Mortals (41 page)

And here was Marlo himself speaking despairingly. “Nothing remains for even the most intelligent to do, but to surrender his social independence and put himself in the service of the capital-rich entrepreneurs, and leave to them the greater part of the fruit of his labor.” Ray could see clearly why Marlo appealed to Kerekang.

Here was the core of it. “Industrial and agricultural enterprises would be limited to a certain number of workers, and each merchandising firm would be given a monopoly over a part of the national market … Those who amass more capital than is needed for their enterprise will be able to
lend it to those who lack the money but not the competence to exploit their share of the national market. The state must keep interest rates low, and must also assure to each citizen ‘a sphere of activity’ equivalent to his abilities. Would not, Marlo asked, such a state be able to ward off the wild struggle for markets and capital, the destructive competition, and the dangerous concentration of wealth and power in the hands of a few which have transformed modern societies into vast arenas in which occur chaotic struggles for survival?… Every citizen will be expected to contribute to health, old age, and life insurance programs …”

It sounded to Ray like Sweden in the fifties. And the outcome for Marlo was that his advanced ideas had enraged the liberal revolutionaries who wanted to break the guilds, and the socialists who wanted to vest ownership of everything in the state, and he had been tried for treason when the reactionaries came back to power after the crushing of the revolution.

Ray thought, Outcomes are funny: Imagine that somehow Marlo and this renovated guild system had won out in Germany, what might have been next? Well, for one thing, no German Marxism burgeoning up enough to drive the ruling classes crazy and no ruling classes putting Lenin on a train to Russia and no Russian Revolution and no Stalin and no Red Army carrying fire and blood and doom to what was left of the crazy old regime, thank you very much: We outsmart ourselves! … How can I possibly get this across? We destroy moderates at our own peril, something like that: He won’t get it, he’s Boyle.

When it came to Kerekang’s political life in Britain, reading it correctly took only the smallest amount of sophistication and goodwill. Kerekang had never taken out physical membership in anything. He had been sampling this and that in the nonparty left, over there. He was a pilgrim. There was no evidence of anything more. Yes, at the very beginning of his time in the U.K. he had fellow-traveled with a couple of Trotskyist sectlets or groupustules, Boyle’s tweaking of the standard derogatory term for miniature left groups, groupuscules, but Kerekang had clearly found them wanting. He had rejected them and gone elsewhere, which ought to count in his favor. He had been a sympathizer with something called the Commonwealth Party, now defunct, a precursor to the Green Party. The man was a seeker, and where he had come out was, if looked at without jaundice, innocuous. But Boyle was Boyle. He remained Boyle. What was wrong with him? What was wrong with the world?

It occurred to Ray that a prime reason people want power is so they can say no, have that pleasure, exercise the power to prohibit. It was how some people made the world simpler, people who hated the confusion of the world. It was primitive.

The buzzer sounded, the red light flashed, he rose up wearily.

W
ith Iris gone Ray could eat anything he wanted, and he had planned a transgressive meal for himself for tonight, which, now that he was sitting down to it, he didn’t have much appetite for. He had to get past Boyle’s
No
, Boyle’s brevity with him on top of it, Boyle’s expression when he had examined Ray’s case for making Morel a POI and his attempt to show what effort it was taking to keep disbelief from turning into a horse laugh.

He had a fine clod of fried steak before him, with baked potato and salad, flageolets dressed with oil and vinegar, a salad by British standards only. It was a thick steak, silverside. Cliffs of beef, he thought. The garnish of sautéed garlic and onions was less thoroughly caramelized than he liked. Iris would have done them perfectly. As a cook, his weakness was impatience. He was doing his own cooking. Dimakatso had offered to take over, but she was a rotten cook and he would have had to praise everything.

He was on his second Ringnes beer. The brand was just lately available in Gaborone and it was wonderful, and strong, which was why he liked it, of course.

He missed Iris cruelly. She would call tonight. He was hoping for a call less consumed by the detail of what was going on with Ellen and her new baby girl than the previous calls had been.

