Norman Rush - Mating

You have to come home, I said, you have to be back with me.

I hadn’t had any intention of saying that, but I did.

I said You don’t know how much I have to hold myself in, with you here and me just visiting. You have no idea. When I washed, took care of, your feet the first night I thought of saying Your feet are killing me, which I repressed. That little joke. I was afraid. Don’t you think that’s slightly funny? Your feet are killing me? I was afraid even to say it under my breath. I thought if anyone did anything wrong you might die.

One disconcerting discovery was that apparently he had gotten to like the pajama pants the infirmary supplied him, so much in fact that he had requested that some copies be made for him out of stronger cloth, some heavier white cotton we had. And to wear with these he’d also had made a sort of sleeveless top on the order of a roomy vest, also white. What was going on? I’d brought him a pile of clean laundry, and I realized that the only things he’d chosen to wear were his white tee shirts. This too shall pass, must pass, I told myself.

3. Coming back to the octagon was as arbitrary a decision as lingering at the infirmary had been, so far as I could tell. He hobbled in and sat down.

We went through the preliminaries, or I did, about how it felt to have him back. I had overprepared the event. Our place was pristine. We had fresh bed linen, clean curtains, and the rugs and karosses had been aired and beaten. I had overprepared the event, and myself, in the sense that all this refurbishment had been driven by the anticipation that with his return to the octagon everything would revert to the way it had been before he left for Tikwe. I was emotional. I was compulsively scanning for signs that everything was going to be all right. It was essential that we be back to normal. Anytime I willed myself into thinking of not being with Nelson, all the physical strength went out of me. He seemed to appreciate all my cleaning up, although I thought I saw a quizzical shadow pass slowly over his features when he fingered one of the karosses. Our karosses had shed quite a bit. I hadn’t known you had to beat them a lot more gently than rugs.

I was trying to preempt everything. On his pillow I’d laid out a sleep mask, against the possibility that it might take him a little while to get used to sleeping next to an insomniac again. He looked quizzically at the sleep mask. My policy was to keep everything light, amusing. I said Do you remember the first time you saw me with my sleep mask?

He was making a good faith effort to remember, but it was taking too long. Throughout this whole time I was fighting against images of someone I had known who, post acid, could take ten minutes to roll up a shirtcuff because the aesthetics of the procedure were, in his illuminated state, so exquisite.

I said The first time you saw me with my sleep mask you took it off me and put it on and went around crashing into the furniture and said Tonto, give me the scissors, the outlaws are escaping!

The outlaws are escaping, he said meditatively. This was a new tic also. He seemed to consider a repetition of the last clause or phrase I’d just said to be an adequate contribution to an ongoing conversation.

I said I remember it because I think it was maybe the first time you went out of your way to make me laugh by acting stupid and going beyond your urbane sort of humor. Remember we’ve discussed this?

Then he remembered. I am grasping at such straws, I thought. Which led to the epiphany that there should be some comical game going, like our The band can’t play because dot dot dot. This would turn the clock back. There was an idea for one lurking in my mind, if I could entice it out.

Do you mind if I tape us? I asked. This was mainly to gain time. I half thought he might very well say Are you insane? Why? To which my answer would be that it was celebratory, just my way of capturing something important, forget it.

Tape us? Certainly.

Certainly what?

Certainly yes, tape us.

I was slow and obtrusive about setting up to tape. I put the recorder very near him. He was sitting at our dinner table with his hands again in the nested palm-up configuration that I hated so much. Everything was more than okay with him.

One inchoate idea for a game had involved a child’s questions to mom, and mom’s clever deflective responses, such as the child saying Mom, why does Dad always sandpaper his fingertips before he goes to work at night? To which Mom has an ingenious response having to do with the better to do such and such and provide for us. But all I had was the question to mom, not mom’s brilliant collaborative-with-evil lie, and without mom’s response there was no game. But then there was another possible game, which my feeling of grasping at straws reminded me of. This game was The Intellectuals Have a Picnic. They have a picnic and play games that are their equivalents of Pin the Tail on the Donkey. Grasping at Straws was one, Knocking Down Straw Men was another, or Setting Up and Knocking Down Straw Men, and Putting the Cart in Front of the Horse, and Kick the Cant. Then there was just a stray shard from The Band Can’t Play series, having the band not being able to sleep because Teutons had stolen the futons. But there was nothing good enough to insert. And I was taping mostly silence, which just in itself was unbearable, the cost.

