Mortals

8. The List

He had a free period. It was three in the afternoon. The school was quiet. The phone rang. That was another thing that could go on the list. The call was going to be from Iris, who was calling him more often at work lately, which could mean she was feeling a need to keep better apprised of his movements, which was a new anxiety with her. And it had to be coupled with something else that was new… her requests that he let her know definitely if he was coming home for lunch or not.

He picked up the phone and said, “Here I am and I still love you.” The caller gasped. It was definitely Iris.

“How did you know it would be me, you fool. Don’t do that. I could have been anybody.”

“I knew it was you.”

“You couldn’t have. My God. Please don’t do that again. It’s not like you. Don’t be strange.”

“I live on the edge,” he said.

“No you don’t. Please don’t do it again.”

“I may, I may not.”

“Quit it, please.”

“Okay. It’s a deal.”

“I don’t want you to be strange.” He thought that was interesting.

She said, lightly, “I just wanted to touch voices.”

“I love you to say that. But tell me about lunch, your lunch date,” he said.

She sighed, and then was silent.

He said, “I take it my recommendation wasn’t great.”

“Well, it was an example of why you could get lonely in Gaborone. We ate at the President, in the Grenadier Room no less. I dressed up. It was fine. Her name is Lorna, but she insisted I call her Lor, which felt awkward. I guess because she’s married to an American I assumed she was too, but she isn’t. Well, she is, she’s a citizen, but she’s Australian. Getting me to call her Lor and not Lorna seemed to be the main thing on her mind. They’ve been all over. She loves the embassy people. We had nothing to talk about, really.

“But, well she’s nice and she’s livelier than a lot of other embassy wives I could name. It was funny, she drank quite a bit of Cape Riesling during lunch, but the main effect it had on her was to stir up lots of umbrage about how much drinking there is in embassy circles. She managed to refer to the embassy staff as Alcoholics Unanimous a couple of times. She seems to think there’s too much daytime drinking, particularly.”

He thought, The fact is that I am talking to the most beautiful white woman in southern Africa, outside of the movies, and someone getting more beautiful, not less… these token signs of age make her beauty more acute, other women must hate her: How can she have friends? She needs friends, outside of me: Nothing can be done. The fact that he could give her pleasure, that life allowed him to, was immense to him. It was like gold.

“What?” he asked, he had missed something.

“I said, Lor and I are both insomniacs. Thank God, because that was basically our only subject. So we were talking and I tried to be entertaining by relating something you said the other night, don’t worry, nothing embarrassing, but I thought it was a funny story. It was when I complained because you had just turned over, like that, flopped over and said goodnight when I was still my usual wide-awake self… It happens, it’s no big problem, this is me. But this was early, even for you. You know how it is when I’m abandoned to myself… my own devices, at night.

“So then you remember I had an attack of pique and kind of yelled at you, ‘I have no rights around here!’ meaning, of course, that I have an unwritten marital right to sufficient notice before you go to sleep. And you said, when I said I have no rights, you said, ‘You have the right to remain silent.’ Well, it was funny. Still makes me laugh. But she didn’t get it at all and I was drawn into one of those explanations, explications, that ends up making you sound like a complete idiot. Her interpretation was just that I was a tyrant and you were a policeman.”

“That was pretty amusing of me. She didn’t get the humor. Maybe because she’s Australian, they don’t have Miranda.”

“It was a misfire,” she said.

“Bad recommendation, I guess.”

“It’s not your fault. She’s fine, really. But she’s not going to be exactly a friend. I don’t know what I mean, exactly… am I pathetic? I guess what I mean is she’s not an answer.”

“She’s part of the problem, you’re saying.”

“I wouldn’t go that far. She’s okay.”

“If she’s not an answer, what is the question?”

“Ah,” she said dryly and not happily.

“So what is the question, Iris?” He knew his tone was wrong. It was what she called his bearing down tone.

“Oh please don’t get all relentless. Please.”

“I didn’t mean to be. I’m sorry. I thought you were initiating something and clearly you weren’t.”

“On the phone? When you have to get back to work? I don’t think I was.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Me too.”

“Okay.”

“Also she was wearing the most painful accessory in the history of jewelry. It was a choker made out of white plastic petals, pointed petals all awry and pointing in different directions. It was sticking into her throat, into the flesh. I couldn’t take my eyes off it.”

This is the way she retreats, he thought.

“It made a teeny clacking sound when she swallowed.”

“I do apologize. If I’d known she was Australian I’d have mentioned it. It’s another culture.”

“Yes, it is. And I don’t transcend cultures at all well. I’m not good at it.”

Uh-oh, he thought.

“But Iris, you are good at it. You’ve done it here and in Zambia beautifully, and before that.”

“No I haven’t. You’re confusing two things, Ray, one being that I don’t complain and the other being your interpretation of that as how well I’m doing. Those are two different things.”

“But you make African friends,” he said, unnerved at how large these declarations were. Usually she was more incremental. A bitter feast was steaming hot and a mouth must be found to eat it, he thought. It was a quotation whose author he couldn’t come up with. That was what he was facing, though. There was something unfair about quotations lasting longer than the names of their creators. He saw her recent declarations as thrusts or lunges, not tentative anymore. And this was going on over the phone and it was unfair, unless she was in a more extreme state than he’d guessed. Maybe she was. It was his brother’s influence. She wanted liberation of some kind. It was Rex. Liberation was fine, he agreed with it, but all he knew was that at the heart of any kind of liberation worth anything there still had to be someone grabbing someone else and saying I’m yours, I love you beyond expression, something like that, embraces, berserk embraces, in his humble opinion. But maybe not, according to her, according to all this, according to his brother. It was unfair. He couldn’t laugh at her anymore when she said something funny she hadn’t intended to say. There was a recent example. She had complained that he was being parsimonious with some piece of gossip or information he had, and she had said something like It’s like pulling hen’s teeth getting anything out of you. So he had laughed, and although she’d realized immediately what she’d said, she still hadn’t liked his laughing, even after he explained that he’d been mainly laughing appreciatively at how appositely the mixed metaphor worked. Well, he thought: Wife is unfair… as somebody said.

Now she was asking him what real African friends he thought she had in Botswana.

“Well, you have a lot of acquaintances…”

“But no close friends, Ray.”

“Sure you do. You must. Maybe not right at this moment. One problem is that compatible people come and