Mating

by Norman Rush

  I scanned around. The furnishings were restful. There was a reed mat on the floor. I could see a wooden table, a cupboard, a wardrobe, all highly polished. I was covered with a cotton thermal blanket, light but warm. My pillow was possibly a little on the hard side. My attendant was sitting in a wooden armchair, reading by the light of candles burning in a holder with winglike mirrors folded out from a spindle attached to the base of the fixture. There was a heat source somewhere. All my goods were laid out along the base of the wall where I could see them.

  Just as I began to drift off again, it came to me that I had yet to ask this woman in loco parentis over me what her name was. I was ashamed of myself. I asked, and it was Mma Isang. Here I had an inappropriate internal reaction. The fact that she was identifying herself in the completely traditional way as the mother of whoever her firstborn was, in this case a son, should have produced no reaction in me whatever. It was ordinary. But I wanted to shake her. Women were saving me, and why wasn’t this motherly woman more a separate being? I seemed to be wanting to say. Somehow it brought up the totally unrelated contempt I have for all the apparatus of seconds and thirds and juniors specific to the patriciate in America and applicable only to sons and never to daughters. Denoon called this scionism. Also I wanted to know if Nelson Denoon had so much as looked in on me. He had to know I or someone very much like me had pitched up in his forbidden city. I had trekked across the plain of the abyss for a purpose. Where was Denoon? Who wants to feel like a tart, and an unsuccessful tart to boot? I felt like one of the loser sperms you see in Swedish documentaries shot inside the reproductive tract, one of the members of the shining herd, who only gets halfway up a fallopian tube when the Time Gentlemen bell is rung announcing that some other particle has made it to the ovum and the game is over. You aren’t yourself, I told myself. Mma Isang saw I was agitated, and I believe I was then handfed some segments of orange, and then it was on to a marathon sleep.

  Yliane

  I awoke in total darkness in that state of intellectual fatigue that means you’ve been working things out violently and exhaustively in your dreamlife. I had had a dream—whose outlines I atypically still had hold of—with stature. I may have had six or so like this in my life, always at rubiconic junctures. My normal dreams are worse than run of the mill. But clearly you symbolically harangue yourself in your sleep when your inner self perceives looming danger. But was I in danger, or rather was I in any danger greater than making a fool of myself? Something in me seemed to think so. I felt as though I had just been excused from an excruciatingly long but absolutely essential lecture which I had had to listen to while standing up.

  In fact the dream revolved around a lecture, and I knew who the lecturer was. She was a woman I’d known in California whose fate had made an impression on me. Initially she was interesting to me purely because she was a French émigré, of which there are not so many, nothing like for example the number of Israelis piling up on the two coasts. She was also interesting because she was in a ménage in which the union had to be based entirely on an uncanny parity of physical beauty. Her lover of many years was handsome and perfectly proportioned, the kind of type who models Norfolk jackets and handcarved pipes, but an absolute jerk. She was both beautiful and substantive but, hélas, nearly forty and therefore in terror of finding herself alone and having to start over in the search for companionship. She was an accomplished paste-up person and very much in demand among people who put out newsletters in the days before desktop publishing. He was intermittently a cad toward her. He was vaguely a creative person in magazine publishing. He had lost his touch. His career was disintegrating when I got to know Yliane, although he was disguising it by being on the phone interminably, talking to contacts and lining up minuscule freelance projects at greatly separated intervals. Maybe a bond between them was that he was Francophile. He was sickeningly Francophile, to the point that one of his projects was to write a uchronia based on the premise that the Louisiana Purchase had fallen through. This project meant that whenever she asked him where he had been when she needed him for something the answer was The library. How this most appeasing of women managed to irritate him so badly that he drove her out of their apartment in her bathrobe while lashing her with a straightened coathanger I have no idea. Drink played some role. Possibly one of her superb culinary efforts came in below par. It was the middle of the night and she was driven out without a sou, and ultimately she had to let herself be fucked by the cabdriver who took her some distance to a friend’s house where she had expected to borrow the fare but where nobody was home. She spent the rest of the night cowering and crying in the rhododendra, waiting for her friend to return from the Mi Carême Ball or wherever she was.

  So they stayed apart for a while. Then he showed up abject and swearing he wanted her back, would contain his drinking henceforward, would be decent. So he talked her back in. But there was just one thing he asked, as they were setting the ménage up once again, which was that she give up recycling for a month. She was a forerunner in ecological sensitivity and was serious about recycling. This would somehow make everything perfect between them. It had nothing to do with anything except power. He had no objection to recycling—not that he would ever bother with it himself. He sprung this codicil on her after she had already moved back in and he had begun being decent, so she negotiated. She wouldn’t recycle for two weeks. That would do, he decided. Then things continued as horribly as before. I pondered this transaction inordinately at the time. She bore him a child, a boy, angelic-looking and destined to be a burnt offering if I was any judge. I lost touch with Yliane after this.

