Mortals (35 page)

“Give me a minute,” he said.

The pose she was holding was impossible. She turned and resumed her previous position, but bracing her heels on the tub above the tap, she drove herself more forcefully against him than before, which he took as a declaration combining love and punishment for idiocy.

He began, mechanically, to soap himself. “You just nearly killed me,” he said.

“You’re an idiot,” she said. She made a spiral pattern in the lather on his right kneecap.

She sighed heavily. A pause followed. “But don’t you think it’s interesting, an interesting thing to realize, that our wonderful huge white civilization is all a big misunderstanding? I mean, Jesus was not a Christian, at all. And that’s only part of it. I know I’m going on and I’m sorry. Hate him if you have to, but I learn interesting things from this man you hate. It’s like your first year of college, before it turns into a drag. But there is something so staggering about it, first the Church stealing Jesus from the Jews, claiming him, and then libeling and killing the people who
gave
them Jesus. Fantastic. You have Judaism and you have Christianity and Islam, these two heresies, coming out of it, and you have these heretics trying their best to kill the people that produced them! There is something astonishing about the magnitude of the lying going on. What you have is this image of a huge upside-down pyramid which is the denominations, all the denominations, and churches, and the mosques, and
they’re all balanced on a point, and the point the whole pyramid is standing on is … is lies! Certain untruths … and nobody telling … Jesus was never anything but a devout Jew, you know, he was never a Christian at all. And the Jews didn’t kill him. It was the Romans.

“So it isn’t just There is no God with Davis. It’s about lies. But I promise you I am not going to keep talking about him. I’m sorry. Also I don’t want to be restricted for no reason. But don’t worry.”

Essentially it was over, this episode, he supposed. She had a bingo. She had everything she wanted. She had carte blanche to see Morel, and to what? flirt with him was what it came down to, with her husband’s approval, although calling it flirting was probably unfair. It would be fun for her. He wondered how she would like it if he proposed a deal like that for himself, except that he was forgetting it was her opinion that men as a class already had a de facto right or privilege to flirt and worse without anyone taking notice of it let alone assessing damages. Love is a strain, he thought. Now was probably not the best time to establish exactly how many sessions per week she was going to have with Morel. But he had to know that.

“What do you think brought him to Africa?”

“Well, Africa is the one part of the world where you’re getting four new Christians for every two you’re losing in the rest of the world. He has the figures. Don’t sound so grave.”

“I’m not grave, I’m pensive.”

“Why should the subject of religion make you so pensive? We aren’t religious, I thought.

“Do we believe in God, for example?

“Was that a shrug I felt?”

He was tempted to be perverse, which would be a mistake.

“Well, yes and no.”

“What do you mean?”

“Indirectly.”

“What?”

“Well, you might say I believe in someone who obviously did. Milton.” This is stupid, he thought. “Without his religion there would’ve been no
Paradise Lost
, no … none of it.”

“You think it’s impossible that he might have written something else great, as an unbeliever?”

“No, nothing like what he did write, of that … stature. And he couldn’t anyway because in his time any declaration of unbelief got you locked up. Where
Paradise Lost
is, there would be nothing, believe me.”

“I believe you and I love you. You don’t know how much more we love you than you love us, in general.”

“You mean, how much more women love their men than men love their women, how ridiculous. How unsupported can you get.”

“How many women know their husband’s Social Security number versus how many men know their wife’s? Venture a guess.”

“Fifty-fifty.”

“Wrong. About seventy percent of women know their husband’s. The figure for men is thirty percent.”

She would never know how tired he was of her facts and figures, courtesy of the good doctor. Now they were doing something interesting together, he and Iris. They were collaborating on a fiction. The fiction was that what had eventuated between them had been a very small thing and that all was well. It was remarkable about how few collaborations in making fiction worked out at all, Ford and Conrad excepted, and the two women who wrote novels about Irish country life. What she wanted from him was childish, on the face of it. She wanted, as he understood it, to see Morel and have fantasies about him and not have to feel guilty about it. That was on the face of it. But there was more going on. The more was a new Mode of Being, or, better, a New Mode of Relating, and his brother was right that there was a larger place for capitals in writing and expression generally than the times were permitting.

