Norman Rush - Mating

I picked up a commotion on the grandiose staircase connecting the balcony of the President Hotel to the mall.

Oh no, I thought, more abnormal psychology. It was Grace, pushing her way roughly down through the ascending lunchtime throng and calling my name.

I stood stockstill to lessen her anxiety, and waved.

If we were going to talk it would have to be someplace else. It was bright and hot and we were already the object of the attention of the mall crowd. The Batswana love it when whites make spectacles of themselves as in fighting or showing affection in public. Grace looked as crazed as before. She was persisting in running, and it was clear she had decided to cast her bra to the winds as part of living life to the hilt for a while in the heart of darkness where nobody knew her, as can happen.

She came up, preceded by the distinct bouquet of Mainstay. She was wearing a different outfit in the same genre as the one she’d worn to the Bemises’. Her undereyes were puffy, but she was neat and clean and all fixed up.

She had to get her breath. Two things told me I was right about some affectional extravaganza going on. She had a leopardskin print ribbon in her hair. And I spotted the notorious extra-large Boer, Meerkotter, proprietarily following her movements from the balcony and holding a drink in each fist, one of them obviously intended for her. He was the local representative for some South African consortium of construction firms, I think. He was a tireless lecher and bon vivant who ate all his meals in the Brigadier Room at the President, usually buying rump steak for one of his various and numerous Batswana teen queen girlfriends. Going jet, as it’s called, was his basic thing, but he embraced all race groups. He was very proud of what Edgar Rice Burroughs would have called his thews. He had forearms like bleach bottles. I immediately wanted to warn Grace about a couple of dangers attaching to him. I thought he must be infectious. But worse, lately the story was that he was steady with an actual beauty contest winner, Idol Mketa. She was famous for her hairdos, which really were art — the current one was amazing and looked like a suitcase handle display — and her violent jealousy. Meerkotter was considered a prize. One recourse of wronged Batswana women is to scald their rivals. I thought Grace should know these things, if I was right that she was with Meerkotter. There was also the story that Meerkotter’s glass eye was the product of female reprisal, which possibly deserved mention if only as a clue to the sort of milieu Meerkotter swam in.

We greeted each other. She had something she so much wanted to say, she said.

She was wearing a little red scarf knotted around her throat. It made her look like a Brownie. I praised it.

I got it here, she said, as a present. It was a gift from a person.

I wanted to warn her that you get drunker on less alcohol in Gaborone, because of the elevation. She wasn’t leaving spaces for me, though.

I know Nelson likes you, she said.

The sun is eating us up, I said. We should go somewhere, but not the President.

Where we could have a drink, she said. She got a death grip on my elbow and began leading me purposely across the mall as though she had a perfect idea of where to go. This was drink spreading its wings in her mind, which resulted in her walking directly across the mat of a woman selling cowpeas, almost treading on the woman’s hand. Grace had no idea where she was going. I took over. She was odd. She looked labile to me. It occurred to me he had been giving her Mandrax, which the grapevine said he had access to.

I reversed our direction and got us out of the mall and across King’s Road onto the long dusty path that takes you to White City, the shabby and unpaved shopping area where everything is on a far far humbler scale and some of the shopowners are actual Batswana. I was told it was called White City because most of the buildings had been white at one time.

I took her to the Carat Restaurant, a hole-in-the-wall place run by a Motswana woman I liked and which was doomed to fail because they gave you too much food for your money. It no longer exists.

Grace wanted a beer. I conspired in Setswana to get them to forget to bring it until she had started on her salad, id est shredded beetroot and some baked beans, and also to bring us some strong tea simultaneously with her beer. I talked her out of getting chips, which at the Carat came so underdone they looked like they were made of Lucite.

She was utterly drunk. She said Do you like the four seasons? Because no one here does that I’ve talked to.

I said I did like the seasons, assuming she meant wasn’t I nostalgic for the snowfall and crisp fall mornings and so on, at which point she went Dawn go away I’m no good for you, in a little deluded whining voice. She meant the Four Seasons. I couldn’t believe it. I let her sing quite a bit of it.

When would she get to Denoon? And in retrospect her great love for the Four Seasons is odd and may have played a part in why it didn’t work out with Nelson, because in his lexicon, one of the all-time stupidest popular songs in history was Walk Like a Man, Talk Like a Man, sung in piercing falsetto by the lead singer of the Four Seasons. I think it was in first place for entire-song stupidity, with first place for single-line stupidity — to say nothing of hardheartedness — going to Now laughing friends deride tears I cannot hide.

I was worried about Grace. She was underprotected. I talked circuitously about Meerkotter. She was seeing him, as she put it. I tried to fill her in gently. This was unwelcome, I could tell. Either very little of it was registering, or I was only making Meerkotter seem more exotic and attractive. I let myself mention the glass eye business. There was an explosive effect that astonished me. She began weeping.

She wouldn’t stop. I wanted to know what I’d said to cause this. Ultimately she told me.

People tell you things that make you wonder if the world is fiction or nonfiction. She had started weeping, she said, because of the glass eye. She hadn’t been aware Meerkotter had one, but her father had had one and it was one reason she was a feminist. She had a slightly younger brother and her brother had been the one allowed to assist her father with certain ministrations, including rinsing, concerning her father’s eye. She, never. And she was the one who had truly loved her father. Her brother had disappointed him right and left. The news that she saw herself as a feminist touched me in some way and helped me be a little more patient with her.

It finally came to my saying What is it you want to say to me about your husband — which is what you want to talk about, Grace, isn’t it?

She sobbed summarily and then said yes. She wanted me to know she and Nelson were finished. Nelson was free and she wanted him to be happy, if he could. She had a sixth sense, she said, about who Nelson liked and would be good for him and she hoped I could forgive her for the way she’d introduced us, but time was short. Had I seen him again yet?

I said that I had and that I liked him and I was interested in his work.

Does he like you? she asked me.

I said I didn’t know, but that it was moot because he was returning to his secret project, which seemed to be a genuine secret as far as location was concerned.

She held up a finger and made herself eat. I think she wanted to be soberer for this part of our talk. I waited. So far nobody would tell me where the site was, not even Z. I gathered there was some new uneasiness and clamming up ever since the solar democracy peroration. For some reason I wasn’t desperate about it. I had faith there was some way to find out that had simply not occurred to me yet.

I know where it is, she said. My lawyers forced it out of him ages ago. I can even draw where it is.