Norman Rush - Mating

I dropped it with him, then, and decided that if he could be inert so could I. It was pique. I said something noncommittal to my contacts on the mother committee, who left me alone afterward on the subject, and gradually the whole proposition seemed to fade away. When Nelson evinced some mild interest in what was happening I put him off, saying no one had followed up, which was the truth.

This Is Intimacy, I Said

A new thing was my sense that the impulse for wordless lounging together was coming as much from him as from me. We had had foreshadowings of this during times together in the bathing engine, but with nudity as an ingredient and the natural terminus put to events by the water cooling, it had been different. Now we would just lie down in the late afternoon or evening, fully clothed, not necessarily — in fact often not — with a precoital feeling going, and not even read or remind each other of things that needed to be done. He gave up always having a notepad and pencil at hand. Our lying down together was noninstrumental. I sensed and he confirmed that he preferred me not to be reading anything too absorbing while we were lying down, because it took me away. Poetry was fine because there were gaps between poems when I was present again. I couldn’t credit this. It was too flattering.

About this time the question of true intimacy — how to define it, did we have it or not — blessedly went away. Sometimes as we were resting Nelson would roll over and confront me with a manic smile that made him look like the logo on a funhouse. This was to give me the opportunity to reassure him about his teeth and smile. This is intimacy, I said. He knew that one reason he smiled less than other people was his feeling that his teeth, which were a little jumbled at the sides, were unattractive, and when he smiled his face felt swollen to him, unnatural. This is intimacy, I said, and dredging up vintage fantasies about having sex with identical twins is fake intimacy, although that constitutes ninety percent of the male concept of it.

Most of the activity around the mother committee elections clearly went on during the afternoons we were engaged in our new extended siestas, because it was almost a surprise when the elections were over. Denoon surprised me by insisting on getting down to the plaza to read the results in the freezing dawn rather than waiting to go by at midmorning. And he surprised me by having no particular reaction to the results. There were a few new women on the committee, but aside from Dorcas Raboupi advancing to the second chair I couldn’t detect any startling change. Dineo was still chair.

The signs that there was less equanimity in Nelson than met the eye must have been around, but in my flattered state I was mostly missing them. They were wavelets.

We were in deep winter, but thanks to the incredibly long growing season in the Kalahari were still getting greens out of the nethouse, albeit only escarole, and only escarole as tough as sacking. Nelson wanted it exclusively in salads nevertheless. He could be insistent. I don’t know how many times I said This belongs in soup, minced, with onions. But no, we had to endure it in salads, and why exactly? Because people should eat something live or raw at every meal. I ascertained that this was something other than an avatar of my saying that the consumption of leafy greens in Tsau needed to be encouraged. He meant something else. It came to me then how unfailing he always was about picking off a cherry tomato or a sprig of parsley from our doorside tubs after a meal, or in seeking out a pinch of whatever we were sprouting that week in the event it hadn’t been an ingredient in our last collation.

Was it that he wanted to eat perfectly as some kind of moral body English for everybody else in Tsau? Was it magic thinking?

It wasn’t that. No, he said, what I think is you should eat something fresh — not much, necessarily — just something at every meal.

Was it a sort of magic thinking connected with the rather uneven appreciation of sprouting manifest in Tsau? No. Nor was it anything I had said about enzymes, our needing more fresh food as we grow older because we produce fewer enzymes physiologically as we age. No, it predated that, he said.

He supposed this had to be called an intuition. Somehow it had come to him. A noetic experience, not to put too fine a point on it.

So this tic about always something fresh could be called revealed science, I said.

I’ve rarely seen anyone so delighted with a phrase. So much so that apparently he was willing to forgo having escarole only in salad thenceforward. Some could go for soup. This was the way it was in those days. We seemed to coast over everything, up and over, a good thickness of rushing water between us and the boulders underneath.

For me love is like this: you’re in one room or apartment which you think is fine, then you walk through a door and close it behind you and find yourself in the next apartment, which is even better, larger, more floorspace, a better view. You’re happy there and then you go into the next apartment and close the door and this one is even better. And the sequence continues, but with the odd feature that although this has happened to you a number of times, you forget: each time your new quarters are manifestly better and each time it’s breathtaking, a surprise, something you’ve done nothing to deserve or make happen. You never intend to go from one room onward to the next — it just happens. You notice a door, you go through, and you’re delighted again.

This feeling of progress to better and larger was present in our conversation too. I suppose that in a sense the size of the items of his personalia I could now unreluctantly bring up obscured my view of smaller but still critical subjects that stayed difficult for us. And of course every topic I ventured was in reality a Trojan horse containing the questions What are you thinking of doing next? and when? and where do I fit in? Probably that was why it felt so congenial to get him on to the very large question of what a person should best do with his or her life. He was willing to return to this again and again.

As a boy and pre-Gandhian he had had no doubt that the best thing you could do with your life was assassinate Franco. Certainly he had had no doubt it was the best thing his father could have done with the end part of his own life. But then in retrospect it was better that Franco had died naturally, with the falangists sated and out of gas, so that Spain could move to normalcy without spasms of reflexive killing on anyone’s part. His intensity about Evasion, about justifying your life, was so unusual in someone at his stage of the game that I was always struck. Of course how it could be that Tsau wasn’t enough of a crown and pinnacle for anyone’s life was beyond me. He was prickly about it and not willing to talk very deeply about Tsau, because, I gathered, it was too soon to sum it up as a success or failure. We talked about peonage in India, which is growing. He listened, but said tackling peonage would mean another physical project probably, and Tsau was his last project, full stop. He bridled a little when I pointed out that in these discussions he always seemed to present himself as someone radically closer to the end of his working life than someone at forty-eight had a right to feel. What about writing? He could tell me about writing. Writing without personal advocacy, if I meant political writing, was pointless. He had written something he would be glad to show me, something he had put into the right hands, something that in retrospect was absolutely correct. It had been an attack on the ANC embracing dual power as a strategy. Dual power amounts to seizing a cellblock while the rest of the prison remains in the hands of the bourgeoisie or the whites or the fascists, whichever. The great apotheosis of revolutionary dual power had been in Italy in 1920 when the workers had seized the factories in the north and held them just long enough to terrify the bourgeoisie into lining up behind Mussolini. There was no second act for the factory occupiers and none for the ANC once they got hold of the townships. Dual power in the South African context was a recipe for repeated decapitation. I could judge for myself how successful his argumentation had been, since the ANC was more yoked to dual power strategies than ever. I didn’t know what was or was not important in discussions like this, so I went off and wrote down what I could in my journal while what he’d said was still fresh. He was still brooding when I returned, but was willing to talk more.