Mortals (25 page)

“How terrible this is. And he’s not young.”

“So, anyway, the event. It’s not exactly a memorial service. I think
they’re calling it a remembrance. I knew they were going to do something, but they hadn’t decided anything the last I heard. This event is a psychological operation to convince Dwight to go home. You hear them talking about closure. It’s supposed to produce closure and get him the hell on the plane.”

“I wonder if I should’ve worn black. I don’t think so. I think this is fine.” She was wearing a dark blue sleeveless dress with a full pleated skirt. She had tried and rejected several sun hats as not right. Over her shoulders she wore a white lace shawl, rather sprung in places. She had a number of tortoiseshell clips in her hair.

“Everything black I have is in the party category. I think this is all right.” She had very little interest in clothes, which he loved in her. He was wearing one of the few safari kits he owned that had full-length pants, a rust-colored outfit he hated.

She was wearing half-heels, which she was unused to. They were now almost jogging. Somehow her sunglasses hopped off her face and he was able to catch them as they fell.

“Are we a team?” he asked her.

“We are,” she said. “A track team.”

They had reached the residence compound. They could slow up. There was a backup of stragglers ahead of them at the gate.

Iris said, “I put too much sunblock on. My face is slippery. These things happen when I’m pressed. I never want to be rushed like this again. I turn into a fool.”

“You never do,” he said.

They got seats in the next to last row of chairs protected from the sun by the canopy erected over the ceremonial area on the side lawn.

“This is an outpouring,” Ray whispered to Iris. “The idea was to get everyone so that Dwight can see how seriously his situation is being taken. They have shaken the sack. There’s a buffet after.” Even the seats behind them that were exposed to the sun were filling up.

Ray sat back. He liked the moment. There was nothing for him to do until this was over, in fact nothing he could do while they were there, waiting for the event to begin and end. Probably he would have liked being a commuter, if he liked this.

He counted the crowd. He estimated two hundred and ten, so far. There were tricks to crowd-counting. He would say that the attendance was about fifty-fifty black and white, which was excellent. The overflow crowd of standees was irregularly distributed among the gum trees and
silver oaks lining the compound wall, wherever there was a chance of shade.

Last-minute improvisations were under way. The podium needed to be moved forward so that the speakers would be in shade as well as the listeners, so the first two rows were being emptied, chairs were being taken away, and a complex process of negotiated reseating had begun. They themselves were not going to be affected, so it was interesting to watch the negotiations. He could see Maeve, the ambassador’s wife, showing distress about the lawn, which was not robust in the best of times and which was taking a beating today. Iris had taken to referring to the lawns in their neighborhood as brownswards.

Almost all of the final arrivals were Batswana. Almost all the people who had gotten seats in the shade were white and almost all the standees were black. That hardly looked good. There were no more than nine or ten Batswana in the seated crowd, not enough.

He turned around to see if it was really as bad as he thought. It was. The news photographs of the event would be strange, showing black people standing back in flowerbeds, the glass shards set into the top of the wall behind them glittering in the sun. The grounds here were in worse shape than his. The empty swimming pool was carpeted with dead oak leaves. There should be a photographer, or at least someone on staff detailed to take pictures for Dwight, as part of the operation, something for poor Dwight to take away with him. I should have been an ambassador, he thought.

The ambassador hadn’t appeared among them yet. Ray thought, You become an ambassador and you think
Great
, and then they send you to a place like this, a desert …

They waited. Iris took his hand. He closed his eyes. I envy no one, he thought.

“My hips are out of control,” Iris murmured.

“I certainly hope so,” he said lewdly. He knew what it was. She was noticing someone whose hips were too big. Lately she would ask him if she resembled overweight women her age that they passed in the street, asking if her upper arms were as far gone, if her waist was as thick.

He looked to see who it was she was comparing herself to. She was fixing on the DCM’s secretary in the row ahead.

“Not even close,” he whispered to Iris. “You’re a ridiculous woman.”

