Norman Rush - Mating

In any case my slow progress toward Denoon was The Kiss in reverse. He looked better the closer I got. His jaws looked bluer, although this may have been the result of seeing him more directly under the peculiar fluorescent doughnut that lit that part of the room. His superfices were good. The whites of his eyes were models of whiteness. He was smiling at Kgosetlemang — the event was to be considered over with, clearly — and I could tell that his gingivae were as good as mine, which is saying a lot. I attend to my gums. People in the bush don’t always attend to their oral hygiene, not to mention other niceties. There was no sign of that here. I of course am fanatical about my gums because my idea of what the movie I Wake Up Screaming is about is a woman who has to keep dating to find her soulmate and she’s had to get dentures. I have very long-range anxieties.

He was appropriate for me and the reverse. I felt it and hated it because it was true despite his being around fifteen years older than me. What did that mean about me? I also hated it because I hate assortative mating, the idea of it. One of my most imperishable objections to the world is the existence of assortative mating, how everyone at some level ends up physically with just who they deserve, at least to the eye of some ideal observer, unless money or power deforms the process. This is equivalent to being irritated at photosynthesis or at inhabiting a body that has to defecate periodically, I am well aware. Mostly it comes down to the matching of faces. When I first encountered the literature, I even referred to it privately as faceism. I will never adapt to it, probably. Why can’t every mating in the world be on the basis of souls instead of inevitably and fundamentally on the match between physical envelopes? Of course we all know the answer, which is that otherwise we would be throwing evolution into disarray. Still it distresses me. We know what we are.

He was in a state of health. His reflexes showed it. There was aplomb in the way he juggled getting closure with Kgosetlemang and turning to deal with a juggernaut consisting of me being driven into his very face by his crazed wife.

Being able to tell if someone is in a state of health is a knack or delusion I acquired when I was working as a receptionist for a charlatan nutrition therapist in Belmont. I predicted Denoon would have sweet breath, and that was right. By this time I was wanting Denoon to be what he appeared to be, or better. The only remaining question was his midsection. I wanted the power of impresarios or whoever they are who tell women trying out for places in the chorus line to lift up their skirts so their thighs can be checked out. A dashiki can cover a multitude of sins. A tense scene like the one that was developing makes you hold your belly in. I wanted to know how thick he was there, if I could. Knowing the extent of his problem would be calming. I am unbelievably cathected when it comes to fat, which works out well in that it impels me to be a good influence on friends who need to lose weight. But beneath it all is the undersea mountain of my mother and what her size is going to mean, ultimately, to me. A dashiki is like a smock. My mother always wore smocks, even long after she was persona non grata in the kindergartens of southern Minnesota for repeatedly eating food meant for the toddlers.

Grace had stopped shoving. I was kind. I provided cover by giving her a complicit or prankish look, which took fortitude on my part.

He said Hello, Grace. His voice was perfect for the occasion. It was wary, but also kind and faintly threatening. He was looking past me. So far he was barely cognizing my presence.

Here’s someone you should meet, she said, in a ravished voice. Like him she was the lucky owner of an above average voice. Did this mean they had been meant for each other at one point? If only their voices could live together, I thought, and let their envelopes go their separate ways. I hadn’t noticed her voice earlier.

One thing at least was clear: I was in the presence of a smashed mechanism: their relationship was over, whether she was ready to admit it or not. I was sorry for both of them, but also alas exhilarated, to tell the absolute truth.

We were now an appropriately spaced triangle.

She liked you tonight, Grace said.

Did you? Nelson said directly to me.

I love a tirade, I said. It came to me on the spur of the moment and once it was said I knew I was being shameless and attempting almost self-evidently to pander to his demonstrated weakness for wordplay. I blushed, it was so obvious. But I was also thinking To hell with it. The fact is you have about ten seconds to impress yourself on someone you meet de novo. People decide up or down almost instantaneously, without even knowing it. And the great and near great decide even quicker, because part of their eminence is based on a facility at classifying the people who are bothering them almost instantly into those who can do something for them and those who can’t. So I struck. I also was aware I was not going to overwhelm anybody with sheer loveliness at the weight I was just then at. The iron was hot. I was the first to arrive at the scene of the accident, namely the wreck of their marriage. I know I flushed. My coloring is a strong point, so that was all right too.

Having been on the periphery of a certain number of the near great, I was in fear of a certain phenomenon transpiring, which is a dimming in their regard like a fine membrane coming down over their eyeballs. They keep looking at you but not seeing you if you aren’t on their level or are a kind of prey not of interest to them. There is such a thing in nature. It’s called a nictitating membrane and certain reptiles have it, as did the great Chinese criminal genius Fu Manchu, a hero of Nelson’s boyhood reading as I later found out in the course of a discussion of the moment we met. Denoon denied he ever did it. My position was that the great can’t help doing it, but I did finally concede that I’d never seen him do it, not even once. He considered himself a congenital democrat. This was urgent to him.

What tirade? he asked.

So I answered him in Setswana, very brisk, slightly parodically, saying The tirade about the sun being the cow that nobody troubles to milk. This was another shot meant to hit before the portcullis came down. It had several features. It gave a sketch of one of my powers. I was someone out of the ordinary. It also had the carom quality of indirectly apprising him that in his description of the sun he had missed a bet by not comparing it to a cow. In Botswana the most magnificent entity you can be compared to is a cow. It’s true for all Bantu people, not only the Tswana. The god with the moist nose, is one way it’s put. Also here or later I used the phrase “dry rain” for sunlight, which he loved and which can be found in the Setswana pamphlet on solar democracy that eventually came out. I must have said it later.

If I overdwell on this it can’t be helped: love is important and the reasons you get it or fail to are important. The number of women in my generation who in retrospect anyone will apply the term “great love” to, in any connection, is going to be minute. I needed to know if I had a chance here. Love is strenuous. Pursuing someone is strenuous. What I say is if you find yourself condemned to wanting love, you have to play while you can play. Of course it would be so much easier to play from the male side. They never go after love qua love, ever. They go after women. And for men love is the distillate or description of whatever happened with each woman that was not actually painful in feeling-tone. There is some contradiction here which I can’t expel. What was moving me was the feeling of being worth someone’s absolute love, great love, even. And to me this means male love whether I like it or not. C’est ça. Here I am, there I was. I don’t know if getting love out of a man is more of a feat of strength now than it used to be or not, except that I do: it is. It’s hideous. It’s an ordeal beyond speech. When I’m depressed I feel like what was meant by one of his favorite quotations: A bitter feast was steaming hot and a mouth must be found to eat it. Men are like armored things, mountainous assemblages of armor and leather, masonry even, which you are told will self-dismantle if you touch the right spot, and out will flow passionate attention. And we know that this sometimes does happen for one of our sisters, or has happened. This comes full circle back to my attitude to kissing, which he never adjusted to. You want kisses, obviously. But you want kisses from a source, a person, who is in a state. This is why the plague of little moth kisses from men just planting their seniority on you is so intolerable. Of course even as I was machinating I was well aware I was in the outskirts of the suburbs of the thing you want or suspect is there. But at this moment in my life I was at the point where even the briefest experience of unmistakable love would be something I could clutch to myself as proof that my theory of myself was not incorrect. Theories can be reactionary and still be applicable.