Norman Rush - Mortals

“Are you ever coming in here?” he asked loudly toward the back of the house. She had left the kitchen for the bathroom and closed the bathroom door. There had been a time when he’d occasionally helped her shave her legs. But that had been on the impractical side because of what it inexorably resulted in. It was too provocative. It had turned him into a nuisance rather than a help. Her hair was true black. She covered the little bit of gray that was coming in with a rinse. She could be a fountain of gray if she wanted, as far as he was concerned. He considered his own hair to be midpoint intermediate between blond and gray, a noncolor, which was fine. Here she was.

She was bringing in a pitcher, their best green glass pitcher, of iced bush tea. She sat it down and hauled the armchair around to her side of the coffee table, opposite him. She wasn’t going to be joining him on the hard, rouge-red sofa as she normally would. Her expression was less than open. It was too pleasant. He thought, Hell is that expression.

She sat down but immediately got up to correct the setting. She turned out the light in the dining room and adjusted the floor lamp at the end of the sofa to its dimmest setting. When they were relaxing in the evening they both liked there to be only one light source in the room, and a mild one. She sat opposite him, with some finality this time, put her feet up on the coffee table, and pushed the lap of her sundress down hard between her thighs as she settled.

“Would you mind if we talked about Rex?” she asked.

“God no, it’s fine.”

“You don’t mean it.”

“Oh God. Yes I do!”

“Really, what’s all this God this and God that all of a sudden if it’s so perfectly okay with you as a topic?”

“You don’t understand. I want to talk about the man because I know you love him. You love him! His wit, his … whatever you love in the man. You love his letters. You know nothing about him except what he prepares for you. Concocts for you. Well, go ahead, Iris.”

He could see her getting more composed by the second. She drew her feet off the coffee table. She sat up straighter.

“Look, I enjoy your brother. His letters.”

“But you don’t know the first thing about him. You have no framework for him. None.”

“You two never got along, I know that.”

“That isn’t quite right. First we did and then we didn’t, due to him.”

“Could you say what happened?”

“This is the way the week ends for me. Hell. Too bad I don’t drink scotch anymore.”

“Well, you can, as you know . Go to the bottle store and get something and come back and let me watch you drink yourself to a point where nothing you say makes sense. Where I ask a question and you take an hour to answer it simply because you’re contemplating what the best possible answer would be, naturally, and I deserve only the best, you’re only being sagacious, you —.”

“Forget I said that. I’m sorry, Iris. Truly and no kidding.”

“All right.”

“Okay, when I say you don’t know anything about Rex let me be concrete. Here’s what his favorite reply to something you asked him to do was — Nokay. That gives you a hint. Nokay, and he would look at you I guess in order to see whether you thought he’d said yes or no. I guess that was a moment he enjoyed.”

“That’s so trivial, Ray.”

“Maybe it is, but it’s indicative. He was unremitting with stuff like that. You know the song with the line The guy behind you won’t leave you alone? That’s what it was like. Or here, relate to this. He became a master at pronouncing disgusting or insulting words so that they sounded so much like an innocent word you couldn’t be sure whether you were being insulted or not. You had to concentrate when you didn’t feel like it. At mealtime, he might say, Oh this is excrement! smiling, his facial expression all full of appreciation, making excrement sound like excellent. He would make it seem as though it was the fact that he was chewing something that was responsible for your misunderstanding what he was saying. Good evening, labia genital was a line he got away with because he said it so fast when he was the toastmaster at his senior dinner. Heil there, he used to say to a gym coach he hated. Some of his little pals tried to copy him but, not being so expert, they got caught out. He was relentless. Anyone could be the target, he was no respecter of persons, just so he could keep his game going. You can smile but you didn’t have to live with it. Our poor mother. Who was someone he loved, insofar as he loved anybody. But the poor woman. She liked to play the piano and sing for us in the evenings. He’d say Mom — he had this way of dragging the word out to make himself sound plaintive … Mom … can’t you play Old Fucks at Home for us? He’d use a fake breathless rapid-fire delivery for camouflage. I’ll think of more examples, now that you’ve got me started. And by the way he liked to make a big deal of my mother agreeing to play a couple of songs out of the Golden Treasury of Old Favorites , or whatever it was called, and he would excitedly go and inform my father about the treat we were all about to have, who of course had to pretend he loved it whenever she would do this. It was not a great experience. The woman was self-taught. So Rex would rush to wherever my father was, doing paperwork or reading his antiques magazines, and force him to come and listen. I say my father, but I mean our father, obviously. The more I look back on it the more harassed I can see my father was, in general. I’ve told you about his antiques business. The fiasco that was.”

Iris nodded.

“Oh, also for mealtimes … Is the soup dung yet? Or, This soup is really swill, for swell, obviously. But sometimes Rex wanted to be understood. Say we were having franks and beans for dinner, and I noticed that Rex was finding a lot of excuses to refer to what we were eating as frank and beans, so I asked him. Oh that was just because he had observed that my mother had only cut up one frankfurter for the whole dish, so the dish should be called frank and beans. So he was just being precise and in the process reminding all of us that the family was eating like the poor, yet again. He projected innocence but he kept everybody off balance in an unpleasant way. So, for him, everything was perfect. We were pretty frugal. The entrée we ate most when I was growing up was creamed tuna on toast, which I loved, in fact.”

“I could make that,” Iris said. “But no doubt she put butter in the cream sauce and that’s why it tasted so good.”

“Who knows? By the way, what is butter?”

She waited for him to resume.

He said, “Wait, I had something else about Rex that fits in here. Let me think for a second.

“I know what it was. Tell me this wasn’t diabolical. He goes to any kind of performance, the gamut, from school assemblies to recitals, what have you. What he loved to do and what you could count on him trying to do was to start a half-assed standing ovation whenever he could. He would stand up and begin clapping maniacally like someone overcome with the dance or the accordion solo or the talk or whatever. And then he would stare around in disappointment at the rest of the audience. And then he would subside, looking crushed on behalf of the performer. Sometimes he’d get a handful of other people to join him and the effect would be even worse. The point was to show that the audience didn’t really like the performer all that much, except for Rex. I hated to sit next to him at anything. And I’d grab his knee to try to force him to stay when I thought he was about to erupt. And of course if I left a bruise it’d be displayed later to my father. And I would be in the spot he loved me to be in. How could you explain using force against someone who had merely wanted to jump up in a moment of enthusiasm? He bruises very easily. You grab him with ordinary force and in fifteen minutes his skin looks like paisley.