Mortals

unique latitude and he was turning his reports into something of clear literary merit, something more important than their immediate function. Marion had understood the art in what he produced because Marion was civilized. But enough on that. Except that Iris didn’t appreciate what it meant to him, the ways in which it was right for him as an artist. He had given her Aubrey’s Brief Lives to read, once, and she had never finished it. Basically, what he wrote went straight to posterity, is the way he liked to think about it, without needing to be nastily reviewed in the Washington Post, say, or the New Republic. And there was no being overlooked when the prizes came out, no sweating over grant applications, no begging for the attention of literary agents, no being remaindered… He sighed heavily, drawing a look from Lillian.

Where was Boyle?

But an inquest was coming. Fortunately, she loved him. She always returned to the subject of why he had gotten involved with the agency in the first place, and he was always fairly frank about it. At the start, a lot of it had probably been the being asked, solicited, by someone he respected, a genuine scholar, someone for whom it was obvious there was no contradiction between the agency and everything that high, humane scholarship was supposed to mean. But ninety percent of it, he thought, was his sheer aversion to mystery, and that went with his curiosity about how things worked in the world, and he would definitely talk more to Iris about that. Knowing how power worked was a form of power. It was seductive. She loved him.

There was a lot to say on the subject. He had an earned right to object to the mysterious. His childhood had been warped by mystery. Why his own brother hated him so violently was a mystery. What had given Rex the right, Rex who was younger, the right to always call him a baby, repeatedly? There were other examples. His father had died mysteriously. He had driven their Hudson into a tree in Contra Costa County, not far from the eastern end of the tunnel that goes through the Berkeley Hills. The accident site had been an approach road to one of the parks in that area, probably Tilden, so why his father had been going fast on it, fast enough to somehow lose control and crash, was mysterious. It had been foggy but not that foggy. And there had been a mystery guest in the car, a young man, at least that was what the first guy on the scene had reported. There had been a shaken-up young guy in the car, who left the scene of the accident during the time it took for the motorist who found the crash to hunt up the police. The theory was that the young guy must have been a hitchhiker. He was never found. That had been it. His father had been lavishly insured, as it developed, so that the family got to feel guilty at being better off with him gone than they had been before, which had been nice for them. And then his mother’s almost instant remarriage, or engagement, rather, and then remarriage, had been mysterious, marrying a mystery man who picked her up at her own husband’s funeral, a guy who had wandered into the wrong service, supposedly. His father’s service had been held in one of the massive funeral homes where there would be four or five funerals going on at once, and Milo had taken a wrong turn and ended up standing in the back at the wrong funeral and being struck dumb by the widow’s beauty. Milo had been younger than his mother. And he knew the lawyer who was managing the insurance claim, they’d found out much later, at a point when no one but Ray thought that was interesting in any way at all. Then there had been the long so-called engagement and then, bingo, the marriage. Milo had been a surety agent, as he preferred to be referred to, rather than bail bondsman, which is what he was. In fact he had been the leading bail bondsman in San Francisco, very successful, with franchises operating in Modesto, Sacramento, and San Diego. There was money. His mother had adapted completely to Milo, but overnight adapted to someone who carried a snubnosed revolver and from the neck up looked more like the comic strip character Mandrake the Magician than anything else, with his slicked-back hair and pencil mustache. Where in hell had he come from, really? After they got married they went on vacations incessantly. And mysteriously Milo had liked Rex, and hated him, a complete reversal of the existing sibling-preference situation, caused by nothing he could think of that he’d done, nothing. He’d continued being earnestly himself, so far as he could reconstruct. He still wondered if there are funeral gigolos, a type, certain types who go to funerals on the off chance they can get next to the widow. In any case, next it was Milo shot to death in his office by somebody who was never caught.

