by
Norman Rush
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[...] And not to venture too far into the underside of our household humor, he also laughed inordinately when I was getting into bed and slightly farted and he said Is that the way you greet me? I replied quick as a flash That’s the only language you understand. Neither of us could figure out why we thought this was funny, but we both did.
<3
Just tell me this, I said. Just tell me if this is right, that something momentous happened to you on the way to Tikwe, you think.
Something momentous. I think so.
It was up to him to elaborate. I could have made him do it, led him to do it. But the sense that I represented the forces of interruption was too much for me, the sense that I was keeping him from certain sessions of sweet silent thought, sweeter and more important to him than anything else on earth.
We sat in silence.
I hated life.
I knew he wasn’t normal in at least one respect because of an unconscionable thing I’d done the night before. I’d gotten into bed naked and we’d begun embracing, all in silence — which was atypical. And I’d discovered what I wanted to discover, that the same things made him sincere as always. But then I’d stopped and moved away to my side of the bed. I moved away gradually enough for him to protest. But he let me slip away without any semblance of pursuit whatsoever. This was accommodation gone mad, at least in terms of our protocols. This was the man I’d learned the phrase A standing prick has no conscience from. Why had I done it, when I was fifty percent certain the outcome might be what it had been? It was plucking at an old generic fear of mine about marriage in general, maybe my most fundamental fear. What happens in a marriage if your husband is no longer sexually compelled by you? What happens in your heart when you sense he’s pretending to want to do it? How old are you when this happens? The whole thing is unbearable.
I recognized what Bronwen was immediately. She was my satanic miracle. I knew it. Her image seemed to leave a print on my sight when I looked away from her. She was reading Nelson’s book with ferocious concentration. I could tell she was believing it.
Ripeness is all, was Bronwen. People had said you would know her when you saw her because she looked like the ingenues in the Coke ads of the nineteen forties, the perfect blond ones. She must have been genuinely beautiful, because fluorescent light, which makes the rest of us look cadaverous, only made her look luminous. She had hair the color of custard. I doubt that she was twenty-six. She wore absolutely no makeup. Conceivably her underlip was a little overfull. She was shorter than I am.
Of course all of the above is really about the phonecall and the What is to be done? question. Somewhere in everything I remember lies the answer to how I should decide. At this point, oddly enough, I have the money to do whatever I decide is required. Of course a month has passed since the call, and I haven’t decided. Instead I’ve done what I do best, made an academic study of myself centering on the last two years, made myself a field of academic study with only one specialist in it. The lutte finale was about resolving doubt, I thought, but it would be exactly doubt that could wrench me out of here one more time. The reason Achilles can never lay hands on the tortoise is the same reason a month has passed while I’ve studied the question of why I have yet to act. There is always new material to be integrated into the study of me. Each moment of thought demands multiples of moments of classification, analysis, parsing. I tried to suppress the gravamen of the phonecall, which was so interesting of me, wasn’t it?
lol
Being in America is like being stabbed to death with a butter knife by a weakling. Brazen Head is the most popular president ever. People think I have very interesting political slants. So much is siphoned from Nelson, so how should this make me feel? I seem to be all things to all women. Feminists like me because of Tsau, socialist feminists like me because of the cooperative side of Tsau, professional women, nonsocialist feminists, like me because of the private property and incentive side of Tsau, and lesbians like me because I never go around with men. There are no men, so far. People see me as women-identified, something new, and seem to be proud of me for it. The left is prolapsed, insofar as I can judge. I can’t find an enemy in my milieu anywhere. If you have ideas that rise above Power to the people! you qualify as someone who should write a book for the Monthly Review Press.
lmao
But back to my phonecall, because inhering in it is the cultural ghost of the whole perplex of women waiting in agony to be phoned by some man or other. I didn’t leave Africa to come back here with the covert purpose of waiting for a phonecall that would set me dancing and playing maracas. I left to leave. In junior high we were forced to read a short story about a girl who meets a boy when she goes ice skating and who then goes home and waits in agony for days for him to call. This is a famous story by a woman named Maureen Daly, who got elevated into the very top level of women’s magazines by it. The story is called Seventeen, and I think she was sixteen when she wrote it. The story won prizes. I had a very strong reaction to it. It sank into my soul and I vowed never to be her or anything like her. I vowed this. Also — and this is something I just now realized, thanks to the phonecall that’s driving me to the edge — it has to do with why, when I could have, I didn’t go after Nelson and stop him while he was still on his horse and heading for Tikwe. I had time. And I started to, but somehow I couldn’t do it. I realize that I was very moved, but in the wrong direction, by Jean Peters running out to stop Emiliano Zapata from going someplace he was determined to go. I may be confusing two different scenes, in one of which she presses a freshly ironed shirt on him, pleadingly, or tries to. I hated her. This would never be me. I wasn’t going to be Jean Peters in Viva Zapata when in fact the sensibility on the horse was who I really was. That was me.
[...] I thought of Grace and finding her and suggesting we move in together.
lmao
At first the jackals ignored him, but then two of them came straying over. He had the conviction that terror, his terror, would doom him and that the first thing he would have to do was make himself into a nonreacting entity: that is, stop thinking and make himself as much like the ground or the trees as he could. He had to stop sending out waves of fear and supplication. It was a process of deidentification, he called it. It soothed him to have this task.
He found it hard to talk about how he got into this deidentified condition. It was a formula, a certain order of images he made himself experience. It was an inner contortion. It had to do with making himself not feel the passage of time. In any case the jackals left him alone.