by Norman Rush
Denoon came out with a flashlight, and I thought for a moment he was about to help us with the fine detail of cooking in the dark, but no, he wavered off into the bush, walking not quite as I was used to.
She saw something in my expression, because she clutched my hand with both hands and said And nor is he my husband, Harold. England is hard. I don’t think you know. There is no regional theater, nothing like. So we do this. My husband is dead. Harold is a homosexualist, you see, and we agreed we would say we were married. There was a ceremony of sorts. Because you see the British Council prefer very much to make use of the married for overseas work like this. Nelson slid past and into the house, carrying something.
She wanted to tell me everything. I tried to listen. There was a tortuous story about favoritism at the BBC. I had things on my mind. The main one was the question of whether Nelson would hold to his promise to stay off the subject of the Catholic Church. The Church fascinated him, and his thesis about it was that through stumbling into the celibacy requirement for priests it had created an accidental sanctuary for homosexuals whose concentrated talents would result in a capital-accumulation mechanism second to none, since the assets of the Church could never be in danger of being dispersed to the heirs of its dramatis personae. Thus, through celibacy to temporal power and invincibility. He loved to talk about the Church, and I was afraid drinking would erode whatever barrier his promise to me constituted. It was institutional permanency that fascinated him, the unmoved movers historically. And Harold was so floridly Catholic. The irony involved in the Church both stigmatizing homosexuals and covertly and brilliantly exploiting their energies was going to recur to Nelson and be difficult to resist. And it occurred to me that another angle of attack might be suggested by Harold’s also florid antisocialism. Nelson had a teasing analysis of the Church as a model socialist institution that I’d heard him trot out before. This would be more manageable on my part, if in fact he succumbed to temptation.
Julia was dishing up soup before my very eyes. It wasn’t as hot or as married as I like French onion soup to be, but I deferred to her anxiety.
We went in with the soup. It seemed to me that both Harold and Nelson were responding benignly to the alcohol. In fact brotherhood was in full flower. Our men had found common ground on an astounding issue, Shakespeare, agreeing that whoever wrote the plays was amazing because for any of the credible candidates, including Shaxpur, writing was a part-time activity, subsidiary in his case to acting and wool gathering, as Denoon put it. He meant, of course, wool factoring. They were even beginning to agree to disagree, I gathered, about men in relation to women, sequent to an exchange of pleasantries about the Lamentations spectacle. Harold wanted a hearing for his denial that men were harder on women than they were on other men, only a hearing. In other words, denying the reality of gynophobia, I thought to myself. Go ahead, Denoon said, fairness incarnate. Also coming up was a hearing for the proposition that women were as bad as men, given the opportunity, as indicated by the fact that the most murderous and depraved period in Turkish history was the wellknown socalled Rule of Women, when concubines ruled various sultans from behind the curtain of the seraglio. We adore women, Harold was maintaining.
I got us all seated and ready to address the soup. Harold and Nelson had ravished the Oban. It wasn’t clear to me that later on I would still be able to get myself heard. I had been through scenes not unlike this in my other life. Before it was too late I wanted to register myself on the subject of gynophobia, so I told a story I told Harold he might find illuminating on the subject, something to think about, at least. I said I’d once lived in a co-op house at Stanford with nineteen other people, male and female. One of the members of the house had been a woman named Betty. Then a man joined the house who owned a dog named Betty. So naturally the practice grew up of making clear, when it was apposite, which Betty we might be referring to by saying, if we meant the dog, Betty the dog. I was subconsciously waiting for what happened to happen, and it did: in an exchange in which someone mentioned Betty the dog a guy said Which Betty the dog? Was this anything but seizing an opportunity to express freefloating hostility arising from some primal substrate? It so happens that Betty the woman was probably the best-liked and best-looking woman in our house, and in fact the guy who was insulting her had gone out with her a couple of times.
