Mortals (3 page)
Authors: Norman Rush
This moment was what Iris was suddenly taking away.
The event was too huge for any image he had been able to come up with. It would take someone as great as Milton to come up with the appropriate image right off the bat. He felt he had no time to think, lately. Iris was full of mental homework for him to do that he didn’t want to do, such as answering the question of why they had been so attracted to one another when they met—but it had to be
aside from
the purely physical reasons she knew he was going to overemphasize.
He stood in the foyer. No one was around. He heard the kitchen door close. That was Dimakatso leaving for the day.
He entered the chill bronze gloom of the living room, where the airconditioner was laboring for his benefit, obviously, since no one else was on hand and the room looked as though no one had made use of it that day. He walked over to the main double window. The louvers of the blinds were tilted downward, almost to the closed position. All the windows in the house were barred and tightly screened. He was fanatical about the screens. There was malaria nearby. He was the force behind both of them continuing to take chloroquine. Iris got worse headaches from the chloroquine than he did, so he understood why she resisted him. There was still no one.
But I’m fine, he thought, trying not to relive a moment from the walk home that had made him feel fragile. Near the school was a rundown property whose occupants kept a goat. The goat had run up purposively to the fence as Ray came by and for an instant Ray had thought something monstrous was happening, because the goat’s tongue seemed to be a foot long. He’d been frightened until he’d realized that it was only a goat eating a kneesock. Iris could be asleep. He would look for her, softly.
R
ay moved silently through the house, coming to the shut door of Iris’s workroom, her study. He knew everything about her study, every detail. He kept silent.
She was in there, at her worktable, doing something with papers, airletters, probably. Three times recently he had come to the door in silence and been privileged to hear her reading aloud to herself from letters sent by her sister or, once, his brother. Privileged was the only word for the way he had felt. Obviously, reading aloud was a sign of loneliness. He couldn’t deny that. She animated her correspondents when she read aloud, bringing them to her. She read with feeling, theatricality, even. The transom over the door was always in the open position. He wanted to hear her read aloud again. There was something rare about it.
Yesterday she had gotten sunburned. He could hear that she was intermittently picking up a sponge or cloth from a bowl of ice, wringing it out, and touching it to her face.
Storage dominated the small room. Metal filing cabinets came to chest height along three walls and were topped with a double tier of uniform cardboard cartons, each carton marked with a code number. The one break in the tiers of boxes was utilized to house a portable phonograph and behind it a tight rank of longplaying record albums. A postal scale stood on top of the block of albums. There was no decoration on the exposed white upper walls or anywhere in the room, and no rug or mat on the maroon linoleum tiles of the floor. A copy of the
International Herald Tribune
folded twice would be aligned with the upper right-hand corner of the table. Through the transom came a remnant scent of cleanser.
Her room was hot and dim. There was no table lamp. If Iris found
something she wanted to read closely in a letter, she would slant the sheet to catch the dying light from outside. There was one double window, and the short side of her worktable was pushed to the wall directly underneath it. The wings of the window were normally cranked out to their maximum extension. She would be sitting with her left side to the screened and barred view of the servants’ quarters fifty feet away. An arbor supporting a system of dead vines framed her view. On the tabletop, in addition to the newspaper, was a dust-hooded bulky typewriter set to one side and a tray of office necessities, like ballpoint pens, Wite-Out, type cleaner, and postage.
As he’d hoped she would, she began to read aloud.
