Discretion (23 page)

In cities I immersed myself in work so that the hours and days I spent away from Africa passed quickly before I had the chance to miss the wide, open, uncluttered spaces I loved. Now I immersed myself again as much to blind myself to the lights, the buildings, the people who talked and walked as if they could stop time, as to keep myself from thinking of Marguerite, from riding that seesaw that one minute had me up with hope that she was free to love me again, and down again with despair that nothing had changed. I was married. She had left me because I was married. She would not want me because I was married.

For the five days I waited for Marguerite to return, I became a man possessed with my mission to liberate Mandela. I was up before dawn and in bed well after midnight. When my colleagues were having breakfast, I was drafting and rewriting the papers my team would present at the UN, or I was on the phone talking to people who had the power to influence de Klerk, who could force him to accede to our wishes. My friends worried about my total absorption
in my work, my doggedness, my relentless pursuit of my goal. I wanted complete consensus for our demand for the release of Mandela, I told them. I wanted the world to issue a moral imperative to the government of South Africa: the unconditional freedom of all political prisoners. The unconditional end of apartheid. I wanted no loopholes, no chance for compromise.

“You need to relax,” they said. “You need to take a break. Socialize.”

I socialized. I went to every event at the UN, I attended every cocktail party, every dinner hosted by the embassies of countries useful to our cause. In four evenings I was present at thirty parties, but I went to these events with the single-mindedness of my mission and left the minute I felt I had the agreement of my hosts. I used every technique I had learned in the art of persuasion, every skill I had inherited to make others like me. No one and nothing escaped my attention, my focus on achieving our mission, the mission of all the nations of Africa. At nights I fell on my bed, exhausted. There was no time to dream of Marguerite, no time to wonder whether she would want me, whether she still loved me.

And yet I counted the days. And yet when the fifth day passed, I knew, and on the morning of the sixth, I woke up with only Marguerite on my mind.

Again, she did not answer when I called, but the recording on her phone had been changed and I knew she was back in New York. This time I left her a message. I tried to make it as simple as possible. I tried to remove the emotion from my voice, my anxiety to see her.

“Hello, this is Oufoula. I am in New York and would like to see you. Call me when you can. 555-7398.”

I left that message four times on the answering machine in her office at the New School, each time struggling harder and harder to conceal my apprehension, my fear that she did not want to speak to me. Then, on the third day, she called my apartment. I was at the UN. She left her home phone number with my answering service.

I was nervous when I called. What if I was wrong? What if her husband answered the phone? But she was not at home, and the
voice on the recording was her voice, not a male voice. She did not give her name, but that fact alone—that the voice on her home phone was hers, not her husband’s—was enough to fan the hope in my heart, to confirm what I had suspected: she no longer lived with her husband. She no longer was married to him.

She called me back that same night. “I’m so sorry it took so long for you to reach me. I was at a conference at the University of the West Indies in Jamaica.”

I could hear in her voice the same confidence, the same optimism I remembered when she had turned to me in the restaurant, a lifetime ago, and said,
“This is my work.”
My heart raced. “A conference?” I asked her.

“I was invited to show slides of my work.”

“You’re painting again.”

“Yes.” She laughed. It was a happy laugh.

“It’s good to hear you laugh.” But I was uneasy.

She laughed again.

“You sound happy.”
What if she had another lover?

“I am.”

I took a deep breath. “Can I see you?”

“Of course.”

“When?”

“I have a class at the New School tomorrow night.”

“Then tomorrow night?”

“Yes, that would be fine. After my class. Say, ten o’clock?”

My hands were shaking when I put down the phone.

A day never passed as slowly. Ten o’clock never took so long to come. I left the UN at five. By eight o’clock I had looked at every news program on the television and was now staring blankly at the screen, calculating for the umpteenth time how long it would take me by taxi to get from Forty-fifth Street to Knickerbocker’s on University Place and Ninth Street, where we had agreed to meet. By nine-fifteen I decided to walk the thirty-six blocks to Knickerbocker’s thinking to dissipate the nervous energy that had made
it difficult for me to concentrate on my work all day. I arrived at Knickerbocker’s sweating in the warm September night air, panting for breath, my shirt plastered to my chest, my tie choking my neck.

