by Norman Rush
I pretended a fixation on seeing every piece of chinoiserie there was, which naturally took me off the beaten track and into the private rooms at the back of the house. Obviously I was drivenly trying to satisfy myself that Denoon wasn’t secreted somewhere. This came to an end when I opened the door to a tiny room and was met with a blast of freezing air-conditioning and the sight of an aged chow on a quilt, an animal never intended for life in Africa. When it barked it was more like a cough than a bark, but it still attracted the attention of a maid who got stern with me and said Mma, it can die. This by the way was the only airconditioning in use anywhere. Everywhere else, massive floor fans swept the different scenes, continuing the meteorological theme of ceaseless wind underway outdoors. All the rippling and undulating produced made for an undersea feeling. It was time for me to circulate normally.
It was also obvious that my usual associates came from a lesser stratum than was being represented that night. I didn’t know many of the attendees, except for a handful, and those glancingly—like the brother-sister act from Montreal who had been brought to my attention a few days previous by the screams of a tot pursuing them through the mall. He wanted his pushtoy back, which his older brother had sold to the Canadians without his permission. They ran a gallery devoted to naive art and were on a buying trip, focusing on the scrapwire toys the children in the squatter sections and the periurban villages make. The one the tot wanted back was a beautiful specimen, complex, a bicycle with wheels that revolved and pedals that rose and fell and a rider devised from a stuffed and twisted yellow hypermarket sakkie with blue text where the eyes should be, saying that refunds were impossible. The legs pumped when the thing was rolled along. The toy was a masterpiece. They were holding it up like a chalice while the tot leapt at them. I meandered after the brother and sister into their bolt-hole, the British Council reading room, and watched while they tried the toy out and exclaimed about it until some Batswana began politely hissing. We chatted at the fête. They were in Botswana on a mission. They had reason to believe that somewhere among the squatters in the Old Naledi section was a blind child who was an artistic genius who made things out of scrapwire not to be believed, such as radios, locomotives, dirigibles, large scale things. Had I heard of him? So far they hadn’t found him, but they were certain he was there. I left open that I might be able to help them: they were an example of the clientele I was reposing on in those times.
It was not a comfortable scene and I was saying the wrong things, out of distraction. Things were going on that I felt I had to understand, like the maid who was darting around and doing something to each lamp. It was nothing, but it was odd—and I was in discomfort until I knew what it was. She was drizzling liquid incense onto lightbulbs with an eyedropper. I edged my way into a group of women talking about their recent vacations. One woman was just back from Greece and was mildly wondering why every Greek woman over forty seemed to be dressed in black. Someone told them it was slimming, it came to me to say. They had no idea I was being amusing.
At about this time I observed that a particular woman seemed to be shadowing me from group to group. She was a wreck.
I let her catch up with me at the shrimp tree.
Do you know me? I asked her. Because you seem to be following me. It wasn’t hostile. She admitted immediately she was following me.
She was following me because I was American and seemed so at home and she was looking for someone she could impose on for something. Underneath the extremis she was in she was the way you would die to look at forty, forty-two. Sorority person, I said to myself. She was in a couture version of safari attire, which she had to know was a mistake. The invitations had specified formal and she was barely touching smart casual. She definitely looked rich, which made me not sisterly toward her. I have a vulgar marxist reaction to the rich, which is part of me. Not that I’m a marxist of any kind. I would have made a wonderful marxist if I’d been born into it, probably, which is the only way it could have stuck. Too bad for marxism. I feel toward marxists the way you feel toward Greek Orthodox people when New Year’s Eve comes and they get to go to this fantasy mass with basso priests droning, candles flaring, gold leaf all over. If only you could believe it. Also my temperament is marxist in that analytically looking for the cui bono or materialist explanation is nearly always correct in retrospect. Also I love marxist academics because it turns them into such absolute bloodhounds when it comes to critiquing actually existing capitalism. But as for the dungheap states these bouquets of humane thought have turned into as they decomposed, no thank you and again no thank you. Denoon knew everything about marxism and loved to talk about it. It was Marx and Engels’s fault that when Lenin took power he had no idea what a socialist state should be like, because they had never bothered to describe it. Engels supposedly thought full communism was going to be like the Shakers, without the celibacy. Denoon told me the name of the actual person who thought up the Russian state socialist system. He is now totally forgotten. It may be Pashukanis. It was definitely not Lenin. I have the name written down somewhere. But to this day I resent it that Denoon never credited me with having had my own view of marxism. I maintain that my attitude had always been pretty nuanced. He also knew by heart some letter of Marx’s where he bewails that it is too late for him to open a small business. The skin of the rich is different and the woman before me had it. She was also ash blond.
