Mating (43 page)

Doing dishes when N came up behind me and began feeling me up, friendlily. I said You may not be aware of the first commandment of feminism, so may I tell you? By all means. It’s Don’t grab or fondle the beloved’s private parts when her hands are occupied, especially when they’re menially occupied. This is not a rebuke, just a word to the wise. He stopped immediately and apologized. I said Usually it happens that men do it when the beloved is cooking or at the sink, suggesting that the sight of a woman engaging in domesticity is aphrodisiac. He said he thought the first commandment of feminism had to do with never using the imperative form to a woman unless she was in the path of a runaway bus. I was pushing the edges of our paradigm by using the term beloved. It went by unnoticed.

I told N about the shebeens. He half knew, he said, but he looked surprised to me. We are both sick with kissing. My lips feel bruised. We have been kissing like adolescents for the last two evenings, intensely, to the point where you begin to feel anthropological about it à la an extraterrestrial voice saying Why are those two people mashing their oral cavities together and why is one squeezing the other’s milk glands even when nothing comes out? Not knowing about the shebeens bothered him, or half knowing, to give him the benefit of the doubt. There is no village this size in Africa that doesn’t have one or two, I keep telling him. But there had been an understanding with the charter women. Someone should have said something. So it went.

He disdains celebrating birthdays. Why? Because they celebrate pure duration. Revolts are all right, though. The Casas Viejas Revolt? and Bastille Day. Don’t you celebrate anything in your life, Nelson? I haven’t done anything to celebrate yet. You floor me. And I named his whole series of projects, names that are famous, listed in textbooks, discussed. He considers them failures. I said What about Tsau? Not yet. We want candor in the men we want, but not bleakness an outsider could easily mistake for perfectionistic posturing. I said You consider them failures? Have you informed your fellow stars in the development firmament or the groundlings who are still studying them in graduate school lo these many years? He could have said more about why he thought these were failures, which I wanted him to do and was inviting. But he fell grim, and I thought Reculer pour mieux sauter if you know what’s good for you. All I added was Do you know how many people would die happy if they could fail at your level?

2 days tutoring English with the kids, which makes me maternal, which I do not need, so made myself do two afternoons in the laundry. N’s concerned about people settling into doing only one or two categories of work, or only one, like the cronies who rule the kitchen. Raising and lowering credits works only up to a point.? says the phenomenon is mainly among older women and is not some general effect of the principle of least effort—that is, earning credits for the thing you know how to do the best and thus need to expend least effort on—but that if he’s wrong then maybe they should think of some rule or custom that would limit the number of days straight in a row you could do one thing. I said that would be against freedom, unfortunately. Not if a group imposes a rule on itself and understands why it’s necessary. What planet are you from? This is like Russia, where you have to wait fifteen years for a car because it’s to the common good to dig the world’s longest canal before anything else gets done. Also you may have heard of the instinct of workmanship, which is, I think, what I was alluding to priorly. But he was obstinate that Tsau was different. The example of the kibbutz, where the women ended up doing washing, cooking, and childcare, irked him, but the explanation socalled was that males ran the kibbutzim whereas here the base was female. I think I planted a seed, no more than that. A thing that corrupts N’s worldview is his own demonic energy, which is what socalled greatness may in fact reduce to. He’s unnatural. He can work six hours flagstoning or paving, scabs of cement stuck all over his body, a bite to eat, into the bathing engine, and he’s all set to work late into the night
reading and writing and using his abacus. But clarity has to go with energy. I think what I want is the feeling I got when I first read David Hume, when I felt something like cold light bathing me. How much of it would I feel reading Denoon as of today? Denoon has no copies of his books here, I discover. He deprecates them. The past is a bucket of ashes undsoweiter. In the morning I feel like a slug at times,? never. I have never been the first one up, to date, which has to change.

Somehow impress on N he is too fertile with ideas for the assets at his disposal here. Projects within projects yielding other projects. I am cast as the apostle of stasis. How would I like to live in a place like Gumare, and so on. He is only trying to establish a propensity to keep trying things. He is continuing with his ostrich ranching mania. I said You’re going to go out and trap ostriches, but how are you going to get a breeding pair? You can’t tell the sexes at the distances you’ll be working from. You have to get underneath them, practically. They’re immensely strong. There are people here who know how to catch them. Such as the great underemployed hunter Hector Raboupi? Possibly. They said the same thing when I said we could raise guinea fowl. Now that’s thriving. Then he said Would it be a good idea for us to set aside a fixed period every evening for arguing? I let that go. The ostrich idea is with the mother committee.

