Mating

by Norman Rush

  What else? What hurt me? There was very little. Only that when he was apologizing about the ambience, viz. that we couldn’t have anything to drink and he would have liked to provide a little something if he could, the fact was that he could have. This is in retrospect and still irks. At the time, what did I know? Of course I also withheld something on this subject. There was plenty to drink in the village if bojalwa was up your alley. I knew, but he didn’t, that there were two functioning shebeens in Tsau. They were rather covert, but they were functional, and not only for the men. All this is symbolic only, because a drink before dinner is decor to me, and decor is a subject I have in perspective. I knew Nelson was very identified with the temperance tendency in Tsau, so I put out of my consciousness the feeling that he might have had the forethought to make an exception in my case by having a jug of Carafino brought in for him on the Barclays plane. He apologized for the limited range of the repertory of tapes he had to offer as background music for our evenings, mentioning in particular that he wished he had a cassette of the Academic Festival Overture, Brahms. The tacking on of the identifier Brahms silently killed me.

  Undressed he became very laissez-faire. He was fundamentally sexually secure. The Herero beast had ended up on the market, not being donated for the braai. I was taking advantage of this little spike in the availability of beef and making a lot of soups and ragouts for us, as well as putting up quite a lot for biltong. Something about all this amused him. I got it out of him. You think I’m middleaged, he said, and red meat is good for my libido. I virtually had to cross my heart to convince him this was a piece of sex folklore I’d never heard of. There was nothing wrong with his libido. By the way, he said, I am old: I remember when science fiction was called scientifiction, which is old. He said You could call my autobiography I Remember Kolynos. What Kolynos was I had no idea, although it sounded vaguely classical or like a Greek place name. It was a major toothpaste from the 1940s. I said You are old, Father William, whenceforth Father William became part of our idioverse. He always laughed when I resorted to it, and, nicely, never felt any need to remind me that I was not, myself, younger than springtime. Ah, of course, he said in the middle of talking about being old, No wonder science fiction replaced scientifiction: it has one less syllable, so that’s one more for George K. Zipf and the Principle of Least Effort. George K. Zipf was one of his intellectual gods. Re autobiographies, I said, A friend of mine who was teaching creative writing had a student who was writing hers and wanted to call it When Hair Styles Were Different, which I’ve always regarded as some kind of high-water mark for innocent banality. He liked it. I had no complaint about Nelson sexually in any way age-related. By laissez-faire I mean that anything went, once he was undressed. He would kid, he would say anything. Take me in your legs, was something he might say in a moment that you would think was supposed to be serious.

  There was great sweetness to everything. I called it mellifluence, to myself. He let fall that he had been celibate for two years. I positively did not solicit or dig to get this. The thought was a source of excitement to me. Before he said anything, it was evident he was enthusiastic about us sexually. But this added. His drought was ending through me. Honeymoon is the word that inevitably comes to mind, but it certainly doesn’t apply: we were both working all day every day, normally, and also without saying it we both knew we were superior to the term. He had in fact had an actual honeymoon with someone, and where had that led? I think we both unspokenly wanted to transcend certain social homilies about coming together. There was never a lot of individual fixing up before we made love.

  I was the first with compliments on the sex side, saying I felt like someone who was just coming out of a maze. To which he said It may feel like that, but you’re entering another one right away instead. I see that this is only in a meta way about sex. But then he praised my hair and breasts, two good choices. In fact, about my breasts he said something to the effect that if individual parts of our bodies went to specific heavens my breasts would be hand heaven.

  If he erred it was on the side of being more consultative than he needed to. He was solicitous. I could be on top to my heart’s content. Up close he had more hair on his shoulders and back than I had realized. He must have been fatter at one time, because there were striae on his buttocks and the sides of his upper legs. I loved our early sex. If it could be done I would drop down into reliving it over and over like those rats that press a pedal connected to their pleasure centers and press it until they die. This is only to say I wish I could relive it, god help me. This is too extreme. I become extreme, at times, still.

  In the spirit of saying everything, he was uncircumcised. He had a significant penis. At first I had to deal with feelings that a smaller penis would have been more relaxing for me. There was a history to this. At some level an average or slightly less than average penis is always going to be a relief to me, thanks to my mother’s berserk attempts to infect me with a specific sex fear. She must have had an unusually small introitus, assuming the whole thing wasn’t a fantasy. She claimed she’d been harmed in a relationship with a man whose penis was simply too big for her, too wide across, as she put it. A woman should always find out if this was the case with a man lest she fall in love and be in for physical suffering. My present theory is that this was probably a fantasy concoction obliquely related to her becoming obese, justifying it, where fat becomes a form of armor against the possibility of all sexual approaches. But maybe she did have an abnormal introitus and this is unjust. She compared the hurtful penis to a Lebanon bologna and a rolling pin. Denoon suggested this scene might be transposed from a real molestation incident in her childhood, which had never occurred to me.

