Mortals

by Norman Rush

  He heard the shower. Iris was in the shower.

  That’s nice, he thought. Normally she showers in the morning, so why is she showering now? Morning or evening, always, unless she was rinsing the evidence off, if there was evidence.

  There was no point in pretending to sleep. He was too agitated. He had to be doing something.

  Perfect, he could read some more Rex, as much as he could stand, anyway. He skipped onward from where he’d stopped, by a few pages.

  At the market in Mérida there was a madman Joel found fascinating. This was an emaciated indio who sat on a straw mat for long periods holding up a hand mirror at various distances from his face, sometimes holding it close up and sometimes at arm’s length. Then at intervals he would go into an apparent state of rage and violently shake the mirror to get his image out of it, presumably. He shakes it so hard you think he is going to get hurt. The moment is frighteningly violent. And that’s the climax of his act, after which he starts another bout of staring. Now Joel is finding an increasing number of things to complain about, like the absence here in Oaxaca of anything as picturesque as the madman in Mérida. And about the absence of something which is, so far as I can tell, totally unobtainable in Mexico, which I tend to take as a sign that he wants us to go home to dingalingdom quite soon. He needs Toll House cookies.

  Well, time to cease, for now. I’ve been at this so long, Joel will be fuming.

  Later. Definitely, we are coming to the end of things here. Now Joel is tired of the processions, which formerly were his chief delight. Many, many processions empty into the zocalo, either at the Cathedral next to us or at the Gobernación across from us, behind the bandhouse or pergola or whatever it is. I myself like the processions.

  From your balcony you look down one of the streets that end here and you see, for example, what looks like a column of giant lollipops approaching. But it turns out to be women, matrons, wearing taffeta party dresses and sporting sunburst headdresses and keening something. Political processions go straight to the Gobernación and graffitize the walls of it (while the army & police look on benignly) and then as soon as the processions disperse, a special team comes out of the Gobernación with paint rollers and paints over everything. They use extremely fast-drying paint. They have to, because there are sometimes two political manifestations in one day. The peasant demonstration yesterday afternoon, someone explained to me, was because gunmen secretly connected to the government were killing them, of all things. The banner they were carrying was a sort of naive art masterpiece, huge, and featuring a rosette of red fists around some monogram or other. Joel likes the religious processions better, or did until one night when a very short procession arrived consisting of a flatbed truck with a hideous effigy of a saint on it attended by little girls dressed as angels and mechanically making their hands do falling leaf motions to, I guess, show adoration. Joel rushed down to see and arrived just as someone in the truck began tossing cherry bombs down among the feet of the few watchers. Now Joel doesn’t like religious processions at all. Now, in fact, to this man who was formerly nonstoply snapping his fingers and grooving generally, to this man Mexico is “too noisy.”

  Well, dear friend, that will be all until next time. I don’t have them with me, so I can’t comment properly on the limericks you wrote.

  What limericks?, Ray wanted to know: Which limericks?

  Ray and Iris had collaborated on limericks. But that had been long ago. He put the letter down.

  The droning of the shower continued, which he didn’t like. Iris was always economical about showering because the geyser that heated the water ran on electricity and electricity was expensive. This was the longest shower she had ever taken, it seemed to him. Thanks, he thought.

  He couldn’t deal with more venom, more Rex, and he couldn’t keep lying there doing nothing. He had to deal with Morel, was the main thing he had to do, but he couldn’t think about it, not now while he was being lied to.

  He had to occupy himself with something practical.

  Valentine’s Day was coming and he had his traditional poem to do. He did one every Valentine’s Day. He would force everything out of his consciousness except that. He could work on his poem and make it sing.

  He didn’t have much, so far.

  Does Julio love a sunlamp?

  Does Tarzan love a Vine?

  Does dumda love a dumda?

  Are you my Valentine?

  The title was going to be It Goes Without Saying. If he could think of something that implied the sentiment without stating it, he’d use that instead. Or it could be untitled.

  Everything is so delicate, he thought. There were cases where wives fucked outside the hearth just once or twice and then regretted it so much they became even more doting than they’d been before. These were in literature. So one route would be to remain passive, just agree to be deceived for some period and then see. This is fantasy, he thought, I am injured, literature is not life.

  Did Nero love a fiddle?

  Does Yeats not love a Trine?

  Does dumda love a dumda?

  Are you my Valentine?

  He thought, But why am I doing this if I think she’s betrayed me? … because she may not have, except that I smelled fear on her … that’s the thing, unfortunately.

  The shower went on. The length of this shower was important.

  Or I could make it the best valentine I ever wrote, he thought, shame her and remind her. There had been a decline in complexity, a decline in the amount of effort he put into the project, over the years. And there had been a drift to the more humorous and away from the grandiose, as he now considered them, the grandiose efforts of the early days of their marriage, his efforts at real poetry. Although it wasn’t all his fault that he’d stopped attempting a certain kind of valentine. She had complained about some of the early ones. That wasn’t true. She hadn’t complained but she had noted that they seemed to contain a despairing tone not exactly appropriate to the occasion. One of his lines, The last light slips from the highest peaks, had led to a discussion he had come away from depressed, he remembered, or deflated. Also, now she was writing limericks herself, apparently. What could he do?

  The shower-sound stopped. A dense silence replaced it.

  There were other things in their past … like the game of Baseless Admonitions, where one of them would shout completely arbitrary or inappropriate injunctions and warnings and accusations at the other, like You love only gold! or Be true to your school! or … what others? This means war! Christ, there had been dozens of these canards and where were they now? You mate with any beast! had been another one, thank you very much. Why had the game dropped away? This was an interesting question, and so was the question of who had been the first one to stop initiating these exchanges.

  Last year’s valentine had been the shortest.

  Rude Time won’t go away

  But neither will my love for you,

  So that’s okay.

  But she had claimed she liked it, loved it, and now this …

  Iris came tentatively into the room, wearing a bathrobe now, a towel around her neck. It meant nothing, necessarily, that her eyes seemed red.

  “You’re awake,” she said.

  “Well, the shower …”

  “I’m sorry.”

  He reassured her that he was better.

  She came to him, took his hand, and looked imploringly, he thought, down at him. Something was coming. He pulled himself up against the headboard. She had something clutched in one hand, a card, white, a note? It was going to be relevant. What was it?

  She sighed, looked away from him, then reached over and pushed Rex’s letter out of the way, as though she wanted the zone around him empty of any distraction. She tried to begin, twice. It was clear she didn’t know how to begin with whatever was coming and about to kill him, no doubt. She patted his hand, which was the worst sign possible. He was numb.

  “Your voice sounds so hollow in these rooms … becaus
e 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.

  12. He Knew Astonishing Things

  Two 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.