Mortals (112 page)

She was taking too long. He was at the end of his list of what he wanted to see. He wanted to look at some limericks she had written. He had collaborated with her on some of them. He had only remembered them at the last minute. It was a reminder of better times, the limericks were.

She was being dilatory. His taste for language was coming back. Not that it had gone away entirely during the last hellish period of his life, but coming out of hell, he had seen his words and speech suffer. They had been instruments to get from one moment to the next as safely as possible. He was getting it back piecemeal. How many times had he wanted to say to her
Hello I must be going
, with his heart cracking? Trying to be light, that would have been, with his heart cracking, trying to be Irish in a pub, all the Irish manqué people letting it out in pubs.

He got up and went into the bedroom to look at himself in her mirror, the full-length mirror on the closet door. Because he was going to be himself elsewhere. She couldn’t have missed that he was dressed for travel. He had decided to look more professorial. He had purchased some low-magnification glasses at the Notwane Pharmacy. He put them on and took them off, checking both images. He was wearing his black safari suit still sharply radiating the chemicals they used, not carbon monoxide but the other one, fresh from the cleaners. It was looser on him. His arms were thin. It was practically impossible to get safari suits with longsleeved jackets in Gaborone, but in South Africa it would be easier. Or he could work on his arms. He did so then a little, standing there, tensing them. Iris was looking for him. His bags were packed.

She had his folder, the limericks. He wanted to say, Hello I must be going. She would appreciate it, normally. But this was the wrong moment. He sat down and opened the file folder.

“I don’t know why you want to look at these,” she said.

“I don’t know either,” he said.

They were hers. When it had come to letters, she had been willing to give up only a few of his letters to her, and none of hers to him, saying she simply couldn’t. So, after a lot of pointless agonizing rereading of the past, he had let her keep everything. He hadn’t wanted his letters to her.
The whole thing had been a mistake. There would have to be a photocopying session sometime. The imbroglio had taken too much time.

He read one of hers.

Then there was one she had written on a visit to Dublin.

That was about street signs in Dublin, place names. It was very personal and parochial. He wanted it.

And then there was

The past is a forest of signs, he thought. The problem was that you could only read them when you turned around and looked back, unfortunately.

“Do you want these?” he asked her.

“No,” she said.

“Then I’ll take them all.”

There was something else he wanted but that he couldn’t ask for or wait for her to find. They had played a game. It had been her game. She had been seized with the conviction that she had ideas for cartoons that were as good as those that were showing up embodied in
The New Yorker
cartoons. And she knew there was a market for cartoon ideas. And she had gotten the name of the person at
The New Yorker
who, as she
understood it, received cartoon ideas and presumably farmed them out to different artists, hired hands, so to speak. Undoubtedly hundreds of underemployed smart married women the world over had had the same conviction. But she had set out to prove to him that she was right. So she had sequestered copies of
The New Yorker
and transcribed actual cartoons into idea form and then shuffled them in among her own cartoon ideas, her own captions, and he had been asked to say which ones he thought were cleverer. And the truth was that he had more often rejected the
New Yorker
actual cartoons as silly than he had hers. Hers had, on the whole, been as good or better, just as ideas. But then somehow it hadn’t gone further. She had made her point and had let it rest there. Probably it could have been carried to the next level. She might have sold a few ideas. Somebody was selling ideas, here and there, to the art director at
The New Yorker
. But she had let it rest. She hadn’t pushed on it. One of her ideas that he remembered involved a centaur standing confused in front of two doors, one for an internist and one for a veterinarian. There was the court jester saying to the king, Thanks, you’ve been great. There was the wife saying, Fred, is there someone else? to the husband behind the open
New York Times
with a lady obviously sitting on his lap. There was the angry punk saying, Get a lifestyle. He decided not to ask for the four-by-six cards on which she had collected cartoon ideas. It was too pathetic. And it was getting late. He had to make the Tlokweng Gate crossing with time to spare. There might be a line of vehicles waiting to get through. The line moved quickly enough on the South African side, through the corresponding gate, Nietverdienst, but on the Botswana side it could be slow or fast. His bags were on the stoop. The rental car, a Beetle, was gassed and ready to go. His heart was beating raggedly. He worked on his breathing and that helped.

He wanted to ask her if he looked okay, meaning okay for the world he was plunging into, the new world. He was used to being told he looked good and he was used to being warned when he needed to trim his nose hair and so on. He would have to adapt. She was acute about appearance. She had pointed out recently that the PolEcon officer at the embassy had gotten his hair cut inexpertly the last time, revealing for the first time to anyone with an eye to see that one of his ears stood off farther from his head than the other. Previously his barbering had been careful to leave more hair on one side than the other, the affected side. She had laughed over Boyle’s bothering to dye the few strands of hair he had left yellow.

Iris asked, from the kitchen, “Have you seen my sunglasses?”

“No,” he said. Why did she want her sunglasses, though?

She was hurrying around. He listened.

She said, “Never mind. I found them. I put them in my purse, unbeknownst to me.”

She had been keeping the house nice, with displays of fresh-cut flowers in rooms where normally they wouldn’t have been, like the bathroom. But it had been partly a facade. Certain things were sliding. There were thrips in the kitchen, little clouds of them over the bowls of fruit.

She came out and took a position in the archway of the living room that he read as declaratory. She was dressed sexily, he thought. She was jaunty, standing there. She had an overnight bag stuffed full next to her. She was wearing a tight short black skirt he had never seen before. She was wearing a denim jacket over a red satin blouse. She had washed her hair. She was wearing a plain black bandeau. She was made up, freshly made up. They were both losing weight.

