Mortals (36 page)

She was intoxicated with this stuff. He needed to be respectful, or not disrespectful. Of course there were any number of retorts to such a simpleminded view of religion, there must be. “And then, and this is the last thing I’m going to mention, his theory is that the contradictory and absurd notions we embrace when we’re religious amount to a variation of the same thing. When we embrace the absurd we are doing something the equivalent of mutilating our common sense, as a sort of goodwill offering. The most ridiculous varieties of religion, the fundamentalist ones, seem to be thriving right now. Davis thinks that things are happening, societal things, that are making people regress.”

This too shall pass, he thought. He grunted.

He guessed it was a good sign that she was adding fresh hot water to the stew they were in. She wanted to be with him. That was real.

He needed to remember that there had been previous enthusiasms of hers to deal with, for example when she’d decided that Ken Russell movies were supreme examples of something or other and she’d made him sit through
The Devils
twice, at the Capitol Cinema.

This was different.

He gripped her shoulders and began kneading her trapezius muscles with his thumbs, which brought back Richard Chamberlain as Tchaikovsky doing the same thing for his new wife and then, when his wife says Yes to the question You’ll stay with me forever, won’t you? converting the massage into an attempt to strangle her, until he comes to his senses not a moment too soon. Iris and he had laughed afterward and had replayed the scene for laughs themselves how many times?

She said, “Never forget how truly grateful I am to you. I never want you to think I’m not.”

He didn’t much like the tone of what she was saying, since it had faretheewell written all over it whether she was aware of it or not.

“Here’s an example why. I feel like a parasite on your knowledge sometimes, which doesn’t mean I’m not grateful. But as an example. Your knowledge of Greek. In Crete. Remember?”

She had no idea how marginal his command of Greek was, at least at this stage, after years of disuse.

“You have no idea what I’m talking about, is that possible?”

“No, say more.”

“This goes back to our Crete vacation in ’83, the incident … When we went to see the pornographic movies in Heraklion?”

He concentrated. He did remember generally, and elements of the evening came back to him, but only in step with her retelling. He remembered the torso of the event, so to speak. They had gone, purely on impulse, as a lark, to see what a pornographic movie would be like in Greece, in Crete. Pornography had been legalized fairly recently, they had gathered. They had walked in on the last tenth of a movie about a licentious Orthodox priest, which the audience was watching in total, fixated silence. Apparently it was a genre. He remembered the priest hanging himself at the end. And then he remembered clearly the suddenly different, rowdy, raucous response to the second feature, a piece of French pornography. The premise of the French film, beautifully photographed, as he recalled, had been odd. It was about a superbly beautiful matron, possibly a widow, who would only allow her lovers and suitors to perform cunnilingus on her. All of them were willing to do it, but they also, naturally, wanted to have follow-up regular intercourse. But all she would permit was the other, and there was no reciprocation from her, oddly enough for a pornographic movie. She rejects all the penises aimed her way. That was his recollection. He was remembering more. The woman was not a widow. Her husband was a society dentist who relieved his frustrations via other female characters who had more reasonable attitudes toward the penis. The dentist was getting it from the other sluts but not from his maddeningly spectacular creamy blond wife. He remembered thinking it was a slightly off-center premise for a pornographic movie. But the main thing she was reminding him had happened was that there had been a claque of young guys in the audience shouting out, at each instance of cunnilingus,
Mathe
, Vassilios!
Mathe
, Vassilios! Now he remembered that. And each bout of yelling had been followed by roars of laughter. And he remembered translating what they were saying, for Iris, when she asked. That he remembered. And the next thing he could remember was being back at the Cretan Sun and having memorable sex with Iris, in their freezing room.

“And you don’t remember my begging you to wait a second and wanting to wait around in the lobby?”

“No. But I remember it was freezing.”

“And you don’t remember being with me in the lobby, unwillingly, but waiting there with me, anything about that?”

“No.”

