Mating (15 page)

The moment after he finished was wonderful in another way. It was not only erotic, it was nationalistically gratifying. Rra Puleng was an American. There have been a couple of other Rra Pulengs, and they also have been Americans. Nobody ever called me a Mma Puleng, but they would have if it had been the Batswana custom to notice the existence of women. No Brit that I know of ever got called Rra Puleng, and people say that even Sir Seretse Khama’s wife hardly speaks the language. Also it was normally so embarrassing to be American. Reagan had just been elected, which was so embarrassing to Denoon
—
I would discover—that he couldn’t speak his name and, for the first few months I knew him, would only refer to him as The Brazen Head, after the hollow metal idols the Babylonian priestcraft got their flocks to worship and which were equipped with speaking tubes leading down into the bowels of the temple whence the priests would make the idol speak.

We were having a distinct afterglow. Kgosetlemang had stopped moving purposively on Denoon. Mbaake was making his hitchhiking gesture, but halfheartedly compared to before. From the look on his face I think he was about to say something complimentary. And then everyone stood up, whites included.

It was not a tribute. A prodigy was happening. For a beat everything felt dead. The lights blinked and then resumed at a vaguer, almost orange level.

There was a sound like nothing in my experience. It was both a roar and a washing or seething sound. It was immense. And there was thunder all over, and ozone. It was a sound like the sea roaring back to reclaim the ex-seabed Botswana actually is.

It was a sand rain, my first. But it was a deluge. These have become more common now, with the drought. But all I could think was Africa! What next!

The performance was over. Guys who had been hanging around outside wanted immediately to come inside, and guys who were inside wanted to go out. They were worried about their wives and their cars. Sand could get into the hood vents, and a fair number of the crowd had undoubtedly left their car windows open because of the heat. The Waygards who had come in out of the storm were pulling their shirttails out and spilling sand all over and laughing greatly. I would have gone out to see, except that I was concentrated on Denoon. Normally I’m as interested in a freak of nature as the next man, but I didn’t move an inch. I was determined I was going to chat Denoon up, but I had to act fast because Z would undoubtedly come to see if I was drowning in sand and I did not want to appear for the first time before Denoon in association with Z.

Before I could think, someone was pushing me from behind. They were a woman’s hands, and it was Grace. She had me by the hips and was steering me through the disintegrating crowd straight at Denoon.

The question is why I didn’t punch her, since my middle name is noli me tangere if it’s anything. Ever since I could do anything about it I have made it abundantly clear that nobody should touch me without being invited or until I make the first move. All the male-initiated touching and kissing currently going on is nonviolent aggression. It’s training for docility and should be fought until the valence of things is equal between the sexes, since as it stands if women touch first it means come and get it. I could become a militant on this easily. God save me from ever ending up working in some Aquarian-type office setting where friendly patting is the religion. I have seen these places. For a while at Stanford I was not staunch about this. I was there when faculty-student relations got oh so casual. The odd thing was that all the touching never led, for example, to even a slightly more expansive comment than usual next to the inevitable eighty-seven on my papers. I think the kissing and patting was worse at Stanford because of the odious human potential movement
and the vapors wafting over us from the twit factory at Esalen, which was not so far away and was going full blast. There could be a campaign saying women who work in offices and who want to be touched should wear a button saying so.

Nelson always complained about how hard it was to get kisses from me. So be it, I had to tell him finally. Because to me a kiss is a carnal thing. In fact he said Getting a kiss from you is about equal in difficulty with getting the average woman to sit on my face. Clearly I see my mouth as a stand-in for what he cutely loved to refer to as my je ne sais quoi. I would be lying if I denied the linkage. We had other antic names for my pudendum, of which his favorite was sí-señor. We got into a small fight over why only women have pudenda, why only one sex has something between its legs to be ashamed of. I had to remind him that pudere, the root word, means to cause shame. He insisted the term was unisex until I got hold of a decent dictionary and converted him. I noticed we were generating more funny names for my private parts than for his: so I put my mind to it and overwhelmed him. I’m all for fun. I think he had been a little cheated in the past in this branch of playfulness. He was good at it. For example, if I prickteased him he would say I was in danger of getting my comeuppance. He wasn’t trying to be demeaning.

