Discretion (20 page)

I was washing out the suds from my hair that I had just shampooed when I saw Marguerite bend her head down toward my son when he tugged her sleeves. She seemed pleased by what he said to her. She smiled, stood up, held his hand and, with the baby in her arms, she walked with him to the other side of the tree. My son pointed to the sky and I saw a shaft of light descend toward them. They were still smiling when the light encircled them, when it pulled them up to the sky and they disappeared with it into the clouds.

I woke with a start, knowing then I had dreamed of the dead. Realizing then, for the first time, that I had dreamed not only of the dead but also of the living. I woke up terrified for Marguerite, afraid I had lost her, desperate to see her again.

“I dreamed of you,” I said to Marguerite when we met for lunch.

She saw the fear in my eyes. “A bad dream?” she asked.

“You were with my son and my daughter.”

“A good dream,” she said.

She wanted to know if it was the daughter I had when my wife was pregnant. When I confessed that I had lied to her. When I admitted I had a son and another child on the way. I told her that they were both dead—the son I had and the daughter I had been expecting.

“Dead?”

Her eyes were already brimming with tears for me before I could
tell her how they had died, tears Nerida had hidden from me, tears Nerida wanted me to conceal from her. I told Marguerite everything: about the senseless killing of my children, of my grief. I did not tell her of my guilt, but she must have guessed my guilt.

“You were not responsible,” she said. “It was their fate.”

Tears rolled down her cheeks and mine. She let me weep. She leaned toward me and handed me her handkerchief. “It’s good to cry,” she said. “Cry.”

The people in the restaurant seemed to pity us. They lowered their voices and turned their heads away from us. The waiter brought us water. He did not say a word to us. He did not return until we had dried our eyes and Marguerite was smiling at the photographs I was showing her of my other three children.

“They must make life easier for you and your wife. They must help you forget.”

But I was not listening to her. I was still thinking of my dream. “I don’t want anything to happen to you,” I said.

“It was only a dream. I am here. I am fine,” she said. “I am healthy.”

“You were with them,” I said.

“You had not seen me for ten years, remember? It must have seemed as though I had died with your son and your daughter.”

But I knew she had not died with my son and my daughter. Even in those years I fooled myself into believing I had forgotten her, she was always alive in my heart, able to set it aflame again with the merest reminder I had of the time we had spent together. I had wrapped her portrait in brown paper, stored it with the books she had given me and with the mementos of my son that had escaped Nerida’s eyes, but it was not enough. When my president asked me to go to New York, the years peeled back. I did not hesitate. I wanted to be with her again.

“I never forgot you,” I said.

She averted her eyes. “And your wife? How is she? How is your marriage?”

I did not lie. “Good,” I said. “Very good.”

She brought her glass to her lips and sipped the water slowly. “I
sometimes wondered,” she said, “if I had caused a problem in your marriage. If I …” Her voice broke. She bit her lower lip.

“Nerida never knew,” I said.

“But I knew.” She put down her glass. “I never asked you about your life. What you did in the weeks in between when I did not see you.”

“You were preoccupied,” I said.

“I occupied myself so I would not have the need to ask. I was afraid of your answer, but I knew. I guessed something was wrong. You never invited me to visit you in Washington. I knew there was someone else. I didn’t want to believe it was a wife. Then when you told me there were children.…”

“It was my fault, Marguerite.”

“It was mine. I have been riddled with guilt ever since, wondering.”

“I loved you apart from Nerida. I still love you. I loved two women. I can’t explain it. I say it to you as a fact I accept. I was not in love with Nerida when I married her, but I grew to love her. I did not think I would love anyone else, and then I met you. I did not love you because I stopped loving Nerida. I loved you in spite of loving Nerida.”

“How foolish I must have seemed to you. I fell in your trap.”

I knew what trap she meant. “I was the first in my family to have only one wife,” I said, trying to explain myself to her.

“Did you really think you could have two?”

“I don’t know. I still don’t know.”

“You still don’t know?” Her eyes stretched open wide.

“You thought the same thing at one time,” I said.

“I was a romantic young woman. I was talking about nameless, faceless women. I know a different reality now.” She spoke softly, and I felt ashamed for reminding her of ideas she once had, ideas she now obviously found embarrassing.

“We were both untested,” I said.

“We should have known better. I should have known better.”

“I thought I believed in one man, one wife. I am a Christian, you remember.”

“All those silly things I said about a man marrying two women. About admiring the old traditions in Africa.”

“When I fell in love with you, I wanted to get back that way of life. You know, the old traditions. I refused to believe loving you was sinful, the way the missionaries taught me to believe. You wanted to believe that everything in Africa was good and right, and then you fell in love with me and discovered you wanted a way of life the Europeans had taught you to admire.”

“I am not so sure their way of life is all that admirable.” She was looking at me now. The eyes that had filled with tears for my dead children were now unabashedly facing mine. I did not dare to hope, and yet I did. Yet at that moment I believed she wanted to tell me that she, too, had not stopped loving me. That though she was married, she still wanted me, too. But she did not say that, though I wanted to believe that that was what she had intended.

“Sometimes people stay together when they shouldn’t,” she said.

I asked her if she was speaking personally. She turned away from me. “Marriages would last,” she said, “if people stopped sleeping with other people’s mates.”

