Mortals (19 page)
Authors: Norman Rush
Ray stopped reading, feeling coldness blossom inside himself. He thought, This is for me, warnings for me, these letters are acts of war … He is striking at me through her. Ray continued reading.
Also, there is a fact of gay life that comes into this that you may not appreciate. I can have my beautiful man and enjoy him intensely as long as I can and not worry about the things I would be worrying about if we were planning to reproduce. There are gay men who want to adopt and so on, a minority, and go for it, I say, if you want that. But there is a certain freedom to enjoy beauty per se that straights must lack, with their great mission of reproducing our species, and so having to consider other qualities, such as brains, for example.
Ray had to stop. He thought, I’m surrounded, this is demonic … The idea is to suggest that Iris is my Joel, my ornament, my toy … We have no children, et cetera, that’s the subtext, that’s it! The bastard!
Now he had to finish the letter. He had to see what else there was that was like this. His hands were shaking. He hadn’t eaten. That had been a mistake.
But getting back to what Joel sees in me, there’s a little more to it. Joel is developing what I would call stirrings of personal ambition, a new thing. He sees me as a writer and a sort of facilitator. He has an idea for a screenplay. In fact he has two ideas. In the first screenplay, there is a pet uprising. Pets attack and kill their owners. And those fortunate enough not to own pets are killed by wild animals who sense their moment of opportunity and rush in out of the woods to
do the deed. Farm animals kill their owners also. Snakes leap up out of toilets, of course. That’s the entire thing. He has made a few notes, mainly of clever ways that the smaller and more innocuous pets might dispatch their much larger human owners. I’m trying to be encouraging to him. By the way, there is no reprieve for humanity in this movie. The pets win. That’s the first screenplay. The second screenplay is what he refers to as a screwball comedy. He doesn’t really know what a screwball comedy is, but he thinks he is conceiving one. In the second screenplay a standard plot (he is vacillating between a western and a film noir) proceeds. The comic element in this western or film noir is as follows: everyday objects employed in the film, like guns or hammers or knives and forks, keep changing in size. In one scene a fork will be a tiny implement like a pickle fork and in the next it will be the size of a pitchfork. A character will, as Joel envisions it, charge around in shoes the size of coffins. Or he will attempt to charge around. Sometimes it will be impossible! The action will be totally impeded by this unreliability in the size of objects, but nobody will ever allude to it. Hence the comedy. And there will be no suggestion as to why this is happening. And that is the screwball comedy. He thinks we could collaborate beautifully on this. I do, in fact, think there is something funny in this idea. It’s certainly high concept.
Just one of Joel’s virtues, not so far mentioned, that I want to touch on. He is kindness itself. A great graphic artist named Posada is from here, a nineteenth-century artist. There is a little museum and gallery devoted to him. Posada was a genius who did upwards of fifteen thousand engravings and woodcuts. But of the original plates and blocks only about four hundred and fifty survive. The bulk of the graphic work was in periodicals that were destroyed or that moldered away years ago. There is no record. My Joel got tears in his eyes when he heard all this.
Why should I feel I want to humiliate this good, boyish man who seems to love me, almost? When you write me, give me any help you can, but also know that it has been helpful just to write this and know that you will be reading it.
My regards to Ray, who, I know, would like to see me humiliated in any way possible. This is something he has always wanted and
which was always as mysterious to me as my own feelings now about Joel are. It could be genetic but I don’t really believe that. Ray hates me because I’m not a True Man. I think he has always felt this way toward me. But if what he thinks is a True Man is a True Man, then he isn’t one either.
