Mortals (113 page)

“I can’t eat,” he said.

“But you need to. You said you were hungry.”

“I am, but I can’t eat. Later on, maybe. But you eat, take care of yourself. Next time we stop I’ll have something. But right now I can’t.”

She opened a packet of Simba chips and began to eat them, but softly, in small mouthfuls, moistening each chip in her mouth before she started chewing, following some impulse, as he saw it, to shrink and mute her presence. She was full of guilt. This maneuver was somehow appropriate to that, for her. She loved Simba chips and would only let herself eat them infrequently because they were so fattening. He was sorry for her but there was nothing he could do.

He said, “Did you let your boyfriend know you were leaving town for this?” He was being too hard. He was too angry.

“He’s not my boyfriend.”

“Sure he is. What is he, then?”

“Not my boyfriend.”

“Your lover, then. Your lover.”

“I haven’t been with him since you both got back.”

“Well I hope you dropped him a line. He might wonder. Okay, so, okay. It hasn’t resumed yet. But you are in fact lovers and as far as that goes you still love him. Is that unfair?”

She was breathing rapidly. She said, “I don’t know. I don’t know how I feel, exactly …”

He sighed heavily at her. “Well let’s figure it out, if we can.”

“Right,” she said.

“Look, I need to get everything straight. It’s like this. You weren’t supposed to do what you did. You weren’t supposed to fuck anyone else, and if you were going to, if it felt like you were moving that way, you were supposed to tell me, warn me. You were supposed to give me a chance. That was the understanding. And it was the same for me. It was the understanding between us.”

She was anguished. She said, “I know I know. But try to understand.
The thing is that our deal, our understanding, wasn’t exactly what it seemed. What it was was a guarantee that it could never happen. It made it unreal. Because it would have led to a talk opera and you making declarations and promising changes here and there and I would have had to believe you and be the decent kind of person I’m supposed to be. And then time would pass and lo and behold the whole thing would become moot because I was too old, imagine that. And time would have passed and then I would be old, and possibly nothing would have changed, truly, between us. Reality. You always talk about being in reality …”

“That last road sign was Willowpark, did you see it?”

“It was. It’s Swartruggens where you have to be careful. We’re fine.”

“Go ahead.”

“Also, you were away when this was developing. I mean when it got serious, got this serious. That’s no excuse, I know. But the truth is I wanted to do it. I wanted that. I was attracted to Davis. I was in a state of temptation that turned intense sooner than I was prepared for, and you were away. It turned intense. What I thought was that I could do it and then see, see how I felt … and I think, I
think
maybe I was assuming that the chances were okay that it wasn’t going to be the greatest thing in the world and that I would conclude that, finally, but in the meantime I would have gotten something out of my system. I know this is crude, me being crude. I think it’s the kind of thing men do and …”

“You have to stop for a minute. This is hard for me, my girl, my girl. Ah
Jesus.”

“And I don’t know if maybe I thought once I had been through it, through something forbidden, that it would be over and
we
could be back together.”

That enraged him. He had plunged from a place where she had been creating a little sympathy in him, down into this. She was a fool.

“Don’t patronize me, Iris
. I’m not a
fool
. You say
that
? You destroy everything and you say
that
? So it was just about forbidden fruit? We have to speak the truth, here. What you’re saying is cheap. My throat is dry. Jesus Christ.”

She handed him the bottle of Appletiser she had been drinking from.

“Don’t make me stop
, Ray, even if I say something you despise me saying. I don’t know how many times I can go over this, so I have to do my best. You’re not going to like any of it. Of course you aren’t. Anyway, a part of it was that I was tired of being good. At that moment, I was. It was weakness and self-pity all mixed together. There. But I was tired of being good. Being good had gotten me a life that had so much wrong with it. In
a way I wanted to stop being good almost out of curiosity. And this is a confession, I’m well aware. I look hideous to myself when I say it, but it’s true. I wanted to see what I was like on the other side of a certain line. Nothing I’m telling you is about getting sympathy out of you.”

