Mortals

microscopic edition you read with a magnifier?”

It was the real OED. Ray could tell she was feeling sorry for him. She wanted him to have his own OED, the real one. He hated the microtext edition. He loved the OED. But it was a tool he could use at the university library if he needed to. And he rarely needed to these days. And the real OED was too massive a possession for people as mobile as they had to be prepared to be. He could afford an OED. That wasn’t the problem.

No doubt he had only himself to blame for this moment arriving. Although what he could have done differently at any point in his earthly life so far was a question he would love to thrash out with someone as sapient as the great all-seeing eye she was paying through the nose to visit, although in fact the fees were pretty low. On the other hand was it possible he should construe her confession of attraction slightly differently, as in its being a way of stopping herself, preempting herself by alerting herself and him too, something done as an act of love? Of course that was slightly too self-congratulatory to be true, probably. She was in a malaise, was what this was about. They both were. Maybe this was simple, florid feminism of some kind. Brute feminism, and with no way he could go into it, but was it something like an attempt to undo something she disliked that was a fixture of regular life, such as the truth that men feel more threatened when their mates show interest in another male than women do when men partake in the more or less general reflexive sizing up of the world of women? some impulse like that, such as wanting to make everyone suffer equally? But he had never much gone beyond the golden mean in noticing other women… Although when he had, she had been quick enough to object, in fact. What was he supposed to do? In his work it was important to blend in. His work was in the male world. Was he supposed to walk around at gatherings like a parson? The sexes are different, he thought. Seeing someone you’re interested in naked for the first time would be an example of how it was different for women and men. For men it was the act of getting inside the mystery, the secret that clothing hides, the package, the getting to see, and then if what you see is splendid, then so much the better. But his guess was that with women it was different and revolved around the fact that a particular man wanted passionately for them to take their clothes off. Urgently. That was what they loved. What they loved was men wanting them to the point of begging them to strip now. Of course what they saw when the importuner himself took his clothes off had to fall within a certain range, physical qualities did go into it, had to go into it, but with a woman a short leg would be nothing if the male had counterbalancing stuff, like power… or intellect. Women who talked about buns and dick size were to an extent faking and going along with the male model, which might truly be triggered by bigness in the shoulders and so on, but it was essentially like claiming they liked to watch football on TV as much as their mates did. Where am I? he thought. He had no idea.

She said, “Anyway, he has been concretely useful with problems I had. Or have. I told you about the hypoadrenia. Another thing, and something you may not know about, is how routine it is for me to get mild cystitis after we have sex. Not every time, I don’t mean that. But it’s a thing to deal with and he had a suggestion which I haven’t really had a chance to discuss with you… but now I will. I just lived with it because it wasn’t much and it went away. But. Anyway, he thinks if you were careful to wash yourself with mild soap just prior, just before… it could be that. It’s variable. It may be that when I don’t have the reaction it’s because you were by happenstance very clean at that time, just out of the shower. And this is not to say you’re not a clean person, Ray. It’s just that there may be certain salts on the body, something like that. And also I didn’t want to mention it because it goes against spontaneity. I don’t know, maybe there’s a scintilla of urine or something I’m sensitive to.”

“My God,” he said. “I will certainly… hear and obey. Good God. Who knew?”

He was enraged at Morel.

“You’re not offended, Ray?”

“No, I’m delighted,” he said, but very fast. He should be feeling guilt, obviously, but why was he hearing about this only now? I am apparently foul, he thought.

“It’s just an example of something practical, another example.”

“No, live and learn. So what kind of soap should I use. How mild is mild. I want to get it right.”

“Oatmeal soap. I have some for you.”

“Oatmeal soap it is, then.”

“It fades pretty fast if I drink a lot of water, so I’m not trying to say it was the end of the world.”

“Say no more. We can do without it.” He thought, Crush him: Find a way.

“God I love you,” she said. In a minute she was going to offer to wash him with this correct soap, he thought. He was picking up slight shifts toward softness. She might not even be aware she was tending that way. It would be instinctual to wrap something as bitter as she was handing him in sweet sex, coat it. She was idly touching her breasts.

She said, “About cleanliness, this is interesting, since so much in religion is about ritual purity, getting clean, being clean before God…”

So I am foul, apparently, he thought.

“I’m trying to reproduce what Davis says on this. Yes, it’s why ritual purity is so universal in religions, which is because the father, the generic father, won’t handle the child or baby if it’s soiled, nasty. God is a stand-in for the father figure. By the way do you know that the Peace Corps had to let their messenger go because he refused to carry stool samples from the Peace Corps nurse to the laboratory?”

“I hadn’t heard.”

“Men here will not handle feces. Women have to collect the cow dung they use to plaster the floors with in their huts, in the countryside. Of course the men are completely willing to walk up and down on it.

“Once you look at it, almost everything people do in religion fits one way or another with the attempt to recapture a moment when there was an all-powerful protector-lawgiver figure in our lives, and we go through motions in this regressed state that deep down we believe are the kind that ought to attract the corrective attention of this all-powerful person. This comes from neoteny, the long period of dependency human infants have. When we get into a crisis, we want to regress into the power of a fatherlike entity, a patrimorph is what Davis calls it. Then we recapture the endorphins we got from being taken care of or attended to, historically. It’s a theory. It’s partly from Freud except that Davis doesn’t think this collapsing back is sick, a pathology, the way Freud did. He thinks it’s normal, and even, in a way, healthy. But it’s also a joke, and silly. Everything really fits with this. Confession. All the kinds of self-mortification, to make yourself more like a deserving injured or perfect child, all that. All the born-again symbology. Purity and obedience. Making yourself either pathetic or into the simulacrum of a deserving child covers just about everything from fasting and rending your garments to all the thousands of mortifications of the flesh, to being celibate, meaning you’re making yourself into a simulated presexual being, like a baby.”

She was intoxicated with this stuff. He needed to be respectful, or not disrespectful. Of course there were any number of retorts to such a simpleminded view of religion, there must be. “And then, and this is the last thing I’m going to mention, his theory is that the contradictory and absurd notions we embrace when we’re religious amount to a variation of the same thing. When we embrace the absurd we are doing something the equivalent of mutilating our common sense, as a sort of goodwill offering. The most ridiculous varieties of religion, the fundamentalist ones, seem to be thriving right now. Davis thinks that things are happening, societal things, that are making people regress.”

This too shall pass, he thought. He grunted.

He guessed it was a good sign that she was adding fresh hot water to the stew they were in. She wanted to be with him. That was real.

He needed to remember that there had been previous enthusiasms of hers to deal with, for example when she’d decided that Ken Russell movies were supreme examples of something or other and she’d made him sit through The Devils twice, at the Capitol Cinema.

This was different.

He gripped her shoulders and began kneading her trapezius muscles with his thumbs, which brought back Richard Chamberlain as Tchaikovsky doing the same thing for his new wife and then, when his wife says Yes to the question You’ll stay with me forever, won’t you? converting the massage into an attempt to strangle her, until he comes to his senses not a moment too soon. Iris and he had laughed afterward and had replayed the scene for laughs themselves how many times?

She said, “Never forget how truly grateful I am to you. I never want you to think I’m not.”

He didn’t much like the tone of what she was saying, since it had faretheewell written all over it whether she was aware of it or not.