Mating by Norman Rush

Author:Norman Rush [Rush, Norman]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-78935-8
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2011-03-02T05:00:00+00:00

I Should Tell Everything

My story is turning into the map in Borges exactly the size of the country it represents, but I feel I should probably say everything.

There was the ambience in our place after dark, which I think of as blond. The base was the yellow candlelight everything transpired in. I had inveigled Nelson to let me put up café curtains over the peculiar windows, custard yellow being the only color available. Why, he wanted to know, on a precipice, totally without neighbors? I said So that if anyone drifts by at the wrong moment they can’t see my breasts and genitals and your penis and anus. He laughed and said But how about your anus? I overlooked it, I said. We looked very golden naked, and I think pretty good, although not perfect by any means.

People act more deliberately by candlelight. Your gestures are slower. I felt like an illustration, at times. Other things contributed to the honied atmosphere. Possibly the absence of an overabundance of reflecting surfaces was one. In America even the most spartanly furnished apartment is full of reflecting surfaces, from windows, through the glass in framed pictures, through the sides of your toaster, through actual mirrors. In fact the frequency of mirrors goes up, as a trompe l’oeil maneuver to make you feel you have more space for your money, as the actual square footage of what you can afford to rent goes down. I have done it myself in certain of the broom closets I’ve been reduced to renting. On the street it’s shop windows and bus windows playing their part in the conspiracy to keep making you monitor how you look. Before Tsau, I knew something was wrong with it: I kept losing my compacts in high school until I stopped carrying them, thusly copying my mother in at least one trait. Of course I was still bound to mirrors as recently as crossing the Kalahari, when I went into shock when mine was lost. Mirrors are bad. Africa is nothing if not matte, and that returns you to yourself, unexpectedly.

But I should tell everything. The underside of the thatch over us was golden-brownish, the unweathered side, and the karosses we’d spread liberally everywhere were medium brown to pale tan. One panel in the big kaross we had on our bed was auburn, exactly matching my hair. It was from a horse. Nelson was very deliberate, sexually, for a man, for whatever reason. I told him he should write a book called How to Undress a Person Other Than Yourself, which was an homage to the delicate and nonfoisting way he would undress me all the way down before touching his own clothing. At first while he was undressing me he would say Sh when I tried to undress him back, make things a little more mutual. Sh meant not to do that. After four or five times I was afraid of two things. One was that this was going to be some frozen onset ritual that meant hysteria somewhere in his past.

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