Mating (63 page)

My project came to me with insane clarity. My previous piecemeal treatment of Nelson had to go. It had been wrong simply to strew bits and fragments on him through my Tsau notes-cum-ongoing-analysis of my unique self. I needed to cull and put together under the right headings
everything I had on Nelson so far, and I had to get more. What I had on Nelson had to be inadequate and misleading. He was the one who talked about protean behavior, namely the tactic in almost all mammal species of jumping erratically and randomly around in response to being chased. This could apply to him. I had pursued him. There was no argument about that. So a lot of what I’d captured was undoubtedly not what it seemed.

As a task, this project was perfect. Of course, this is as I see it now. It was perfect because of its penultimacy. It was concrete and it was urgent, but it was the act preceding the final act or decision, which would have to be postponed, necessarily.

I wanted to begin right away—in fact it felt urgent to begin right away. Whatever the mental equivalent of flailing around is was what I was doing. I knew it but couldn’t help it. Somehow I had to get the true dimensions of this man. The word “dimensions” galvanized me. The minutiae of this are important. My attention was caught by Denoon’s beloved retractable steel measuring tape. It was Swedish. It had been everywhere with him. The reel case was the size of a compact, but the steel tape seemed to come out of it forever. The quality of the tape was amazing: it was like silk but indestructible. He loved his measuring tape. It was on the floor near his head, where he could reach it. It and his slide rule and his hunting knife were equivalent pet things. The hunting knife I was ambivalent about because he wore it around too much and also because by using it in mundane little chores he rendered them overdramatic, in my humble opinion.

I know there are lines in the Greek lyrics that describe the frantic state of mind, derived from love, I was entering. You burn me, someone says to Eros, and in one epigram someone complains that Eros is inside him and he feels his limbs being shaken by Eros’s wingbeats, approximately. I crept over to Denoon and lifted the blanket. He was deep asleep, naked as usual. He was sleeping the sleep of true exhaustion. He was on his left side, his right arm stretched out as though reaching for something and his right knee raised. He looked like a hurdler. I was going to measure him.

I wanted him to wake up and not to wake up, both. I was pulling his blanket off but I was keeping the place dark, not opening the curtains. I was going to measure him, but gently, not letting the metal tape measure touch him, lest the cold of it startle him.

I measured dimensions not standardly taken, thinking Why not? I measured across his buttocks. I measured his right calf. I wrote the
numbers in ballpoint pen on the palm of my hand, like a Motswana clerk in a small general dealer shop. I was being outré in other ways too. I never sit around in the morning in my yakuta. The yakuta was for sex. Sitting around in a kimono was too much like my mother clinging to being not dressed for work as long as she could. But there I was. My hair was a wreck. Either he was genuinely sleeping the sleep of the dead or he was faking: whichever it was, I had to know, because my personal motto should probably be You lie to me at your peril. I measured his fingers, still keeping the tape from touching them. I decided I would measure his penis.

Obviously I wasn’t delicate enough because voilà he was awake, explosively. He pushed me away. It was understandable. I was a shadow to him and was no doubt conforming to some invasive hag archetype we all carry around within us. Also he’d caught the glint of the metal tape and hadn’t had time to process exactly what metallic thing he was seeing. Then also I give him credit for sensing I wasn’t in normalcy, the proof being that it was no problem for me to wait until he spoke first, even though I was the invasive one and the convention of the female speaking first when an unresolved conflict has gone on long enough was alive and well in our house. Ah good, I thought, another thesis topic although unfortunately not in my field, id est proving that women are almost invariably the appeasers when fights occur that lead to stalemates. Nelson was alarmed. Finally he said something like What was that?

I believe in the existence of situational genius and that I occasionally possess it. An explanation of what I was doing leapt into being. It was that I was planning to make something for him, clothing, pants in fact, a surprise, so I’d been measuring his inseam on the q.t., I was sorry, his pants wardrobe was useless for getting an idea of how long a normal pair of pants should be because it consisted of pantaloons and shorts, and I was sorry.

