Mortals (10 page)

She sighed, and then was silent.

He said, “I take it my recommendation wasn’t great.”

“Well, it was an example of why you could get lonely in Gaborone. We
ate at the President, in the Grenadier Room no less. I dressed up. It was fine. Her name is Lorna, but she insisted I call her Lor, which felt awkward. I guess because she’s married to an American I assumed she was too, but she isn’t. Well, she is, she’s a citizen, but she’s Australian. Getting me to call her Lor and not Lorna seemed to be the main thing on her mind. They’ve been all over. She loves the embassy people. We had nothing to talk about, really.

“But, well she’s nice and she’s livelier than a lot of other embassy wives I could name. It was funny, she drank quite a bit of Cape Riesling during lunch, but the main effect it had on her was to stir up lots of umbrage about how much drinking there is in embassy circles. She managed to refer to the embassy staff as Alcoholics Unanimous a couple of times. She seems to think there’s too much daytime drinking, particularly.”

He thought, The fact is that I am talking to the most beautiful white woman in southern Africa, outside of the movies, and someone getting more beautiful, not less … these token signs of age make her beauty more acute, other women must hate her: How can she have friends? She needs friends, outside of me: Nothing can be done. The fact that he could give her pleasure, that life allowed him to, was immense to him. It was like gold.

“What?” he asked, he had missed something.

“I said, Lor and I are both insomniacs. Thank God, because that was basically our only subject. So we were talking and I tried to be entertaining by relating something you said the other night, don’t worry, nothing embarrassing, but I thought it was a funny story. It was when I complained because you had just turned over,
like that
, flopped over and said goodnight when I was still my usual wide-awake self … It happens, it’s no big problem, this is me. But this was early, even for you. You know how it is when I’m abandoned to myself … my own devices, at night.

“So then you remember I had an attack of pique and kind of yelled at you, ‘I have no rights around here!’ meaning, of course, that I have an unwritten marital right to sufficient notice before you go to sleep. And you said, when I said I have no rights, you said, ‘You have the right to remain silent.’ Well, it was funny. Still makes me laugh. But she didn’t get it
at all
and I was drawn into one of those explanations, explications, that ends up making you sound like a complete idiot. Her interpretation was just that I was a tyrant and you were a policeman.”

“That was pretty amusing of me. She didn’t get the humor. Maybe because she’s Australian, they don’t have Miranda.”

“It was a misfire,” she said.

“Bad recommendation, I guess.”

“It’s not your fault. She’s fine, really. But she’s not going to be exactly a friend. I don’t know what I mean, exactly … am I pathetic? I guess what I mean is she’s not an answer.”

“She’s part of the problem, you’re saying.”

“I wouldn’t go that far. She’s okay.”

“If she’s not an answer, what is the question?”

“Ah,” she said dryly and not happily.

“So what is the question, Iris?” He knew his tone was wrong. It was what she called his
bearing down
tone.

“Oh please don’t get all relentless.
Please.”

“I didn’t mean to be. I’m sorry. I thought you were initiating something and clearly you weren’t.”

“On the
phone?
When you have to get back to work? I don’t think I was.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Me too.”

“Okay.”

“Also she was wearing the most painful accessory in the history of jewelry. It was a choker made out of white plastic petals, pointed petals all awry and pointing in different directions. It was sticking into her throat, into the flesh. I couldn’t take my eyes off it.”

This is the way she retreats, he thought.

“It made a teeny clacking sound when she swallowed.”

“I do apologize. If I’d known she was Australian I’d have mentioned it. It’s another culture.”

“Yes, it is. And I don’t transcend cultures at all well. I’m not good at it.”

Uh-oh, he thought.

“But Iris, you are good at it. You’ve done it here and in Zambia beautifully, and before that.”

“No I haven’t. You’re confusing two things, Ray, one being that I don’t complain and the other being your interpretation of that as how well I’m doing. Those are two different things.”