  The message of the dream lecture was that there was something I had to avoid. It was a strain to formulate it. There was something I should beware, something that was not good enough.

  What was not good enough was the usual form that mating takes.

  I had to realize that the male idea of successful love is to get a woman into a state of secure dependency which the male can renew by a touch or pat or gesture now and then while he reserves his major attention for his work in the world or the contemplation of the various forms of surrogate combat men find so transfixing. I had to realize that female-style love is servile and petitionary and moves in the direction of greater and greater displays of servility whose object is to elicit from the male partner a surplus—the word was emphasized in some way—of face-to-face attention. So on the distaff side the object is to reduce the quantity of servile display needed to keep the pacified state between the mates in being. Equilibrium or perfect mating will come when the male is convinced he is giving less than he feels is really required to maintain dependency and the woman feels she is getting more from him than her servile displays should merit. In the dream this seemed to me like a burning insight and I concentrated fiercely to hold on to it when I woke up: I should remember this inescapable dyad at the heart of mating because it was not what I had come this far to get.

  It was impossible not to sleep more.

  You Should Be an Assassin

  In all I must have slept for more than twenty-four hours.

  Suddenly I was slept out. Unfortunately it was still in the middle of some night or other, either the one during which I’d had my homiletic dream or the one following. I lay there staring at nothing, being hungry.

  I decided to use my time constructively by trying to figure my way out of the cleft stick of wanting to have Nelson think both that my expedition was a reckless ordeal undertaken under the influence of un-masterable feelings toward him and that an exploit like this was nothing extraordinary for someone of my experience and grit. But there was something amiss in my immediate vicinity.

  I could hear someone breathing. This was not Mma Isang: it was excited breathing. I felt to see that I was modest. I felt around for the thermal blanket, but it must have been on the floor. My shift came just below the knee. I would have been happier with my underthings on underneath it, but this was all right.

  I inched up
to a sitting position and held my forearms in an X in front of my face. I held my breath so that I could hear where my intruder was.

  Someone dove for me and got a hand across my mouth before I could yell. I knew it was Denoon and I was astounded. His hand was very hard and smelled of diesel and smoke, but his person smelled of soap. He had washed up before coming over to assault me, at least. He was pressing me hard against the wall and trying to tell me something in a whisper. My mind was blank with shock, but I remember managing to note that there was indeed garlic in Tsau. His fear was that I would thrash around in resisting and knock something over. He was tremendously strong and I sensed he was trying not to hurt me. He had me pinned to the wall, with his left arm stretched behind my shoulders and left hand gripping my arm at the elbow and his right hand clapped over my mouth. Once he had me bundled together the way he wanted, he held me that way and continued to whisper apologies into my ear, and then entreaties to say nothing, to promise to be silent while he explained something urgent to me.

  The proof that I am a basically empathetic person is that I complied instantly. My essential nature is inclined to violence when someone touches me without being invited, and I am also physically strong. There were things I could have done. However, they would have prolonged the wrestling imbroglio we were in, which would have been okay with me except that the male constitution is a problem, or rather friction is a problem for it. The human penis is a thing like a marmoset or some other unruly small pet they carry around with them. An erection would hardly mean Denoon was in love with me or even desired me qua me, in all my wondrous dimensions. I wanted to spare us embarrassment. Also there would have been something faintly promissory in his getting an erection, which would have been unwelcome to me and unfair to him. If I was going to elicit an erection it should be nonaccidental. So in my enormous delicacy I went limp and began nodding violently yes to the question Will you be silent when I take my hand off your mouth?

  He got off me like a shot then and slid over and sat up against the wall next to me, half on the bed.

  You should be an assassin, I told him.

  Even a low voice was too loud. He wanted us to whisper.

  First there were more apologies. Secondly, was I all right? meaning all right after my expedition, which he couldn’t believe I had attempted myself. He was not going to ask me to say why I had come to Tsau or how I had found out where it was, but he wanted me to know—and here he became halting—that he was impressed, he was flattered, if that was the right word, and he was glad I was there. We were both uncomfortable during this stanza, but I was also triumphant. As I read it, I was being admitted into a game neither of us could bear to be explicit about, and I had been right that the game had begun at Tutwane’s. I was controlling joy.

  There was a situation at Tsau I had to understand, was next. I no doubt knew that Tsau was a project for women. That is, he had started the project with women, destitute women from all over Botswana but mostly from the northwest, women cut off from their families for any one of a number of reasons and subsisting on one sack of mealie a month from the government. So they had been the ones gathered together to make Tsau. I am making this more compressed temporally than it was, because he was pausing throughout to get his breath and to listen to see if there was any sign that we might be being intruded on. But I am not misrepresenting what it was intellectually. What he conveyed in the dark in the time he had was a feat.