“And you don’t remember when finally after everybody else had left, after they were turning out the lights, dragging himself out was a poor physically fucked-up person, one leg dragging, this pitiful man with very white skin, an obvious sort of outcast, dragging himself out past us?”

“No, what I remember is the next act, same night.”

“Which was?”

“Well, back at the Cretan Sun. Making love there. Our room overlooked the market and we were right above the spice vendors.”

“And you don’t remember we exchanged looks when we saw this poor devil, this physically unfortunate man, or neighborhood idiot, or whatever he was? And we were sure he was Vassilios?”

What he remembered was hating the Cretan Sun, the cheapest hotel they had ever stayed in, the poster of Delphi above the bed with the line
Il y a des poux dans cette chambre
penciled neatly along the bottom margin, the miserable shower that gave two minutes of warm water.

“And you don’t remember we exchanged glances … And by the way, when you tell people about our adventures in Crete I would appreciate it if you’d leave out the note on the poster about lice being in our room.”

He was obviously blocking out what should have been cognized as the main event, apparently, of that night. Sex was the reason. Somehow getting aroused, which he had, at the movies, had arced over to the sexual event, events, back at the Cretan Sun, and obliterated the interim for him. It had been that night at the Cretan Sun when he had come up with the affectionate term nethers for her pudenda, which had come from Netherlands, and which he still used from time to time.

He said, “We didn’t discuss this at the time, that night?” She shook her head.

“And we didn’t discuss it the next day, either, did we? That is, we never got into a
discourse
about it.”

“No, we were too stunned, I thought.”

“I remember
noticing
an oddlooking guy. But that’s all.”

He thought, Here it is, a thing that has never been an issue: But here it is courtesy of the female mind for which there is nothing dead that can’t be made to live again. He had failed to recognize the situation at the theater as the burning emblem of man’s inhumanity to man it obviously was for her. Then it hadn’t come up the next day due to their
katastrofi
, when she stepped into a hole in the pavement and cracked her ankle and then the nightmare come true of trying to get medical help in Crete had begun. He remembered every detail of that. He loved her, that was why.
But here it was again, the past that lives forever, in detail, with women, like the women in Joyce, “The Dead,” ruining everything. Then at the museum in Heraklion they had been unable to see the murals because the galleries were closed due to a recent
katastrofi
. And then there had been the
katastrofi
of the side trip to Anoja in the White Mountains where the insane monster winds had blown his pitiful, hobbling wife flat into the sides of buildings and walls time after time.

She pushed herself to a standing position and got slowly out of the tub, distractedly, not punitively abandoning him, apparently. She was through. She was keeping her back to him, which could be just accidental.

He got out of the tub and dried himself off very thoroughly. He followed her damp footmarks into the bedroom. Once there, he malingered, dragging out finding the right pajamas and selecting a bathrobe from his oversupply. He had four, all gifts from Iris and all too expensive and all more appropriate for some rich parasite than for him. Why she kept buying him bathrobes that lacked pockets was a mystery. He settled on a black silk robe he thought he looked pretty good in. He combed his hair. Iris was in bed. Still naked, looking at a copy of the
International Herald Tribune
he knew was at least a week old.

It was so clear and so dumb, what was happening. He was being cast as the incarnation of Secrecy. It was inevitable because he worked for the agency and the agency was what, Secrecy Itself. And at the same time she was casting Morel as the dry light of the mind that goes everywhere, anywhere, as Truth with the bit between its teeth, the maypole of Truth she was traipsing around like a berserk Isadora Duncan, flinging her arms around like a jerk, naked, flutes and ribbons all over. That was the scene he was trapped in.

But at least his costume was perfect. He was uncomfortably warm, a natural consequence of dressing himself in a daze, putting pajamas on without reference to what season it was. Black matched his mood. It was his fault that she kept giving him pocketless robes. The first robe she’d given him had been pocketless and he’d praised it. The absence of pockets had seemed to him like a fairly central objection, especially considering the effort she’d gone to, delegating her sister, transatlantic phone consultations. And it had been when they were starting out, when she was insecure about buying things for him. So now all he needed was a cocktail shaker and a Santos Dumont in a cigarette holder and it would be clear he had wandered in from an adjoining farce, a Noël Coward farce. In fact they were both costumed perfectly for the scene, layers and blackness for him, and for her … nudity, symbolizing fearless disclosure.