I think the main reason I was passive to her shoving was because I felt sorry for Denoon that this was his wife. He hardly needed the embarrassment of a scene such as my turning and punching her lights out. And also something else tranquilized me. The other thing that saved her from the disaster she was ignorant she was flirting with was a feeling of fatedness I was undergoing. The feeling was that this was supposed to happen, according to the stars in their courses.

When I think of being pushed toward Denoon it feels dreamlike and slow, and like the reverse of a short story whose title has to be The Kiss. I always remember titles and authors, unlike women in general. I make a point of it. I slipped up in this case because I thought The Kiss would be something I would always be stumbling across in anthologies. But it vanished, and now when I tell people about it they think it’s some kind of feminist canard of mine. The Kiss is short, a two-page account of what a man sees when he keeps his eyes open as his face gets closer and closer to the woman he is kissing. Her eyes are of course closed per the custom. When he begins the descent to the kiss her face is a seamless mask of beauty. Then as he gets closer and keeps scrutinizing, it turns into the surface of the moon, cratered, with points of oil glittering and her lanugo
showing up. Of course this is quintessential hatred of the female. Her metamorphosis into ugliness is a result of sheer proximity and nothing else: she is a normal beauty. I’ve tried to recapture where I read this and who wrote it. The author was British, I’m sure. When I ask women if they’ve read it and I mention that I think the author is British, they say Oh, then this has to be a gay thing.

Nelson had great difficulty adapting to my thesis anxiety. He was so far beyond that kind of question. And he was so antiacademic. And it had all been so easy for him. Once he stopped trying to shut me up with facetious suggestions for alternative fields of study and thesis topics, he could make an interesting suggestion now and then. He thought somebody could surely get a thesis out of the fact that if you ran a computer through the corpus of murder mysteries written since the genre began you would find a rising curve for female as opposed to male victims, which meant something. I objected that this was a paper and not a thesis. Then I could expand into other vital statistics, was his idea. He was convinced that the average number of killings per title had also gone up. And he was insensitive at first to something he refused to consider an issue in doing a thesis these days: that is, you do your thesis and discover that due to the enormous volume of theses being produced, you’ve duplicated a half or a third of somebody else’s thesis. I said But you say that because you’re an original thinker. This annoyed him.

In any case my slow progress toward Denoon was The Kiss in reverse. He looked better the closer I got. His jaws looked bluer, although this may have been the result of seeing him more directly under the peculiar fluorescent doughnut that lit that part of the room. His superfices were good. The whites of his eyes were models of whiteness. He was smiling at Kgosetlemang—the event was to be considered over with, clearly—and I could tell that his gingivae were as good as mine, which is saying a lot. I attend to my gums. People in the bush don’t always attend to their oral hygiene, not to mention other niceties. There was no sign of that here. I of course am fanatical about my gums because my idea of what the movie
I Wake Up Screaming
is about is a woman who has to keep dating to find her soulmate and she’s had to get dentures. I have very long-range anxieties.

He was appropriate for me and the reverse. I felt it and hated it because it was true despite his being around fifteen years older than me. What did that mean about me? I also hated it because I hate assortative mating, the idea of it. One of my most imperishable objections to the world is the existence of assortative mating, how everyone at some level
ends up physically with just who they deserve, at least to the eye of some ideal observer, unless money or power deforms the process. This is equivalent to being irritated at photosynthesis or at inhabiting a body that has to defecate periodically, I am well aware. Mostly it comes down to the matching of faces. When I first encountered the literature, I even referred to it privately as faceism. I will never adapt to it, probably. Why can’t every mating in the world be on the basis of souls instead of inevitably and fundamentally on the match between physical envelopes? Of course we all know the answer, which is that otherwise we would be throwing evolution into disarray. Still it distresses me. We know what we are.

