Norman Rush - Whites

The interior was candlelit. The atmosphere was dark yellow. The palmist was a woman his age. She was seated behind a table draped with a kaross. He knew who she was: she was the wife of their dental-systems man, Napier. Carl knew something about her and tried to remember what it was. There was some kind of feeling against her among the wives, except for Lo as per usual. As he recalled, people said she had something to do with the occult. Her name was Ione, he knew. She had gone all out. Her lean face was masklike with powder, and her eyes were extreme — framed in squared-off black makeup patterns like the eyes of women in Egyptian tomb murals. She was wearing a black turban and a red caftan with mirror chips sewn into embroidered eyelets around the yoke. She was pretty striking. He liked her. He sat down and paid. The chair was perfect. He was going to prolong this. There was some colorless bright stuff on her lips that looked good. He was comfortable. She reminded him that she needed his palm. There was a tremor in his fingers. His hand calmed down right away when she took it. He admired her for staying in character. He could rest. She was value for money, just for her getup.

His mind drifted while the woman studied his palm. Friendship was a problem in the foreign service — having the kind of friend you could go to for comfort and advice. It was only natural to hold back when everybody you met would be moving on to some other country in two years at the outside. On top of that, potential friends were always one of two things — superiors or subordinates, neither of them good categories of people to expose your troubles to. Life was brief, really brief. And, if on top of everything else your wife was your enemy, good luck. He wanted to knock wood about having Lo.

He remembered another thing about Ione. She knew Setswana. But he had heard that when she was learning the language, she had refused every female tutor assigned to her by the Orientation Centre, insisting on having a male. People had carried on about that. Now she was speaking.

She told Carl that she was picking up enormous stress, but she wanted to know if it made sense to say that the source of this stress was unusual in some way. He said yes. She asked if this stress was from something other than a person presently around him. To Carl, this meant the dogs. This woman was extraordinary. Something was happening to him that was undeserved, she said.

He began about the dogs. She stopped him and said she wanted him to know she had sensed a nonhuman source for his problem, as he could verify in what she had said. He told her more. She said that he was facing a threat but that he could be helped. Either she was a superb actress or she was really concerned and serious. He found her convincing.

He told her everything. She listened intently. When someone tried to come in, she got up and said she was closed. It was only someone reporting that the Brits had won second, anyway. She had him go over his situation again, repeating certain parts. She was intelligent.

Ione said she was going to help him.

That night he was still awake when the dogs began, at two. Things about Ione were agitating him. Why would all their arrangements have to be so sub-rosa? Why did he trust her? She was extreme.

He got up. Now that he was sleeping in the study, he had more freedom for quick, furtive acts of vengeance against the dogs: “venting behavior,” Ione had called it, approving of it as a stopgap. He put on his shaving robe and went softly out into the yard. Next to the stoop he had a cache of small stones and fragments of roof tile. He hurled three stones in the direction of the worst noise. Two of his shots struck metal. There was no change in the barking. He felt better, less wound up, when he was back inside.

Also, he had never thought of Lois as tiny until Ione — trying to identify who Lois was — had asked if she was “that tiny blue-eyed person.” Lo was small. Maybe she seemed smaller because of being with someone his height and also because she would never wear heels because of what they did to your spine. Of course, Ione herself was on the tall side, which would also explain what she’d said.

He was smoking again, a little, as a pastime and only at night. He felt it was justified. He lit a cigarillo. There was no inhaling involved. Lois would understand, when she found out. Dutch cigarillos were the best in the world, and they were cheap in southern Africa, for some reason. He would never be able to afford Ritmeester Seniors back in the U.S.

Ione put things in a way that stayed with him. He should imagine everything he’d done about the dogs, so far, as pictures in an album, with everything he had done in a certain category represented by one picture with a caption: a picture called “Lapidation” would show him throwing rocks through the fence at night. And the title of the whole album would be “Things That Didn’t Work.” And then he should believe that there would be a second album coming, with just one picture in it, and the title of that album would be “The Thing That Worked.” But he had to believe in the second album. She had been shocked by his trapezius muscles, the rigidity. She had made him feel them himself.

He was getting more hopeful. The dogs continued. Idly, he began singeing the hairs on his wrist with the tip of his cigarillo.

Ione said, “I learned hypnosis from a fairly sinister woman — a religious charlatan, really. Classes in hypnotism were a sideline for her. Her main business was a little sect she ran in her garage, the Church of the Supreme Master.” She was moving her hands in a smoothing pattern above him as he lay in a lounge chair. He was supposed to relax, but her insistence on meeting in the motel was still bothering him. She was sitting to his right, leaning over him. She had made him take off his shoes. Was it a sign that he was going under that he saw her hands almost as detached things? He asked her.

She said, “You have to try and avoid critiquing each step of the way or you won’t go under. You have to let go more. Tell me anything that’s still bothering you. I think you understand about confidentiality and so forth. I want to help you. Your situation is pretty severe. Go long enough with low sleep and you can begin seeing things, seriously. So I want you to seal all that up in a mental envelope and lick the flap and visualize it going into a mailbox. Concentrate on your tongue, licking. Good. That’s better.” She resumed her breaststrokelike movements. “Remember, we have plenty of time and you’ll be back in your office by four, tops. I run a tight ship. You can trust me.” He concentrated.

She said, “We met in her garage, where she had, I’ll never forget it, a picture of Christ on the wall with the eyes coated with clear nail polish — to give you some kind of frisson, I guess. The other students were something. A woman who demonstrated stove polish in ten-cent stores for a living was one. And a man who at the time owned the largest sandblasting concern in New Jersey. He was losing contracts. And an unfortunate type who was in it for one thing only — the power to cloud women’s minds. You follow me. She was a wonderful teacher, though.”

Today Ione was normally dressed, except that her blouse had unusually deep armholes, if you were interested. She was wearing a tight white skirt and a white sleeveless blouse. She had started off by removing an ivory bracelet and her wedding ring, because they would distract him when he was concentrating on her hands.

She bent closer to him. “Think what I speak but don’t move your lips,” she said.

• • •

“This is sad,” Ione said. Carl had the impression she was repeating herself. He had been asleep. “This is too sad, as they say here. You’re too exhausted to be hypnotized.”