She was about to be a spectacle, unless I helped. Her eyes were red and her left hand looked like one of those claw feet on nineteenth-century furniture clutching an orb, except that the orb in her case was composed of damp Kleenex. I realized that her safari coatlet was in fact perfect for her situation because of its accordion pockets. Even as I watched she reached into one for yet another Kleenex, which she passed across her nostrils before adding it to the orb she was creating. My first act was to gently relieve her of her collection and force it into a stoneware urn.
I want to go to my husband, she said. But I—
What? I said.
But I, they—
What? I said.
These men. There are men.
Be more consecutive, I said. I don’t know why I was so butch with her, but she elicited it, and she also seemed to respond to it. She seemed unsteady. Thank god the shrimp tree is empty, I thought, because it looked as though she might collapse into it.
Would you go with me? she said.
For a second I could see something a little ulterior in her distress, but I lost my grasp of it when she said she was Grace Denoon. Instantly I was her sister.
There was a party or gathering within the party, it seemed. Denoon was there. She knew where it was. She wanted to go there. She had a right to go there. Throughout she was making the correct assumption that the name Denoon would be a major thing not needing explication. Was I a person who would go with her? I was.
I was elated, but now I felt shabbily dressed, next to her. Nothing could be done about it. I perceived that her skirt was in fact expensive culottes. So definitely that night I was among the avec-culottes, a joculism I would later use on Denoon and that he would praise. She was wearing a very sheer lime green thing for an ascot, brilliantly obscuring her throat lines, if any. Her nostrils astounded me, they were so small, like watermelon seeds. How could she breathe?
Then will you go with me? she said.
Of course.
I’m not actually invited, she said.
All you have to do is show me where it is. You’re his wife. You have the right.
Thank god I found you, she said.
Z came up just as I was going off with her. He was holding out a just-popped Castle Lager with a knob of foam in the mouth, and saying that Denoon wasn’t coming after all, so far as he could tell.
Serious Men
Exactly what is it I enjoy about situations like finding myself the only or almost the only woman in a roomful of men trying to ignore me? They energize me no end. I used to fantasize about slipping into a burlesque show so
meday just to see how the rest of the audience took it. Anyway, at the door was a slight gauntlet of reserved personalities for us to run. I felt like a tugboat because Grace had physical hold of my waistband. It took a little effort to make her let go before we forged through. This is his wife, I said, to get us through the anteroom and into the symposium proper.
The venue was rather improvised, I thought. It was the guesthouse, deep at the rear of the property, with the regular furnishings removed and the living room set up with folding chairs for the audience and a big armchair for the man of the hour. It was a very bare white space in a concrete block building with windows standing open on three sides apropos the heat and the definite attar of mankind arising. The room wasn’t big enough for the thirty or so of us.
Spare me is what I said to myself when I got my first look at Nelson. I meant Spare me the heroic in all its guises.
