Mortals (82 page)

“Okay, let me see. Well, very generally, it was for therapy.”

“As in psychotherapy.”

“Yes.”

“She was … what?”

“She was in need of therapy. Oh fuck it, man, she was depressed. That’s it.”

“And now she isn’t.”

“Right, she isn’t.”

“Now she’s happy.”

“I didn’t say she’s happy. What I am saying is that she isn’t depressed.”

“Clinically depressed, you’re saying she was?”

“I don’t know what that is. It’s a label. She was unhappy enough to want to talk about it and do something about it.”

Don’t make me kill you, Ray thought. The fact was he had some respect for Morel’s ethics so far. He was holding back information he knew would be painful to Ray, holding it back as well as he could. And he was couching everything he did say so that nothing would be a lie direct when they got to the heart of the labyrinth and met the beast, the one with two backs. Because they were going to get there. On the other hand the man was intolerable and it was intolerable that what he was saying without actually saying it was that Iris was much happier now that she was receiving the doctor’s mighty affection, the doctor’s love and care with the emphasis on love, the clouds lifting, landscapes of joy by Maxfield Parrish springing into view, paradise,
O paradise
. And she was a paradise … a portable one, apparently. No, Morel was smart and tough, but he was going to have to let everything out. It was coming. The man was intelligent. He had to know.

Ray was ready for Morel to be adamant in denial, but this was probably the best moment to go in for the truth.
The Adamant Penis
would be a good title for a porn thing. It could go with the titles of unwritten books in his brother’s olla podrida.
The Butcher Elf
was one of those. He had to get
Strange News
back from the bastards who had it now. It was urgent. He had to try.

“You admire my wife,” Ray said, which was wrong, which would remind Morel of her legal status. It would put his back up. He was going to stick strictly to Iris for the foreseeable future.

“Of course,” Morel said.

Ray felt he needed to switch his angle of attack.

He said, “By the way, I don’t know if this is the right question but what, um, school of therapy are you in, or from? That is, who do you follow? I’m curious.”

Ray waited. There were a number of ludicrous or exploded names he could think of that might be mentioned, like Jung, like the Englishman whose name he couldn’t remember who had encouraged people to go nuts as a form of liberation. And of course Freud himself was in a certain amount of bad odor. It was too much to hope for that Morel would mention somebody Ray knew was an established fool. We live in hope, Ray thought.

Morel said, “No particular school. I took the basic courses for qualifying in psychiatry but I never got a certificate. I read a lot and I rejected a lot and I came up with my own mix.”

“Your own mix.”

“Yes. Well, I like the work of Erich Fromm,
The Fear of Freedom
, do you know it?”

The name was a name he knew and that was all he knew. But he didn’t necessarily like the title of the book Morel had mentioned. And he did realize he had made a mistake, opening up an avenue to a discussion of different schools of therapy instead of getting to the subject matter. He had to retreat so he could attack properly, reculer pour mieux sauter, was the phrase. We live out phrases we barely remember, he thought.

Suddenly something intrusive was going on outside, at a distance. There were cries. He and Morel tried to listen seriously together. The cries stopped. Ray realized that his injuries had come back to life, hurting, all at once. They had been fine when he had been concentrating on the subject matter. Something terrible was going on in what it was fair to call the outside world, but he wanted it to stop mainly so he could continue going where he had been going with Morel. He couldn’t help it.

Morel wanted to keep on listening to the fracas or whatever it was. He wanted Ray to listen with him and that was unacceptable because the subject matter had to be gotten through. Nothing would be normal until that was accomplished.

Ray said, “You find Iris attractive.”

Morel made a show of reluctance in turning his attention back to Ray, to the subject matter.

“When did I say that?” Morel asked.

“But do you or don’t you?”

“She’s an attractive woman. Yes.”

“So you find her attractive?”

“What is this?”

“She’s staying at your place, isn’t she? Can we establish that?”

“She came to the intensive, yes.”

“And she’s still staying there now.” It stands to reason, Ray thought. He was guessing, but he was sure it was the case.

