by Norman Rush
The talking died and eating in earnest took over. The evening ended when we were stupidly full.
We were meditative, finally. I think that what was dawning on Nelson was the realization that the next day it would be just us again and that certain questions yawned before us.
These Things Are Nothing
I purposely left Denoon asleep behind me the next morning, getting myself up and out swiftly and silently to escort Harold and Julia to the plane, which was due very early. I hoped Nelson would still be asleep or just surfacing when I got back. We needed to talk, and we would get to the heart of the matter sooner if nobody had been busy building elaborate rationales and defenses.
All the way to the airstrip Harold kept looking over his shoulder for Nelson, whose fan he had clearly become. I told him Nelson had gone to take care of something urgent but might make it to the airstrip before they left. Harold wanted Nelson to know that this place of his, meaning Tsau, was extraordinary. Julia was touching. I wished her well. In fact she was on the threshold of becoming wellknown at the level of Nyree Dawn Porter, after starring in an endless television series based on a Maria Edgeworth novel, as I later found out. I was happy and relieved for her.
It was all gracious. They were nice with the women and children who had come along to say goodbye. My mind was on Denoon throughout.
But in hurrying back to the octagon to get things straight, I went through a strange evolution, a mutation almost. I was using what amounts to a mantra to calm myself down, something like We are still acquiring each other—meaning to avoid being premature. I was over being clenched about the Lamentations and Perfidious Albion exercises, which I had managed to reframe as cases of simple overweening in trying too hard to make a point, the kind of thing I might do myself if I had the same degree of passion as Denoon and were in the same position with respect to resources. But now there was last night at dinner. Had all Nelson’s overpowering bonhomie vis-à-vis Harold been in vino Veritas? What bonhomie was this so powerful that it had led to the unearthing of an almost sacred cache of wine it wouldn’t have been amiss to produce at least one bottle of so we could toast a couple of significant personal events I could think of. Also what was this huge susceptibility to alcohol? And what was this nostalgia for an uncle who was a certifiable fascist? And how did this nostalgia fit with Nelson’s heretofore immutable position that pursuing anschluss—his term for it—by armed action in Northern Ireland was a perfect example of choosing the strategy that was exactly the reverse of the one strategy practically ordained by history to be successful in the circumstances, id est mass nonviolence à la Gandhi in India? And where was the subtending irony he was so prone to mention in his right mind: that the result of all the suffering in Northern Ireland if and when the anschluss happened would be all power to the priests and the cretinate, their dupes? Now he was all roseate toward Ireland. I was even more right than I thought. At the time I was unaware that in his closet role as a poet manqué he had written a poem beginning Night falls and the Irish cease beating their children, which was apropos Ireland at the time of writing being the world’s largest importer of a certain type of cane used by the nuns and brothers for beating children in school. But what happened is that as I jogged I felt all my questions leave me, for no reason. It was like entering a warm cloud and coming out the other side changed. I think it was profound. One minute I was tremendously vexed and the next I was dead certain the correct thing to do was leave Denoon alone. I had passed through a cloud of unknowing of some kind. It was crystal clear to me that I had delved enough, full stop. The everyday man he was was fine, full stop. I should stop evaginating him, to use a term I had gotten from him and demanded he stop using the second time I heard him do it, because it was stupidly provocative and not funny, even though all it means technically is to turn something inside out.
And there was actually very little to pursue when I got back home. Nelson was all abjection and apology. He should never drink. I was supposed to help him forever after if he was tempted. Reciprocation had been behind his producing the wine. And this was wine he had been saving for something genuinely momentous, whatever it might be, in our future. He had made me some toast and Ricoffee. He would sit down with me, but there was no way he could eat anything himself, the way he felt. He was his father’s son. Never before or since have I felt myself become tranquil so abruptly and causelessly. I can look back and say that it was some physicochemical way station on the road from the state I called acquisitive love to the state of love itself, I suppose. It felt ordained. Something was saying These things are nothing, Ecce homo.
The first thing I felt I had to do was convince him he was absolved insofar as the Albion and Lamentations spectacles were concerned. Your problem is that you want to do everything, be everything, an impresario, I said. Try to remember that nobody can do everything. He looked wry and said Except Leonardo da Vinci: did you know that on top of everything else he could do he was one of the great singers of his time, with a beautiful singing voice, and that he won first place in a competition at Milan over singers from all over Italy and won it accompanying himself on a new type of lyre invented by himself, made out of silver, in the shape of a horse’s skull, which gave out powerful and ravishing sounds of a kind never heard before?
Then more about alcohol. He rejected it. He hated it. It gives you pseudo insights such as how absolutely astonishing it is that creatures who have to go so frequently to the toilet to void their wastes have managed to create such complex civilizations as we have, he said. Hear hear! was my attitude, but softly.