“But you make African friends,” he said, unnerved at how large these declarations were. Usually she was more incremental.
A bitter feast was steaming hot and a mouth must be found to eat it
, he thought. It was a quotation whose author he couldn’t come up with. That was what he was facing, though. There was something unfair about quotations lasting longer than the names of their creators. He saw her recent declarations as thrusts or lunges, not tentative anymore. And this was going on over the
phone and it was unfair, unless she was in a more extreme state than he’d guessed. Maybe she was. It was his brother’s influence. She wanted liberation of some kind. It was Rex. Liberation was fine, he agreed with it, but all he knew was that at the heart of any kind of liberation worth anything there still had to be someone grabbing someone else and saying I’m yours, I love you beyond expression, something like that, embraces, berserk embraces, in his humble opinion. But maybe not, according to her, according to all this, according to his brother. It was unfair. He couldn’t laugh at her anymore when she said something funny she hadn’t intended to say. There was a recent example. She had complained that he was being parsimonious with some piece of gossip or information he had, and she had said something like It’s like pulling hen’s teeth getting anything out of you. So he had laughed, and although she’d realized immediately what she’d said, she still hadn’t liked his laughing, even after he explained that he’d been mainly laughing appreciatively at how appositely the mixed metaphor worked. Well, he thought: Wife is unfair … as somebody said.

Now she was asking him what real African friends he thought she had in Botswana.

“Well, you have a lot of acquaintances …”

“But no close friends, Ray.”

“Sure you do. You must. Maybe not right at this moment. One problem is that compatible people come and they go, if they’re foreign service, say. It’s standard. And you have African friends from Zambia you write to …”

She groaned.

“Let’s stop talking,” she said.

He shook his mechanical pencil to see if the lead reservoir was reasonably full. And he was not going to smoke. He hung up, then took the receiver off the hook.

Ray confronted his pad. There was a polished sheet of stainless steel exactly the size of the pad that he kept between the final sheet in the pad and the cardboard backing. He slid it out and inserted it under the top sheet as a preventive against leaving impressions on the next sheet down as he wrote. He tended to press hard when he wrote. Now he was ready. He decided to chance setting the receiver back in its cradle.

The phone rang. It was going to be Iris, and putting the phone back in use had been the right thing to do because this was going to be an
apology and if she’d kept on getting a busy signal it would have led to frustration and the need for some kind of explanation later on. Also, knowing that she was trying to call him would have wrecked his concentration. He had had no choice.

He answered the phone.

“I’m sorry too,” he said. He knew it was Iris.

It was. She sighed. “That’s what I wanted to say, Ray. I hate myself.”

“Don’t hate yourself. We’re both sorry. It’s all right. I appreciate you.”

“I know.”

It was important that she hang up first. He waited.

She said, “Before I forget, there’s one thing I found out that I wanted to tell you. Yesterday Fikile was looking up at one of our palm trees and smiling, so I asked him what he was looking at. He said it was rats. Apparently that place on the palm where the dead fronds hang down and form a kind of mass is where a certain kind of rat, tree rat, makes its home. He had seen one of them peeping out. He said we have quite a few. They’re small, though.”

“That’s nice. Well. Is this something that needs to be attended to or do we just keep cohabiting with them?”

“No, that’s not why I’m telling you. I don’t think they bother anything. But I thought it was interesting because it might explain certain sounds we hear on the roof at times that we can’t figure out. We thought they were caused by birds, but it seemed strange because it was nocturnal, remember?”

“I do.”

“I was afraid I’d forget to mention it. I’ll let you go now. I love you. One other thing is that I think my sister may be pregnant and not telling me directly, or that she plans to get pregnant. But I can tell you about that later.”

He became alert. He wanted to know about this. Her sister was unmarried. The relationship between the sisters was strained and important to Iris.

“Wait, I want to hear this. You’re not saying she’s gotten married, are you?”

