Discretion (27 page)

Marguerite had folded her easel and stacked it against the wall to the side of the glass front door.

“When I work, I put it in the middle of the room under the skylight,” she told me. “That way, I get the light from the sun above me and in back of me.”

There was a wooden closet with large doors next to the easel. She told me she stored her tools there and her work. Apart from a striped gray and white couch that faced the bay, and her drawing table with two chairs that stood behind the couch, the only other furniture in the room was a matching pale gray armchair and a pine wood cocktail table on which she had placed a stack of large art books and an antique bronze metal jug filled with sunflowers.

I had noticed the sunflowers immediately when I entered the room. I knew she would not replace them with the roses I had given her. She had put my roses in a glass vase. After she set the table, she placed them on top of the linen tablecloth. They looked garish. Out of place. Vulgar. And yet I would bring her red roses two more times, until she stopped me. Until she told me that red roses were the flowers men brought to their mistresses—the peacock’s plumage meant to announce to the peahen the peacock’s readiness to straddle her: biology, the animal instinct, set irreversibly in motion.

“I’m not as colorful as I was before,” she was saying to me now, as though she sensed my need for an explanation, some way to
understand the change in her, to interpret the pale palette of colors before me.

“The sea tamed me. I couldn’t compete. Only blend.”

She said she kept her work in the closet to prevent it from being bleached by the sun. Most of it she took to her office. She had hung only one in the room. It was a large framed painting of bamboo trees. She had mounted it on the back wall, away from the windows on either side of the room.

“There was a pinkish carpet on the floor. At least I think pink was its original color, not red. Most of it had turned ivory, except in the places where I suppose there was furniture. I ripped it all out and sanded the floors. The wood turned out to be in good shape.”

“It looks great,” I said.

“I thought of staining it darker so it wouldn’t look so raw.”

“I like it,” I said.

She smiled approvingly at me.

The furnishings in her bedroom were sparse, too—simple: a bed with a plain white spread, a pale green rug on the bare wood floor, a night table covered with a white cloth edged with white embroidery. On the table was a clay pot of purple African lilies and a silver reading lamp next to a stack of books. Opposite the bed, bookshelves, some buckling under the weight of too many books, lined the walls from ceiling to floor. There was no TV in the room. She kept it in the kitchen, she said. It distracted her when she cooked.

“Maybe I shouldn’t be distracted.” She laughed.

We sat down to eat. She had made poached salmon. It was a fish Nerida knew I loved. She had prepared it the way Nerida knew I enjoyed it.

“I can make this better, I promise you.”

“Let me taste it,” I said. I put some salmon on my fork and brought it to my mouth. “Perfect. It couldn’t be better. Perfect.” I touched her hand. “Like you, Marguerite. Like everything about you.”

After dinner I searched the bookshelves in her bedroom looking for the books she once wanted me to read.

“Do you remember our quarrel over Achebe?”

She joined me.
“Things Fall Apart.”
She pulled it from the shelf.

“You were right, you know.” I took it from her hand. “I was a callow fellow. I expected too much from Africa. I was too ready to blame Africa alone for its problems.”

“I was also too young, too idealistic. I didn’t want to believe that colonialism had done such damage. I didn’t want to believe that it affected our minds, that it could distort our thinking. Fanon was right. Though the Europeans have gone, we still have to battle racism. The one we have internalized. Have you read him?”

I nodded. “A Martiniquan gave me a book of his.”

“Black Skin, White Masks?”

“Yes, that’s the one. But we should be easy on ourselves. We were both young, Marguerite. We didn’t know better.” I handed her back the Achebe novel.

“Do you still have the books I gave you?” She turned to put it on the shelf.

“They are in my bedroom,” I said. “Opposite to my bed on my bookshelves. Like yours are.” She was standing in front of me. I put my arms around her waist.

“Do you read them?”

“Sometimes,” I said. “The times when I missed you.”

She leaned her head against my chest. “Did you miss me?”

“There were times I missed you so much, I could not bear to have anyone around me.”

She faced me and put her arms around my neck. “And did you dream of me?”