The outlaws are escaping, he said for the second time. This I couldn’t bear, and I began to weep behind his back. He must not have heard me, although I can make it out on the tape.

I had no idea where to take hold of things. Certain traits I wanted desperately to stop in their tracks, like this repeating business. I wanted to say Are you repeating after me because you want to savor certain lines or words? But I was afraid noticing it openly would concretize it somehow, make it harder, not easier, for it to go away. Even my acid friend eventually lost interest in his shirtcuff.

We will, someday, sit down and just go through everything, won’t we?

He seemed to nod.

Doing it soon would be good, because people are making things up that are ludicrous.

They’ll stop, he said.

No they won’t, I said. Not until someone can say with some sort of authority that this is what happened and that this is a fable, such as you. Or me.

It was a mistake, he said.

What was?

Going into it. People are going to forget about it.

Do you think you’re different since Tikwe?

Do I think I’m different. Yes. I don’t know. I was different before.

This was going to lead to a paradox of some kind. I had no appetite for it.

Just tell me this, I said. Just tell me if this is right, that something momentous happened to you on the way to Tikwe, you think.

Something momentous. I think so.

It was up to him to elaborate. I could have made him do it, led him to do it. But the sense that I represented the forces of interruption was too much for me, the sense that I was keeping him from certain sessions of sweet silent thought, sweeter and more important to him than anything else on earth.

We sat in silence.

I hated life.

Conspiracies

In my attitude toward Tsau I was stuck at a paranoid level. All I did all day was revolve the permutations of the explanations for the lurid impasse I was in. There were explanations in which everything that had happened was connected, like parts in a complicated machine. There were explanations in which everything critical that had happened to me was accidental. Certain things could have been charades. Dineo’s dilatoriness about letting me organize help for Nelson could have been a result of the fact that she somehow knew he was all right someplace. Possibly all this was an ordeal designed for me, something to test how much I wanted this man. Or possibly Nelson wanted me out and gone. Or possibly I had just been a catspaw of forces that had favored my getting together with Nelson in order to move him along the path to departure, stimulating him to speed it up by my ordinariness and consumerism and need to get back to the country money comes from. Or possibly Dineo had disposed of Hector in order to break up Boso and stimulate Dorcas into going somewhere else. On it went with me. Possibly the original idea had been to use me to get Nelson’s case of founder’s disease out of the vicinity and into a project on some other continent, leaving the women of Tsau to evolve in their own way. But maybe the new revised passive Denoon was another story: maybe he was now someone who could be useful in his present form, a Prince Albert in a can for Dineo. Or was it conceivable Nelson had disposed of Hector and out of remorse dumped himself to either die or improve and come back shorn and tractable, speaking only when spoken to, being good, already up and hobblingly doing little chores, a man as good as a woman. That was conceivable. I laved myself in conspiracy and in the process felt myself closer to the central or historical Nelson, with his very patent — to me — view of the world as a place in which conspiracy is routine. I don’t mean that he was an obsessed assassinationologist of the standard kind you run into in the States. With him it was more an assumption of the mundanity of conspiracy. He was offhand about it: of course there was a conspiracy behind the John F. Kennedy assassination, he might remark, unless it makes sense that Lee Harvey Oswald would advertise himself as a marxist by having his picture taken holding up copies of the Militant and the Daily Worker at the same time, two papers whose party lines in regard to Cuba were violently opposed at a time when he was supposed to be a member of the Fair Play for Cuba Committee and so, strictly pro-Castro. Then there was the Shakespeare conspiracy, although on that he was more of a zealot than in some other cases.