Norman Rush - Mortals

“God I love you,” she said. In a minute she was going to offer to wash him with this correct soap, he thought. He was picking up slight shifts toward softness. She might not even be aware she was tending that way. It would be instinctual to wrap something as bitter as she was handing him in sweet sex, coat it. She was idly touching her breasts.

She said, “About cleanliness, this is interesting, since so much in religion is about ritual purity, getting clean, being clean before God …”

So I am foul, apparently, he thought.

“I’m trying to reproduce what Davis says on this. Yes, it’s why ritual purity is so universal in religions, which is because the father, the generic father, won’t handle the child or baby if it’s soiled, nasty. God is a stand-in for the father figure. By the way do you know that the Peace Corps had to let their messenger go because he refused to carry stool samples from the Peace Corps nurse to the laboratory?”

“I hadn’t heard.”

“Men here will not handle feces. Women have to collect the cow dung they use to plaster the floors with in their huts, in the countryside. Of course the men are completely willing to walk up and down on it.

“Once you look at it, almost everything people do in religion fits one way or another with the attempt to recapture a moment when there was an all-powerful protector-lawgiver figure in our lives, and we go through motions in this regressed state that deep down we believe are the kind that ought to attract the corrective attention of this all-powerful person. This comes from neoteny, the long period of dependency human infants have. When we get into a crisis, we want to regress into the power of a fatherlike entity, a patrimorph is what Davis calls it. Then we recapture the endorphins we got from being taken care of or attended to, historically. It’s a theory. It’s partly from Freud except that Davis doesn’t think this collapsing back is sick, a pathology, the way Freud did. He thinks it’s normal, and even, in a way, healthy. But it’s also a joke, and silly. Everything really fits with this. Confession. All the kinds of self-mortification, to make yourself more like a deserving injured or perfect child, all that. All the born-again symbology. Purity and obedience. Making yourself either pathetic or into the simulacrum of a deserving child covers just about everything from fasting and rending your garments to all the thousands of mortifications of the flesh, to being celibate, meaning you’re making yourself into a simulated presexual being, like a baby.”

She was intoxicated with this stuff. He needed to be respectful, or not disrespectful. Of course there were any number of retorts to such a simpleminded view of religion, there must be. “And then, and this is the last thing I’m going to mention, his theory is that the contradictory and absurd notions we embrace when we’re religious amount to a variation of the same thing. When we embrace the absurd we are doing something the equivalent of mutilating our common sense, as a sort of goodwill offering. The most ridiculous varieties of religion, the fundamentalist ones, seem to be thriving right now. Davis thinks that things are happening, societal things, that are making people regress.”

This too shall pass, he thought. He grunted.

He guessed it was a good sign that she was adding fresh hot water to the stew they were in. She wanted to be with him. That was real.

He needed to remember that there had been previous enthusiasms of hers to deal with, for example when she’d decided that Ken Russell movies were supreme examples of something or other and she’d made him sit through The Devils twice, at the Capitol Cinema.

This was different.

He gripped her shoulders and began kneading her trapezius muscles with his thumbs, which brought back Richard Chamberlain as Tchaikovsky doing the same thing for his new wife and then, when his wife says Yes to the question You’ll stay with me forever, won’t you? converting the massage into an attempt to strangle her, until he comes to his senses not a moment too soon. Iris and he had laughed afterward and had replayed the scene for laughs themselves how many times?

She said, “Never forget how truly grateful I am to you. I never want you to think I’m not.”

He didn’t much like the tone of what she was saying, since it had faretheewell written all over it whether she was aware of it or not.

“Here’s an example why. I feel like a parasite on your knowledge sometimes, which doesn’t mean I’m not grateful. But as an example. Your knowledge of Greek. In Crete. Remember?”

She had no idea how marginal his command of Greek was, at least at this stage, after years of disuse.

“You have no idea what I’m talking about, is that possible?”

“No, say more.”

“This goes back to our Crete vacation in ’83, the incident … When we went to see the pornographic movies in Heraklion?”

He concentrated. He did remember generally, and elements of the evening came back to him, but only in step with her retelling. He remembered the torso of the event, so to speak. They had gone, purely on impulse, as a lark, to see what a pornographic movie would be like in Greece, in Crete. Pornography had been legalized fairly recently, they had gathered. They had walked in on the last tenth of a movie about a licentious Orthodox priest, which the audience was watching in total, fixated silence. Apparently it was a genre. He remembered the priest hanging himself at the end. And then he remembered clearly the suddenly different, rowdy, raucous response to the second feature, a piece of French pornography. The premise of the French film, beautifully photographed, as he recalled, had been odd. It was about a superbly beautiful matron, possibly a widow, who would only allow her lovers and suitors to perform cunnilingus on her. All of them were willing to do it, but they also, naturally, wanted to have follow-up regular intercourse. But all she would permit was the other, and there was no reciprocation from her, oddly enough for a pornographic movie. She rejects all the penises aimed her way. That was his recollection. He was remembering more. The woman was not a widow. Her husband was a society dentist who relieved his frustrations via other female characters who had more reasonable attitudes toward the penis. The dentist was getting it from the other sluts but not from his maddeningly spectacular creamy blond wife. He remembered thinking it was a slightly off-center premise for a pornographic movie. But the main thing she was reminding him had happened was that there had been a claque of young guys in the audience shouting out, at each instance of cunnilingus, Mathe , Vassilios! Mathe , Vassilios! Now he remembered that. And each bout of yelling had been followed by roars of laughter. And he remembered translating what they were saying, for Iris, when she asked. That he remembered. And the next thing he could remember was being back at the Cretan Sun and having memorable sex with Iris, in their freezing room.

“And you don’t remember my begging you to wait a second and wanting to wait around in the lobby?”

“No. But I remember it was freezing.”

“And you don’t remember being with me in the lobby, unwillingly, but waiting there with me, anything about that?”

“No.”

“And you don’t remember when finally after everybody else had left, after they were turning out the lights, dragging himself out was a poor physically fucked-up person, one leg dragging, this pitiful man with very white skin, an obvious sort of outcast, dragging himself out past us?”

“No, what I remember is the next act, same night.”

“Which was?”

“Well, back at the Cretan Sun. Making love there. Our room overlooked the market and we were right above the spice vendors.”