Mortals (21 page)

“Your voice sounds so hollow in these rooms … because of the high ceilings,” she said. He shrugged.

She was circling. She couldn’t bear it, either, which was something. He thought, Does Gallo love his wine?

She mastered herself, swallowing. “Anyway,” she said.

“Anyway … Did you know that my father once told me he wouldn’t read Conrad because Conrad was a Jew, something he concluded from the jacket portrait on
The Portable Conrad
I’d given him for a present. It was frightening. I was stunned. I’d never known he was an anti-Semite. But you repress things. I’d forgotten about it. It was out of the blue.”

Ray was listening. It was clear that this was deeply fraught for her. She seemed to be in a state of upheaval. Life is insane, he thought.

“You can probably tell I’ve been talking about this kind of thing, Ray, and …

“And anyway,
I’ve been seeing someone
 …” She rushed it out, squeezing Ray’s hand and moving closer to him.

He couldn’t speak, at first. He could groan.

“Oh God,” he said finally.

“Wait, but what’s wrong. I haven’t …”

“What’s
wrong?
You said you’re
seeing
someone, I mean this is the way the world ends …”

She broke in with “Oh please can we discuss this without literary quotations coming into it,
please please please
. No I’m sorry.

“No, I’m seeing a
doctor
, a very fine, well, therapist, but he’s also a doctor of medicine, which I know is important. Oh my darling, no. A doctor, which is where I was today when you came in, and of course I hadn’t told you and I didn’t want to tell you. But.
But
. Ray,
I have been unhappy
. Oh but God you’re an idiot!” She stopped to compose herself a little.

“I’ve been three times. It’s very helpful, Ray. He’s just around the corner. It’s been really important for me, really good. Amazingly good. And I
didn’t tell you because you have enough on your plate and I thought I could go a few times and, well, feel better, and I could avoid bringing you into it because you know the way you are. You hover and worry and you hover and you worry about me if I … Well, you know. You want me to be happy
so much
. And that’s what I want, for your sake, really. Mine too, though.

“And I didn’t even go originally because I was unhappy, really. This is true. I went because I thought my urine looked too dark. Which I mentioned to you and you thought I was being absurd I guess. You said it was chloroquine, but we’ve been taking chloroquine for years and I never noticed that effect. But you didn’t look, you just insisted that we all fluctuate or whatever you said. So.

“My urine is fine, by the way.

“But anyway he’s, well, quite holistic I suppose is the term, and he asked about whatever else might be bothering me. He could hardly not see it.

“And, well … So I go to him now. I was going to tell you. It’s just that you surprised me today and I wasn’t ready to.

“So that was stupid.

“Also he’d told me to tell you.”

What she’d been clutching was an appointment card. She handed it to Ray.

“This is the man,” she said. “You’d approve of him.”

The card read Davis Morel, M.D., 16 Tshekedi Crescent, Gaborone, Eclectic Medicine. Her next appointment was for the following Tuesday, at noon.

Ray reached for her and, trembling, embraced her fiercely.

She relaxed.

T
wo days had passed.

Tonight dessert was half a papaya each, perfectly ripe papaya that deserved to be savored bite by bite, he knew. He had tried to eat companionably, at her desultory rate, God knew he had, but there were things to do. She seemed to have forgotten that they were going out for a walk this evening.

Surely now she was finished. The scraped papaya skin was a flimsy thing, like a silk scarf and like the platonic idea of the color orange. Idly she held it up to the light to get the pure orange effect the skin yielded when she did that. She was sensitive to color. She was an aesthete, a genuine one. She stopped to notice aesthetic events there was really no time for, fleeting conjunctures and juxtapositions of things. Later you were glad you had bothered.

He got up. They could go out in a minute.

One thing did bother him about her seizures of meticulousness, and that was that there was another explanation for them, and that explanation was boredom. Elongating simple tasks like eating half a papaya into protracted, meticulously executed exercises. Peeling carrots and destringing celery earlier, she had arranged the carrot peels and celery strings into the letter I on the counter as they talked. When she was starting to sauté something for supper, she had drizzled some symbol or other, maybe her initials, with oil, in the pan before it got hot. He thought, This could be boredom, and boredom kills, and what can I do?

She was in back, getting ready to go out. Their toilet flushed thunderously, which was its way.

