Mating (40 page)

It was dinnertime and I still could not get this man to stop touring the by now completely terminal cleaning-up efforts. When I whined a little he murmured something about seeing Tsau as an organism showing it could repair itself. Self-repair was important. It was the opposite of social decadence. And did I know the moment that Ignazio Silone had decided he was no longer a statist type of socialist? There was an essay on the exact moment, a classic, in fact. A flood had occurred in the mezzogiorno, and the local village people, who had always in the past undertaken to do their own disaster relief and reconstruction, instead this time—owing to the growth of the welfare state—sat down in folding chairs and watched in droves while the carabinieri did all the cleanup.

Do you know who I’m talking about? he asked me point-blank. I was straining to get the neuron to fire that would tell me who this guy was. I almost knew, I thought. It didn’t come.

Then he looked intently at me and said Don’t be in pain if you don’t know.

Then he explained who this man was, what pleasure I had facing me when I read a novel of his,
Fontamara,
which he even thought he had around somewhere. By now we were at last back in the octagon.

Supper was ready by the time he’d established he was unable to find
Fontamara
anywhere. I didn’t mind cooking while he searched. I love someone who takes a serious tutelary attitude toward me, so long as he’s not doing it just to turn out another member of his cult. It has to be ecumenical. The idea of having someone want to improve me and fill me up with new ideas rather than punish me for my lacunae is tonic. I see myself as quite perfectible. It always surprised me how few pygmalious, polymathic men had ever been interested in sprucing me up, given that I’m so interested and available, and that, as everyone notices first about me, I remember everything.

As we were eating, my face got hot when I realized that I had come within an ace of saying Yes, Silone, the fascist or profascist. I had been thinking of Céline. I thanked god my mind had failed to provide. Silone was an icon of humanist socialism.

Just to illustrate the depths women live at emotiono-intellectually: it
occurred to me briefly that I ought to confess my near miss over Céline. Can This Marriage Be Saved? I thought, to josh myself out of my cravenness. I had been saying that to myself all day, as a matter of fact, when I realized I had things to do other than roam around with Denoon sampling civic joy but that he seemed to be in his element. Can This Marriage Be Saved? was a column in a women’s magazine my mother occasionally shoplifted from our local supermarket, which she would study fixedly, every page, as though this was the manual that was going to teach her how to become a normal person.

There was more about socialism, free associatively, as we ate and washed up. It was mostly against socialism as an orientation or aesthetic or feeling instead of socialism as being about concrete institutional propositions that could be shown to work or not work. A form of Stimmung, I said, which he liked. There was a socialist magazine whose charter issue had the epigraph Socialism is the name of my desire, from Tolstoy, over its manifesto. They had no idea what they were revealing about themselves, Denoon said. Socialism was becoming a bibelot. Student socialism was essentially an art school phenomenon. He shuddered to think of how few socialists there were who could define marginal utility. And so on.

That this man loved to talk was obvious. Also, I was appropriate for him, as a listener if not exactly as a discussant, although that evolved pretty quickly. He had been an isolated limb of the West for long stretches. I was a denizen of the same academic subculture he was from. When I got up in the middle of that night to go out to the latrine I inadvertently woke him. As I got back in with him he asked if I felt like talking, being quick to say that it was all right if I didn’t and wanted to get back to sleep. I think this was prefaced with his saying I was stimulating. Of course it was fine, how not?

It was just that he wanted me to not misunderstand him when it came to socialism: he could be considered a socialist in the noumenal sense of being for a society where human self-realization and liberation were a general outcome and not an outcome only for the most talented or driven or unscrupulous in any given generation, and their heirs. He wasn’t going to bore me with all his specifications for the devices you had to put together to give you such a consummation devoutly to be wished. But also I mustn’t be confused about him and unadulterated capitalism or think he thought anything but that the limited liability corporation was a virus that was devouring the world. Underneath everything in America he sometimes imagined there was a subliminal sound like an
orange crate cracking when you stand on it, except that this sound never stopped. When Nelson really got rolling and interested in what he was saying at night he liked there to be a light on, just a touch, one candle, I now discovered. We need socialism, correctly specified, he said, or rather we need the soul of it or its noumen. But then nervously he said When I say we I don’t mean to be incorporating you into my construct in some subtle way, by the way. It’s all right, I said: I’m not not a socialist, if that’s any way to describe yourself politically. You could call me a nihilo-liberal. He laughed. I meant it, though.

