Mortals

by Norman Rush

  She began to speak and he saw that he had been wrong. It was something else and it was worse.

  She seemed to be saying that she felt he ought to know that she felt a certain attraction to Morel. She was talking about it because it was important for her to tell the truth about things, for her own sake and for his. Ray was numb. He went over what she had said so far. First of all, she was going to go to Morel despite, as Ray understood it, this attraction she felt. Nothing had happened between them and nothing was going to happen. She had determined in her mind and heart that nothing was going to happen with Morel and nothing was going to happen with their marriage. But, as he understood it, she didn’t want to go to Morel under false colors, false pretenses. He, Ray, was the only one who knew this attraction existed. Morel had no idea. There had been no flirting, no exchange of vibrations, none, and there would be none. All this had come out in a rush, involving a divagation about men feeling attraction for the women they worked among all the time, and wives knowing, seeing it at parties and in other transactions and having it denied to their faces. Her plan, he gathered, was to proceed smartly through her course of therapy and get what she needed to out of it and then remove herself still unstained, better, happier, a happier self, for him, for Ray. The thing was that telling him was killing him. It was good she was going away for a while, or was it? He didn’t know. This is the spit on which we turn. Time is the fire in which we burn, was a fragment of his attempted poetry, from the deep past. This moment would pass. He knew something about the therapy relationship that she didn’t. One thing he knew that Iris didn’t was that a woman named Daddario whose first name would come to him in a minute had done a doctoral dissertation showing that thirty percent of women who sought counseling wound up having some form of sexual contact with their therapists, from kissing and petting to sexual intercourse. Linda was Daddario’s first name. It was odd that he remembered that.

  “Ray, don’t tell me you haven’t been in situations where you felt attracted to someone. And don’t say yea or nay if you don’t want to. I know you have. I’ve seen it. Married women are used to that.”

  “But I don’t,” he said. “I don’t look, I don’t flirt. I don’t.”

  “I didn’t say you flirt. But you look. But that’s not what I want to talk about.”

  She was getting distraught. He wondered if it could be as simple as telling her not to go, telling her to forget it, saying he wouldn’t pay for it, taking the choice away from her … as if he could do such a thing. Then the idea would be for her to go to someone else. Except that there was no one else. They were in Botswana. It was a total fluke that someone with Morel’s credentials had bobbed up in Gaborone, available for her. The idea that what she wanted was for him to command her to desist was a fantasy. Alas, he thought. There was no one else for her. There was the Italian head of the mental hospital in Lobatse whose English was a national joke.

  Something nice was happening. She was joining him in the tub. He hadn’t proposed it. “Take me in your legs,” she said.

  …

  It was still about Morel, on the subject of religion. Ray hadn’t been listening. He had to listen.

  “But this is what he says. How he says it. That … That, separate from any problems the particular narrative your denomination has decided to believe in might have, might have regarding ordinary reality, the virgin birth or whatever, there’s the problem of how it articulates with the rest of what’s in this sort of narrative heap, the Bible, which is somehow both internally contradictory and holy. To the naked eye the Old Testament disagrees with the New Testament, very much. So the Bible is put in your little hands and the fact that it doesn’t add up is supposed to be beside the point. So in church you’re undergoing modeling in overlooking contradiction, being trained to push contradictions out of your consciousness just like the respectable adults who run the church do. They seem to thrive on it. But you slowly turn into a dunce, of sorts. You could call this the original sin of religion, is the way he puts it. You become a Christian by ignoring contradictions, not only between the magic-contra-reality elements in your own denominational story but between it and the other weird flowers in the folly garden you got it from.”

  He thought, She has no idea how obvious the novelties in her vocabulary are, like contra and folly garden and narrative, the way she just used it.

  “I think he’s right about this. Ray, I was such a serious child. I was so good. I wish I could remember more about my wretched time in Sunday school. I was so good while all this was leaching into me. I wanted my parents to love me, obviously, which is why I went along, obviously. The thing is that I think I liked Sunday school, being a dunce, and even looked forward to going. I don’t know. I think I was even sort of thrilled when I had confirmation. We were Episcopalians then.”

  “So you were a believer for how long?”

  “Well, a believer … I don’t know. I went to church, I was in a club called Chi Rho. What I mean is I don’t know how actively I believed. I try to recapture it and I can’t.”

  “So you were an Episcopalian and what happened? Because when I met you there was no sign or real residue of that, at least so far as I can remember.” His cheek was against her temple. He was speaking against her skull. They were bone to bone, almost. If only his love could travel into her mind physically, by pure resonance in some way, straight in, so she would feel it and know it. Her hair was perfect. Her body was heaven to him, the pastures of heaven, perfection.

  “It was funny because I think once I was confirmed and had gotten into adolescence it was as though my parents lost interest, almost as though they had done their job by exposing me to Jesus. And I suppose they thought it had taken, I was inoculated to be good, and so that was that and they could go back to not going to church once that seemed to have taken place satisfactorily. It was like what they do to cattle here, for ticks, run them through a spray, or like orthodontia. My parents stopped going, my father first. Then my mother. And then I kept going to church, and then just to Chi Rho, and then I stopped going to that. There was never much discussion around it.”

