Mating

by Norman Rush

  Exuberating

  Our mobile dolce far niente continued all morning. I was very conscious of his body as we went around mutedly reveling in the effects of the storm. We had made love twice so far, majorly once and then minorly, so to speak. I wanted him to be as attuned physically to me as I was to him, be in my aura. He was a good lover, a very comfortable lover, and also courteous as hell. In fact he had rather formally thanked me both times, as though there was only one beneficiary in our exertions and not two. I wanted him to be comfortable, now that it was settled that he was fine, and not feel he had to mark our getting together by being nonstop about sex. He was not in the first flush of youth, which I had to be sensitive to to some unknown degree. He was a young forty-six or seven or eight, was my guess, but which was it, exactly? I had a quasi right to know. I suppose I felt this as one of the threshold questions. Some others were What about Grace and what was all the grimness and unpleasantness in their breakup due to? Had he loved her? Also, what had he been doing about sex lo these several years? Had he masturbated, for example, as one answer, and how would I feel about it? I have complex attitudes, not all rational, on the subject. These were questions I could pose only after getting as close to Denoon as I now was. I had to be inside the moat. There was nothing violently preconditional about this. I was not going to rush. But I am at the opposite end of the spectrum from someone I know who, the morning after the first night with whoever her new friend is, says Tell me what I have to do to keep you.

  Siesta that day was nice, and showed Nelson wasn’t under a compulsion to complete lovemaking each time certain customary points of no return were reached: he understood about promissory occasions and seemed to like them all right. He had a proposition about cooking. If I didn’t mind, he wanted to cook our dinners unless something came up or I specifically asked to. Was that all right? I said Does Julio Iglesias own a sunlamp? but I had to explain that this was in the genre of Is the Pope Catholic? Nelson had never heard of Julio Iglesias.

  He wanted to go out again in the afternoon and continue exuberating, and he wanted me to come with him. We had already done the few really necessary things like checking on the nethouses and the windmills. People were saying that the rain had been so heavy that standing water could be seen at some low places in the sand river. They were organizing parties to go and exclaim, so we went too. It was true. We had also already toured the few trees, mostly on the summit, that had been struck. There were loaves of sand and silt at the mouths of the main north-south streets, but by midnoon they had been shoveled away. The supports to some of the overhead lattices had slumped, and in places pavings had been undermined. No hail had fallen, luckily. Mainly people were extravagantly occupied with putting drenched mats and karosses out to dry. The day off was an excuse for celebrating this huge influx of water to the community’s supply, essentially. Nelson reminded people about stopping off at Sekopololo for packets of chlorine for their cisterns. There was a moment that took me by surprise as we were leaving to resume whatever it was we were doing. I hesitantly asked Nelson if he wouldn’t wear his kepi when he was out in the sun. He owned one, I knew. He was normally out in the noonday sun bareheaded, except in the depths of summer. He looked at me. The back of your neck worries me, I said. It looked cured. You probably don’t wear the thing so you can avoid looking like the French Foreign Legion, subconsciously, I said. But please wear it. He still hesitated. I want you to last forever, I said, and then my eyes filled up. Chronologically he was closer to death than I was, and the thought was unbearable for a minute. It was not the last time this would happen. He was immediately good about the kepi.