That was almost sensationally mysterious. And then it had turned out that Milo was also insured to the hilt. And then, mystery of mysteries, his mother, now ensconced with a certain amount of splendor in a deluxe retirement community in Corte Madera, had, after a lifetime of inaction, taken up golf, at which she had become stellar. She played in tournaments for senior women amateurs and won trophies regularly. Her face appeared on magazines! Her whole life, now, was golf. And she had been actively mocking about sports of all kinds, as far back as he could remember. He could still hear her distinctive, hacking laugh. Her attitude had even been influential with him, to tell the truth. He had never really cared about sports.

Possibly Iris could find it in herself to be understanding about his developing an interest in the linings of things at a tender age. Of course she already knew a lot of this.

So.

So there Ray was, if you could find him, in one or another of the communicating cabinets that he constituted or that constituted him. And he had even left out a part of the array of cabinets. He knew why he had left it out. First, it was hard to articulate, and anyway it was nobody’s business. Secondly, it was a late part of the array. It was wrong to say it was new. But it had come to him in thunder recently and not, he hoped, just because Iris was getting labyrinthine and unhappy. This part of the array was himself as a perfect husband, to trivialize it, or as Compleat Husband preferably, except that Rex had contaminated even the most playful mental use of capitals for him. Thank you very much, he thought. But it was like this… in saving himself he had been saving Iris in the only way, an admittedly complex way, the only way he had been able to figure out.

It came to him then that probably one of the best things, or at least one of the simplest good things, you could do with your mortal life would be to pick out one absolutely first-rate deserving person and do everything you could conceive of in the world to make her happy, as best you might, and never be an adversary on small things, be more forthcoming than might be comfortable for you, hide anger and even justified irritation… always wait sexually… and think of Thomas Wyatt and Patiens shall be my song. It was right.

And the idea was to let this single flower bloom without notifying her of what was going on. Because it would be on the order of a present because it was only fair reciprocation for someone who enthralled you and who had incidentally saved you from your demons. Or the idea was to so charge her life with his appreciation that some morning she would sit up and say What the fuck is going on with us, I am so happy. The idea was to let this single flower bloom until it was something monstrous, like an item in a Max Ernst collage, something that fills the room and the occupant says Oh, this is you, this is you, my beloved friend, my love, now I see, something along those lines. He was going to float her in love and she would be like those paper flowers that open up. Water rising around her. She didn’t know about him that he could get an erection just thinking in passing about her and that on one occasion he had had to claim he was having a hamstring problem, sitting facing Boyle was when it had happened, sitting facing Boyle and saying Ow and massaging his Achilles tendon so he could sit there until it was decent to get up. Boyle was divorced, or rather separated, since he was a Roman Catholic. He was in some null state with his wife, was the story. A lot of regular officers in the agency were divorced. A divorce would kill Ray. Maybe the evaporation of Russia would make this easier. He wasn’t sure what he meant, unless it was that a certain pressure had gone out of that sector of his work. He couldn’t believe it was over with the Russians, leaving only bullshit antagonists on the horizon, it looked like now. Maybe they could all relax some. And the joke of it was that Russia had gone up in mist not because of anything the agency had done, really. The agency had been amazed, startled. All this would probably never lead to a verbal event, where she says Good God, I seem to be floating in love. It would be enough if she just thought it, or something like it. No, he had been too average in his attitude and all that toward her in the past, and now he knew it and so would she, soon enough, although she would feel it before she truly knew it, but he was repeating himself. So this would be his new secret work. It would be like adding, say, potted blue hyacinths, one pot at a time, to a shelf or a ledge in the living room, one at a time, until the atmosphere was paradisiacal.

* * *

Lillian was looking at him with a kind of horrified expression. He must have been talking to himself. He needed to concentrate on Boyle, who was certainly taking his time.

When Boyle had taken over, all the procedures had changed. The flexibility had gone out of the relationships, his with Boyle, at least. He assumed it was the same for the others. All the irony went away, what there had been. Boyle’s mission seemed to be that everyone needed to be reminded that all their activities were life and death, at