  “Did your family say grace?”

  “We did for a while at Thanksgiving and Christmas dinner. I remember it as feeling awkward.”

  He pressed his cheek harder against her. Her breath was empty, neutral, which meant ideal. He was cupping her breasts lightly, protectively, was what he was aiming for. Getting erotic was wrong for this juncture. He asked if her family had tithed.

  “Tithed? No of course not. I don’t know. I don’t think Episcopalians tithe. I think Jews do, and Mormons. They did put money in the collection plate, but secretly from me. It was always already in an envelope, so I have no idea how much they gave. Parents are odd. They were odd. They never got in line to shake the minister’s hand on the steps after services. They slid around, somehow, nodding. Of all the events the church gave, we only went to the massive ones, where the crowds were. Don’t get an erection, I beg you. We’re not doing anything tonight. Don’t get an erection and make me feel guilty.”

  “I’m trying,” he said.

  “Well succeed.”

  Touching her between the legs at times like this was something they liked to call getting away with murder. He was never absolutely sure when she was going to permit it, when they were in casual mode, which was a good thing, no doubt. Take nothing for granted was what it said.

  “Even after my religion went away I kept putting Episcopalian on the line that asks for your religion on application forms, like a robot. Then I began putting Protestant. And then I started leaving it blank and to my astonishment discovered that nobody cared if I did. What I really wanted to write was None of your business. But I never did. I’m sure the reason we were Episcopalians was because St. Michael’s was the church closest to us in our neighborhood, walking distance.

  “So there went my religion …”

  “Your shackles turned to dew,” he said.

  She was struck. She swallowed.
He felt it. She sat up a little.

  “That’s a beautiful line, what is it?”

  There was a problem. The line happened to be his own. Let your shackles fade like dew, or as the dew, he couldn’t remember which, came from his delusional period as a would-be poet. What he did not need just now was admiration for his aesthetic ejecta, leading to questions about what else he should be doing with his great talents rather than working for the agency.

  She sat up fully. He kissed the nape of her neck.

  “What is that from?”

  All he remembered about his poem at this point was the struggle to get it right, which he had lost because he hadn’t found the right image for shackles turning to dew and then subsequently rising away like mist, dew in the morning sun, something like that. Fade was wrong.

  “I don’t know what it’s from. I don’t know. I’ll try to think …”

  “I have to know,” she said. “Can you track it down for me? I’m asking you to.”

  “Tasking me. I’ll try.” May your shackles turn to dew, had been the original line …

  “I’m going to remind you,” she said.

  Then he understood. It was for Morel, for his use, for his armamentarium, he knew it as clearly as he knew anything. She loved it as an image of liberation and she wanted to bring it as a gift to her mentor, which was what he was becoming, not that she would ever admit that that was why she wanted it.

  She said, “Because I would love to pass it on to Davis. For his writing. He’s constantly writing.”

  She sank down again, to her former position, drawing his hands back to her breasts. Everything is a wound, he thought. He didn’t know what to do. Everything with her was Morel, not that she could help it. He was afraid. He wanted to know if behind all this declared attraction something worse was moving its slow thighs, something like individual vacations, something middle-class decadent like open marriage, whatever that was. He was afraid of conceptualizing what he was afraid of. Something was coming. He thought, She’s wounding me, I could die … She doesn’t know. His heart was beating rapidly. She should be able to notice that, unless she was dismissing it as sex, which she didn’t want, tonight. Was it because Morel was black? Was Morel using that? Would this be happening if Morel were white? Injustice to blacks had been a preoccupation of Iris’s. Of course suppose the Africans had had the Renaissance first and then gone off to conquer the world, how different would it have been? Every race is as bad as its power permits it to be was his opinion.

  “You’re hurting my breasts,” Iris said.

  “God I’m so sorry. It was unconscious.” He took his hands off her, but again she caught them and pressed them to her breasts.

  Something was coming that he didn’t want to hear and it was coming at the worst moment, because in a way everything was perfect. The color of her skin in the color of the bathwater was perfect. The water in the tub was the exact shade of something … Jasmine tea was what it was. He thought he knew the particular cup of tea, even, and the restaurant they’d been in when it had been served, years ago, before Africa. The scent from the citronella candle burning in the hallway was contributing to the moment … the scent was enough like perfume for her, enough not like perfume, closer to an astringent, for him. Physically nothing was hurting. It was excruciating.

  He had to know what was coming. It was, and it didn’t matter why it was coming, it didn’t matter why it was coming, whether it was the issue of their childlessness aggravated again via her sister cleverly devising to get pregnant by an absolute fool, or if it was the first cold wind of menopause beginning to blow, or if it was boredom with him versus the black glamour of the black bastard he had the power to destroy utterly, if he was careful. She prefers a jackass who says contra instead of versus, as if that made any kind of difference: she wants to mate with a larger vocabulary, he thought. But larger vocabulary wasn’t what he meant. He meant gaudier vocabulary, flashier.

