Discretion (25 page)

“Soon there’ll be no place for white people to go but in the sea. Then they’ll come back to Brooklyn.”

Marguerite had predicted this to me in 1968, and in 1989 the evidence was before my eyes. Park benches had been repaired, painted, and welded onto iron platforms lodged into the cement, but that did not spare them from the graffiti that was looped across the fresh green paint. Maple saplings were wired to the ground, but paper swirled around the roots, garbage carelessly discarded there by people who seemed indifferent—hostile, even—to the attempts at urban renewal that surely they knew were not being made for their sake. So they let their dogs defecate on the sidewalks, and threw empty beer bottles and soda cans on the cordoned-off areas around the newly planted trees. Too disillusioned, Marguerite told me later, to have hope. Too poor to care.

There were places along Eastern Parkway where the stone facades of apartment buildings had been sandblasted and bright new awnings shaded oak doorways, but these seemed incongruous, even to my eyes, to the rest of the buildings, with their torn window shades and dirty entranceways. Young mothers sat with their babies on front stoops, young men leaned against walls unsuccessfully camouflaging
the beer cans in their hands with brown paper bags. These were the daughters and sons of black immigrants who must have had great hopes when they crossed the Atlantic, some dream, now lost, of getting their piece of the American pie. These were the unemployed, the neglected, the poor.

Past the wide roundabout, the grand Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Memorial Arch with its bronze statues of the triumphant Winged Victory, Lincoln, Grant and the soldiers and sailors of the Civil War, past the stone walls of the Brooklyn Public Library, past the Doric columns of the Brooklyn Museum with its freshly cut front lawn, Eastern Parkway seemed unconquerable, irreclaimable, the home indeed of West Indians. But further down, a few streets beyond Nostrand Avenue where the art gallery was, where I was going to meet Marguerite, a new wave of Jewish immigrants was pushing its way westward. The Hasidim. In a very short time, they would clash in the infamous Crown Heights riots—the West Indians refusing to yield in their march eastward, the Hasidic Jews determined to reclaim territory abandoned by their predecessors of another clan.

In those days, and still today, the West Indian hold on Nostrand Avenue was firm. Unshakable. All along the street I saw bakeries, restaurants, video shops, beauty parlors, pharmacies, travel agencies, all touting West Indian names. West Indians were everywhere. I recognized them by their characteristic way of talking with their hands, their animated gestures. My driver was forced to bring the car to a crawl, sometimes to stop abruptly in the street when the car in front of him braked suddenly for the driver to hail someone he knew or for a gypsy cab to discharge passengers. It reminded me of Africa. The inefficiency and inconvenience that disturbed me less than the efficiency and convenience of the developed countries where the heart did not count, where nothing mattered more than how much money was made, how much lost.

The art gallery was three blocks south of a college named for an African American civil rights martyr, Medgar Evers. But the founders of the college had underestimated the tenacity of the West Indians, their persistence and determination. In 1989, almost all the
students were first- and second-generation West Indian Americans and the college was finding itself forced to adjust to a new music, a different rhythm, and an ambition focused less on breaking down the barriers of race than on removing the obstacles of class.

Marguerite came to the door to greet me. She was wearing a pale green fitted short-sleeved jacket over a long black-and-tan-print sarong not unlike the ones women in my home village wore. She looked lovely. I told her so. She smiled, took my hand, and led me inside.

It was a small place, the studio of an art framer that had been divided into two rooms: the front, where he received his clients, and the back, where he did his framing. That evening the countertop in the front room served as a bar and a table for hors d’oeuvres. People were huddled around it leaving a small corridor that led to the room where the paintings were exhibited. I saw Marguerite’s work immediately. It was not difficult to identify. There were three framed drawings, all in black and white. One was of a man, the other two of women. Light and shadows played across their faces and bodies, giving them an emotional poignancy that was startling in its realism.

“Do you like them?” Marguerite studied my face.

She had perfected the technique she was working on when I first met her, that she had told me was called chiaroscuro. “It looks like me.” I pointed to the drawing of the man.

“It is you. I started it years ago and finished it recently. I had to touch it up.”

It was me as I was twenty-five years ago, my skin firm, taut. No gray hair, none of the puffiness that had developed with age under my chin. But my eyes were sad. An old man’s eyes.

“Did I seem that unhappy when you knew me?”

“When I saw you again fifteen years ago. I never forgot the expression in your eyes when you told me about the accident.”

“The accident?” But in that instant I knew what she meant.

“I saw the pain in your eyes.”

“You cried with me.”

“I saw your courage, your pride. Your commitment, your decency.”

“You give me more credit than I’m due.”

“Oh, you’re due it. You’re due it.”

“I thought you had forgotten me.”

I had not intended to weaken so soon, to let her know so soon how anxious I was to be with her.

“An artist never forgets an image that makes an impression on her,” she said.

“An image? That’s all I was?” I spoke like an adolescent.

We had been standing in front of her drawing of me. A small group of people had collected behind us. She pulled me aside. “Go see the other work,” she said. She pointed to the wall behind me and, before I could respond, she walked away in the opposite direction.

For the rest of the evening she ignored me. Once I caught her eye and she smiled at me, but most of the time I saw only glimpses of her back as she stopped to talk to the people who had come to see her work. A young couple, assuming from the way I was dressed that I was an African of some stature, engaged me in a discussion about South Africa that became somewhat heated when some of their friends joined in. I was grateful for the distraction, but I felt abandoned by Marguerite, rejected, and it was only later, when the crowd thinned, and the couple had left with their friends, that, finding myself once again face-to-face with the portrait she had done of me, I allowed myself to take comfort in the evidence that she had not forgotten me, that even if all I was to her was an image for her art, she had not wiped me out of her mind.