“More times than I would want to tell you.”

She kissed my neck. “I want you to tell me,” she whispered. “Tell me how many times you dreamed of me.”

“There were nights I could not sleep, waking up from a dream about you.”

She kissed my mouth. “For twenty-five years? You dreamed about me for twenty-five years?”

“Twenty-five years. I never forgot you.”

She unbuttoned my shirt. “And what did you want to do when you dreamed about me?”

“I wanted to make love to you.”

“Like we used to?”

She had taken off my shirt. My fingers were now under her T-shirt, unfastening her bra. She pulled her arms through her sleeves, and I lifted her T-shirt over her head.

“Did you ever dream of me?” I asked her.

“Many times.”

“And did you want to make love to me?”

“Many times.”

I slid off the band that held up her hair and kissed her behind her ears.

“Even when I was married,” she said, “I dreamed of you.”

I cannot blame what followed on these words she said to me. I cannot say that because she mentioned her marriage, I was reminded of mine, and because I was reminded of mine, my body refused me. For the truth was I had not forgotten my marriage. I was the son of a long line of men who had had many wives, a man who had come to Christianity after he had passed the age of myth. So Marguerite had often told me before.

So it must have been.

So it was that I felt no guilt when I kissed Marguerite, no guilt when I lay naked next to her. And so it had to be that when my body failed me, when it could not do what my heart, my soul, every fiber of my being desperately pleaded with it to do, I could not say it was because I was married, because Marguerite reminded me that I already had one wife.

“Did this ever happen to you before?”

I could hear the tremors in her voice.

I lay on top of her naked, impotent. “No,” I said.

Tears gathered in the corners of her eyes. “It must be me. It must be me, then.”

“No. No.” I pulled her on top of me and hugged her. “It’s not you. It’s me.”

“It’s happened to me before,” she said. “Harold …”

I put my finger to her lips. “It’s not you. You are warm and beautiful and lovely.”

“It happened with Harold,” she said.

“I am not Harold.”

“He said it was me.”

“It’s not you. How could it be you? Look at you. You’re a sensual woman. Your skin is the color of the Sahara. Brown, warm, smooth. Not a blemish, not a mark. You smell like the desert. Like a flower in the desert.”

“He said it was me,” she repeated.

“Harold was a fool.”

“He said I was hard to love.”

“Harold was wrong.”

“He said—”

“You are lovable, Marguerite. You are easy to love.”

“Then why?

“It happens to men, you know. More than we are willing to admit. I’m just nervous. Anxious. It’s been too many years. Tomorrow,” I said. “You’ll see tomorrow. I’ll be okay tomorrow.”

I had told her the truth. I was anxious and nervous. But it had not happened to me before. Not in twenty-eight years of marriage to Nerida.

This was the fear every man lives with: the day he would lie on top of a beautiful woman and be betrayed by the body that had always served him. And yet I did not think that this was happening to me—the impotence men of my age feared. I knew that the stories we told of our wives’ declining libidos were a camouflage to mask our anxieties, our fear of losing our own sexuality, our potency. We sought reassurance from each other. We wanted to convince each other that the end had not come. And I did not think the end had come for me that night. I knew that when my heart had stopped racing, that when with each touch of Marguerite’s hand on my body my toes would stop tingling, my spine would stop quivering, I would have control of my body again.

“Let’s sleep,” I said. “It’s too much for one day. After so long.”

After so long. Not only with Marguerite, but also with Nerida. But I did not tell her that. That it had been six months since Nerida
had let me in her bed. I was overexcited, overstimulated. My desire for her too intense, my mind racing too fast for my body.

Yet I knew that when my body failed me, it was not only because anxiety had reduced me to jelly, not only because I had waited so long, wanted her for so long. Remnants of a hard-learned reticence had returned to plague me. When I lay naked, stretched out on top of her, trying in vain to make love to her, it came back to warn me: this thing I had taught myself to shun. I remembered the passion that took control of me with Mulenga, the passion that had driven me into my room in the mission school, a prisoner of my fantasies. The passion that drove me into my work when Marguerite ordered me to leave her apartment, the passion that sometimes made me a stranger in my house.

