Mating (38 page)

Afterward I was extremely elated. There was an impromptu lunch set out for us when we got back. Denoon claimed all this happened on the very day he was going to ask me to think about moving in with him but that seeing me so elevated and involved with the group, he had decided to hold off. I think I do recall him contemplating me avuncularly while we were eating and being told how valiant we were. He even insisted he’d felt an extra attraction occasioned by my amazonesque accessories and general look. Only a fetishist would say that, I said. In any case, it would be a few days more until I was asked, and asked poorly, if you ask me.

I was enjoying working. For one thing, I was very approved of for working more than I had to and for being goodnatured about volunteering my brawn for some of the heavier jobs. I liked being able to skip work altogether if I felt meditative. I especially liked shifting from one phylum of work to another and also that from time to time spontaneous singing would break out during certain kinds of gang work. These songs were real inventions. They were topical. There used to be something like them in rural Mexico. They were far removed from people robotically lip-synching along with the top forty, which was my closest workplace experience analog. Also work was transparent, unabstract. I was halfway into a state at right angles to my usual American median state of being in which you are in perpetual anxiety about the next thing that’s supposed to transpire in your lifeplan, to the point that you can barely enjoy the thing you’ve just done or the plateau you’ve reached. Can you get pregnant? You do, but then will your child be healthy? Will it be popular, productive, and if it’s a girl will she be assertive but not abrasive? And so on unto whether she is going to abandon you or not when you get old and burdensome. It resembles being a writer and having each book you write being judged essentially on how promising it is, what it augurs about how well you might do next time out. In America there are people who spend all year in agony because they don’t know what quality of New Year’s Eve party they’re going to get invited to. Even in summer camp, which is supposed to be a respite, it was impossible to relax, because the Lutherans who were so charitably giving me a scholarship fixed it so that I was striving the whole time to rise into the next and less humiliating grade of the swimming competence hierarchy or be the object of subtle scorn—not that they realized it. All this was falling away. Partly it was just being with Africans, who are so much the reverse of the American anxiety. And who knows how much of my luxe and calme may have been my romantic reaction to the idea of the experience I was having rather than the result of the experience itself, by which I mean reaction to received ideas about the beauty of communal labor, women
being in charge, and so forth. Another perfect fragment from a different imperfect favorite poem of Nelson’s describes pretty well the way I was feeling: Zeno’s arrow in my heart / I float in the plunging year. Basically the reason I don’t know why I felt the way I did is because unfortunately we don’t know what we are, anthropology notwithstanding, even though the reason I clutched anthropology to my bosom was because I believed that academic disciplines did what they said they were doing rather than being hotbeds of dominance behavior where disagreeing on the simplest point gets you into a Götterdämmerung with somebody or his disciples. Another layer of it all was the problem of my knowing that Nelson would no doubt love me more if I loved his system, which Tsau was, tout court. He would be happy if I was happy, he would be seduced if I was seduced, and so on into the night. So it was another bolus.

It was public when Nelson asked me to come and live with him. He chose a cream tea which happened to be particularly well attended. I’m still annoyed. He strode over and drew me to my feet as in some period movie. It was done to be observed. I suppose I betrayed myself to some extent, because I could have said We should talk this over later, but in fact my relief that the moment had arrived was too much. I did want it. I’d sought it. It could be seen as just one more instance of Satan controlling the timing. I accepted with a nod. Some women at my table said Ow! which signified surprise, pleasant surprise, and was just short of ululating on the applause meter.

We embraced. On my part it was dutiful but numb, and brief. A kiss, which I was in no mood for anyway, would have shocked the Batswana, who still mainly regard the act as outré.

I brought up his peculiar choice of venue much later. Horrifyingly his shortlived initial position was that he had chosen the moment on impulse and not out of any public relations consideration. I controlled the rage I felt, but I said You are a liar. It was over almost instantly, with Nelson admitting everything and apologizing and concluding by saying what a bad liar he had always been.

