Mortals

single term in English for affirmative head movements but that for the negative you were forced to use three words? He had no idea why there was no one-word antonym of nod. Her questions came from nowhere, you were never prepared. She was good company. There were her peculiar dreams, her amusing dreams, many of them lately, he realized, about getting rich. A few mornings ago she had said to him, “I dreamed I got rich on a doohickey I invented that would let you put your hair up in a bun shaped according to your religion, cross, crescent, star of David, a little Buddha…”

“You poor thing,” she said. “I am in pain if you thought I was thinking of anything like that. Please. Oh my poor thing.”

He thought, She wants Morel, despite all this she does, she won’t do it with him, but this is where we are… she prefers him… I’m more interesting… I am, not that she can see it, but I am.

Still regarding him steadily, she said, “We love each other.”

He flinched. He felt weak. It was too much.

“I mean us, us,” she said, clearly alarmed. She touched his face.

“Give me a minute,” he said.

The pose she was holding was impossible. She turned and resumed her previous position, but bracing her heels on the tub above the tap, she drove herself more forcefully against him than before, which he took as a declaration combining love and punishment for idiocy.

He began, mechanically, to soap himself. “You just nearly killed me,” he said.

“You’re an idiot,” she said. She made a spiral pattern in the lather on his right kneecap.

She sighed heavily. A pause followed. “But don’t you think it’s interesting, an interesting thing to realize, that our wonderful huge white civilization is all a big misunderstanding? I mean, Jesus was not a Christian, at all. And that’s only part of it. I know I’m going on and I’m sorry. Hate him if you have to, but I learn interesting things from this man you hate. It’s like your first year of college, before it turns into a drag. But there is something so staggering about it, first the Church stealing Jesus from the Jews, claiming him, and then libeling and killing the people who gave them Jesus. Fantastic. You have Judaism and you have Christianity and Islam, these two heresies, coming out of it, and you have these heretics trying their best to kill the people that produced them! There is something astonishing about the magnitude of the lying going on. What you have is this image of a huge upside-down pyramid which is the denominations, all the denominations, and churches, and the mosques, and they’re all balanced on a point, and the point the whole pyramid is standing on is… is lies! Certain untruths… and nobody telling… Jesus was never anything but a devout Jew, you know, he was never a Christian at all. And the Jews didn’t kill him. It was the Romans.

“So it isn’t just There is no God with Davis. It’s about lies. But I promise you I am not going to keep talking about him. I’m sorry. Also I don’t want to be restricted for no reason. But don’t worry.”

Essentially it was over, this episode, he supposed. She had a bingo. She had everything she wanted. She had carte blanche to see Morel, and to what? flirt with him was what it came down to, with her husband’s approval, although calling it flirting was probably unfair. It would be fun for her. He wondered how she would like it if he proposed a deal like that for himself, except that he was forgetting it was her opinion that men as a class already had a de facto right or privilege to flirt and worse without anyone taking notice of it let alone assessing damages. Love is a strain, he thought. Now was probably not the best time to establish exactly how many sessions per week she was going to have with Morel. But he had to know that.

“What do you think brought him to Africa?”

“Well, Africa is the one part of the world where you’re getting four new Christians for every two you’re losing in the rest of the world. He has the figures. Don’t sound so grave.”

“I’m not grave, I’m pensive.”

“Why should the subject of religion make you so pensive? We aren’t religious, I thought.

“Do we believe in God, for example?

“Was that a shrug I felt?”

He was tempted to be perverse, which would be a mistake.

“Well, yes and no.”

“What do you mean?”

“Indirectly.”

“What?”

“Well, you might say I believe in someone who obviously did. Milton.” This is stupid, he thought. “Without his religion there would’ve been no Paradise Lost, no… none of it.”

“You think it’s impossible that he might have written something else great, as an unbeliever?”

“No, nothing like what he did write, of that… stature. And he couldn’t anyway because in his time any declaration of unbelief got you locked up. Where Paradise Lost is, there would be nothing, believe me.”

“I believe you and I love you. You don’t know how much more we love you than you love us, in general.”

“You mean, how much more women love their men than men love their women, how ridiculous. How unsupported can you get.”

“How many women know their husband’s Social Security number versus how many men know their wife’s? Venture a guess.”

“Fifty-fifty.”

“Wrong. About seventy percent of women know their husband’s. The figure for men is thirty percent.”

She would never know how tired he was of her facts and figures, courtesy of the good doctor. Now they were doing something interesting together, he and Iris. They were collaborating on a fiction. The fiction was that what had eventuated between them had been a very small thing and that all was well. It was remarkable about how few collaborations in making fiction worked out at all, Ford and Conrad excepted, and the two women who wrote novels about Irish country life. What she wanted from him was childish, on the face of it. She wanted, as he understood it, to see Morel and have fantasies about him and not have to feel guilty about it. That was on the face of it. But there was more going on. The more was a new Mode of Being, or, better, a New Mode of Relating, and his brother was right that there was a larger place for capitals in writing and expression generally than the times were permitting.

She said, “I didn’t mean to get into that and I’m sorry. It’s marginal. I want to say just two main things. I’m going to see him and nothing is going to happen. I love you and you’re my husband. But I’m going to go to him and when he’s helped me I’m going to stop. Helped me, to my satisfaction. But I just don’t want you sensing something you don’t like, suspecting something untrue, and my being forced to deny it over and over.”

He was going to say something he shouldn’t. “You’d tell me first if something was… was starting? You know what I mean. Not that this should be any kind of condition for your going to him, but you would, you would tell me?” He felt like a fool. She was silent.

He said, “I feel vacant. This is making me feel vacant.”

“I’m very sorry if it is. It shouldn’t.” He was hearing a tough tone that was new toughness.

I am nowhere, he thought.

She was brisk. “Nothing is going to happen. I am swearing this to you. I swear it.” She pressed her palm to her sternum, like a diva, but in all seriousness.

Nonsense was pushing its way into his mind. They began to begin to be gone, he thought, three times, making himself stop when he felt the phrase entrenching itself. He needed to steady himself. He had to keep in mind that she was going to be away in the States, which would postpone everything as well as giving him time to strike back at Morel.

She said, “I really want you to understand how helpful he’s been to me. In the smallest ways.

“For example. He taught me to spit, how to hock up mucus, rather. Everybody knows how to spit. But how to hock up mucus from the back of my throat, when my sinuses are going crazy.”

“Hawk, I think you mean.”

“No, it’s hock. He says hock. I think hawk must be a corruption of hock. Because it’s hock. He showed me in the OED.”

“Ah, lucky guy. He has the OED? Are we talking about the real Oxford English Dictionary, not the