She said, “I didn’t mean to get into that and I’m sorry. It’s marginal. I want to say just two main things. I’m going to see him
and
nothing is going to happen. I love you and you’re my husband. But I’m going to go to him and when he’s helped me I’m going to stop. Helped me, to my satisfaction. But I just don’t want you sensing something you don’t like, suspecting something untrue, and my being forced to deny it over and over.”

He was going to say something he shouldn’t. “You’d tell me first if something was … was starting? You know what I mean. Not that this should be any kind of condition for your going to him, but you would, you would tell me?” He felt like a fool. She was silent.

He said, “I feel vacant. This is making me feel vacant.”

“I’m very sorry if it is. It shouldn’t.” He was hearing a tough tone that was new toughness.

I am nowhere, he thought.

She was brisk. “Nothing is going to happen. I am swearing this to you. I swear it.” She pressed her palm to her sternum, like a diva, but in all seriousness.

Nonsense was pushing its way into his mind. They began to begin to
be gone, he thought, three times, making himself stop when he felt the phrase entrenching itself. He needed to steady himself. He had to keep in mind that she was going to be away in the States, which would postpone everything as well as giving him time to strike back at Morel.

She said, “I really want you to understand how helpful he’s been to me. In the smallest ways.

“For example. He taught me to spit, how to hock up mucus, rather. Everybody knows how to spit. But how to hock up mucus from the back of my throat, when my sinuses are going crazy.”

“Hawk, I think you mean.”

“No, it’s hock. He says hock. I think hawk must be a corruption of hock. Because it’s hock. He showed me in the OED.”

“Ah, lucky guy. He has the OED? Are we talking about the real Oxford English Dictionary, not the microscopic edition you read with a magnifier?”

It was the real OED. Ray could tell she was feeling sorry for him. She wanted him to have his own OED, the real one. He hated the microtext edition. He loved the OED. But it was a tool he could use at the university library if he needed to. And he rarely needed to these days. And the real OED was too massive a possession for people as mobile as they had to be prepared to be. He could afford an OED. That wasn’t the problem.

No doubt he had only himself to blame for this moment arriving. Although what he could have done differently at any point in his earthly life so far was a question he would love to thrash out with someone as sapient as the great all-seeing eye she was paying through the nose to visit, although in fact the fees were pretty low. On the other hand was it possible he should construe her confession of attraction slightly differently, as in its being a way of stopping herself, preempting herself by alerting herself and him too, something done as an act of love? Of course that was slightly too self-congratulatory to be true, probably. She was in a malaise, was what this was about. They both were. Maybe this was simple, florid feminism of some kind. Brute feminism, and with no way he could go into it, but was it something like an attempt to undo something she disliked that was a fixture of regular life, such as the truth that men feel more threatened when their mates show interest in another male than women do when men partake in the more or less general reflexive sizing up of the world of women? some impulse like that, such as wanting to make everyone suffer equally? But he had never much gone beyond the golden mean in noticing other women … Although when he had, she had been quick enough to object, in fact. What was he supposed
to do? In his work it was important to blend in. His work was in the male world. Was he supposed to walk around at gatherings like a parson? The sexes are different, he thought. Seeing someone you’re interested in naked for the first time would be an example of how it was different for women and men. For men it was the act of getting inside the mystery, the secret that clothing hides, the package, the getting to see, and then if what you see is splendid, then so much the better. But his guess was that with women it was different and revolved around the fact that a particular man
wanted
passionately for them to take their clothes off. Urgently. That was what they loved. What they loved was men wanting them to the point of begging them to strip
now
. Of course what they saw when the importuner himself took his clothes off had to fall within a certain range, physical qualities did go into it, had to go into it, but with a woman a short leg would be nothing if the male had counterbalancing stuff, like power … or intellect. Women who talked about buns and dick size were to an extent faking and going along with the male model, which might truly be triggered by bigness in the shoulders and so on, but it was essentially like claiming they liked to watch football on TV as much as their mates did. Where am I? he thought. He had no idea.

