Norman Rush - Mating

I let him take his time. I had wanted him to talk, and now he was.

The husband goes out of his way to try to demonstrate to his wife that she lacks a certain thing, which you could call gratitude. He has a philosophy of gratitude of a certain explicit or even crude sort, which he rightly or wrongly thinks may be at the heart of the difference between them, his better luck. But a thing about his philosophy of gratitude is that it has to be spontaneous, or come spontaneously, to work. It can’t be a rote thing like saying grace. He feels all he can do is exemplify what he feels, because, and this may be irrational, he feels that if he instructs her or catechizes her into it, not only will it not work for her but he himself might then lose the benefits of his attitude to the world. By the way, both of them are atheists, so this is not about religion. But how this story ends is a problem. One way it could end would be his telling her, and her laughing. And then they both begin to decline.

I said Well, didn’t you say they were both elderly to begin with?

Maybe I implied it. But in my mind, in my story, they are.

A fable, I thought. No, a parable, god help me.

But I am very good with dreams and parables.

I said So the husband says goodbye to a hardy old age. I don’t know what to say, really, except that I think this is your way of telling me not to ask you about things you feel prohibited from telling me for cosmic reasons of some kind, to which I say what you once said to me and made my hair stand on end with: Thought looks into the face of hell and is not afraid. That was you, wasn’t it, from Bertrand Russell? I loved it. Thought looks into the face of hell and is not afraid. Loyalty to this is why you stipulated that they’re atheists, and why you wince when I use the word revelations, I guess. I think this story is silliness. If only the wife is smart enough to read his body language and copy him they can live another what? nineteen months beyond their allotted span, or something? I am sorry, but this is just plain Don’t bother me, in spades, and I hate it, hate it, hate it, reject it. I don’t care.

I said I can’t help reading between every line, can I?

So there are certain private magnificent things you could tell me, but if I were perfect I wouldn’t make you tell me. Because of the consequences, and so on. But I’m not perfect. Tell me this: will you be punished by some vaguely female force or image or power if you tell me everything? I’m just guessing here, but tell me. And don’t think I don’t love you for telling me this story, which is an act of friendship as well as being whatever else it is.

Go back a step, I said. Try and see this just as documentation for someone you love.

He really groaned.

I said Tell me the worst thing you’re not supposed to tell me, as I construct it, because something might happen we both would hate.

With his eyes closed, he said Consciousness is bliss.

I said This is something you know and feel? As opposed to something you were told or got as a message?

Again he groaned and said Yes, yes.

Was this literary or was it real? It seemed real. All my questions à la Then how are you ever going to get anything done? seemed callow, or worse.

Here was my beloved envelope looking into his palms. Why was parsing all this up to me? which it was.

I knew suddenly what he was really like: he was like a fortune-telling machine you put money into for each message or prophecy you got, the head being behind glass, encased.

This is something you feel even as we speak, I assume. Say those words again.

I will.

But he was pale and looked almost disgusted. This was the most excruciating part of the morning. He looked exsanguinated. I was being driven into seborrheic hyperactivity. I touched my nose and it felt anointed. A desperate protojoke tried to emerge premised on how difficult it would be for me to be led around by the nose, it was so shiny. Meanwhile the revenge of the womb was ongoing.

It was violative, but I had to make him say more. The gist of what I got out was that over the days, he had been allowed to have this experience of consciousness as bliss and finally to keep it, protract it, take it away with him as part of him in his reconstituted state. This element of allowance or permission was what bothered me the most, since it implied personal agency on the part of some undisclosed party. And I was right. He had had a vague sense of a presence always near, mostly behind him, and he would say female, if he had to assign that kind of quality to it. The word ethereal evidently caused him so much pain that I felt I had to apologize.

I wanted to know if this consciousness change was part of any other, larger conclusions about the secret of the universe or of nature or if it had anything to do with his conceit — I let myself use that word — about the confederal nature of the body.

No, there was no doctrine coming out of this. Every part of what had happened to him was separate.

I asked Might there be a connection, though, that you just haven’t forged or come upon yet?

The Smile.

I tried to slip in an insinuation or two about Taoism. The Smile again. Taoism was a nondoctrine, not to put too fine a point on it. He had always been a sort of Taoist, he said. I was making a mistake in trying to reduce any of this to some established schema. He could see where I was going, and it was a waste of time. I of course was thinking that his mother’s Mary fixation, osmosed to him as a child, was seeping up in all this in the guise of the hovering eternal feminine I had made him, by bitchlike persistence, disclose and talk about however minimally.

I was going to have to let us stop. But first I took him back over this bliss-consciousness development. He was halting and recursive. It was impossible to formulate it further for me. It was an overwhelming feeling when it was at its strongest. It was on the order of sexual pleasure and had to be controlled, actually — kept down. He claimed he was holding it down, keeping it at a subdued level even at that moment. One of his tasks was to learn how best to do this — in fact, it was one of his main tasks.

An image came to me from a philosophical discussion about torture we’d had a year or so before, something practiced by the Manchus in which an incision is made in the victim’s stomach and a piece of the intestine is nailed to a tree and the victim is lashed and made to circle the tree, unwinding his entrails as he goes. I was being the Manchu.

I produced a kind of last straw for both of us for that session by asking if I could watch him while he relaxed his control and let himself feel this new state of being he had discovered. I knew it was invasive when I said it, but I was desperate to get to some kind of conclusion I could penetrate. I felt slightly sordid and took it back right away, seeing the expression on his face.

When I asked him — looking for a little forgiveness — if he didn’t think he would feel better once all this was out, external, he said no.

It was time to stop. I got up. He had just lately given up the knobkerrie he’d been using as a crutch. He asked me to get it for him.

He suggested we not eat lunch together, if I didn’t mind. He would prefer to eat separately. I was hurt, but I was also convinced by his manner that his motivation, whatever it was, was not punitive, not in the least.

Satanic Miracle

After lunch he was willing to resume, but sitting side by side in our wicker chairs rather than facing. I’d moved the table away. We were in the same spot, al fresco. It was hot and bright. He apparently felt strongly about our continuing our conversation there, where it had begun, instead of indoors. I was for indoors for reasons of privacy. Because of the drought there was a ban on using hosepipes for garden watering, so the yardman was ubiquitous with his watering cans throughout the grounds. His English was rudimentary, though. An odd thing was that he professed to not be able to understand my quite good Setswana except with difficulty, whereas anything Nelson said, however murmurous, he got right away.