I Should Tell Everything
My story is turning into the map in Borges exactly the size of the country it represents, but I feel I should probably say everything.
There was the ambience in our place after dark, which I think of as blond. The base was the yellow candlelight everything transpired in. I had inveigled Nelson to let me put up café curtains over the peculiar windows, custard yellow being the only color available. Why, he wanted to know, on a precipice, totally without neighbors? I said So that if anyone drifts by at the wrong moment they can’t see my breasts and genitals and your penis and anus. He laughed and said But how about your anus? I overlooked it, I said. We looked very golden naked, and I think pretty good, although not perfect by any means.
People act more deliberately by candlelight. Your gestures are slower. I felt like an illustration, at times. Other things contributed to the honied atmosphere. Possibly the absence of an overabundance of reflecting surfaces was one. In America even the most spartanly furnished apartment is full of reflecting surfaces, from windows, through the glass in framed pictures, through the sides of your toaster, through actual mirrors. In fact the frequency of mirrors goes up, as a trompe l’oeil maneuver to make you feel you have more space for your money, as the actual square footage of what you can afford to rent goes down. I have done it myself in certain of the broom closets I’ve been reduced to renting. On the street it’s shop windows and bus windows playing their part in the conspiracy to keep making you monitor how you look. Before Tsau, I knew something was wrong with it: I kept losing my compacts in high school until I stopped carrying them, thusly copying my mother in at least one trait. Of course I was still bound to mirrors as recently as crossing the Kalahari, when I went into shock when mine was lost. Mirrors are bad. Africa is nothing if not matte, and that returns you to yourself, unexpectedly.
But I should tell everything. The underside of the thatch over us was golden-brownish, the unweathered side, and the karosses we’d spread liberally everywhere were medium brown to pale tan. One panel in the big kaross we had on our bed was auburn, exactly matching my hair. It was from a horse. Nelson was very deliberate, sexually, for a man, for whatever reason. I told him he should write a book called How to Undress a Person Other Than Yourself, which was an homage to the delicate and nonfoisting way he would undress me all the way down before touching his own clothing. At first while he was undressing me he would say Sh when I tried to undress him back, make things a little more mutual. Sh meant not to do that. After four or five times I was afraid of two things. One was that this was going to be some frozen onset ritual that meant hysteria somewhere in his past. The other was that this was revealing him as one of those congenital bores who think silence during sex is holy and who usually turn out to be men who have either barely or nominally escaped the effects of intense religious processing during their formative years. And of course I had just learned Denoon had been, however briefly, an altar boy. I was afraid I had an ex-burnt offering on my hands. But luckily neither was at all true. I guess I was overreacting to the politics of feeling that I had to always let myself be passively undressed, complicated by the fact of life of not minding it that much erotically. He liked my book title. He also liked a much later conceit for a title for a book by him, What to Do with Your Hands While You’re Making Love. He knew how to touch.
What else? What hurt me? There was very little. Only that when he was apologizing about the ambience, viz. that we couldn’t have anything to drink and he would have liked to provide a little something if he could, the fact was that he could have. This is in retrospect and still irks. At the time, what did I know? Of course I also withheld something on this subject. There was plenty to drink in the village if bojalwa was up your alley. I knew, but he didn’t, that there were two functioning shebeens in Tsau. They were rather covert, but they were functional, and not only for the men. All this is symbolic only, because a drink before dinner is decor to me, and decor is a subject I have in perspective. I knew Nelson was very identified with the temperance tendency in Tsau, so I put out of my consciousness the feeling that he might have had the forethought to make an exception in my case by having a jug of Carafino brought in for him on the Barclays plane. He apologized for the limited range of the repertory of tapes he had to offer as background music for our evenings, mentioning in particular that he wished he had a cassette of the Academic Festival Overture, Brahms. The tacking on of the identifier Brahms silently killed me.
Undressed he became very laissez-faire. He was fundamentally sexually secure. The Herero beast had ended up on the market, not being donated for the braai. I was taking advantage of this little spike in the availability of beef and making a lot of soups and ragouts for us, as well as putting up quite a lot for biltong. Something about all this amused him. I got it out of him. You think I’m middleaged, he said, and red meat is good for my libido. I virtually had to cross my heart to convince him this was a piece of sex folklore I’d never heard of. There was nothing wrong with his libido. By the way, he said, I am old: I remember when science fiction was called scientifiction, which is old. He said You could call my autobiography I Remember Kolynos. What Kolynos was I had no idea, although it sounded vaguely classical or like a Greek place name. It was a major toothpaste from the 1940s. I said You are old, Father William, whenceforth Father William became part of our idioverse. He always laughed when I resorted to it, and, nicely, never felt any need to remind me that I was not, myself, younger than springtime. Ah, of course, he said in the middle of talking about being old, No wonder science fiction replaced scientifiction: it has one less syllable, so that’s one more for George K. Zipf and the Principle of Least Effort. George K. Zipf was one of his intellectual gods. Re autobiographies, I said, A friend of mine who was teaching creative writing had a student who was writing hers and wanted to call it When Hair Styles Were Different, which I’ve always regarded as some kind of high-water mark for innocent banality. He liked it. I had no complaint about Nelson sexually in any way age-related. By laissez-faire I mean that anything went, once he was undressed. He would kid, he would say anything. Take me in your legs, was something he might say in a moment that you would think was supposed to be serious.
There was great sweetness to everything. I called it mellifluence, to myself. He let fall that he had been celibate for two years. I positively did not solicit or dig to get this. The thought was a source of excitement to me. Before he said anything, it was evident he was enthusiastic about us sexually. But this added. His drought was ending through me. Honeymoon is the word that inevitably comes to mind, but it certainly doesn’t apply: we were both working all day every day, normally, and also without saying it we both knew we were superior to the term. He had in fact had an actual honeymoon with someone, and where had that led? I think we both unspokenly wanted to transcend certain social homilies about coming together. There was never a lot of individual fixing up before we made love.