Free Mating by Norman Rush Page A

is no way I would do anything with what you told me, or repeat it, which you know. You could tell me something obsolete but that I’m still not supposed to know. Let’s stop. This is making me feel neurotic.
    I kept on in that vein, urging us to drop the whole thing and continue on bravely but by implication lamely in whatever relationship would survive my cri de coeur–type outburst, continue on in a relationship that—since I was using the past tense and the conditional a lot—looked as if it might be coming to an end sooner rather than later.
    Then he cut me off with You mean to say you have no particular field of inquiry, no particular set of questions, no particular question at all? This I find strange.
    So I laughed and said This is how you tell a thing is a quirk. This is what you call humoring a person. Tell me something quote unquote forbidden. Make it something pointless, useless, out of date, anything, just so it’s something somebody thinks I shouldn’t know. You have the choice of seeing this as a caprice or believing that I’m not what I seem and what you know I am.
    You have been an absolute angel to me, he said. Now, how would you know if I made something up in order to pacify you? How would you know?
    That would be up to you. I probably wouldn’t know. Who am I? That’s what a clever man would do, probably. You could.
    It was late, so I said he should go home, that I regretted the whole thing and he should come back the next night for dinner and he should forgive me if he could for yielding to a feeling of wanting to get something from some deep protected nonpublic part of him. It was an impulse I said I was sure many other women had had with him and been smart enough to suppress.
    I’m not good at being rueful, so I curtailed things. I made myself say the whole thing was about being open, and I nearly gagged. The world is what it is, I said, and you are what you are, and if I’m a neurotic about the fact that men have all the secrets and I have an impulse and want to get one, then that’s what I am. I said I’m not saying to tell me the worst thing you ever did, although who wouldn’t love to hear that, or tell me something filthy about the queen or something defense related or something that puts perfidious Albion in a bad light—did I say that? I wanted to get a smile out of him before he left.
    You thoroughly confuse one, he said. He left, thinking.
What Was I Doing?
    Once he was gone I felt like a lunatic. I was engaging in something deluded and worthless. What was I doing? How stupid a goal could you set for yourself?
    I suppose I had a dark night of the soul. I had no relation to anything that had meaning. It was like an experience Nelson would tell me about that was similar. He was in New York, where he had a couple of hours free between appointments or appearances. He was in the vicinity of the New York Public Library so decided to stop in. It was going to be an enormous pleasure to be there. I don’t know where he’d been living just before that, but it had been remote, someplace without libraries, and he was famished for print. He was filled with anticipation, he would be flooded with choices of things he wanted to look up or catch up on. He stepped into the main reference room, a vast place where every wall was lined with banks of card catalogs, where he would have access to every written thing in the Western world that was worthwhile, virtually. He steps into the room and begins to sweat from every pore, as he put it.
Nothing interested him.
Not only had he forgotten what it was he’d intended to follow up on,
there was nothing of interest.
He called it the abomination of desolation.
There was nothing he wanted to read.
He felt cold but not faint. He felt he was real but that the material of the world had changed into something like paper ash that would disintegrate if he touched it. Paper ash was all he could compare it to. He was in terror. He felt he had to walk carefully in