  I was trying to be casual and as provisional and patient as I could, but as we continued promenading and visiting a lot with people that day a quirk of his seized me that I felt would destroy me. It was this. When he was given something liquid, soup or a beverage of any kind, he would swill the first sip around in his mouth for a noticeable period before swallowing. It was an unconscious thing of some kind, a tic. I couldn’t stand him to do it. I knew it would be insane to say anything on such short acquaintance, but there was no way not to. I had never previously been with him continuously enough in convivial situations to have this tic impressed on me. Table manners are fraught for me. I resisted my reaction. My mother had made me a demonically fastidious and correct eater, clearly abreactively to her own inner chaos and loss of control when she was faced with something to eat. There were periods when she would eat out of sight of me and then serve me my food and sit opposite me to monitor and correct my table manners. Up and down Tsau we went, taking tea or juice in various settings, myself embroiled in what to do about this gross thing he was repeatedly doing. I wanted to know where it came from. Even when she was supposedly sated and finished I could feel rays of greed steaming from my mother as I ate. Something rose in her every time she saw food, whether she was full or not, which meant to me later that this was a trait in someone who was definitely not meant to reproduce, because such a trait indefinitely replicated would mean the world gnawed down to its core, but in fact she had managed to reproduce and the result was me. For the time being I conquered myself.

  Toward evening there was a general meeting where Denoon announced the readings on the main storage cisterns. The readings were wonderful. Even the men felt free to show they were happy, a mood helped by the fact that a heifer and two tolleys had been killed by lightning and would be donated for a town braai. I stood next to Denoon like a what? a consort? Why was I walking around with Denoon and being gracious instead of attending to things I could enumerate that needed doing? I comforted myself by reminding myself how rare such rain prodigies were.

  There was a small hitch, it developed, regarding the dead cattle. Dineo and Nelson met over it, and no one said I couldn’t bystand. The heifer that had been killed belonged to the Baherero. In a slightly anomalous arrangement the Herero cattle, though kept with the municipal herd, were vested in the Herero group separately. There was an arrangement obtaining to defray feeding and veterinary costs, through Sekopololo. In any case the Baherero had decided not to donate the dead heifer to the braai but to sell it to Sekopololo for the purpose. This was rather late in the day. All the animals had been field-dressed by then. Denoon was unhappy and wanted someone to argue with Martha, the Herero spokeswoman, to try to get her to keep to the precedent of making donations in cases like this. I was interested in the way Dineo diverted Denoon from doing anything, which was mainly by patently, to me, humoring him about how unfortunate this was but at the same time stressing that it could be seen as another vindication of her longtime belief that the Baherero would pull up stakes and go back, however they could, to Namibia whenever the government yielded to their insistence that they be allowed to go back taking all their cattle with them rather than leaving them behind. Someday we are going to wake up to see nine empty houses, she said. This was by way of being a subtle reminder to Denoon that his wager—that the Baherero in Tsau would stay even if the rest of their nation decamped for Namibia—would be strengthened if this small matter was not turned into a cause célèbre. He yielded.

  It was dinnertime and I still could not get this man to stop touring the by now completely terminal cleaning-up efforts. When I whined a little he murmured something about seeing Tsau as an organism showing it could repair itself. Self-repair was important. It was the opposite of social decadence. And did I know the moment that Ignazio Silone had decided he was no longer a statist type of socialist? There was an essay on the exact moment, a classic, in fact. A flood had occurred in the mezzogiorno, and the local village people, who had always in the past undertaken to do their own disaster relief and reconstruction, instead this time—owing to the growth of the welfare state—sat down in folding chairs and watched in droves while the carabinieri did all the cleanup.

  Do you know who I’m talking about? he asked me point-blank. I was straining to get the neuron to fire that would tell me who this guy was. I almost knew, I thought. It didn’t
come.

  Then he looked intently at me and said Don’t be in pain if you don’t know.

  Then he explained who this man was, what pleasure I had facing me when I read a novel of his, Fontamara, which he even thought he had around somewhere. By now we were at last back in the octagon.

  Supper was ready by the time he’d established he was unable to find Fontamara anywhere. I didn’t mind cooking while he searched. I love someone who takes a serious tutelary attitude toward me, so long as he’s not doing it just to turn out another member of his cult. It has to be ecumenical. The idea of having someone want to improve me and fill me up with new ideas rather than punish me for my lacunae is tonic. I see myself as quite perfectible. It always surprised me how few pygmalious, polymathic men had ever been interested in sprucing me up, given that I’m so interested and available, and that, as everyone notices first about me, I remember everything.