He thought, Remember you overinterpret. A case in point was his
recent alarm over a band of cursive doodling in ballpoint pen on the kraftpaper jacket of their address book. At first glance he had taken the band of doodling for something like a border decoration in Islamic or Greek art. Iris was always doodling. He had never paid attention to her productions, which in a small way was funny because doodles were something he had been trained to be interested in. And he was certainly well aware of the lengths the agency had gone to in the past, and presumably was going to even now, to retrieve doodled-on materials from certain persons of interest in certain settings, which he hadn’t thought ridiculous when he’d heard about them. The idea was that someone who doodled was leaking signs and hints. I’m not boring, he thought: Except that a lot of me is like the storage areas in a good museum.

But the decoration, the arabesque, on the phonebook jacket, which she had taken the trouble to continue across the spine and around across the back, in her very neat way, had frightened him because, if you looked closely at it, it seemed to be saying No over and over. In fact he would take a look at it again, while she got ready to go out sometime before cockcrow.

He went into the living room and, locating the address book, got a surprise. The cover was gone. The book was its chipped, cheap black plastic self again. He looked around to see if possibly the cover had simply fallen off. But there was no sign of it. The cover had been discarded.

Iris had said that that was a design she had been doodling since before she remembered, and she could see why he thought it looked like No’s, except look how many of the o’s look like lowercase e’s. She had reassured him … Said it was nothing.

Handling the phonebook, he noticed that of all the doodling on the former jacket, only the Nonononono had left an impression on the plastic cover. She had been bearing down.

Asking where he was as she approached, Iris came to a halt in the living room doorway and stood there waiting for a little appreciation. She was ready to stroll. In honor of the occasion, she had gotten herself up a bit. She had a bright look he slightly distrusted. She was made up and wearing earrings. She had put on a longsleeved chiffon overblouse, despite the heat, because she was attractive to mosquitoes, unlike him. The blouse was a shade of orange just a degree lighter than the illuminated papaya skin.

“You look like a movie star,” he said.

“That was the point.”

Fixing herself up was for him, only for him. There wasn’t much chance that they would run into somebody they knew when they went out. He wanted her to be happy.

“You’re too beautiful for this joint,” he said, not knowing exactly what he was implying. It was a line out of the ash heap of dead movies lining the bottom of his mind, of course, her mind too. Probably it was also an apology of some kind.

She beckoned him to come along.

One difference between them was that he had seen more movies in his life than she had, especially in his young life. So he had more referents. He thought, One of us is closer to death than the other and we really have no idea which of us it is.

Abruptly, he was overjoyed to be going out to walk with her. Abruptly, he loved the idea. The prospect filled him with emotion and reminded him of the answer a famous philosopher whose name he had forgotten had given when he was asked for an example of an absolute or unalloyed good, and he had said Having coffee with my wife.

That was what it had been like, in the old days, going out walking. Going out walking now was a reminder that things were no longer the same. They were trying to recapture something. She knew it too. Up until two years ago they had been fairly constant about going out to walk, so how far back were the old days anyway? He fought to hold on to his feelings of pleasure and anticipation. The fact that he was suddenly seeing this as being in the same category as pathetically renewing your marriage vows was beside the point. She was ready to be festive. He could be, too.

Fikile ushered them out into the roadway and stood in the street so that he could watch proprietarily until they turned the corner. They both liked the weight of the night, these hot winter evenings. There was a red nail paring of a moon. Nights in Africa were easier than days, because you weren’t fending off the sun every minute you were outside.

He could tell she was enjoying things by a certain softness that was coming into her movements, and by her breathing, too. He wanted deeply to talk about anything except his brother or her sister. He especially wanted to stay off the topic of Ellen because the woman appeared to be seriously considering single motherhood, which would be a gigantic mistake, but one that was apparently becoming as popular in the United States as it was in Botswana. At least in Botswana there was a purpose to it other than reckless self-indulgence. The point in Botswana was for a woman to produce a child prior to marrying, as an ad for her fertility, once she had reached the age of twenty or so and hadn’t been chosen yet. Apparently Ellen was being influenced by having met a darling child. Iris had read him some of the child’s bons mots, and they had been cute enough. But was Ellen under the impression she could pop out a stellar
child just because she thought she deserved one? We contain monsters. The most darling child can flower into a monster. Rex was an example. He couldn’t make this point. He would also rather not talk about the future. Anything else was fine.