You are? I said in a tone that must have been more underlined than I intended. It made him look warily at me for a long time. He sensed something.

Nelson came to dinner that evening, bringing gifts for Mma Isang that served as a sort of joke surrogate for lobola. It was a nice touch. There was a small crowd hanging around. Individuals wandered in and out, giving good wishes.

The joke brideprice Nelson brought consisted of various delicacies of which I remember particularly a can of mandarin orange segments and a jar of marmite. He was trying to promote marmite as a spread. I had intimated to him that it would be advisable for there to be a general increase in B-complex intake. Marmite is yeast, so Nelson was reviving an earlier failed effort to get people to like it. He would say things like This is very popular in Australia. At our little leavetaking ceremony he was eating marmite demonstratively himself on water biscuits and buttering biscuits with it and passing them around the way hostesses do at parties where they’ve put hard work into a gourmet dip that isn’t going over at all well. Mma Isang told me emotionally she would always be my mother.

We had a friendly entourage all the way to the octagon. King James made a thing out of saying the dung cart service was free. All my things were in his dung cart.

I thought I heard some distant ululating vaguely below us and assumed, wrongly, that it was just more good wishes for the hymeneal party. You get very used to ululating being the normal expression of high spirits and best wishes in Africa. In fact after you adjust to ululating as the norm, it makes applause seem strange and less delicate. Denoon agreed. Once during rest and recreation he had been privileged to hear Vladimir Horowitz playing sonatas in London, and it had been sublime. And then the applause had begun and he had experienced the bashing together of hands as a way of expressing appreciation as being animalistic, crude. In all my time in Africa I never learned to ululate, but not because I didn’t try. Self-consciousness blocked me. I took the ululations I was picking up as equivalent to scattered applause for our getting together, leftover enthusiasm like the firecrackers you hear being set off at
wide intervals on the fifth of July. Nelson stopped our progress a few times to look and listen. He had a different idea of what was transpiring, clearly, and so apparently did our entourage, which departed rapidly once they got us to our doorstep. What’s going on? I asked him as we started my moving in. Maybe nothing, he said.

We kissed a bit, and I complimented the way things looked. The interior was changed utterly. I was extremely happy. He had applied himself to making the house something that would be more amenable to my needs, as he conceived them, down to placing little bouquets variously about. He was happy too, but I sensed I was holding him indoors and was proved right when he said Just a minute, and went out. I followed and found him standing at the edge of our terrace, gazing north.

All at once I was aware of the thick feel of the night. Denoon pointed: the stars were disappearing on a broad front north of us. A feeling like the one you get descending in an express elevator came over me. My shins prickled.

He said Do you have any idea what everyone is going to think if we get rain tonight? It would be the best omen you could imagine. He was elated. It was June and not a time when rain should be expected. Good, he said, they see it. The plaza bell had rung to warn people to get things covered up in case of hail.

He wanted to watch the storm descend, if it was indeed going to. The distraction was fine with me. We were shy. We had both been very shy discussing the bed. He had been apologetic. The mattress was new, double size, but it was still maize husk and not foam. There were a few foam mattresses in the stores house, but new households had a claim on them. I had insisted the mattress felt fine to me and that he should stop going on about it. What we both knew was that we had the moral equivalent of a wedding night looming. We were volatile. Our feelings, my theory is, were exceeding what we’d expected them to be. Mine were.

We got footstools and sat touching, facing the storm. The first lightning, like filaments, shone far away.

I took his hand. Are you willing the storm to come this way? I asked him. He smiled and said Of course. I am too, then, I said.

It crawled toward us, magnificent and immense. It looked organic, I thought, more like an electrified placenta than anything else. The breadth of the lightning display was amazing. It was transfixing. Earlier it had been cool, but now for long moments it was tropical and there were hot surges of air in the trees. The magnitude of the storm had not
been lost on anybody in the village. Doors were being slammed, there were outcries, commands were being shouted.