Her voice vibrated with a restrained anger, the source of which I was uncertain. I did not know if she was speaking of herself or of me. Whether she was blaming me for making love to her when I was married, or blaming herself for interfering in my marriage, for not admitting to herself that I was married. I said to her again that my marriage was strong; it was good and that nothing we had done had weakened it. But she repeated her statement, this time with emphasis, her anger specifically targeted to women.

“Women want power,” she said, “but they will never get power until they stop sleeping with other women’s men.”

I did not know then that she was thinking of her own marriage. I did not know then that she was battling her husband’s infidelity. I took her comment as an accusation against herself and the affair she had had with me. I saw it as her resolve not to repeat what she now viewed as reprehensible in the light of a morality that had more to do with politics—the protest rallies in support of equality for women that were an everyday occurrence these days—than
with cultural beliefs or religious ethics, and I felt the hope that had sprung in my heart only moments before drain out of me.

We said good-bye as friends. She reminded me to find comfort in the children I now had and to put my dead son and daughter to rest in the past. She congratulated me when I told her I had been ambassador to Ghana and Ethiopia from my country and that I was now going to take up a similar post in Chad. She was proud of me, she said, and happy for me. I asked her again about her art. She said she still painted on weekends.

“When my husband has gone campaigning and my son’s busy playing or is asleep.”

“Do you miss it?” I asked.

“I’ll get back to it as soon as my husband gets elected or finds a job and my son is older.”

“Do you miss me?” I asked.

“Always,” she said. “I have put you in a vault in my heart, locked the door, and thrown away the key.”

For years I prayed she would find that key again, but that day did not come until fifteen years later, and when it did, we both knew that the love we felt for each other that first time in New York, when we were young, was a lasting love. That it would burn for a lifetime and stay with us even to eternity.

W
hen I returned home to Africa, to Nerida, I knew that I could no longer do as I had pretended to do in the past. I could no longer say to myself that I could forget Marguerite, bury her in my memory, live as though she ceased to matter to me, as if I no longer loved her. Now I had to live with the truth of knowing I loved her, that I would always love her. I had to face the possibility—the fact it now seemed to me—that I might never again hold her in my arms, make love to her, feel her skin warm against mine, her heart beat fast against mine.

Some would say it is a gift, this ability to see all, to understand, to perceive the truth even when the truth has been covered up, concealed, when all traces have been removed from the eye. But those who say that do not know the inconsolable loneliness, the pain this awareness brings of seeing into the secret passages of the human heart. Your own heart. Of carrying inside of you the terrible burden of knowledge—your knowledge of your own truth. For it is only you who see this truth. Only you who know that nothing, not even what you know, what you may tell others you know, can change the irrefutable, immutable facts that lie before you: I loved Marguerite. I could not have Marguerite.

Every day brought me to a newer and newer understanding of my mother, closer and closer to forgiving her. My mother could have lived with my father if all that it took to live was food; if all that she needed was shelter. She could have been content in his village if all that it took for contentment was work, work that was meaningful, work that contributed to the community where she lived. If all that it took for happiness was the approval of friends, of her society—a good reputation, a place in her community. I do not think my mother disliked my father. I think she could have learned to make love to him and not feel disgust. And yet I know that none of these mattered to her. That no one, not her mother, not her father, not her friends, not her work, not her love for me could have concealed from her the truth that she knew: she loved another man. She wanted another man. In the end she could not bear that truth and live. In the end she could not make love to my father and breathe.

I loved another woman, but I also loved my wife. I longed for Marguerite but I also desired my wife. I did not want one or the other. I wanted them both. I did not have my mother’s tragic good fortune. I could not choose not to live with one because I wanted the other. But now I had to accept the painful truth that I must live without Marguerite, that I must bear the heartache of knowing I loved her, of knowing I wanted her. Of knowing I could not have her. It was a reality I did not know how I could change.

I gave up all pretense when I said good-bye to Marguerite in New York. Now, in Africa, I unwrapped her portrait. I removed the brown paper that I once thought would protect me from seeing her, from remembering her. I unpacked the books she had given me. I brought them all into my bedroom. I hung her portrait on the wall above my bed. I put her books among Nerida’s in the bookcase next to the side of the bed where I slept.

Nerida did not oppose me. She found reasons to hope. She took my actions as evidence of my restoration, my return to a system of beliefs she had not abandoned, my acknowledgment of the fluidity of time, the unity of past, present, and future. She did not know that the portrait of the head of a woman that had reminded her of
an African mask was the portrait of a woman I loved, the portrait of my Marguerite. She did not know that the books I put in her bookcase were the books my Marguerite had given me, the books I had deceived her into believing I bought, and which, in that happy ignorance, she had read to me in our bed in Washington. She thought that the portrait and the books were symbols of a past, a past I was wrong to bury when I buried my son, when I buried my daughter. She said to me that it was our children who had died, not the life we had before them or with them. It was only
their
things she had left behind her in Washington ten years ago, not
our
things.

Nerida dealt with her anguish in ways I could not. The past, present, and future fused for her in ways they had not for me. She could bring our children in the present with her, let them live in her heart and her soul. She could strip the past of the things that confined it, that imprisoned it, and free it to merge with the now. She could discard this thing, she could keep that thing from the past, and each thing she discarded, each thing she kept seemed to allow her the wholeness of time. She would leave the clothes of our dead children in Washington but she would bring their spirits with her to the present, to Africa. She would pack our furniture from our apartment in Washington and take it with her to our house in Africa, carrying the past with her to her present as she had carried it once before when she put baskets and plants in our apartment and decorated it in colors that reminded her of Africa.