Ray paused, thinking Ah, the True Men. Their mother had been an expert at discerning True Men, separating them from counterfeit True Men in the flux of male celebrity. Gary Cooper had been a True Man, as had Gene Tunney, General Douglas MacArthur, and, oddly, one singer, Robert Goulet …
You may tell him I said this. I would love to hear any response he gives you. A True Man would never be gay like me, he thinks. What is a True Man? you ask. I’d say that at the heart of a True Man is a sort of hunger to get as close as possible to the act of obliterating some other True Man, either directly (war) or indirectly and symbolically (nowadays via sports … action-adventure fantasy products … killing animals as surrogates for killing other True Men and using the tally to show everyone how high you rank as a potential obliterator of actual men). You really have to distinguish between the voluntary and the involuntary contents of the mind of a True Man. True Men have to think about work and business, too, in order to eat. Fortunately there is scope for a lot of transferred aggression in economic life, especially at the entrepreneur level. So men have to think a lot about work and making it and turning their firms into killers of other competitor firms. Plenty of True Men are gay, by the way. But I’m not one, and
neither
is
Ray
, mon semblable, mon frère. Ask him. He was never in a war. He hates hunting. He would rather not be outdoors with the True Men. He’s not interested in sports. There’s a psychological thing called the Bem scale. Tell him to take it and see where he registers. I dare him. But I am willing to go on record as saying he will find some way never to do this. I know him.
Ray stopped reading, not out of annoyance but because he was being watched.
R
ay always knew when he was being watched. He was being watched now. It was a faculty he had and not a product of his connection with the agency.
He saw who was watching him. It was Dimakatso. She was standing just within the extreme right edge of his field of view, just visible outside the frame of the breezeway window overlooking the front yard. She had come around that side of the house. She was in and out of sight, but mostly out. He had seen her without moving his head or looking up. He continued ostensibly reading. He had caught her without any movement, he was sure, that would have let her know he was aware of her. Now only her little paunch was showing. He wanted to know why she was behaving so furtively. He couldn’t remember her being furtive in any of her outdoor activities before. She was the opposite. There were times when you had to look away, in fact, like when she pulled up her skirts and rinsed her legs at the standpipe or when she was rubbing the soles of her feet against a piece of log she had, to get rid of calluses.
Something was going on.
He moved closer to the breezeway window. His view comprehended the drive forking from the gate and most of the gate. An overgrown rubber bush half obscured the gate. He was sure Dimakatso had gone back around the house and was now out there somewhere to his left.
He moved even closer to the breezeway window, pretending to be reading with more absorption than before, moving only to get better light.
He wanted to know why nothing, nothing, ever, was straightforward for him in the last year, say. Blame it on a guy named God, he thought.
He thought, Okay! Because there she was, standing, waiting for something. He had caught her edging out from behind the garage. She was poised to go to the gate. She had already made one false start and drawn back, looking in his direction. He kept his head down, which was hard because he was looking into brightness without being able to shade his eyes.
It was clear what this was. He could, of course, go out and see what she had to say. But there was no question about what this was. She was waiting to intercept Iris coming back from wherever she’d been, to warn her about what, though?
It looked like the universal conspiracy of women, stanza nine billion, on the face of it. She was out there to signal to Iris that he was on the scene, contrary to what she expected at this time of day.
He hated it.
The question was whether she would try to signal from the wings or actually run out to give the message. It would be the second. There was something urgent about this business.
Too much is enough, he thought, I have too much to deal with, I have Boyle, I have no more writing, I have my orders, my POI is
not
Morel, no, it’s whoever the most virtuous character in
Pilgrim’s Progress
is, Kerekang is his equivalent, my POI is, if you can believe that.
Dimakatso made another false start.
He thought, Then on top of that include the bastard my brother that no one has ever been able to do anything about: I have to do something, though, from Africa no less, but what?
Dimakatso was in motion, rigidly
sauntering
up to the gate. As a piece of acting, it was pathetic. Iris had to be coming.
He went out onto the patio, still holding the letter, trying to look idly okay.
Dimakatso met Iris at the gate. He had been right. The point had been to alert her, and it could be completely innocent, the reason being a considerate desire that her mistress not be taken off guard. Iris liked the incredibly sour Dimakatso. Or the reason could be sinister, for want of a better word, except that the word had never applied to anything Iris did and couldn’t. Iris saw him.
Iris struck a pose of comic surprise, hands up to shoulder level, palms out. Dimakatso sidled briskly off, looking at the ground. He heard the kitchen door bang.