Petty crime was up, but mainly in the form of housebreaking. He was alert, though. No one seemed to be walking tonight but the two of them.

“We like to do this,” Iris said, as they settled into their steady-state stride.

He smiled. No reply was required, because the line was resurrected from their past, specifically from the prattlings of a precocious child, speaking of precocious children, they’d known. They both knew what it meant. It was a parajuvenile way of mocking what they were doing, in a gentle way.

This was the stride they liked for strolling, aerobic but not so fast that they would slight any interesting detail in the passing parade, although in truth there was less to see now, as the formerly common wire frontage fencing was replaced with solid walls like theirs. It was more like going strolling in upper-class neighborhoods in Mexico, that is, more a tour of blank walls and gates with the tops of trees as the main points of interest. The standard wall was getting higher, too. Also, it was embarrassing to be seen overtly exercising. Sauntering was fine with the Batswana, but jogging was a thing for ridicule. The Batswana would pass comments when joggers went by. And the Batswana thought heel-and-toe walking was a hilarious form of lunacy. The one heel-and-toe walker in the extension was the deputy chief of mission at AID, and he was secretly famous for it all over the country. He was a paradigm of lunacy. Walking together was nice, but there was a practical cause for letting it lapse as they had. There had been something artificial about their constitutionals, except for the company. They both walked a great deal during the course of the day.

“We like to do this,” she said again.

The subject matter of her sister was en route, and this unconscious reaching back to a precocious child in their own background was the signpost. It looked as though he wasn’t going to escape. Mainly he hated it because it led back, by implication, to their own childlessness.

“We like to do this,” he said.

“My doctor. Weren’t we just talking about him before?”

“Not that I recall. Unless I missed something. Maybe you were having a mental dialogue of some kind.”

“Maybe I was. I do that.” She seemed blithe enough, saying so. Depart this subject, he said to himself.

“So then, I take it another one of his specialties is South Africa, I mean, he is an eclectic, after all.”

It was dark, but he could make out the familiar quizzical but good-natured look she was giving him that was meant to ask
What
is your problem? So far they were dealing lightly and fairly openly with his skeptical, as she read it, attitudes toward Doctor Morel.

Ray had no problem. If he had a problem it was the oversupply of experts on South Africa that just being in the region seemed to stimulate, the superabundance of people who thought they knew everything, but knew, in actual fact, nothing … people just off the plane who had talked to one alcoholic exile in the airport bar and thought they knew the shape of the future.

Iris said, “He knows a lot about everything. He’s a polymath. Like you. Very much like you.”

Ray said nothing.

“He’s very attuned to words,” Iris said.

Ray waited. They walked in silence for a few minutes.

She said, “He’s attuned to what we’re really saying when we talk and why we select the particular words we do.”

“Who would this be?” Ray asked, knowing who she meant.

She smiled, tightening their arm link, drawing his arm snugly into the side of her breast.

It was quiet for a Friday evening. Very florid stereo music pulsing in a couple of the houses didn’t necessarily mean that any social festivity was going on, because the preferred way to listen to stereo music was at high volume, not only among the Batswana but among the younger expatriate audiophiles as well. It was universal, or becoming universal. Bringing a torch might have been a good idea. The streetlights were set at wide intervals, not all of them were functioning, and those that were delivered a weak icy blue light muffled, especially in this season, by swarming insects. Luckily they were past the peak of the termite mating season, when the melee around any available light had to be seen to be believed. He couldn’t think of a metaphor to describe the dense, shimmering, heaving fluxes the termites created as they swarmed in midair. Getting used to Africa was getting used to termites. He remembered eating dinner with Iris in a hotel in Serowe during the worst of a particularly ferocious mating season. An attempt had been made to keep the insects out of the dining room. There were screens at the windows being pummeled, was the word for it, pummeled
by the insects trying to get in. And then as people went in and out, no matter how quickly they tried to manipulate the screen door, clouds of termites had come surging in to join their mates in the swarm dance already going on around the ceiling lights. He and Iris had hunched over their plates to keep the falling, shed wings from getting into their food, their plates of goat stew and samp. The floor had been treacherous with their slippery, silvery wings, which formed a cover something like the artificial snow no longer on the market that people mound up around the bases of their Christmas trees. The Serowe trip must have been a considerable time ago because he remembered it seeming exotic to them, not nightmarish, the way it would now.