was a universal, besides which she was a hard worker when she worked. One part of why he didn’t like the idea of bothering her in her quarters was that he had guilt feelings over how modest the accommodations provided her were, not that there was anything that could be done about it. The other part of his reluctance came from not wanting to advertise that he had no idea where his wife might be, the implications of which, the man-in-the-street implications of which, he had no interest in unleashing. Also Dimakatso had been clearing her throat obtrusively lately. She smoked dagga for her chronic upper respiratory complaints. Often when she came in after lunch her eyes would be like rubies or little taillights, and he didn’t relish impinging on Dimakatso while she was at it, smoking away, in her cloud of unknowing.
He went through the pantry and into the garage. The VW was there, so Iris had walked wherever she’d gone. They were in walking distance of ninety percent of everything of interest, and she believed in walking, so she could be roughly anywhere.
The house felt dead without Iris, dead and clean and cold. There was a saucer with two cherry pits in it. The house felt like the
He got through to the school and worked everything out smoothly but talking too fast. Mild food poisoning had been a good excuse. Curwen himself had had a touch of it recently.
He could use the time to his advantage. Unease about Iris was putting Boyle and all his works in perspective, a little.
It was conceivable that Iris was having another go at lunch with Lor. He had urged her to give it a third try. She needed friends. He took off his shirt and his shorts, his costume. He sat down on the living room sofa in his underwear, kneesocks, and shoes. Iris liked to tease him about his attachment to his classic undershirts because, as she pointed out correctly, they were bare under the armpits so that you sweated directly into your shirt but they covered up areas where you hardly sweated at all, and raised your body temperature to boot. He couldn’t help it. He was used to them, and both his father and his stepfather had worn them. And he could get very decent classic undershirts easily, too, because they were still popular in South Africa with the time-lagged Boers. He couldn’t sit there for more than a minute because Dimakatso was going to turn up at some point.
He proceeded to wash up. He put on a fresh shirt and bush shorts. It was seeming less likely to him that Iris had gone again to lunch with Lor. Their second lunch had been more of the same, the usual. Iris had repeated samples of the conversation to him, in Lor’s voice: It’s really so frightening nowadays in Joburg, especially Hillbrow, where we always stay… Because of the unemployed people everywhere living in alleys and on stoops and in every foyer, everywhere, running after you and forcing these unnecessary services on you, running along to open any door you approach, even automatic doors, standing there with their arm extended, ushering you into places of business they have nothing whatever to do with… Or if you parallel-park you’re directed by people using big arm movements as though without them doing that you might crash into something despite the fact you have oceans of room… And the high-rises with laundry fluttering from every balcony… And all the squatters taking over and all the buildings to let or for sale… And the begging, so constant…
He went into the breezeway and contemplated his yard. For two days Rex’s most recent letter, a jumbo with many closely written pages, had been left out, naked, on top of the credenza in the breezeway, out of its envelope, like bait or like the trap itself. He was ignoring it. It was right behind him.
Something moved along the shrubbery at the left-hand edge of his field of view. It was Fikile, early again. He was early today because on other days recently he had been late. Apparently he could offset his late arrivals by coming absurdly early on other days. Of course there was no need for watchguarding during the middle of the day. And there was doubly no need for it when he overlapped with the yardman, who came three days a week though not today. Ray suspected that Iris had said yes to this arrangement, it would be like her. If those oscillations kept on, Ray would say something.
Ray wasn’t interested in any more exposure to his brother. He had made it explicit that he had no desire to follow every kink and dogleg in Rex’s travesty of a career. The thick letter represented another unwanted task. He had too many tasks as it was. Iris presented him with more tasks than she knew. He was conscientious, and out of love and conscience he took as tasks many things, wishful things, things she might waft at him completely innocently. When she said Why is the French noun for war feminine and why is the French for vagina masculine, it wasn’t as though he physically had to go and jerk somebody’s hem at the Alliance Francaise or hunt around in his reference books, no. But he loved her and anything he could satisfy her on right off the bat became a kind of ghost task for him whether she meant it to be or not.
Ray hefted the letter, not looking at it.
These letters were getting longer because Iris was encouraging it, and encouraging it, it had to be, by being forthcoming about herself and her problems, a.k.a. their problems, their his-and-hers problems. He had no idea what she was writing to Rex, beyond what he could infer from what Rex wrote back. What she was writing to Rex was not something he was going to obsess on. He should remember that there were harmless models for what she was probably doing here. Rex was providing a gay ear. There was nothing dangerous about that. So many major women were linked to gay men as confidants that in a way Iris was only joining a procession. Iris was major. She didn’t know it, but Ray did. Of course, in this case the bastard listening to her was his own queer brother, his enemy. Rex was spying on him through Iris. Revenge was going on.
Every ongoing relationship contains a quid pro quo somewhere, he thought: The task is identifying it. How intimate was Rex being in these letters? Very, Ray had gathered from hints dropped here and there by Iris. So.
He could scan, he could read excerpts, or he could read the whole thing.
He picked up the letter and began to read it, leaning against the wall.
My Dear Iris:
We are still in Mexico, but in Oaxaca, in a weird hotel right on the zocalo. Our room has an actual balcony you can go out on to endure the musical performances blaring from the bandshell it overlooks, or purling up from the strolling mariachi groups who afflict the street-level cafes until late at night, or rising repetitively from the blind or otherwisely decrepit solo guitarists with their overlapping tiny repertoires.
Mexico is frightening. It’s as frightening as Grace Jones and frightening in somewhat the same way she is. It’s sort of beautiful but you get the feeling it wants to bite you. It’s a nightmare that Joel is enjoying very much.
I’m up early and have come downstairs alone to have breakfast and write these lines to you in privacy. It’s a glorious morning and as usual one part of God’s creation is eating another part of it for breakfast. I hope to join in but I am growing faint. The service in Mexican restaurants is obsequious but slow. But to be absolutely fair the waiters in these arcade cafes have other things to do than bring you your food. For example they have to keep the doves off your table. Some can scare them away with a deft snap of a filthy towel they carry. Others have developed a peculiar screaming cry that seems to do the job, sometimes clearing several tables at once. Bending over your place setting to blow dove-molt off it is another task they have.
It is truly early. A detachment of the Mexican army marches into the zocalo every morning after waking you up at six-thirty with their reveille. Except that possibly you are already awake because another nighttime activity that begins at just about the time when the cafes finally close is the de-limbing, with chain saws, of the tule trees that are planted throughout and around the zocalo. Pollution is killing them. I don’t know why the de-limbing is restricted to the small hours, unless it’s because the government thinks tourists would be upset at the spectacle. But in my opinion tourists who come to Mexico are very hardy indeed.
When I say Mexico is frightening what I mean is that almost every aspect of Mexico that you confront contains something frightening, like the bus driver who is all smiles and courtesy until you get to your destination and he won’t take your suitcase out of the storage section in the bottom of the bus unless you give him a huge tip. I do hope you know who Grace Jones is. It occurs to me you may not. I’ll send a picture. You go to the museum to see the antiquities and these turn out to be mainly horrific representations in stone of skulls and rattlesnakes. In the last earthquake, in Mexico City, an innocuous building collapsed—I think it was the post office—and what do you know, there was an operative torture chamber in it.
So now here we are in Oaxaca, where we can enjoy my kind of travel. There are basically two kinds of travels, my kind, vegetative travel, where you go someplace and vegetate and stay in your room and sigh looking out at the palm fronds if need be, and the other kind, activist travel, where people trudge out to every ruin, plant themselves for a half second before every painting in the museum, in short push their way into every nook and