  Do it, he said to himself. “What do you want?” he asked, his tone strange to his ears, realizing as he spoke that this was clumsy and would only baffle her.

  That was the effect. “What do you mean?” she asked. He had succeeded in baffling her.

  “Iris, I don’t know what you want, if you want us to have an arrangement … something like an arrangement …” He could barely hear himself.

  She sat up and torqued herself violently around in order to look hard into his eyes. She seemed amazed. It seemed genuine.

  She had covered her breasts with her hands, reflexively, as though she had suddenly found herself in the presence of a stranger. She was staring at him, shaking her head minutely.

  Anyone would want her. She was interesting. Yesterday she had raised the question of why there was a single term in English for affirmative head movements but that for the negative you were forced to use three words? He had no idea why there was no one-word antonym of nod. Her questions came from nowhere, you were never prepared. She was good company. There were her peculiar dreams, her amusing dreams, many of them lately, he realized, about getting rich. A few mornings ago she had said to him, “I dreamed I got rich on a doohickey I invented that would let you put your hair up in a bun shaped according to your religion, cross, crescent, star of David, a little Buddha …”

  “You poor thing,” she said. “I am in pain if you thought I was thinking of anything like that. Please. Oh my poor thing.”

  He thought, She wants Morel, despite all this she does, she won’t do it with him, but this is where we are … she prefers him … I’m more interesting … I am, not that she can see it, but I am.

  Still regarding him steadily, she said, “We love each other.”

  He flinched. He felt weak. It was too much.

  “I mean us, us,” she said, clearly alarmed. She touched his face.

  “Give me a minute,” he said.

  The pose she was holding was impossible. She turned and resumed her previous position, but bracing her heels on the tub above the tap, she drove herself more forcefully against him than before, which he took as a declaration combining love and punishment for idiocy.

  He began, mechanically, to soap himself. “You just nearly killed me,” he said.

  “You’re an idiot,” she said. She made a spiral pattern in the lather on his right kneecap.

  She sighed heavily. A pause followed. “But don’t you think it’s interesting, an interesting thing to realize, that our wonderful huge white civilization is all a big misunderstanding? I mean, Jesus was not a Christian, at all. And that’s only part of it. I know I’m going on and I’m sorry. Hate him if you have to, but I learn interesting things from this man you hate. It’s like your first year of college, before it turns into a drag. But there is something so staggering about it, first the Church stealing Jesus from the Jews, claiming him, and then libeling and killing the people who gave them Jesus. Fantastic. You have Judaism and you have Christianity and Islam, these two heresies, coming out of it, and you have these heretics trying their best to kill the people that produced them! There is something astonishing about the magnitude of the lying going on. What you have is this image of a huge upside-down pyramid which is the denominations, all the denominations, and churches, and the mosques, and they’re all balanced on a point, and the point the whole pyramid is standing on is … is lies! Certain untruths … and nobody telling … Jesus was never anything but a devout Jew, you know, he was never a Christian at all. And the Jews didn’t kill him. It was the Romans.

  “So it isn’t just There is no God with Davis. It’s about lies. But I promise you I am not going to keep talking about him. I’m sorry. Also I don’t want to be restricted for no reason. But don’t worry.”

  Essentially it was over, this episode, he supposed. She had a bingo. She had everything she wanted. She had carte blanche to see Morel, and to what? flirt with him was what it came down to, with her husband’s approval, although calling it flirting was probably unfair. It would be fun for her. He wondered how she would like it
if he proposed a deal like that for himself, except that he was forgetting it was her opinion that men as a class already had a de facto right or privilege to flirt and worse without anyone taking notice of it let alone assessing damages. Love is a strain, he thought. Now was probably not the best time to establish exactly how many sessions per week she was going to have with Morel. But he had to know that.

  “What do you think brought him to Africa?”

  “Well, Africa is the one part of the world where you’re getting four new Christians for every two you’re losing in the rest of the world. He has the figures. Don’t sound so grave.”

  “I’m not grave, I’m pensive.”

  “Why should the subject of religion make you so pensive? We aren’t religious, I thought.

  “Do we believe in God, for example?

  “Was that a shrug I felt?”

  He was tempted to be perverse, which would be a mistake.

  “Well, yes and no.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Indirectly.”

  “What?”

  “Well, you might say I believe in someone who obviously did. Milton.” This is stupid, he thought. “Without his religion there would’ve been no Paradise Lost, no … none of it.”

  “You think it’s impossible that he might have written something else great, as an unbeliever?”

  “No, nothing like what he did write, of that … stature. And he couldn’t anyway because in his time any declaration of unbelief got you locked up. Where Paradise Lost is, there would be nothing, believe me.”