Norman Rush - Mating

Nelson took the helm more that afternoon. I let him. There were long gaps, when he was doing the narrating, that I could use to reprise the questions I was asking and reasking myself, the main one being what was I going to do with him? Where had his comic side gone? was another. And why was everything between us so asymmetrical — my having urinary frequency versus his never having to pee, his appetite being tiny and precise, mine being pretty much out of control. And what exactly would he be to Tsau if he went back in his present mode? This was a very interesting question. What exactly was I supposed to do now? Should I stay with him and pray for a remission? Should I give him an ultimatum and somehow get him back to the States the same way I got him out of Tsau, even though it seemed everybody was certifying him as more lucid than thou? Should I marry him as he was, sweet, and take some kind of pleasure in his wifely qualities and satisfaction in my association with his past glorious works and the future glory of what Tsau would be seen as when it was thrown open to the world? Should I kill myself, seek professional help for myself, give him another six months of my nets and snares and shock therapy, stay with him on the assumption this was a maneuver of some kind on his part and that he’d turn to me some night with a smile and lucidly explain why all this had been necessary? Which? What? I grasped an unfortunate truth: his willingness to be a father was operating on me, confusing me, weakening me. He was appealing to my maternalism on two levels. He needed to be taken care of, self-evidently. And there was also the real thing: I could be the mother of the children of this brilliant, unique man. And then I would always have them, whatever else happened.

I must have said This is too much, because he said What is too much?

Nothing, I said. I realized I was doing something women did only in nineteenth-century novels. I was wringing my hands.

I should tell you about the lion, he said. I think you heard a parody of what it was like.

A lion found me, a male, a rogue, solitary, as the sun was going down that night.

It came toward me after nosing around what was left of my horse. By the way, streams of ants as big as my thumb were covering the carcass, and more were coming all the time.

The male was advancing on me, then I felt the presence I told you about behind me. This upsets you.

Well. At the same time from a tree off to my right a horde of bees came out and formed an arc in the air between me and the lion. They made a sound louder than I’ve ever heard bees make in my life.

I know this is amazing. I have no proof the whole thing wasn’t a hallucination. And I know you never see bees around at sunset.

The thing is that the lion surprised me and terrified me so much I had no chance to go into the interval. I was pumping out fear.

The lion came close to me twice. Within six feet. The second time he was stung around the eyes. I passed out. I woke up in blackness later and I think I still heard the bees. That was the night before the day the Baherero found me. I woke up, and the scene was quiet. And there was another odd thing. The stench of the carcass had been torture. That morning it was gone. In fact I thought I smelled something almost like cosmetics, if I smelled anything at all, coming from that direction.

You agree everything could have been a hallucination, in theory, the lion, everything, don’t you? I asked him.

Certainly, he said.

I could tell from his expression that this admission was pro forma, which took the heart out of me. This amounted to saying whenever it was convenient, Of course, anything could be hallucination. If that was the plan, then where were we? Nothing was going to be scrutinized. I had the sensation of my chest cavity filling up with gravel.

I said But the feeling you have about consciousness, this is not a hallucination.

No.

So it must mean something about the other events that went with it.

It may.

I said Do you think the world should be taught how to achieve or at least know about this kind of consciousness you have?

He said Not necessarily.

I was flailing around. I was coming from different directions. I asked him if he thought he was normal, considering how little he was doing in the course of a day.

He thought so.

I knew he wasn’t normal in at least one respect because of an unconscionable thing I’d done the night before. I’d gotten into bed naked and we’d begun embracing, all in silence — which was atypical. And I’d discovered what I wanted to discover, that the same things made him sincere as always. But then I’d stopped and moved away to my side of the bed. I moved away gradually enough for him to protest. But he let me slip away without any semblance of pursuit whatsoever. This was accommodation gone mad, at least in terms of our protocols. This was the man I’d learned the phrase A standing prick has no conscience from. Why had I done it, when I was fifty percent certain the outcome might be what it had been? It was plucking at an old generic fear of mine about marriage in general, maybe my most fundamental fear. What happens in a marriage if your husband is no longer sexually compelled by you? What happens in your heart when you sense he’s pretending to want to do it? How old are you when this happens? The whole thing is unbearable.

I said And you think your going back to Tsau is what everyone there wants. You have no suspicion they might not mind so much having two fewer faces, white faces, hanging around?

He was never more puzzled. Why, what did I mean? Almost everyone at Tsau came to him before he left to say he should come back as soon as he could once he was rested.

More than came to me, then, I said.

You were included, he said.

I don’t know why this delusion or fiction in particular so undid me, but I went into a mad scene so embarrassing in retrospect that I’ve repressed half of it.

I was manic and global. Everything was a last straw. I went up the hill on passivity and down again. How did he define love, in his present state? Did he deny he was insanely passive? Also did he think the capacity to get pleasure out of sheerly being awake was something: (A) everybody had at one time had but they’d lost? (B) animals had but we didn’t and he like a shaman had gotten from his experience and a little help from the eternal feminine? (C) something that people like me could be taught and would he teach me? or (D) if he tried to teach me and I failed to get the hang of it would he or would he not say that might create a hairline crack in our relationship? granted that he loved me more than life itself. Did he think I enjoyed being driven out of control like this? Or suppose all this was quote unquote real, did he imagine I wanted to spend the rest of my life with someone marching in the direction of total perfection as in the case of someone so homeostatic he had the eating habits of an angelic being of some kind? I think at this point I compared him to an exotic flower, a bromeliad, because during his time in the wilderness he had lived on light and air, virtually, the way they do. I had added up the food he’d had available and it was negligible, so he was a bromeliad and not a human being.

I was circular. In my display the pattern that developed was that I would say something irrational and then walk away, then come back, be irrational and circular again, then drift away, slightly farther each time, finally finding myself going into the house at one point. The help was transfixed, but I hardly cared. I kept going farther afield and coming back to see if he was all right and if there was any change, had he thought of anything to say to me to stop all this from uncoiling this way. There was nothing I could do. I said to myself I could have fallen in love with a Catholic, whose beliefs were more outré and more numerous than anything my poor Nelson seemed to be believing lately. But of course I couldn’t have unless he was presented to me in the costume of someone else, a rational person, unless I had fallen strictly through the commands of the flesh, which can happen but more with men than with women, no matter what the conventional wisdom says. But always he was just still sitting there, his hands tented. Think what you’re doing, I said to myself. Was I showing him madness, my madness, my worst self opposed to his?