Norman Rush - Mating

I realize now that a thing that happened that morning had put me in a volatile state, quite obviously. I thought I’d conquered it by defining it as pseudo. It’s only recently that I connect it to my bolting act. This was a pseudo epiphany regarding Nelson. I saw the tree of life on his front for a second and got hot in the eyes and weak all over. He had come in naked from sponge-bathing in the courtyard. As he turned in the doorway he was ventrally lit by a shaft of sunlight that made the way his body hairs were matted, chest and belly and so on hairs were matted, look like a perfect tree of life, with the exfoliation on his chest the canopy, the pressed-together belly growth the trunk, his escutcheon and genital area hair — he had quite a bit of hair on his actual scrotum — the root, and the whole genital package the treasure or casket or rare gem the roots of the tree were twined around. I got a grip on myself and warned myself that if I was seeing Nelson’s flesh as a billboard for Yggdrasil, I was having the pseudo epiphany of all time. But we are fools, and the moment was unquestionably a contributant to my hair-trigger state of being as The Lamentations began.

I retreated as far as a privy in back of the kitchen building. I hid out there. The excuse for my absence was going to be gastric distress not further specified. Why I bothered to sequester myself during The Lamentations is, in retrospect, a good question, since as the event tediously ran its course I began proposing my own tribulations, as a distraction, to fit into the gaps in the cycles of cheering and groaning. This is my way. A lot of The Lamentations I knew by heart. In my own private pageant I had masses of women vilifying the State of Maryland for having Fatti Maschii, parole femine, deeds are like men, and words — weak things — are like women, for its official motto. I was fairly miscellaneous. I ranged from the case of the first woman gynecologist being forced to attend courses disguised as a man, and then having to practice as one, on through the woman who invented the astrolabe being stripped and tortured to death by a male mob led by the patriarch of Alexandria, and when I sensed I was cleaving to a rather elite level I went for the generic class of women east to west in Africa who had routinely been forced to let male relations fuck them in exchange for trifling little loans, not to mention a study I read some years back about the percentage of American women owning small businesses who, credit being unobtainable by them, earned their original stakes by selling their only material asset, their bodies. It was easy to monitor The Lamentations and know where you were, because somewhere toward the end there would be cries in English and Setswana of a favorite line of Nelson’s from Blake: Every female is a golden loom. That moment came.

It was all dissolving as I approached. Two late contributions that struck me as not quite in keeping with the spirit of the event rang out, one being No more to drink only always bush tea! and the other being No more only to be using block soap! The first referred to Sekopololo’s resistance to stocking socalled white tea, brands like Joko available from South Africa, out of fidelity to the idea that we should continue drinking the locally gathered rooibos tea, which was free and perfectly good, albeit without caffeine. The second related to Sekopololo’s similar chariness when it came to ordering commercially produced soaps, again because we were supposed to be happy with the local homemade soap, its feeble lathering capacity notwithstanding. Somebody was out to provoke a little. That was interesting.

Denoon was off with the performers. It was truly over. Once again Harold and Julia seemed to be my lot: I was the logical one to do something since no one else was, and here they were, wafting toward me, Harold looking especially superior to everything and Julia looking rather numbly appeasing. Harold had wanted to say something, but, he claimed, only by way of thanks, and that hadn’t been arranged, which increased my guilt feelings, because if I hadn’t sequestered myself I could have seen to it.

So I said to come to dinner in a half hour, that it would be just entre nous, at which they half melted with relief. In truth I may have invited them because I thought it would be easier than facing Nelson alone with the fund of questions I had built up burgeoning. There was also defiance in it in that I was fairly sure the last thing in the world he would choose to have happen that evening was a prandial confrontation with the people he had been aiming his shafts at, at least in the Perfidious Albion segment. It was defiance saying to me that if I wanted to have people in I should be able to. He would be welcome but not as a boor. He was going to have to be nice as a courtesy to me. He was going to have to be nice out of his best instincts, not via negotiation with me. With men it takes too long for me, as a usual thing, to come face to face with the nature of what I’ve actually gotten into. Is this the man? was the question that was always with me. Nelson would be lovely to people of my choosing as a courtesy to me if for no other reason, or I could draw my own conclusions. Of course in this case I was choosing guests specifically not to his liking. But tant pis. He hated what the British had done in Africa. I appreciated all this and also all his buried anxiety about his origins at every level, from the mother of empires through his mother and father. But nevertheless. Why should I give in to his hysteria over being a created being instead of some self-created neat original? I would love to be original. I would love to. There are things you can do something about and things you can’t. I was determined that Nelson was not going to be someone with a neurotic stance toward his origins. That way lies madness.

Anyway, Harold and Julia would turn up in no time to partake of I knew not what at that point. But I sped home and began deciding what canned delicacies to sacrifice for the occasion. Our last can of consommé was going to go for onion soup. I was feeling reckless. I pulled down items, like some smoked oysters, I knew Nelson would bridle at laying out. Oddly and to my great relief he was all mildness about their coming for dinner. I sensed he was nervous that I was going to take up the question of the point of the Albion exercise, at least, and that he was glad not to have to look forward to being alone with me, even if it meant more Harold. Combined with any rays of indignation proceeding from me was the symbolism of my having a knife in my hand while I sliced onions perfectly thinly, like a machine of some kind. I slice very thin and I slice very fast. It’s a gift I have. Nelson helped minutely with dinner.

I heard our guests outside. I said to Nelson The only substantive thing I want to beg you to let alone is religion. The man is an observing Catholic and not an adolescent you might consider it reasonable to proselytize. If you want to argue about England you’re on your own, but do it on the merits and be scholarly, the way you can. He said something like it was never too late for reason, which I took to be apropos my request about arguing religion, but in such a murmur that I took it as compliance.

This is more a collation than a normal kind of dinner, I said when they came in. In looking at what I had wrought, I realized I had just been putting one thing next to another and come up with something signifying nothing. Also I had concentrated on what was quick. There were chapatis, toasted sprouts, tabouleh, the oysters, the French onion soup, goat’s milk clabber to go with the tabouleh. There was no entrée, strictly speaking. I decided to boil some eggs.

Evidently Harold had more than one crucifix. This one was silver, also very large, a Maltese cross. Denoon admired it and asked Harold if he knew who had the world’s largest personal collection of crucifixes. Harold had no idea, but when he was told it was Boy George he seemed genuinely delighted to know that, not offended in any way I could tell, and then I saw why: he was just into the foyer of drunkenness. That was also why Julia seemed so scattered and tense, sans doute. In a trice Harold was producing from a knapsack the source of his joy, which was a bottle of rare Scotch, Oban, a little more than three quarters full, a gift. Ah, Denoon said, trying not to look my way.