Norman Rush - Mating

We could never close a certain gap. Everything I was doing in that direction, like fixing up his diet, raising the creature comfort level, I did innocently and because I didn’t think it would hurt anything for him to live a little less exigently. He, for instance, had no stereo. The house I was sitting did, a good one, and a good collection of tapes of Renaissance music. He started listening to them but then made himself stop, abruptly. One evening we were playing Albinoni and making sex — I won’t say making love — nice and protractedly. He couldn’t help turning on me afterward. Clearly the whole thing was too voluptuous for his image. He demanded I stop making custard for him, because it made him feel like a child. Blancmange was another thing I had just learned to make and had to stop making. I had been trying to find out what his favorite foods were and cooking them for him, not such an insidious thing to do. It took ingenuity because of the limits of what can be bought in Botswana: I made clever substitutions. I think I deserved appreciation, not what I got, which was an outburst against Americans for breeding a taste for luxury wherever they went. I tried to be more Spartan. I wanted to avoid fighting. It was too hot for it.

Even if somehow I had been able to overcome being an American, being hypermaternal, being a few years older — which he was sensitive about — there would still have been the question of what discipline meant. I was fascinated by the concept of being under discipline. It took force to get him to discuss it at all, and even then everything was couched so cryptically it was agony.

Martin was under discipline. He would never say whose, even though he knew I knew it had to be ANC. What he seemed perpetually unable to comprehend was that our relationship gave me the right to know something about this situation. I was also interested, in fact initially interested, from a social science angle. If he had been the least bit forthcoming when I first raised the matter we might have slipped past it. Over and over I told him I had no interest whatever in who it was he was under discipline to or what being under discipline was requiring him to do. I was curious about what it meant to be part of a social organism in the way I assumed he was. I wanted help conceptualizing it, was all. I knew his movements were to some extent controlled by orders he got. One reason he put in so much time at my place, I concluded, was because he could get and send phone messages there. There are no phones in Bontleng. But my questioning was never exquisite enough for him. If I asked something like Could you be a member of the movement against apartheid in a contributory way as opposed to the way you are now? he would fly into a rage and treat me like a spy.

Could someone who was under discipline ever be an appropriate mate? This was of course the underlying question I wanted answered. I had serious feelings for Martin. Most of the obstacles between us were probably erodable. I wasn’t prepared to spend a life with him in permanent atonement for being American, but I was confident that if he loved me, it would denationalize my image. But I could never be hypothetical enough to have our discussion come off. I had long since given up asking naive — and, he thought, leading — questions like Do you have to have been born in South Africa to join the ANC? But a question like Suppose someone gave someone an order to kill someone he had nothing against except as a symbol? was also inadmissible. Being under discipline was something I may have reacted to too strongly, as a woman, and I told him that. But nothing helped.

I think he needed our relationship to come apart nastily, to make it easier for both of us.

We almost couldn’t break it off, because just when I’d made the decision someone killed his cat. He had adopted a stray. One night he went home and found it strangled on his kitchen table. The house had been locked. He was very shaken. Then letters to him started turning up with razor slits across the address, just that, the contents not touched. I was terrified, but I kept making mistakes. Here was my heinous suggestion: I thought he should get away for a while and I proposed he come with me to a game area. I had some contacts in the safari business in Maun and I knew how we could do this for next to nothing. I told him it was ridiculous of him to be in Botswana for whatever reason and never see the last and greatest unfenced game area in the world. He looked at me as though I were a criminal. I tried to argue him into it by saying he was missing a unique experience, because camping out in a game area was the only way you could get the frisson of what it must have been like to be a lone human being who was the subject of predation by stronger, bigger, and more numerous animals. This was deeply stupid, and he let me see it. He was already a prey. My heart was in the right place, but that was the end for us.

Nothing happened to him, finally. People I met glancingly through him were ultimately killed by the South Africans, not in Botswana but in Angola or Zimbabwe, where they had gone for safety. He got to England. The ANC has a choir, which he has something to do with.

The British Spy

My last relationship before Nelson Denoon rose in the skies of my life was with a spy, Z. Z is for zed, meaning the last in a series of things of a certain kind. It took me awhile to get him to admit it, but the reason he initially sought me out was because his information was that I was going with Martin Wade, in whom the British High Commission had an interest. I was no longer seeing Martin but I was still trying to keep track of him, see how he was doing, regretting things. It even occurred to me that I could use Z’s attentions to me as a way to get back with Martin by offering to disinform Z, if that was appropriate.

Z didn’t know that thanks to Martin, I knew Z was a spy. I felt I had enormous leverage, for once. Everything I do is so overdetermined. I was moved by the feeling that this was just what I deserved — a spy. He pulled up beside me in a black Peugeot as I was walking home with a netbag of groceries over my shoulder and offered me a lift. Whites do that for one another. I hated to accept free lifts from fellow whites: the Batswana notice it and I empathize with them standing waiting forever for jammed taxis or vans while the whites slide off into the sunset. But I got in. I got in because I had some dairy products I needed to rush to my refrigerator, but I got in even more because Z was a spy.

He must have been mid-fifties. I found him attractive. I don’t despise people for fighting old age tooth and nail, which he was. I like the impulse more in men than I do in women, though, which I should probably explore sometime. He was still well built but showing a little gynecomastia, which didn’t really go with his rectilinear, almost columnar midsection. Later, his first evasion on that subject would be that he was wearing a truss. Then it came out that it was a girdle. He was wearing the usual safari shirt and shorts, and I noticed he had touched up a couple of varicosities with something pink. He was a leading-man type who was just over the line into paterfamilias roles and hating it. He had gray hair worn long on one side and carefully articulated and spray-fixed over his bald crown. His eyebrows were like ledges. I wondered if wanting to be sexually plausible, which he clearly did, had anything to do with needing to be able to do his job, id est extracting confidences. He seemed very tan, but there was something off about the hue, which was another secret of his I ultimately extracted.

What would a spy be like personally? Would a spy compensate, say, for the duplicity of his working day by being the opposite in his free time with his loved ones or one? What kind of spy was Z, in the sense of how far he was expected to go in corruption or surveilling or whatever his job description required? Just as a feat, how much that I wasn’t supposed to know might I be able to get him to tell me? I was getting ahead of myself, but I could tell Z was in a state of appreciation toward me. I gave him a couple of minutes to arrange himself before he stepped out of the car at my place. I had invited him to come in for iced tea.