Norman Rush - Mortals

Ray grunted. By being minimal he hoped he was encouraging Iris to get through this story. He wondered if what she was doing was trying to fill the air with narrative to occupy the space that questions about Doctor Morel would rush into once she stopped, since she knew they were coming.

But he remembered a car trip he’d taken with a cousin going through a cruel divorce, whom he’d asked, just by way of conversation, what he’d been reading lately, which had produced an almost line-by-line retelling of The Autobiography of Lincoln Steffens , a late literary discovery his cousin had made, a lost classic, and so on. The object had been not to talk about the main ingredient in his collapsing life. It had gone on for two hours.

They had come into Kgari Close.

“So she found this man touching. And you do understand that up to the point I’m describing, they weren’t lovers. I think he had tried, clumsily, to start something intimate. I’m not clear when that happened.

“She loved his mind, not his body. She had a program for him. She had a campaign. She was serious about getting him into print. For example she had him get business cards printed so that he wouldn’t always be scribbling his name, address, and phone number in matchbooks, and this plays a part in what happened, by the way, as you’ll see. She was maternal toward him. That’s her word. What she had done was this. He was a brilliant conversationalist and she decided she would freeze, that is tape, without his knowledge, one of his arpeggios and then confront him with it and tell him to write it down, turn it into an essay, I guess.

“Well, astonishingly this worked. He had a product. It was an essay comparing certain people, one a Japanese who killed and cooked and ate his girlfriend but got a light sentence and moved to France, where he became a popular celebrity, another someone named Howard Stern who is, I gather, a disgusting radio personality, and the third a famous reactionary named Joseph de Maistre. She said it was absolutely brilliant.

“She got to work and a party was planned where Frank was going to be placed in the path of the editor of the book section of a big paper, this would be a place it would be worth being noticed in. She considered Frank a natural reviewer.

“The plan was just for Frank to engage in his usual conversationalism with the book section guy, but of course Frank is shy, she knows this. So she talked to Frank beforehand and extracted from what he was saying the best, funniest topics, four or five of them. And she drilled him on how to bring them up. She coached him. Now remember how shy this man is.

“She told me what the topics were but the only one I remember now was that in England somebody had just developed a process for putting advertising on eggs, and he had a riff on this. They were cultural topics, striking things.

“It’s too horrible. Keep in mind how shy Frank is. So the party transpires and Frank does as he’s told and brings up his topics one-two-three, and makes an impression, clearly, to the point where the editor asks him if he might want to consider doing something for them, to which Frank says yes and hands him his card. He thought. In fact, and without Ellen’s knowledge, he had prepared a pony for himself, not only listing the topics he was supposed to take up but giving the little stage directions Ellen had thought up. He had written this pony on a card. He’d been afraid of forgetting something, losing one of the topics. And when he thought he was giving his business card to the editor, of course he was giving him this embarrassing aide-mémoire. He discovers this after the party is over and Ellen is congratulating him.

“Well, you can imagine. He was beyond deflated. He was suicidal. He was certain he was never going to hear from the book section editor again. And he didn’t. So what was her role? Well, what with one thing and another, she slept with him, sort of right on the spot.

“It was to cheer him up and convince him he hadn’t done anything so cataclysmic as he thought. She was claiming this guy was just going to be puzzled, not think anything about it. I guess also she was feeling responsible for sponsoring this thing that had turned into such a humiliating event. Also, as they talked, they were consuming nightcaps, from nervousness. Neither of them had been able to imbibe during the party out of anxiety. We know the way that is. So she ended up screwing him and without a condom, and don’t say what you’re going to say.”

“I wasn’t going to say anything. I’m just astonished at her.”

“Well, don’t be. In the first place she knew his life inside out and he had been celibate for five years. She was properly hysterical about it the next day, though, she made him get an AIDS test as soon as he left work so she could kill him if it was positive. And then, strangely enough, he was offended to the quick. This was a breach of trust. He had told her his whole life in detail. He had never been so disappointed. He got the test, but that was it for them. The test was fine, but they were over. So then when she missed her period she felt that events were making her mind up for her and she should become a single mother. The father has no idea. I don’t know if she’ll tell him or not. Neither does she. She was leaving Chicago in any case because she had enrolled to take Montessori training in Florida, in their main training center. You know about that. She’s out of advertising forever and she’s going to be a Montessori person. She thinks she’s going to be a teacher, but she’ll end up administering because she’s so talented. But let her start as a teacher … So that’s where we are now.

“Now. My mother is useless for this kind of thing, like being around for the delivery. And she disapproves of single motherhood. And she hasn’t offered. And Ellen needs to know someone is going to come. And that’s me.”

They walked in silence up to their gate. Fikile was nowhere around, so they let themselves in. They had just entered the house when the phone began to ring. He had never acclimated to the standard ring pattern in Africa, the two peremptory short burrs and a long interval.

Iris started toward the phone but stopped herself when she sensed Ray wanted to take it. He did.

It was one of his notification calls, with the information he needed coded into the wrong number or wrong resident name the caller would claim to be trying to reach. Iris had a good sense of when one of these calls was coming through. It was odd. She would hesitate. She would look at him as if she knew in advance what kind of call it was, not always, but often enough to be odd.

A voice he knew said, “Dumela, rra. Is this number 5412, 5412?”

“Dumela. Sorry, rra. No. Tsamaya sentle.”

It was good news. His man had successfully removed and unloaded the tackhead microcam Ray had taken the risk of having installed in Samuel Kerekang’s bedroom in his dismal lodgings in Bontleng. He would have the footage tomorrow, ready for reviewing. It wasn’t a good idea, but he could get hold of the footage now …

“Finally you look happy,” Iris said. “But are we through with my sister for tonight?” She didn’t like his wrong-number calls. She was showing it more than usual tonight. He did his best to keep them to a minimum. But there was only so much he could do about it.

“I don’t know, are we?”

“We are if everything is clear about my trip back. Because I definitely am …”

“We have no argument, my babe. You’ll go. Of course.”

“You’re not enthusiastic. I wish you were. I need you to be.”

He could see she meant it. She was distressed about something he’d just done, or about the call. She turned away rather abruptly and left him, heading toward her study. He assumed she wanted more enthusiasm about their separation. He started to follow her but decided against it and waited. He didn’t know what to do. He wanted to see the footage. He was tempted, but it wouldn’t be right. It would wreck the night. There was a chance, a minute chance, that this might give him something that would satisfy Boyle that Kerekang was nothing to them. And that might untie his hands for the question of Morel.