by Norman Rush
The truth was that the man was in concealed distress most of the time. Nobody at the High Commission could know the extent of it lest the idea of his retirement arise. I had the key. What developed from this was a profound physical relationship without sex, although there was sexual feeling here and there in it. If you need professional massage in Botswana you’re in the same position as someone who needs periodontia. It isn’t there. I’m not a masseuse, but I have strong hands and arms and the conviction that massage is all logic and feedback, which, so far, checks out. With Z I was brilliant. I changed his life, briefly.
I mastered his back. I developed a rapport with it, is the best way I can describe what I did. I dealt with his back as though it were an autonomous entity like a face or a frightened animal. For two weeks we had nightly sessions and at the end of it he was close to reborn. He had decent cervical mobility again, which meant he could look over his shoulder for the first time in years, which had to have professional value to him—as I was kind enough not to point out. He was overcome with what I was doing for him. He would do anything for me, I only had to say what, why was I refusing his gifts? I was the only American he had ever met who made him want to see America, no woman had ever done for him what I was doing and I was doing it during the hottest part of the year like an angel of mercy and on and on, and did I know that he himself had been very anti-American and did I know how very much anti-American feeling there was among British Overseas Territories staff, which they hid, and he had to confess he hadn’t been totally uninterested in America until me because he had always been curious to see the Grand Canyon, and on and on.
By about the third session I had figured out what the protocol needed to be. The frame around the process was that we should both understand his back as our antagonist. He had to grasp that the process was cumulative. I was assembling my mode from what seemed to work, unknown to him, and it was clear that an authoritative tone was a winner. There would be two things we were going to ignore during this intensive, as I decided to call it. First of all, I said, we are going to ignore any erections you get and call them manifestations and laugh at them. Second of all, there are going to be incidents of flatus and we are going to ignore them and refer to them as queries. There was a genuine therapeutic notion behind both maneuvers. I wanted to abort the tension that would come from his thinking he, in the circumstances, ought to be getting aroused. And also the first time I had sensed I’d gotten him deeply relaxed a fart had escaped him. He was horrified and got tense. I presented the protocol on erections as a coin with two sides in that I would also be ignoring any feelings of desire that transpired in me. The regulations were that he would be in his undershorts and I would be in my mom-type lentil-green one-piece South African bathing suit. Finally, because I was the one who was in communication with his back, I would control the rhythm of the sessions. He was a bystander. He might have to be silent sometimes, and if he spoke to me I might not reply, because my mission was to preserve my concentration.
I could do anything with him. I could sit on him. I could walk on him if I was careful. I could put my heels in the nape of his neck and grip his arms at the elbows and pull until he gave a groan of pleasure that was absolutely specific. There isn’t just one all-purpose groan of pleasure, as we assume. His back acclimated to me. There was something about being able to manhandle a male body without having to treat the experience as foreplay. I wasn’t rough with him. In fact it became very domestic. He was suddenly sleeping wonderfully, he told me. I didn’t mind this man. I gave myself to his back. Gratitude is a drug.
But what I do resent, still, is Denoon for trivializing the experience when I told him about it and he, in one of his litanies about the normalization of the bizarre in the U.S., asked if I knew that in sex tabloids there were ads from women making themselves available to men for wrestling purposes, no penetration involved. It seems men with a taste for being bested by big, strapping women had been allowed, through the magic of late capitalism, to constitute themselves as one market among others. I hadn’t heard about it. But it was worse when he tried to get away with the canard that what I had been doing was nothing more than soft core SM whether I knew it or not. And was I aware of some famous datum showing that the largest vocational category resorting to SM-specialized prostitutes was law enforcement personalities, not excluding the judiciary? I pointed out that Z had had nothing to do with law enforcement that I knew of, but Denoon insisted—out of jealousy, no question—that spies were in the same ballpark. I mocked him into retracting that, finally, as beneath him. I said something like I revere the level of argument you impose on others and now you come up with something like this? His real problem was that he thought my ministrations to him along the same lines were a pale reflection of what I had depicted myself as doing for Z. He was right, which I never denied. You are a different moment, I told him. Your back is fine, for one thing.
Denoon couldn’t understand that there was a feel almost of paradise about being absorbed so completely in a project of personal alleviation. This may be a strictly female view. And it is not the same as saying it wouldn’t be boring as a lifetime repetitive vocation. One difference between women and men is that women really want paradise. Men say they do, but what they mean by it is absolute security, which they can obtain only through utter domination of the near and dear and the environment as far as the eye can see, how else? Most men. In any case, aside from the exertion involved, which ultimately I was able to think of simply as good exercise, I liked the ordeal, down to the details—perspiration, flesh smells, towels all over, his rather charred breath, insects banging incessantly into the window screens.
