Mortals (32 page)

“Aren’t you suffering in there?” Iris asked from the hall.

“In a good way,” he answered. “I like it.”

“It can’t be good for you.”

But she didn’t pursue it when he didn’t reply. He heard her withdraw … toward the bedroom, he thought.

If she wanted to join him in the tub room, there was a problem. There was no place for her to sit, except the uncomfortable rim of the tub. There was nothing in this cubicle but the tub and the washbasin. The toilet sat in its own cubicle, if a cubicle could be taller in the vertical dimension. If she was determined to come in and chat she could drag in the hamper from the toilet room, or bring in a chair, though she had never done that. He ran fresh hot water into the tub.

He thought, All hail the monster bathtub, the one true good thing the British left in Africa: Oversized because the imperial classes were so large in stature they hated to be hunched up when it came to bath time and time to relish their conquests that day.

Iris was back. He turned to look at her in the doorway. She was down to her bra and panties now, fanning herself. She still wanted to talk.
We have talked our extinction to death
was the one line he remembered from the whole corpus of Robert Lowell. He thought, Nobody talks about Lowell these days. The fading of great reputations was a hazard for people doing English … He was lucky with Milton. She wanted to talk about Morel and so did he, as much as you could want something to happen that you simultaneously dreaded, for no good reason.

“How long might you be in there?” she asked.

“I don’t know. This is a treatment, I.” She was going to be surprised at that. The use of I as a nickname for her, or a diminutive, one or the other, had fallen away years ago. It had been his earliest nickname for her. She’d never liked it much, actually.

“Treatment for what?” she asked.

“For what ails me.”

“You’re going to dissolve.”

“That would be okay,” he said, reaching for a tone that would suggest to her that he was midway in a process of some importance to him that he wanted to continue with, but that wouldn’t sound unfriendly. They were going to talk. Of course she was already paying someone else to talk to her, if he wanted to be childish about it. He was certain she was well into some sort of talk therapy with Morel. He thought, Every man whose wife goes out to get help of this sort from a male, another male, feels something like this. He knew he was being a cartoon, but it made a difference that the therapist was male, whether it should or not. It was a stupid fact, but a fact. She was getting therapy, but therapy for what? What was the subject matter? His guess was that a certain proportion of what he was paying for was what could be called general conversation or general thoughts on how difficult life was, that kind of thing, and why couldn’t she get that at home? But no, she wanted to warm her hams at the fire of another intellect, Morel’s intellect and not his … This is a good place to have unworthy thoughts, he thought.

Silently Iris entered the bathroom, carrying a camp stool. She had put on a dark green silk kimono, his favorite out of the four or five kimonos she owned. These costume changes were about something. She was very deliberate in the way she opened and lowered the camp stool, setting it
down at the foot of the tub. By being so delicate about it she was giving him space to object, he supposed. It was comical.

He arranged his washcloth over his genitals, for no reason. Apparently this was going to begin.

But instead of seating herself, Iris went to the basin, posted herself there, and proceeded with brushing her teeth. After a moment she said something that sounded to him like “I can’t stand the world.” Then she left the room, still brushing.

She was one of those people who have a need to walk around while they brush their teeth, in whom the act of brushing sets up a tension over the basic nullity and boringness of the procedure that they have to release by strolling while they do it, holding one hand cupped under the chin as they go. People in that category were always assiduous brushers. More nominal brushers like himself could stay in one place until they finished.

She passed by the doorway and said something unintelligible, completely unintelligible this time. She was under the delusion that she could say whatever she wanted while she was brushing her teeth and that it would be comprehensible to him because of the care with which she enunciated. It was his fault, because during their life together, since he had usually been able to divine what she was trying to say, he had never revealed his true feeling about it, which was that it was annoying and uncouth, like talking with your mouth full of food. So he had led her to believe she was being normal. He was unable to translate what she had just said.

At the basin again, she concluded by brushing her tongue.

“I couldn’t make out what you said, your last thing,” he said, when she was done.

“Just as well.” She extended her tongue and studied it in the mirror.

It would be hostile to add more hot water to his bath at this point. He asked her to sit down if she wanted to.

His offer went unacknowledged. She said, “I do everything I’m supposed to …” The tone of grievance was there. He waited.

“I read somewhere that it’s good hygiene to brush the back of your tongue when you do your teeth, so I do
that
. I sterilize my toothbrush, same reason. Nobody we know does that. The same with our diet. Whatever, if you’re supposed to do it, I do it.”

“I don’t exactly follow you,” he said, but in fact he had an idea where this was going. What was unstated was the conclusion her declarations implied, something along the lines of “I do all this and what does it get me?” she meant, get her in general. She was all over the place with her
declarations of dissatisfaction, which was what this amounted to. Not that she would put her dissatisfaction as nakedly as he had.

She sighed, turned, and said musingly, “Do you know that I don’t know if your penis is particularly large or not?”

It
is
, by God, he thought, outraged. But what was
this?
It was pure provocation.

She said, “You claim it is, but how do I know, really? I’m almost a virgin, I mean I was almost a virgin when I met you.”

He was agitated. He had to keep himself under control. The tone had to be light. This was new. He could say “Gulp he said,” but that was witless. Anxiety was doing this to her. She was flailing. She was being random.

She left the room, which was not possible.

“Iris, come and sit down,” he called after her.

“It’s so hot in there.”

“Please, though. Please.”

“The heat is too much.”

“It’s cooling down,” he called. He wasn’t going to give his treatment up. He needed it. “Please,” he said. “I would like to reassure you about my penis. I think that’s important.”

“I have to come and sit in that steambath? All right, I will.”

He listened intently. She was doing something.

She came in naked, and sat on the camp stool. “I hope you don’t mind,” she said.

