Mortals

by Norman Rush

  He asked, “What are those paper flowers that expand from nothing into complex blooms when you put them in water called?”

  She was blank. “Paper flowers was what we called them. I don’t think I ever knew any other name for them, like expando flowers or something like that. Paper flowers.”

  He said, “But of course there are all kinds of paper flowers.”

  “I know.”

  The wavering light the candles produced was fundamentally unhelpful.

  Go first, he thought, but too late because she was saying in a constricted voice that they had to talk about Davis now, it was the right time.

  Resentment drove him to say, hotly just under his breath, “Son of a bitch.” She didn’t hear it. She was continuing. This was not something she was enjoying, at least.

  “Ray … I want to go two or three times a week to Davis, go on a regular basis instead of off and on the way I do now. I have really decided. That’s one thing. So it’s going to cost something we need to budget for.”

  He made an ill-considered dismissive gesture, to show that the money was nothing, ill-considered since his arms were underwater and the gesture splashed water out of the tub, alarming her instead of the reverse.

  He apologized.

  She said, “The more I go the sooner it’s over. I don’t plan to be going to him forever. So that’s one thing. I love you. And now the other thing is that I need it to be agreed that I don’t tell you anything about what we discuss, our sessions. This is standard in therapy, but it’s going to be hard for you, for us, because it’s so unlike the way our life together has always been. And I know you’ll be curious, but I want you to promise you’ll just leave these sessions as terra incognita. I know you. I know the way you try to get things out of me. You do it almost automatically, you can’t help it. So I need you to promise that you won’t. I want a pledge. That you’ll try.”

  “Is this pledge something your doctor proposed?”

  She didn’t want to answer.

  “Why?” she asked him.

  “I’d just be curious to know who it emanated from, him or you?”

  “Both.”

  “Okay, that’s fine, but you give me pause in a certain way. And we should discuss this now, I guess. Because what I see is, okay, you’re going into therapy, psychotherapy, and the money is not an issue, you understand, that’s all fine. But here’s a consideration. I’d like to understand how this … process … this process can be useful to you if you have to observe certain limits in what you can tell him about your life. That is, our life, your life with me.” He thought of Boyle’s chamber.

  He continued. “He would consider me a spy.”

  “You are a spy,” she said.

  “Well,” he said. Despite the heat of the bath, he felt a sensation of cold in his chest, like a lozenge the size of a bar of soap.

  “I apologize for raising this, but I can’t help it. Is this correct?… that a whole constituent of your life and the problems it causes will be left out. We’re agreed on that? I mean, I know we are, but I seem to be asking for reassurance …”

  She was silent. He needed to be able to see her face better. The abominable lighting was against him.

  Finally she said, “I don’t see that as a problem.”

  “Okay, you mean you accept these limitations … And you don’t think that leaving all that out will, well, moot the process you’re … paying for?”

  She was slow to answer. He thought, In the States the agency has its own roster of cued-in shrinks for this kind of thing. Talk about sinecures.

  “I accept,” she said.

  “Then it’s fine.”

  Maybe I shouldn’t do this, he thought, saying, “Maybe I shouldn’t ask you what I’m about to ask you. But it will just be this once. I would just like to know in a general way why you’re going to him, need to go to him.”

  “How can you stand this?” she murmured, meaning the ambience, the heat, and not that she was relenting or showing sympathy toward him.

  She was trembling slightly. “You know why. At least you know why I went to him initially.”

  They went through it. She had thought her urine looked too dark. Ray had been dismissive. She had gone to Davis Morel and Ray had turned out to be right, but Davis had discovered something else. He had looked at her and seen something and had questioned her.

  Ray sat up straight in the tub. This was new.