“Of course.”

“Also he didn’t want to do it, at first, at all. This may surprise you.”

“It does and it doesn’t.” He couldn’t swallow.

She went on. “Well it surprised me. I made it clear enough to him. I was the initiator and I had certain expectations about the target, about men. So I was pretty surprised when he resisted. When he turned me down. Like that. If he had yielded right away, I don’t know …”

“I’m not following this.”

“No it roused
me
. It galvanized something. I felt worse when he turned me down than I had before. I didn’t like that. It was the worst outcome. You think I’m shallow.”

He didn’t know what he believed or thought. He remembered vividly one of her post-coitum triste moments when she’d answered his question about what was troubling her, because she had an odd look, and she’d answered with the strange assertion that she was sad that sex was about the greatest thing she could give him and that sex wasn’t enough because she loved him so much. It was hard to credit, but it had really happened. He had felt what, ennobled.

“And there’s this, Ray. There had been some incidents with you, not recent, but still … I was dwelling on them. You wanted certain women. You did. Oh yes you did. I’m not saying you represented an extreme of the way married men are, or men generically. I’m not a child. But I …”

“This is too much, really Iris. It’s insane. I mean in the present circumstance, really. I have been utterly one hundred percent faithful to you and you know it. I
do
represent an extreme, a good one. This is too fucking much.”

“Ray, I told you you wouldn’t like this. I know you’ve been faithful. I utterly do know it. I believe it. I believe you never
acted
. That’s what I believe. But I also believe that you wanted to act, because you’ve humiliated me more than once.”

“
Humiliated
you?”

“Yes, exactly. Staring at that woman on the train, Rhodesian Railways, at that particular young woman in the dining car, even after I asked you to stop it. Turning around in your chair to stare at her like all the other men, doing it all through dinner, it was absolutely humiliating.”

“That one again. I have apologized for that, I believe. Let me count the times.”

“And there were other lovely moments. But I do believe you never acted. But I believe you wanted to.”

“Never, not once … No.”

“Oh
sure
you did. Don’t tell me otherwise. But you’re missing my point. And by the way, I believe you imagined yourself betraying me with the embassy nurse. Your juices run. You’re not dead there. I benefited from that. You’re a live cock. But this isn’t my point. I don’t know if I’m being too subtle for you. You were my model. I don’t doubt that your history of rectitude would have been different if any of the ladies you enjoyed staring at so much had gone aggressive toward you. Do you doubt it?”

“Of course! I don’t know what you wanted from me …”

“You’re not getting the point I’m making. There was a certain imbalance that felt worse to me than maybe it should have when Davis showed up. The fact is that I have truly been a virgin when it came to feeling or showing anything toward other men. So when I decided to move toward Davis I had a certain model in my mind and a certain amount of historical aggravation to go with it. That I had never felt free to address because I didn’t know how to address it and didn’t know I had a right to address it other than asking you to cut it out in public, in the rare cases when that happened.”

“Cases? Don’t you mean case, singular?”

“No, cases. But this is a byway and not an excuse for what I did and I don’t want to have it taken for an excuse because it’s not an excuse. So let’s stop talking about it. Let’s pause.”

They stopped at the side of the road near Swartruggens. He ate a banana.

He said, “So is this right? two things happened. First, it got, in your words, more intense than you’d expected it would, leaving
intense
undefined for the moment. And second, it came to my attention. I found out about it and I wasn’t supposed to find out about it. Because you were preserving, or reserving, better, the right to have this thing evolve to its full stature and glory and intensity, at which point I would have been clued in, or not. And possibly you harbored expectations that you would gain knowledge out of this and decide to return to the mixture as before with yours truly in the dark forever? In other words, this was your variant of a
very commonplace … 
with other people
 … situation. So is that about right?”

“I don’t know.”

“You do know.”

“You’re cold. You’re being cold.”

“No I’m not. Wait until I start on myself. But before I do that, I have to know everything I don’t know about you and Morel.”