Gleanings re Grace. Her great beauty started it. Are you especially susceptible to great beauty? was my question. I must be, he said. She tried repeatedly to live overseas with him and to give up or suspend her career in architectural history and preservation, but he would always urge her to go and curate when the opportunity arose, or to develop as a consultant, the original idea. Her desire to please was excessive: he had to convince her she didn’t have to say she enjoyed sex per anum. She said the only question was if he enjoyed it. It made no difference that women have no prostate and so have greatly less anatomical basis for enjoying it than men. She plainly hated Africa but never said a word against it. She tried to be interested in vernacular architecture, unsuccessfully: her heart and mind were in the Baroque. He thinks two miscarriages in Tanzania, one concealed from him. She was shy about nudity and he loves my whoresque ways, but when pressed, yes, there can be something a little erotic about conventual and hypermodest ways. She was attracted to Vedanta the last he knew. He thinks she may end up religious because of her phobias re cleanliness and contamination. Once they get going, all religions manipulate and pump up human hysteria about contamination, a subject he
would appreciate more discussion of with me. I think I know a lot about lustration, if I can recapture it. She had an eyecup and rinsed her eyes with a solution, but not because she had conjunctivitis—to prevent it. She would pore over him for whiteheads. Her first reform for N was to never keep his comb in any pocket he carried money in, for hygienic reasons, and once he’d said no, he caught her subsequently clandestinely scalding his comb. She was obsessed with depilation. Severe menses. An example of how distressed she got around menses: he found her weeping and finally got her to explain: it was because if she lost something he would come to her aid and they would find it, but when he lost things she was never able to add anything to the search that helped. She had no interest in reforming him, the comb mania aside, and she only made the one attempt. My antennae vibrated: what was he meaning to say? Did they argue? Very little, although they once argued over whether dance was a major art form or not, he negative, to a point of hurt feelings. Symphonic music should be on during sex, she felt, especially Sibelius. She was a member of a recorder consort. In sex she had two modes: number one, she is a normal not particularly sexy person being soldierly, trying hard to get into state two where she becomes almost a nut or dissociated person, wild breathing, sometimes fainting, throat sounds: getting from one to two is the eye of a needle, the aperture growing smaller, probably due to their increasing separations, he says. Had he noticed my nipples are slightly off axis? He hadn’t. He denied everything. He said I shouldn’t complain. Why? Grace has a supernumerary nipple. He wanted me to know he was not criticizing Grace, only describing. You can always find something nice to say about a girl, his mother instilled in him. If you can’t find anything else nice, you can usually say she has nice skin. Grace’s very good skin has come up inter alia more than he may be aware of. The skin of the rich is different, I say. Her family is wealthy, so ipso facto she must be too, but he is vague about the magnitudes, which I marxistly interpret as meaning they are substantial and also as one reason parting was apparently mostly such sweet sorrow, his claims to the contrary notwithstanding. He sees his mother’s advice as machiavellian in that the motive behind it was that it would get around the junior high school girls that here was someone who always had something nice to say about a girl and this would mean he had a greater chance to find his right mate, not make the wrong choice, important because divorce would kill her, his mother, for one thing. If you failed to find your true mate it was life in death. Each woman is a copy of the Virgin Mary that the world is smearing and trying to ruin. Grace collects lacquerware and majolica, or
did. She is subject to rose fever. When she begins a novel she feels she has to read it straight to the end: he could sleep through her doing it, but in the morning she would be drained. She depended on his literary taste. He bemoaned the paucity of first-rate short novels and novellas in English, which is what her fixated attitude to novel reading led him to search out for her. They tried every variation of interim living together: visits, six months together six months apart, reconciliations, everything. Any cruelty I saw toward her in Gaborone was an act to get her to let go and face the need to find someone appropriate for her while she is still beautiful and possibly still fertile, with luck.