Nadine Gordimer - No Time Like the Present

The church pool friends are the best of hosts — female guests noting that old conventions in allocation of domestic roles have been discarded in Constitutional normalcy of gay households more completely than in heterosexual ones. Ceddie, the jambalaya cordon bleu, cooks while Guy the apprentice (in the order of sexual relations managed by the commune, as well?) peels and chops, Justin who seems to be the Elder (as Jabu’s father in another church) mixes drinks, chattering ice in glasses along with animated indiscretions about the clients in the decorator’s business where he works as an interior designer. — I make houses habitable after the architects have cleared out. — That’s the way he mockingly describes himself. — Wifey wants a full-length mirror in the bathroom so that she can check the spread of her backside against the kilos on the scale, husband prefers not to see what he’s neglecting in favour of the new girl he’s picked up among women who’re now getting theirs down on boardroom seats. — And he gets his laughs, as he distributes the drinks, for his unprejudiced tolerant gossip: the kugels —Jewish sweetmeat term he’s picked up for all over-dressed rich women — these days they’re also Indian, black, mixed palette of the risen middle class. Politics touched on indirectly with Justin’s quips from the underside of progress are not the subject of talk the way they are when Struggle comrades, Steve, Jabu, the Mkizes, Isa and Jake gather alone, belong for ever under that rubric, which needs no tattoo to mark it — although Isa was never a cadre but a fellow traveller late-come recruited as Jake’s freely chosen wife. At times she’s good leaven in their set. That property in her personality isn’t necessary in the company of the Dolphin commune and its friends, some of whom are still arriving. Lively anecdotes of where you’ve been and what you’ve been up to, holiday trips, the predicted break-up of ‘this’ relationship and the surprise blooming of ‘that’; ambitions in professional activities, Marc’s just written a second play and does anyone know a backer for production, he’s found amazing, you’d never believe it — such talent — among young black men who wave you into parking bays, no education, can’t read a script you have to teach it to them orally—

— Illiterate. — Jake confirms, reminded. — What happened to your call on the ministry?—

Steve asking Marc what his play’s about — turns aside: this is for everybody — Haven’t you learned the new terminology for your kids?—

— You mean?—

— They are Learners and there will be Outcomes.—

— The ministry have any plans to get them past ABC?—

Steve’s shoulders rise and drop. His response is curt. — Euphemisms.—

Jabu is concerned that this exchange means the happy lunch is going to be spoilt for the Dolphins by the preoccupation of Steve and Jake — heavy. She glances at Steve as a mother hushes a child with a certain loving look.

He pauses in dismissal and turns back to Marc and his play. Euphemism. Not a word Jabu would be likely to use. Not in her vocabulary of what? — her three, four languages he doesn’t know, not in the vocabulary her father expanded for her through his reading of books in English smuggled from a library for whites. Everything’s been definitive for her, imposed. Her experience. He dismisses again — in himself, the glib judgement. Black is being black that’s all, has been; in some circumstances, still is.

The gay commune like every household in the Suburb except Steve and Jabu’s, which has a resident relative, deploys a domestic servant called a Helper as a school child is a Learner, but the Dolphins’ woman doesn’t work over weekends. Isa knows this through her own helper informing her that those men in the church house grant this desirable condition of employment which she doesn’t. A word aside to Jabu, and Isa and Jabu insisted they would do the washing-up. Comrades don’t exploit their hosts.

Yet a kitchen is like a Ladies’ Room in a public place, the secure refuge for confidences — same food-warmed air despite the fan the Dolphins have installed in their conversion of the chancel into the place where (some of) the appetites of the flesh are catered to by the latest models of microwave and blender, and a dishwasher helps with the aftermath of sinful indulgence.

— I’ve never known them, you know, so close before. They seem just like us, don’t they — living here like us in this suburb, keeping house, bothered having to call the plumber because of leaks, paying the monthly fee of security patrol. All the stuff that goes along with being married, domestic, in the end however you started together. Steve and you, Jake — coming in from the cold. No — the heat, Umkhonto —I don’t count myself in your class, Jake has to stand in for me; well, another way, they’ve come in from the cold. They’re neighbours with the rest of us. We lend each other the lawnmower, soda water when we run out. Comrade bourgeoisie. Oh, by the way, I resent, that’s one thing I hold against them, they’ve hijacked the word. You can’t say you had a gay time, you like gay colours, and what about ‘gaily’, you can’t walk gaily along feeling happy — all these have a special meaning these days. Theirs. You can’t have that word just for living it up. Having a jol. — Isa was stacking the plates into the machine, word by word.

Both were laughing, because they were doing just that, themselves with these good neighbours.

Jabu put the detergent tablet into its slot and snapped the latch, Isa pressed the right combination of switches. Under the machine’s swirling tidal rush that isolated them she was able to speak as if without being heard. — Have you ever had a man do, I mean what they do — to you.—

Jabu runs the palm of one hand down the fist of the folded other, cautious as what she understands Isa has said cannot be what she meant.

There was never a curtained confession box in a Protestant Gereformeerde Kerk, but there can be confession under the leap tide of the dishwasher. Isa places herself before the black box curtain.

— Once I did. I was crazy about the man and he told me, to know everything sex is, can be, do. It was so horrible Jabu — some goo, Vaseline, so he could get into me and it hurt I was ashamed I felt like I wanted to shit he came on his own without me. All I could get out of it was the idea of the dirt in that place, my dirt, coming off on him, his thing. How can they do it to each other? — An abrupt gesture — stayed — in the direction of the swimming pool. — And we have the clean soft smooth place specially for them. To take them in.—

Jabu could only move to take Isa’s hand as if whatever had happened had only just happened. This woman Isa-and-Jake, Jake didn’t know, would never know? That’s certain, the way some things can’t be said between a man and a woman: what had been told now. It’s a responsibility she didn’t want — to have received it.

Isa was asking as if to put finality to the moment in the kitchen — A black man wouldn’t do it to a woman.—

A question. Or an affirmation to compensate for all the assertions of blacks’ savagery that she had lived among as a white.

Jabu was finding herself as she so seldom had time, was ever challenged within, to be set in the past — going home was done easily now, with a sense of belonging unchanged though experienced in a new self; no estrangement. The way sexuality had been, was still ordered there — and the way it was far from home, Swaziland college, recruitment to detention, bush camp; correspondence courses, Freud included, in Glengrove clandestinity. This kind of order is what she would think of as ‘sexual code’. What did she know.