Discretion (31 page)

The men on my team said I seemed distracted. That my mind strayed. Once, in the middle of a discussion, I left the room abruptly. I had remembered that Marguerite told me she liked cashews. I wanted to bring her cashews when I came to her house that night. I wanted to get them before I left the UN. I did not want to miss the train to Long Island. I did not want to be late.

I felt Bala Keye’s eyes on me when I came back to the room, a brown paper bag clutched in my hand.

Be careful, Oufoula, his eyes seemed to say to me. I know your secret.

It was that evening, the evening I brought cashews for Marguerite, that she told me that she had spoken to Catherine.

“What? Here in New York?”

“She’s moved to Canada,” she said.

“Why didn’t you tell me?”

“Catherine said she wasn’t sure you liked her.”

I was sitting opposite Marguerite at the table. She had made dinner for me. Steak. It was the red meat I most enjoyed. She had bought it at the butcher shop, not at the supermarket. I saw the plain white paper wrapping stuffed in the kitchen garbage can. I had walked out of an important meeting to get cashews for her. She had put aside her paintings to go to the butcher for me.

Private lives spilling into public lives: we had allowed personal feelings to affect the work we did, the work we had to do. We did not care. It did not matter to us that we had abandoned the safeguards we had constructed to protect ourselves. That I had abandoned the safeguard I had constructed after Mulenga, the caution I practiced after I understood the power of the passion that had taken my mother’s life. Her lover’s life. I was in love. We were in love. Love did not allow us to see much beyond ourselves. Love colored everything beyond ourselves so that we accepted the delusion: we could work, we could love each other. Our love would not hurt our work.

“Well, do you like her?” she asked me.

I could see tiny quivers gathering in the corners of her mouth. I did not know why they were there.

“Yes,” I said. “Of course,” I said.

“She does not think so. She said you did not answer her letter.”

The time we had left together was too short for lies. I knew what letter she was talking about. It was a long time ago, but I remembered.

“Her husband was a brutal man,” I said. “I did not know what he would do to her if he knew she had asked me for help. If he knew she had told me about him.”

Marguerite studied my face. “Catherine warned me that there were cultural differences between us that I could never patch together. You are a macho man. Both of you are macho men.”

“I didn’t think you’d buy that stereotype.” I said it with a sneer.

“Stereotype? I am calling you what you are.”

“Am I a macho man? Have I treated you like a macho man? Can you compare me with Catherine’s husband?”

She was too angry to answer me. She got up from the table and walked toward the kitchen.

“It would have made no difference if I had spoken to him,” I said to her retreating back, already regretting my sneer, my foolhardy harshness. “I could have made things worse between them.”

“How much worse than losing her child?” She turned and faced me. There was no love for me in her eyes. She knew what she had said. She knew it would hurt me. She knew she would trigger memories of the children I had lost—my children who had died.

“Catherine said you were an ambitious man. A cautious man. You weighed the consequences of all you did. Even the friendships you made.”

“Do you believe that, Marguerite?”

“She said you made no enemies. She said people like you because you make it your business to make them like you. You cultivate them like plants. You water them. You court them.”

“And you believe her?”

“Did you court me, too, Oufoula? Was I a plant you nurtured, too, Oufoula?”

“Think about what you’re saying, Marguerite. Words count. They poison the air.”

“Was I R and R to you?”

“R and R?”

“Rest and recreation. Did you need someone to screw when you came to New York? Is that why you looked me up?”

“Stop this, Marguerite. What has got into you?”

“Well, did you?”

“Look in your heart, Marguerite. Does your heart tell you that what you’re saying is true? I love you, Marguerite. I am in love with you. I have been in love with you from the very first moment I saw you. I have never stopped loving you.”

She sat down. The quivers around her mouth intensified. Tears welled in her eyes.

“You know what I said is true. With your head, your heart, and your soul, you know that.” I came close to her.

“Catherine said that if you were Adam you would never have taken the apple from Eve.” She wiped away a tear that had dripped silently down her cheek. “She said you would have saved the whole human race from sin.” She laughed. It was a bitter laugh.