Morel was hesitant. He was contemplating the possibility that word of the arrangement had somehow reached Ray in the depths of the Kalahari.

“You’re right. She’s at my place, looking after things. After we decided I should come up here it seemed to make sense. She’s been helpful around the place, in the office, in the clinic.”

“She’s helpful to you.”

“She is, really. In fact we talked about a position.”

“A position there, with you.” Words are cruel, Ray thought.

“Part-time.”

“So you find her attractive and maybe she could have a job in your establishment.”

“I don’t get this.”

“Sure you do. But let me ask you a different question. Which is this. Assume something happened to me, say. This is hypothetical. Something happened to take me away. A misadventure. You would help her. You’d see that she was fine.”

“Don’t you have insurance?”

“Sure. But say she’s distraught. She needs help. She wants to stay in Africa. Her family in America, forget it. She’s at her wit’s end. You’d help her, take over and help her, orient her. This huge venue you live in, plenty of room. You take people in, you have. She told me about that. It’s something you do. And this is a woman you’ve helped to get on her feet from something that was bothering her, whatever that was. How would I know? But you’ve gotten her out of depression, an episode. She depends on you.”

“Well of course. But …”

“But nothing. You’ve formed an attachment. You’d see that she was all right. Her family is a zero, her mother. She has a sister, you may know about her, a basket case with a child, and we even thought, mainly Iris thought, we should consider taking her in …”

“Oh hey God
damn
me, man, I forgot. I have news about Ellen Iris wanted me to give you. The news about your brother drowned it out, I guess. Sorry.

“Anyway, Ellen met someone. I have to be sure I have this right. She teaches in a Montessori school and what was it, she ran the music program. And she ran a recorder consort, as part of that. And a parent of one of the students, a widower, young widower, joined the recorder consort. Well, young. He was fifty. But in any case they came together and he fell in love with her. He’s an attorney, very, as she tells it, well fixed.

“There’s more to the story. At some point after some stumbling attempt of his to participate correctly in the recital she went up to him and told him she loved him, like that, just announced it …”

“It runs in the family, being very direct. Iris was direct with me. She wasn’t what I was used to,” Ray said.

I have to escape this, he thought. Scenes from his courtship of Iris were the last things he needed to descend on his ass, her straight pure declarations, how little jockeying there had been, the shocks of straight truth, her pure face, her face so graphic.

“So you know all about her family.”

“Oh yeah, pretty much.” He had the decency to say it lightly, but still it stabbed, bit. Everything he says hurts, Ray thought.

Morel kept on. “The main thing is that they’re married. He adores her and the child. So it looks fine. Just between us, I have to say keep your fingers crossed. But Iris is looking on the bright side. She’s very relieved.”

I am plunging into something, falling down, sinking, Ray thought. He wanted to know what it was, why it was, because it was terrible, worse than anything.

I know what it is, he thought. It was Iris needing no help being Atlas, and holding up the world the way it had taken two of them to do. She had only been able to do it with his help, up to now. On the one hand there had been her sister and on the other had been his brother and now there was nothing, the mist leaving the trees. What it reminded him of was the brilliant cover on the magazine
Impreccor
that the Communist International had distributed around the world in the thirties and forties, not to mention the twenties, with the graphic of the muscular worker raising his sledgehammer for yet another blow against the chained-up globe, the world, the chains breaking but also the underlying world fracturing, incidentally. It was all there. He had studied those pages like a madman in the days when communism was going to be a permanent half or three-quarters of the world, including China, and there was going to be destruction, machines of destruction, created in those dark precincts and then it had all turned into mist stuck in the trees on Orcas Island until the sun came out. His brother was gone and her sister was fine. All their thinking of what to do was over and he was unnecessary. Morel had money, like a thick soft cloud and pillow under anything he wanted to do, enough for two of them, enough for her to develop causes and projects of her own. The truth of the matter was that she could begin to think differently about what she wanted to do in the world now that money in larger magnitudes was heaving into view. He couldn’t help but wonder if this hadn’t occurred to her. It was a truth. He was giving her situation a Marxist analysis, which was to say a cui bono analysis. And there was nothing wrong with Marxist analysis, only with Marxist prescriptions. He was not saying she was mercenary, because she wasn’t, as God was his witness. But she would have what, scope, more scope, scope was the word, with Morel. He had intimate knowledge of Morel’s financial status. It was impressive. No, she could think up any number of causes she might want to throw herself into. Or she might want to join the good doctor in his great crusades against circumcision and Christianity, turning back the tide of Christian belief, like Canute. Be yourself, he wanted to tell her. He wanted her to do anything she wanted to. It was only fair. Wife is
unfair, John F. Kennedy should have said. In Uruguay there had been a radical group he had read about in training, Grupo los Canuteros, and it was odd that it was only now he realized the deliberate irony in what they had called themselves. They had identified with King Canute and his broom and sweeping back the waves. They were long gone. Irony weakens, he thought. Morel lacked irony, which was why he was strong and attractive to her and up for a few more runs at the brick wall constituted by everything that was the case.

