Discretion (15 page)

“So,” I began carefully, “you wouldn’t divorce your husband if he were having an affair?”

“Not if I had children.”

“And you don’t think a husband should divorce his wife if he’s in love with another woman?”

“What would the husband do in Africa?” she asked me.

“He’d marry the other woman,” I said.

“But he wouldn’t divorce his wife?”

“No,” I said. “He wouldn’t divorce the woman he married first.”

“And he’d have two families and all his children would be treated the same, right?”

“In fact, his first wife would be treated with more respect,” I said. “And her children, too.”

She put her arms around my neck. “See, I’m more African than you think. I agree with that tradition.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yes, I’m sure.”

“You think it’s a tradition we should keep?”

She kissed me. “Yes, it’s a tradition you should keep.”

Slowly I removed her arms from around my neck. “Do you think I should keep it?”

She began to answer me: “Yes, you should …” But her voice
faltered. She cleared her throat. “Africa, I mean.” She gained confidence. “Africa should keep that tradition.”

“What about me?”

She lost her footing again with my question. I think this time she sensed it was not academic. She tried to laugh, but the laugh stuck in her throat.

“You ask me that as if you were married,” she said. I saw her eyes travel to my left hand, a hand that by now she knew as well as her own. I did not wear a wedding band. I never did. “You are not married, are you?”

I did not answer her.

“Well, are you?” There was still hope in her voice.

I cast my eyes anywhere but in her direction.

“You’re scaring me. Are you married?” She tried to force my eyes to meet hers. “Tell me, Oufoula.”

I remained silent.

“Are you? Are you?” Her voice was tense now. “Look at me.”

Again I did not answer her. I did not look at her.

“Oufoula, stop it. You’re really frightening me now. Tell me you’re not married.”

But she knew my answer. She heard the truth in my silence.

“Say it, dammit. Say it. Don’t just stand there. Say it.”

“What do you want me to say?”

“Say it!”

“I’m married.”

“Liar. Say it’s not true.” But she was looking at me with glazed eyes, the eyes of dead fish laid out on trays in the market.

“It’s true, Marguerite.”

“Liar.” There was no conviction in her voice.

“No, Marguerite. It’s true.”

My words must have finally penetrated the defenses she had mounted in her brain. She opened her mouth to speak again, but no sound came. It was as if she suddenly understood what I had said to her and, understanding, could not trust herself to use words again. For words had trapped her, deceived her. When they rose on her tongue she swallowed them, pushed them deep into her throat
and buried them. The moan that eventually came through her lips was not unlike the mournful lowing I had heard from animals caught in a hunter’s snare.

I stood still next to her, wishing I could absorb her pain, take it away from her. I did not touch her. I did not speak to her. I wanted her to hurl curses upon me, shout, scream at me. I wanted to be punished. But when finally she spoke, her voice was almost a whisper: “Children?”

“A son. A baby on the way.”

“Leave,” she said. She did not raise her voice. “Leave and don’t come back.
Ever
.”

I knew she meant it and there was nothing I could do to persuade her to change her mind. I went back to the bedroom, threw the rest of my clothes in my bag, zipped it closed, put on my jacket. She did not look at me when I came back into the living room. She did not move. She did not stop me when I opened the front door. She did not say good-bye.

I asked the cab that took me to the airport to stop first at the UN. I went directly to my office. I walked to the closet where I had hidden Marguerite’s portrait. I took it out and brought it home with me to Washington.

H
ow can I describe the days that followed, the weeks afterwards? Self-recrimination was not enough to ease my pain. It did not bring relief. How could it when what I had said to Marguerite was the truth? When finally I had been honest with her? How could I expect guilt to assuage my pain when I was guilty only of ending the lies, the lies I told to Marguerite, the lies I allowed Nerida to believe when I gave her the impression that my visits to New York were for business only?

The truth, I was told by the missionaries, sets you free. I was anything but free. I came to Nerida that night a prisoner, locked out from the woman I loved, locked in to the woman I loved. An iron gate stood between the life I had with Nerida and the one I wanted with Marguerite. On one side of that gate I was free to love Nerida, our son, the child we would soon have, but it was a freedom I could not enjoy. It barred me from the freedom I also wanted, the freedom to be with the other woman I loved.

I know now that there is no such thing as freedom. I know now that whatever freedom we experience comes when we voluntarily submit ourselves to the opposite of what we think is freedom. When we impose limits on ourselves. When we deny ourselves
choice. I remind myself of that when I do mundane things, things of little import or consequence, like choosing the shaving cream I use. I know that there is much available to me: the kind that has moisturizer in it, the kind that has perfumes, the kind that will not burn me if I cut my face. I have the money. I can buy whatever I want, but I limit myself to one kind. I disregard the others. I buy only one brand. I do not think of the attributes of the others. I am not plagued by indecision. I am not tormented by doubts that there are others better than the one I bought. It is I who voluntarily excluded the others. That fact alone gives me contentment with what I have.

I know that now as a man of fifty-five, though every day I must remind myself. Every day I must tell myself that freedom comes from voluntary exclusion. I did not understand that then, so I grieved without restraint for the loss of Marguerite. I did not choose to give her up. I had not voluntarily imposed that limitation on myself. I wanted her, I longed for her. So I took my grief and my longing to Nerida. It brought me discontent and unhappiness. It made me a prisoner of myself in my home.

Nerida saw the change in me when I returned to Washington with Marguerite’s portrait in my hand. She attributed it to the exhaustion.

“You really have to tell the ambassador that you cannot be expected to make so many trips to New York,” she said.

