Norman Rush - Mating

You’re unique, he said. No woman in my life has done for me half what you have, and yet you’ve asked nothing. Please, what can I do for you?

Really nothing. I enjoyed this. Nothing, unless you wanted to satisfy my curiosity about something.

Anything. What?

I don’t know. Tell me something I’m not supposed to know.

He got tense instantly. I said Now don’t do that and ruin our work. Let’s drop it.

But what did I mean?

I began kneading him while I vamped. I said I know this will seem perverse to you. But in a way — and I understand it has to be this way, don’t think I don’t — in a way there’s something in you I can’t reach and never will and probably it can’t be helped, but it’s a hindrance, really. I know how involuted this sounds. But you are obviously some kind of spy or operative, which is all right, but you are. I happen to know about it. But of course life puts us in the position where you have to deny this to my face, so feel free. But you know what I am and I can’t know what you are, which I accept, because your mission is to playact the commercial attaché for me and what is resulting is false consciousness, inevitably.

He got very upset. We had to talk. I had to get off him and we both had to dress and talk properly. He wanted a drink.

We sat at the kitchen table after he had washed his face twice and made me look around to see if perchance there were any cigarettes about.

He didn’t immediately deny being a spy but took a line which I didn’t honor with a reply. He wanted to know where on earth I had gotten such an idea, and from whom.

Then he did deny it, to which I said Fine, but I know otherwise for a fact, and you might consider admitting something just for the sake of our relationship.

How did I mean? Did I mean he couldn’t see me, all this couldn’t continue, if he didn’t confirm what I was saying?

Then we circled around my assertion that of course I was not saying anything like that and of course we could go on, however imperfectly. And then of course I invited him to reassure himself any way he liked that there was nothing clandestine going on with me, no tape recorders or surveillance cameras, which he dismissed curtly, saying I know who you are.

Then it was theme and variations, theme being tell me what I am, then: I’m an anthropologist, I have a hobby which is related and which is putting together an understanding of the real world and trying to live in it. He should consider it a quirk.

Somehow I knew it was no longer touch and go. He continued looking stricken for a while, then said Well, suppose I were to go along with you and we carry on together and I endorse this fairytale that I am whatever you like: what would you be expecting then?

We could do that, I said. It would be up to you. This is symbolic anyway. You could tell me something I’m not supposed to know, and it could be anything. It’s a token of something. Let’s forget it. There is no way I would do anything with what you told me, or repeat it, which you know. You could tell me something obsolete but that I’m still not supposed to know. Let’s stop. This is making me feel neurotic.

I kept on in that vein, urging us to drop the whole thing and continue on bravely but by implication lamely in whatever relationship would survive my cri de coeur — type outburst, continue on in a relationship that — since I was using the past tense and the conditional a lot — looked as if it might be coming to an end sooner rather than later.

Then he cut me off with You mean to say you have no particular field of inquiry, no particular set of questions, no particular question at all? This I find strange.

So I laughed and said This is how you tell a thing is a quirk. This is what you call humoring a person. Tell me something quote unquote forbidden. Make it something pointless, useless, out of date, anything, just so it’s something somebody thinks I shouldn’t know. You have the choice of seeing this as a caprice or believing that I’m not what I seem and what you know I am.

You have been an absolute angel to me, he said. Now, how would you know if I made something up in order to pacify you? How would you know?

That would be up to you. I probably wouldn’t know. Who am I? That’s what a clever man would do, probably. You could.

It was late, so I said he should go home, that I regretted the whole thing and he should come back the next night for dinner and he should forgive me if he could for yielding to a feeling of wanting to get something from some deep protected nonpublic part of him. It was an impulse I said I was sure many other women had had with him and been smart enough to suppress.

I’m not good at being rueful, so I curtailed things. I made myself say the whole thing was about being open, and I nearly gagged. The world is what it is, I said, and you are what you are, and if I’m a neurotic about the fact that men have all the secrets and I have an impulse and want to get one, then that’s what I am. I said I’m not saying to tell me the worst thing you ever did, although who wouldn’t love to hear that, or tell me something filthy about the queen or something defense related or something that puts perfidious Albion in a bad light — did I say that? I wanted to get a smile out of him before he left.

You thoroughly confuse one, he said. He left, thinking.

What Was I Doing?

Once he was gone I felt like a lunatic. I was engaging in something deluded and worthless. What was I doing? How stupid a goal could you set for yourself?

I suppose I had a dark night of the soul. I had no relation to anything that had meaning. It was like an experience Nelson would tell me about that was similar. He was in New York, where he had a couple of hours free between appointments or appearances. He was in the vicinity of the New York Public Library so decided to stop in. It was going to be an enormous pleasure to be there. I don’t know where he’d been living just before that, but it had been remote, someplace without libraries, and he was famished for print. He was filled with anticipation, he would be flooded with choices of things he wanted to look up or catch up on. He stepped into the main reference room, a vast place where every wall was lined with banks of card catalogs, where he would have access to every written thing in the Western world that was worthwhile, virtually. He steps into the room and begins to sweat from every pore, as he put it. Nothing interested him. Not only had he forgotten what it was he’d intended to follow up on, there was nothing of interest. He called it the abomination of desolation. There was nothing he wanted to read. He felt cold but not faint. He felt he was real but that the material of the world had changed into something like paper ash that would disintegrate if he touched it. Paper ash was all he could compare it to. He was in terror. He felt he had to walk carefully in leaving, not touch anything. Then he left and it stopped. I walked him through it again when he told me about it because I thought the paper ash was a clue. It may have been. One of his chores as a boy was to endlessly burn newspapers and periodicals in a backyard incinerator. His father subscribed to everything, but by the time Nelson was fifteen or so his father’s reading had become haphazard and was in the process of stopping altogether, so Nelson would be burning a lot of periodicals unopened, in their mailers. And it had been painful for him, and he had a strong image of stirring the ashes and of whole intact pages reduced to black or gray ash with the print still readable. He denied there was a connection.

Finally I got myself in hand. Not proceeding would be even more demoralizing than seeing where this would come out, even if it was ridiculous. And so to bed.