Now she was sitting on the edge of the bed, her back three-quarters to him, examining the sole of her foot. The great aesthetic absolute, he thought.

She caught him looking too raptly at her. “Why are you looking at me that way?” she asked.

“I’m not looking at you, I’m beholding you.”

“Well this is the wrong moment for it. By the way, I think you have mild priapism.”

“That’s the best kind.”

“Well don’t,” she said, smiling a little.

She was going to sum up. He could tell. She held her mouth in a certain way.

She said, “First, nothing is going to happen to us. Second, I’m going to go and be with Ellen and I’ll be back in six weeks and everything will be okay, I promise.”

“When did we say
six weeks
?” he asked, not calmly enough.

“Well six weeks at the outside.”

Do
not
resist, he thought, saying, “Well six weeks then, although … it wracks and harrows me.” He was surprised at himself. Somehow he had decided to be slightly poetic just then. It was insane. She was looking at him with a certain heightened interest, he thought, although it might be concern and not interest. There were still moments in his life when he felt capable of poetry. When the impulse was there he was normally afraid of it, for the simple reason that he wasn’t a poet. The Irish, or some of them, felt free to burst out with it. But even in the case of the Irish talking gorgeously he knew they were working from a fixed menu of tropes and images and not engaging in individual invention. What was he doing? He wanted to send her away with an absolute knowledge of how lovely she was to him, was all. But this had been like a deacon suddenly breaking into a juggling routine. You can’t just wrench yourself into some new and cuter state, he thought. He was embarrassed. They were both going to ignore it. He thanked God.

“I don’t think we should have sex tonight,” she said.

He couldn’t agree more. Having sex would dishonor their differences.

“I couldn’t agree more,” he said. His tone dissatisfied him and he added, “I mean that. I seriously do. And if you would slip into something less comfortable it would be a help.”

She was amused. He went to the closet and got out his favorite robe of hers, a blue and white yakuta they had bought in Paris. He draped it over her shoulders and she got properly into it in a rather piecemeal if not
exactly teasing manner, he thought. He was a little surprised to realize that the blue elements in the pattern were winged seeds, on the order of locust seeds, and not the Horus eyes they had been in his mental picture of the garment for years. Lately he was looking too closely at everything around her. It was fear. It felt valedictory.

How could he tell that they weren’t, even now, through yet? It was in the eyes. What else there could be was beyond him. He was probably safe in assuming that they were down to odds and ends, that she’d started with the more offensive items and was working down, the way he would have. There was no guarantee about that, though. Now he was scaring himself.

He said, “Look, the best thing now would be if you would just tell me everything that’s still on your mind, if anything is, because … because here we are.” In hell, he thought.

“I don’t think there’s anything special,” she said. She was undecided, he could tell. Was she trying to gauge what he could take at one sitting?

“This is truly minor,” she said.

But it wasn’t. She could barely bring it out, which could mean that it was about what, their sex life, as in too much or too little …

“I think I want to take a break from reading novels … by men. I don’t know why. I just feel like it. Don’t be so stunned. You know how grateful I am to you for your help and effort getting me good books. I’ve depended on your recommendations and they’ve been wonderful. Maybe it’s that I want to take a break from novels per se in general.”

Injustice never sleeps, he thought. Finding decent and reasonably current reading for her in Africa had been a major task, a career. Help and effort was right, especially effort. It took work to develop literate social contacts, who inevitably got reassigned. Taste among the embassy people ran at the level of James Michener. The paperback leftovers that turned up in the jumble sales departing embassy officers gave were an embarrassment to the United States. The American Library had no budget and what it had it spent on Young Adult titles.