  He held his breath while she talked, so he could hear everything. Because Davis had listened to her and gone beyond the original complaint that had brought her to him he had discovered that she was suffering from hypoadrenia, which was not something Ray should worry about and which was essentially being taken care of. Davis had questioned her about her energy level, about which she had complained listlessly and endlessly at home. Because Davis had listened to her he had found something that Ray with his congenital optimism had never acknowledged. She was telling him more about hypoadrenia than he needed to hear. What it was was obvious. Her energy had been low. She’d been having adrenal insufficiency due, most probably, to the universal cause, stress … although stress included not just emotional but physical, chemical, and thermal varieties. He had tested her for the Ragland effect and it had been positive. Now she was taking glandular supplements and heavy B complex and malic acid and magnesium and she was enormously improved. The whole thing had been fixed so rapidly that she hadn’t bothered to mention it to him. The extra supplements she was taking fitted in with the regular vitamin pills they took. So that had been the physical side of why she began with Morel.

  He could read between the lines. His attempts to buck her up and tell her to rest had been a mistake, a form of letting her down. She didn’t have to say so directly. It had been a mistake to judge her by his own condition, which was that his energy level went up and down too. His policy was to ignore his fatigue. He thought, I could be Bartleby in ten minutes, little does she know … I could stop, freeze … I could permanently relax … terminal relaxation, retire physically, stop exerting. But he couldn’t retire. They hadn’t figured that out yet, but it was coming up. Candles are perfect for this. He thought, I am guttering … at fifty she’ll be fine but at sixty I won’t unless I relax. It was time to think about retirement. It was almost too late, in fact, so it was definitely time. He needed a new way to get significantly ahead.

  He said, “What you’re telling me … this is good. It’s great. And you do seem fine. Of course you always did, but, this is wonderful. Kiss me when you get a moment. I love you. I’m grateful to this man, truly.”

  “He really does go beyond,” she said. “You may not want to hear this but it illustrates something.”

  She hesitated, then said, “He really studies you. Okay, he smells you, studies that aspect. He feels your hair. He smells your breath, something no doctor I ever heard of does. He looks at the whites of your eyes …”

  “Okay, okay, I get it. I’m not crazy about it. It’s a little theatrical for me, but what do I know? So. So does it involve any touching along the way? Just curious.”

  “Oh please. He feels your trapezius muscles for a second. But listen to this. The way he deduced I might have hypoadrenia was by looking at my hands. People who are the most likely to experience adrenal problems have certain physical characteristics, such as being long-waisted like me, and miscarriages, a history of miscarriages. But a main indication is that the index finger is more rounded than the others and longer than the ring finger. Which again is me. Realize that this is not an extended process. It’s brisk. There are people around, in and out all the time. Also, if I may say this, the fact is that regular doctors do not look at you. They look at your history while they’re talking to you. There is nothing intimate about this examination he does. It’s the same for men, I’m sure. That’s it. I wanted you to know about this from me before you hear about it from someone else, because it’s different, what he does, and it’s going to be talked about, God knows. That’s really it.”


  He thought, I am burning with love, what can I do?… She loves him, I think.

  The fact was, he loved talking to her, the sheer talking, whatever the subject was. It didn’t matter that they were at odds and that she was extracting his heart from his chest like an Aztec. Her voice was a gift to him when it was aimed his way. “I am leaving you!” she could be saying and he would still want to hear it.

  “So in effect this is a onetime thing he does, not something that gets repeated time after time, as I understand you.”

  “Of course not.”

  “So that part of this is in the past.”

  “Absolutely.”

  “I love you.”

  She loved him too. He said, “So that covers the physical part, I guess. So now we come, briefly as we can, to, to, anything you can tell me about these sessions …” No way could he say what he wanted to say, which was What is wrong with me that this is happening, for God’s sake, and what was the Hauptsache, the main thing, a German term that came to him from his Introductory German, for God’s sake. Maybe we are lost, he thought. He continued his thought, “… I won’t ever ask you again, but anything you can say about why you are going and what I should assume you’re talking about in the most general way, I would appreciate, Iris, and I beg you to God to forgive me for asking you this. But anything you can tell me about what is going on here, tell me, and I apologize. But tell me …”

  “It’s conversation.”

