Norman Rush - Mortals

“You’re hurting my breasts,” Iris said.

“God I’m so sorry. It was unconscious.” He took his hands off her, but again she caught them and pressed them to her breasts.

Something was coming that he didn’t want to hear and it was coming at the worst moment, because in a way everything was perfect. The color of her skin in the color of the bathwater was perfect. The water in the tub was the exact shade of something … Jasmine tea was what it was. He thought he knew the particular cup of tea, even, and the restaurant they’d been in when it had been served, years ago, before Africa. The scent from the citronella candle burning in the hallway was contributing to the moment … the scent was enough like perfume for her, enough not like perfume, closer to an astringent, for him. Physically nothing was hurting. It was excruciating.

He had to know what was coming. It was, and it didn’t matter why it was coming, it didn’t matter why it was coming, whether it was the issue of their childlessness aggravated again via her sister cleverly devising to get pregnant by an absolute fool, or if it was the first cold wind of menopause beginning to blow, or if it was boredom with him versus the black glamour of the black bastard he had the power to destroy utterly, if he was careful. She prefers a jackass who says contra instead of versus, as if that made any kind of difference: she wants to mate with a larger vocabulary, he thought. But larger vocabulary wasn’t what he meant. He meant gaudier vocabulary, flashier.

Do it, he said to himself. “What do you want?” he asked, his tone strange to his ears, realizing as he spoke that this was clumsy and would only baffle her.

That was the effect. “What do you mean?” she asked. He had succeeded in baffling her.

“Iris, I don’t know what you want, if you want us to have an arrangement … something like an arrangement …” He could barely hear himself.

She sat up and torqued herself violently around in order to look hard into his eyes. She seemed amazed. It seemed genuine.

She had covered her breasts with her hands, reflexively, as though she had suddenly found herself in the presence of a stranger. She was staring at him, shaking her head minutely.

Anyone would want her. She was interesting. Yesterday she had raised the question of why there was a single term in English for affirmative head movements but that for the negative you were forced to use three words? He had no idea why there was no one-word antonym of nod. Her questions came from nowhere, you were never prepared. She was good company. There were her peculiar dreams, her amusing dreams, many of them lately, he realized, about getting rich. A few mornings ago she had said to him, “I dreamed I got rich on a doohickey I invented that would let you put your hair up in a bun shaped according to your religion, cross, crescent, star of David, a little Buddha …”

“You poor thing,” she said. “I am in pain if you thought I was thinking of anything like that. Please . Oh my poor thing.”

He thought, She wants Morel, despite all this she does, she won’t do it with him, but this is where we are … she prefers him … I’m more interesting … I am, not that she can see it, but I am.

Still regarding him steadily, she said, “We love each other.”

He flinched. He felt weak. It was too much.

“I mean us, us,” she said, clearly alarmed. She touched his face.

“Give me a minute,” he said.

The pose she was holding was impossible. She turned and resumed her previous position, but bracing her heels on the tub above the tap, she drove herself more forcefully against him than before, which he took as a declaration combining love and punishment for idiocy.

He began, mechanically, to soap himself. “You just nearly killed me,” he said.

“You’re an idiot,” she said. She made a spiral pattern in the lather on his right kneecap.

She sighed heavily. A pause followed. “But don’t you think it’s interesting, an interesting thing to realize, that our wonderful huge white civilization is all a big misunderstanding? I mean, Jesus was not a Christian, at all. And that’s only part of it. I know I’m going on and I’m sorry. Hate him if you have to, but I learn interesting things from this man you hate. It’s like your first year of college, before it turns into a drag. But there is something so staggering about it, first the Church stealing Jesus from the Jews, claiming him, and then libeling and killing the people who gave them Jesus. Fantastic. You have Judaism and you have Christianity and Islam, these two heresies, coming out of it, and you have these heretics trying their best to kill the people that produced them! There is something astonishing about the magnitude of the lying going on. What you have is this image of a huge upside-down pyramid which is the denominations, all the denominations, and churches, and the mosques, and they’re all balanced on a point, and the point the whole pyramid is standing on is … is lies! Certain untruths … and nobody telling … Jesus was never anything but a devout Jew, you know, he was never a Christian at all. And the Jews didn’t kill him. It was the Romans.

“So it isn’t just There is no God with Davis. It’s about lies. But I promise you I am not going to keep talking about him. I’m sorry. Also I don’t want to be restricted for no reason. But don’t worry.”

Essentially it was over, this episode, he supposed. She had a bingo. She had everything she wanted. She had carte blanche to see Morel, and to what? flirt with him was what it came down to, with her husband’s approval, although calling it flirting was probably unfair. It would be fun for her. He wondered how she would like it if he proposed a deal like that for himself, except that he was forgetting it was her opinion that men as a class already had a de facto right or privilege to flirt and worse without anyone taking notice of it let alone assessing damages. Love is a strain, he thought. Now was probably not the best time to establish exactly how many sessions per week she was going to have with Morel. But he had to know that.

“What do you think brought him to Africa?”

“Well, Africa is the one part of the world where you’re getting four new Christians for every two you’re losing in the rest of the world. He has the figures. Don’t sound so grave.”

“I’m not grave, I’m pensive.”

“Why should the subject of religion make you so pensive? We aren’t religious, I thought.

“Do we believe in God, for example?

“Was that a shrug I felt?”

He was tempted to be perverse, which would be a mistake.

“Well, yes and no.”

“What do you mean?”

“Indirectly.”

“What?”

“Well, you might say I believe in someone who obviously did. Milton.” This is stupid, he thought. “Without his religion there would’ve been no Paradise Lost , no … none of it.”

“You think it’s impossible that he might have written something else great, as an unbeliever?”

“No, nothing like what he did write, of that … stature. And he couldn’t anyway because in his time any declaration of unbelief got you locked up. Where Paradise Lost is, there would be nothing, believe me.”

“I believe you and I love you. You don’t know how much more we love you than you love us, in general.”

“You mean, how much more women love their men than men love their women, how ridiculous. How unsupported can you get.”

“How many women know their husband’s Social Security number versus how many men know their wife’s? Venture a guess.”

“Fifty-fifty.”

“Wrong. About seventy percent of women know their husband’s. The figure for men is thirty percent.”