Mating

by Norman Rush

  I think I put it confusedly.

  I said: One thing about yourself that I think you don’t appreciate is the complexity of why people tend to accept things you lay out for them as good ideas. Don’t get mad, but in a way your lifework could be described as getting people to do things you regard as improvements, better for them. You have great powers of getting people to do things the way you want. Only partly is that because the things you come up with are sensible in themselves. The rest of it has to do with something benign about you, unusually so. You seem good. You seem unselfish. Even people who are really at loggerheads with you see it, although it may drive them even crazier against you when they do. Also you look counter to what you are, since you look more like an unemployed wrestler than anything else, which incidentally adds to your power. What you are operates cross-culturally, for some unknown reason. I may be trying to say that possibly the plenary is less important in a structural way than you think, and that it should sink or swim but you should hold back from using your powers to try to get it reinstated. What I want to feel is that you’ve divorced yourself from it.

  This is as I reconstruct it. By the end of it I was confused about what, really, I was trying to say, other than quite obviously declaring appreciation tantamount to the most abject love.

  His reaction to this was to say Light from the caves! This was a standby he used to greet solecisms or cant.

  I was overwhelmed with the desire to apologize, which I suppressed.

  An Impassioned Lecturette on the Enclosure Movement

  When Nelson said in so many words that he loved me, I should have felt it more as the major benchmark it was, the thing long sought, than I did. We were living as though he had already said it, for one thing. And for another it seemed to me that something about his almost always appending a phrase like heart and soul or root and branch to his declaration made it more literary and less real. Something fell off a shelf in the middle of the night and when I said What was that? he said The scales falling from my eyes. I love you.

  He started talking about movies with me, gamely but lamely, because he was worried he’d insulted the cinéphile in me by earlier saying things like Only a fool could think an art form is significant where your emotional response to it is signaled to you by mood music. He made good-faith efforts to think of movies he’d seen but forgotten he’d liked, like Dead of Night and Fame Is the Spur, neither of which I’d seen at the time, unfortunately. He was going to get better movies for Tsau, not just the kung fu films that were so popular: I should think about what classics I might like him to try to get. I remember saying to him Explain to me how I can love someone who has never seen a movie he liked enough to see twice? This had even been a point of pride with him, and it derived from his huge antipathy to repetition of experience in general, to which he attributed his recoil from the prospect of university teaching. I had tried lately to get a little deeper into that famous aversion of his.

  I was also getting sensate confirmations thick and fast. It was cold and we were cutting back on using the bathing engine because of that and also to set the usual noumenal good example re water use, which resulted in cooperative rather sloppy indoor showering and sponge bathing. I actually had to admonish him to slow up on the worshipful and hyper-intimate aspects of our lustrae unless he was willing to be a little less sparing with the briquettes we used for our heating fires, which were kept minimal, also as an invisible Kantian good example. !Gum, we would say, shivering and lumbering around in our anoraks and layers of sweaters. He was sexually very available. The number of erections coming to my attention was, for someone his age, outstanding, I told him, willing as ever to stoop to any depth for a smile. !Gum is winter in Sesarwa.

  This especially I prized: once when he was refusing to let me help wash up after dinner I decided to read something while he finished, but there was nothing to read immediately visible so I mock-complained, to which he said You can read my fichier if you want to. This was a surprise. His fichier was an oversized oilskin wallet he kept next to his bedlamp and in which he stored excerpts and quotations that spoke to his essence, in essence, all transcribed on two by five cards in his neat handwriting. Nothing he’d ever said had specifically laid out that these were private materials—in the way my diaries were, for example—but the tender way he handled this wallet when he wanted to find something in it told me it was at least personal. My hood is up, is what he was reinforcing with this offer, clearly. I was flustered because I felt reading hungrily would seem unseemly, so I was brief and consequently remember only a few things in any detail. There were his warhorses à la Zeno’s arrow in my heart, and Society—an inferno of saviors, but there was also a quotation from Rousseau that struck me as central and which he later let me copy for my own information, and which I still have: The problem is to find a form of association which will defend with the whole common force the person and goods of each associate, and in which each, while uniting himself with all, may still obey himself alone. And there were several long passages from a book on the enclosure movement in England, about the one village that had the good sense never to enclose its common, a town called Laxton, which survives into the present: I remember it was described as a proud village, a happy one, and a prosperous one. This led to a discussion or more accurately an impassioned lecturette by Nelson on the enclosure movement. He was against the enclosure movement! What manner of man is this! was all I could think. The enclosure movement is hardly something you can still be against in any personal, burning sense, you would think. But he was!