It began to bother him that there was apparently nothing he could do for me in return. We had even stopped eating out, so that we could have longer sessions. He was grateful across the board. He was cutting back on his smoking, he noticed. It was a byproduct of feeling better and was something he had wanted to do for a long time. My merest hints were helping him. I’d advised him to stop his housekeeper from picking up vegetables at the prison garden, beautiful as they were, because night soil was used in cultivating them and he was running definite gastrointestinal dangers in eating them. Whatever his original interest in me had been, I had blasted it into nothingness with my attentions. Martin Wade never came up once.
I did accept one gift, a beautiful ethereal blue and white yakuta. I couldn’t believe it was cotton. But this was a bagatelle to him, and as I pounded and wrenched he would lie there free associating on my virtues and uniqueness and how hurtful it was that I was refusing his generosity.
As to secrets, I had more than I wanted on the personal side but nothing that counted from his professional side, yet.
Tell Me Something I’m Not Supposed to Know
I was liking Z. His improvement made him cheerful. We had certain things in common, such as both being natural mimics. After one particularly acute but cutting impersonation of his, I said Remind me to warn my daughter about going with someone who’s a good mimic, because they aren’t necessarily the kindest, as in my case. Ah, do you have a daughter, then? And I said No, I mean when I do, someday. And then he said So it wouldn’t be a good idea for two mimics to marry, would it? Even through his carotene I could tell he was blushing. I was touched. We both were.
I remember I was sitting on the back of his legs, resting, when I decided it was time to shorten the game. My Martin Wade fantasies were fading. I decided to be a little reckless.
You’re unique, he was saying, apropos his having come to the conviction that I could tell people’s nationality at a distance at a glance. Recently there had been a couple of lucky shots in the dark doing that. And then, at a tea the day before, he had asked what the nationality was of a rather Syrian-looking woman who was new in town and new to me. I’d said Oh, British, flooring him. But it had been easy because I’d overheard her say arvacado for avocado earlier, unbeknownst to him.
You’re unique, he said. No woman in my life has done
for me half what you have, and yet you’ve asked nothing. Please, what can I do for you?
Really nothing. I enjoyed this. Nothing, unless you wanted to satisfy my curiosity about something.
Anything. What?
I don’t know. Tell me something I’m not supposed to know.
He got tense instantly. I said Now don’t do that and ruin our work. Let’s drop it.
But what did I mean?
I began kneading him while I vamped. I said I know this will seem perverse to you. But in a way—and I understand it has to be this way, don’t think I don’t—in a way there’s something in you I can’t reach and never will and probably it can’t be helped, but it’s a hindrance, really. I know how involuted this sounds. But you are obviously some kind of spy or operative, which is all right, but you are. I happen to know about it. But of course life puts us in the position where you have to deny this to my face, so feel free. But you know what I am and I can’t know what you are, which I accept, because your mission is to playact the commercial attaché for me and what is resulting is false consciousness, inevitably.
He got very upset. We had to talk. I had to get off him and we both had to dress and talk properly. He wanted a drink.
We sat at the kitchen table after he had washed his face twice and made me look around to see if perchance there were any cigarettes about.
He didn’t immediately deny being a spy but took a line which I didn’t honor with a reply. He wanted to know where on earth I had gotten such an idea, and from whom.
Then he did deny it, to which I said Fine, but I know otherwise for a fact, and you might consider admitting something just for the sake of our relationship.
How did I mean? Did I mean he couldn’t see me, all this couldn’t continue, if he didn’t confirm what I was saying?
Then we circled around my assertion that of course I was not saying anything like that and of course we could go on, however imperfectly. And then of course I invited him to reassure himself any way he liked that there was nothing clandestine going on with me, no tape recorders or surveillance cameras, which he dismissed curtly, saying I know who you are.
Then it was theme and variations, theme being tell me what I am, then: I’m an anthropologist, I have a hobby which is related and which is putting together an understanding of the real world and trying to live in it. He should consider it a quirk.
Somehow I knew it was no longer touch and go. He continued looking stricken for a while, then said Well, suppose I were to go along with you and we carry on together and I endorse this fairytale that I am whatever you like: what would you be expecting then?
We could do that, I said. It would be up to you. This is symbolic anyway. You could tell me something I’m not supposed to know, and it could be anything. It’s a token of something. Let’s forget it. There is no way I would do anything with what you told me, or repeat it, which you know. You could tell me something obsolete but that I’m still not supposed to know. Let’s stop. This is making me feel neurotic.
I kept on in that vein, urging us to drop the whole thing and continue on bravely but by implication lamely in whatever relationship would survive my cri de coeur–type outburst, continue on in a relationship that—since I was using the past tense and the conditional a lot—looked as if it might be coming to an end sooner rather than later.
Then he cut me off with You mean to say you have no particular field of inquiry, no particular set of questions, no particular question at all? This I find strange.
