Mating (19 page)

I reversed our direction and got us out of the mall and across King’s Road onto the long dusty path that takes you to White City, the shabby and unpaved shopping area where everything is on a far far humbler scale and some of the shopowners are actual Batswana. I was told it was called White City because most of the buildings had been white at one time.

I took her to the Carat Restaurant, a hole-in-the-wall place run by a Motswana woman I liked and which was doomed to fail because they gave you too much food for your money. It no longer exists.

Grace wanted a beer. I conspired in Setswana to get them to forget to bring it until she had started on her salad, id est shredded beetroot
and some baked beans, and also to bring us some strong tea simultaneously with her beer. I talked her out of getting chips, which at the Carat came so underdone they looked like they were made of Lucite.

She was utterly drunk. She said Do you like the four seasons? Because no one here does that I’ve talked to.

I said I did like the seasons, assuming she meant wasn’t I nostalgic for the snowfall and crisp fall mornings and so on, at which point she went Dawn go away I’m no good for you, in a little deluded whining voice. She meant the Four Seasons. I couldn’t believe it. I let her sing quite a bit of it.

When would she get to Denoon? And in retrospect her great love for the Four Seasons is odd and may have played a part in why it didn’t work out with Nelson, because in his lexicon, one of the all-time stupidest popular songs in history was Walk Like a Man, Talk Like a Man, sung in piercing falsetto by the lead singer of the Four Seasons. I think it was in first place for entire-song stupidity, with first place for single-line stupidity—to say nothing of hardheartedness—going to Now laughing friends deride tears I cannot hide.

I was worried about Grace. She was underprotected. I talked circuitously about Meerkotter. She was seeing him, as she put it. I tried to fill her in gently. This was unwelcome, I could tell. Either very little of it was registering, or I was only making Meerkotter seem more exotic and attractive. I let myself mention the glass eye business. There was an explosive effect that astonished me. She began weeping.

She wouldn’t stop. I wanted to know what I’d said to cause this. Ultimately she told me.

People tell you things that make you wonder if the world is fiction or nonfiction. She had started weeping, she said, because of the glass eye. She hadn’t been aware Meerkotter had one, but her father had had one and it was one reason she was a feminist. She had a slightly younger brother and her brother had been the one allowed to assist her father with certain ministrations, including rinsing, concerning her father’s eye. She, never. And she was the one who had truly loved her father. Her brother had disappointed him right and left. The news that she saw herself as a feminist touched me in some way and helped me be a little more patient with her.

It finally came to my saying What is it you want to say to me about your husband—which is what you want to talk about, Grace, isn’t it?

She sobbed summarily and then said yes. She wanted me to know she and Nelson were finished. Nelson was free and she wanted him to be
happy, if he could. She had a sixth sense, she said, about who Nelson liked and would be good for him and she hoped I could forgive her for the way she’d introduced us, but time was short. Had I seen him again yet?

I said that I had and that I liked him and I was interested in his work.

Does he like you? she asked me.

I said I didn’t know, but that it was moot because he was returning to his secret project, which seemed to be a genuine secret as far as location was concerned.

She held up a finger and made herself eat. I think she wanted to be soberer for this part of our talk. I waited. So far nobody would tell me where the site was, not even Z. I gathered there was some new uneasiness and clamming up ever since the solar democracy peroration. For some reason I wasn’t desperate about it. I had faith there was some way to find out that had simply not occurred to me yet.

I know where it is, she said. My lawyers forced it out of him ages ago. I can even draw where it is.

I got out my pad. There was a God.

She did know.

It’s somewhere called Tsau, she said, on a straight line east into the Central Kalahari Game Reserve from a place that sounds like it should be in China, called Kang. I corrected her pronunciations. I was breathless. I even knew roughly where Tsau was. It would be about a hundred miles from Kang. Everything was findable. She could see I was emotional.

You can’t of course tell anybody, she said, because a part of what he’s signed so far says I can’t tell anyone. It has to go no farther. You have to swear. I was never allowed there.

I swore. We relaxed. But why was she giving me all this? My thoughts on this were a bolus, to use a word I owe to Denoon and that seems to have become indispensable to me. Was revenge in it somewhere or was she trying to involve me with him in order to get some legal advantage? This was my realpolitikal lobe speaking. My other lobe sensed this as something personal and unsordid. It was a bolus.