  I think she also tried to warn me about uncircumcised men, but not insistently enough to leave a mark, evidently. I did examine his member fairly closely when we first made love, to his amusement. I was holding a candle up next to it, and he asked me to be careful re the molten wax. He asked if I knew that prostitutes in Gaborone, the more hip ones, carried lemons in their handbags which they would squeeze over the penis of a prospective if they were worried about small lesions or sores being present, an adaptation to the detestation by both sexes of the use of condoms. You know many things, I said, but not that I don’t need that. He was holding a little jar of Vaseline. His wife had always used it, or something like it. He was embarrassed. I asked If the prospect flinches, what happens? Is the deal off or is the lemon juice considered a disinfectant? He said he didn’t know. Clever of you not to know, I said.

  In the act he was very orthodox, which was what I wanted. I wanted him to be solid in what I think of as the foundational part of sex. His endurance was good to the degree that I sometimes held myself back for a long time, although not often. The man had been celibate for two years, was a consideration. I asked him if he used particular images to retard himself. He said yes but didn’t want to tell me what they were. I tried to encourage him by telling him a thing I do to move myself on, if I need to. There is a certain type of swing for young children that used to be common in parks in Minnesota, consisting of a square of piping with a canvas sling affixed to the front and back of the upper rim. There was quite a bit of direct pressure on your je ne sais quoi. My mother specialized in taking me to parks at dinnertime or even later because she was likelier not to encounter anyone there for her to have to talk to or act normal toward. She would talk to herself while she pushed me hard and interminably. I was tiny, but there were certain moments that were rapturous and erotic. It seemed to have to do with how long the swinging lasted. In retrospect I’m astonished that no one was ever prompted to inquire about this strange woman. We weren’t always the only ones in the park, and my mother talked a lot. I was surprised when I discovered there were people who didn’t talk to themselves pretty much nonstop in the privacy of their own homes. I thought it was part of adulthood. Nelson was interested in my story but still wouldn’t tell me his images, saying it might be bad luck. He was very noisy,
for a man. This is not a complaint. These bosun’s chair swings were suspended by chains, not ropes, and the sound of the chains squeaking together at the peak of the highest rises, just before the strain came off them as you rose above the crossbar, is a sound that helps if I can reimagine it. His groans of release were a cross for me between music and food. I was convinced I could hear sadness going away when they came. I felt I knew he was sad about something he was unlikely ever to admit, but that these were moments when I could hear it going, being overwhelmed.

  Afterward he would sleep like the dead, almost instantly afterward, it seemed to me. It was a tribute. He might try to converse for a while, but I was kind and let him plunge. I experimented some, as in seeing how loud I could talk or sing when he was asleep before he would stir. I perused him. He had the usual vaccination scar and one from a mastoidectomy. I had more scars than he did. Depending on how he was lying, I could take his sac in my palm and watch it slowly heave around, one of my favorite phenomena for its power to ground you utterly in the biological substrate of being. He was graying, but concentratedly, in his nape hair and behind his ears, more behind his right ear than his left. My utopia is equal love, equal love between people of equal value, although value is an approximation for the word I want. Why is it so difficult? Assortative mating shows there has to be some drive in nature to bring equals together in the toils of love, so why even in the most enlightened and beautifully launched unions are we afraid we hear the master-slave relationship moving its slow thighs somewhere in the vicinity? It has to be cultural. In fact the closest thing to a religion I have is that this has to be cultural. I could do practically anything while he was asleep and not bother him. I wrote in my journal, washed dishes in slow motion if we hadn’t gotten around to them. I was emotional a lot, privately. I wanted to incorporate everything, understand everything, because time is cruel and nothing stays the same.

  ACQUISITIVE LOVE

  The Bathing Engine

  The bathing engine was good for us. We were using it in fairly cold weather. Denoon would make the fire under the boiler and I would run out in my kimono when the tub was full of hot water. We would get in together and I would slide one of the litani mats aside so that we could look out into the desert. Denoon took the back position and I would recline against him. The bath hut was dim in a particular way that obscurely bothered me at first. Then through free associating, with Nelson, around why I felt that way, I was able to transcend. That made the bathing engine sessions auspicious. Confessional or difficult times between us came up there.

  I would smolder over stupid things. In cleaning up I had found a copy of a radio message he had sent out in February after hearing that Bernadette Devlin McAliskey had been shot. It annoyed me that he knew her, that that was the level he moved at. I even imagined that maybe he had had something to do with her, since she was so superbly political, his kind of woman, and so on. We cleared that up. I was able to help him with his depression about Poland. He was expecting the Russians to invade and produce a bloodbath. Solidarity had been pretty much repressed, but he was still expecting the Russians. I gave him a useful rule of thumb. I said In the case of Poland, which would be more dramatic and historically interesting—for the Russians to invade the way they did in Czechoslovakia or for the government to manage things on its own with imprisonments and halfway measures and so on? He agreed it would be the first. So my rule of thumb was that of any two possible historical outcomes that you could possibly be aware enough of to obsess on, by some huge odds and for some unknown reason it would be the less dramatic and interesting that was likeliest to occur. This is one of those conceits that happen to be apposite, for the most part. He liked it well enough to urge it on me later once or twice when I was having similar megrims.