Because here was a genuinely goodlooking man, alas. He was of course older than in the photographs of him I’d seen. The lower part of his face was softer. There were plenty of crowsfeet. He still wore his hair pulled back aboriginally in a short ponytail, which was brave because the style forfeits any camouflage for a receding hairline. His was still good. His hair was still black, although it had the slightly dusty look of hair that is going to be definitely gray someday soon. There was some distinct gray along his part. His cheekbones were still carrying him. Fullface he looked more Slavic than Cherokee now, but this was a matter of weight. This man is not vain, I thought, when I noted that on one side his hair went over his ear and on the other behind it: so here was a serious man, in all probability. Serious men are my type. That was why Martin Wade had been painful for me. But there was a difference between them, and of course a lot of this is retroanalytic, in that Martin’s seriousness was narrower and more guilt-driven. He had moments of definite irritation at his fate: there was no escape from his obligation, but he was so good at music it was unfair.
Possibly I should have been a sculptor specializing in busts. I appreciate the head as an aesthetic unit—the weight, the poise, the shape. Most women don’t. Or rather they respond subliminally, but at the conscious level they apply a hilarious planar aesthetic, as in Those eyes, Those lips, That smile. Denoon had a beautiful head. I date my more advanced sense of the head to my brief flirtation with physical anthropology, with all its front and sideview photographs and cephalic indices. I thought I was smart not choosing physical anthropology as my specialty. There had been openings. I think I can honestly say I was once even faintly solicited by what amounts to a star in the field. But I thought This is a doomed subfield if there ever was one. Everyone in it is suspected of having chosen it in order to prove something about the godly white race. I did know at least one unquestionable racist in the field. Also, every single male I met in the specialty was married. But I could have gone into it to wreak intellectual havoc, I suppose. This could have been one of my numerous career gaffes. I can get into throes of self-doubt and accuse myself of opting for nutritional anthropology for stupidly female generic reasons, because nurturance is natural to me as a woman, la la la, going the way I did for the same reason so many women in medicine wind up in obstetrics or clinical dietetics. Denoon was thicker through the neck and middle than he needed to be. He could be helped.
I immediately misjudged the way Nelson was dressed. He was wearing a garish dashiki with a red and black naive floral motif, some kind of unisex gray muslinoid drawstring pants, and elaborate leather sandals of a kind I’d never seen. I of course leapt to the conclusion that he was dressed to show how little dressing up meant to someone of his degree of seriousness and inner direction. I thought it was pointlessly combative or provocative. I even got a pang when I realized that only an objectively goodlooking presence could transcend the implications of such a costume. Later on when I discovered that he was dressed that way for a perfectly good reason I felt callow. He was acting as a manikin. Everything he was wearing or carrying represented something the people in his project were producing. He was even taking orders for things. All his accessories were from the workshops at Tsau, including a peculiar spade-shaped cowhide sidebag and some hideous leather bracelets. Not only was his costume defensible, it was self-sacrificial. But for the time being I took comfort from my snap judgment that, at least in this, he was a bit of a fool.
A Great Reckoning in a Little Room
What was my attitude? So far Denoon was impressing me with his performance of absolute repose in the midst of turbulence. We had arrived during a break. The audience was pure agitation—guys machinating, exchanging greetings, checking the time, organizing couriers for more drinks. It was the usual male smokefest, but no cigarettes for him. He was at rest even though he was standing up. He was leaning on one palm against a window frame, gazing out into the night. He was roughly my height or a little under, which was fine because I regard caring about height as a kind of fetishism, which is easy for me to say, I recognize, being tall myself. He looked very strong and I know why: I associate big wrist and elbow knobs with unusual physical strength. Actually it was Nelson who elucidated that to me about myself, in the life to come. The light was fluorescent, very harsh. No matter what he thought he could stand on the basis of his dark complexion, he was getting too much sun, in my humble opinion. But had he noticed that his wife had entered the room? In fact, where was she? Had he taken the lost-in-thought pose he had in order not to have to interact, or was everything accidental?
