Norman Rush - Mating

We went in with the soup. It seemed to me that both Harold and Nelson were responding benignly to the alcohol. In fact brotherhood was in full flower. Our men had found common ground on an astounding issue, Shakespeare, agreeing that whoever wrote the plays was amazing because for any of the credible candidates, including Shaxpur, writing was a part-time activity, subsidiary in his case to acting and wool gathering, as Denoon put it. He meant, of course, wool factoring. They were even beginning to agree to disagree, I gathered, about men in relation to women, sequent to an exchange of pleasantries about the Lamentations spectacle. Harold wanted a hearing for his denial that men were harder on women than they were on other men, only a hearing. In other words, denying the reality of gynophobia, I thought to myself. Go ahead, Denoon said, fairness incarnate. Also coming up was a hearing for the proposition that women were as bad as men, given the opportunity, as indicated by the fact that the most murderous and depraved period in Turkish history was the wellknown socalled Rule of Women, when concubines ruled various sultans from behind the curtain of the seraglio. We adore women, Harold was maintaining.

I got us all seated and ready to address the soup. Harold and Nelson had ravished the Oban. It wasn’t clear to me that later on I would still be able to get myself heard. I had been through scenes not unlike this in my other life. Before it was too late I wanted to register myself on the subject of gynophobia, so I told a story I told Harold he might find illuminating on the subject, something to think about, at least. I said I’d once lived in a co-op house at Stanford with nineteen other people, male and female. One of the members of the house had been a woman named Betty. Then a man joined the house who owned a dog named Betty. So naturally the practice grew up of making clear, when it was apposite, which Betty we might be referring to by saying, if we meant the dog, Betty the dog. I was subconsciously waiting for what happened to happen, and it did: in an exchange in which someone mentioned Betty the dog a guy said Which Betty the dog? Was this anything but seizing an opportunity to express freefloating hostility arising from some primal substrate? It so happens that Betty the woman was probably the best-liked and best-looking woman in our house, and in fact the guy who was insulting her had gone out with her a couple of times.

I didn’t elicit much with my anecdote. There was some pro forma nodding. I don’t know how closely anyone was listening. But I didn’t have to feel like a fool for very long. Denoon was being peculiarly agreeable and passive. Shortly I saw why. He was ashamed of something, and here it was: two bottles of Cape Riesling with bits of earth still clinging to the labels. They dated back to the Italian construction workers and had been cached against a special occasion rising. It was hard for me not to think of special occasions in the past involving just the two of us when a taste of wine would have made a nice addition, but no, instead the wine was unearthed in honor of a visiting male no one would be likely to mistake for a comrade of his. There was no justification for it other than Denoon’s feeling that he had to reciprocate for the Oban. I was not happy.

Denoon began pouring generously all around. Almost as though it were a chore he swallowed down whatever Oban remained in his mug, so that he could get properly going with the wine. Julia nudged me under the table. She declined wine until I signaled her that it might be a good idea for her to assist me in diminishing the supply, as feebly attempted before with the Oban. I was making the assumption that these two bottles were all there was. Nelson was indicating that that was the case. But how could I be sure? Wasn’t it just as possible that he was trying to reassure me that however tonight developed I wasn’t going to have to endure something like it ever again? I felt traces of pity, his shame was so patent.

Harold was developing the standard canard about the ingratitude of women regarding the unappreciated efforts of men to provide for them, even knowing that women in the long run are going to outlive them by a long chalk. Where was the hatred in that, on the part of men? Everything men accomplished in society was for women, for acquiring the attributes of all kinds needed to attract them and maintain them in as much comfort as could be managed. And was it not illuminating that, as much as women might complain, when they had got the suffrage, what was the result? Giving the vote to women had been the one thing needful to bring about a new and perfect world, so the previous generation had been told, but what have we here? Women voting to affirm the world as men have made it in every respect, albeit with something a little more for crèches. You endorse us, really, he said, do you not?

I had my artillery ready, but I was waiting for Nelson. I thought, he knows reams more than I do on this. Where was he, while Harold ruled the waves with half-baked vignettes of women in power behaving exactly like men? A man should be rebutting Harold. Of course Nelson didn’t know it, but Harold was acting, playing sort of paterfamilias. Speak, I was thinking toward Nelson, or forever hold your peace.

Then Nelson came up with Do you happen to know which country in Western Europe has the fewest women in parliament and cabinet, both? He sipped wine vigorously while he waited for Harold to guess. Harold wouldn’t. Greece, Nelson said, and a close number two, the United Kingdom, very close. Nelson’s expression told me that this feeble thrust was supposed to calm me. But this statistic was nowhere near the point Harold was making. If this was Denoon inter pocula I needed to know it.

This in no way refutes me, Harold said. Julia asked me on the side if it was true, and I told her that Denoon was always right on his facts and figures.

Ultimately it was my continuing silence that got Denoon to realize he had to perorate. Nelson roused himself. He really let fly, and all for me. I knew he was encyclopedic on the woman question and that night he proved it. He said to Harold You mention Turkey groaning under the rule of women, which is an old chestnut, but I wonder if you know that all during this supposed reign of terror the kadeins, that is, the favored concubines, even the most favored and sovereign ones, had to join the nominal sultans in bed by crawling from the bedroom doorway on hands and knees, over to the bed, then kiss the coverlet, and then crawl up underneath it from the foot until they got level with the sultan? This was nota bene for me because Nelson had come to bed that way a couple of times and I had not known there was a referent, I had been under the impression he was just being funny. I think I prided myself that his playful side was developing under my benevolent influence. But his being able to strike back so specifically against one of Harold’s major canards was the main thing. I loved that. I lose detail here because I had to organize more food for us. The men had eaten about as much of the soup as they were going to. It was unlikely Julia would be much help. Thanks to her pitching in with the wine reduction strategy, she was becoming visibly more relaxed.

Nelson was masterly. He drove home two theses. One was that despite apparent differences every society can be analyzed to show that women are in essence being shaped to function as vehicles for male imperatives and the physical reproduction of male power. He didn’t carry this thesis into its most perfected form, in which he shows that in strictly biological terms man is a parasite on woman. This would have been too much for Harold. The second thesis was that because of the history of crushing and molding of women, men have no idea what women are or what they might be if they were left alone. One proof of this was the spectacle of male marxism searching high and low for the liberatory class that would lift human arrangements into a redeemed state — the proletariat, the students, the lumpen, third world nationalists — in short, every group around except for the most promising one, a majority group at that, a necessary and sufficient class an sich, the mass of women, women suitably enlightened and thus für sich. Then he brought out a pet contention, which was that among the thousands of credit and producer coops in Africa, the ones that tended not to be looted by their officers or to have fallen deeply into debt were the ones controlled by women. Then he rested.