He knew what he was going to hear.

“I’m coming with you on this trip,” she said.

“No you are not.”

“I am. I want to. I’m packed. It’s just for the trip. Then I’ll turn around and come back. I’ll return the car.”

“I can turn the car in down there, in Joburg.”

“I know you can. But they like it better at the car rental place if the car is returned there. They said so. There’s an extra charge if you turn it in across a national boundary, border I mean.”

He was in turmoil. He was not going to consider her proposition. Or he was going to consider it for a couple of minutes. It was possible that it was a dodge, that she wanted an imbroglio that would drag on until it would be too late to make the Tlokweng Gate, which would give her another day with him to continue the exercise she was engaged in, whatever that was. He knew what it was. It was about pathos and love and fear. And it was about guilt. She didn’t comprehend that he had to get going, get out of Botswana. In the course of saying goodbye to his contacts, he had learned that Kerekang was indeed in Johannesburg. Boyle might have that news too, in time, days probably. You have to get going, Ray thought. Plainclothes members of the Gaborone Police Unit, the Criminal Investigation Division, were occasionally driving up and sitting around in their cars outside the house. You’re a person of interest now yourself, he thought.

“I can share the driving,” Iris said.

“Look it’s only four or five hours, depending on roadblocks. I can manage it alone.” He expected her to look crestfallen, but she surprised
him. She was defiant. But driving together was a cruel idea. They had had only good times doing that in the past. She knew that.

He said, “But you couldn’t just turn around. You’d have to stay in Joburg and come back tomorrow.”

“That’s okay. Don’t worry, I won’t bother you. I can sleep on a couch, a chair, it’s okay.”

“Don’t be silly. We’ve been sleeping in the same bed since I got back.”

“Anyway, I’m coming with you.”

He had to consider it, he supposed. There were things she wanted to say. Their exchanges had been difficult and some subjects had been aborted and others had been covered superficially. They had been going a little better in the last couple of days. It had been difficult on both sides. And probably she had a right to more from him than he’d been able to give on the really hard subjects, like what had gone wrong in the past. And it would make the time pass quickly. And then there was the matter of saying goodbye in some adequate way, something that matched what they had been to each other, for years. They had said only formal goodbyes, half-goodbyes, so far, feeble ones.

He stood up. She came over to him and reached under his jacket and seized his belt. He pushed at her but she held her grasp.

“What’re you doing?”
he asked. She was trembling. It was cool in the house but she was flushed and warm. She had some kind of scent on. She rarely wore perfume, cologne, any of that, almost never. He wondered if Morel liked his women scented.

“You’ll have to hit me,” she said. He loved her breath. He had always thought of it as delectable.

“All right then. I don’t think this is a great idea, but I guess it’ll be all right.”

“It will be,” she said. She went to get her overnight case.

“Bring a jersey, it’s getting cold,” he said after her.

So far they were traveling together in what the Batswana would call
boiling silence
. He forgot what the Setswana phrase was. It was evening and it was cool, but they had the front windows cranked down. He felt he had to have cold air flowing over him, blasting over him, and so did she, although pretty soon it would be too uncomfortable and they would have to live together with the windows closed. But that was ahead of them. The car was a metal shell full of boiling feeling. He was driving faster than was normal for him. She wasn’t objecting. The gale they were in
undid the possibility of conversation, which was what he wanted until he was calmer. He had gotten angrier, without provocation, since crossing the border, where things had gone smoothly, which had been a relief. He had felt there was a faint chance that his name might have turned up on a watch list on the Botswana side, in which case the game would have been over before it began and he would have been going back to Kgari Close with Iris.

The light was fading over the low, repetitive, stony hills they were passing through. This region, the Groot Marico, was thinly settled. Most of the farmsteads were set far back from the road. Somehow farming went on in this dry terrain, on the flatland between the hills. From a distance the occasional isolated settlements of the black farmworkers looked like dice. You could only get a glimpse of them from an elevation, because the cement cubes provided for them to live in were packed together behind sheet-metal fencing which was always maintained on the side of the settlement fronting the road, randomly maintained around to the back. It was undoubtedly a cosmetic thing. There were no shade trees in the locations, as they were called. The Boer farm homes were uniformly bracketed with plantings of silver oak and eucalyptus.

The roads were broad and hard and smooth. The bridges spanning the dry creeks and gullies were unusually monumental. The agency theory was that they had all been reinforced to a standard that would support the weight of tanks. There were intermittent stretches where the road broadened to four lanes for no apparent reason, the true reason being that these were intended to function as landing places for light aircraft in an emergency. Certainly segments of roadway were densely lined with sturdy metal light poles. The road system had been militarized. Electric lines were buried safely away. Brush had been scoured back to deny cover to anyone out to injure the roads or the traffic they carried. It had all been futile, a preparation for the civil war that was not now going to be fought.

A petrol plaza appeared ahead of them. Everything within the double ring of security fencing was brilliant and clean. He could see shops, the petrol pumps, a restaurant. All the buildings were new-looking, constructed of brightly colored glazed brick. Stadium lights blazed down. Iris put her sunglasses on.

She said, “I saw a shooting star back there. This is a funny thing. My father was interested in comets. Something about comets interested him, but he had no interest whatever in astronomy, the surrounding discipline. It was just comets.”

“Some people are like that,” Ray said.

…

They had picked up Simba chips, bananas, and Appletiser at the service plaza. Iris was preparing to hand-feed him, as they would normally do on the road, but he couldn’t bear it. He didn’t want to hurt her, but the fact was that he couldn’t bear it.