Norman Rush - Mating

Nelson was not succinct. And he was repetitive. But the power was there and Julia, for one, was seemingly getting it. Nelson knew his audience. He was gingerly with religion, barely treating it as causative in the case of female circumcision. She made him repeat the estimate of seventy-five million victims alive and suffering as of then, not seventy-five million since the origins of the outrage. I think the only other reference to religion in that whole segment had been in his windup, in which the Trinity of Plunder — Church, State, Capital — got alluded to. Julia seemed mildly spellbound. I saw her repeat rather wonderingly to herself certain phrases, of which Trinity of Plunder was one.

It was a ringing finish. Even I was moved, as much of all this as I’d already heard. As always there was something new, which served to remind me how lucky I was to have someone so encyclopedic for my own. This time it was the image of Chinese brides under the old regime lying in bed and waiting for the groom to descend on them while hundreds of banners fluttered over the marriage bed saying May you produce a hundred sons and a thousand grandsons.

Come out with me, Julia said impulsively, undone, I thought, by the preemptive drinking I’d urged on her. I didn’t want to. I needed to understand more of what was going on. Denoon semidrunk was terra incognita. I looked at him and found him doing something he had olympianly observed his father doing inter pocula — that is, picking up the nearly empty wine bottle and bringing it close to his face and grimacing as he studied the label, as if to mime the sentiment What in the name of God liquid is this I have been drinking? He had presented this to me as a sure sign of sotdom in a person. Now he was doing it himself. Please come, Julia said. The implication, I thought, was that her need was personal, as in being escorted to and made comfortable with our outhouse. So I went with her.

Julia pulled me almost to the precipice. Obviously this was not about what I’d assumed it was. We stood in the starlight. She commenced with a long, heartfelt look. Clearly, small women get stewed faster than ampler ones. You must, she seemed to say. I asked her to explain. It was that I must seize him, marry him, this man. She was dazzled with Nelson. She couldn’t think why I hadn’t married him, since it was plain that he loved me, the way he deferred to me, his manner. I mustn’t miss out over anything silly. She had been married. Then a second theme emerged: especially I must be calm about drinking. She could see I was unhappy with it. But she had been married to a man who had drunk to the point of unsteadiness at times. He was dead now. But he had been a fine man. And he and she had been great friends with William Empson and Hetta his wife, Empson another great man and someone who would overdrink, but William and Hetta had been very happy together. Did I know the books of William Empson, or his poetry? Nelson reminded her of Empson in the subjects he could inform upon, and William had lived in China and here Nelson was living in Africa. I didn’t know who William Empson was. I thought he had something to do with Basic English.

I thanked her and assured her I appreciated what she was saying. This kind of thing was in fact the last thing I needed to hear, but her sincerity was touching, and the fact that someone so British would be so open and intimate was too. Now she needed the loo. I took her to it and waited for her and we went back to the fray.

Harold and Nelson were closer than ever. Unbelievably, they were rejoicing in both being Irish. Harold had confessed that his true given name was O’Mealia. Julia was not amused by this, I could see. And there was another slight bombshell for me: Denoon was mixing up his personal gods. Suddenly I was hearing what a Fenian his father had really been, underneath. Until that moment I had been under the impression that Nelson’s attitude toward Irishness was the same as his god James Joyce’s — viz. that Ireland was a sump and a cracked looking glass and so on. Suddenly his father’s Fenianism was positive. I realized I was even hearing positive references to Nelson’s worse-than-black-sheep uncle, who had gone to Spain to fight alongside some fascist blueshirts led by a madman called O’Duffy against — against! — Nelson’s other gods, the Spanish anarchists, the wonderful Confederación Nacional of whatever it was, CeNeTé is all I remember, the wonderful Cenetistas. I could hardly believe I was learning in extenso what a true Fenian his father had been, because I remembered clearly the fact or story that he, Nelson, had been so appalled at the one or two forays his father had made into Irish cultural gatherings with folkdancing and so on, instancing them to me as examples of how far his father had been willing to go to get cover for drinking himself blind, before deciding that eisteddfods, which is Welsh and the wrong term, but the Irish equivalent, were too bogus and embarrassing to be borne even in that holy pursuit. And then where was the terrible fistfight between his good old fascist uncle and his good old father that had taken place when his uncle had turned up threadbare in Palo Alto after the war, his hitherto beloathed Uncle Niall, hitherto until just then? But there were parallel wonders, I gathered, involving Harold, who was both a British Empire loyalist who believed the IRA, especially the provos, should be suppressed root and branch, and a son of Eire, however crypto, who also admired their spunk or grit or whatever Briticism he used, their tenacity. What was this all about with Nelson? I was shocked. Was this about loving Uncle Niall for the intensity of his beliefs, however imperfect? But I thought if I had learned anything from my life to date with Nelson, it was that credulism, believing in believing, was beneath retrograde. But why else would he be referring so nonjudgmentally to his suddenly so colorful and nothing more Uncle Niall?

Now there was also new news, from my standpoint, to the effect that the last Nelson had heard, his Uncle Niall had been working as a courier for the IRA. So he had been functioning as a shuffling old murderous factotum well into the sixties or even later. Was there a faint note of pride in Nelson’s voice? I couldn’t believe it, since Nelson’s day-to-day presentation of self had him maintaining that the struggle in Northern Ireland was the best candidate since late colonial India for a purely nonviolent campaign, two years of disciplined satyagraha and the six counties could join all the others in one big madhouse. What was this celebration of joint Irishness by these two men about? Was what I was facing the revelation of yet another, inner, more standard, less interesting Denoon, almost an anti-Denoon, manifest only thanks to the solvent effects of alcohol, his proclaimed enemy? How could this be? Could the inner man be more generic and mundane than the man I embraced and who embraced me? Is that what all this meant, or could it all be understood in some more benign way, an excursion, load-shedding, something like that? Or was it just weakness of some kind being amplified, raised into a second self, through the power of the perfect male actor, Harold? Or was Nelson just expelling toxins accumulated in the course of living too solitarily for too long in the bush? Also was this inner man an old man like Niall, a residue of something that had been overcome, or was he fetal, a homunculus, something yet to be? It all made me feel like getting critically drunk myself, immediately, so that our revealed selves could meet and get to know each other and waltz. I felt desperate and like screaming out What is wrong with this picture? Except that what I felt was that what was wrong was my presence in it.

People weren’t eating sufficiently. In an inspired state I got up and began a commedia, wherein I rifled our larder for every canned and jarred delicacy I had been hoarding, these constituting the analog to Nelson’s Riesling, undoubtedly. I’m not absolutely certain I knew what I was doing. But it was symbolic language saying All right, if you won’t eat what there is then what about this? and this? and also this? You prefer to just drink, but will you when you see this and this and this? The joke ultimately was on me. I thought I was putting out a shaming overabundance of food, but drinking makes you hungry and virtually everything seemed to go — the mandarin orange segments, the anchovies, the hearts of palm, the white plums, the fig paste. These were treasures. Only toward the end did people seem to notice what lengths I had gone to. No one commented on how utterly miscellaneous the spread was.