He apologized for startling me with his reaction. I could see he was simply going to accept my explanation and not probe to see if there was any element of provocation in what I was doing. Something in his attitude convinced me, in the state I was in, that reducing him to paper was the right idea. I needed to proceed with it. I wanted him to leave the house so I could do that. I hope never again to undergo the state I was in. I even remember one peculiarity of it: I was aware more than usually of the edges of my field of vision, my lashes, the ghostly nose we forget is always there.

Surprisingly, the conviction that getting Nelson on paper was urgent was just as strong in the days following. Denoon Evaginated was the secret working title for my compilation.

There was a significant amount about Denoon in my journal for me to extract and collate, for which I needed index cards or paper that could be cut up to serve as index cards. There were no index cards available. In fact we were in one of our chronic general paper famines. We had orders in for all kinds of paper, but inevitably they were the items left out of the consignments of sundries the supply plane brought in. In my journal I had no more than forty blank pages left, and these were not expendable because my diarizing was going to go on simultaneously with my anatomy of Nelson. An example of my focus was my strolling in the vicinity of the school one gloaming and being tempted to slip in and pinch one or two exercise books from the handful we had left. But I remembered how proud we all were of the absence of stealing in Tsau and controlled myself.

It occurred to me I could use aerogram blanks, which the post office had plenty of. In a way, that was perfect. I could appear to be writing to friends when in fact I was doing otherwise. Nelson for some reason liked the idea of my writing to friends, or possibly what he liked was the appearance of my having as many friends as my quote unquote letter-writing implied. Seeing me writing even inspired him to do more than he usually did vis-à-vis dinner and housekeeping, which was already substantial, though, it now came to me, not as substantial as he’d originally led me to expect. He thought I was referring to my journal for current incidents to include in my letters. It was admittedly a little reckless of me. The only drawback to the airletters was their price, but something about that felt right to me. I put fictitious names and addresses on my airletters and even sealed them up, only to have to later open them and cut up the sections for classification.

It was surprising to see how many sections I had that bore one way
or another on Denoon and fatherhood, or more specifically on Nelson and his father. Was this because I was interested in any clue that would tell me whether or not he was germane as a father-of-my-child prospect? There was too much on fatherhood. I had to compress it. For example, I had a surplus on the contention that good father-son relationships are predicated on the father having some expertise or maestria to pass on to the son—nothing about daughters here—preferably something wherewith the son can make money, although sports or philately or hunting and fishing will do. Because his father was in advertising there was nothing vocational to convey, advertising being a fraud and something his father was ashamed of in any case. Pathetically, along these lines, he realized his father had tried to tell him about something he did know, drinking, or rather how to get away with it, as in avoiding hangovers by taking two aspirin and drinking all the water you can hold before going to sleep when you’ve overindulged. This was along with other advice at the time Nelson was leaving for college.

Religion was another hypertrophied facet. It was everywhere. He was adamant about the Catholic Church. Even if he acknowledged for a second that there might be some progressive Catholics in Brazil, say, his next question was sure to be Why is it it never occurs to the Pope to excommunicate a serial murderer like Pinochet? or something similar. According to the Koran, when Mohammed went up to heaven to meet Allah he asked Allah to reduce the number of obligatory daily prayers to whatever it is today, fifteen or sixteen, which Allah agreed to as a mark of approval. But did this belong under Religion or under Repetition, another very oversupplied category? Or where did religion, the most effective of the placebos, go?: under Religion or Humor? At this point I decided to let the category alone for the foreseeable future, which was, in retrospect, dumb of me.