Slowly he was getting ready for a normal day. He began shaving. Hector Raboupi had been by while I was at the airstrip. Nelson got agitated telling me about it. Raboupi was claiming lions had been seen. He was raising the cry for guns again. Raboupi had gotten almost apoplectic when Nelson proposed that if there were truly lions around we should call in the game scouts from Maun, because that, according to Raboupi, would make the men of Tsau look like small boys. Finally he had sent Raboupi off after telling him that he had to bring proof there were lions around, such as droppings. Nelson nicked himself. I took over, and he let me finish shaving him, a first. I had to make him not talk while I finished up. It was nice. He wanted to kiss my breasts, but through my blouse, he wasn’t asking for more. There were more apologies.
Admit one thing, I said. Admit you like to fight in the generic male way, you liked fighting or contending with Harold because you like fighting with other men, specifically, which is more fun than contending with women or fills some other need. No, he said, no and no.
You do know, I said, that Harold is gay, by the way?
All he said, after a pause, was How do you know that? He looked offended or hurt.
I told him how I knew. He wanted to know when I’d known for certain, and seemed a little relieved that it wasn’t until I was told. But all this had an odd effect.
He sat down fairly abruptly. He still had soap on his face. The state he seemed to be in wasn’t meditative, a state I’d seen him in enough times to identify for what it was. This was something else—sheer cessation, stasis. I prayed that being hung over had something to do with it. It was alarming.
Nelson did have a trait of occasionally branching off into an intense static condition of empathy for some victimized group he hadn’t thought about in a while. It was a trait that was en route to the borderline of neurosis, in my humble opinion, and was part of his ongoing great question, the question of which contemporary evil was the actual worst and therefore the one you should really be directing your life effort against. This business of dwelling on abused groups was like driving through the mountains with someone likely to stop and brood at every overlook, even though night was falling and the inn lay far ahead. The first few times he fell into these broodings it made me feel I was dealing with someone very pure, someone who in fact needed protection, shielding. I connected these bursts of brooding to his mastery of the statistics of every injustice known to ma
n, such as the number killed in concentration camps under Tito or this year’s figures for dowry bride murders in India.
He came out of his stasis saying something about what an abyss it must be to be homosexual in a society whose every gesture of law and culture makes you feel unclean. It was a form of crucifixion. He himself couldn’t imagine anything more perverted than being forced to act against your sexual orientation.
I was just beginning to appreciate how deeply hung over he was. He took my hands and said An alcoholic promising not to drink again is roughly like anyone promising never to fart again, I’m aware, but never again, so help me, I swear.
I appreciated the impulse behind what he was saying, but I wanted one thing clear. I’m not an involvee, I said, and I’m not your mother. You’ll see me react to the way you are when you drink, if you drink, but never in my life will you see me wagging my finger. I have no interest in controlling another human being’s vices. I said My reaction was about never finding a reason to offer to dig up some wine just for us, or for me, even, but you say reciprocation, plus already having begun drinking, did something to your judgment, which is fine. I said that I also thought he associated me with the cardinal virtue of sobriety. I said Let’s just regard the whole episode as overdetermined and forget it.
This worked out to be a genius thing to say, evidently. He was relieved. We held hands across the table. Sail away, I thought, this being my personal phrase for moments of feeling perfect and at ease. I more sing it than say it, mentally. I only use it in extremis, so to speak, when I have to face the fact that nothing is wrong. I don’t know if the phrase comes from some cheap pop source. It may. I don’t know when I had used it last.
I was having an overwhelming experience of joyfully being with someone and not wondering what he or I should do next to maintain this. Nobody was entertaining anybody. Remorse is powerful with me. I said While everybody around here is apologizing I want to apologize for something myself: I want to apologize for calling my mother the Colossus of Duluth. He smiled, but he wanted us not to talk. This was extraordinary for him too, then. For me the feeling was like being in a bath and being fed at the same time, or thereabouts. But this also traces back to Nelson, who’d mentioned the theory of someone he admired that every abstract painting you instinctively admire is in fact a picture of a biomorph in a perfect environment for it, a homolog of the womb. As I recall, this was something he’d mentioned as an example of paradox, because the author of it was a literary fascist terrible in almost every other respect, although admittedly very smart. We must have been talking about bad people dot dot dot good ideas, how to deal with that, how to deal with taintedness, a theme of his.
I don’t want to hear the answer to this, really, I said, but if you were in a room full of women, thirty or so women, or ten, and you saw one of them and felt a deep attraction and you had a magic ring you could touch that would make people fall in love with you but not one by one, only in a broad zone, and this was the only way you could be sure your target woman would fall in love with you, sweeping all the others of various degrees of attractiveness along with her and presenting you with the problem of turning them off, probably hurtfully, would you still do it? I don’t know where this came from, to this day.
He said of course, no. Still he wanted us not to talk. I had the clear sense that he wanted the feelings this silence together gave us. My fear was that I was going to show I was less tolerant of perfect silence than he was, or than he assumed I was. Sail away, I thought.
