Mortals (6 page)

He handed out copies of the school brochure. There was a little conversation about the honors class he taught over at the university. They reported that Mr. Curwen the rector had told them how proud St. James was to have a scholar like him amidst their staff, a Miltonist! That was true. Curwen seemed genuinely glad he was there, culturally flattered, too, that an American seemed so interested in a poet he himself had been taught to revere but found unreadable. As the group left the office they could hardly miss the run of
Milton Studies
in which Ray’s two articles and four research notes were buried. It was displayed at eye level in the bookcase just to the right of the door.

The group was rising. They had been seated around a conference table set endwise against the front of his desk. The men were in coats and ties and the women in skirts and sleeveless blouses. The women’s forearms had left damp-prints in the finish of the table. He watched the damp-prints fade, annoyed because there was something he was forgetting to do. Curwen was outside, with an escort of Form Ten boys. One thing he had forgotten to mention was that the school was coeducational now, since a year ago. He heard Curwen’s enthusiasm.

At the last minute he remembered to present the cyclostyled handouts giving the last examination results for the school. He went out into the heat to watch them go, Curwen gesticulating. Curwen had put his robes on despite the fact that there were only four in this group. The man was endearing. They were headed for a tour of the ablution block.

Ray thought, How can he keep doing it?… But we all do and we all do it the same way, by not thinking about it. About half of the last graduating class at the university had failed to get placements with the government, which represented a severe public shock no one had gotten over. Batswana used the Boer term for the government of the day or reigning power, Domkrag, which meant lifting-jack. Some of us are doing our best, he thought, but Domkrag is broken, Domkrag isn’t working … But we do our best.

The other thing was to keep in mind what education was like not that far away, where the killing was still going on, Angola, students without limbs, from the land mines. He thought, Please raise your hands, Oh, sorry. He couldn’t think about it.

Thank God this isn’t the only thing I do, he thought.

T
hey were in bed together, naked under one sheet, sitting up and talking. It was late.

“I gather you want this to be about my brother again,” Ray said.

She nodded, and he said, “Fine, but before I forget, let me give you another example of his, what shall I call it? his drive to be irritating. This is the kind of thing he was always doing. He was continually annoying his classmates by acting like a completely innocent literalist in the way he pronounced their names. Two examples: A girl named Margot became Margott. And someone named Lloyd he called Luh-loyd, pronouncing both l’s. This is a small thing, but it’s Rex.”

“That sounds like someone who’s bored.”

“It was more than that. He got other people, other kids, to go along with it. That turns it into harassment. He had a claque. He created claques. Anyway.”

“By the way he’s starting up a new gay column. I think he said it’s going to be in a free newspaper. But he still gets paid.”

“His old columns weren’t that funny.”

“Yes they were. There were clever things in them.”

“Such as?”

“Come on, nobody can remember exactly what it was that made them laugh. But there were things. Joke definitions. One of them was, Man is the only animal that prefers brand-name items.”

“If that amuses you, okay. I think it’s routine. It’s patter.”

“And maybe he’ll get inspired and get more work with the patter service.”

“I thought he decided he was too far left for them.”

“You keep trying to say he’s so left. Why? He mocks everything. He thinks there
is
no left. In his old columns he even had a department called
Life in the Afterleft
. You want to think he’s so subversive. He makes fun of anyone. He makes fun of … that very famous … now I can’t remember his name. But he was famous in the sixties and went to France in 1968 during the student revolution and appeared at the Sorbonne at the height of everything and got up on the stage and shouted
Le peuple au poivre!
Rex makes fun of everybody.”

“He’s left. I know him.”

“You don’t know him now.”

“I know what he is. He’s culturally left.”

“I don’t even know what that means. I don’t think it means anything. You just let your animosity control you. I can’t stand it. I can’t stand it because I love you both.”

“Good luck loving Rex.”

“Please, Ray! All right. Let’s be calm. Now. All right, tell me about this event he precipitated when you were children that was so titanic and let me just listen. Start where we stopped the other night.”