I didn’t elicit much with my anecdote. There was some pro forma nodding. I don’t know how closely anyone was listening. But I didn’t have to feel like a fool for very long. Denoon was being peculiarly agreeable and passive. Shortly I saw why. He was ashamed of something, and here it was: two bottles of Cape Riesling with bits of earth still clinging to the labels. They dated back to the Italian construction workers and had been cached against a special occasion rising. It was hard for me not to think of special occasions in the past involving just the two of us when a taste of wine would have made a nice addition, but no, instead the wine was unearthed in honor of a visiting male no one would be likely to mistake for a comrade of his. There was no justification for it other than Denoon’s feeling that he had to reciprocate for the Oban. I was not happy.
Denoon began pouring generously all around. Almost as though it were a chore he swallowed down whatever Oban remained in his mug, so that he could get properly going with the wine. Julia nudged me under the table. She declined wine until I signaled her that it might be a good idea for her to assist me in diminishing the supply, as feebly attempted before with the Oban. I was making the assumption that these two bottles were all there was. Nelson was indicating that that was the case. But how could I be sure? Wasn’t it just as possible that he was trying to reassure me that however tonight developed I wasn’t going to have to endure something like it ever again? I felt traces of pity, his shame was so patent.
Harold was developing the standard canard about the ingratitude of women regarding the unappreciated efforts of men to provide for them, even knowing that women in the long run are going to outlive them by a long chalk. Where was the hatred in that, on the part of men? Everything men accomplished in society was for women, for acquiring the attributes of all kinds needed to attract them and maintain them in as much comfort as could be managed. And was it not illuminating that, as much as women might complain, when they had got the suffrage, what was the result? Giving the vote to women had been the one thing needful to bring about a new and perfect world, so the previous generation had been told, but what have we here? Women voting to affirm the world as men have made it in every respect, albeit with something a little more for crèches. You endorse us, really, he said, do you not?
I had my artillery ready, but I was waiting for Nelson. I thought, he knows reams more than I do on this. Where was he, while Harold ruled the waves with half-baked vignettes of women in power behaving exactly like men? A man should be rebutting Harold. Of course Nelson didn’t know it, but Harold was acting, playing sort of paterfamilias. Speak, I was thinking toward Nelson, or forever hold your peace.
Then Nelson came up with Do you happen to know which country in Western Europe has the fewest women in parliament and cabinet, both? He sipped wine vigorously while he waited for Harold to guess. Harold wouldn’t. Greece, Nelson said, and a close number two, the United Kingdom, very close. Nelson’s expression told me that this feeble thrust was supposed to calm me. But this statistic was nowhere near the point Harold was making. If this was Denoon inter pocula I needed to know it.
This in no way refutes me, Harold said. Julia asked me on the side if it was true, and I told her that Denoon was always right on his facts and figures.
Ultimately it was my continuing silence that got Denoon to realize he had to perorate. Nelson roused himself. He really let fly, and all for me. I knew he was encyclopedic on the woman question and that night he proved it. He said to Harold You mention Turkey groaning under the rule of women, which is an old chestnut, but I wonder if you know that all during this supposed reign of terror the kadeins, that is, the favored concubines, even
the most favored and sovereign ones, had to join the nominal sultans in bed by crawling from the bedroom doorway on hands and knees, over to the bed, then kiss the coverlet, and then crawl up underneath it from the foot until they got level with the sultan? This was nota bene for me because Nelson had come to bed that way a couple of times and I had not known there was a referent, I had been under the impression he was just being funny. I think I prided myself that his playful side was developing under my benevolent influence. But his being able to strike back so specifically against one of Harold’s major canards was the main thing. I loved that. I lose detail here because I had to organize more food for us. The men had eaten about as much of the soup as they were going to. It was unlikely Julia would be much help. Thanks to her pitching in with the wine reduction strategy, she was becoming visibly more relaxed.