My kind Nerida, my sweet Nerida. I walked past her to the cabinet where I stored my tools. I did not wait to take off my jacket. I took out my hammer and a nail from the drawer and went to our bedroom and hammered the nail on the wall above our bed and hung the portrait of my Marguerite there.

“It looks like a mask from back home,” Nerida said.

But I knew she wanted to ask me other questions: Where I did I get it? Did I know who drew it? Did I know the artist personally? Why did I want it hung on our bedroom wall? Why not in the dining room or the living room? Why couldn’t I wait until the next morning to hang it up? Why did it have to be done as soon as I arrived? Why now, when I was so exhausted?

But Nerida did not ask me these questions though they were probably fermenting in her brain. Instead, she comforted me, worried that I had overworked myself. That it was the accumulation of my many trips to New York that had made me so listless, so distant. But I was certain when she said this it was merely a subterfuge, a cover-up for the true fears that gnawed at her.

She had cooked salmon for dinner. It was a fish I liked. That night I barely touched it.

“You’re not eating.” She slid my plate gently toward me.

“I’m not hungry.” I pushed it away.

She said again that she thought I was overworked. “You look tired. You can hardly hold up your head.”

“I just need to sleep,” I said.

“I’ll tell my father to speak to the ambassador. Either you work here where we live or we move to New York.”

“No!” I saw her flinch when I hit the table with my fist. “We will
not
move to New York.”

I could not live with Nerida and our son in the same city where Marguerite lived and not make love to Marguerite. The thought alone set my head on fire.

Nerida picked up our son from his chair. “I’ll put Ayi to sleep.” She brought him to me. “Kiss Baba.”

I did not take my son from her arms.

“Kiss Baba. He had a hard day.”

My son sensed the rigidity in my body. He pulled his head away from me.

“Kiss Baba,” Nerida told my son again. She leaned him toward me. “Kiss Baba.” She pushed his head against my face.

My son began to cry. His tears wet my cheeks.

“Kiss Baba.”

He refused.

Nerida was almost shouting now, my calm Nerida who always spoke so gently to her son. “Kiss Baba.” She was crying, holding him tightly to her breasts. Tears ran down both their eyes.

“See, see,” she said to my son. “See how you made Baba unhappy and he is so tired. Look how we made him unhappy.”

Only my son spoke the truth that night. Only my son who could not yet talk in sentences that would have made his feelings clear, only he said I was the guilty one. He and his mother were the innocent ones. They had not made me unhappy. I was the one who had made them unhappy. They were the ones who were crying. I was the one sitting like a stone, unmoved by their tears. I did not deserve his kisses. He would not kiss me. His mother could not make him say he loved me. I did not deserve his love.

We lied to each other that night, Nerida and I. When she touched me in bed hoping I would put my arms around her and comfort her, I turned my back on her.

“Sleep,” she said. “I know you’re tired.”

I allowed myself to accept her lie as the truth. I kissed her and said I would be better the next night after I had some sleep, after I had the rest I needed. She allowed herself to accept my lie as the truth.

I made love to Nerida the next night with the portrait of Marguerite looking down on us above my head. I could not see the eyes, but I knew the eyes saw me. I told Nerida I loved her. It was not a lie. I did not tell her that I also loved Marguerite, the woman in the room with us. That was a lie of omission. It was the same kind of lie I had used with Marguerite.

I was a man divided into two selves, each self a different self, desiring and needing a different love. But I could not exist if my two selves remained divided. I could not survive if they were separated. I needed Nerida, but I needed Marguerite, too. I loved Nerida, but I loved Marguerite, too.

Mornings were the worst for me. I would wake up and see Nerida lying on the bed next to me and I would be happy that she was my wife, the mother of my son and my unborn child. I would be grateful for the family I had. But soon the serpent of discontent would slither into my Eden and I would yearn for Marguerite. She would enter my mind and it would be she I would see on my bed lying next to me, not Nerida.

I would see her as I had seen her many mornings, her hair loose from the ponytail she wore during the day. She would have pushed
it off her neck. It would have splayed across her pillow. Her large eyes would still be closed, her full lips slightly parted, her brown face smooth and silky soft when I touched it, her legs entangled in the bedsheets. How many times had she pulled the sheets off me during the night? She laughed at me when I complained.

“You’re too tall for my sheets,” she said.

I would pull her on top of me. If our heads met, there would be a full twelve inches of my legs left bare from where her feet touched my calves.

When memories of my mornings with Marguerite tormented me, I would rush to the office to call her. Always there would be no answer. Sometimes Nerida would still be in bed when I left the apartment. Those were the days when my desperation turned to fear, the mornings when I tried to convince myself that I needed to call her earlier, that if I called her earlier, she would not yet have started to paint or draw, that she would answer the phone when it rang.

Nerida never questioned me. She apologized instead that she had not woken up in time to make breakfast for me. But how was Nerida to know that I would leave our apartment at five in the morning? I myself did not know. I did not know until four that morning when I would be plagued with doubts that I would calm with excuses that gave rise to other doubts. Marguerite was waking up earlier to do her art, I said to myself, and then I would remember she needed the light from the sun. But no matter what time I called during the day, she never answered the phone.

I began leaving my house at all hours in the night to call her from the phone booth in the street. Still, she did not answer. Soon the excuses I had used to calm my anxiety ceased to work. It was foolish to believe Marguerite would never answer the phone. She had friends who called her, her students, people she hoped would purchase her work or exhibit it. She would answer the phone for them, and if it was me she did not want to hear from, she could put down the phone when she heard my voice or she could change her number.