Discretion (24 page)

“Do you remember me?” I asked her.

She laughed at me. “Same old Oufoula,” she said.

The tone of voice was not what I wanted, the words not what I wished she had said. I sat back heavily in my chair. “Old,” I said, “but not the same.”

“You’re not old. You look great. The years were good to you. You haven’t put on an ounce of fat.”

I patted my stomach. “Except here.”

“Where? I can’t see it.”

“It’s there. I see it every day. And my hair. Don’t you see how gray it is?”

“You haven’t lost it. Most men your age are bald or they’ve lost at least half their hair. Look at you. You just have a sprinkling of gray hair and it makes you look great. Like a famous, distinguished ambassador.”

“I am none of those. Famous or distinguished.”

“False modesty will get you everywhere.”

The waiter brought us the water she ordered. I let her choose my dinner. She did so without looking at the menu.

“I’ve memorized it by now,” she said, not missing the eyebrows I raised. “I told you I came here often. With DorisJean, of course,” she added as if I had asked.
The old Marguerite. Still solicitous, still careful of my feelings
. “So,” she asked, crossing her arms over the table, “why are you here?”

I told her.

“Then you
are
famous and distinguished.”

“I’m just a part of a team. Tell me about you. Tell me about your trip to Jamaica.”

“I was invited by the University of the West Indies. A conference on postcolonial art. I hadn’t realized how much Edna Manley had influenced art in Jamaica. The people there are doing extraordinary work.”

“Then you’re painting again?”

“I began in earnest about five years ago. After I left my husband. I’m divorced, you know.”

“I guessed as much from the message on your phone. I’m sorry,” I said. The words came out bland, dry, devoid of emotion, of any genuine compassion.

“Don’t be. It was the best thing that happened to me. I don’t think I would be painting today if I’d stayed in my marriage. To tell
you the truth I like coming to this restaurant not so much because I want to remember DorisJean as because it is here that I realized what a false life I had been living for years. I thought I could have given up my art for my son. I was Miss Super Mother, Miss Super Homemaker, and all the time I was angry inside. That’s why DorisJean never told me she drank. She didn’t want to shatter the Pollyanna image I built around me, the fairy-tale world I pretended to live in. The politician’s wife dressed in politician wife’s clothes. No wonder you think I look different now. It’s the clothes.”

She was speaking to me as if the conversation we had had fifteen years ago had never ended, as if it had continued in her mind and she was answering questions I had raised about her marriage to a politician, about her willingness to give up her art.

“It’s not just the clothes.” I said. “You look young. Your eyes are young.”

“I’ve come back to life.”

“I never understood how you could give up painting. It meant so much to you.”

“It was easy once I found a way to put it out of my mind. I’m good at that—putting things out of my mind when I need to.”

I felt the wound to my heart. It was what she had done when we were young. What I wanted her to do. She had put the things she did not want to know—I did not want her to know—out of her mind. My secret would have destroyed us. She would have stopped seeing me if I had allowed her to expose it. But Marguerite was not thinking of those times. She was talking of the times
after
I had forced her to face the truth,
after
I had given her no choice but to banish me from her life. She was talking about the times when I was no longer in her life, when the people in her life, the people she loved, were her husband, her son.

“I was lying to myself thinking I could stop. Paul said I became a better mother, less nervous and edgy, when I started painting again every day. He told me that it was easier for him to get on with his life when I was happy. He didn’t have to spend so much time worrying about me. He was a terrible student all through elementary
school and high school. His teachers would say the same thing: Paul has the intelligence, the potential, but he won’t concentrate, he won’t do his work.”

She opened her handbag and took out a photograph. “Here’s a picture of him.”

I took it from her hands. The bar erupted again with shouts and laughter, but Marguerite did not turn to look at the TV. We could have been the only two people in the restaurant, the noise around us mere background.

“Then in his last year in high school, everything changed.”

She spoke with the same intimacy I remembered when we were lovers. When I was certain she loved me. When she told me all—all her thoughts, all her feelings—because I was the one she loved, the one she trusted.

“That was when I had decided to leave Harold and I went back to painting again. Paul asked me not to leave until he went to college. He said too many of his friends were living with a single mother. He needed his father in the house until he left home for college. I stayed nine more months for Paul. I don’t regret it. Paul knew the marriage was over, but I think it was a relief to him that I had stopped trying so hard. That there was no more tension in the house. We all knew what was happening. Paul knew I did not want his father as a husband, but he still had Harold as his father. I was happier. I was painting. Paul’s grades made a complete turnaround. Now he’s in graduate school. Happy and doing well.”

I looked at the photograph she had given me, fighting my guilt, struggling with my jealousy. Her son was a handsome young man but he looked nothing like her. He was tall, darker than she was, his lips thicker, his nose broader. The thought crossed my mind that he could have been mine. It was a foolish thought, yet I asked her.

“How soon after we broke up did you get married?”

She looked straight into my eyes. “He’s not your child,” she said.

Still, I persisted. Still, I did not want to give up the illusion that there had been no quarrel between us. That through the years of not seeing each other, something still held us together, linked us.
Like a child. Like a son. Like a child conceived out of our passion, our love.

“He looks like an African,” I said.

“His father is African American.”

Just the barest hint of anger flashed across her eyes but it was enough to stop me. “It was a foolish thing for me to suggest.” I did not want her upset with me. Not now. Not on the first day after fifteen years. Not ever. She reached for the photograph in my hand and I handed it back to her. “I was hoping,” I said.

“I would have told you.”

“I wished—”

She cut me off. “Do you have pictures of your children?”

“Marguerite—”

“Let me see them.” She stretched out her hand.

I reached for my wallet. “They are grown up now.”