  As we were eating, my face got hot when I realized that I had come within an ace of saying Yes, Silone, the fascist or profascist. I had been thinking of Céline. I thanked god my mind had failed to provide. Silone was an icon of humanist socialism.

  Just to illustrate the depths women live at emotiono-intellectually: it occurred to me briefly that I ought to confess my near miss over Céline. Can This Marriage Be Saved? I thought, to josh myself out of my cravenness. I had been saying that to myself all day, as a matter of fact, when I realized I had things to do other than roam around with Denoon sampling civic joy but that he seemed to be in his element. Can This Marriage Be Saved? was a column in a women’s magazine my mother occasionally shoplifted from our local supermarket, which she would study fixedly, every page, as though this was the manual that was going to teach her how to become a normal person.

  There was more about socialism, free associatively, as we ate and washed up. It was mostly against socialism as an orientation or aesthetic or feeling instead of socialism as being about concrete institutional propositions that could be shown to work or not work. A form of Stimmung, I said, which he liked. There was a socialist magazine whose charter issue had the epigraph Socialism is the name of my desire, from Tolstoy, over its manifesto. They had no idea what they were revealing about themselves, Denoon said. Socialism was becoming a bibelot. Student socialism was essentially an art school phenomenon. He shuddered to think of how few socialists there were who could define marginal utility. And so on.

  That this man loved to talk was obvious. Also, I was appropriate for him, as a listener if not exactly as a discussant, although that evolved pretty quickly. He had been an isolated limb of the West for long stretches. I was a denizen of the same academic subculture he was from. When I got up in the middle of that night to go out to the latrine I inadvertently woke him. As I got back in with him he asked if I felt like talking, being quick to say that it was all right if I didn’t and wanted to get back to sleep. I think this was prefaced with his saying I was stimulating. Of course it was fine, how not?

  It was just that he wanted me to not misunderstand him when it came to socialism: he could be considered a socialist in the noumenal sense of being for a society where human self-realization and liberation were a general outcome and not an outcome only for the most talented or driven or unscrupulous in any given generation, and their heirs. He wasn’t going to bore me with all his specifications for the devices you had to put together to give you such a consummation devoutly to be wished. But also I mustn’t be confused about him and unadulterated capitalism or think he thought anything but that the limited liability corporation was a virus that was devouring the world. Underneath everything in America he sometimes imagined there was a subliminal sound like an orange crate cracking when you stand on it, except that this sound never stopped. When Nelson really got rolling and interested in what he was saying at night he liked there to be a light on, just a touch, one candle, I now discovered. We need socialism, correctly specified, he said, or rather we need the soul of it or its noumen. But then nervously he said When I say we I don’t mean to be incorporating you into my construct in some subtle way, by the way. It’s all right, I said: I’m not not a socialist, if that’s any way to describe yourself politically. You could call me a nihilo-liberal. He laughed. I meant it, though.

