Norman Rush - Mating

I was led into one of the wonders of the world, the Denoon outhouse, and left there awhile. I used the facility correctly. When I came out I was shown that normally I should dip my hands in a bowl of weak antiseptic fluid on a stand next to the outhouse door. Because of my bandages this was impossible, but they did somewhat brush and press my bandages with a damp towel anyway.

Baph was safe, was the good news.

I was in a regulated place. They had put some kind of unguent on my lips.

Being in this place and in the hands of women ran counter to my main established refuge fantasy, wherein my father or uncle is a retired judge or captain of industry with a giant Victorian house in an area like Bucks County. He is there off and on. You can go to this house anytime and collapse there for as long as you like, no questions asked. There would be a staff. My father or uncle is powerful but also good, which is one reason the place is so safe. He has goodwill extending to him from far and near, either because his legal judgments were so wise and beloved or because of unspecified other benefactions touching everyone in that county. The food would be simple but good. There would be a farm attached to the house. My protector is very diversified economically, so that no depression would wipe him out. I could be a spinster if I wanted, live in my beautiful room, use the extensive library and the piano, or if I chose to I could moon around in my room and only come down for meals. There was no mother in this. My uncle, though, would be devoted to the memory of my mother. I once said to Denoon, after he denied he harbored any refuge fantasies whatsoever, I don’t believe you, but if this is true it’s because the thing you as a white male will carry to your grave is the feeling that you’re safe anywhere in the world, in essence, unless you have some particular physical handicap. I suppose my position was that everyone has refuge fantasies. I said Saying you have no refuge fantasies and even believing you don’t is not the same thing as really not having them in some way, shape, or form. He got mad. Was I saying he was lying? he wanted to know. Only partially, I said. Then god damn it, he said, I’ll tell you again I don’t and that I also doubt that any fully mature human being does and also that if you do, you belong to the one tenth of one percent of the female race who construct this refuge fantasy because the automatic marriage fantasy, which is the real refuge-fantasy people have until they try it, is repugnant to them somehow.

I scanned around. The furnishings were restful. There was a reed mat on the floor. I could see a wooden table, a cupboard, a wardrobe, all highly polished. I was covered with a cotton thermal blanket, light but warm. My pillow was possibly a little on the hard side. My attendant was sitting in a wooden armchair, reading by the light of candles burning in a holder with winglike mirrors folded out from a spindle attached to the base of the fixture. There was a heat source somewhere. All my goods were laid out along the base of the wall where I could see them.

Just as I began to drift off again, it came to me that I had yet to ask this woman in loco parentis over me what her name was. I was ashamed of myself. I asked, and it was Mma Isang. Here I had an inappropriate internal reaction. The fact that she was identifying herself in the completely traditional way as the mother of whoever her firstborn was, in this case a son, should have produced no reaction in me whatever. It was ordinary. But I wanted to shake her. Women were saving me, and why wasn’t this motherly woman more a separate being? I seemed to be wanting to say. Somehow it brought up the totally unrelated contempt I have for all the apparatus of seconds and thirds and juniors specific to the patriciate in America and applicable only to sons and never to daughters. Denoon called this scionism. Also I wanted to know if Nelson Denoon had so much as looked in on me. He had to know I or someone very much like me had pitched up in his forbidden city. I had trekked across the plain of the abyss for a purpose. Where was Denoon? Who wants to feel like a tart, and an unsuccessful tart to boot? I felt like one of the loser sperms you see in Swedish documentaries shot inside the reproductive tract, one of the members of the shining herd, who only gets halfway up a fallopian tube when the Time Gentlemen bell is rung announcing that some other particle has made it to the ovum and the game is over. You aren’t yourself, I told myself. Mma Isang saw I was agitated, and I believe I was then handfed some segments of orange, and then it was on to a marathon sleep.

Yliane

I awoke in total darkness in that state of intellectual fatigue that means you’ve been working things out violently and exhaustively in your dreamlife. I had had a dream — whose outlines I atypically still had hold of — with stature. I may have had six or so like this in my life, always at rubiconic junctures. My normal dreams are worse than run of the mill. But clearly you symbolically harangue yourself in your sleep when your inner self perceives looming danger. But was I in danger, or rather was I in any danger greater than making a fool of myself? Something in me seemed to think so. I felt as though I had just been excused from an excruciatingly long but absolutely essential lecture which I had had to listen to while standing up.

In fact the dream revolved around a lecture, and I knew who the lecturer was. She was a woman I’d known in California whose fate had made an impression on me. Initially she was interesting to me purely because she was a French émigré, of which there are not so many, nothing like for example the number of Israelis piling up on the two coasts. She was also interesting because she was in a ménage in which the union had to be based entirely on an uncanny parity of physical beauty. Her lover of many years was handsome and perfectly proportioned, the kind of type who models Norfolk jackets and handcarved pipes, but an absolute jerk. She was both beautiful and substantive but, hélas, nearly forty and therefore in terror of finding herself alone and having to start over in the search for companionship. She was an accomplished paste-up person and very much in demand among people who put out newsletters in the days before desktop publishing. He was intermittently a cad toward her. He was vaguely a creative person in magazine publishing. He had lost his touch. His career was disintegrating when I got to know Yliane, although he was disguising it by being on the phone interminably, talking to contacts and lining up minuscule freelance projects at greatly separated intervals. Maybe a bond between them was that he was Francophile. He was sickeningly Francophile, to the point that one of his projects was to write a uchronia based on the premise that the Louisiana Purchase had fallen through. This project meant that whenever she asked him where he had been when she needed him for something the answer was The library. How this most appeasing of women managed to irritate him so badly that he drove her out of their apartment in her bathrobe while lashing her with a straightened coathanger I have no idea. Drink played some role. Possibly one of her superb culinary efforts came in below par. It was the middle of the night and she was driven out without a sou, and ultimately she had to let herself be fucked by the cabdriver who took her some distance to a friend’s house where she had expected to borrow the fare but where nobody was home. She spent the rest of the night cowering and crying in the rhododendra, waiting for her friend to return from the Mi Carême Ball or wherever she was.

So they stayed apart for a while. Then he showed up abject and swearing he wanted her back, would contain his drinking henceforward, would be decent. So he talked her back in. But there was just one thing he asked, as they were setting the ménage up once again, which was that she give up recycling for a month. She was a forerunner in ecological sensitivity and was serious about recycling. This would somehow make everything perfect between them. It had nothing to do with anything except power. He had no objection to recycling — not that he would ever bother with it himself. He sprung this codicil on her after she had already moved back in and he had begun being decent, so she negotiated. She wouldn’t recycle for two weeks. That would do, he decided. Then things continued as horribly as before. I pondered this transaction inordinately at the time. She bore him a child, a boy, angelic-looking and destined to be a burnt offering if I was any judge. I lost touch with Yliane after this.