“We are house-sitting in Sausalito for a public relations couple (People of the Fib) vacationing in Lappland. I should say ‘estate-sitting.’ It’s going to be a long three weeks. The man I’m with, Joel, I chose for this because he was verbal looking. He really isn’t verbal. People around here are being extremely social toward us. This is an area with many children deformed by utter wealth. In the next house we heard a child screaming because a swimming pool, which they have, isn’t enough. He wants them to get a water bloom (fountainlike thing). He is on strike and won’t go into the water. We heard his mother try to explain that water blooms are just trick things to make people satisfied when all they can have is (lowclass) aboveground pools, whereas they have this splendid in-ground pool. But he won’t go in the water. Sausalito would be a good place for you to adjust to the fact, when you come back (and you are going to come back), that you now rather often see vanity in the faces of young children. I mean of the permanent, adult sort, not the fleeting kind any child gets when he or she figures out that he or she got the best Xmas present in his or her circle of friends that year. You see it more and more, and in children of both sexes. I feel I must prepare you. And it’s not only in Marin County. By the way, isn’t my handwriting more appropriate now? You complained that I was writing too bigly for airletters and sort of cheating you of information. But that is my natural handwriting and look how small I’m making it for you herewith.
“There are many hazards in this place of wealth. This morning Joel came out of the bathroom scowling and saying ‘Ow, I just burned my ass on the towel warmer.’ Joel is normally very silent, except
when he hurts himself. I think I deserve someone more verbal than he.
“I myself live a very moral life, of my own sort. I try to live as though there’s never anything good on television. That’s why I get so much more done in my waking hours, which is a necessity because I’m self-employed. I am thinking of starting a new religion for the self-employed. It would be based on the never-anything-good-on-TV premise and would have as its main sin not returning telephone calls. I’m out of a job, incidentally, in a de facto way. I was working for a patter service, an outfit that mass-produces clever lines for politicians and celebrities to pretend they thought of themselves. I was doing pretty well with them and then I just turned noir and then went dry. I tried to produce things the rabid right could make use of. One was ‘Homebodies are Somebodies.’ The service thought I was being mocking. I think I got in a rut out of rage at the Roman Catholic Church. Everything I thought of was quasi-antireligious, which nobody is buying these days. Here’s a discard: ‘Aside from that, Mrs. Iscariot, did your husband enjoy supper?’
“Here’s a little tip for when you return:
NEVER
ask professional people whose children are probably out of college a while what their children are doing, or even how they are doing. The chances are overwhelmingly high that their children are dysfunctional. And you can be sure that if a child is doing anything that suggests some degree of coping
THIS WILL BE VOUCHSAFED TO YOU
. Last night a proud father was bragging that his son was working as a sommelier. He was telling
EVERYONE
.
“That’s all for now. My love to you. You belong in America. Rex.”
She turned to an earlier letter.
“Nothing good is happening. My commode runneth over. We went to a thing of French chamber music, and how boring
was
it? So boring I decided to occupy myself by making up an imaginary program of the works of the widely unknown French composer M. Prépuce Joli. First on the program was his
Ratatata Cantata
(drum corps and Vienna Boys’ Choir). Then a piano work the
composer wrote in Italy, the
Polonaise Bolognaise
. Then his
Valse Gauche
(Waltz for the Left Foot). Then his majestic
Hymne Interminable
. And finally his rather depressing
Marche Inutile
. Then I fell asleep.”
The reading stopped. She must have realized he was there.
H
ere I am,” Ray said, and waited for the scrape of chair feet on the linoleum. Do not touch the door, he instructed himself. He wanted to know if she had locked it. Occasionally, these days, she did. There was a knob-controlled bolt lock on her side of the door that operated quietly, so that it was hard to hear the bolt being retracted. He stilled himself. This was her room of her own and the door could be locked if she wanted and that was fine. If something should happen to her in there when the door was locked, he could break in, so there was nothing to worry about. She was taking her time. She liked referring to her room as her den, lately. She needed a decent worklight on her table but it was clear she was going to stick to her claim that all she needed was the ceiling light, despite the fact that she was on record saying that she hated fluorescent light and that it was like gray dust. She was putting something away.
