Mortals (20 page)
Authors: Norman Rush
Still carrying Rex’s letter, he followed her into the house. She had noticed the letter in his hand but, obviously, had decided not to mention it at this juncture. He thought that must be because she didn’t want to go
down any byways right now. She was thinking. He could tell. She needed time to think her way into her lie. If it was a lie. She needed him not to engage with her for a while. I know you so well, he thought. She would try to stow him away while she thought. That would be next.
“You need to get off your feet,” she said. “And let me get you some cold tea. Also your pulse, I want to take your pulse. We’re sure this is something you ate, right? That would be the best thing for it to be …” Now she was looking pale herself. Before she had been flushed, in fact. It was happening. He was frightening her.
“Excuse me a second,” he said, and stepped into the bathroom. He ran water for a moment, then stood immobile while the water ran. He did it not to deepen his act but to get more time to think, himself. He was in turmoil. Lying is murder, he thought, she is killing me, she has a lover.
Iris insisted that he lie down in the darkened bedroom, which he did. She began naming the teas he could have.
“Give me anything. Give me orange pekoe, then. Or Earl Grey. And tepid is fine. I don’t need it to be freezing.”
She was in favor of an herb tea.
“You gave me a choice and I chose. Orange pekoe is what I want.”
“All right, all right.” She signaled to Dimakatso, who was in the doorway, waiting for instructions.
“Are you angry at me?” Iris asked him.
“No, no I’m just not feeling that great.”
“Did you get something at one of the takeaways? King’s?”
“A drumstick, in effect. I had some chicken peri-peri at King’s before my meeting. I didn’t finish it. It tasted all right.”
“Usually the takeaways are safe. They overcook everything so drastically.”
“I know.”
He declined a warm compress.
She sat next to him on the bed and took his hand. Tea came. He drank some, then lay back, closing his eyes, trying to drive the word
whore
, which was unfair, out of his thought-stream.
She got up carefully. “Stay here,” she said, leaving.
He wanted to sleep, not that it was conceivable.
Dreaming of dreamless sleep
was somebody’s line and not bad. An interval of blankness might help him. He had to get through this. Nothing was going to be right until she admitted she’d lied. She had gone someplace she didn’t want him to know about and then she had lied about it.
He didn’t know how he was going to be able to sound normal when he
talked to her until this was cleared up. She had seemed guilty, or evasive, at least, out on the stoop.
So, had all her unhappiness and discontent lately come to a point in sex with someone else? Or had the sex not happened yet, which would be something, anyway. It could be in the preliminary stages, in the flirtation stage.
But why would she do it if there was nothing the matter with their own sex life?
The last time, she had asked him, Do you want to know what it feels like to a woman when … What it feels like when you come really hard? And she just had. And he had said of course he wanted to know. And she had said, Well, part of what it feels like is like this, that you’re just a drop of oil on a white tablecloth, just a tiny, still drop of oil, and then in a flash you’re expanding outward in every direction, evenly, turning into a stain, a little drop expanding into a bright stain that covers the universe, the process of that, the expanding … that’s part of it …
Anyone in his right mind would take that as a compliment from his wife.
Of course, she was unusual. She had an appetite for sex that was probably unusual. She liked it about herself. She was humorous on the subject. When he had said, and this was a compliment or at least an appreciation, when he had said Don’t you think you let yourself be felt up more than the average woman does without complaining? she had answered I have no idea how much the average woman complains.
What was he supposed to do? What?
He was accommodating, also, in his opinion. They did what she wanted. They played games. They had fun. There were so many examples. What was her problem? There were so many examples, even recently. The last game, how had it started? He couldn’t remember, but there had been a discussion of what it would be like to have sex with someone who was in the hospital. Now he remembered. It had come up because someone they knew had done it. They had speculated about the mechanics of it and she had gotten mildly aroused and what with one thing and another she had asked him if he could imagine himself making love to her when he was in the hospital, when of course there was no lock on the door to his room. And he had described himself doing it to her when she came to visit him in the hospital during this imaginary convalescence. And then to amuse her he had gone into the bathroom and wound gauze rather obscenely around his naked torso and then come
back to her, and it had amused her, and she had gotten into the spirit of the game, though afterward she had teased him for the gauze, for being so literal.
One last thought and then he would stop thinking along these lines, but the fact was that at thirty-eight the conventional wisdom was that she was at her peak, or just getting there, and she had always been sexually lively. And then the last thought was that, of course, the point of some of the games was for one partner or the other to be somebody else, so maybe games led to an appetite for a real somebody else, which would constitute an argument against too many games.
Where had she been?
Who was there
for
her in walking distance? But since anything could be a lie, it was possible she had been picked up anywhere and dropped off down at the corner. Or she could have walked one way and been driven back afterward and dropped off. Or was it conceivable the whole thing was to trick him into thinking she had done something she hadn’t, make him jealous so that she could dissolve the whole thing by proving that she’d been someplace innocent? But that was ridiculous because she’d had no idea he would come home early and find her gone.
He heard the shower. Iris was in the shower.
That’s nice, he thought. Normally she showers in the morning, so why is she showering now? Morning or evening, always, unless she was rinsing the evidence off, if there was evidence.
There was no point in pretending to sleep. He was too agitated. He had to be doing something.
Perfect, he could read some more Rex, as much as he could stand, anyway. He skipped onward from where he’d stopped, by a few pages.
At the market in Mérida there was a madman Joel found fascinating. This was an emaciated indio who sat on a straw mat for long periods holding up a hand mirror at various distances from his face, sometimes holding it close up and sometimes at arm’s length. Then at intervals he would go into an apparent state of rage and violently shake the mirror to get his image out of it, presumably. He shakes it so hard you think he is going to get hurt. The moment is frighteningly violent. And that’s the climax of his act, after which he starts another bout of staring. Now Joel is finding an increasing number of things to complain about, like the absence here in Oaxaca of anything as picturesque as the madman in Mérida. And
about the absence of something which is, so far as I can tell, totally unobtainable in Mexico, which I tend to take as a sign that he wants us to go home to dingalingdom quite soon. He needs Toll House cookies.