I know all about you, she said. I picked you out before I knew anything except the way you look, but I find out you’re perfect. Everybody has an opinion about you.

I loved that.

You’re like a strong person, I feel, she said. Someone like you must have a lot of siblings. I said no and she was surprised.

I made us go. She held my hand once or twice walking back to the President.

Her South African side of beef was waiting agitatedly for her at the foot of the stairway.

We had an effusive moment where she asked me a little wildly if I would write to her. Meerkotter was already pulling her to come with him.

I don’t have your address, I said. She wrenched free of Meerkotter and fished up a minipurse out of her blouson and began rummaging through it. Again Meerkotter pulled on her. This enraged me, and I must have looked at him in some medusan way because he let go and permitted her to continue searching. Finally she came up with her checkbook and tore out a blank check, which she forced on me. This has my address, she said. She lived in Cos Cob. I didn’t want her check, but in the tension of the moment I couldn’t think of what to do.

Oh, she said, do you know what bruxism is? I forgot to mention this.

Grinding your teeth at night, I said.

Nelson has it. I knew you were smart.

It struck me that I could tear the address out of the check, and I did.

I had a sudden confused feeling toward her. I wanted to say I knew that what she was now was not what she had once been. I think I loved her for helping me. I wanted to say something like Neither am I always going to be like I am. There was no way to say it.

Meerkotter maneuvered her up the steps to the hotel.

I think I’m going to Milan, she said. I think it was meant to reassure me.

Once a week the government sends a flatbed truck, a monster Bedford, the two hundred and fifty miles north from Lobatse to Kang. The trip actually starts in Gabs, whence you go briefly south to Lobatse. The truck carries sacks of World Food Program cornmeal, building material, mail, and soap and other sundries. The load is a huge mound under canvas, which people have the privilege of clinging to the lashings of if
they sign a waiver of liability at CTO. The trucks also provide a good deal of additional, nonapproved, bus service for people encountered along the way. At any given time you can have as many as eight or ten people and their chattels up back.

I was on the truck and waiting for the fun to begin, which would be when we got off the tarmac, at Jwaneng, and onto the alternating sand, washboard, and rubble track that stretches all the way to Maun. The time to think was now, in the predemonic phase, while traffic on the Gaborone-Lobatse road was keeping our speed down in normal range and even bringing us to a dead stop now and then. The sun came up while we were halted opposite one of the few raised landforms in that part of the country, the abrupt little massif with lime-streaked cliff faces behind Ootse, where the Cape vultures mate and roost. They only do it there or at a similar place in the Magaliesberg. Ergo, they’re doomed as civilization creeps up the slopes from Ootse toward the vultury. I understand them, though, I thought. In love and mating, ambience is central.

All was well. I had tied up the loose ends of my life with a vengeance. I had given a jumble sale almost as a joke but ended up making money. I had mailed things off and reduced my possessions to what I could carry. I had said thanks wherever it was applicable. There had been some misdirection. It had seemed like a good idea to give the impression that I was going back to the U.S. I had everything I needed for my sortie including my Botschem tweezers. I was decently equipped for light camping. I had a map of the water points along the route I intended to take from Kang to Tsau, although it could have been more recent. It was six years old, but I told myself that since it had been made during a previous drought it was probably accurate enough.

We were going so fitfully there was even time, between lunges, to chat with my copassenger, a young pregnant woman from Mogoditsane who was under the impression her cousin could get her a job as a cleaner at the abattoir in Lobatse. Her questions showed she was sorry for me that at my advanced age I was unmarried and childless. She also was unmarried. In Botswana, in the villages, the practice is for women to produce a child first, to advertise their marriageability.