Things intergrade. I had another touch of the feeling the next day when I got a fullfledged endearment from Nelson. When I got it I felt faint, which shows the level I was coming to this from. I had a klang association with being in a house where the mother is an accomplished cook and four dishes are in the oven at the same time, including baking, rolls baking, and the united fragrance is perfect. Which reminds me that as a child when I was invited to anyone else’s house for a good meal I had a secret fetish of putting something from each item on my plate on my fork each time I took a bite, which must mean something. Nelson was being sexually attentive post Harold and Julia. The endearment was more a conclusion on my part than an endearment direct and nonpareil, but still I clung to it when it happened. Nelson was up first that morning and when he heard me stirring he said Ah the voice of the turtle is heard in the land. So then am I your turtle? I asked. You are, he said, my dear turtle. He seemed to like thinking of me as that. He used the term affectionately later that day, and then on and off later on. I think he was grateful to me that morning over a discussion the night before during which I had been frank with him about cunnilingus. I’d told him I appreciated it but that he should relax about it. He’d gotten into a pattern of regularly descending every fourth or fifth outing. I explained to him I enjoyed it but only really enjoyed it when I felt it was undertaken out of being genuinely overwhelmed in that direction. Otherwise he should know I preferred our usual face to face but with the nice, graduated approach he had. He was relieved. They always are. There’s something infantile somehow about cunnilingus except at the right moment and the right interval. The subject is left communicating with the vacant air during it, for one thing.
Where Were We Going?
I think I was tentatively starting to pride myself on having a generally good effect on Nelson. He agreed, at least insofar as his attitude to keeping up with the news was concerned, something he was perpetually striving to keep from turning into a mania. He had conquered it as far as print went, because although he still saved all his Economists, he had disciplined himself to read them in batches, working backward from the most recent issue so that tributary pieces in earlier issues could be skipped. This was an old intention of his that had been honored more in the breach before my arrival. He was spending far less time trying to catch Deutsche Welle or the World Service than initially. In fact we had missed the attempt on Reagan’s life as a contemporaneous thing, about which he was grateful. I can’t tell you, he said, the amount of time I would have wasted, while it looked like he might die, trying to figure out which clique or faction was going to turn out to be behind this thing. It was all moot when he first heard about it, and he had saved hours of his mental life, indirectly thanks to me.
I also thought he was tending to be more truthful, or rather more truthful more quickly. There was one contraindication to this, when I asked him, lightly and en passant, how old he was, and he palpably hesitated before answering. We were working in the gum tree plantation. I was stunned for a second at his apparently revealing himself to be someone who thinks age is important. No truly adult male does. Then he said the only thing that could have saved him, which was that he didn’t know how old he was. He thought he was forty-seven, but he might be a year older. He had been born at home. His mother had already gotten pregnant, he gathered, by the time she began living with his father. His father had been trying to make a living as an apprentice to a man who sold redwood mulch and made coffee tables out of redwood tree boles and on the side did serious woodcarvings. This was in a collapsing Utopian colony founded by Finnish socialists in the nineteenth century, mostly abandoned by them, and feebly recolonized by Depression unemployed people. It was in Washington State, in the woods. Nelson’s father had delivered him. The birth certificate was gotten after the fact, in fact long after, and his mother’s sensitivity, as a good Catholic, may have had something to do with the date entered.
Then he amazed me by saying I know you think I was about to lie to you on the subject of my age. The opposite is true. The lie would have been just to save mental time, I suppose. But I think we can both stand it if we, if I, stick to the absolute truth from now on. This was said with an undernote of How do you like that? almost, I thought, that was faintly threatening.
It was threatening because it dared me to advance prematurely into questions I knew would be difficult for him. They were inchoate or global, many of them, but they were all pressing to me. Where were we going? was one. What was I su
pposed to make of his recent allusions to the truism that people who worked in development created situations that were supposed to be good enough for the locals forever but not for their Western animators, who would be leaving shortly for the fleshpots of home, everyone should understand. But did that mean he intended to be the exception? And if so, I had questions about that, because the exceptions to going home were the religious. They were the only ones who fought being torn from their projects in the mean streets of the world, and lurking in their motivation had to be—and Denoon saw it this way too—something self-punitive. He did seem to be loving Tsau more. In part it was the freak rain, the sense of an unusual surplus making daily life enormously easier. I kept looking at the going-versus-staying conundrum from different angles. Of course I am and was in revolt against the cultural diktat—which is what it amounts to—that women are by nature sessile and men are footloose and that when they find the right man women are supposed to go against their sessile instincts if they can’t anchor their male alongside them and go wafting along after him, to wherever. But here Denoon was being too sessile for my taste. You could say I felt slightly torn.
A paradoxical result of Nelson’s declaration was that I was more reluctant to pursue things with him than before the edict. I wondered what was going on, since I hadn’t asked for anything so drastic from him. But there it was, and also it was supposedly obtaining without my having said Ah, me too, because I’m not a hypocrite.
I was sleeping unusually well in Tsau, as a result, I assume, of the substantial component of physical work I was doing daily, but my underlying insomniac nature still got galvanized from time to time, especially when in the middle of the night I’d discover Nelson gone somewhere, usually briefly, but not invariably briefly. He did go off, as I knew, on personal retreats of a day or two, without much preambling. That was a given with him. But there were more than a handful of times when I would wake up and find him not present.