  There was even more being done for me. Nelson was cooking more dinners than he had been recently, soups or other one-dish propositions by and large, but I love soup. Keep talking to me, he said a few times when I thought we had covered something and I was moving off to attend to something not in his vicinity. For someone always afraid she’s overtalking, what could be more reassuring? Also he was responding, it seemed to me, to my encouragements to get beyond his stimmung when it came to women in general, which I found ideological. Women are not semisacrosanct. I informed him our nurse was still fighting against isolated outcrops of the traditional method of weaning children when they got to be two or so, viz. putting snuff on the nipple or telling the children worms were coming out of it. How nice was that? I saw progress when he made jokes of the following sort: at breakfast by mistake he took my pile of various pills rather than his, mine including Enovid, and then that evening when I pointed out what he’d done he said That explains why all day I’ve been unusually sensitive to the needs of others. There were a handful of retroconfessions unprompted by me. One was that he felt he’d been a prig in one of his responses to me. I’d said something like Don’t you ever get the feeling you’d like to get out of here just for a few days and act like a pig, eat steak and profiteroles and dress up and go dancing with the kind of funheads who like to go dancing, drink whiskey sours, in your case one just before dinner and one glass of wine with dinner, out of consideration for me? He’d said no and now he took it back and of course he could go for a steak chasseur. He also said he was sure he’d implied that he’d read Middlemarch, but the truth was he’d only read two thirds of it, or a half.

  As if to complement the impression of a barrage of lovely things occurring we had on two successive nights displays of unusually brilliant shooting stars. Everywhere people agreed this meant great changes coming.

  A Pedestal for Something

  The woman who ran the meat tree was one of ours, very pro-Nelson and Dineo. She served up all kinds of news and gossip from her customers, so it paid to stop and chat even if the meat offerings were not exactly what you had in mind. I was reminded how circuitous everything in Tsau was when I gathered from what she was saying that Rra Puleng had fixed it for the summarist to continue reading and announcing everywhere, just as before. So he’s still machinating outside proper channels, I thought to myself. How interesting. I bought two hares because she had so many and it was late in the day. There seeme
d to be a steady flow of hares from the Basarwa camp lately. This was good because the situation in our rabbit domes was unpromising again.