She said, “Anyway, he has been concretely useful with problems I had. Or have. I told you about the hypoadrenia. Another thing, and something you may not know about, is how routine it is for me to get mild cystitis after we have sex. Not every time, I don’t mean that. But it’s a thing to deal with and he had a suggestion which I haven’t really had a chance to discuss with you … but now I will. I just lived with it because it wasn’t much and it went away. But. Anyway, he thinks if you were careful to wash yourself with mild soap just prior, just before … it could be that. It’s variable. It may be that when I don’t have the reaction it’s because you were by happenstance very clean at that time, just out of the shower. And this is not to say you’re not a clean person, Ray. It’s just that there may be certain salts on the body, something like that. And also I didn’t want to mention it because it goes against spontaneity. I don’t know, maybe there’s a scintilla of urine or something I’m sensitive to.”

“My God,” he said. “I will certainly … hear and obey. Good God. Who knew?”

He was enraged at Morel.

“You’re not offended, Ray?”

“No, I’m delighted,” he said, but very fast. He should be feeling guilt, obviously, but why was he hearing about this only now? I am apparently foul, he thought.

“It’s just an example of something practical, another example.”

“No, live and learn. So what kind of soap should I use. How mild is mild. I want to get it right.”

“Oatmeal soap. I have some for you.”

“Oatmeal soap it is, then.”

“It fades pretty fast if I drink a lot of water, so I’m not trying to say it was the end of the world.”

“Say no more. We can do without it.” He thought, Crush him: Find a way.

“God I love you,” she said. In a minute she was going to offer to wash him with this correct soap, he thought. He was picking up slight shifts toward softness. She might not even be aware she was tending that way. It would be instinctual to wrap something as bitter as she was handing him in sweet sex, coat it. She was idly touching her breasts.

She said, “About cleanliness, this is interesting, since so much in religion is about ritual purity, getting clean, being clean before God …”

So I am foul, apparently, he thought.

“I’m trying to reproduce what Davis says on this. Yes, it’s why ritual purity is so universal in religions, which is because the father, the generic father, won’t handle the child or baby if it’s soiled, nasty. God is a stand-in for the father figure. By the way do you know that the Peace Corps had to let their messenger go because he refused to carry stool samples from the Peace Corps nurse to the laboratory?”

“I hadn’t heard.”

“Men here will not handle feces. Women have to collect the cow dung they use to plaster the floors with in their huts, in the countryside. Of course the men are completely willing to walk up and down on it.

“Once you look at it, almost everything people do in religion fits one way or another with the attempt to recapture a moment when there was an all-powerful protector-lawgiver figure in our lives, and we go through motions in this regressed state that deep down we believe are the kind that ought to attract the corrective attention of this all-powerful person. This comes from neoteny, the long period of dependency human infants have. When we get into a crisis, we want to regress into the power of a fatherlike entity, a patrimorph is what Davis calls it. Then we recapture the endorphins we got from being taken care of or attended to, historically. It’s a theory. It’s partly from Freud except that Davis doesn’t think this collapsing back is sick, a pathology, the way Freud did. He thinks it’s normal, and even, in a way, healthy. But it’s also a joke, and silly. Everything really fits with this. Confession. All the kinds of self-mortification,
to make yourself more like a deserving injured or perfect child, all that. All the born-again symbology. Purity and obedience. Making yourself either pathetic or into the simulacrum of a deserving child covers just about everything from fasting and rending your garments to all the thousands of mortifications of the flesh, to being celibate, meaning you’re making yourself into a simulated presexual being, like a baby.”