  Being deliberate with each other was mutual. I had not done the usual swan dive women do when they start a promising relationship, which is to just deliver all there is about ourselves, the entire midden of past relationships, your first sex, your hopes, your dreams, the entire midden in a backhoe. We were wary and going through a more male process, which resembles two people sitting opposite each other and taking turns putting soupçons in the scales blind justice carries around and trying to keep the pans level. He was parsimonious because he was a man. I was parsimonious because I knew I was dealing with a feminist to whom a heart-laid-bare swan dive would seem stereotypical and also because I had had a shorter and, to say the least, more restricted life. So I felt it might be intelligent to ration my res gestae a little. I wasn’t the one who had someone like Bernadette Devlin McAliskey to send a get-well telegram to or who got six-page letters from Hungarian socialists named Kornai, another name I had just added to my syllabus. The most famous person in my ambit was Denoon himself. But in the bathing engine the ratchet would turn a click or two toward greater openness. He was, for example, apparently worried about rifles.

  Has anyone talked to you about rifles? he asked me.

  About rifles? No. The main topic is still the rainstorm. Tsau is as full as a plum, and so on.

  No one is saying Sekopololo should be stocking a few rifles?

  No, and what is this about?

  Probably nothing, but tell me if it happens.

  I think it was to get off this subject that he, luckily as it turned out, brought up the question of what it was about the particular atmospherics of the bath hut that made me a little anxious.

  What light is this like? he asked.

  Well, it turned out that it was like the light in a treehouse some neighborhood boys had built, which I had been allowed up into in order to play doctor. There was a tarpaulin across the top and most but not all of the way down the sides, although you could get virtual privacy by sliding sections of cardboard carton over the open spots. There was a nice view. We were quite a way up. Access was via slats nailed to the trunk, of one of the trees. My mother crept up on us. She wanted to know what was going on up there. I forget what we said, but it couldn’t have been the right thing, because she decided she would climb up and see for herself, with the inevitable result that the rungs popped out of the tree under her weight right away, inspiring her to start howling like an animal. Come down! she screamed, all the while in her rage and berserk strength plucking the remaining rungs out of the tree, destroying, naturally, our only means of downgress. We could get a little way down, then had to hang and drop to our fate.

  You were terrified, Denoon said.

  Oh indeed, I said. But at least she never hit me. I was inviolate that way. Property was another matter.

  We lay there silently for a while. Light breaks where no sun shines, he said, quoting something.

  Already the feeling in the bath hut was different for me.

  Vervets

  Shortly after this I did begin hearing about rifles, in connection with a vervet monkey population explosion in the eastern wards.

  I mentioned it to Nelson while we were eating dinner and I was getting him to admit he looked incredibly improved since he’d let me cut his hair. It was short, almost en brosse, parted over the left eye. I had teased him gradually into it by showing him how he looked with his long hair fanned around into pageboy bobs and so forth and calling him Prince Valiant.

  He knew about the vervet problem. Male vervets are particularly distracting because their favorite pastime is to sit on your door or windowsill and display their electronic blue or lime green testicles, an act they intersperse with helping themselves to food items. I said that what I understood was being proposed was buying a couple of rifles to have available for hire at Sekopololo for situations just like this. I had been lobbied gently and had expressed myself as thinking it wasn’t unreasonable.

  Guns are not a good idea, he said, very curt. Then it was Who, exactly, talked to you?

  Reason with me and I might tell you, I said.

  He didn’t want to. He wanted me to accept the general proposition. I was firm. I took a lighter tack, telling him about my pacifist friends in Palo Al
to who had forbidden their little boy to play with toy guns. By the age of five he was so obsessed with guns he turned everything into a gun. He would bite his toast into a gun shape. He aimed his banana at you at breakfast. This could be similar.

  But it seems I was being infantile. There were serious reasons not to, among them the paranoia about Tsau in certain quarters in Gaborone. Certain people in certain ministries were in the pay of the Boers, who were convinced that somehow Tsau was giving aid and comfort to SWAPO, if not the ANC, or both. Everything that came out on the Barclays plane was monitored. He wouldn’t tell me how he knew any of this. In addition, hunting was illegal where we were, in the Central Kalahari Reserve. Only the Basarwa were allowed to hunt, and then only with bows and arrows and blowguns. He would appear to be getting set to violate one of the founding conditions he had agreed to.

  I thought that was all, but in a minute he went on more vehemently. Couldn’t I see how it would go? Suppose we got a waiver and got a couple of rifles in. Then we would need a few more. Then the main thing the men would be doing would be clandestine hunting instead of attending to the heavier work they were doing now. The guns would be checked out by the women for legitimate nuisances like the vervets and they would be passed on the sly to the men. I was an anthropologist, so I must know that the oldest male racket ever invented was hunting, I of all people. Didn’t I know how laughable the nutritional contribution male hunters made to the common diet was, everywhere? Which didn’t stop them from acquiring status with the women in honor of their long hours drinking and lolling around out in the bush. So he was going to oppose it as long as he could. He was very unhappy.