Toward the end of the evening, just when I thought I would not get the chance to say good-bye to her before I left, she suddenly reappeared. She could give me a ride to my apartment, she said, if I could wait fifteen minutes longer. She lived in Long Island now, in a tiny house on the water. She could take the Midtown Tunnel on Thirty-fourth Street. It would be no trouble to drop me off.

It was the first sign she had given me all evening that she wanted to be with me. I sent my driver away and waited for her.

In the car we talked about her art. Her work was being exhibited more, she said. Even in Manhattan, though only in small galleries. But it was a beginning. I told her I wanted to buy the portrait she had done of me.

“I would never sell it to you,” she said. “I would give it to you. But I can’t right now. I need a collection. When I have enough of a collection I will give it to you.”

She spoke to me as if we were discussing a business transaction. She explained that there were advantages to having a number of works to show potential buyers. She did not want to seem like a Johnny-come-lately. It inspired confidence in the buyer if an artist had a collection, she said. She wanted to keep her best work until there was a demand for it in the market. Then, she informed me, it would fetch the price she wanted.

Nothing in her voice suggested any lingering romantic feelings that may have still remained in her heart, but yet I did not lose hope. I remembered the pressure of her fingers on my arm. I remembered that she had leaned her head on my chest when I had embraced her the night before. I did not despair.

When she stopped the car to let me out, I reached to kiss her. She resisted. She turned her lips away from my mouth and pushed me away from her, but I held her tightly in my arms and sought her lips again. She struggled, pushed me away again, but I kissed her again. And so we did three times—I kissing her, she pushing me away—until suddenly, when I least expected it, she yielded to me, her kiss so intense, I was taken aback, surprised, momentarily stunned. My lips froze, my heart raced, my knees turned to liquid. It was seconds before I recovered, before my lips thawed, before my mind accepted that she had kissed me, and when it did, I returned her kisses with the longing of twenty-five years, with the passion of a man who had tried to forget, who for twenty-five years had made a futile effort to blot out memory; who, no matter what he did, how much he had used work, family, friends to forget her, still remembered her, still loved her, still desired her.

With my mouth on hers, I reached feverishly for the buttons on
her jacket. She let me spread my fingers over her breasts; she let me hold them, caress them. She stopped me only when I slid my hand through the slit in her skirt searching for her thighs.

“Not here. Not now.” She clamped her fingers over my wrists.

But she was still yielding to me, still twisting her body away from the steering wheel toward me.

“Calm down. Calm down.”

I remembered the words we said to each other that first time.

“Calm down. Calm down.”

The words did not reach my lips.

We were parked on the street near the corner of Thirty-eighth Street and Fifth Avenue. Cars slowed down past us to stop at the traffic light, people walked inches next to us. I did not care if they saw us.

I was a man who had grown accustomed to the caution of the diplomatic world. When I traveled outside of my country, I made it a point not to eat in the same place twice, not to enter my hotel at a predictable time. I was always aware of the people around me. I knew who stood at my side, at my back. In the years since I first met Marguerite, I had learned how to measure my words, my actions. I left no tracks to be traced, nothing for the blackmailer. Nothing for the person who could twist my words for his purposes, who could find the skeletons in my closet where I had buried them. Yet here I was, former ambassador, member of a prestigious African delegation sent on a mission to the UN for the liberation of Mandela, the overthrow of apartheid; here I was, husband of a faithful wife for twenty-eight years, admired father, role model. Here I was sitting in a car at a busy intersection in Manhattan, off Fifth Avenue, my mouth on the breast of a woman who was not my wife, my hand between her thighs, desperately clinging to her as if my life depended on her—on her love, on her desire for me.

Marguerite would say afterwards, she had experienced an epiphany. “A sudden clarity of feelings I must have denied for years. I knew at that moment that it was you I first loved. You I always loved. You I will love forever. I yielded to that realization. I did not fight it.”

But she did not come up to my apartment that night though I
begged her to, though I promised that we would not make love unless she wanted to.

She needed to go home, she said. She needed to catch her breath, to breathe before she drowned, before she lost herself irrevocably in me again. It had come too quickly, too suddenly. But she would not refuse me. Ever again.

“Come, spend the weekend with me,” she said. “You win.”

I
took the train to Long Island. Marguerite picked me up at her station. I brought her red roses. I would bring her red roses the next time I saw her. One week later, when she was sure I knew she loved me, she asked me not to bring her red roses again.

“It makes me feel like a courtesan. Your mistress. I am more to you than a mistress.”

We had been together again for just seven days and she knew that already.

But that first time when I brought her red roses, I had taken a risk for her that was more than the risk a man takes for a woman with whom he knows he would have only an affair, a temporary arrangement, sexual and nothing more.

I had had a meeting that afternoon with the UN ambassador from the United States. It was a meeting that my team had planned for weeks. We wanted a clear understanding of the extent of the U.S. commitment to the unconditional suffrage of all black people in South Africa. We were aware of the fears of the white world. We knew of the nightmares that terrorized even their waking hours: the specter of the masses of black people free at last. Liberated.
Armed
.

For decades white South Africa had unleashed indescribable cruelties upon its black fellow citizens—insufferable oppression, torture, humiliation. Now white South Africans were terrified. They knew that that kind of suffering demanded not simply justice, but revenge. This was not America. This was not England. Black people in South Africa were not in the minority. Only brute force, they believed, guns—weapons blacks could not afford—had been able to stop them from massacring their torturers. White South Africa was afraid to shut its eyes, afraid to sleep. What if the locks to the prisons where they had penned black people were removed? What if their passes were destroyed? The ones they had created to herd black people into slums, to rope them out of the areas where they had built their sprawling houses? Where their children played? They had let black people in, of course, to work in their kitchens, to dig their ditches, to empty their garbage, their refuse, but what if?
What if?