Nelson was masterly. He drove home two theses. One was that despite apparent differences every society can be analyzed to show that women are in essence being shaped to function as vehicles for male imperatives and the physical reproduction of male power. He didn’t carry this thesis into its most perfected form, in which he shows that in strictly biological terms man is a parasite on woman. This would have been too much for Harold. The second thesis was that because of the history of crushing and molding of women, men have no idea what women are or what they might be if they were left alone. One proof of this was the spectacle of male marxism searching high and low for the liberatory class that would lift human arrangements into a redeemed state—the proletariat, the students, the lumpen, third world nationalists—in short, every group around except for the most promising one, a majority group at that, a necessary and sufficient class an sich, the mass of women, women suitably enlightened and thus für sich. Then he brought out a pet contention, which was that among the thousands of credit and producer coops in Africa, the ones that tended not to be looted by their officers or to have fallen deeply into debt were the ones controlled by women. Then he rested.
Nelson was not succinct. And he was repetitive. But the power was there and Julia, for one, was seemingly getting it. Nelson knew his audience. He was gingerly with religion, barely treating it as causative in the case of female circumcision. She made him repeat the estimate of seventy-five million victims alive and suffering as of then, not seventy-five million since the origins of the outrage. I think the only other reference to religion in that whole segment had been in his windup, in which the Trinity of Plunder—Church, State, Capital—got alluded to. Julia seemed mildly spellbound. I saw her repeat rather wonderingly to herself certain phrases, of which Trinity of Plunder was one.
It was a ringing finish. Even I was moved, as much of all this as I’d already heard. As always there was something new, which served to remind me how lucky I was to have someone so encyclopedic for my own. This time it was the image of Chinese brides under the old regime lying in bed and waiting for the groom to descend on them while hundreds of banners fluttered over the marriage bed saying May you produce a hundred sons and a thousand grandsons.
Come out with me, Julia said impulsively, undone, I thought, by the preemptive drinking I’d urged on her. I didn’t want to. I needed to understand more of what was going on. Denoon semidrunk was terra incognita. I looked at him and found him doing something he had olympianly observed his father doing inter pocula—that is, picking up the nearly empty wine bottle and bringing it close to his face and grimacing as he studied the label, as if to mime the sentiment What in the name of God liquid is this I have been drinking? He had presented this to me as a sure sign of sotdom in a person. Now he was doing it himself. Please come, Julia said. The implication, I thought, was that her need was personal, as in being escorted to and made comfortable with our outhouse. So I went with her.
Julia pulled me almost to the precipice. Obviously this was not about what I’d assumed it was. We stood in the starlight. She commenced with a long, heartfelt look. Clearly, small women get stewed faster than ampler ones. You must, she seemed to say. I asked her to explain. It was that I must seize him, marry him, this man. She was dazzled with Nelson. She couldn’t think why I hadn’t married him, since it was plain that he loved me, the way he deferred to me, his manner. I mustn’t miss out over anything silly. She had been married. Then a second theme emerged: especially I must be calm about drinking. She could see I was unhappy with it. But she had been married to a man who had drunk to the point of unsteadiness at times. He was dead now. But he had been a fine man. And he and she had been great friends with William Empson and Hetta his wife, Empson another great man and someone who would overdrink, but William and Hetta had been very happy together. Did I know the books of William Empson, or his poetry? Nelson reminded her of Empson in the subjects he could inform upon, and William had lived in China and here Nelson was living in Africa. I didn’t know who William Empson was. I thought he had something to do with Basic English.
I thanked her and assured her I appreciated what she was saying. This kind of thing was in fact the last thing I needed to hear, but her sincerity was touching, and the fact that someone so British would be so open and intimate was too. Now she needed the loo. I took her to it and waited for her and we went back to the fray.