Grace had found the only place to hide that there was. She was sitting on a camp stool behind a big potted arboricola near the door. Since I owed my entrée to this scene entirely to her, I went over. She waved me off, violently, but keeping her movements tight. I tried again and produced what I can only call a paroxysm, so I stopped. She put her head back against the wall, which lifted her tiny nostrils once again into my field of vision. The effect conveyed was of unspeakable refinement. I left her alone. All I wanted next was to hear Denoon speak. I am apparently voice activated. I judge inordinately by the voice. And there was the promo his voice had been given by Whoreen.
This might be good, I thought as I studied the crowd. There were several definitely intelligent guys present, not strobe-light intellects but people who could make you uncomfortable in a debate if you got too much beyond what you absolutely had the facts on. My preference is always for hanging out with the finalists, and there were some there. What did I want? I wanted Denoon either to turn out to be the definitive elusive great man or I wanted him to turn out to be an open-and-shut fraud—that is, mediocre—so I could go on with my lifelong headlong flight from the unintelligentsia and all its works. I don’t know which I wanted more, although I’ve thought about it. I was well aware this was chapter nine thousand in the supremely boring unfinished comic opera The Mediocre and Me, and also aware there was nothing so superlative about me as to justify my stupid elitism. But there it was, crazing me as usual. The psychogenesis of this is not a mystery to me.
I loved the averting of eyes my presence seemed to stimulate.
I finally found a couple of people willing to overlook my interloping and talk to me. One was an Ethiopian underling at UNDP. I love Ethiopians for their almond eyes. And they remind me of Siamese cats, they’re so sinuous. I gathered from him that the left was fairly joyous over Act One, which was devoted to excoriating the capitalist development mode for Africa. The country representative of the Gustav Noske Foundation looked happy, and the Swedes did too, insofar as you can detect emotion in them. I said Act Two, where he attacks the socialist mode, is going to be good, especially if somebody remembers Denoon once said socialism is like knitting with oars. But just then an overling from UNDP saw me talking with my contact, who thereupon slid off.
I got next to a Motswana from Commerce and Industry, who I expected would be unhappy but wasn’t. This was surprising in a way. Botswana is capitalist. There is plenty of socialism—subsidized housing, car loans, and so on—for the civil service, but the political class i
n toto is whole hog for capitalism red in tooth and claw, which is why the West loves the country so much. When the man who had just become president of the country was vice president he had gotten up in parliament and said, apropos a proposal to regulate the number of bottle stores in the towns, If a man can get rich selling liquor let him make the nation drunk. So how did they feel at Commerce and Industry about someone they were sponsoring, Denoon, pissing all over capitalist Botswana, a jewel in the crown of capitalist success right up there with Malawi and the Ivory Coast? I took it they were just very pleased. Everything was just all right, which is idiomatic for superb in southern Africa. I had a flash of the feeling I used to get from time to time of the Batswana as spectators at a great game played by whites called Running Your Country.
Meantime I was trying to keep something of an eye on Grace and figure out what was going on with her as she made herself small behind the arboricola. She still looked crazed. Remember this is Africa, I said to myself, where hospital patients run around the streets of the city in pajamas. Grace’s glittering eyes were nothing. In West Africa the foux were part of the cityscape. Also I was certain that there was something subsidiary going on with her, something involving cunning, which I chose to take as reassuring. I should have been more sisterly toward her, but I couldn’t be. She was extremely goodlooking, which I had to push aside a little if I was not going to be affected by envy of her derisory little hips and just right bosom. My breasts are the wrong size for an active person. They would be fine for someone restricted to lounging. I am built for childbearing, which was the last thing I wanted to happen to me, but—but looking at her I comforted myself with the idea that should I fall pregnant, as the idiom goes over there, I’d be in better shape than she would. Her bust was perfect in that it was perfect for galvanizing oafdom if she chose to stand up straight and inhale, and perfect in that she could let a succession of males pass by her in a narrow train corridor without having to keep her back to each one that passed. Of course apparently something unspeakable was going on between her and her husband. She had something planned relating to it. A talent I have is being able to step into a roomful of people and fairly instantly classify the majority who are just walking around in intake mode and the handful who are bent on something.