Never have I seen any natural event like it. I shuddered and had pop philosophical insights, viz. human beings are microcosms of this vast oncoming system in that the thing that allows us to salivate and think and embrace is also electrical, in essence. We were related, this behemoth air beast and myself. I was its pale affiliate. Also I felt I was being acted on at some constitutive and possibly electrical level. I was terrified and wanted to get out of there, but something was preventing me from doing that, I mean besides Denoon’s presence.

Tremendous thunder was involved, guttural at first but like metal ripping as it got closer. We stood up. Denoon put his arms around me. I happen not to be one of the many women who find thunderstorms sexually arousing. My associations with thunder, or more specifically long sequences of thunder, are, for some reason, with experiences in which you are helpless, the involuntary in general, and throwing up in particular. I’ve always been more or less phobic about vomiting: having to vomit, feeling it coming on, being in the grip of something wherein you’re a bystander at some animal internal event, some overriding need of the systems that constitute you and that aren’t your mind. As a child I resisted throwing up when I was ill, and regarded anyone who told me just to let it come as strange. If they went further and urged me to elicit the gag reflex, I knew they were insane. I would keep my head between my legs until my face turned black rather than surrender. During my first adventures in overconsumption of alcohol, when I realized that vomiting was frequently among the sequelae—which others might accept—I became pretty much a lifelong abstainer. Thunder is obviously a metaphor for something happening that no one can stop, which a good number of women I’ve talked to admit they find erotic, the idea of being overwhelmed, as by passion, notwithstanding how counterrevolutionary they know that whole thing is. But so are we made, some of us.

For me another link to vomiting is the destruction of my mother’s last best chance to secure a better life for us. Through a friend my mother had gotten recommended for a job as a receptionist, with the prospect of moving up to bookkeeping. She was prepared to demonstrate that she knew bookkeeping. Her friend had coached her for a month. Concurrently my mother had been crash dieting in a pathetic attempt to get within armslength of normal overweight. My mother is not stupid. She is accursed but not stupid. She learned bookkeeping. But on the eve of her interview she had lost a trifling amount of weight and was still, by
any standard, terribly fat. So in a moment of hysteria she decided that the thing to do to get the last ounce of fat off her that she could would be to induce vomiting. So she had gone into the bathroom and stuck her finger down her throat and, because she’d eaten virtually nothing, got almost nothing up. So she had performed the act repeatedly, enough times to burst every capillary in the whites of her eyes, thusly guaranteeing that she would show up at the interview as a certifiable movie monster with eyes like embers. In the morning, there she was with this condition. So it was her one big chance, she just knew, down the drain. After that it was aide positions in playschools. Don’t miss your one big chance, was the message to me my whole childhood. Of course the one-big-chance-lost proposition is often a lie. Nelson’s father had a one-big-chance story too, which was supposed to explain his ending up in advertising. He had been given a partial scholarship to a place called Brookwood Labor College, which had he gone to it might have changed his life. Other people who came out of Brookwood had gone on to do significant things in the labor movement. But his mother had either refused to give him the little extra he needed to support himself at school or in some even more insidious way had put a spoke in his wheel—she was a follower of Father Coughlin—so that naturally he had been forced to drink his way through life thereafter and apply his genius to being a brilliant sellout in advertising, the obvious antiprofession to leading labor for a living.

The storm was a cage sliding over us. I wanted to retreat to the octagon, but Nelson wanted to stay put until he felt rain. Staying there was ridiculous. The thunder was so shattering you wanted to get down low. The ozone smell was cutting, a stench and not just the usual tinge. I relinquished our embrace and decided it would be better to annoy him by pulling him back with me than see him electrocuted before my very eyes after I’d come this far. Lightning was streaming over us and striking the summit of the koppie. I swore to him I could hear rain coming.