Norman Rush - Mating

It was public when Nelson asked me to come and live with him. He chose a cream tea which happened to be particularly well attended. I’m still annoyed. He strode over and drew me to my feet as in some period movie. It was done to be observed. I suppose I betrayed myself to some extent, because I could have said We should talk this over later, but in fact my relief that the moment had arrived was too much. I did want it. I’d sought it. It could be seen as just one more instance of Satan controlling the timing. I accepted with a nod. Some women at my table said Ow! which signified surprise, pleasant surprise, and was just short of ululating on the applause meter.

We embraced. On my part it was dutiful but numb, and brief. A kiss, which I was in no mood for anyway, would have shocked the Batswana, who still mainly regard the act as outré.

I brought up his peculiar choice of venue much later. Horrifyingly his shortlived initial position was that he had chosen the moment on impulse and not out of any public relations consideration. I controlled the rage I felt, but I said You are a liar. It was over almost instantly, with Nelson admitting everything and apologizing and concluding by saying what a bad liar he had always been.

You are? I said in a tone that must have been more underlined than I intended. It made him look warily at me for a long time. He sensed something.

A Deluge

Nelson came to dinner that evening, bringing gifts for Mma Isang that served as a sort of joke surrogate for lobola. It was a nice touch. There was a small crowd hanging around. Individuals wandered in and out, giving good wishes.

The joke brideprice Nelson brought consisted of various delicacies of which I remember particularly a can of mandarin orange segments and a jar of marmite. He was trying to promote marmite as a spread. I had intimated to him that it would be advisable for there to be a general increase in B-complex intake. Marmite is yeast, so Nelson was reviving an earlier failed effort to get people to like it. He would say things like This is very popular in Australia. At our little leavetaking ceremony he was eating marmite demonstratively himself on water biscuits and buttering biscuits with it and passing them around the way hostesses do at parties where they’ve put hard work into a gourmet dip that isn’t going over at all well. Mma Isang told me emotionally she would always be my mother.

We had a friendly entourage all the way to the octagon. King James made a thing out of saying the dung cart service was free. All my things were in his dung cart.

I thought I heard some distant ululating vaguely below us and assumed, wrongly, that it was just more good wishes for the hymeneal party. You get very used to ululating being the normal expression of high spirits and best wishes in Africa. In fact after you adjust to ululating as the norm, it makes applause seem strange and less delicate. Denoon agreed. Once during rest and recreation he had been privileged to hear Vladimir Horowitz playing sonatas in London, and it had been sublime. And then the applause had begun and he had experienced the bashing together of hands as a way of expressing appreciation as being animalistic, crude. In all my time in Africa I never learned to ululate, but not because I didn’t try. Self-consciousness blocked me. I took the ululations I was picking up as equivalent to scattered applause for our getting together, leftover enthusiasm like the firecrackers you hear being set off at wide intervals on the fifth of July. Nelson stopped our progress a few times to look and listen. He had a different idea of what was transpiring, clearly, and so apparently did our entourage, which departed rapidly once they got us to our doorstep. What’s going on? I asked him as we started my moving in. Maybe nothing, he said.

We kissed a bit, and I complimented the way things looked. The interior was changed utterly. I was extremely happy. He had applied himself to making the house something that would be more amenable to my needs, as he conceived them, down to placing little bouquets variously about. He was happy too, but I sensed I was holding him indoors and was proved right when he said Just a minute, and went out. I followed and found him standing at the edge of our terrace, gazing north.

All at once I was aware of the thick feel of the night. Denoon pointed: the stars were disappearing on a broad front north of us. A feeling like the one you get descending in an express elevator came over me. My shins prickled.

He said Do you have any idea what everyone is going to think if we get rain tonight? It would be the best omen you could imagine. He was elated. It was June and not a time when rain should be expected. Good, he said, they see it. The plaza bell had rung to warn people to get things covered up in case of hail.

He wanted to watch the storm descend, if it was indeed going to. The distraction was fine with me. We were shy. We had both been very shy discussing the bed. He had been apologetic. The mattress was new, double size, but it was still maize husk and not foam. There were a few foam mattresses in the stores house, but new households had a claim on them. I had insisted the mattress felt fine to me and that he should stop going on about it. What we both knew was that we had the moral equivalent of a wedding night looming. We were volatile. Our feelings, my theory is, were exceeding what we’d expected them to be. Mine were.

We got footstools and sat touching, facing the storm. The first lightning, like filaments, shone far away.

I took his hand. Are you willing the storm to come this way? I asked him. He smiled and said Of course. I am too, then, I said.

It crawled toward us, magnificent and immense. It looked organic, I thought, more like an electrified placenta than anything else. The breadth of the lightning display was amazing. It was transfixing. Earlier it had been cool, but now for long moments it was tropical and there were hot surges of air in the trees. The magnitude of the storm had not been lost on anybody in the village. Doors were being slammed, there were outcries, commands were being shouted.

Never have I seen any natural event like it. I shuddered and had pop philosophical insights, viz. human beings are microcosms of this vast oncoming system in that the thing that allows us to salivate and think and embrace is also electrical, in essence. We were related, this behemoth air beast and myself. I was its pale affiliate. Also I felt I was being acted on at some constitutive and possibly electrical level. I was terrified and wanted to get out of there, but something was preventing me from doing that, I mean besides Denoon’s presence.

Tremendous thunder was involved, guttural at first but like metal ripping as it got closer. We stood up. Denoon put his arms around me. I happen not to be one of the many women who find thunderstorms sexually arousing. My associations with thunder, or more specifically long sequences of thunder, are, for some reason, with experiences in which you are helpless, the involuntary in general, and throwing up in particular. I’ve always been more or less phobic about vomiting: having to vomit, feeling it coming on, being in the grip of something wherein you’re a bystander at some animal internal event, some overriding need of the systems that constitute you and that aren’t your mind. As a child I resisted throwing up when I was ill, and regarded anyone who told me just to let it come as strange. If they went further and urged me to elicit the gag reflex, I knew they were insane. I would keep my head between my legs until my face turned black rather than surrender. During my first adventures in overconsumption of alcohol, when I realized that vomiting was frequently among the sequelae — which others might accept — I became pretty much a lifelong abstainer. Thunder is obviously a metaphor for something happening that no one can stop, which a good number of women I’ve talked to admit they find erotic, the idea of being overwhelmed, as by passion, notwithstanding how counterrevolutionary they know that whole thing is. But so are we made, some of us.