Norman Rush - Mortals

“Is anything wrong?” she asked.

He said that he had felt lightheaded after leaving one of his meetings at the embassy, so he’d come home instead of going back to St. James, and that once he had gotten home there had been an episode of diarrhea, that he was feeling better, now, but Curwen had told him to take the rest of the day off. It was almost identical to what he’d told Curwen. Her breathing was a little rapid, he felt, even allowing for exertion, for hurrying.

She looked somber. She undid the chin cord tie and took her hat off. There were the marks in her jaw flesh. She was wearing her hair straight back, unparted, held by a white bandeau he didn’t think he’d ever seen.

He said, “I feel okay, now. It was quick. Whatever it was.”

“Are you sure? You look a little green. God, I wish I’d been here. I was out walking. Why wasn’t I here? Did you think of calling me to come for you?”

“No, I just hoofed it. I’m fine, Iris, fine, nothing to worry about.”

She touched his forehead with the back of her hand. She was lying.

At least it was possible she was. The way she had tried to slide across what she’d been doing and over onto an adjoining subject was bad. And she was wearing stockings, she would never wear stockings to take a walk. Now this , he thought.

“Come inside,” she said.

If it was a lie, he was entering a new world here, a cold place. He hated this place. He shivered, and she noticed it.

“You aren’t well. Look at you shivering.”

He knew he was putting her through something, but there was no way he could avoid it. What he was putting her through was the generic fear of falling ill in Africa, where small things turned fatal because the medical system was what it was, so full of gaps, and because if you started shaking it could as easily be malaria or sleeping sickness as some kind of minor electrolyte imbalance.

He was, now, actually beginning to feel unwell, obviously in sympathy with the story he had told. You could call it a talent, he thought. But of course he hadn’t eaten since breakfast, so that was part of it. Undoubtedly stress was pouring buckets of acid into his stomach. Her lie was the worst thing, it was the worst. He had been okay until she lied, physically okay.

There was no proof she had lied. But he wanted to know since when was she taking walks in the middle of the day, for example? If they walked, they walked in the cool of the evening. If she was out in the midday sun wearing stockings it stood to reason it wasn’t for exercise or for the breeze. There was no breeze. She wasn’t carrying anything, which would fit with walking for its own sake. She had her waist pack on, twisted around to the back, the way she preferred to wear it despite the fact that it was less secure than wearing it on the side. But she wouldn’t wear it on the side because she didn’t want to bulk out the line her hips made. She was entirely deluded about her hips. She was womanly, was all. She was so obstinate, in ways. My hips fill the universe, she liked to murmur as she was getting undressed. And then he would reassure her. It was a routine.

Still carrying Rex’s letter, he followed her into the house. She had noticed the letter in his hand but, obviously, had decided not to mention it at this juncture. He thought that must be because she didn’t want to go down any byways right now. She was thinking. He could tell. She needed time to think her way into her lie. If it was a lie. She needed him not to engage with her for a while. I know you so well, he thought. She would try to stow him away while she thought. That would be next.

“You need to get off your feet,” she said. “And let me get you some cold tea. Also your pulse, I want to take your pulse. We’re sure this is something you ate, right? That would be the best thing for it to be …” Now she was looking pale herself. Before she had been flushed, in fact. It was happening. He was frightening her.

“Excuse me a second,” he said, and stepped into the bathroom. He ran water for a moment, then stood immobile while the water ran. He did it not to deepen his act but to get more time to think, himself. He was in turmoil. Lying is murder, he thought, she is killing me, she has a lover.

Iris insisted that he lie down in the darkened bedroom, which he did. She began naming the teas he could have.

“Give me anything. Give me orange pekoe, then. Or Earl Grey. And tepid is fine. I don’t need it to be freezing.”

She was in favor of an herb tea.

“You gave me a choice and I chose. Orange pekoe is what I want.”

“All right, all right.” She signaled to Dimakatso, who was in the doorway, waiting for instructions.

“Are you angry at me?” Iris asked him.

“No, no I’m just not feeling that great.”

“Did you get something at one of the takeaways? King’s?”

“A drumstick, in effect. I had some chicken peri-peri at King’s before my meeting. I didn’t finish it. It tasted all right.”

“Usually the takeaways are safe. They overcook everything so drastically.”

“I know.”

He declined a warm compress.

She sat next to him on the bed and took his hand. Tea came. He drank some, then lay back, closing his eyes, trying to drive the word whore , which was unfair, out of his thought-stream.

She got up carefully. “Stay here,” she said, leaving.

He wanted to sleep, not that it was conceivable. Dreaming of dreamless sleep was somebody’s line and not bad. An interval of blankness might help him. He had to get through this. Nothing was going to be right until she admitted she’d lied. She had gone someplace she didn’t want him to know about and then she had lied about it.

He didn’t know how he was going to be able to sound normal when he talked to her until this was cleared up. She had seemed guilty, or evasive, at least, out on the stoop.

So, had all her unhappiness and discontent lately come to a point in sex with someone else? Or had the sex not happened yet, which would be something, anyway. It could be in the preliminary stages, in the flirtation stage.

But why would she do it if there was nothing the matter with their own sex life?

The last time, she had asked him, Do you want to know what it feels like to a woman when … What it feels like when you come really hard? And she just had. And he had said of course he wanted to know. And she had said, Well, part of what it feels like is like this, that you’re just a drop of oil on a white tablecloth, just a tiny, still drop of oil, and then in a flash you’re expanding outward in every direction, evenly, turning into a stain, a little drop expanding into a bright stain that covers the universe, the process of that, the expanding … that’s part of it …

Anyone in his right mind would take that as a compliment from his wife.

Of course, she was unusual. She had an appetite for sex that was probably unusual. She liked it about herself. She was humorous on the subject. When he had said, and this was a compliment or at least an appreciation, when he had said Don’t you think you let yourself be felt up more than the average woman does without complaining? she had answered I have no idea how much the average woman complains.

What was he supposed to do? What?

He was accommodating, also, in his opinion. They did what she wanted. They played games. They had fun. There were so many examples. What was her problem? There were so many examples, even recently. The last game, how had it started? He couldn’t remember, but there had been a discussion of what it would be like to have sex with someone who was in the hospital. Now he remembered. It had come up because someone they knew had done it. They had speculated about the mechanics of it and she had gotten mildly aroused and what with one thing and another she had asked him if he could imagine himself making love to her when he was in the hospital, when of course there was no lock on the door to his room. And he had described himself doing it to her when she came to visit him in the hospital during this imaginary convalescence. And then to amuse her he had gone into the bathroom and wound gauze rather obscenely around his naked torso and then come back to her, and it had amused her, and she had gotten into the spirit of the game, though afterward she had teased him for the gauze, for being so literal.