So I laughed and said This is how you tell a thing is a quirk. This is what you call humoring a person. Tell me something quote unquote forbidden. Make it something pointless, useless, out of date, anything, just so it’s something somebody thinks I shouldn’t know. You have the choice of seeing this as a caprice or believing that I’m not what I seem and what you know I am.
You have been an absolute angel to me, he said. Now, how would you know if I made something up in order to pacify you? How would you know?
That would be up to you. I probably wouldn’t know. Who am I? That’s what a clever man would do, probably. You could.
It was late, so I said he should go home, that I regretted the whole thing and he should come back the next night for dinner and he should forgive me if he could for yielding to a feeling of wanting to get something from some deep protected nonpublic part of him. It was an impulse I said I was sure many other women had had with him and been smart enough to suppress.
I’m not good at being rueful, so I curtailed things. I made myself say the whole thing was about being open, and I nearly gagged. The world is what it is, I said, and you are what you are, and if I’m a neurotic about the fact that men have all the secrets and I have an impulse and want to get one, then that’s what I am. I said I’m not saying to tell me the worst thing you ever did, although who wouldn’t love to hear that, or tell me something filthy about the queen or something defense related or something that puts perfidious Albion in a bad light—did I say that? I wanted to get a smile out of him before he left.
You thoroughly confuse one, he said. He left, thinking.
What Was I Doing?
Once he was gone I felt like a lunatic. I was engaging in something deluded and worthless. What was I doing? How stupid a goal could you set for yourself?
I suppose I had a dark night of the soul. I had no relation to anything that had meaning. It was like an experience Nelson would tell me about that was similar. He was in New York, where he had a couple of hours free between appointments or appearances. He was in the vicinity of the New York Public Library so decided to stop in. It was going to be an enormous pleasure to be there. I don’t know where he’d been living just before that, but it had been remote, someplace without libraries, and he was famished for print. He was filled with anticipation, he would be flooded with choices of things he wanted to look up or catch up on. He stepped into the main reference room, a vast place where every wall was lined with banks of card catalogs, where he would have access to every written thing in the Western world that was worthwhile, virtually. He steps into the room and begins to sweat from every pore, as he put it. Nothing interested him. Not only had he forgotten what it was he’d intended to follow up on, there was nothing of interest. He called it the abomination of desolation. There was nothing he wanted to read. He felt cold but not faint. He felt he was real but that the material of the world had changed into something like paper ash that would disintegrate if he touched it. Paper ash was all he could compare it to. He was in terror. He felt he had to walk carefully in leaving, not touch anything. Then he left and it stopped. I walked him through it again when he told me about it because I thought the paper ash was a clue. It may have been. One of his chores as a boy was to endlessly burn newspapers and periodicals in a backyard incinerator. His father subscribed to everything, but by the time Nelson was fifteen or so his father’s reading had become haphazard and was in the process of stopping altogether, so Nelson would be burning a lot of periodicals unopened, in their mailers. And it had been painful for him, and he had a strong image of stirring the ashes and of whole intact pages reduced to black or gray ash with the print still readable. He denied there was a connection.
Finally I got myself in hand. Not proceeding would be even more demoralizing than seeing where this would come out, even if it was ridiculous. And so to bed.
Two Feints
He came in glum. I was rehearsed.
I saturated the first half hour with protestations that I repented the whole thing, that I had been incredibly jejune, that the little nips of Mainstay I had taken while I was massaging him had been part of the problem, that I was distraught. I looked the part thanks to my dark night of the soul. My plea was that we forget it. It was just that when he had said Please let me do something for you it had been the equivalent of someone inviting you to make a wish, no more. Also I didn’t want things to end uglily because I had to start thinking about getting home and I wanted to not leave a stain behind.
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br /> Also, I said, I know you can’t help but worry this is something that however circuitously could endanger your job. I want you to know I’m not cavalier about jobs. You can fall into a fissure between jobs and never be seen again, because of your age, for instance. My antecedents are one hundred percent working class, I said, by which I mean just barely arrived there and glad of it. Here I was exploiting my having gotten him to let slip that he was Labour, which people at his level in the ministry he was in are supposed to reveal only on pain of death, I gathered.
I forget what I made for dinner, but I remember he toyed with the entrée. Not the bread, though. He could never keep his hands off my baking.
We sat in the heat. I was supposed to pick up that he’d made some brave decision that rendered all the preambling I was doing irrelevant.
Might we talk as friends, or family? he finally asked. He was going into a role.
I know what you’re doing, I said: You have an instinct for the avuncular. But go ahead anyway. He smiled.
Well, there are so many things of interest, aren’t there? The Bushmen. Let us say you were concerned with the Bushmen—everyone here is, it seems. The fate of the Bushmen. Sad, isn’t it, that the South Africans are turning them into trackers to hunt down guerrillas in Ovamboland?
This annoyed me no end, because it was such common knowledge. But I just said that I knew about this because it had been in the Rand Daily Mail, and it was more than sad. Patronize me at your peril, my attitude said, and he got it.
