Mortals (50 page)

“Oh no, prose, definitely.”

I was raised by idiots, he thought. He wanted the last line of
Moby-Dick
and couldn’t get it, something about I alone have escaped.

He said, “I was raised by idiots.”

“Oh I know,” Iris said. “You can see that in Rex’s book.”

They had reached the car. He was exhausted, but he managed to load up and get them all set to go with celerity. His knee hurt.

First she had wanted to go into her den, her study, and sit there in the baking silence for a few minutes with the door closed. The mail, sorted out on a huge platter by him, she had ignored.

Afternoon was dying.

They had laughed at the alp her travel tunic made, dropped on the floor.

He waited.

She was lying full length on the sofa in the living room and he was preparing to rub her feet, at her request. He had aimed two electric fans toward her, one at her head, the other at her midsection. Nothing had been said about the house, the way it looked. He was back with the Nivea cream.

He sat down. Her naked feet were in his lap.

He said, “Do you want to pull off those elf pants, me to pull them off?”

“You want sex,” she said.

“Of course, but this is a separate matter because those things look hot. They look uncomfortable.”

“Stirrup pants is what they call them. You may remove them.”

“I am not sort of crushingly out for sex, my dear.”

“Oh mais non.”

“Well I’m not.”

“Sure you are.”

“Well I am and I’m not, you know how it is.”

Her perfect legs were out, there, perfect things, gleaming.

“You can have it if you want it,” she said.

“I know.”

“It won’t be full-dress. I’m so tired. But you know me. I’m happy if you need to.”

“Non, merci.”

“You have a right.”

“No I don’t. There is no such thing.”

“Please,” she said. “Please. Be real.”

She began rubbing her eyes with her knuckles, producing a sound, a creaking sound he hated to hear. It was too organic.

“Ray, I can accommodate you anytime.”

“No I think I’ll wait instead of taking advantage of a lagged-out wreck of a darling and guaranteeing that when I die I’ll go directly to hell.”

He sat at the end of the sofa and took her feet into his lap.

She had her forearm over her eyes. It was possible she was concealing tears, trying to.

She asked, “Did you masturbate?”

He hated this. It was mere liberationism. She knew who he was, for better or worse. He was someone used to there being more of the unsaid in love-talk, love-communications. I’m almost fifty, he thought. Of course this might be an attempt at seduction, getting him onto the slippery slope and then getting sex over with so she would feel better because she had taken care of an obligation.

“No,” he said, lightly, as lightly as he could. This subject was sediment stirred up, he was certain, by the weekend Antichrist, Morel, whose doom was coming. He would arrange it. He thought, He thinks I’m Bottom … I’m Tamburlaine … He’ll see.

He rubbed Nivea cream into the soles of her feet.

She was persisting. “Really not?”

He moved back so that her feet were decently remote from his genitals.

“No. It was part of waiting for you to come back, Iris,” Ray said. It was perverse, what she was doing.

“Did you have wet dreams?” she asked.

“Iris. Yes, I had wet dreams. Since you ask.” Suddenly, he was enraged. She was pushing him around.

“I masturbated,” she said, which was more cheap fucking damned liberationism, offensive, offensive.

“You did?” he said, but lightly, calmly, falsely, to his ears. He wanted to ask her if she had thought of him, if he had been involved in her imagery, if imagery had been involved in the act, which would be a tremendous mistake on his part.

“Did you think of me?” he asked, thinking that if she hesitated before saying yes, it would mean hell, of a sort, was here. She had not even glanced at the mail. Where was she?

“No,” she answered, not hesitating, which was a plus, a great plus. He loved her for her truthfulness.

Now the worst thing he could do next would be to ask further along this line rather than being superior to it. She could save him from ignominy by volunteering something, images from the movies, something innocuous he could live with. This was not like her. Why was she doing this if she loved him? She thinks she wants truth, he thought. Truth for him, when he saw her at the airport, would have meant some act like pressing his hands along her physical outline in the world, hard, like an idiot, a scene.

Tears were leaking out from underneath her forearms. She was trying to disperse and spread them around with arm movements so he wouldn’t notice.

