Norman Rush - Mating

Another question I had was Supposing I were more vocationally clear and driven and less skeptical and ambivalent, how would that affect this? It wasn’t that I was no longer interested in nutritional anthropology. I am and was. And I knew that with a modicum of luck and encouragement I could blow on the embers and get the son et lumière back, probably. But pursuing Nelson had filled the skies of my mind with another edifice. I would try to revivify my feeling for anthropology from time to time, even carrying my efforts into little fantasies of pulling out, going alone and whole hog back to Stanford and into a new thesis and a new thesis adviser and lo and behold having Nelson without warning turn up, having followed me across the world to be with me. But if he didn’t come, what then? And what about having to deal with the dynamo women who were taking over in anthropology, the ones who had been smarter and who had done it better, who would be really en route, some of them with husbands they loved, who loved them, children already? And what would I do when it turned out that the most interesting thing I could tell anyone was anything I was willing to divulge about the great social genius Nelson Denoon, who was rumored to have been very attached to me at one time?

This moment in my life wasn’t good and had to end. To live in Tsau decently you have to attend to small things. Distraction can hurt you. I got slipshod about checking the bedclothes for scorpions, for example, and felt something on my ankle one night and that was what it was. I knocked it away before it could sting, but it was a warning to me.

My dreams were not helping me in any way. In one of them I had a suitcase and was entering a house that was like a child’s drawing and in one of whose windows I had caught a glimpse of a name anthropologist, male, who had once expressed an interest in me but who was, I had found out, bisexual. When I got inside the house it was a place where I had lived briefly with my mother, a rickety cottage on the outskirts of a quarry. There was blasting at any time of the day, two or three times a week. In this house there were no level surfaces. You would get used to it but then the next time they blasted, things would slide in a direction you weren’t adapted to. My mother in a deluded attempt to spruce the place up had pried down the lath covering the joins in the beaverboard panels that made up the ceiling and had tried to spackle and repaint the whole thing to create a more seamless effect, because, as I recall, she hated the feeling of being under a grid. But unfortunately the outcome was that as the grout between the panels dried out and the blasting continued, little bits of stuff and dust would drop down on you, especially, it seemed, when you had your little friends over for a tea party. Anyway, that was the house I was back in, in my dream, although nothing seemed to be going on and there was no sign of my mother.

One night I looked at my right hand and noticed a callus like a little knob just above the first joint on my middle finger, and a padlike thickening on the tip of my index finger that I’d been unconsciously picking at lately, all due to incessant writing. This has to end, I said to myself.

A Branch of Tsau Is Needed

One morning he was up before light. He was gathering things together and putting them in a pack. I’m leaving, I thought I heard him say.

Naturally I was electrified. He looked altered. He was purposive. If he was packing, I should be packing too, n’est-ce pas? I was afraid to say or do anything that would threaten the construction I was placing on things.

But he undeceived me in a flash. He knew what he was going to do vis-à-vis Tsau. He was going to go, now, at once, to the minuscule hamlet of Tikwe. Tikwe was forty-five miles to the north of us. In the stretch of desert between us and Tikwe, there were no settlements whatever. He, singular, was going. He was looking for my water-points map.

He would be going to Tikwe for a specific purpose. It was time for Tsau to have a sister colony, an affine of some concrete sort. The lack of a sister or daughter colony was at the root of what was wrong in Tsau. People had to be confronted with the need to spread the idea of Tsau rather than merely reposing comfortably in it. There needed to be exchange. Exchange would concentrate the public consciousness in Tsau on what Tsau truly was. People in Tsau had gotten too casual and spent too much time writing letters to poor relations elsewhere, essentially lording it over them. In Tikwe he would see about setting up a branch of Tsau, or at a minimum explore bringing back a couple of women as interns. Tsau had the wealth to begin to expand modestly, and this was modest. Also he would be able to see if there was any news of Hector in Tikwe.

Sit down while we eat something, I said. I could smell danger all over this project, commencing with his mode of conveyance. He was going to borrow — this was his word — a horse. Tsau owned two horses. I knew this was something that had to go through a committee, and he was not planning to go through a committee. He was departing immediately. He was speaking in short sentences and sentence fragments, I pointed out to him. I said Being this terse is proof this whole thing is precipitate, isn’t it?

I was frank with him. This is action for the sake of action, I told him. There was no risk, he claimed, and if there was, it was a fraction of what I had faced in coming to Tsau. He knew this patch of the Kalahari inside out, whether I believed that or not. In any case he wasn’t going to argue the central proposition, because that would be time-consuming and he was definitely determined to go. If he was wrong, so be it, it would cost him a week and then he would be back to rejoin the waltz and I would have been proven right about something yet again.

I could stop you, I said. I could notify people. I love you, which you’re exploiting: you know I won’t stop this. But I should. I should, just to stop you from talking to me in this particular way ever again. I am not your audience. Remember that. I’m dead against this and I love you, but nothing I say can have the slightest effect on you, can it? We both know it. This is patter you’re giving me, and you’re the supposed proclaimed enemy of the idea that women are just pontoons for the various male enterprises coming down the pike, but look at this. What would be wrong with going tomorrow or the next day? The problem is that the women would make difficulties for you. They are not going to love your absconding with one of our horses. This is going to be left for me to handle. In fact you need me to be here, which is why I can’t go along if you have to leave without notice like this. Isn’t this right? If we took both horses without a by your leave, there would be hysteria to the skies. But with me left behind I can rationalize, I can explain, I can invent the reasons why this had to be done without notice, and so on, right?

I made him let me check on his food choices, which were adequate. But he had forgotten both the first aid and the snakebite kits. He found them.

I am trying to save this place, he said.

But you don’t deny anything I’m saying, do you? I asked.

No, he said.

This is wrong, I said.

Why Was He Doing This?

I talked to myself after he left. He wasn’t a fool, so why was he doing this, or why did he feel so absolutely that he had to do it? I was full of staircase wisdom. Maybe the conviction was establishing itself that people wanted him to go, actively in some cases, clearly, and more passively in others. So that by this action he would reverse everything and create a new role for himself it would take them awhile to fathom and object to. So that he could stay. I could have raised this possibility with him. I could have raised the possibility that all the approval for and orchestration of our getting together as a ménage had been directed at the same thing, something permitted to happen premised on the prescient idea that I was younger and would be likely to have an agenda that would pull us both away sooner rather than later. I could have found some way to get under the closed surface of his patter. I could have made him argue, somehow.