  Then I was converged on by several women, good friends like Mma Isang and Dirang Motsidisi among them. What followed was odd and left me thinking This is a pedestal for something. We were going to walk homeward together, so I had to wait while protracted transactions went on over hares. A conversation began, in the echt traditional way, with inquiries about key relatives. Was my mother keeping well? She was a poor person, wasn’t it? I had no father, wasn’t it? This really set me back because I’d discussed my pater absconditus situation with only two people in Tsau, Denoon and Mma Isang. Wasn’t it so, that no moneys were being sent to me from my home? Other questions established that if I returned to lefatshe la madi there would probably be no one to pay me for my studying about birds and that I would have to go for lowly work as in serving up drinks to men. I was a little irritated. They began commiserating almost before each individual drawback was acknowledged. It seemed to me I was getting oeillades from Mma Isang and Dirang to play up any sadness or forebodings I had. The scene was a contrivance. We were back and forth between English and Setswana. I was uncomfortable and wanted to leave not only because of the oddness of what was going on but because I had what I thought was a consummate entry in a stupid comedic competition Nelson and I were engaged in. He’d started it. Just to annoy me, and based on my age and milieu, he asserted that I had to be a fan of Bob Dylan. This had come up in the umbra of allusions to the difference in our ages. I was such a young person that naturally I was a fan of the great bard of my age cohort, with his wonderful elegant grasp of the lyric, as in Lay Lady Lay, or as in his whining queries as to when we all might expect cannonballs to be forever banned. Denoon liked this conceit so much that my protests were wasted. I think at one point I defended as pretty good the line The pump don’t work ’cause a vandal stole the handle. Somehow this led to a Ping-Pong competition re completions of the phrase The band can’t play ’cause dot dot dot. We had gone through the simple completions like ’cause a strumpet stole the trumpet, or a bum stole the drum, and were at about the level of Jean Arp stole the harp, or a wily crone stole the xylophone. I wanted to spring on Nelson that the band couldn’t play because Vera Hruba Ralston stole the tuba for Halston. Since he knew nothing about movies he was sure to assert Vera Hruba Ralston was a name I made up.

  It was hard getting Nelson’s attention, he was such a hive of industry of late. When I commented on it he quoted a line of Blake from a catalog to an exhibition of his pictures I remember as Now after such long slumbers I once again display my giant forms. The exhibition was a failure, as I recall, and Blake went back to engraving ads.

  In any case Nelson was back at work in his spare time on a contrivance about the size of a beer keg that I made the mistake of referring to as a light fixture. No, it was more than that, much more, it was something in notional Latin like luminon, lucinant, noctiluminant. The polyhedral carapace was panels of amber and lettuce-colored glass set in a metal framework. Within was a revolving honeycomb entity involving mirrors and certain cells which were crude lenses that would swell the beams of light. A ring of vanes around the top would let the slightest breeze turn the inner entity, at whose heart burned a lamp that would run for twenty-four hours on two quarts of sunflower oil. The idea was to be able to raise and lower it from a mast in the plaza or, better yet, one on the summit of the koppie. But probably it would be for the plaza since decorating the top of the koppie would have to wait until the committee as to names ended the deadlock on what the koppie should be called. Denoon had originally wanted the koppie named the Fulcrum, until he had been convinced that there was no equivalent word in Setswana. His proposal to use a word in Sekalanga that might be stretched to mean fulcrum had been met with furious objections. Even in Tsau the Bakalanga were considered foreign, more foreign than the Baherero. Then he’d proposed Tshiamo, Justice. But there was suddenly an iron consensus for the koppie’s being named for a person, a woman, possibly some woman from the charter days of Tsau. Factions had formed, and there the matter stuck.

  I loved to go down to the glassworks and write letters or read while he tinkered with this ornament, sanding glass or buffing or drilling and setting it. Concentration was important when he was at this, so I wasn’t supposed to talk while he was busy unless something in his train of thought led him to laugh out loud or say something on his own. Then I could partake. He started laughing once because he had just had an epiphany in which it suddenly became clear to him how comical a word foolproof was, with its associated imagery of objects or machines so basic no flailing oaf could damage or misuse them. This was !gum, moreover, and the glassery was usually warm because of the furnaces Nelson used. There was immense tablespace there, whereas at the octagon I had to elbow his impedimenta aside whenever I tried to do personal clerical work. The glassery was domestic. The thatch on the building was recent, I gathered, since a faint smell like cinnamon or sherry came from it. There were generous windows looking east to the kraals and the mealie fields. I could duck out and visit my boy Baph.