“You see nothing, you know nothing, and you lie,” Iris said.

“If you say so.” He closed his eyes again. But I see everything, he
thought, I am a camera … The worst image for a life has to be the one bad poets love the most, a candle, burning for what? giving off light for
what
?… There is no image for life.
Life is a sexually transmitted disease
, according to my brother. That aphorism had made Rex a bit well known, briefly. People used it. It would get into anthologies of bright sayings.

Iris nudged him. “Open your eyes. It doesn’t look good to seize this opportunity for a nap.”

Programs were being distributed. One reached them.

“There’s going to be music,” Iris said.

“Oh yes. Of sorts. They were trying to get hold of a woman in Molepolole who plays the zither, a Peace Corps volunteer. And there’s a choir group from the Anglicans. They probably have something on tape, too. The big speakers are hooked up over there.”

“What about the refreshments. I’m starving.”

“You go from being stuffed to being starving so rapidly it’s pathological, do you know that?”

“I know.”

“I believe the collation is going to be fairly deluxe this time, not just samoosas being waved about by fleet-footed servers. Samoosas yes, but piled up in platters in one place so you can get at them. Many many salads. Chicken salad.”

He opened the photocopied program and flinched.

“What?”

“The notables, the Batswana. They shouldn’t have put this in print. Two of them won’t come, no matter what they said. The Health permsec will
not
come. Not a chance. Matsila may or may not, or he may come so late it amounts to the same thing. They hate us at Health. This thing should have started by now. I can tell you exactly what’s going on inside the residence. The ambassador is arguing with somebody about whether to start now or wait until everybody they have on the program is on the premises. I could write the script. But Segoko won’t come. If he does, I will kiss your introitus numerous times.”

“Are you
insane?”

“You obsess me.”

“Clearly.”

“Nobody can hear me. Besides, nobody around here knows what introitus means. You can ask them.”

She crossed her eyes at him. She should have let him rest. During the reception part of this, there would be work to do. Everybody was here. Boyle was, radically misdressed in a white linen suit and wearing a red
bow tie and, apparently, a leather baseball cap, and holding a handkerchief folded into a pad in one hand, at the ready to tamp away any offending fluids he might produce. The menthol cigarettes Boyle favored came from some outlaw manufacturer in India, probably the last source in the world for these lethal products.

Iris was saying something. She was asking him so softly that he could barely hear her why, by the way, was kissing a certain area of hers a penalty of some kind.

“I’ll explain later,” he said. They were both playing. But actually she had a point. He had to think about it.

This event had to be about to begin. The amount of life you wasted in waiting for things to get under way was enormous. In one of his letters to Iris, Rex had written on the subject of starter tabs on toilet rolls, an innovation in the States.
Now
they invent these things, referencing his lost hours picking at toilet rolls to get them started.

What had been in his mind was to impose on himself a penalty that was
in fact
a pleasure, in saying Kiss your introitus. But of course the fact was that she would know very well that he had been doing rather less of that than when they were younger. Although she was as forthcoming in that way as ever, she liked it. He was forty-eight. She was thirty-eight. He wished he had never mentioned it. She would come back to it. But there were other sexual, what? festivities of theirs that had dropped away, like her purposely giving him erections in potentially embarrassing public circumstances. She could do it in a second without touching him any time she wanted, still. I came out of the shower and we were late for breakfast, he thought, remembering … It was at her friends’ place in Carmel and they were waiting for breakfast and she got me hot the way she does, whore that she is, and then I said Now how am I going to go out there? and she said Backwards? She liked to be called a whore during sex. You have the heart of a whore, he would say.

She was waving at someone behind them. It was the man, undoubtedly.

“Is that your doctor?” he asked.

“Yes, it is,” she said, her voice betraying something, some extra lightness. He wasn’t going to swivel around to look at the man. She wanted him to.

