Norman Rush - Mortals

That was almost sensationally mysterious. And then it had turned out that Milo was also insured to the hilt. And then, mystery of mysteries, his mother, now ensconced with a certain amount of splendor in a deluxe retirement community in Corte Madera, had, after a lifetime of inaction, taken up golf, at which she had become stellar. She played in tournaments for senior women amateurs and won trophies regularly. Her face appeared on magazines! Her whole life, now, was golf. And she had been actively mocking about sports of all kinds, as far back as he could remember. He could still hear her distinctive, hacking laugh. Her attitude had even been influential with him, to tell the truth. He had never really cared about sports.

Possibly Iris could find it in herself to be understanding about his developing an interest in the linings of things at a tender age. Of course she already knew a lot of this.

So.

So there Ray was, if you could find him, in one or another of the communicating cabinets that he constituted or that constituted him. And he had even left out a part of the array of cabinets. He knew why he had left it out. First, it was hard to articulate, and anyway it was nobody’s business. Secondly, it was a late part of the array. It was wrong to say it was new. But it had come to him in thunder recently and not, he hoped, just because Iris was getting labyrinthine and unhappy. This part of the array was himself as a perfect husband, to trivialize it, or as Compleat Husband preferably, except that Rex had contaminated even the most playful mental use of capitals for him. Thank you very much, he thought. But it was like this … in saving himself he had been saving Iris in the only way, an admittedly complex way, the only way he had been able to figure out.

It came to him then that probably one of the best things, or at least one of the simplest good things, you could do with your mortal life would be to pick out one absolutely first-rate deserving person and do everything you could conceive of in the world to make her happy, as best you might, and never be an adversary on small things, be more forthcoming than might be comfortable for you, hide anger and even justified irritation … always wait sexually … and think of Thomas Wyatt and Patiens shall be my song . It was right.

And the idea was to let this single flower bloom without notifying her of what was going on. Because it would be on the order of a present because it was only fair reciprocation for someone who enthralled you and who had incidentally saved you from your demons. Or the idea was to so charge her life with his appreciation that some morning she would sit up and say What the fuck is going on with us, I am so happy. The idea was to let this single flower bloom until it was something monstrous, like an item in a Max Ernst collage, something that fills the room and the occupant says Oh, this is you, this is you, my beloved friend, my love, now I see , something along those lines. He was going to float her in love and she would be like those paper flowers that open up. Water rising around her. She didn’t know about him that he could get an erection just thinking in passing about her and that on one occasion he had had to claim he was having a hamstring problem, sitting facing Boyle was when it had happened, sitting facing Boyle and saying Ow and massaging his Achilles tendon so he could sit there until it was decent to get up. Boyle was divorced, or rather separated, since he was a Roman Catholic. He was in some null state with his wife, was the story. A lot of regular officers in the agency were divorced. A divorce would kill Ray. Maybe the evaporation of Russia would make this easier. He wasn’t sure what he meant, unless it was that a certain pressure had gone out of that sector of his work. He couldn’t believe it was over with the Russians, leaving only bullshit antagonists on the horizon, it looked like now. Maybe they could all relax some. And the joke of it was that Russia had gone up in mist not because of anything the agency had done, really. The agency had been amazed, startled. All this would probably never lead to a verbal event, where she says Good God, I seem to be floating in love. It would be enough if she just thought it, or something like it. No, he had been too average in his attitude and all that toward her in the past, and now he knew it and so would she, soon enough, although she would feel it before she truly knew it, but he was repeating himself. So this would be his new secret work. It would be like adding, say, potted blue hyacinths, one pot at a time, to a shelf or a ledge in the living room, one at a time, until the atmosphere was paradisiacal.

…

Lillian was looking at him with a kind of horrified expression. He must have been talking to himself. He needed to concentrate on Boyle, who was certainly taking his time.

When Boyle had taken over, all the procedures had changed. The flexibility had gone out of the relationships, his with Boyle, at least. He assumed it was the same for the others. All the irony went away, what there had been. Boyle’s mission seemed to be that everyone needed to be reminded that all their activities were life and death, at some level. The cover at this embassy for the chief of station was consular officer. It always had been. And with Marion it had been perfectly okay to pop by upstairs on ostensible school business, say to discuss arrangements for student scholarships in the U.S. that the consular office had a lot to do with, pop in and talk about the real stuff, his assignments, how they were going. Marion had always let him read the Foreign Press Intelligence Summary cables that kept piling up. Now all that was dead. When he turned things in, Boyle never had much to say. Calls at the consular office had to be based on dire emergency only.

Now there was a whole new drill around seeing Boyle face to face. The embassy, a narrow three-story building, looked outward onto the parking lot flanking the mall. The American Library was built into the side of the embassy building and opened on one of the alleys that cut through from the parking lot to the concourse itself. The American Library had always been a physically separate entity. Somehow Boyle had arranged for the construction of a secret spiral staircase, housed in a tube stairwell, to connect his second-floor offices to the library’s inmost conference room. In fact, the old conference room in the rear had been divided in half for the purpose of creating a new, secret meeting place for Boyle’s use. Boyle’s access to the room was by way of a secret panel rather than a conventional doorway. Ray had never seen Boyle enter or exit the back cubicle. He was always in place, set to go, when Ray was let in. There was a new keypad lock on the door to the main conference room, and two keypads for the lock on the inner door. Ray had the combination to the first door only. Lillian had to punch him through. He understood that the tube stairwell was a tight fit for Boyle, which wouldn’t be surprising. Boyle tended to look flushed, often, when they met in back. In fact, he always did.

A few Batswana students had come in to read magazines. Ray wanted to get started with Boyle, but nothing was happening. Finally there was a signal. Lillian murmured something to Ray about picking up the photocopies he had come for. That was standard. He was glad to be leaving the reading room because a fine, gnawing, sourceless hum hung in the air, and something smelled powerfully of solvent. Lillian was thin, cold, and officious. She was a Motswana. She had studied library science in the United States. She had been posted to Dar es Salaam prior to coming home. She was about forty, he guessed. He always skipped offering her the traditional greetings, unless there were Batswana present, because he had gotten the distinct impression that she regarded the act as being condescending. Looking at her now, he wondered if Lillian was a genuine Motswana. She was very Nilotic, very elongated, with what the Batswana call “long eyes.” She had arrived in the country simultaneously with Boyle.