He thought, on the contrary. But somehow it was completely apposite that the discussion they were going to have would be conducted with both of them stark naked. She was comfortable naked. Maybe that should worry him. Her breasts were small and full. She had never nursed, of course, but her nipples were on the tan or darker side, away from pink, which he assumed went with her coloring. And she had larger areolas than you would expect for someone who had never nursed, he thought. He was glad she was sitting down. The body of a naked woman standing in front of you could be a face looking at you, the breasts, the navel, the pudendum. He needed to be serious. She was intelligent about her nudity. She rationed it. She kept it a treat. She always wore something to bed. That was strategy, it was smart, and he loved her for it. But this just now was nudity for political reasons. It was coercive, to show what she had to put up with in order to come to grips with him. Sometimes after a bath his cleanness would provoke her into immediately sucking him off.

She said, “You know that was just kidding, about your penis. Just to get your attention.”

“I know,” he said. And he did know.

“I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be. There
is
the fact of your limited exposure, due to marrying me when you were a child bride. That’s real.”

“Well, and I also never saw my father naked. And of course I had no brothers, and then I was in girls’ schools. Men have endless opportunities to check the full range of breasts and everything else in the movies, and magazines, and nudes in paintings. There’s no parity. And of course in pornography the men they select would represent an extreme. So. And nude paintings are mostly females … and of course if it’s a male, it’s a flaccid male …”

“Men are shy,” he said.

“I was just stirring things up.”

“No, forget it,” he said. He knew he was fine. He was better than fine. He had observed enough to know that. The men in his family happened to be well endowed. He had seen his father’s penis. And when his brother reached puberty, it became clear he was going to be in the money too. She could write Rex and ask him, if she wanted to, they were so close. Or he could get a medical book and let her look him up, measure him and look him up. There was a sexy idea.

Now they were going to talk about Morel. Somehow the die was cast. He felt it. She felt it.

But she got up, yet again, and said, “I have to do something about the light if I’m going to stay here. I’ll get a couple of candles, if that’s all right.”

He nodded vigorously. She left the room and he added a little more hot water to the bath. The geyser rumbled the way it did when a new demand was placed on it. Crush me, he commanded it.

She was sensitive to lighting. She hated the overhead light in this room. He was sorry for her. He wanted to help. She had a way of making things worse. Now the idea that he was going to hear something much worse than he’d expected was growing. She was in love with Morel. Or she was falling in love with Morel. Or they’d done it and now she was sorry. Never, he thought. He was being extreme. Or they’d done it and she wasn’t sorry. It had been wonderful and now she didn’t know what to do. He would have to help her. That was going to be his role. All her preambling was making things worse.

She brought in two tall candles in a candelabrum, a wobbly craft object from Uganda. She tried different floor placements for the candelabrum, finally settling on a spot to his right, near the wall. She turned out the ceiling light.

They sighed together. “This is mysterious,” he said. The new lighting tended to make the scene more extreme. She was mainly a shape to him. Half her face was in shadow. Her hair looked wild, as though it were swelling outward as he looked at her. She had taken her bandeau off. The Medusa effect he was seeing had to be an optical illusion or a consequence of the steamy atmosphere.

He asked, “What are those paper flowers that expand from nothing into complex blooms when you put them in water called?”

She was blank. “Paper flowers was what we called them. I don’t think I ever knew any other name for them, like expando flowers or something like that. Paper flowers.”

He said, “But of course there are all kinds of paper flowers.”

“I know.”

The wavering light the candles produced was fundamentally unhelpful.

Go first, he thought, but too late because she was saying in a constricted voice that they had to talk about Davis now, it was the right time.

Resentment drove him to say, hotly just under his breath, “Son of a bitch.” She didn’t hear it. She was continuing. This was not something she was enjoying, at least.

“Ray … I want to go two or three times a week to Davis, go on a regular basis instead of off and on the way I do now. I have really decided. That’s one thing. So it’s going to cost something we need to budget for.”

He made an ill-considered dismissive gesture, to show that the money was nothing, ill-considered since his arms were underwater and the gesture splashed water out of the tub, alarming her instead of the reverse.

He apologized.

She said, “The more I go the sooner it’s over. I don’t plan to be going to him forever. So that’s one thing. I love you. And now the other thing is that I need it to be agreed that I don’t tell you anything about what we discuss, our sessions. This is standard in therapy, but it’s going to be hard for you, for us, because it’s so unlike the way our life together has always been. And I know you’ll be curious, but I want you to promise you’ll just leave these sessions as terra incognita. I know you. I know the way you try to get things out of me. You do it almost automatically, you can’t help it. So I need you to promise that you won’t. I want a pledge. That you’ll try.”

“Is this pledge something your doctor proposed?”

She didn’t want to answer.

“Why?” she asked him.

“I’d just be curious to know who it emanated from, him or you?”

“Both.”

“Okay, that’s fine, but you give me pause in a certain way. And we should discuss this now, I guess. Because what I see is, okay, you’re going into therapy, psychotherapy, and the money is not an issue, you understand, that’s all fine. But here’s a consideration. I’d like to understand how this … process … this process can be useful to you if you have to observe certain limits in what you can tell him about your life. That is, our life, your life with me.” He thought of Boyle’s chamber.

He continued. “He would consider me a spy.”

“You
are
a spy,” she said.

“Well,” he said. Despite the heat of the bath, he felt a sensation of cold in his chest, like a lozenge the size of a bar of soap.

“I apologize for raising this, but I can’t help it. Is this correct?… that a whole constituent of your life and the problems it causes will be left out. We’re agreed on that? I mean, I know we are, but I seem to be asking for reassurance …”

She was silent. He needed to be able to see her face better. The abominable lighting was against him.

Finally she said, “I don’t see that as a problem.”