“May I put on the airconditioning?”

“Sure, but then you’ll have to shout.”

“So obviously I won’t put the airconditioning on. But if you don’t mind I’ll just rinse my face before I get into this.”

Ray went into the bathroom. He cooled his face with a wet washcloth. He thought, This may be for the best … it might help … it may help us: It won’t, I may cut my throat, which might help.

“I adore you,” she said as he got back into bed.

“Thanks.”

“I do, Ray. And you’re gorgeous.”

“I am? Hm. May I call you angel-tits, then?”

“Stop that. But listen to this, before you begin. This is wonderful. The other day when we were talking about why we’re so attracted to each other …”

“Yes, the nonphysical reasons, if we could think of any. Yes indeed.”

“Don’t be so mocking. Anyway I realized something about you. This isn’t exactly nonphysical but I bet it had something to do with how I felt. What I realized is that you look like the actor who played Woodrow Wilson in that biographical movie they made about his life and I realize I have just uttered a redundancy, so don’t bother. But that was absolutely one of my favorite movies of all time. I saw it in high school and I thought it was wonderful. Woodrow Wilson, or the actor, rather, was extremely
handsome in case you don’t know. The same actor played Wilson young and then older. I’m comparing you to the younger Wilson. Can that movie be as good as I remember?”

“I never saw it, but this is horrible news, isn’t it? You went for me because I reminded you of an authority figure you really loved? And I look like
Woodrow Wilson
? Didn’t he look like a bank president or a leading Presbyterian, something like that? I believe he looked very boring. Also wasn’t he a great failure, by any standard? War to end war and the League of Nations and all that? I’m not crazy about these associations, frankly.”

“He was one of the four great presidents. He tried.”

“Oh God and also in the end didn’t he turn into a vegetable and his wife was discovered to be running everything? I
hate
these associations.”

“Well, I can’t help it. I think it was one of the first big Technicolor movies. That can’t be right. I think it wasn’t a recent movie when I saw it. We saw it for social studies. Well. Sorry I brought it up.”

“I’m glad to know about this. And I have to report that I haven’t thought of anything other than your supernal beauty that originally knocked me out about you. I’m still trying. Something will come.”

“I don’t want to hear about my beauty as an explanation for everything.” She spoke seriously, but was half smiling.

“I know, I know. You forgot to say my
supposed
beauty, the way you usually do, by the way. Okay, no more.”

“You know we have this difficulty,” she said, still smiling.

“We do. I look like a movie star and you don’t and never did. Okay. That’s all on this subject. I’m sorry.”

They sighed heavily in unison, and with the same impulse, they joined in pulling the sheet up to their shoulders.

Ray began again. “We were living in North Oakland and my father wanted to move the family to Piedmont so he could be nearer his store. Where we were was still very white middle class but the writing was on the wall. Blacks were well established on the east side of East Fourteenth Street by then and a certain amount of panic selling was under way in the better neighborhoods. Probably he was just being prudent in wanting to move, but there was a problem. My mother was tepid to lukewarm about moving but Rex was absolutely determined against it, so when she saw how upset the idea made Rex she turned against it in solidarity with him, still wishywashily, though. My position was that I was happy to move.

“Our house on Kingsland was really a peach. A building contractor had built it for himself, so it was only the best. It was a big mock Tudor,
parquet hardwood floors upstairs and downstairs, hilltop site. The house was on a very sizable triangular lot surrounded by a retaining wall. This was late fifties. Rex was in junior high and I was in high school. The house sat up very high and you looked east at Skyline Drive and then the hills that hadn’t been built on yet. There was a lot of open space in reach and a few vacant lots right in the neighborhood where kids could build forts and play nasty if they so chose.”

“What about friends, did you both have friends around there?”

“Rex did. My social life was based around school by that time. But yes, in fact he had a particular friend, as it developed. His friend Michael. He did not want to leave Michael behind.

