Norman Rush - Mortals

“And Rex was always doing cartoons. One I remember showed a guy supposed to be me rushing downstairs his arms spread and shouting Dad’s dead! And sitting there in the living room with his back to the stairway, reading, this character who’s Rex, who says I’ll say!”

Iris said, “But didn’t you find any of this amusing, at all?”

Ray thought, This is a mistake: She thinks he’s funny: One person can destroy a family: You can destroy a family through the exercise of your sovereign wit, she doesn’t get it: I was his enemy, I was the traitor, I was in the Scouts, I was a traffic monitor …

“But all these things happened when you were still children. We’re talking about a child, here.”

“But not every child sets out to torment his family members to the brink of distraction. I didn’t. There was something wrong with him. He was younger than I, but he sure wasn’t following in my footsteps. In Rex you’re dealing with a person with an absolutely gargantuan ability to resent things. Such as that I was named after our father. Rex thought there was something unfair about it.”

“Oh, so were you Ray junior? I didn’t know that.”

“No, I wasn’t. I’m not. I was Ray, my father was Raymond, simple as that. But my brother’s sense of injustice was so exquisite he actually complained about the situation.”

“It can be sort of strange with children and names. I knew a family there were four girls in and their names were Ruby, Pearl, Opal, and Doreen.”

“Why do I think that sounds like something from Rex’s cabinet of stupid marvels?”

“It isn’t. It’s mine. They lived in our neighborhood in Seattle.”

“Maybe the parents couldn’t think of another mainstream precious stone to name the fourth girl after.”

“In case you’re interested, your brother is house-sitting in Marin County. Talking about names reminded me of what he said about children’s names around there. It seems the boys have lastname firstnames like Foster or Tuttle, like companies. The girls have romantic firstnames. He knows a little girl named Sunset and one named Autumn. He’s house-sitting with a new boyfriend. You’d enjoy his letters. You would.”

“Are you trying to convince me that I have no power to communicate with you whatsoever ? Something critical is not coming across. I don’t know what it is that I’m leaving out. When he was tiny but old enough to be in the bathtub by himself what he loved to do when his hair was lathered with shampoo was twist up his hair into two horns. In itself it’s nothing. Like everything. This is nothing — he’d take a very fine crowquill pen and draw escaping pubic hair in bathing suit or underwear ads in my mother’s women’s magazines. Or axillary hair. But he would do it so faintly you might almost miss it. You notice the sexual angle here. He also drew fly vents on women’s panties. His favorite comeback when he was mad at you was Oh eat hair! I know I’m all over the map. But that’s because all this is pointing toward something that turned out to be ruinous for us, ruinous …”

She was pensive. “You mean something I know nothing about?”

“Right. Something I’ve never brought up, I guess partly because it has his trademark of making you seem stupid when you try to describe any event he precipitates. Everything reduces to Rex being an innocent surrounded by bullies and fools. But I promise I’ll tell you about it sometime. I have to gear up for it.”

It was evident to him that she wanted to hear about it now, but that because she loved him and could sense his upset she was going to let him postpone it. He had to postpone it. He needed to be at a lower emotional register before he began that story. Rex was fascinating her. It was revenge, more revenge on him. Of course all he was was friendly Rex keeping her cheered up in weird yet boring Botswana, as she would construe it. But the idea would be to disaffect her. Ray was absolutely certain about it. The point was to disaffect her in her African captivity.

Any second she was going to say he didn’t have to tell the story now if he couldn’t bear to. Why was she still so transparent? He remembered saying to her, at some point, You give everything away with your face and you need to learn to take a couple of beats before you judge something or commit yourself or confess you don’t know something. Look around, he’d said. Realize that sometimes you know more than you think you do, he’d said, so don’t be so immediate about confessing ignorance. He’d given examples of her being premature on matters he proved to her she knew something about many times. The line from her ear, down her neck, to the point where her shoulder was cut by the sundress strap, was an example of the bodily sublime, in this amber light. He hated the memorializing impulse, or rather what it meant that he was having it so often. He thought, Foreboding comes into your life in your forties, if you let it … comes into your thought like a stain, if you love your mate, especially: Abandon hope, all ye who enter a happy marriage … The foreboding getting stronger if you let it, like guys who take naked pictures of their wives, I understand it, poor bastards, Let me take a picture of your neck, your knee, your foot … She mocks me when I freeze in mid-act when she asks me something or says something, I freeze so I don’t miss a syllable, I can’t help it, “Close the refrigerator! You can listen to me and close the refrigerator at the same time,” “Come in or go out!”

She was about to speak. He could preempt. “I have one more classic Rex example.”

“But not the enormous one you were talking about?”

“No, but classic. Classic in the sense it shows how consummate he was as a breeder of disequilibrium. I’ll make it short.”

“You don’t have to.”

“I love you. The background to this is that my father had decided we should belong to a real church, the whole family should. This was after he was out of Ethical Culture for good, which is another obscure matter I wish I knew more about. Anyway, he wanted us to join a rather snooty Episcopal church in Piedmont. A Marxist interpretation of why he wanted us to join would be that membership would do him no harm when it came to his antiques business. He’d just opened the shop in Piedmont and it was near the church. And he was also interested in moving to a house over there. North Oakland, where we lived, was in the process of turning black. He wanted to sell our house. Rex hated going to church and he put up an argument, but my father was adamant. We had to get into the car and drive forty minutes to get over there, which added to the lack of enjoyment. I wasn’t crazy about going but I didn’t say that much. I was becoming a fatalist. We all had to go to church and that was it. Rex was eleven.

“Why are we using that pitcher of tea as something to look at? Let me get some glasses.”

“No, I will.” She did. They served themselves.

“So, one Sunday we went as usual and sat through everything … this was for services, not Sunday school … and got on line the way they expect you to after the service. You line up to shake hands with the priest.

“We got up to the priest and I noticed that my brother seemed to be wearing a large rustic homemade-looking wooden crucifix around his neck. That in itself was startling enough.

“But as he’s standing in front of the priest he does something completely astonishing.

“He eats the crucifix.

“He eats it! Or rather he crams it into his mouth and starts chewing it up. What he’d done was take two big pretzel sticks and tie them together with string to make a crucifix, and then he’d threaded it on a string and put it on and covered it with his suit jacket until the right moment came.