Norman Rush - Mortals

Every ongoing relationship contains a quid pro quo somewhere, he thought: The task is identifying it. How intimate was Rex being in these letters? Very, Ray had gathered from hints dropped here and there by Iris. So.

He could scan, he could read excerpts, or he could read the whole thing.

He picked up the letter and began to read it, leaning against the wall.

My Dear Iris:

We are still in Mexico, but in Oaxaca, in a weird hotel right on the zocalo. Our room has an actual balcony you can go out on to endure the musical performances blaring from the bandshell it overlooks, or purling up from the strolling mariachi groups who afflict the street-level cafés until late at night, or rising repetitively from the blind or otherwisely decrepit solo guitarists with their overlapping tiny repertoires.

Mexico is frightening. It’s as frightening as Grace Jones and frightening in somewhat the same way she is. It’s sort of beautiful but you get the feeling it wants to bite you. It’s a nightmare that Joel is enjoying very much.

I’m up early and have come downstairs alone to have breakfast and write these lines to you in privacy. It’s a glorious morning and as usual one part of God’s creation is eating another part of it for breakfast. I hope to join in but I am growing faint. The service in Mexican restaurants is obsequious but slow. But to be absolutely fair the waiters in these arcade cafés have other things to do than bring you your food. For example they have to keep the doves off your table. Some can scare them away with a deft snap of a filthy towel they carry. Others have developed a peculiar screaming cry that seems to do the job, sometimes clearing several tables at once. Bending over your place setting to blow dove-molt off it is another task they have.

It is truly early. A detachment of the Mexican army marches into the zocalo every morning after waking you up at six-thirty with their reveille. Except that possibly you are already awake because another nighttime activity that begins at just about the time when the cafés finally close is the de-limbing, with chain saws, of the tule trees that are planted throughout and around the zocalo. Pollution is killing them. I don’t know why the de-limbing is restricted to the small hours, unless it’s because the government thinks tourists would be upset at the spectacle. But in my opinion tourists who come to Mexico are very hardy indeed.

When I say Mexico is frightening what I mean is that almost every aspect of Mexico that you confront contains something frightening, like the bus driver who is all smiles and courtesy until you get to your destination and he won’t take your suitcase out of the storage section in the bottom of the bus unless you give him a huge tip. I do hope you know who Grace Jones is. It occurs to me you may not. I’ll send a picture. You go to the museum to see the antiquities and these turn out to be mainly horrific representations in stone of skulls and rattlesnakes. In the last earthquake, in Mexico City, an innocuous building collapsed — I think it was the post office — and what do you know, there was an operative torture chamber in it.

So now here we are in Oaxaca, where we can enjoy my kind of travel. There are basically two kinds of travels, my kind, vegetative travel, where you go someplace and vegetate and stay in your room and sigh looking out at the palm fronds if need be, and the other kind, activist travel, where people trudge out to every ruin, plant themselves for a half second before every painting in the museum, in short push their way into every nook and cranny of the Other in order to suck out the genius in all the loci they can get to. So I should be happy. But am I? No.

Do you know the Emily Dickinson poem that begins “A Day! Help! Help! Another Day!”? That’s almost me. I need you to help me with Joel, or rather I need you to help me with certain impulses I am developing toward him, impulses I disown but need help in curbing. I suspect that what is happening is my own fault, in a way. Lately Joel is finding himself irresistible. Somehow all my loving efforts to build up his selfconfidence have born monstrous fruit. He has begun to really love himself. He feels he is too good for anything. Here is an outburst he had. He started to put on a shirt with his monogram on it, a gift from his mother, but then stopped and tore it off and threw it on the floor, saying I HATE MY INITIALS. Suddenly he is too fine for them, or something. Later we were getting on the bus for a day trip to Monte Alban and he was in a fine mood, looking forward to it, we had a nice little lunch packed, and he turned to me and said, “This is going to be neat. Now don’t let anything I do ruin our day.”

Now he is preening himself and is on the verge of flirting with other people. In fact he was flirting the other night, in a sidelong way and over his shoulder, with a clot of tenured fauves from the UC Berkeley Art & Musicology Departments.

As you know, and as Ray will have emphasized, I am not prepossessing, physically. I could be described as pudgy. Also I am being driven bald at an accelerated rate lately, through anxiety, I believe, or possibly by something in the water in Mexico. I am not saying I am repulsive. Let others say that. But on my best day I rise to the average. Joel seemed always not to notice. So we got on famously until I succeeded in convincing him that not only is he attractive but he is worth knowing and worth treating nicely. The problem that is emerging between us is teasing. I have a tendency to want to tease, which I am basically in control of. But I began teasing more as his rehab progressed, I think. I don’t know why. Possibly I am seeing him as a duckling getting ready to fly, and if he is going to fly away it might be better for me if he does it now, before I get further attached to him. So that would be one Surmise. Or the impulse could be to tease him as a way of showing I still have some kinds of power he doesn’t. His attempts to tease back are pathetic. Or the fact that I am footing the bill for everything could be involved. One thing I do to make a little money now and then is to sell one of the business names I’ve copyrighted. I have a list of these names, in different categories, and I sold one, Bodysmith, to a gym chain, and here we are, spending my fee together. We never discuss money. We used to. He used to actually express gratitude now and then. Or possibly I tease because teasing was the worst thing ever done to me (ask your husband what I am talking about) and I have some perverse drive to make Joel experience at least a dilute version of what I went through. I don’t even know what I mean by this. I am trying to think of everything. I am drifting toward wanting to humiliate Joel and I reject myself for it.

I see that my breakfast is here. On a plate with a dollop of refried beans and a piece of toast like a section of planking is a sunnyside up fried egg with a major bloodspot in it. The coffee is like ink. This may be a diet day for me. I have had many diet days in Mexico.

Joel makes me wonder who I am.

By the way, we must be Proud of our identities these days, we must be fierce, insulting, even, as we proclaim ourselves, flaunt our teeny individualities. A woman who teaches English at one of the junior colleges in Marin told me that a student requested she not be required to do a paper on a certain writer because he smoked. She explained that she felt strongly on the subject and would be much more comfortable expositing a nonsmoker. Believe me that this happened. This is not the sort of thing a normal mind could make up.

One thing that tempts me in re teasing is that Joel is truly a virginal mind. Teasing can be a form of instruction. And Joel is a dummy, in fact, but so beautiful that if it weren’t for his accompanying stupidity he would be totally beyond my reach or grasp. I no longer say “A penny for your thoughts” to Joel. I hate being overcharged.