Here we are, he thought. The tears could be over anything, anything, her sister, secret adventures, anything.

Her panties were red lace, ones he liked but not his greatest favorites, the one or two high-cuts she was willing to wear only for sex.

“Stop staring at my mons.”

“I’m not, or not exclusively, anyway. I’m staring at your whole pleasant body.”

“Peasant body?”

“Pleasant.” He enunciated.

“Sorry, my ears are still clogged from flying.” She tried to work up a yawn, but failed.

Now she had both arms crossed over her eyes. Her tears increased. At least she seemed not to be actively crying. Her rib cage movements were slight. She wasn’t heaving out the tears, it was more like leakage, an overflow. He decided to let her weeping run its course, to say nothing until he was solicited. It was always possible he was going to hear that these were tears of relief. He kept kneading the soles of her feet, feeling like weeping himself. What was it about individual vigorous pubic hairs poking here
and there through the lace at her crotch that he liked to see, loved, in fact? It was festive, was why.

She said, “Tell me everything.”

“I think I kept you pretty up to date on the phone. Let’s see. Around here, not much. We’re still waiting for the Boka Report. There’s been plenty of funny business in the Housing Authority and it’s possible the vice president will be hurt. There’s a new press law, very objectionable. Somebody in admin at the embassy posted a complaint about the Batswana leaving rubbish behind when they eat in the building. The word pigs was used. Barrage of apologies.

“South Africa is looking okay. You know de Klerk got sixty-seven percent in the white people’s referendum. The oil embargo is off, not that it was ever really on.

“What else … I would say it’s going okay except for Natal. The killing won’t stop in Natal. And you know that Winnie and Nelson are separating.”

“I heard that. She seems to be awful. But it’s sad.”

“She had lots of boyfriends, apparently.”

“Well, but
Ray
. He was in prison for years. What do you want from people?”

“I know.”

“Why even
mention
that, when it was about that insane football club she ran and that boy they killed?”

He said, “I had a dream last night. I dreamed there was an ad in the paper for see-through spandex shorts or something. I was going to buy some for you.”

“You don’t need to convince me you’re concupiscent. My offer is on the table. Don’t worry.”

“I’m not worried. Let’s see. The drought, bad here but patchier than in Zimbabwe. The maize crop is bust.

“Nothing definite on Dwight Wemberg, although there are theories that he’s gone to ground up north. And by the way, I’m getting the distinct impression that I’m supposed to bring him in. Me. He’s
my
responsibility. I may have to go up to Maun. There’s no logic to it. Whenever there’s a fugitive around here the conventional wisdom is that he’s hiding up in the swamps. Like the mass murderer. Lord Lucan. They thought he was in the Okavango.”

“No, the Tuli Block.”

“Same thing. The imbroglio at St. James you know about, except the latest. There was the Too Much of Cabbage rebellion and then there was
property damage, then the school was shut down. And where it is now is that the parents want somebody to give the miscreants a big punishment event, with the miscreants getting lashes. All hands refer to the students as miscreants, by the way, myself included.

“So, you know Curwen. He won’t hear of any lashing business. There’s a standoff and I don’t know how long we’ll be closed. The House of Chiefs, big surprise, has come out against Curwen.

“You met Pony, the young guy who worked in the bursar’s office. Curwen was grooming him for bursar, although I guess he had never gotten around to hinting to Pony that that offer was coming, being a Brit. Anyway Pony has disappeared.

“Which we think has to do with something else. The government finally drove our friend Samuel Kerekang into the wilderness, literally. He was creating incidents over everything, it’s true. He came out with the claim, probably true, that the country is already about ten percent seropositive for HIV, which nobody wanted to hear. He couldn’t get work anywhere. And, um, there were a number of mishaps connected with his paper
The Mattock
, copies disappearing on the way to the distributor, and then a fire wrecked his printery. And then somehow the Anglican women’s guild got very interested in taking control of his gleaners group. And now they’ve done it. Suddenly they had all kinds of money.