  So these ablebodied destitute women had been gathered together to make Tsau. All the homesteads in Tsau were vested in women, meaning that the charter women owned the individual homesteads, and he had even worked it out with the government that in Tsau inheritance of the homestead would be restricted to female offspring and female collaterals or designees. Of course I would see men in Tsau, mostly relatives who had turned up miraculously after the fact, but they were a minority. But I should know all this. And there would be more men in the population down the road, of course. But the vesting of the homestead as an asset, and the entitlements that went with it, would always be in the female line. And of course the idea behind that was to demonstrate that at least here something could be done about the economic disenfranchisement of women that was taking place in the society at large as it modernized. Women were being impoverished wholesale because cattle herds, the main productive asset in Botswana, were being concentrated in fewer and fewer hands, all of them male, something he knew I had seen for myself in Tswapong and Keteng.

  I love a concise mind.

  So he wanted to be sure I grasped that there was a certain sensitivity about the presence of mates, since most women in Tsau either lacked them and were unlikely to get them or were beyond them and had strong feelings about those women still unhappy about the problem. As a matter of fairness he had been living alone in Tsau. He was not going to be seen as inviting special company for himself in the form of women or whites of his particular background. It was imperative that there be no suggestion of a prior connection to him and imperative that it be believed that I had gotten to Tsau sheerly by accident. It was an important source of strength to him that tourists and evaluators had been kept out of the project, and I must not seem to be either one of those things. He disliked dissembling, he said, but a great deal was at stake.

  He paused. I was thinking that of course the spiritus rector of a female community would need to be a sexual solitary, at least during the foundational period. But such periods needn’t last forever, it was my humble opinion. I wondered if this situation was the analog of western series on television where the female watchership shrank to nothing when the producers let the marshal get married.

  He wouldn’t describe the situation re the shortage of men as a split, exactly. On the whole the younger women were the more critical ones, unsurprisingly but not uniformly, and the older women were solidly on his side. If I could convincingly appear to be a lost traveler everything could evolve. He had no choice but to imply he’d never known me.

  The sense of assumed collaboration was thrilling to me. The whole unstated side of our exchange was delicious. I felt brilliant.

  I think men hate to whisper, because I noticed he found it necessary every so often to let his natural deep man’s voice show itself for a moment or two before going back into hiding.

  Be a lost traveler, he said. Do you have some story?

  I told him. He thought ornithology was good and liked my lost donkey and lost scientific impedimenta flourishes. It worried him that I knew nothing—as I confessed—about birds. He would get a field guide to me, he said, posthaste.

  Are we a conspiracy? I asked.

  He circumvented with They don’t know it, but the reason people are so pro bird is because ninety-five percent of bird species are monogamous.

  I’m not, I said. I can do this but I have to overcome a sort of mocking feeling I have about birdwatchers. I figure Let the birds watch me. Of course this is me speaking as a higher life form.

  Are your hands all right now? he asked. He felt my forehead and said Good. So he had been looking in.

  Jesus, what am I doing? he said, I think with genuine feeling and apropos of nothing, to which I said Same here, and we laughed.

  This place is going to generate wealth, he said. And men will be welcome, but by then the women will be where they should. You’ll see. I think you deserve to be here.

  This isn’t exactly it, but he finished with something like I’m delighted you’re here and now I have to crawl out of here on my belly like a reptile.

  There was a brief, whispered exchange with someone, probably Mma Isang, who, I sensed correctly, was a confederate, outside the door.

  I was already trying to recollect what little I knew about African birds and reflecting on how perverse it was for me to choose ornithology to misrepresent myself in. After all, I am the daughter of a mother whose humiliating favorite radio program was a thing called the Canary Chorus, wherein a Hammond organ droned for hours on end in a roomful of trilling canaries. She w
ould recommend this program indiscriminately.

  Mysteries Fall Away

  In the morning I made a production of being concerned about my binoculars, digging fixedly through my goods until I came up with them—as any shipwrecked ornithologist would.

  Mma Isang seemed to like me. It was mutual. She was in her fifties, built very blockily, with an unfortunate face. The root of her nose was sharply indented, her eyes were deep-sunk, and there were marked crowsfeet extending from her eyes around the sides of her face. Her face looked as though it had been crimped. I never learned if this was a congenital defect or just an unlucky but normal featural concatenation. There were residues of a Serowe accent in her Setswana, which I noted and which she acknowledged, impressed with me. All my clothes had been laundered.