“I would have taken the apple if you had given it to me,” I said.

I think it was the seriousness of my tone that stopped her, that changed the colors in her eyes, that took the edge off her anger.

“Catherine said when you go back to Africa, you’ll be a diplomat again.”

Those were the words we had avoided, the words we had not wanted to speak.
When you go back to Africa
. We were afraid of what would happen to us when my time in New York was up.

I could not look at her. “I do not know what I will do when I go back to Africa,” I said.

That night we did not make love. We hardly slept. We lay quiet in each other’s arms, shutting out the words we did not want to hear, stilling them on our tongues.

“I didn’t mean to hurt you,” she said.

“I know.”

“I know you loved your children.”

“I know.”

“I know you miss them.”

“I know.”

But she would become angry with me again. Again, she would say words to me she would regret. She would accuse me of not loving her. She would know as she said those words that all she said was false. But she did not have the courage yet to say the words she wanted to say, the words I feared.

“Do you think that what we are doing is a sin?”

This was the first question Marguerite asked me when we woke up that morning. I was not ready for it.

“Oh, Marguerite,” I said, and pulled her to me.

“Well, do you?”

“Marguerite, please.”

She pushed my arms away and swung her legs off the bed. I shut my eyes and turned to the other side. I could hear her shuffling the papers in the large bag she carried to her classes.

“It says here in the Bible, ‘Thou shalt not commit adultery.’ ”

She climbed back on the bed and hovered over me. “Do you see it? Did you read it? Here. Here in the Bible.”

I opened my eyes. Her face was clouded, dark. Her breasts hung inches above my face. I wanted to touch them, to caress them, to lick my tongue on the dark circles around her nipples. These were the breasts I had loved, I had kissed. I had drunk from these chalices, I had received her sacrament of love. Now these breasts were my accusers, pointing their fleshy globules at me, condemning me.

She straddled me. She dug her knees into the mattress on either side of me. She waved the Bible above me. It grazed my nose.

“Are we sinners? Tell me, Oufoula, are we sinners?”

I grabbed her wrists, held them still, bound them in one hand,
and with the other I took the Bible away from her. “This is not the place,” I said.

“Why isn’t it the place?” She struggled with me.

I reached past her. “Leave it there, Marguerite.” I put the Bible on the table next to the bed and loosened my hold on her.

She lurched for the Bible again. “Why can’t I have it?”

I pulled her back to the bed with me.

“Give it to me.” She flung out her arms and struck me. “Give it back to me, Oufoula.” She struck me again.

“Stop, Marguerite.” I bound her hands again.

“Because it’s too holy? Is that it? It’s too holy to be on the bed with us. Tell me, Oufoula, is it too holy to be on the bed with us because we are sinners?”

“Marguerite, stop.”

“I want to know what you think, Oufoula.”

“What is it you want to know, Marguerite?”

“I want to know if you think what we are doing is a sin.”

I released her. “I love you, Marguerite.”

“Is it a sin, Oufoula?”

“I adore you, Marguerite.” I was kissing her now, clasping her face between my hands, kissing her eyes, her nose, her cheeks, her mouth. “No more. I adore you. I adore you.”

She struggled some more. I held her tightly until she was spent and her head fell in the well of my shoulder. “I found the Bible in your apartment,” she said. Her words were muffled against my neck. “It was in the drawer of the table next to your bed.” She looked up at me. “Do you read it?”

“Yes,” I said.

“Do you take it with you wherever you go?”

“When I travel,” I said.

“Do you read it every day?”

“When I get a chance,” I said.

It was a habit formed out of gratitude in the mission school when I wanted to please those who had saved me from the rejection of an indifferent father, the shame of a dishonorable mother. I
had followed their rituals; their rituals became my rituals, habits not easily shaken. I had become accustomed to sleeping with my Bible next to me. I took it wherever I went. I took it with me to New York.

“But you won’t read it before you go to bed with me? Is that it, Oufoula?”