  “But what should I assume? Conversation about what? About your disappointments in life?”

  “It’s conversation. It’s partly about philosophy. He gives me things to read as part of it. From time to time. Homework.”

  “That’s interesting. Are those things I could know about, your syllabus, the things he recommends.”

  “I don’t know. I can tell you what I’d prefer.”

  “Not to. Not to tell me.”

  “Right. And if you see me reading something, since I’m not going to put brown paper jackets on everything, just let me proceed with it without any commentary being elicited.”

  “That’s fine. I don’t know a lot of what you read normally, anyway. You go into your sanctum.”

  “I’ll tell you what I’m doing, what I want.” She got up and stood away from the tub, her arms folded. She wanted him to understand the seriousness of what she was about to say, although the stance she was taking, with her legs slightly apart, meant that the bottom of her pubic fringe was backlit. It was the main feature in the silhouette she was presenting to him. He didn’t need to be reminded that they were a couple of animals, however civilized they were in a situation like this. He turned his gaze away, up toward the geyser, again willing it to fall and crush him.

  There was a substantial pause while she calmed herself with a breathing exercise he’d seen her perform a couple of times lately, a new thing.

  “This is what I want. What I want for myself is like that line in the Bible, ‘Let your yes be yes and your no be no.’ I want my life to be like that, this is yes, this is no. Yes I am your friend. No I’m not your enemy. I want clarity. You remember when everybody was talking about that religious fanatic who’s dragging a cross around the world, when he showed up in South Africa? He’s been at it for years. This is supposedly his mission. But in the photograph in the paper, it was obvious there was a twelve-inch wheel attached to the foot of the cross, meaning he isn’t really dragging his cross around the world, he’s rolling it, which a person might think was still pretty admirable … but it isn’t the same thing. Nobody referred to the presence of the wheel. I want clarity. And I want to feel really good, not just physically. This is turning into a collage, isn’t it? And I want us to get to a new level, which I don’t have a definition of. But I want us to be at a new level. And I want to stop chopping ashes …”

  She was so animated. “Chopping ashes?”

  “Kgabatlela melora. It’s what the Batswana say about someone who’s doing something really pointless. I guess our closest equivalent would be ‘pounding sand,’ but that doesn’t really capture it in the same way.”

  “Everything you want is what I want, Iris.”

  “I know. I believe that.” She returned to her seat at the foot of the tub.

  He said, “Could you, though, give me just an indication of the kinds of things he’s giving you to read?”

  She sighed at him.

  “Literature,” she said. “You are so relentless.”

  “Okay, that’s fine. I love you.”

  “But I’ll tell you something he wanted me to read that I absolutely gave up on. It was Thoreau’s Journal, Volume Six, and I said no after I’d read fifty pages because I’d gotten the point. Davis thinks it’s the greatest literary work of art of the whole period, I don’t know, since Shakespeare. I got the point, which is that Thoreau is really paying attention to the world, in detail, seeing everything there is. I said to him that there was no development. Maybe he thinks I’m shallow, I don’t know. He was nice about it. And please don’t give me your opinion of Thoreau or get into that whole thing you have on English Literature versus American Literature.”

  “I won’t. Okay.”

  “Also, out of fairness I ought to tell you that some of what he’s giving me is writing of his own. Chapters, drafts, for something he’s writing, a book of essays called Idol Meat.”

  “What? Meat? Idle?”

  “It’s i-d-o-l meat, Ray.”

  He felt like a fool. And the title hurt him. He liked it. He thought of his own unwritten books, with pain, his book plans, all embryonic. He had ideas. There was no time.

  She said, “Idol meat is …”

  He interrupted her, saying, “I know what it is.”