  It turns out that being in a symposium lying down in the small hours when all you want is to be asleep is a little akin to being asked to bleed to death. I ultimately developed a slight capacity to intersperse dozing with a murmur here and there before I dropped off that was satisfactory, and a murmur when I came back to consciousness again briefly. I was fading. The problem was that calling yourself a socialist put you in the same pew as people who had a purely reflexive concept of what socialism would be: it would be whatever came after capitalism was undone, and it would be beautiful. The mind the new left had been the most at the feet of took the position that all you needed to know about the oncoming free society was that it would be like the feeling you get from great art, beautiful music. This was decadence. Undergraduates had supposedly been going to be the midwives of the new society. Marx was the original offender with his attacks on the people who had the temerity to physically try out a particular concrete stab at the common life. He started naming them. Here I drifted off, only to come back to a more musing stream, particularly about me. I had gone to sleep with his arm around my shoulders, and he was patting me now to make a point. He was so happy we were both nonreligious and empiriocritical, because it was no good for a person to go along with a partner’s strong convictions against something like socialism or religion as an act of will when in fact there were private residues to the contrary, residues of credulism. I assumed this was a meander fed by his parents’ terrible mismatch or possibly Grace retaining Episcopalian feelings underneath it all. She looked Episcopalian to me, despite the fact that undoubtedly she had presented herself to him as his own tabula rasa. And the last of it was about purification, somehow, and was there a general human need for something called that, and wasn’t that the element religion stuck its taproot down into, once it got started otherwise? Here was when I learned in passing that he had been an altar boy. I remember asking if by purification he really meant atonement, something I could understand better, a need to expel guilt over the thousands of transgressions you discover you’ve committed as you get older and more ethically acute. That wasn’t what he meant. People could have done nothing and still have this other need. I was out of stamina. I fell deep asleep. There was something interesting afoot in the underbrush here but I missed it. In the morning I woke up being kissed on the leg.

  I Should Tell Everything

  My story is turning into the map in Borges exactly the size of the country it represents, but I feel I should probably say everything.

  There was the ambience in our place after dark, which I think of as blond. The base was the yellow candlelight everything transpired in. I had inveigled Nelson to let me put up café curtains over the peculiar windows, custard yellow being the only color available. Why, he wanted to know, on a precipice, totally without neighbors? I said So that if anyone drifts by at the wrong moment they can’t see my breasts and genitals and your penis and anus. He laughed and said But how about your anus? I overlooked it, I said. We looked very golden naked, and I think pretty good, although not perfect by any means.

  People act more deliberately by candlelight. Your gestures are slower. I felt like an illustration, at times. Other things contributed to the honied atmosphere. Possibly the absence of an overabundance of reflecting surfaces was one. In America even the most spartanly furnished apartment is full of reflecting surfaces, from windows, through the glass in framed pictures, through the sides of your toaster, through actual mirrors. In fact the frequency of mirrors goes up, as a trompe l’oeil maneuver to make you feel you have more space for your money, as the actual square footage of what you can afford to rent goes down. I have done it myself in certain of the broom closets I’ve been reduced to renting. On the street it’s shop windows and bus windows playi
ng their part in the conspiracy to keep making you monitor how you look. Before Tsau, I knew something was wrong with it: I kept losing my compacts in high school until I stopped carrying them, thusly copying my mother in at least one trait. Of course I was still bound to mirrors as recently as crossing the Kalahari, when I went into shock when mine was lost. Mirrors are bad. Africa is nothing if not matte, and that returns you to yourself, unexpectedly.

  But I should tell everything. The underside of the thatch over us was golden-brownish, the unweathered side, and the karosses we’d spread liberally everywhere were medium brown to pale tan. One panel in the big kaross we had on our bed was auburn, exactly matching my hair. It was from a horse. Nelson was very deliberate, sexually, for a man, for whatever reason. I told him he should write a book called How to Undress a Person Other Than Yourself, which was an homage to the delicate and nonfoisting way he would undress me all the way down before touching his own clothing. At first while he was undressing me he would say Sh when I tried to undress him back, make things a little more mutual. Sh meant not to do that. After four or five times I was afraid of two things. One was that this was going to be some frozen onset ritual that meant hysteria somewhere in his past. The other was that this was revealing him as one of those congenital bores who think silence during sex is holy and who usually turn out to be men who have either barely or nominally escaped the effects of intense religious processing during their formative years. And of course I had just learned Denoon had been, however briefly, an altar boy. I was afraid I had an ex-burnt offering on my hands. But luckily neither was at all true. I guess I was overreacting to the politics of feeling that I had to always let myself be passively undressed, complicated by the fact of life of not minding it that much erotically. He liked my book title. He also liked a much later conceit for a title for a book by him, What to Do with Your Hands While You’re Making Love. He knew how to touch.