He should be happier right now. He was set up to read and eat, a combination he liked, a pleasure in itself that a happily married man generally experienced only when he was eating away from home. He had two
Times Literary Supplement
s still in their glassine sleeves. He didn’t mind eating in the kitchen, despite the too-bright overhead light, because everything he might have forgotten to put on the table was close at hand.

The phone was on the table. It rang and he picked up the receiver. It was her voice. He wanted her back home. He wanted to kiss her mouth, feel her open it under his kiss. He pushed his plate aside.

“Oh God I can hear you,” he said, which was not how he had meant to begin. Somewhere he had a list of things he wanted to mention. It must be at work. There were key things on the list. The point was to attract, to attract, for want of a better word. One item was that they had fennel now, at the Chinese greengrocer’s in White City. But that was the least interesting item on the list.

She thought he was referring to the phone connection, obviously.

“I can hear you too,” she said, twice.

He wanted to do something, talk French to her, something, attract her, remind her of how much he loved her but without just saying it over and over.

“I love you,” he said.

“I do too,” she said. He knew what she meant. It was fine. He didn’t know what he wanted. He wanted something stronger.

She was proceeding with the news about the baby, still unnamed, fully recovered from the mild case of jaundice she’d suffered from when she was born. Iris was keeping Ellen as calm as possible. The baby was at home with them now. It was good that she had come. Did he have any suggestions for a name for a girl, keeping in mind that it had to go well with Gunther.

“Not right now,” he said, realizing that he wanted urgently to escape the subject. The last time he’d been engaged in baby-naming exercises was during one of Iris’s false pregnancies, long ago.

“But please help us, Ray. Think about it. You have good suggestions. Anything with a little literary feeling to it would be welcome to Ellen. She’s getting the most absurd suggestions from her friends here. I hate them. That’s another subject. I’ll tell you later. Just rebarbative is what I’d call the whole bunch of them. But there seems to be a trend going to find a name that’s got trashy associations like Lulu or Lola or Ruby. I don’t understand it. Or she’ll be enthusiastic over a name that’s just plain weird, like Merle. Of course there was Merle Oberon … But the worst is that she keeps muttering that if black people can make up any sort of name they want for their children, then why can’t she? Who knows what she might come up with. Ladeeda or Ladido or something.”

“I think the father should have some say in it, Iris.”

“The father. No.”

“I don’t understand that.”

“Ray, he knows about the baby, she told him, he just doesn’t know she’s been born yet.”

“Shouldn’t somebody inform him, Iris?”

“Of course! But this is the way Ellen wants it. He’s in another state. He got married. I don’t know how this is going to work out, but she wants me to help with an insane letter she wants him to sign. He’s getting his mail at a post office box. It’s all a mess. He works in a bookstore. He has nothing. He’s in terror of his wife finding out. He always calls, when he calls, from a pay phone. And he always whispers. I don’t know what I’m supposed to do. I might call your brother …”

“Now why in hell would you do that?”

“For
advice
.”

“What in the name of hell does he know about legal … the legal realm?”

“There’s no reason to be upset. He might know someone I could talk to. He knows amazing people. Did you read the sort of joke guidebook for returning to the States he sent me? I was going to show it to you. It turned out to be useful, really. He seems to know people in high places, gay people. The number of people you would never think of being gay that he can identify is pretty staggering. He reminds me of that diabetic woman at the embassy who named all the secret diabetics she knew about in Washington. Your brother can be very helpful.”

“Call him, then.”

“I did, once. But not to talk about this. Just to say hello.”

“How is he?”

“I think he’s all right. I couldn’t tell. He’s so funny. He has a new motto for the CIA. Do you want to know what it is?”

He was silent. If he kept silent long enough it might remind her that there was a rule. He hadn’t been able to tell her about Dictionary Echelon but he thought he impressed a general rule of caution about certain references.

She sighed. “I know what I did, Ray. I’m sorry. But don’t you want to know?”

“Okay, what is it?”

“Peek and ye shall find.”

“Very amusing.”

