Mating by Norman Rush Page A

the rest of the audience took it. Anyway, at the door was a slight gauntlet of reserved personalities for us to run. I felt like a tugboat because Grace had physical hold of my waistband. It took a little effort to make her let go before we forged through. This is his wife, I said, to get us through the anteroom and into the symposium proper.
    The venue was rather improvised, I thought. It was the guesthouse, deep at the rear of the property, with the regular furnishings removed and the living room set up with folding chairs for the audience and a big armchair for the man of the hour. It was a very bare white space in a concrete block building with windows standing open on three sides apropos the heat and the definite attar of mankind arising. The room wasn’t big enough for the thirty or so of us.
    Spare me is what I said to myself when I got my first look at Nelson. I meant Spare me the heroic in all its guises.
    Because here was a genuinely goodlooking man, alas. He was of course older than in the photographs of him I’d seen. The lower part of his face was softer. There were plenty of crowsfeet. He still wore his hair pulled back aboriginally in a short ponytail, which was brave because the style forfeits any camouflage for a receding hairline. His was still good. His hair was still black, although it had the slightly dusty look of hair that is going to be definitely gray someday soon. There was some distinct gray along his part. His cheekbones were still carrying him. Fullface he looked more Slavic than Cherokee now, but this was a matter of weight. This man is not vain, I thought, when I noted that on one side his hair went over his ear and on the other behind it: so here was a serious man, in all probability. Serious men are my type. That was why Martin Wade had been painful for me. But there was a difference between them, and of course a lot of this is retroanalytic, in that Martin’s seriousness was narrower and more guilt-driven. He had moments of definite irritation at his fate: there was no escape from his obligation, but he was so good at music it was unfair.
    Possibly I should have been a sculptor specializing in busts. I appreciate the head as an aesthetic unit—the weight, the poise, the shape. Most women don’t. Or rather they respond subliminally, but at the conscious level they apply a hilarious planar aesthetic, as in Those eyes, Those lips, That smile. Denoon had a beautiful head. I date my more advanced sense of the head to my brief flirtation with physical anthropology, with all its front and sideview photographs and cephalic indices. I thought I was smart not choosing physical anthropology as my specialty. There had been openings. I think I can honestly say I was once even faintly solicited by what amounts to a star in the field. But I thought This is a doomed subfield if there ever was one. Everyone in it is suspected of having chosen it in order to prove something about the godly white race. I did know at least one unquestionable racist in the field. Also, every single male I met in the specialty was married. But I could have gone into it to wreak intellectual havoc, I suppose. This could have been one of my numerous career gaffes. I can get into throes of self-doubt and accuse myself of opting for nutritional anthropology for stupidly female generic reasons, because nurturance is natural to me as a woman, la la la, going the way I did for the same reason so many women in medicine wind up in obstetrics or clinical dietetics. Denoon was thicker through the neck and middle than he needed to be. He could be helped.
    I immediately misjudged the way Nelson was dressed. He was wearing a garish dashiki with a red and black naive floral motif, some kind of unisex gray muslinoid drawstring pants, and elaborate leather sandals of a kind I’d never seen. I of course leapt to the conclusion that he was dressed to show how little dressing up meant to someone of his degree of seriousness and inner direction.