“You didn’t change your suit.”

Marguerite’s face burst through the bodies that had jostled past me—the eccentricities of the streets near Washington Square: young men with purple hair, rings pierced through their ears, their noses, their eyebrows; girls who could pass for boys; university students with their backpacks and raucous voices; men and women in business suits; tourists who came to gawk. Her face shone through them all.

“The uniform. Always the diplomatic uniform.” She stood on tiptoes and stretched up to kiss me. I bent down to her. Her lips grazed my cheek.

“You are perspiring.” Her smile lit up her eyes.

I would not have recognized her if she had not come up directly to me. She seemed so young, so different from the woman in the long skirt I had seen fifteen years ago, the mother of a nine-year-old boy, the wife of a politician, the teacher, the homemaker. Time had receded for her, stood still at that summer when I first met her. Her hair was long again. She wore it in a single plait behind her head, hardly different from the ponytail I remembered. She was slim again, her hips narrow again, her breasts tiny again. She was wearing an ivory blazer cropped at the waist and a short narrow tan skirt. It exposed the legs I loved—the curves of her calves, the smooth skin above her knees.

“You haven’t changed,” I said.

Suddenly I felt old.

“Come. Take off your jacket.”

Suddenly, I was the old man cheating on his wife with a woman half his age, the man Ibrahim Musima had urged me to become. And yet Marguerite was not half my age. She was fifty, a mere six years younger than me.

“Loosen your tie.”

I undid the top button of my shirt and slid my arms out of the sleeves of my jacket. I felt worn out, stuffy in my wool suit.

“That’s better.” She helped me out of my jacket.

“You look beautiful,” I said.

“You always knew how to flatter me.”

“No, I mean it. I did not expect you to look like this.”

“Like what?”

“You look younger than when I last saw you.”

“I use a good hair dye.”

“No. It’s your face. Your skin.”

We were standing near the entrance to the restaurant. People were passing around us to get to the door. She touched my arm. “Let’s go in,” she said.

She stepped back when I opened the door, and her hair brushed against my chest. It took all my willpower not to wrap my arms around her, not to turn around and embrace her.

In the darkened dining room of the restaurant I saw the circles under her eyes, the flesh that had loosened around her mouth and eyes with the years, and yet there was not a wrinkle on her face, not a line, not an indentation. Her skin was as smooth as a river-washed pebble. Her eyes shone with the brightness—the confidence, the optimism—that usually dulled with age.

She was four years younger than Nerida. No one would have believed it. Nerida’s waist had long thickened, her hips had spread, and the muscles in her breasts and stomach had slackened with five pregnancies. Any optimism that remained in her eyes was the hope she had for her children. Nerida had long ceased to set goals for her personal fulfillment, but in Marguerite’s eyes I saw the excitement, the anticipation of the young, of a life yet to be realized.

“This was my friend’s favorite restaurant.” She smiled broadly. The smile spread across her face and widened the gap I felt yawning between us—the stodginess I seemed to personify, the youthfulness that exuded from her. “She was a writer. She introduced me to Knickerbocker’s.” She stretched out her arm, taking in the room around us. “Isn’t this a great place?”

There was a bar, close to the door. People were cluttered around it, drinks in their hands, applauding and cheering a baseball game on the huge television screen that hung from the ceiling. It reinforced
my discomfort. It made me feel out of place, out of time, out of sync, and I wanted to be in sync with Marguerite. I wanted to be light and gay as she seemed to be—to be the man who could seem young as she seemed young, the man who could smile and talk as if he were young, as if life had never burdened him with disappointment, with loss; as if the weight of responsibility for his children, his family, his country, his mission now for South Africa had not lain heavily on him.