That’s up to them, I thought, which reminds me that I have to stop using phrases meaningless except between me and Denoon. See what happen! is another phrase I have to stop using for the same reason. That’s up to them arises from an older Jewish couple who had come to Botswana with the Peace Corps and had had a number of difficult cultural adjustments to make, the one they talked about most being that
their Indian upstairs neighbors ate rice every day. The Roths believed strongly that it was more appropriate to eat potatoes every day as a starch staple. Mr. Roth agreed with his wife that the Indians were strange, but when she continued to wonder over and over at this matter in front of people, his attempt to get her to abbreviate her going on about this was to say—of the Indians preferring rice—That’s up to them. I told this story to Nelson and he found it as obscurely funny as I did, and between us it became indispensable as a signum of the recurring problem of other people doing things you find peculiar or stressful but probably shouldn’t. The provenance of See what happen! was a lake in a park in Oakland where there were flocks of geese and ducks. A rabble of Hispanic boys was there, with one ten- or eleven-year-old ringleader urging a five-year-old minion to try to urinate on a duck. The five-year-old was reluctant but began complying, running after some ducks with his tiny penis out, after the older boy had inspired him with cries of See what happen! The deed was being done in the scientific spirit, apparently. Where could you find a better emblem for dubious propositions being vigorously encouraged, and where is Denoon, who understands, and what is he doing now?

One attractive thing about me is that I’m never bored, because during any caesura my personal automatic pastime of questioning my own motives is there for me. I looked at my copassenger. Was it possible I was homing in on Tsau out of maternal urges I was incapable of recognizing in myself? Was that the kind of fool I was, underneath? I think and hope I’m averagely maternal, but I think I reject the idea that the repetition compulsion, which is my private phrase for the drive to reproduce, is shadowily behind every move we make while we’re fertile.

I don’t see myself as antimaternal, but I’m not under any compulsion to repeat myself, either. I think if I were laden with accomplishments to date or saw some on the horizon I might feel differently. Nor had there been up to then any particular male person I was so impressed with I thought I should contribute to his replication. Was I being attacked by this whole question now because the impetus of my drive to reach Denoon had slackened, physically, for the first time since I began it: I was on a track, being conveyed, passive, stopped, and had a pregnant woman as part of the landscape. Denoon was childless, so far as I knew: and that was interesting. But, next question, if the whole issue of repetition is so uninteresting, why was Denoon’s childlessness interesting? Was he also waiting for the perfect missing jigsaw puzzle partner to complete his inner wholeness and so release him into wanting to reproduce? That I
could be swept out of myself under the sign of absolute love and into embracing motherhood was something I suppose I was assuming, but this has to be bracketed with the population question, on which I’m a fanatic, still. In the cities of the third world your heart is constantly breaking for the children who are either homeless or next door to it, excess children that you feel in your heart of hearts you should be doing something concrete for, creating crèches or schools, something. Also who would want what I was as an adolescent? Pas moi. Denoon once said Do you realize that ninety percent of all the adolescents who have ever lived are alive today? I think I wanted the question of reproduction to be deliberative, as in Well, should we reproduce? or What are we that we should want to reproduce? and so on, à la Immanuel Kant. Of course, this would give you a minuscule world population.

Or was I in fact holding the repetition compulsion at bay at a deeper level with vague self-admonitions that there were more options available in my wonderful home culture than I could shake a stick at, more than there had ever been, e.g., single motherhood via a friend or a sperm bank. Or, just to mention everything, what about a relationship with another woman? This was happening. I have no inclination toward it, but then, presumably, neither had some of the women in my personal range of acquaintance who had astonishingly turned up in that category, mostly during their forties or fifties. In fact I remembered hearing about a woman who was seeing a psychotherapist with the object of overcoming her heterosexuality, presumably in response to the dearth of decent men. Wait, consider the source, I said to myself when it came to me that this story was a gem from the lips of a man with whom I’d had a short sharp relationship which ended when it dawned on me that he was a complete fool, an example of whose level of wit was his whistling or humming the first bars of Two Different Worlds whenever we happened to pass by an interracial couple. There was nothing interesting about Gary, or rather an index of his blankness was that the most interesting thing about him was that he was lactose intolerant. I think I like children. I know I like intelligent children. I might be impatient for a child of mine to talk. I never wanted pets. My mother wanted me to have a dog once, which I tried, and which I rejected because it couldn’t talk to me. This may relate. Infants qua infants fail to produce faintness and emotional synesthesia in me. I might have bonded with my dog if my mother had gotten it for me when I was younger. I had too high expectations by the time I got it. I was precocious.