  I realized the luminon must be the object he’d referred to earlier as something he’d given up working on because he’d concluded it would take forever. I couldn’t resist saying At the risk of being what you hate most, that is, psychologistic, at least tell me we both see this object you’re making as a form of undoing or of some process related to putting the bottle castle your father smashed back together. I thought at first he hadn’t heard me, but then he said I’m not a complete fool, am I? So what? he said. He seemed calm. I thought but didn’t say that what this bauble would most resemble once it was up was a lit-up macropineapple or one of those mirror-chip globes that tell you this is a prom and not just a regular dance. That sent old feelings cascading through me, about dance avoidance. We had established that we were both nondancers, historically. With me it was a feeling of bad faith about dancing, especially close dancing, with someone you had no intention of letting sleep with you. Dancing is erotic for me. Dancing was unpleasant for him because it got him hot, or I should say had when he was adolescing and still in the shadow of the withdrawing batwing of the church. It was a minor bond between us.

  His back was to me when he said We could stay here. He may even have been fully out of sight: all I have is the voice. We were in the glassery. I may have been facing the landscape, trying to catch a glimpse of my animal, which I could sometimes do if he drifted to the far end of the kraal he was in. I know I stayed fixedly wherever I was and tried to replay what Nelson had said, to be certain he wasn’t saying something as innocent and local as that we could stay an extra couple of hours at the glassery if I sent to the kitchen for some soup and scones, rather than going back for supper to the octagon. But the inflection was wrong for that. This was what it seemed to be and it was pivotal. I felt cold. I had to deal with the way I felt, somehow, without saying something that would turn out to be fatal, something assaultive re his lifework, Tsau. Also, why did I feel so cold?

  By stay, I said, you mean stay indefinitely in Tsau, us both.

  That was what he meant.

  But what about Jews? was my absolutely peculiar first thought. I felt panic. Staying in Tsau with Nelson could hardly be considered durance vile, but there were no Jews there. All of my best friends were Jews. The only male colleague friends Nelson ever alluded to with signs of feeling were Jewish, I had happened to note. Then there was a surge of feeling about my mother. I would never see her.

  Nelson came over then and we embraced.

  How smart are you, fundamentally, I was thinking, if you love someone who produces these tests for you? Because I felt it as a test. This was not the drift things had been taking.

  I went on a diversion. But how could you qualify, how could you stay in Tsau, I asked, since we’re not citizens?

  There was no problem. There was a provision in his contract with the government specifying that he and any depe
ndent of his could elect citizenship—but not dual citizenship, he was quick to point out. In fact the government had been pleased, he thought, when he’d proposed it. This also was news to me, and another rung in the ladder of tests I felt I was climbing. I’m trying to be fair to myself and what I felt when this news came. I was in tumult. I wanted to know why everything comes out as an ordeal, a test. Tests have been my bête noire all my life.

  I said But what about your status otherwise? The rules are that men only get to stay in Tsau as dependents, relatives. Same for Sekopololo. You can’t just say koko, I want to be a member, and get in. There are rules.

  I could through you, he said. It would be like this. As my dependent you could be a citizen and as your dependent I could live here and belong to Sekopololo. It would work. You could be chartered in terms of the rules, technically: you have no money, you’re unemployed, in fact with your student loans you’re a pauper. Your mother is not a resource.

  I maintained my neutral to slightly positive attitude façade fairly well until he mentioned in passing that he had recently assigned all his royalties in perpetuity to Sekopololo. We hadn’t discussed that. He described it as only a gesture, but to me it was preemptive. I felt betrayed by it, but equally I felt I was betraying Nelson with my reactions, my apparent grasping at the negatives of staying on in his creation.

  I fought myself back to a casual level. I remember Denoon as now back at his workbench and holding a piece of glass up to the light. He looked absolutely beautiful to me at that moment, more beautiful than he ever had. This is a serious man, kept saying itself to me. Other men aren’t. What I was suddenly afraid of was that this moment was our perihelion, the closest we would ever approach or be, and that everything after this would transpire between bodies farther apart. I was thinking that if you looked back over the trajectory of every mating once it was over, there would be an identifiable perihelion. I couldn’t stand the idea that this was ours. I didn’t know why I thought it was, even. My eyes were hot. I had to leave. This is all hypothetical, I said, keeping it declarative and trying to keep any note of entreaty out. But I knew better.