Norman Rush - Mating

He pointed out, on one of my return swings, that my period was showing on the seat of my skirt. That I attended to, and when I returned he was rising, not abruptly or in any way dismissively to me, to go in to take a nap. It made me feel more epiphenomenal than ever.

I followed him into the bedroom.

Can you see in any way that this is hell from my standpoint? I asked him.

Yes.

But is it making you personally suffer, to any degree, through your bliss?

Certainly. This answer followed a long pause.

I left him to his nap.

I went to the hideous mall and to the main shrine of the expatriate depressed, the Botswana Book Centre. Mordant whites went there more to touch books than to buy them, the exchange rate being what it was. I’m thinking particularly of Peace Corps volunteers, I suppose, with their limited living allowances. There was a huge staff at BBC. The Batswana at the cash registers were the swiftest in the world. The rest of the staff, in blue dustcoats and carrying feather dusters, was the reverse, more like a functionless chorus grouped along the back wall, chatting and sitting on books. It was hectic when the Rand Daily Mail and the Johannesburg Star came in but otherwise the place was quiet and dreamy, just what I wanted.

Someone that everyone was talking about was in the next aisle from mine, her head down as she studied a book I saw was the paperback Development as the Death of Villages. This had to be beautiful Bronwen Something, a State Department intern who was over in Gaborone short-term to work on the trade fair held every summer. It was a customary position, and since the American participation in the exercise was fairly nominal, these pcps, as they were for some reason called, had rather little to do. She wasn’t the first pcp I’d seen reading at three in the afternoon in the Botswana Book Centre.

I recognized what Bronwen was immediately. She was my satanic miracle. I knew it. Her image seemed to leave a print on my sight when I looked away from her. She was reading Nelson’s book with ferocious concentration. I could tell she was believing it.

Ripeness is all, was Bronwen. People had said you would know her when you saw her because she looked like the ingenues in the Coke ads of the nineteen forties, the perfect blond ones. She must have been genuinely beautiful, because fluorescent light, which makes the rest of us look cadaverous, only made her look luminous. She had hair the color of custard. I doubt that she was twenty-six. She wore absolutely no makeup. Conceivably her underlip was a little overfull. She was shorter than I am.

I got interlocking satanic inspirations. This woman would be awed to meet Nelson. He would love her for her honey-colored hair alone. She could have Nelson. I had had the Nelson she was reading the words of. What there had been of him I had in my mind, in my memory, in my notes. Maybe she would love the present Nelson even more than she would have loved the original. We could see. We could find out. I could bring them together. This led to my second inspiration. I could bring them together at a celebration for Nelson he would never forget. I would open the floodgates. Something had to change in my life. If I was unable to get him back to himself singlehanded, then maybe the curious descending all at once on him could do it, along with Bronwen Something. He wanted to be Adamic, then okay, leave it to me to round up an Eve. He hated surprise parties, and he hated birthday parties. His birthday was in the wrong part of the year, but this could just be my mistake. I could orchestrate this. It could be done. I had been kept from taking any kind of real action for too long. Now I could act. It was intoxicating to think of all this. She was the right one: unknown to her as she plowed on through Nelson’s book, she was the center of a web of male glances, black and white male glances. Some of them even saw that I saw, and it meant nothing to them. They kept staring, so what was I? People were arranging what they had to do so they could rest their eyes on her. I was nothing. I was nothing despite my superior bosom, and she was some pure flamelike thing with her part perfectly straight and perfectly white, her custard-colored hair up in valences behind her absolutely perfect ears. I felt almost simian. I have definite down on my arms, no more than average but it is a little darkish, and her arms were like polished dowels of some kind. I would drop her in his lap. He would have the option to ignore her. He would have the option to be enraged, to accuse me of anything, pimpery. That would be something. We would see. There was a suppressed furor going on over Nelson’s sequestration. Everyone would want to come. Let them, I thought. She never looked up. She was not a rapid reader.

The Call

I don’t like it here in Palo Alto. For a while I was able to sustain myself by self-congratulation. Severing myself from the spectacle Nelson had become to me had been a success, as I read it, a stupendous thing. It gave me strength. Everything worked for me. A way I could contrive a thesis out of my Tswapong Hills data and some haphazard data from Tsau came to me. I have an extension. The department was delighted to see me. I went to see my mother and controlled everything. I was never insulted once. The most partial of answers satisfied her for a change. She is in the bosom of a Lutheran cult and likes it: they operate a nursing home on a freezing peninsula, where she works in the mailroom for room and board, essentially. She can stay there forever if she wants to, she says. She considers she has her first white-collar employment ever. Everything was yielding to my hand. I kept saying Freedom. I was riding a wave of fire at first. I went to a parasitologist, who said I was cleaner internally than the average middleclass American.

Of course this demonic phase had to end sometime, and it has. The wonder of my escape from Africa, as I so often couched it for myself in the beginning, is less sustaining to me. Now, apparently, I would rather think circuitously back and imagine ways that the necessity to sever us could have been avoided. Or I have time fantasies. Supposing we had met in the eighteen nineties, say, when there was nothing ambiguous about socialism being the answer to everything. It would have been obvious that the collective ownership of the means of production was all that was needed to make us happy. That would have been a medium for us to embrace in. We would have been perfect militants. I come out of fantasies like this furious with actually existing socialism, vacuously enough.

The demonic phase was on an adrenaline continuum with my lutte finale surprise party for Nelson. It almost arranged itself. Everyone wanted to come, the extraordinary Bronwen most of all. She was on the qui vive re Nelson after picking up on all the speculation at the embassy concerning him. That was why she’d looked up Development as the Death of Villages.

As an infernal device the party was perfect. Once I’d started issuing invitations the die was cast. I had to go through with it, however fainthearted I got. I’m not sure now what it was I really wanted, other than to see him either alter before my eyes or be confirmed as what I was afraid he had become. Just to have him infuriated with me, in a personal way, would have been a treasure. In the beginning I tried to honor my promise to Dineo to protect him from certain unfriendly characters in the donor community. But ultimately there was no way I could. They all heard about it — Brits, Boso people, a closet Trotskyite in the Friedrich Ebert Foundation. The Libyans call their embassy the Jamahiriya, meaning nonembassy or people’s bureau or whirlwind, I forget which: two of them were coming. Apparently Qaddafi had pervertedly incorporated some anarchist tenets into his political bible, The Green Book, an act which Nelson had found extremely offensive, so perhaps those embers would have a chance to reignite. I realized the guest list was very light on anyone who might be called Denoonisant, except for lustrous Bronwen. So much the better, I thought. With Bronwen I played a complex game of self-presentation intended to lead her to think of me as someone not necessarily happily associated with this great man, someone possibly coarse, possibly uncaring toward him, someone not legally married to him, in any event. I thought so often of Grace, Grace pushing me toward Nelson. There was even a full moon the night of the party.