Their huge ambassador was at the podium, giving his usual broad initiatory smile but then quickly thinking better of it. He was six foot five and enjoyed his toweringness in this country of small men enough to add to it by routinely wearing cowboy boots with significant heels. He was a man who had been reckless about his exposure to the sun all his life and
was now paying for it. He looked dappled. His jaw and cheeks were marked with the sites of excised basal skin cell carcinomas. It was a continuing thing. The last tranche of cancers had been removed by a South African surgeon, who, out of some misplaced aesthetic impulse, had scoured out the sites in the shape of perfect circles. Ned Van Ness had spent too much time in the sun first as a developer and builder and then as a yachtsman, and now he was out in the sun too much here. His big bald pate bore spots of another kind, liver spots, probably. Van Ness had to be missing Galveston, where he was said to be the maximum leader of the city elite, and where you could go yachting. His face was pear-shaped, with full, soft jowls.

Because of his age, Van Ness couldn’t be blamed for being reckless about sun exposure, since the bad news about photodamage had only started getting around in the last five years or so. Ray himself had always been, by instinct, sun-averse. But he had been the only one in his family. His impression was that Rex still went regularly to tanning salons. The explanation there was that having a nice tan would give him his only good feature, physically, so he blocked out the bad news about ultraviolet. His brother was not attractive. He deserved credit for persisting with things as he had, coming on to people, looking for boyfriends despite everything. But why, now, Van Ness couldn’t seem to adapt to the African sun was puzzling. He wouldn’t wear hats. The consequence of it all was that his head looked increasingly like a decorated thing.

The microphone gave a keening sound. The ambassador made a prayerful gesture, his head bent briefly, then resumed his manic smile of welcome. He couldn’t help himself. He was an odd man. He was an awkward man. Ray liked the ambassador because he sensed that the man was having fun. He was a political appointee, here for the status that having been an ambassador gave you for the rest of your life. He would go back to his former life still odd. There was something carefree about him, and it showed in his odd, abrupt, ringing, undiplomatic laugh. Ray had seen Batswana flinch at that overwhelming laugh. He was certain that Van Ness found Africa funny. And the ambassador was transactionally odd in other ways. He was a perfectly amiable character, but when he reacted to something said to him there was often a lag in his response that could be unnerving. He tended to consider you with a long stare, while he thought, and when he responded it was normally sensible or reassuring or whatever was required in the situation. But in the meantime you had been unnerved. Ray liked the idea of patently odd men holding positions of power. He was interested in trying to scope out what it was in them
that allowed them to escape the marginalizing juggernauts that crush the standard odd man, the average odd man. At some point in his past Van Ness had worked with a professional to rid himself of his Texas accent. This struck Ray as a strange thing to have done, since presumably his cronies in Galveston all spoke traditionally. Yet he’d bothered. The result was a neutral, actually foreign-sounding style of speech. His wife Maeve still had her accent. They had been married since high school. So when they were together there was always an unspoken question hovering, which was If you’re both from Galveston why does one of you sound like you learned English in central Europe? Whatever the prescription was for the lenses in Van Ness’s glasses, it had the effect of magnifying his eyes, which you couldn’t help but notice when he was staring at you.

There was another balk. The ambassador was waiting now as his wife tenderly escorted Dwight Wemberg to the seat reserved for him in the front row. Ray had a proviso to his inclination to like the odd in positions of power. They had to be odd but decent. Boyle was fairly odd, but he was not a decent person. Maeve Van Ness was the reverse of odd. She was a hive of industry. She never rested. She was a rather hunched woman with a hard, intelligent face and stiff, bright blond hair. She had her hands full with Wemberg, who seemed distraught and recalcitrant.

The ambassador repeated his prayerful gesture, then startled the gathering with one of his laughs, a blasting, baffled laugh prompted by Maeve dumbfoundedly standing and sitting and standing again as Dwight Wemberg got rigidly up and left his seat to make his way around to the rear of the seated crowd and over to a place among the standees at the wall. Most of the expatriates sat frozen, watching Wemberg talking to himself, saying something over and over.