The passion that had cost my mother her life.

The passion that made the man who loved her put a razor to his throat.

“You are beautiful,” I whispered to Marguerite. “Desirable. Too desirable.”

She curled into my arms. “Tomorrow,” she said. She kissed the hair on my chest. “I love you,” she whispered.

Her words would make me sleep until morning, would make me forget. They allowed me to sleep without dreams that would wake me in a sweat. I had her with me now, the curves of her body locked into mine like the pieces of a puzzle. We were whole again. I was safe. The passion would not undo me.

In the morning I reached for her. The trembling under my skin had subsided, my blood ran warm again through my groin. We made love as we had before when we were young—with the same energy, the same intensity, the same passion. I remembered she liked my tongue in her navel. She remembered I liked hers in my ears. I remembered she loved when I kissed her neck. She remembered I loved when she licked my chest. When the moment came, she stretched out taut beneath me and pushed me away, shouting the same words, “Get off. Get off.” They had the same meaning. I braced myself and held on to her until the moan that had begun in
the back of her throat rolled out to her lips, gathered force, and she screamed. Screamed with the pleasure of it. Begged me not to stop, not to let go. “Wait. Wait. Not yet. Not yet.” And when I joined her, our voices became a symphony of the past restored.

Afterwards, she lay on her side next to me. My hand traveled across the sand dunes of her body, the crest of her breasts, the slope down to her waist, the incline up her hips. I kissed each inch I touched. I buried my face in the basin that cradled her navel.

“I like this,” I said. “I like this valley. I could lose myself in this valley.”

She kissed the top of my head and turned my face upwards to hers.

“And I love this,” she said. She covered my eyes with her mouth, first one eye, then the next, and she ran the tip of her tongue down the spread of my nose and across my lips. “And I love this.”

No one had ever kissed me like that. Not Nerida. No one. No one had ever made me
feel
so worthy, so handsome. She said she loved my wide nose, my thick lips, my nappy hair, my blue-black skin. I had a classical face, she said. Like a piece of African art.

“Tell me,” I asked her, grateful, wanting to give something back, “tell me your secret. How do you stay so beautiful, so young?”

“I am beautiful and young because you think I am beautiful and young.”

“No.” I looked into her eyes. “I tell you this objectively. Without bias. A man would have to be blind not to see how young you look, how beautiful.”

“I’m short,” she said. “Short people seem younger than they are.”

“I know short people your age. They don’t look as young as you.”

“Ah,” she said, “you mean menopausal women. You mean women who can no longer have babies. Women whose wombs have dried up.”

Discovered, I rubbed my chin across her hip to distract her.

“Ouch,” she said. “That hurts.”

“My stubble.”

“I take a tiny little pink pill every morning.” She would not let me off so easily from the slip I had made—Ibrahim Musima’s theories that had penetrated my defenses even as I rejected them.

“A what?”

“To keep me young.”

“A pill?”

“The elixir of life for the menopausal woman. It keeps us vibrant. HRT. Didn’t you hear of it? Hormone replacement therapy. It gives us the estrogen we lose after menopause. It makes us young again, our breasts firm. It makes our skin glow. It’s bad for us.”

“Bad?”

“Yes, bad.” She turned on her back. “Some say it can cause breast cancer.”

“Then why do you take it?”

“Vanity.”

“If it’s bad for you, throw it away.”

“You see this skin you like?” Her fingers brushed her cheek. “It would be dry without it.”

“I don’t love your skin. I love you.”

“All men say that, but we women know it’s the image you love.”

“Marguerite!” But as my tone of voice admonished her, my heart sank. What else did she know, my Marguerite?

“You can’t imagine how terrible a woman feels when she sees the disappointment in a man’s eyes that will inevitably be there, later if not sooner. Then she knows for certain that she is not who he has fantasized her to be.” Her eyes grew dark.

She was speaking about men in general, but still she frightened me. She had come too close to a truth I had lived. But there could be no comparison between her and my fantasy. She was infinitely more beautiful, her character immeasurably more admirable.