“So Kerekang decided to pull back to Galilee, if you know what I mean. He has a family claim to land in one of the villages way the hell up on the Cunene River, almost into the Caprivi Strip. And he’s organizing some sort of commune up there, turning the northeast into his version of Yenan, is what the government thinks. Now that he’s out of town they’re even more hysterical than before. Domkrag want something done!
The Mattock
, or rather
Kepu
, because it’s three-quarters in Setswana now, is circulating again. He puts a lot of poetry in it, by the way.

“What nobody likes is that a number of kids from the university dropped out and followed him. Some of them are sons and daughters of big men in Domkrag. Sons, I should say. Only two young women are among the missing, versus seven guys.”

The flow of tears had stopped.

She said, “Don’t press so hard on the top of my foot, there’s no flesh there and you’ll bruise me. In fact, thank you, but you can stop now. I am so sorry about everything, Ray.

“My sister. My
sister
. Ray, I encouraged her to have this baby. I don’t know if I was identifying or what. I thought it would be fine. People are doing it all over. I am coming back to you a crock of woe, just what you
need. I kept trying to find a metaphor on the plane for how I am and that was what I came up with. Woe is you. I mean woe is what you get. From me. I am responsible for my sister. I mean … I don’t know what I mean. I mean beyond the thousands I gave her, I have to do more. Thank God for the way you are. You are my God, you know, which is the problem, Davis would say, but he would be so wrong. We have gods. I don’t know. My sister. I am responsible. Now she has Margo.”

“Who’s Margo?”

“Oh, you don’t know. Margo is her baby. Ellen went back twice to change the name at the registry place, making scenes. She kept changing her mind. Nothing I could say. I shouldn’t have left. She gets me hysterical. She is completely provocative.

“Here’s an example. I don’t know if I told you about this or not. The first time she nursed in public somebody made a face or passed a remark, which was lighting a fuse if only they had known. Now she just throws out her breast for nursing anywhere in Tallahassee she happens to be, the more public the better, the more dubious the location the better.

“She is totally miscast in Tallahassee, by which I mean
totally
out of place. Except with her associates at the Montessori place, of course, she’s in a frenzy. She goes around
raging
. She wants to make citizens’ arrests! She should be with my mother. But my mother is out of the question. She keeps going on about illegitimacy. They could never get along. She has no room. Ellen drives me to the edge. I was on the verge of taking the postman aside and pleading with him to tear up her copy of
The Progressive
when it comes. Of course, I didn’t. But she reads their classifieds and orders the latest inflammatory bumperstickers, which they seem to specialize in. She has one she hasn’t put on her car yet because she can’t find it. Guess why. I hid it.
WWJD—Who Wants Jelly Donuts?
I have to think of what I can do.”

“Do what, though?” Ray said, thinking
There is no physic for the world’s ill, it will burn in a fever forever
.

“I have to walk around for a minute,” she said, getting up abruptly.

He watched her. Doing something for her sister was going to mean bringing her here, he knew it, and it was impossible.

Iris walked in a circle, leaving oily footprints on his clean floor.

Abruptly she lay down again and returned her feet to him.

She said, “I don’t know what to do. That child cannot just vanish into state care. Say something.”

“Such as what?”

“Maybe she could come here. Not forever but for a while. We have the
space, Ray. I could give up my den.” She liked to call her room of her own her den.

“Well, I mean, the idea is pretty staggering, Iris. I, um. What. We, I think, um, we need to monitor the situation first, don’t we?”

“If we could just calm her down, Ray. I know Davis could help her.”

He felt suffocated for a moment. It passed.

He resumed rubbing her feet.

“Be gentle,” she said. He didn’t feel like being gentle. He felt like ripping her feet off and cutting his cock off and starting life over as a eunuch someplace where there were no phones.

“I’ll have to think about this,” he said. Think about opening a madhouse, he thought.

“Okay, good. Bend my toes back. And hold them back forever. And if you can remember from the reflexology book the spot you push for constipation, work on it. If you remember, from when you were doing reflexology before we decided it was ridiculous.”

“I do remember,” he said. He thought he did. He pressed his thumbs into the balls of her feet.