Read Online Mating by Norman Rush - Free Book Online

to, but I would get more points, the game would be more consummate, if I got his secrets by trading something else, something that hadn’t defined itself yet. I was greedy for his secrets, and I construed secrets as embracing everything he would rather not tell me—personal, political, what have you. I’m willing to call this decadent. The fact that spying is an execrable and stupid thing had nothing to do with why I wanted to play this game with Z.
    I feel putrid when I go over my nexus with Z, but so be it. What Idid, I did. Greed misrepresents my motives, which were complex, but is what you would come up with as an outside observer, because of the wining and dining that continued, the entrée into upper echelon white teas and potlatches. Overhanging me from the breakup with Martin were heroine fantasies, my somehow starring unexpectedly in the struggle against apartheid. Breaking with Martin meant losing someone who had something important, which was significance. I felt deprived and retrograde. I had begun letting my eating inch up. When I was with Martin I was almost never hungry, partly out of involuntary corporeal sympathy with what he was and partly because there was a limit to how disparate from my skeletal boyfriend I could stand to be. When it ended with Martin it was like a spring being released, evidently. I was in the Star Bakery and suddenly the bread available in Gaborone was intolerable. In the Star you could almost imagine you were in a bread museum, the display of types of bread was so broad—baguettes, braided loaves, rolls. But interiorly everything was made from the same spongeous cement-colored stuff. I had to bake. And what you bake you eat. I was eating too much and felt like a zero because of it, or a doughnut, rather. Here came Z, a worse bread maven than even I was, someone even more famished for good bread. We fit. Moreover, when the time came for me to regroup on my weight, the odd physical relationship that had evolved between us was perfect for that too—because of the quantum of sheer exercise in it.
    We’d had some minor postprandial necking in the car, in the course of which I’d wondered if he was uncomfortable kissing in a sitting position. Or there might or might not be a goodnight kiss at the door as he left following a nightcap ceremony during which he had not been insistent on accelerating the physical pace, far from it. In retrospect I think the kissing was more a recurring declaration that in spite of the continued decorousness of our relationship, he was not unsexual toward me. He would occasionally get mild erections, nothing full-blown, though.
    But once I’d faced what I wanted, I knew it was time to stop skirmishing so much. His back was his Achilles’ heel. One night as he was coming in I insisted he bring his back pillow. He was chagrined that I’d even noticed it. It was an orthopedic pillow he always tried to twitch out of sight into the backseat before I could spot it if I was getting into the car. I put it that since he had to know I knew about it he should bring it in and use it, because then he might be disposed to stay longer. I think he said You notice everything, and I said Oh you’ve noticed, so we laughed and he brought the thing in. This is how reduced I was: I took his Younotice everything as a compliment conceivably containing the suggestion that he thought I might somehow make a good spy. This is how much, at our lowest, we suck after the male imprimatur for some completely congenital quality we might have. This is how I know I was on the plain of the abyss.
    I said Your back is a mess, am I right? He couldn’t agree more and was prone on a sheepskin in front of the fireplace almost before I asked if he would let me see what I could do. I acted knowing in the area and that was all it took. I sat on my hams next to him and said I can’t do this through cloth, and he, in a sort of frenzy, said Yes, yes, and violently worked his shirt up to his neck