Norman Rush - Mortals

“Right.”

“Are you making suggestions as you read?”

“If something strikes me. But don’t get the idea I’m editing him or anything remotely resembling that.”

“He appreciates your contributions, though.”

“He seems to.”

“I’m not surprised.”

He wondered if they had come to the end of the discussion. Apparently not, because she was still sitting there, unhappily. There was more, then.

She said, “One of the areas I’m trying to improve in is telling the truth, not being as politic as I have.”

“So you have something more you want to tell me.”

“Yes. God help me, though.”

“Say it. Say it.”

“I know you know about this, Ray. There were certain schools of Greek philosophy where doing this was part of achieving virtue or enlightenment. It was called parrhesia . It means saying everything .”

“The Stoics,” he said.

“No, the Cynics, the Cynics. Parrhesia.”

“The Cynics, not the Stoics, are you sure?”

“ Parrhesia , the Cynics. I’m completely sure. The Cynics are very misunderstood. In fact the Stoics are a dilution of the Cynics. Well, in my humble opinion they are.”

“Obviously I have to go back and look at my Phil One notes.”

“No you don’t. That’s not what I want.”

The truth was that he remembered not that much about the ancient Greeks. He hadn’t found them interesting, partly because what they seemed to find most interesting was pederasty. How great had they been? They had given their empire away by stupidly fighting among themselves and then their superbly civilized upper classes had invited the Romans to take over when the plebs made the slightest trouble. As he recalled, Stoicism was about numbness, being numb, their great object. What else was it that she was going to say? He had references, he could look up the Stoics. He could deal with this. He was not a child.

“I never took philosophy in college,” she said. “Did you know that?”

“Philosophy is a joke,” he said, hotly, trying to think of what his actual position was. She was making him suffer, without intending it. She could not come to the point, obviously because it was going to be too painful for him. What else could explain this? What was it?

He knew what he wanted it not to be. He did not want it to be about their failure to reproduce, again. That was settled. It had to be a settled thing. A solid scab had formed over the issue. And of course it was exactly the kind of issue that was going to turn up once she began free-associating through the universe of her disappointments. Why they had no children was complicated. There had been delay and bad luck involved. They hadn’t started trying early enough. They had been living in Africa. Getting it definitively established that she was infertile had taken years more. They had stuck with different regimens for too long before that, before facing the truth. He didn’t think he had been halfhearted about having children, despite certain reservations he might have had. Inwardly he knew that he would not have enjoyed being his own parent, being a parent to the child he had been. He had never been captivated by the idea of reproducing himself. But he had wanted it very much, for Iris. He had, despite the fact that children exposed you to hellmouth, which was the opening up of the mouth of hell right in front of you, without warning, through no fault of your own. It was the mad gunman shooting you at lunch and it was the cab jumping the curb and crushing you. It was AIDS and it was the grandmother, the daughter, the granddaughter tumbling through the air, blown out of the airplane by a bomb, the three generations falling and seeing one another fall, down, down, onto the Argolid mountains. With children you created more thin places in the world for hellmouth to break through. Morel was hellmouth for him. Hellmouth was having the bad luck to be born in Angola anytime after 1960. And hellmouth was Bertrand Russell coming home from a bicycle ride and announcing to his wife that he had decided he didn’t really love her, like that. That was hellmouth, too. When it had come to adoption, he wasn’t opposed to it. It had been Iris who dropped it. She had been so determined that it be his flesh, his child. Now at forty-eight he was at the limits of eligibility, if he hadn’t already crossed them, unless they went for a half-grown child, which was not what she had wanted. Now her sister was fanning the flames. And Iris was going to be with her, in the middle of it, while an actual infant was produced, to feel and hold. Was there going to be some state of the art nostrum Morel would give Iris?

She began to speak and he saw that he had been wrong. It was something else and it was worse.

She seemed to be saying that she felt he ought to know that she felt a certain attraction to Morel. She was talking about it because it was important for her to tell the truth about things, for her own sake and for his. Ray was numb. He went over what she had said so far. First of all, she was going to go to Morel despite , as Ray understood it, this attraction she felt. Nothing had happened between them and nothing was going to happen. She had determined in her mind and heart that nothing was going to happen with Morel and nothing was going to happen with their marriage. But, as he understood it, she didn’t want to go to Morel under false colors, false pretenses. He, Ray, was the only one who knew this attraction existed. Morel had no idea. There had been no flirting, no exchange of vibrations, none, and there would be none. All this had come out in a rush, involving a divagation about men feeling attraction for the women they worked among all the time, and wives knowing, seeing it at parties and in other transactions and having it denied to their faces. Her plan, he gathered, was to proceed smartly through her course of therapy and get what she needed to out of it and then remove herself still unstained, better, happier, a happier self, for him, for Ray. The thing was that telling him was killing him. It was good she was going away for a while, or was it? He didn’t know. This is the spit on which we turn. Time is the fire in which we burn , was a fragment of his attempted poetry, from the deep past. This moment would pass. He knew something about the therapy relationship that she didn’t. One thing he knew that Iris didn’t was that a woman named Daddario whose first name would come to him in a minute had done a doctoral dissertation showing that thirty percent of women who sought counseling wound up having some form of sexual contact with their therapists, from kissing and petting to sexual intercourse. Linda was Daddario’s first name. It was odd that he remembered that.

“Ray, don’t tell me you haven’t been in situations where you felt attracted to someone. And don’t say yea or nay if you don’t want to. I know you have. I’ve seen it. Married women are used to that.”

“But I don’t,” he said. “I don’t look, I don’t flirt. I don’t.”

“I didn’t say you flirt. But you look. But that’s not what I want to talk about.”

She was getting distraught. He wondered if it could be as simple as telling her not to go, telling her to forget it, saying he wouldn’t pay for it, taking the choice away from her … as if he could do such a thing. Then the idea would be for her to go to someone else. Except that there was no one else. They were in Botswana. It was a total fluke that someone with Morel’s credentials had bobbed up in Gaborone, available for her. The idea that what she wanted was for him to command her to desist was a fantasy. Alas, he thought. There was no one else for her. There was the Italian head of the mental hospital in Lobatse whose English was a national joke.