Well, time to cease, for now. I’ve been at this so long, Joel will be fuming.
Later. Definitely, we are coming to the end of things here. Now Joel is tired of the processions, which formerly were his chief delight. Many, many processions empty into the zocalo, either at the Cathedral next to us or at the Gobernación across from us, behind the bandhouse or pergola or whatever it is. I myself like the processions.
From your balcony you look down one of the streets that end here and you see, for example, what looks like a column of giant lollipops approaching. But it turns out to be women, matrons, wearing taffeta party dresses and sporting sunburst headdresses and keening something. Political processions go straight to the Gobernación and graffitize the walls of it (while the army & police look on benignly) and then as soon as the processions disperse, a special team comes out of the Gobernación with paint rollers and paints over everything. They use extremely fast-drying paint. They have to, because there are sometimes two political manifestations in one day. The peasant demonstration yesterday afternoon, someone explained to me, was because gunmen secretly connected to the government were killing them, of all things. The banner they were carrying was a sort of naive art masterpiece, huge, and featuring a rosette of red fists around some monogram or other. Joel likes the religious processions better, or did until one night when a very short procession arrived consisting of a flatbed truck with a hideous effigy of a saint on it attended by little girls dressed as angels and mechanically making their hands do falling leaf motions to, I guess, show adoration. Joel rushed down to see and arrived just as someone in the truck began tossing cherry bombs down among the feet of the few watchers. Now Joel doesn’t like religious processions at all. Now, in fact, to this man who was formerly nonstoply snapping his fingers and grooving generally, to this man Mexico is “too noisy.”
Well, dear friend, that will be all until next time. I don’t have them with me, so I can’t comment properly on the limericks you wrote.
What
limericks?, Ray wanted to know:
Which
limericks?
Ray and Iris had collaborated on limericks. But that had been long ago. He put the letter down.
The droning of the shower continued, which he didn’t like. Iris was always economical about showering because the geyser that heated the water ran on electricity and electricity was expensive. This was the longest shower she had ever taken, it seemed to him. Thanks, he thought.
He couldn’t deal with more venom, more Rex, and he couldn’t keep lying there doing nothing. He had to deal with Morel, was the main thing he had to do, but he couldn’t think about it, not now while he was being lied to.
He had to occupy himself with something practical.
Valentine’s Day was coming and he had his traditional poem to do. He did one every Valentine’s Day. He would force everything out of his consciousness except that. He could work on his poem and make it sing.
He didn’t have much, so far.
Does Julio love a sunlamp?
Does Tarzan love a Vine?
Does dumda love a dumda?
Are you my Valentine?
The title was going to be It Goes Without Saying. If he could think of something that implied the sentiment without stating it, he’d use that instead. Or it could be untitled.
Everything is so delicate, he thought. There were cases where wives fucked outside the hearth just once or twice and then regretted it so much they became even more doting than they’d been before. These were in literature. So one route would be to remain passive, just agree to be deceived for some period and then see. This is fantasy, he thought, I am injured, literature is not life.
Did Nero love a fiddle?
Does Yeats not love a Trine?
Does dumda love a dumda?
Are you my Valentine?
He thought,
But why am I doing this if I think she’s betrayed me? …
because she may not have, except that I smelled fear on her … that’s the thing, unfortunately.
The shower went on. The length of this shower was important.
Or I could make it the best valentine I ever wrote, he thought, shame her and remind her. There had been a decline in complexity, a decline in the amount of effort he put into the project, over the years. And there had been a drift to the more humorous and away from the grandiose, as he now considered them, the grandiose efforts of the early days of their marriage, his efforts at real poetry. Although it wasn’t all his fault that he’d stopped attempting a certain kind of valentine. She had complained about some of the early ones. That wasn’t true. She hadn’t complained but she had noted that they seemed to contain a despairing tone not exactly appropriate to the occasion. One of his lines,
The last light slips from the highest peaks
, had led to a discussion he had come away from depressed, he remembered, or deflated. Also, now she was writing limericks herself, apparently. What could he do?
The shower-sound stopped. A dense silence replaced it.
There were other things in their past … like the game of Baseless Admonitions, where one of them would shout completely arbitrary or inappropriate injunctions and warnings and accusations at the other, like
You love only gold!
or
Be true to your school!
or … what others?
This means war!
Christ, there had been dozens of these canards and where were they now?
You mate with any beast!
had been another one, thank you very much. Why had the game dropped away? This was an interesting question, and so was the question of who had been the first one to stop initiating these exchanges.
Last year’s valentine had been the shortest.
Rude Time won’t go away
But neither will my love for you
,
So that’s okay
.
But she had claimed she liked it, loved it, and now this …
Iris came tentatively into the room, wearing a bathrobe now, a towel around her neck. It meant nothing, necessarily, that her eyes seemed red.
“You’re awake,” she said.
“Well, the shower …”
“I’m sorry.”
He reassured her that he was better.
She came to him, took his hand, and looked imploringly, he thought, down at him. Something was coming. He pulled himself up against the headboard. She had something clutched in one hand, a card, white, a note? It was going to be relevant. What was it?
She sighed, looked away from him, then reached over and pushed Rex’s letter out of the way, as though she wanted the zone around him empty of any distraction. She tried to begin, twice. It was clear she didn’t know how to begin with whatever was coming and about to kill him, no doubt. She patted his hand, which was the worst sign possible. He was numb.