He loved his wife, shimmering there all in white. She was dressed up,
he would say, that is, dressed up for her, dressed up a little more than usual for going downtown. She was wearing a long white rough linen skirt he particularly liked her in, a longsleeved white silk blouse with shoulder tabs they both thought were funny, her best sandals, but with stockings, which was unusual, and one of her conical Lesotho sun hats, one of the extreme ones with a sort of raffia sphere sitting on the peak. They were ungainly objects and she had to keep this one on her head with cords run through a slip bead and cinched under her chin. The cords left faint, transient grooves in the flesh of her jaw that he liked to press away. Generally, she was well covered up for the sun, as she was supposed to be, except that she wasn’t wearing her sunglasses, which he ought to upbraid her about at some point. A line of brass buttons closed her skirt along one leg. He wanted to unbutton her and tell her everything, which was impossible. Now would be a good time for one of the imaginary crude pickup lines she used to laugh at, whatever they were, like Gee I bet you look tremendous naked, or Let’s go take each other’s pants off.
She came up to him, looking concerned. They were going to talk first about him, about why he was there, at home, and that would leave the delicate question of whether or not she was going to volunteer anything about where she’d been. Or would it be up to him to ask? Questions of her whereabouts had never been an issue, but now that he thought of it, her whereabouts were a gray area, something like opening mail addressed to her before she got to it. Neither of them ever opened letters addressed to the other, although either could read any mail opened and left around. Of course they were both aware he belonged to an organization that gave him access to diabolical machines that could flush out and print whatever was inside an envelope and never leave a sign.
“Is anything wrong?” she asked.
He said that he had felt lightheaded after leaving one of his meetings at the embassy, so he’d come home instead of going back to St. James, and that once he had gotten home there had been an episode of diarrhea, that he was feeling better, now, but Curwen had told him to take the rest of the day off. It was almost identical to what he’d told Curwen. Her breathing was a little rapid, he felt, even allowing for exertion, for hurrying.
She looked somber. She undid the chin cord tie and took her hat off. There were the marks in her jaw flesh. She was wearing her hair straight back, unparted, held by a white bandeau he didn’t think he’d ever seen.
He said, “I feel okay, now. It was quick. Whatever it was.”
“Are you sure? You look a little green. God, I wish I’d been here. I was out walking. Why wasn’t I here? Did you think of calling me to come for you?”
“No, I just hoofed it. I’m fine, Iris, fine, nothing to worry about.”
She touched his forehead with the back of her hand. She was lying.
At least it was possible she was. The way she had tried to slide across what she’d been doing and over onto an adjoining subject was bad. And she was wearing stockings, she would never wear stockings to take a walk. Now
this
, he thought.
“Come inside,” she said.
If it was a lie, he was entering a new world here, a cold place. He hated this place. He shivered, and she noticed it.
“You aren’t well. Look at you shivering.”
He knew he was putting her through something, but there was no way he could avoid it. What he was putting her through was the generic fear of falling ill in Africa, where small things turned fatal because the medical system was what it was, so full of gaps, and because if you started shaking it could as easily be malaria or sleeping sickness as some kind of minor electrolyte imbalance.
He was, now, actually beginning to feel unwell, obviously in sympathy with the story he had told. You could call it a talent, he thought. But of course he hadn’t eaten since breakfast, so that was part of it. Undoubtedly stress was pouring buckets of acid into his stomach. Her lie was the worst thing, it was the worst. He had been okay until she lied, physically okay.
There was no proof she had lied. But he wanted to know since when was she taking walks in the middle of the day, for example? If they walked, they walked in the cool of the evening. If she was out in the midday sun wearing stockings it stood to reason it wasn’t for exercise or for the breeze. There was no breeze. She wasn’t carrying anything, which would fit with walking for its own sake. She had her waist pack on, twisted around to the back, the way she preferred to wear it despite the fact that it was less secure than wearing it on the side. But she wouldn’t wear it on the side because she didn’t want to bulk out the line her hips made. She was entirely deluded about her hips. She was womanly, was all. She was so obstinate, in ways. My hips fill the universe, she liked to murmur as she was getting undressed. And then he would reassure her. It was a routine.