She was stubborn. She could call her cell anything she liked, den included, but the truth was it wasn’t a room of her own in the full sense. She could only accept a room all for herself if it was actively in use for some other purpose as well. That was obviously why she was still finding things to box up and store in there. Which was unnecessary because there was plenty of space in the garage. It had been his idea for her to take one of the side rooms for herself, and now she used it all the time. He was going to put a circulating fan in there, and she could take it and put it in a box and seal it up and put a number on the box if she wanted to. But he was going to put a fan in there. He could do the same thing with a table lamp. He thought. No, it was bright dust she compared fluorescent light to. And the linoleum was ugly, it was the color of raw liver and had sunwelts
in it. He could get her a reed mat at Botswanacraft. She was coming to the door.
He stood against the wall opposite her door, listening. There was no indication the door had been locked. It opened smoothly and she came out to embrace him.
It never changed for him, seeing her again after a day’s separation, or even less. He felt a flowing, objectless gratitude so strong it weakened him. He wanted her touch. It was permanent with him. She put her hands on him and slipped one hand through the unbuttoned top of his shirt. She was wearing a plain white sundress and she was barefoot. The shape of her heavy hair against the light and the scent of it as he put his face into her hair were perfections, were absolute things. He was forty-eight. She was thirty-eight. A pleasure he had was catching flashes of surprise in people’s expressions when she told her age, which she was always truthful about. He often had the satisfaction of seeing people look at him, obviously wondering what it was about him that they weren’t seeing that made it reasonable for a woman of this quality to be with him, be his. He had always looked his exact age. And he also liked seeing them being given pause by someone at her level of physical beauty dealing with people so much more nicely than she should be, on their past experience of great beauties, which she was, which she was. These were instantaneous moments, but real. She was a democrat, a spiritual democrat. And then with women, and gay men too, sometimes, he would get the moment when they tried subtly to ascertain if they could possibly be right in their first impression that Iris was wearing hardly any makeup. There was a way they widened their eyes briefly and then focused again. Iris wore next to no makeup.
He wanted the touch of her breath on his throat. When they embraced after being separate that was what he wanted first.
“You are so beautiful,” she said.
“So say we all,” he said, being wry.
A line came to him,
I am the mirror you breathe on
. It wasn’t quite right, though. If he wrote poetry what he would want would be a line that united holding a mirror up to the mouth and nose of a particular beloved to see if she was still alive
with
the mirror being the fixed register of her personal beauty. Could the line be
I am the mirror your breath is for?
He thought. No because it’s slightly sinister. No because it’s stupid. This was why genius would be so handy if you had it. Iris had no real appreciation of how beautiful she was. She was sealed off from that by her past, complications
in her past, and he lacked the genius to strike through and say Look what you are! Look! and have her believe it.
Her hair was black and shining. She wore it centrally parted, with the wings caught together in a heavy shell clip low on the nape of her neck. He put his hands into her hair. The top of her head came to just under his eyes. Her immaculate part bisected an oval of highlights at her crown. Africa was too hot for hair this long, but she knew he loved it that way. She was almost a type. Euro-patrician would be the type, although her eyebrows, which were straight, like dashes, contradicted it. She wouldn’t tweeze her eyebrows into arcs. People often presumed she was French. Her face was too graphic and lively for the type, also. And that was another thing he enjoyed witnessing, the slight shock registering when people met her for the first time and she was absolutely normal toward them and not fixed in the modes of underlying vanity or distance the culture had taught them would go with a presence like hers. He moved his hands to her back, under the broad straps of her sundress. Her nose was of the essence of the type. You could easily forget that it was a biological organ. Also it was euro-patrician that she flared her nostrils when she got incensed over something. She was getting too much sun. Her teeth were ideally white and almost childishly small. Her gray eyes were perfect, or their axis was, the tilt slightly upward from the root of her nose. The line
She makes the female face seem nude
was also not quite right and was also from the days when she’d inspired him briefly to wrench himself toward poetry, got part of what he felt and part of why he needed to protect her. Her underchin was taut. Age seemed to be touching her in only two spots—her mid-throat, in the form of a single fine line across it, and just under the corners of her mouth, in the form of incipient softness.