“No, not at all. This is all reading between the lines, really, but I think she’s going to stay single and just do it. But see what this sounds like to you. This is from her last letter. I’d better summarize it instead of reading it. She eats lunch in a playground near her office every day and eavesdrops and reports things the children say that are cute enough but are not the wisdom of the ages in the mouths of babes she seems to think they
are. This is only one example. She overheard some children arguing over whether there could be good monsters as well as bad ones. She drew some great significance from it. Now I can’t find what I wanted to read you. But in every letter there’s something about how profound children are if you only listen.”

“When you answer, tell her that yes there are good monsters.”

A silence fell.

“Well,” she said.

“Well, but you do think she may be planning to reproduce? I find that reckless and also typical of her.”

“Don’t be so hard. Some child said It’s noon o’clock, and she thought that was wonderful. And here’s another thing she seems to think is beyond darling. She was visiting a friend of hers who has a two-year-old daughter, very delicate and sensitive and very resistant to going to bed. So four adults were sitting around and they decided to all yawn at the same time to show how tired they were and by implication how tired she should be. So they did it and the baby burst into tears because she knew it was so unnatural or manipulative or something. Ellen raves about the child. Oh, and, lest we forget, her friend is a single mother.”

“I have to go. I have to sit revision,” he said. He thought, Maybe I can cancel revision. He needed a list.

The International Postal Union was his enemy. It brought Rex and Ellen into her life, and his.

Curwen himself would take over Ray’s revision group, as a favor. He loved Curwen for always trying to be like Christ, an idea of Christ, a cartoon but a completely benign cartoon. He even half envied Curwen whatever the restricting cultural history was that had led him into feeling that copying Christ was a fulfilling thing to do with his mortal life. The whole teaching staff exploited Curwen, the Marxists worst of all. Ray didn’t like to do it, and he tried not to. Iris thought of Curwen as an ideal good guy on the basis of Ray’s anecdotes. But Ray didn’t, because there was a difference between good acts resulting from adherence to a model of some kind and some other way to be good, some more natural way, that for example women had. Women seemed not to need these models to kneel to and copy. It was true that Curwen got less appreciation than he deserved because you could predict his acts of goodness so infallibly. Curwen wanted to be loved, and Ray wanted to love him, but Ray knew that there was condescension in his attitude to Curwen that he couldn’t do anything about and that wrecked it as a form of love. Life is unfair, Ray thought, unfair to Curwen.

He centered the writing block on his desk and adjusted the point length of his pencil lead. He wondered whether he should begin by generating categories first, as against putting down everything that came to him in no order, chaotically, which might be better because the project was making him feel chaotic.

He couldn’t decide. This was difficult. It shouldn’t be. He had done hundreds of profiles in his time, which was all this was. But of course very few profiles had been of women, almost none.

It came to Ray that he didn’t like to think about women—the
subject
of women, he meant. He was surprised at himself. But of course the
subject
of women was not the same thing as
individual
women, which he thought about just as much as the next man, that is, all the time, off and on, depending on the mood or circumstances he was in, or what a particular woman might be up to. He wasn’t counting involuntary trains of carnal imagery.

And of course, because something confusing was going on with Iris, she was on his mind constantly. So he did think about women, just not as a
subject
.

There were other things besides women he preferred not to think about. For example … death, say, and unidentified flying objects. But these were things you could decline to think about without feeling guilty. It was human not to want to think about death, about being mortal. And it made him irritable to think about unidentified flying objects because, as a phenomenon, it was in the hands of charlatans and clowns. He had seen something odd in the sky, once, so of course he was interested. The subject was completely surrounded by liars, unfortunately. And flying saucers were more and more irritating as a phenomenon in that they kept recurring, and the claims of what they were doing kept getting more elaborate. And of course
if
it was true that they existed, then the whole human enterprise obviously needed to be redirected toward finding out who was flying these damned things, especially since their occupants had supposedly taken up molesting hordes of people in their bedrooms at night and stealing fetuses and other absurdities. He wondered if there was some quality common to death, women, and UFOs that made him want to not think about them. He considered the question. They were all similar in a way, ontologically. They were all entities that nothing could be done about.