Humor was tough for several reasons. Sometimes something I’d collected would seem to me to be humor and other times it would seem merely median sardonica. Did his singing go under Humor? He liked to sing a parody of The Impossible Dream, in which he ate the inedible meal and drank the unpotable beverage, and so on. The question was whether it should go under Humor or a character trait like obstinacy, because while I’d smiled the first two or three times I’d heard him sing this, I finally had to signal that I wasn’t finding it very funny, and finally that I wasn’t finding it funny at all. But he was still singing it off and on, trying to get my approval for ongoing refinements in the lyrics. Other areas of his humor were slightly invasive as well. For some reason he
continued to think it was funny to pretend I liked the music of Bob Dylan, when in fact all I had admitted at an earlier point was that I liked It Ain’t Me Babe. He would murmur-sing How many times must the cannon balls fly Before they’re forever banned, and then shout Wuxtry! Wuxtry! Historic Agreement! UN Bans Cannonballs Forever! Flintlocks Next! And of course out of my supposed adoration of Dylan came our longrunning match on why the band can’t play. There were many more reasons than I’d remembered. Mine were consistently more hubristic than his, I noticed. He was not really ever going to evolve much beyond a strumpet stealing the trumpet or Jean Arp stealing the harp. Gender may be involved more than I recognized. He told me something he’d said jokingly, to which his wife had taken exception. Two people they knew had been living together for eight years and had decided to marry. So Denoon said to them Marriage is wonderful, this is great news, I know you’ll find the addition of the sexual dimension to your relationship a great improvement to your life and a real eye-opener. He seemed surprised that I agreed with Grace that this was low-level. I’d put down very few of my own sallies, except when he’d seemed to react inordinately, as for some reason he did to my I’m attracted to you as to a magnate, or you attract me like a magnate. I persevered with this category. And not to venture too far into the underside of our household humor, he also laughed inordinately when I was getting into bed and slightly farted and he said Is that the way you greet me? I replied quick as a flash That’s the only language you understand. Neither of us could figure out why we thought this was funny, but we both did.

The physical description I assembled is a masterpiece of some kind. I doubt that there is a more minute physical description of one human being by another anywhere. I wish I had never done it.

I was improving on my texts as I went along, adding asides and priorly left-out associations.

That the fact that I was creating material almost as fast as I was classifying the material already in hand didn’t bother me meant something—either
I was at heart a congenital academic or the prospect of indefinitely delaying coming to a conclusion about living with Denoon was not unwelcome to me. Neither interpretation was flattering. One or both were probably right, but this realization was completely weightless, somehow. I kept on, drivenly, with that mobbed feeling your brain gets when you’re cramming for finals in nonelectives. Meanwhile the issue of the night men was turning crescive without my noticing.

One morning three women I particularly liked came to get me for an arch raising. They were Mma Isang, Mina Hlotse, who was our best midwife, and Prettyrose Chilume, who was physically so slight that her contribution to the actual labor of arch raising was basically spiritual, even though she pulled and shoved along with the rest of us. I was always asked. That day we were supposed to raise an arch over Our Mother Street, the mother being not the Virgin Mary, as I think I’d been bemusedly assuming, but Mme Mpopo Kalighatle. This was an average arch, about twenty feet high and seven wide, made of gum tree logs enameled red and black in alternating bands, with the street names carved into the crosspiece and painted with tar into which multicolored glass fragments had been pressed while the tar was still sticky. Raising the arch involved pushing the crosspiece up using claw-tipped poles while the uprights were slid into the pits dug to receive them. The main problem was the weight of the poles. You needed a few fairly sturdy women in the crew. These events were largely celebratory. A few words would be said about the virtues of the honoree, which, in Mme Mpopo’s case—I was about to learn—included an unfailing willingness to work wherever she was needed most and an aptitude for intercepting children about to wander out into the desert. She’d died two years earlier. Her name came up often. She had a genuine reputation for great benevolence, and I wished I had known her. A new thing was that men were offering their services at the raisings, claiming that they could do it faster and more safely. In fact there had been a time or two when the arch had not gotten to apogee at first try and had flopped back, narrowly missing someone’s foot. But women are nimble. Whatever we lack in hoisting power we more than make up in agility at getting out of the way of toppling structures. We were perfectly able to manage the raisings on our own.