly glossy thatch and other odd features I was too ragged to attempt to parse. This would have to be the gatehouse compound. I could see a kgotla chair set in the shade of a gigantic cloud tree in the yard, and I knew I had to get to it immediately.

  I wanted to rest, but I also wanted to see everything. The path through the arch became a roadway leading to a complex of much larger buildings halfway up the koppie. In the flatland between the arch and the slope were neat identical rondavels in oblong fenced plots. There were thorn trees throughout. The scene was very busy in the sense you apply the term to a piece of printed fabric. There were novelties in the scene before me. There was the ubiquitous flashing and glinting, coming, it seemed, from all over and due, I was already assuming, to the various mirrors and solar instruments and other glass oddments that seemed to be specific to the place. There were repeated clicks of brilliant color observable at points along the upper paths: I had no idea what was causing them. I wanted to see everything at once, especially an ominous thing, something white and shrouded, hanging from a tree near where the roadway began to rise. Body, I thought. I was frightened and felt that at least I had to see what this was. In fact I was having a regressive recurrence of a feeling from kindergarten. I painted a sheet of newsprint with blue calcimine, solidly blue. I had never seen such a sublime blue and I had kept trying to fill my eyes with it by staring at it and by holding it close to my face. My teacher made me stop.

  Goats all seemed to be either tethered or in pens, which I had never seen in an African village. There were no stray dogs. I could hear poultry but not see any—that too meant pens of some sort. The rondavels were not the usual monochrome red brown: they were painted in bright colors, sky blue being a dominant choice. There were people, but they were looking at me from around the edges of things.

  The rondavel closest to the arch was magenta with a canary door. This door was flung open and a woman ran out toward me, stopped, turned and went back inside, and came out again with a police whistle in her mouth, on which she blew three skreels. Someone farther up the slope repeated the signal. This didn’t strike me as unfriendly. The person approaching me with the whistle was a motherly older woman. I see that I’m using Denoon’s or my neologism for the sound a police whistle makes, which was a byproduct of one of our personal games, called Filling in the White Spaces in the Dictionary. We satisfied ourselves that there was nothing in English for the sound except shrill blast, which was two words. Everything should have a name, according to Denoon. Decadence is when the names of things are being lost. He could be eloquent on this. He loved the Scots, who had had more names for everyday things in the eighteenth century than we do today. Greece was in terrible shape. He showed me an article in the Economist proving that groping for words among the general population was becoming a serious issue. On it would go.

  Here things begin to fragment on me. The woman addressing me was in anxiety. Her costume, a gray tunic and long skirt and a white headscarf knotted to produce collapsed rabbit ears, struck me as beautiful. She was stocky. I believe I said something about vegetables or possibly even something about garlic. I know I sensed it wouldn’t be against my interests to be a little incoherent for the time being, until I could see more clearly what kind of place I had come to: I was especially determined not to let anything slip suggesting a prior association with Nelson. I was going to present myself as a derelict traveler whose excursion had gone wrong. My story would have me doing ornithology. Tsau was a closed project, with an automatic exclusion rule for uninvited visitors. I would outwit this.

  I knew she was afraid I had something to do with the Boers. The South African Defence Force does as it pleases in Caprivi and Namibia and if they one day decided they wanted to drop down into the central Kalahari like the wolf on the fold, there would be nothing to prevent it. She had active eyebrows, but she calmed down once I convinced her I was an American. I was sitting down and drinking broth by this time, and fading badly.

  I didn’t want to fade out before I knew what this place was, or if not what it was, what it was like, at least. In its symmetry and neatness and Mediterranean color scheme it looked like a town in the Babar books, but in its atmosphere there was something operatic or extravagant. I had no referent for it.

  Then two women were insisting I come inside and lie down. I communicated about my animal: someone had to be sent for him. They were quick to arrange that. So I went inside and
lay down on a platform bed in a clean white room. There was some cool tea, my face was sponged, and then I slept.

  They woke me up to get more soup into me, a more substantial soup, with macaroni in it. It was evening.

  My hands felt huge. They had been taken care of medically, the splinters extracted, and rather excessive bandaging wound on. I had been cleaned up. They had done everything but shampoo me. I was wearing a garment like a shift, very lightweight.

  I was led into one of the wonders of the world, the Denoon outhouse, and left there awhile. I used the facility correctly. When I came out I was shown that normally I should dip my hands in a bowl of weak antiseptic fluid on a stand next to the outhouse door. Because of my bandages this was impossible, but they did somewhat brush and press my bandages with a damp towel anyway.

  Baph was safe, was the good news.

  I was in a regulated place. They had put some kind of unguent on my lips.

  Being in this place and in the hands of women ran counter to my main established refuge fantasy, wherein my father or uncle is a retired judge or captain of industry with a giant Victorian house in an area like Bucks County. He is there off and on. You can go to this house anytime and collapse there for as long as you like, no questions asked. There would be a staff. My father or uncle is powerful but also good, which is one reason the place is so safe. He has goodwill extending to him from far and near, either because his legal judgments were so wise and beloved or because of unspecified other benefactions touching everyone in that county. The food would be simple but good. There would be a farm attached to the house. My protector is very diversified economically, so that no depression would wipe him out. I could be a spinster if I wanted, live in my beautiful room, use the extensive library and the piano, or if I chose to I could moon around in my room and only come down for meals. There was no mother in this. My uncle, though, would be devoted to the memory of my mother. I once said to Denoon, after he denied he harbored any refuge fantasies whatsoever, I don’t believe you, but if this is true it’s because the thing you as a white male will carry to your grave is the feeling that you’re safe anywhere in the world, in essence, unless you have some particular physical handicap. I suppose my position was that everyone has refuge fantasies. I said Saying you have no refuge fantasies and even believing you don’t is not the same thing as really not having them in some way, shape, or form. He got mad. Was I saying he was lying? he wanted to know. Only partially, I said. Then god damn it, he said, I’ll tell you again I don’t and that I also doubt that any fully mature human being does and also that if you do, you belong to the one tenth of one percent of the female race who construct this refuge fantasy because the automatic marriage fantasy, which is the real refuge-fantasy people have until they try it, is repugnant to them somehow.