It turns out that being in a symposium lying down in the small hours when all you want is to be asleep is a little akin to being asked to bleed to death. I ultimately developed a slight capacity to intersperse dozing with a murmur here and there before I dropped off that was satisfactory, and a murmur when I came back to consciousness again briefly. I was fading. The problem was that calling yourself a socialist put you in the same pew as people who had a purely reflexive concept of what socialism would be: it would be whatever came after capitalism was undone, and it would be beautiful. The mind the new left had been the most at the feet of took the position that all you needed to know about the oncoming free society was that it would be like the feeling you get from great art, beautiful music. This was decadence. Undergraduates had supposedly been going to be the midwives of the new society. Marx was the original offender with his attacks on the people who had the temerity to physically try out a particular concrete stab at the common life. He started naming them. Here I drifted off, only to come back to a more musing stream, particularly about me. I had gone to sleep with his arm around my shoulders, and he was patting me now to make a point. He was so happy we were both nonreligious and empiriocritical, because it was no good for a person to go along with a partner’s strong convictions against something like socialism or religion as an act of will when in fact there were private residues to the contrary, residues of credulism. I assumed this was a meander fed by his parents’ terrible mismatch or possibly Grace retaining Episcopalian feelings underneath it all. She looked Episcopalian to me, despite the fact that undoubtedly she had presented herself to him as his own tabula rasa. And the last of it was about purification, somehow, and was there a general human need for something called that, and wasn’t that the element religion stuck its taproot down into, once it got started otherwise? Here was when I learned in passing that he had been an altar boy. I remember asking if by purification he really meant atonement, something I could understand better, a need to expel guilt over the
thousands of transgressions you discover you’ve committed as you get older and more ethically acute. That wasn’t what he meant. People could have done nothing and still have this other need. I was out of stamina. I fell deep asleep. There was something interesting afoot in the underbrush here but I missed it. In the morning I woke up being kissed on the leg.

My story is turning into the map in Borges exactly the size of the country it represents, but I feel I should probably say everything.

There was the ambience in our place after dark, which I think of as blond. The base was the yellow candlelight everything transpired in. I had inveigled Nelson to let me put up café curtains over the peculiar windows, custard yellow being the only color available. Why, he wanted to know, on a precipice, totally without neighbors? I said So that if anyone drifts by at the wrong moment they can’t see my breasts and genitals and your penis and anus. He laughed and said But how about
your
anus? I overlooked it, I said. We looked very golden naked, and I think pretty good, although not perfect by any means.

People act more deliberately by candlelight. Your gestures are slower. I felt like an illustration, at times. Other things contributed to the honied atmosphere. Possibly the absence of an overabundance of reflecting surfaces was one. In America even the most spartanly furnished apartment is full of reflecting surfaces, from windows, through the glass in framed pictures, through the sides of your toaster, through actual mirrors. In fact the frequency of mirrors goes up, as a trompe l’oeil maneuver to make you feel you have more space for your money, as the actual square footage of what you can afford to rent goes down. I have done it myself in certain of the broom closets I’ve been reduced to renting. On the street it’s shop windows and bus windows playing their part in the conspiracy to keep making you monitor how you look. Before Tsau, I knew something was wrong with it: I kept losing my compacts in high school until I stopped carrying them, thusly copying my mother in at least one trait. Of course I was still bound to mirrors as recently as crossing the
Kalahari, when I went into shock when mine was lost. Mirrors are bad. Africa is nothing if not matte, and that returns you to yourself, unexpectedly.

But I should tell everything. The underside of the thatch over us was golden-brownish, the unweathered side, and the karosses we’d spread liberally everywhere were medium brown to pale tan. One panel in the big kaross we had on our bed was auburn, exactly matching my hair. It was from a horse. Nelson was very deliberate, sexually, for a man, for whatever reason. I told him he should write a book called How to Undress a Person Other Than Yourself, which was an homage to the delicate and nonfoisting way he would undress me all the way down before touching his own clothing. At first while he was undressing me he would say Sh when I tried to undress him back, make things a little more mutual. Sh meant not to do that. After four or five times I was afraid of two things. One was that this was going to be some frozen onset ritual that meant hysteria somewhere in his past. The other was that this was revealing him as one of those congenital bores who think silence during sex is holy and who usually turn out to be men who have either barely or nominally escaped the effects of intense religious processing during their formative years. And of course I had just learned Denoon had been, however briefly, an altar boy. I was afraid I had an ex-burnt offering on my hands. But luckily neither was at all true. I guess I was overreacting to the politics of feeling that I had to always let myself be passively undressed, complicated by the fact of life of not minding it that much erotically. He liked my book title. He also liked a much later conceit for a title for a book by him, What to Do with Your Hands While You’re Making Love. He knew how to touch.

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.