Norman Rush - Mortals

She would never know how tired he was of her facts and figures, courtesy of the good doctor. Now they were doing something interesting together, he and Iris. They were collaborating on a fiction. The fiction was that what had eventuated between them had been a very small thing and that all was well. It was remarkable about how few collaborations in making fiction worked out at all, Ford and Conrad excepted, and the two women who wrote novels about Irish country life. What she wanted from him was childish, on the face of it. She wanted, as he understood it, to see Morel and have fantasies about him and not have to feel guilty about it. That was on the face of it. But there was more going on. The more was a new Mode of Being, or, better, a New Mode of Relating, and his brother was right that there was a larger place for capitals in writing and expression generally than the times were permitting.

She said, “I didn’t mean to get into that and I’m sorry. It’s marginal. I want to say just two main things. I’m going to see him and nothing is going to happen. I love you and you’re my husband. But I’m going to go to him and when he’s helped me I’m going to stop. Helped me, to my satisfaction. But I just don’t want you sensing something you don’t like, suspecting something untrue, and my being forced to deny it over and over.”

He was going to say something he shouldn’t. “You’d tell me first if something was … was starting? You know what I mean. Not that this should be any kind of condition for your going to him, but you would, you would tell me?” He felt like a fool. She was silent.

He said, “I feel vacant. This is making me feel vacant.”

“I’m very sorry if it is. It shouldn’t.” He was hearing a tough tone that was new toughness.

I am nowhere, he thought.

She was brisk. “Nothing is going to happen. I am swearing this to you. I swear it.” She pressed her palm to her sternum, like a diva, but in all seriousness.

Nonsense was pushing its way into his mind. They began to begin to be gone, he thought, three times, making himself stop when he felt the phrase entrenching itself. He needed to steady himself. He had to keep in mind that she was going to be away in the States, which would postpone everything as well as giving him time to strike back at Morel.

She said, “I really want you to understand how helpful he’s been to me. In the smallest ways.

“For example. He taught me to spit, how to hock up mucus, rather. Everybody knows how to spit. But how to hock up mucus from the back of my throat, when my sinuses are going crazy.”

“Hawk, I think you mean.”

“No, it’s hock. He says hock. I think hawk must be a corruption of hock. Because it’s hock. He showed me in the OED.”

“Ah, lucky guy. He has the OED? Are we talking about the real Oxford English Dictionary, not the microscopic edition you read with a magnifier?”

It was the real OED. Ray could tell she was feeling sorry for him. She wanted him to have his own OED, the real one. He hated the microtext edition. He loved the OED. But it was a tool he could use at the university library if he needed to. And he rarely needed to these days. And the real OED was too massive a possession for people as mobile as they had to be prepared to be. He could afford an OED. That wasn’t the problem.

No doubt he had only himself to blame for this moment arriving. Although what he could have done differently at any point in his earthly life so far was a question he would love to thrash out with someone as sapient as the great all-seeing eye she was paying through the nose to visit, although in fact the fees were pretty low. On the other hand was it possible he should construe her confession of attraction slightly differently, as in its being a way of stopping herself, preempting herself by alerting herself and him too, something done as an act of love? Of course that was slightly too self-congratulatory to be true, probably. She was in a malaise, was what this was about. They both were. Maybe this was simple, florid feminism of some kind. Brute feminism, and with no way he could go into it, but was it something like an attempt to undo something she disliked that was a fixture of regular life, such as the truth that men feel more threatened when their mates show interest in another male than women do when men partake in the more or less general reflexive sizing up of the world of women? some impulse like that, such as wanting to make everyone suffer equally? But he had never much gone beyond the golden mean in noticing other women … Although when he had, she had been quick enough to object, in fact. What was he supposed to do? In his work it was important to blend in. His work was in the male world. Was he supposed to walk around at gatherings like a parson? The sexes are different, he thought. Seeing someone you’re interested in naked for the first time would be an example of how it was different for women and men. For men it was the act of getting inside the mystery, the secret that clothing hides, the package, the getting to see, and then if what you see is splendid, then so much the better. But his guess was that with women it was different and revolved around the fact that a particular man wanted passionately for them to take their clothes off. Urgently. That was what they loved. What they loved was men wanting them to the point of begging them to strip now . Of course what they saw when the importuner himself took his clothes off had to fall within a certain range, physical qualities did go into it, had to go into it, but with a woman a short leg would be nothing if the male had counterbalancing stuff, like power … or intellect. Women who talked about buns and dick size were to an extent faking and going along with the male model, which might truly be triggered by bigness in the shoulders and so on, but it was essentially like claiming they liked to watch football on TV as much as their mates did. Where am I? he thought. He had no idea.

She said, “Anyway, he has been concretely useful with problems I had. Or have. I told you about the hypoadrenia. Another thing, and something you may not know about, is how routine it is for me to get mild cystitis after we have sex. Not every time, I don’t mean that. But it’s a thing to deal with and he had a suggestion which I haven’t really had a chance to discuss with you … but now I will. I just lived with it because it wasn’t much and it went away. But. Anyway, he thinks if you were careful to wash yourself with mild soap just prior, just before … it could be that. It’s variable. It may be that when I don’t have the reaction it’s because you were by happenstance very clean at that time, just out of the shower. And this is not to say you’re not a clean person, Ray. It’s just that there may be certain salts on the body, something like that. And also I didn’t want to mention it because it goes against spontaneity. I don’t know, maybe there’s a scintilla of urine or something I’m sensitive to.”

“My God,” he said. “I will certainly … hear and obey. Good God. Who knew?”

He was enraged at Morel.

“You’re not offended, Ray?”

“No, I’m delighted,” he said, but very fast. He should be feeling guilt, obviously, but why was he hearing about this only now? I am apparently foul, he thought.

“It’s just an example of something practical, another example.”

“No, live and learn. So what kind of soap should I use. How mild is mild. I want to get it right.”

“Oatmeal soap. I have some for you.”

“Oatmeal soap it is, then.”

“It fades pretty fast if I drink a lot of water, so I’m not trying to say it was the end of the world.”

“Say no more. We can do without it.” He thought, Crush him: Find a way.