She took the photographs from me and studied them, shifting them over and over between her fingers. “And your wife, do you have a picture of her?”

I lied to her. I did not know why. Embarrassment? Loyalty to Nerida? I could not show her a photograph of Nerida, a photograph of a woman who looked twice her age.

“I don’t have one with me,” I said. She didn’t ask for an explanation.

By the time the waiter brought our dinner, her mood had shifted completely from the lightheartedness with which she had greeted me. She seemed older now, more mature. But it was a maturity that still retained its youthfulness, a youthfulness I did not find disconcerting. We talked some more about our children. We avoided the precipice of my marriage, the possibility that she had a lover. I skirted that dangerous tumble downwards to the rocks from the solid ground on which we stood. I asked her to tell me more about Paul. She said he was working on a Ph.D. in urban planning at Howard University. Besides being smart, he was a loving son to her, kind and compassionate.

“When he was twelve and I saw him leaning toward the wrong
crowd, I bribed him into doing some social work. I thought if I could teach him to care for someone other than himself, he wouldn’t join the ‘me’ generation, he wouldn’t become like too many of the selfish, self-centered young people I see today. There was a senior center near me. I arranged for Paul to be an assistant to a counselor there. Of course, there was no such position for someone as young as Paul, but I asked them to do me a favor. I gave them the money to pay Paul for working there ten hours a week in the summer. It was the best thing I did. Paul went there only for the money at first, but soon he was rushing out of the house, telling me that one of the seniors was expecting him to take her for a walk, or something like that. He learned the importance of being reliable. He discovered that other people needed him and he had to be responsible.”

“Like you were,” I said. “Like how he was able to rely on you.”

She looked down at her hands.

“Paul’s a compliment to you,” I said.

“I didn’t mean it that way,” she murmured.

“You shouldn’t be embarrassed. When children turn out well, it’s because their parents paid attention to them. Because their parents were reliable and responsible.”

“And your children?”

“Like your son. Good students. Good human beings.”

“Then you were a good father.”

I told her the truth. “Their mother was a good mother. Still is. I was always away, or I came home too late.”

“You have a good wife, then?”

“Yes,” I said.

An awkwardness grew between us with my response. It gave me hope. If all she wanted from me was friendship, she would not have grown quiet. She would have asked more questions about my wife. There would be no tension between us as there was now.

“We’re lucky,” I said, breaking the silence. “Not all parents are so lucky.”

When our dessert came, we were still talking about our children, about our good luck, still avoiding any mention of my wife, any mention of a man she may be seeing. I told her I had friends whose
sons had dropped out of school in spite of their parents’ money. Some were on drugs.

“Even in Africa?” She was surprised.

“Television,” I said, “is the new colonizer. We’re in an age of cultural imperialism. Western television beams into our living rooms all over Africa. It invades our lives. Our children imitate what they see. In our cities it’s pornography and drugs. Some of the old ways of respect for the elders are dying.”

“Then you know how hard it is here.”

“That’s why you should be proud of yourself for the way your son turned out.”

This time she accepted the compliment. My comment did not seem to make her uncomfortable. She smiled. “There’s going to be a little reception tomorrow at an art gallery in Brooklyn for the opening of an exhibit on Caribbean art. Would you like to come?”

“An exhibit of your work?”

“Just three of my paintings are included.”

“So you’re the one who’s famous!”

“It’s a small gallery.”

“Well, well.”

“Just three paintings. Will you come?”

“Of course I’ll come. I want to come.”

“Here’s the address.” She handed me a card. “The reception is at six.”

She kissed me on my cheek again when we parted, but there was a difference. It was not the warm, cheerful gesture of affection between friends she had extended to me outside the restaurant. This time she touched my arm when she raised her head to kiss me. Her fingers pressed my flesh. I could feel them through my jacket as if she had touched my bare arm. I put my arms around her. She leaned her head against my chest. It was only for a moment, but a moment was all I needed to hear her heartbeat race with mine. A moment was all I needed to know she had not forgotten me, that she had not expelled me from her heart.

I
n the many times I had been to New York I had never been to Brooklyn. Marguerite had told me much about Brooklyn that summer when I first met her, in those days when I was not so foolish as to think I was more important to her, or even just as important to her, as her art. When she would not take a full-time job because it would interfere with the time she needed for her art. She told me she would know her work was good when people in Brooklyn bought it.

“Brooklyn is the West Indian mecca,” she had said. “The first port of call for West Indians in America, and for most, the last. There are more West Indians in Brooklyn than in any other place outside the Caribbean. That’s why Sparrow says, ‘Brooklyn is my home.’ ”

The Mighty Sparrow. He was the reigning calypso monarch from Trinidad and Tobago. Even in Africa we had heard of him.

“Come Labor Day, Eastern Parkway is a sea of West Indians. They bring carnival to Brooklyn—the costumes, the steel band, the calypsos. They have to close down Eastern Parkway. The Americans call it the West Indian parade, but it’s not a parade, it’s a jump
up. Just like back home with people dancing and winin’ their bodies in the streets. I’ll take you to it.”

But Marguerite and I parted before Labor Day and I never got the chance. Now I was driving down that same parkway she had described to me. It reminded me of the boulevards of Paris. There were shades of an elegance that once must have been there but now could only be guessed at from the wide avenue and the cobblestone pavements that came between the avenue and the narrow streets on either side. Trees lined the avenue and there were park benches and lanterns on the pavements, but these were recent replacements, the frustrated effort of some city planner to recover a past that had foolishly slipped through the fingers of the white people who once lived there, who took flight when the Jews descended from Harlem, the Jews who themselves ran to Long Island when the West Indians arrived.