“You mean the details.”

“The details, yes. And I have to know about the question of love, who loves who. Because I love
you
. In all this, that’s absolutely clear, crystal clear, as they say. I can’t be with you, anymore. I know I can’t. And that’s because I love you, paradoxically. This is what I think and this is what makes everything impossible, and that is that even if you told me you loved me
again
, interesting concept, reloved me, I wouldn’t be able to believe it. Believe it again. I’d be afraid you were being pragmatic or something like that. I mean, I could try to think of your adventure with Morel as an experiment that got out of control and that I was partly to blame for it in the first place. But I don’t see how it could work.

“And I don’t even know if you would be interested in convincing me that it could. That would be presumptuous of me, now that I bring it up. So, no. Yes, the details.”

“You assume I stopped loving you, Ray.”

“You must have. Of course you did.”

“I can’t stand discussing love. Ray, I can’t.”

“Ah.”

“It’s too simple. I have … feelings …”

“Love-feelings? Love-feelings. See, I understand what’s going on here. The reason you don’t want to talk about how you feel about Morel is because it would be disloyal to do that, to give the details to somebody else, such as your husband. You may not have thought of this. You develop a primary loyalty to the person you love and a secondary loyalty to the person you used to love and primary trumps secondary.”

“You’re making it too simple, the way you always do.”

“Well, describe it in your own words, how you feel about him. By the way, I like Morel. He’s sterling, my dear, in many ways. He has gone out of his way to have an interesting mind to present, interesting views. He was a friend to me in captivity. This is just by the way. But you owe me a description of how you feel. You can make it concise. But don’t leave anything out.”

“This is impossible.”

“Ah,” he said.

“I mean, it’s hard enough talking about this, but talking about it cooped up where you can’t move is impossible. Could we just get out and walk around?”

He agreed to do it. He didn’t like it. He didn’t know how dangerous it was in this area. There was some SADF presence. They had been stuck behind a convoy of six army trucks for a few kilometers. He supposed it was all right. He had good, long vantages in every direction. There was plenty of starlight. They would stay close to the vehicle. He understood how she felt. They were discussing enormous subjects under conditions of restrictions that were unfair. He wanted to pace around and break things. But they couldn’t. Wringing each other’s necks would also be appropriate to their discourse. They got out.

She was sensitive to their need to abbreviate as much as they could, if they were going to make it into Joburg not later than nine-thirty or ten. He would have to find a hotel, find a safe place to deposit the Volkswagen, get organized so he could start out early in his search for Kerekang.

“We’re having a sighing contest,” she said. They were leaning against the car.

“We have to go soon, Iris.”

“I know. But I want to get this part over with. You have a right to know certain things. This is so impossible. But you’re going to quiz me about the sex with him, with Davis, and the part that played in everything. And in a way I’m eager to tell you, as much as I hate it, because it reflects well on you.”

“This is a little too abbreviated for me. Say what you mean.”

“Well. First is that you have nothing to be concerned about … about you, sexually. You’re fine. You’re unusually fine, I guess you could say I’m concluding, not that my experience has been so exhaustive.”

This is how much I love her, he thought. He was alarmed at the idea that she was implying inadequacies, sexual ones, that she was preparing to live with. You are a prince, aren’t you, he thought.

He had to ask. “Does he have some sort of problem? Something I should, I mean, I mean you should, be concerned about?” He was thinking of impotence. There were phobias about touching some people had. It wasn’t size. What was it?

“Oh it’s not a problem. Look I’m giving you a compliment, is all I’m doing. This is awkward to say. You’re very skilled, Ray. What I’m saying
is that I wasn’t overwhelmed by things he could do that you can’t or haven’t. He’s kind of prudish.”

“I’m skilled? How can I be skilled? I’m what you made me, what we are together.”

She couldn’t look at him. He wanted to know how many times they had done it, and where, and how. She would tell him if he made her do it. He wouldn’t. He wanted to apologize.