“Anyway these names she likes are, this is a guess, from movies we haven’t seen, with cheap women as heroines. Arva is another one she likes, and Thelma. My sister is excitable right now. I think it’s stress and postpartum and I think she’ll be better. My mother can’t come. She’s in a
wheelchair with gout. Also she’s so out of it. She’s not leaving Michigan. Since she heard there’s no father on the scene or even in the wings, she really has nothing to say to Ellen. I am overwhelmed here. It would be heaven if you could be with us, but you can’t, I know that. If I didn’t give you the tourist reentry thing your brother wrote, go and look on the second shelf of my nightstand. It’s brilliant …

“Ray, I want to talk to you forever. Can we?”

“You know we can.”

“But you didn’t ask for this expense with Ellen.”

“It’s all right.” He was attracting her, which wasn’t the right word, still. He was getting something going …

“Ray, how are you, are you eating decently?”

He said, “I don’t have much appetite,” to his surprise, because it wasn’t true.

“No appetite?” she said. “Why is that? Then go eat out …”

He had committed a mistake. She felt criticized.

“You don’t want Dimakatso to cook, so okay. She is perfectly adequate. I don’t want this on me. I don’t want to hear about how only one person can feed and nurture you the right way. I’m sorry. I’ll tell you what to do if you have no appetite. Don’t eat. Don’t eat for
one day
. I bet your appetite might come back. Do you have any idea of the insanity I am dealing with here, a tiny infant child, my sister, her friends, do you have the slightest idea? Wait, I’m sorry. I’m sorry. Oh God. I’m marginal. Oh Ray my darling. It’s stress. Pay no attention.”

It was his fault. He had been tempted to go for sympathy by the stupid Ringnes. That was enough Ringnes. The pleasant feeling of having a little extra space in the top of the skull was declaring itself nicely. It was excellent beer, Norwegian. He liked Norwegians. Swedes he could take or leave.

“Please forgive me,” she said.

“Come on. Nothing to forgive.”

“I have so much to tell you, Ray.”

“Tell, then.”

“I think it’s good my sister had this baby. I know it’s a mess with the father, but still. They love Ellen at the Montessori Institute. The job part of her life looks solid. She likes doing publicity. They pay pretty munificently. They think she’s brilliant.

“She needed this child. She was volunteering to baby-sit for all her married friends and she was falling in love with their children. They could do no wrong. She would baby-sit for a twenty-one-month-old holy
terror who would go through the apartment dismantling it. But after each depredation, like tearing the knobs off the stereo, he would toddle over to her holding out the thing he had torn off as a gift, giving this darling smile. Or he would go into the bathroom and grab a container of shampoo and come out and give it to you as another gift but leaving a trail of spilled shampoo all through your living room. Of course Ellen doesn’t keep the caps screwed on. But anyway the child would be picked up and she would slowly discern her apartment was in ruins. She had been in a dream. I met one of the children who pushed her over the edge, a darling little girl, just a toddler. When she came over to be baby-sat she brought along a whole menagerie of stuffed animals. Going to sleep meant collecting them into a heap and lying down on top of them. She had fantastic names for them. When I asked her about her animals she said, ‘I use them as friends.’ Ellen wrote the names down so she could refer to them correctly on the phone. They had a phone relationship. Look at this. I’m at her desk now and here’s a card with the names of the animals. Here they are … Snartz, Gwinty, Pobeel, Woot, Fard and Dardena. Don’t you love Dardena? How is St. James College?”

He knew what he wanted from this conversation. He wanted to attract her and he wanted some evidence that he was succeeding. He wanted to hear that she was keeping her personal footing in all the upheaval around having a baby, particularly as the proposition might apply to her. He wanted her to miss Botswana, if that was possible. He wanted to hear what it felt like to be back in the States, if she liked it there. It was probably fortuitous that she had gone to Florida, which, if he was any judge, she was going to find boring and extreme, culturally. That was what he hoped. He had to say something about school. There was nothing attractive going on. The pigs were dead.

“School is fine. No big changes.”

“I think she’ll be a good mother. My fingers are crossed. Do you know what cradle cap is?”

“Some type of bonnet for a child? No idea.”