  He hadn’t meant to say it the way he had. “Idol meat is the leftovers, isn’t it? The burnt offerings made by the pagans and the Jews, cooked animals, meat, that Christians weren’t supposed to partake of if it came their way. Taboo meat.”

  “Right.”

  “Are you making suggestions as you read?”

  “If something strikes me. But don’t get the idea I’m editing him or anything remotely resembling that.”

  “He appreciates your contributions, though.”

  “He seems to.”

  “I’m not surprised.”

  He wondered if they had come to the end of the discussion. Apparently not, because she was still sitting there, unhappily. There was more, then.

  She said, “One of the areas I’m trying to improve in is telling the truth, not being as politic as I have.”

  “So you have something more you want to tell me.”

  “Yes. God help me, though.”

  “Say it. Say it.”

  “I know you know about this, Ray. There were certain schools of Greek philosophy where doing this was part of achieving virtue or enlightenment. It was called parrhesia. It means saying everything.”

  “The Stoics,” he said.

  “No, the Cynics, the Cynics. Parrhesia.”

  “The Cynics, not the Stoics, are you sure?”

  “Parrhesia, the Cynics. I’m completely sure. The Cynics are very misunderstood. In fact the Stoics are a dilution of the Cynics. Well, in my humble opinion they are.”

  “Obviously I have to go back and look at my Phil One notes.”

  “No you don’t. That’s not what I want.”

  The truth was that he remembered not that much about the ancient Greeks. He hadn’t found them interesting, partly because what they seemed to find most interesting was pederasty. How great had they been? They had given their empire away by stupidly fighting among themselves and then their superbly civilized upper classes had invited the Romans to take over when the plebs made the slightest trouble. As he recalled, Stoicism was about numbness, being numb, their great object. What else was it that she was going to say? He had references, he could look up the Stoics. He could deal with this. He was not a child.

  “I never took philosophy in college,” she said
. “Did you know that?”

  “Philosophy is a joke,” he said, hotly, trying to think of what his actual position was. She was making him suffer, without intending it. She could not come to the point, obviously because it was going to be too painful for him. What else could explain this? What was it?

  He knew what he wanted it not to be. He did not want it to be about their failure to reproduce, again. That was settled. It had to be a settled thing. A solid scab had formed over the issue. And of course it was exactly the kind of issue that was going to turn up once she began free-associating through the universe of her disappointments. Why they had no children was complicated. There had been delay and bad luck involved. They hadn’t started trying early enough. They had been living in Africa. Getting it definitively established that she was infertile had taken years more. They had stuck with different regimens for too long before that, before facing the truth. He didn’t think he had been halfhearted about having children, despite certain reservations he might have had. Inwardly he knew that he would not have enjoyed being his own parent, being a parent to the child he had been. He had never been captivated by the idea of reproducing himself. But he had wanted it very much, for Iris. He had, despite the fact that children exposed you to hellmouth, which was the opening up of the mouth of hell right in front of you, without warning, through no fault of your own. It was the mad gunman shooting you at lunch and it was the cab jumping the curb and crushing you. It was AIDS and it was the grandmother, the daughter, the granddaughter tumbling through the air, blown out of the airplane by a bomb, the three generations falling and seeing one another fall, down, down, onto the Argolid mountains. With children you created more thin places in the world for hellmouth to break through. Morel was hellmouth for him. Hellmouth was having the bad luck to be born in Angola anytime after 1960. And hellmouth was Bertrand Russell coming home from a bicycle ride and announcing to his wife that he had decided he didn’t really love her, like that. That was hellmouth, too. When it had come to adoption, he wasn’t opposed to it. It had been Iris who dropped it. She had been so determined that it be his flesh, his child. Now at forty-eight he was at the limits of eligibility, if he hadn’t already crossed them, unless they went for a half-grown child, which was not what she had wanted. Now her sister was fanning the flames. And Iris was going to be with her, in the middle of it, while an actual infant was produced, to feel and hold. Was there going to be some state of the art nostrum Morel would give Iris?