“So there we were. Now let me see if I can remember exactly how this got started …

“We each had our own room, did I mention that? We were opposite each other on the second floor. My room you could walk into anytime. Rex was totally secretive and kept his room locked. He started out only keeping it locked when he was in it, and that was accepted. And then he had to have the right to keep it locked when he wasn’t in it and my mother would have to petition him to go in there for any reason. There was a battle royal before that was agreed to and he had to agree to let her look in from time to time, escorted by him, to see that he was keeping his room in order, before it was settled. But he got his way. Naturally I thought he was being ridiculous, but I was probably annoyed at the perquisites he was working out for himself that I was forbidden to have, just because of the way things had come about. I was hardly going to give him the satisfaction of seeing me copying his demands. I was the older one, after all.

“His secrecy annoyed me.

“I’m not sure of the exact order these next two items occurred in. First I should say that we were excessively frugal as a family, or we were supposed to be. My mother was the enforcer. Don’t use too much soap when you do the dishes … return the milk carton to the refrigerator immediately after you pour your milk … and so on. We got screamed at if we left the milk on the counter for ten seconds or if we drank our milk before we put the carton back. Always do that first. Don’t ruin things. Someone set a pot from the stove down on some new Formica and it left a semicircular scorch mark. She would have little seizures of agony every time she looked at it, for years. No one ever admitted doing it. In any case. Two things happened in some order or other. I was accused by my mother of using too much heavy duty aluminum foil when I wrapped leftovers up to
store in the refrigerator. We were really kitchen slaves. I got good at it, or rather I got fast at it, so I could get out of there. She had just opened a new box of this foil and she discovered that some untoward amount of it was gone, so since I was the one who put things away most of the time I must be the guilty party. I said I was innocent, but no, I was slapdash, I rushed through things, I was guilty. I had to be. Now shortly after this, something strange was going on in Rex’s room. I was hearing sounds of strange typing. Very slow typing, you know, hunt and peck. Late at night, this was. And the typing had a banging quality, tinny.

“I figured there had to be a connection between the typing and the missing foil. I decided to find out what Rex was up to, and, to make a long story short, I went up on the roof when he was away and hung over the edge so I could look in his window, albeit upside down, and see what there was to see. And this was what he was doing. We had this old Remington that he’d appropriated and he had set the thing to stencil mode and he was typing out some imperishable text, obviously that was the point, on some of the aluminum foil he’d pinched. I couldn’t read it. But I did notice one other thing before my head filled up with blood, and that was a long, metal, screwtop canister photographers use, I guess about eighteen inches long. It was on his bed. Don’t ask me how I knew, but I knew it went with the imperishable text and that he was making a time capsule.

“So I was in possession of an interesting piece of information. What did I do with it?

“In my defense, remember that I was ticked off over the missing aluminum foil business.

“I decided I had to know what the subject of his document was.

“I couldn’t get into his room. Also I was bound by a certain protocol toward him that he had bullied the family into generating. I was never to touch him. Never ever to lay a hand on him for any reason. There had been some physical conflict between us, provoked by him, and of course I was in the wrong, being the older and bigger and wiser party, so we had all agreed I was never to touch him. Of course in a less well-regulated family I could have taken him by the throat and made him tell me what he was doing.”

Iris said, “You mean you were so certain that what he was doing was injurious to you or so nefarious in some way that you had to find out what it was. You couldn’t just let him go on with it, do whatever he was going to do with it, and forget about it. You couldn’t.”

“I don’t know why I couldn’t. I was convinced it was threatening.”

“This is vintage you. You become immovable. You’re still like that when you’re convinced for no reason that you’re right. The other night when I nudged you when you were snoring and …”

“I wasn’t, though.”

“May I finish? You
were
. You woke me up with it. I nudged you and you woke up furious and denied it and said … are you
still
denying this? I was under the impression you’d dropped this absurd … I can only call it a canard and I’m getting
furious
by the way all over again if this is still your position, that I had
dreamed
you were snoring? You meant it. You don’t take it back, right?”