Norman Rush - Mortals

Last year’s valentine had been the shortest.

Rude Time won’t go away

But neither will my love for you ,

So that’s okay .

But she had claimed she liked it, loved it, and now this …

Iris came tentatively into the room, wearing a bathrobe now, a towel around her neck. It meant nothing, necessarily, that her eyes seemed red.

“You’re awake,” she said.

“Well, the shower …”

“I’m sorry.”

He reassured her that he was better.

She came to him, took his hand, and looked imploringly, he thought, down at him. Something was coming. He pulled himself up against the headboard. She had something clutched in one hand, a card, white, a note? It was going to be relevant. What was it?

She sighed, looked away from him, then reached over and pushed Rex’s letter out of the way, as though she wanted the zone around him empty of any distraction. She tried to begin, twice. It was clear she didn’t know how to begin with whatever was coming and about to kill him, no doubt. She patted his hand, which was the worst sign possible. He was numb.

“Your voice sounds so hollow in these rooms … because of the high ceilings,” she said. He shrugged.

She was circling. She couldn’t bear it, either, which was something. He thought, Does Gallo love his wine?

She mastered herself, swallowing. “Anyway,” she said.

“Anyway … Did you know that my father once told me he wouldn’t read Conrad because Conrad was a Jew, something he concluded from the jacket portrait on The Portable Conrad I’d given him for a present. It was frightening. I was stunned. I’d never known he was an anti-Semite. But you repress things. I’d forgotten about it. It was out of the blue.”

Ray was listening. It was clear that this was deeply fraught for her. She seemed to be in a state of upheaval. Life is insane, he thought.

“You can probably tell I’ve been talking about this kind of thing, Ray, and …

“And anyway, I’ve been seeing someone …” She rushed it out, squeezing Ray’s hand and moving closer to him.

He couldn’t speak, at first. He could groan.

“Oh God,” he said finally.

“Wait, but what’s wrong. I haven’t …”

“What’s wrong? You said you’re seeing someone, I mean this is the way the world ends …”

She broke in with “Oh please can we discuss this without literary quotations coming into it, please please please . No I’m sorry.

“No, I’m seeing a doctor , a very fine, well, therapist, but he’s also a doctor of medicine, which I know is important. Oh my darling, no. A doctor, which is where I was today when you came in, and of course I hadn’t told you and I didn’t want to tell you. But. But . Ray, I have been unhappy . Oh but God you’re an idiot!” She stopped to compose herself a little.

“I’ve been three times. It’s very helpful, Ray. He’s just around the corner. It’s been really important for me, really good. Amazingly good. And I didn’t tell you because you have enough on your plate and I thought I could go a few times and, well, feel better, and I could avoid bringing you into it because you know the way you are. You hover and worry and you hover and you worry about me if I … Well, you know. You want me to be happy so much . And that’s what I want, for your sake, really. Mine too, though.

“And I didn’t even go originally because I was unhappy, really. This is true. I went because I thought my urine looked too dark. Which I mentioned to you and you thought I was being absurd I guess. You said it was chloroquine, but we’ve been taking chloroquine for years and I never noticed that effect. But you didn’t look, you just insisted that we all fluctuate or whatever you said. So.

“My urine is fine, by the way.

“But anyway he’s, well, quite holistic I suppose is the term, and he asked about whatever else might be bothering me. He could hardly not see it.

“And, well … So I go to him now. I was going to tell you. It’s just that you surprised me today and I wasn’t ready to.

“So that was stupid.

“Also he’d told me to tell you.”

What she’d been clutching was an appointment card. She handed it to Ray.

“This is the man,” she said. “You’d approve of him.”

The card read Davis Morel, M.D., 16 Tshekedi Crescent, Gaborone, Eclectic Medicine. Her next appointment was for the following Tuesday, at noon.

Ray reached for her and, trembling, embraced her fiercely.

She relaxed.

Two days had passed.

Tonight dessert was half a papaya each, perfectly ripe papaya that deserved to be savored bite by bite, he knew. He had tried to eat companionably, at her desultory rate, God knew he had, but there were things to do. She seemed to have forgotten that they were going out for a walk this evening.

Surely now she was finished. The scraped papaya skin was a flimsy thing, like a silk scarf and like the platonic idea of the color orange. Idly she held it up to the light to get the pure orange effect the skin yielded when she did that. She was sensitive to color. She was an aesthete, a genuine one. She stopped to notice aesthetic events there was really no time for, fleeting conjunctures and juxtapositions of things. Later you were glad you had bothered.

He got up. They could go out in a minute.

One thing did bother him about her seizures of meticulousness, and that was that there was another explanation for them, and that explanation was boredom. Elongating simple tasks like eating half a papaya into protracted, meticulously executed exercises. Peeling carrots and destringing celery earlier, she had arranged the carrot peels and celery strings into the letter I on the counter as they talked. When she was starting to sauté something for supper, she had drizzled some symbol or other, maybe her initials, with oil, in the pan before it got hot. He thought, This could be boredom, and boredom kills, and what can I do?

She was in back, getting ready to go out. Their toilet flushed thunderously, which was its way.

He thought, Remember you overinterpret. A case in point was his recent alarm over a band of cursive doodling in ballpoint pen on the kraftpaper jacket of their address book. At first glance he had taken the band of doodling for something like a border decoration in Islamic or Greek art. Iris was always doodling. He had never paid attention to her productions, which in a small way was funny because doodles were something he had been trained to be interested in. And he was certainly well aware of the lengths the agency had gone to in the past, and presumably was going to even now, to retrieve doodled-on materials from certain persons of interest in certain settings, which he hadn’t thought ridiculous when he’d heard about them. The idea was that someone who doodled was leaking signs and hints. I’m not boring, he thought: Except that a lot of me is like the storage areas in a good museum.

But the decoration, the arabesque, on the phonebook jacket, which she had taken the trouble to continue across the spine and around across the back, in her very neat way, had frightened him because, if you looked closely at it, it seemed to be saying No over and over. In fact he would take a look at it again, while she got ready to go out sometime before cockcrow.

He went into the living room and, locating the address book, got a surprise. The cover was gone. The book was its chipped, cheap black plastic self again. He looked around to see if possibly the cover had simply fallen off. But there was no sign of it. The cover had been discarded.

Iris had said that that was a design she had been doodling since before she remembered, and she could see why he thought it looked like No’s, except look how many of the o’s look like lowercase e’s. She had reassured him … Said it was nothing.