Harold and Nelson were closer than ever. Unbelievably, they were rejoicing in both being Irish. Harold had confessed that his true given name was O’Mealia. Julia was not amused by this, I could see. And there was another slight bombshell for me: Denoon was mixing up his personal gods. Suddenly I was hearing what a Fenian his father had really been, underneath. Until that moment I had been under the impression that Nelson’s attitude toward Irishness was the same as his god James Joyce’s—viz. that Ireland was a sump and a cracked looking glass and so on. Suddenly his father’s Fenianism was positive. I realized I was even hearing positive references to Nelson’s worse-than-black-sheep uncle, who had gone to Spain to fight alongside some fascist blueshirts led by a madman called O’Duffy against—against!—Nelson’s other gods, the Spanish anarchists, the wonderful Confederación Nacional of whatever it was, CeNeTé is all I remember, the wonderful Cenetistas. I could hardly believe I was learning in extenso what a true Fenian his father had been, because I remembered clearly the fact or story that he, Nelson, had been so appalled at the one or two forays his father had made into Irish cultural gatherings with folkdancing and so on, instancing them to me as examples of how far his father had been willing to go to get cover for drinking himself blind, before deciding that eisteddfods, which is Welsh and the wrong term, but the Irish equivalent, were too bogus and embarrassing to be borne even in that holy pursuit. And then where was the terrible fistfight between his good old fascist uncle and his good old father that had taken place when his uncle had turned up threadbare in Palo Alto after the war, his hitherto beloathed Uncle Niall, hitherto until just then? But there were parallel wonders, I gathered, involving Harold, who was both a British Empire loyalist who believed the IRA, especially the provos, should be suppressed root and branch, and a son of Eire, however crypto, who also admired their spunk or grit or whatever Briticism he used, their tenacity. What was this all about with Nelson? I was shocked. Was this about loving Uncle Niall for the intensity of his beliefs, however imperfect? But I thought if I had learned anything from my life to date with Nelson, it was that credulism, believing in believing, was beneath retrograde. But why else would he be referring so nonjudgmentally to his suddenly so colorful and nothing more Uncle Niall?
Now there was also new news, from my standpoint, to the effect that the last Nelson had heard, his Uncle Niall had been working as a courier for the IRA. So he had been functioning as a shuffling old murderous factotum well into the sixties or even later. Was there a faint note of pride in Nelson’s voice? I couldn’t believe it, since Nelson’s day-to-day presentation of self had him maintaining that the struggle in Northern Ireland was the best candidate since late colonial India for a purely nonviolent campaign, two years of disciplined satyagraha and the six counties could join all the o
thers in one big madhouse. What was this celebration of joint Irishness by these two men about? Was what I was facing the revelation of yet another, inner, more standard, less interesting Denoon, almost an anti-Denoon, manifest only thanks to the solvent effects of alcohol, his proclaimed enemy? How could this be? Could the inner man be more generic and mundane than the man I embraced and who embraced me? Is that what all this meant, or could it all be understood in some more benign way, an excursion, load-shedding, something like that? Or was it just weakness of some kind being amplified, raised into a second self, through the power of the perfect male actor, Harold? Or was Nelson just expelling toxins accumulated in the course of living too solitarily for too long in the bush? Also was this inner man an old man like Niall, a residue of something that had been overcome, or was he fetal, a homunculus, something yet to be? It all made me feel like getting critically drunk myself, immediately, so that our revealed selves could meet and get to know each other and waltz. I felt desperate and like screaming out What is wrong with this picture? Except that what I felt was that what was wrong was my presence in it.
People weren’t eating sufficiently. In an inspired state I got up and began a commedia, wherein I rifled our larder for every canned and jarred delicacy I had been hoarding, these constituting the analog to Nelson’s Riesling, undoubtedly. I’m not absolutely certain I knew what I was doing. But it was symbolic language saying All right, if you won’t eat what there is then what about this? and this? and also this? You prefer to just drink, but will you when you see this and this and this? The joke ultimately was on me. I thought I was putting out a shaming overabundance of food, but drinking makes you hungry and virtually everything seemed to go—the mandarin orange segments, the anchovies, the hearts of palm, the white plums, the fig paste. These were treasures. Only toward the end did people seem to notice what lengths I had gone to. No one commented on how utterly miscellaneous the spread was.