Mortals (5 page)

“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.

“He just … ate the crucifix, with a staring expression on his face.

“It looked demonic, of course. Eating it insanely, with chunks and crumbs falling out of his mouth. I suppose people just thought Rex was a crazy person, but there was an electric pall cast over everyone. My father was stunned. There was terrible misery over it when we got home but Rex said he’d only done it because he thought everybody would think it was funny. He was full of apologies. Another one of his talents was that he could weep on cue.

“So he got exactly the outcome he wanted. My father was too ashamed to ever go back there. He knew that whatever he did he was going to be the father of the kid who ate the crucifix. Brilliant.”

They sat in silence.

Iris asked, “Isn’t it funny that I never met your brother? What does he look like? Like you?”

“Ask him for a snapshot. But no. He’s bald, must be by now. Shorter than I am. He has a very small mouth. He had a trick he could do when he wanted to show that he was hearing something that was incredibly stupid. One of his subtle things. He could flatten his nose, sort of, and flare his nostrils out and make his upper lip puff out, shelve out. He knew it cracked me up. Also … well, he looked sort of feminine. His skin was very pale. These areas under his eyes got bluish when he was tired or sick. He resembled my mother’s side of the family. Big extremities, big feet, big limp hands that look like paddles when they’re lying in his lap. He had hips.”

“So you’re physical opposites.”

“One other thing, because I think maybe it had some occult effect on the way he turned out. He had rather prominent, almost Dracula eye-teeth. I’ve wondered if maybe he was swimming in a sea of negative associations that people have for prominent incisors, thanks to the movies, and maybe he adapted to that. I don’t know. It’s a theory. He got them
ground down before he went off to college. It should have been done sooner. It was never discussed. He was an awkward person. He looked awkward.”

“So, pretty much, you’re physical opposites.”

I hope so, Ray thought. He felt that he didn’t really know how he looked, though, or how he ranked rather. There was no question about his weight. He was lean. Iris kept telling him that he was handsome, that he was beautiful. But he was forty-eight. You have such great legs, give me your legs and take mine, she would still say. She thought her thighs were too soft. He couldn’t convince her she was judging herself by some unreal standard. They had been married for seventeen years and statements made in the context of marriage about how the other looks were statements of a certain kind, except that in his case he was telling her the absolute truth. When he’d had to start wearing glasses she’d said he reminded her of the distinguished types they choose for display portraits in opticians’ windows that show how glasses make no difference in the attractiveness of the truly handsome. You look like what you are, you look like a scholar, she’d said. He was used to the bush shorts and shortsleeved shirts and kneesocks he had to wear in Africa, but he didn’t love wearing them. His arms were average. His legs were a far cry from the mighty instruments you could see walking up and down the mall. It had been a while since she’d said Your hair must be German because it’s thick, blond, and obedient. Now he was going gray. No, what she had actually said was You look like what you are, a scholar and a fine person. Then she had tacked on that he was beautiful.

She said, “We can postpone talking about the main event until another time. I appreciate you, Ray. You’re being very open. This has been your secret, really. I love you. I know you don’t enjoy talking about these things. About Rex. I do appreciate you.

“I wish you could love your brother.”

She had brought things to a close.

She pulled the lap of her skirt free and smoothed it out across her thighs. She began slowly inching the hem up, looking steadily at him.

“You seem to be a whore tonight,” he said.

“Always,” she said.

S
ometimes Ray started his patter for the occasional groups of overseas educators who visited St. James by saying Welcome to the only completely circular campus in the known world. It was true, so far as he knew, but he had noticed that lately the rector was showing a clear preference for not having the school described primarily in terms of the ways in which it was very unlike what the visitors were used to. And there were so many ways in which it was very unlike. But it truly was interesting that when the All Saints Trust had gotten permission to build whatever it liked in the broad, rock-ridden depression in the raw bush west of the capital, somebody had chosen to lay out the grounds in the shape of the ancient Greek world-serpent eating its tail, which happened to be his own private metaphor for the educational process when he was feeling down. But there was no one still around from the founding days in the sixties who could say why it had been done. His guess was that it had been an attempt to cohere symbolically with the universal preference for the circular in Tswana culture, as in the kraals and huts. He liked to point out the circularity of St. James because it was interesting, but the place was so extensive that its circularity was only noticeable from the air. The circle had been filled in solidly with distracting features—nethouses, rondavels, ovaldavels, completely rectilinear ablution blocks, sports fields, a chapel in the form of a rondavel with a bell tower stuck onto it, fig tree groves, the piggery … The most southerly baobab in Africa grew on the grounds.

The four people in the group waiting for him to begin were obviously impressed with his office. He had his own oversized rondavel entirely to himself. They liked the zebra skin on the wall behind him and the jennet
kaross covering a good deal of the floor. His desk chair was thronelike. This group was from Cyprus, two men and two women. They were very courteous. They spoke English, but hesitatingly. He had a circulating fan grinding out a breeze for them. It was trained directly at them and they were grateful. They had glanced uneasily up at a white spider pod the size of a doorknob clinging to the thatch directly above one of them. They probably liked, without knowing why, the pleasant dissonance between the associations they had for the primal versus the refined aspects of his office—the primal thatch smelling subtly like bread and the primal skins and the spider pod versus the refined glass-fronted bookcases and the orderly array of books and periodicals they displayed. When they were gone he would knock the spider’s nest down. The sad, comradely feeling he had for this group was real.

He began, “St. James College isn’t a college … nor is Moeding College in Otse a college, nor is the other one … Moeng College, in Moeng, of course. A college.” He heard himself sounding more British than usual. He’d just almost said And nor is. Sounding British happened to him at work if he didn’t watch himself. Four senior staff members and the rector were Brits.

“We’re a senior secondary school,” he said, and went on to explain that they might be considered a somewhat elite school because not all secondaries awarded the Cambridge certificate as they did. Beginning by saying St. James wasn’t a college always led to the temptation to tell about the Peace Corps volunteer teacher who’d taught for them for a year and then left after undergoing a breakdown and who in his terminal interview had said It looks like a bank but it isn’t a bank, It looks like a post office but it isn’t a post office, It looks like a restaurant but it isn’t a restaurant. That had been his explication of why he had never adjusted to Botswana. The discrepancy between what he thought institutions were supposed to be and what they were in Africa had been too much for him, among other things about the country. There were aspects of St. James that would fit into a litany about things not being what they seem. St. James was denominational but the All Saints Trust that sponsored it wasn’t a denomination. It was a peculiar institution. There were authentic religious involved in it, but a lot of the lay element in All Saints seemed to be ex–British military. The emissaries from the trust who came out to inspect every year all were. The trust was famously generous with bursaries in their schools in southern Africa, although he was picking up tremors and rumors that budget cuts were coming. Cuts would hurt. He would be all right. His position at St. James was good for
as long as he wanted it. That had been arranged at a level far above the rector.