He was in a state of health. His reflexes showed it. There was aplomb in the way he juggled getting closure with Kgosetlemang and turning to deal with a juggernaut consisting of me being driven into his very face by his crazed wife.

Being able to tell if someone is in a state of health is a knack or delusion I acquired when I was working as a receptionist for a charlatan nutrition therapist in Belmont. I predicted Denoon would have sweet breath, and that was right. By this time I was wanting Denoon to be what he appeared to be, or better. The only remaining question was his midsection. I wanted the power of impresarios or whoever they are who tell women trying out for places in the chorus line to lift up their skirts so their thighs can be checked out. A dashiki can cover a multitude of sins. A tense scene like the one that was developing makes you hold your belly in. I wanted to know how thick he was there, if I could. Knowing the extent of his problem would be calming. I am unbelievably cathected when it comes to fat, which works out well in that it impels me to be a good influence on friends who need to lose weight. But beneath it all is the undersea mountain of my mother and what her size is going to mean, ultimately, to me. A dashiki is like a smock. My mother always wore smocks, even long after she was persona non grata in the kindergartens of southern Minnesota for repeatedly eating food meant for the toddlers.

Grace had stopped shoving. I was kind. I provided cover by giving her a complicit or prankish look, which took fortitude on my part.

He said Hello, Grace. His voice was perfect for the occasion. It was wary, but also kind and faintly threatening. He was looking past me. So far he was barely cognizing my presence.

Here’s someone you should meet, she said, in a ravished voice. Like him she was the lucky owner of an above average voice. Did this mean they had been meant for each other at one point? If only their voices
could live together, I thought, and let their envelopes go their separate ways. I hadn’t noticed her voice earlier.

One thing at least was clear: I was in the presence of a smashed mechanism: their relationship was over, whether she was ready to admit it or not. I was sorry for both of them, but also alas exhilarated, to tell the absolute truth.

We were now an appropriately spaced triangle.

She liked you tonight, Grace said.

Did you? Nelson said directly to me.

I love a tirade, I said. It came to me on the spur of the moment and once it was said I knew I was being shameless and attempting almost self-evidently to pander to his demonstrated weakness for wordplay. I blushed, it was so obvious. But I was also thinking To hell with it. The fact is you have about ten seconds to impress yourself on someone you meet de novo. People decide up or down almost instantaneously, without even knowing it. And the great and near great decide even quicker, because part of their eminence is based on a facility at classifying the people who are bothering them almost instantly into those who can do something for them and those who can’t. So I struck. I also was aware I was not going to overwhelm anybody with sheer loveliness at the weight I was just then at. The iron was hot. I was the first to arrive at the scene of the accident, namely the wreck of their marriage. I know I flushed. My coloring is a strong point, so that was all right too.

Having been on the periphery of a certain number of the near great, I was in fear of a certain phenomenon transpiring, which is a dimming in their regard like a fine membrane coming down over their eyeballs. They keep looking at you but not seeing you if you aren’t on their level or are a kind of prey not of interest to them. There is such a thing in nature. It’s called a nictitating membrane and certain reptiles have it, as did the great Chinese criminal genius Fu Manchu, a hero of Nelson’s boyhood reading as I later found out in the course of a discussion of the moment we met. Denoon denied he ever did it. My position was that the great can’t help doing it, but I did finally concede that I’d never seen him do it, not even once. He considered himself a congenital democrat. This was urgent to him.

What tirade? he asked.

So I answered him in Setswana, very brisk, slightly parodically, saying The tirade about the sun being the cow that nobody troubles to milk. This was another shot meant to hit before the portcullis came down. It had several features. It gave a sketch of one of my powers. I was someone
out of the ordinary. It also had the carom quality of indirectly apprising him that in his description of the sun he had missed a bet by not comparing it to a cow. In Botswana the most magnificent entity you can be compared to is a cow. It’s true for all Bantu people, not only the Tswana. The god with the moist nose, is one way it’s put. Also here or later I used the phrase “dry rain” for sunlight, which he loved and which can be found in the Setswana pamphlet on solar democracy that eventually came out. I must have said it later.