I kissed her again. “No more, Marguerite.”

“Because you know you are breaking God’s commandment. Is that why you don’t read it before you go to bed with me?”

“I am in love with you, Marguerite.”

I reached to kiss her mouth again. She turned her head away from me. “Don’t you see the contradiction?”

“People in love don’t look for contradictions, Marguerite. I had you once and then I lost you. I won’t lose you again.”

“You have a wife.”

“I am in love with you.”

“What about your wife?”

“I am in love with you, Marguerite.”

I seemed to have convinced her, or perhaps it was simply exhaustion that made her end her fight with me, but I knew this would not be the last time we would have such a quarrel. Our days were becoming fewer. We were frantic. We were desperate. We needed answers. We needed to know what next.
What next, after I left?
We were afraid of what next. She was afraid to ask me more questions about my wife. I did not want to answer questions about my wife.

I had said to her I would be with her forever. I had not wanted to know the consequence. I wanted only the thought of forever with her in my mind—forever, nothing else.

Before she stirred out of my arms again, she whispered to me, “Will we go to Hell?”

I had been taught the answer to that question in my mission school. It did not seem right now. It did not seem possible that what we had done, what we were doing, what I hoped we would continue to do, could displease a merciful God. And yet I knew it was one of His commandments. She was right. I could not read my
Bible when she was in the bed next to me. I could not have it visible, witness to my love for her. I hid it in my drawer. Had habit infiltrated my conscience? But I did not feel we had sinned. Nothing in my soul told me we had sinned.

In the days that followed, Marguerite was tortured by guilt that was brought on by anxiety, our refusal to confront the reality of the diminishing days, the little time we had left together. It gave her no respite, no release.

“I left Harold,” she said to me one morning, “because he had an affair.”

“You left Harold, you told me, because you did not love him.”

“Yes, but I would have stayed with him if he had been faithful to his vows.”

“You said you would have stayed with him if you loved him.”

“I would have loved him if he had kept his word. I kept mine.”

“Marguerite, you did not love him. You could not have made yourself love him.”

“Not the way we love each other. But I could have loved him enough for a marriage. Marriage,” she said, “is not about passion. It’s about love. Security. If he had not broken the contract he had made with me, I could have had that kind of love for him. I wanted to love him when I married him. Lasting love is in the will, not in the heart. I could have willed myself to love him.”

She could have been speaking of my marriage to Nerida. I did not love Nerida when I married her. There was no passion between us. There never was. But I came to love her. I loved her kindness to me, her commitment to me, her loyalty. No matter what happened in my life, Nerida was there for me. She was my comfort, my support, the net to hold me if I fell. She had given me children. A family. How could I not love her? Yes, I agreed with Marguerite, marriage is not about passion. It is about the willingness to love. It is about commitment, security. I did not want to lose the security I had with Nerida, the reassurance that the ground would never shift beneath my feet, that nothing would change.

“We had been married only six months when Harold was unfaithful to me,” Marguerite was saying to me now. “He admitted it
after I found out and confronted him with it. For eighteen years I lived with the pretense I had forgiven him, forgotten about it. But I never did. Sometimes I actually made myself believe the lie that I could not love him because he did not appreciate my art. But that was not the reason I could not love him, I could not bend my will to make myself love him. It took me eighteen years to admit to myself that I never would, that his betrayal of me had shattered our marriage irrevocably.

“Marriage is about fidelity, not just sexual fidelity. It is about trust. It is about believing in the word of your spouse. I give you my word that I will honor the terms of our contract, you give me your word you’ll do the same. When that word is broken, the contract is broken, the marriage is broken. You may continue to live together, you may be friends, lovers, parents, but without that word you are not husband and wife.

“If there is any advice I have for my son, it is that no matter what he does, he must be careful not to push Humpty Dumpty over the wall. A woman will take a lot for a man. You can push her close to the edge. But push her over and she cracks, and all the king’s horses and all the king’s men cannot put her together again. My marriage was cracked. It was cracked for me in the first six months when Harold had his first affair.”