He said, “Well, that’s good news. Genuinely, Ellen was pretty unstable. We didn’t know what to do. We talked about it a lot.”

Ray got up. It was time to go head-on with the subject matter. He had to be on his feet for that. He wanted his shoes, not that there was anything he could do about it. He wanted to be on the same footing as his rival his betrayer, so to speak. It was unfair that Morel had gotten his shoes back and that he had to proceed with his performance in stocking feet.

He said, “We both want the best for Iris.” He put it as neutrally as he could, as much like an observation about the weather as he could.

Morel nodded. Ray could tell he was back into wariness.

“And also we both believe, you and I, believe in the truth. I mean, that’s what your mission is, here in Africa, basically, I believe … to get the truth out … the truth shall set you free, all that, the truth till it hurts.” He had botched the tone. He hated himself.

Morel was annoyed. He replied sharply, “Why would you say
you
believe in the truth? Maybe you do. But I wonder why you think we’re in the same boat on this.”

This was a gauntlet and Ray hadn’t been expecting it and here it was, take
that
, bang.

Maybe it was all right. Maybe it was for the better, in a way, a contest framed that way. Morel would get war if that was what he wanted.

“You’ve reached a conclusion on me, I see. Based on what?”

“We don’t need to go into it. I’m sorry I said anything.”

“Oh yes we do. You think you have the truth, some kind of truth about me. Go ahead.”

“I know what you are. What you do.”

“Oh and what am I?”

“I don’t need to tell you what you are. You know what you are.”

“You think you know more than you do.” Ray warned himself to slow down. He was talking too fast, agitated. He was on war footing. This was war.

“What do you think I am?”

“I know. Trust me.”

“So Iris told you something.”

“No, not a word. She didn’t have to. What a laugh.”

“What do you mean?”

“You think nobody knows who you work for. It’s a laugh. I was hardly off the plane and I knew.”

“She told you.”

“You’d like to think that. Wake up. Everybody knows who Boyle is, the consular officer you can never get hold of. That woman who works for him does everything in the office.”

This was bad. It was impossible for Ray, the idea of presenting the complete picture of what he was and what he was doing and what he had done, justifying himself. It was the wrong moment. He had to get out of this. He was on the wrong tack. And now he had to deal with the new question of whether, in addition to everything else that had to be settled, whether Iris had revealed what he did. They had an iron agreement about that. Whatever happened, it was supposed to be honored.

“Iris never said anything. That’s what you’re telling me.”

“
There was nothing to tell me
. I told her what I knew. What was being said. It was common knowledge. She wouldn’t even confirm it. She talked around it.”

“But finally she did confirm it to you.”

“All right, after I hounded her. But she only confirmed it after she was convinced I knew.”

“I’ll tell you what’s wrong with this. She knows there are specially, specially approved doctors to go to if anybody connected to the agency needs to see somebody. There’s one in Pretoria. She shouldn’t have done it. She broke an oath.”