I found myself taking comfort in the staidness of the dining room. It was like the dining rooms I had been accustomed to in hotels—solid and formal—linens on the table, china, stemmed glass, brass reflecting candlelight, wood-paneled walls. In the corner I saw a black baby grand piano. I latched onto it. I turned it into a symbol of the world I knew, the world in which I exercised power, in which I was in control. The world in which I had a place.

“Does anyone play the piano?” I asked Marguerite.

“Sometimes.” She seemed puzzled by my question.

“Tonight?”

“No, not tonight.”

I pulled the bottom of my tie and tightened the knot at my neck.

“There’s a baseball game tonight,” she said.

I was aware she was watching me.

“Oh.” I spread my fingers on the table, unwilling to put an end to the attention she was giving me.

“Does the TV bother you?”

I did not answer her.

“We could go to another restaurant,” she said.

The first time we met I had behaved this way. But then I was a young man preening with the pretensions of my office. I wore a suit—the diplomat’s uniform, as Marguerite had called it—to signal my status, even to the woman I had planned to seduce. She wore leggings and a loose shirt and shamed me. She shamed me now again. There was nothing wrong with the restaurant. There was something wrong with me.

“No,” I said.

“The bar is too noisy?”

I wilted when those trusting eyes were fastened on me, for it was insecurity that had made me so peevish. “It’s fine,” I said.

“If you don’t—”

I stopped her. I reached for the courage that had abandoned me. “It’s a great place, Marguerite. A really great place.”

“Are you sure? Because if you’re not, we could—”

“It’s fine, Marguerite.”

“You’re certain?

“It’s fine. I like the bar with the television. It makes the room less formal.”

Her smile returned, the one I had removed with my schoolboy petulance. She leaned back in her chair. “That’s why my friend liked it. Doris was her name. DorisJean, as she preferred to be called. You know, like it was one name—DorisJean. She liked the bar especially.”

The room grew noisier. People were slapping high fives at each other, yelling and shouting.

“It’s the playoffs for the World Series. The New York Yankees are up.”

I looked up at the TV. The man who had slid into first base was covered in dirt all along the sides of his pants and up his shirtsleeves. Baseball was not a game I liked. Tennis was my game. The diplomat’s sport.

“They seem to be winning,” I said.

“For now,” she said, but she was not looking at me. Her eyes were on the TV.

“Do you follow it?” I asked her. I did not want changes I could not identify with, could not relate to, could not understand. I did not want any changes at all. When I knew her she never talked about baseball.

“DorisJean got me involved in it, but I don’t follow it much.” She turned back to me.

“Ah, your friend.” I relaxed. I had thought it was the American husband who had taught her to like this sport.

“I used to think that’s why she came here. To watch baseball. Then I caught her drinking here.”

She bent her head to one side and tucked a loose strand of her hair behind her ear. I wanted to pull it out again. I wanted to be the one to smooth it back into place.

“When she came to my house for dinner, she always refused the wine,” she was saying to me. “Then, one day, it was her last birthday, I decided to take her to dinner here at her favorite restaurant. I got here late, I can’t remember why. But when I arrived she was at the bar, plastered. I didn’t talk to her for months after that for lying to me. Everybody knew she drank, except me. And I was one of her best friends. Then she died suddenly and I regretted those months I did not talk to her. I come here often now. This place reminds me of her.”

“Maybe we should go someplace else,” I said. “I don’t want you to be sad.”

“No, I’m not sad when I come here. I’m happy.”

The waiter approached us. “Sparkling water,” she said. “What about you?”

“Water is good for me, too.”

“Not wine?”

“I don’t drink.”

“Not even socially?”

“Never. Have you forgotten?” How easily the jealousy returned. How easily it slipped back in again after I thought I had righted myself, banished my insecurities.

“No, but that was a long time ago.”

“I haven’t changed. I still do not drink. I’m still a bore at parties.”

She dismissed me with a wave of her hand.

“I like coming here because I like remembering DorisJean,” she said.

But I wanted her to tell me that she was glad I was still a bore at parties. That I had not changed. That I was still the Oufoula she remembered. The Oufoula she loved.