Discretion (32 page)

Did I crack my marriage, too, with my dreams—the days I sat morose, huddled in my armchair, with the books Marguerite had bought for me, the hours I spoke to no one? Nerida kept the children away from me those days when I wrapped myself in my memories of Marguerite. “Baba is in his mood,” she would say. Did it crack then? Or was it when I ran from her bed, my body trembling for Marguerite, my eyes burning with my longing?

Perhaps Marguerite was right. Perhaps the crack I had caused in my marriage was irreparable. Perhaps it was too late to make it whole again, to be a husband to Nerida, not just partner, friend, parent with her of our children.

The simplest of happenings, the most ordinary of events became lessons in morality for Marguerite in those days, allegories that
held larger personal meaning for us, revelations we both understood yet discarded.

Soon after Marguerite had turned a child’s nursery rhyme into a cautionary tale for my marriage, she would tell me another story and I would tell her another, and our stories would expose our hypocrisy, would reveal our fear of acting on the truth. We spoke the words of things we would not do, could not do, without ending our happiness, without making it impossible for us to remain as we were.

Marguerite had taken her car to the mechanic. She came back with a Sunday sermon for us both, a homily we knew too well, one we had passed on to others. A lesson in integrity and honesty we both professed to practice.

I had already told her my story, the story of an old man from my village who was renowned for his honesty. His job was to calculate the exchange of monies between my country and the one that bordered us. He was a simple man, a man without much schooling, but he had a gift for numbers. He could calculate fifty digits in his head, add and subtract them without paper. He was in charge of the small outpost on the border of my village. One day, when I was no more than twelve, I bought something in his shop. A piece of cloth for my aunt. I had saved the money I had earned from sweeping the floors of the mission school. I was proud to be able to buy this gift for my aunt, but I was prouder of the fact that I was first in my class in math. I excelled not only in arithmetic, but also in geometry and algebra. When I gave the man the French currency I had, I knew exactly how much it was worth in exchange for the currency we used for trading with the neighboring villages. But he gave me more than I thought he should. Principled, full of integrity, I argued with him. He stood his ground. He would not take back the money.

I thought it was his pride. He did not want to look foolish before a schoolboy, but I could do nothing to change his mind. Later, I found out I was wrong. The rate of exchange had gone up that morning. He had known that and he was too honest to cheat me.
Still, I insisted on giving him the money. I wanted to reward him for his honesty. It was a virtue I prized.

I told that story to Marguerite and she shared my awe of the man.

“There should be more people in the world like him,” she said.

We both believed we were among those few.

Marguerite’s story about her car mechanic was similar to mine. She had paid for the service on her car with her American Express card. When she came home, she realized that the mechanic had made a mistake. He had undercharged her by a hundred dollars. She wanted to return the money.

“He was a white man from the North Shore where the rich people lived. He couldn’t believe a black woman was challenging him. I don’t know what baffled him more—that I was black and could count better than he could, or I was black and was honest enough to tell him I owed him money.

“I don’t think he wanted to see me after that. I offered to bring him the hundred dollars. He refused to accept it. He said he would take the loss. It was his fault, his carelessness.”

We were hypocrites, Marguerite and I, full of self-righteousness and pride for our honesty and integrity, but all the time we felt the tension between us, the truth hanging over us like a guillotine. We would have to run to save ourselves. Something had to happen to spare us. If we stayed where we were, the guillotine would fall down on our necks and chop off our heads.

Then something did happen, but it did not spare us. It forced us to confront the truth, to see ourselves as we were: so desperate to be with each other, so terrified that we could lose each other, we were willing to lie to ourselves and to each other, to do anything to avoid the moment, the choice that was always inevitable, that was always unavoidable, that was the consequence of our human condition: We cannot have it all. One or the other. The apple or the Garden.

Ten days before I was scheduled to leave, Nerida phoned me. She wanted to come to New York. She wanted to hear me speak at
a rally. She wanted to be in the thick of the excitement that was bubbling up in New York. Mandela was going to be free, she was certain of it. We were certain of it. She wanted to be present in the making of that great historical moment.

It was Bala Keye who had put those thoughts in her head. I had no proof, but there was no doubt in my mind. It was he who had told Nerida to come. He had seen me run to the train with red roses in my hand. He had seen me bring back a brown paper bag the day I walked out of a meeting in the middle of an important discussion. He had seen my eyes stray, lose focus. He had had to call my name three times once, when we were at dinner, before I acknowledged him. My soul had drifted to Marguerite.

I did not try to dissuade her. I did not ask her to stay in Africa. I knew she would guess the truth. She had figured out the truth when I left her bed. She would know now I did not want her here with me in New York. No excuse I could make—work, the pressure to make certain nothing endangered the release of Mandela, the little time I would have to spend with her—nothing I could say would fool her, persuade her to believe otherwise.

“I can get a flight in two days,” she said. “I called your office. It’s all arranged. Uncle took care of the details.”

Bala Keye, the man who had guessed my secret.

I did not tell Marguerite that night that Nerida was coming, that though there were just a few days left for us to be together, I could not spend them with her. That she could not come back again, here, to my apartment. That I could not wake up to see the mornings with her.

On the day Nerida arrived I did a stupid thing, a foolish and an immature thing. A cowardly thing. My excuse was my desperation, my fear of losing Marguerite, of losing Nerida.

I was a young boy wanting to bury his head in the sand like an ostrich. The storm would have passed when I looked up again. Everything would have settled into place. Nerida would still be my wife; Marguerite, the woman I loved, the woman I had begun to call my wife.

So, bargaining for a stay, I thought. So, deluding myself that I could forever postpone a decision I would have to make, I thought.

“Your colleague is here,” I said to Marguerite.

I had left her house that morning and had said nothing to her. Nothing about Nerida’s imminent arrival. Nothing, not even when we planned I would meet her at the theater that evening.

I was at the UN when I called her.

“My colleague?” she asked me. Unsuspecting Marguerite. Marguerite who did not want to know what I had to tell her.

“Yes, your colleague.”

“I don’t know any colleague of mine that you know.”

“Think, Marguerite.”

“A colleague you know?”

“Think.”

“Who?”

I heard the question stretch to a pause, and then quietly she acknowledged the truth.

“Your wife?”

Her voice was soft. Gentle. There was no accusation in it, no condemnation.

“She’s coming tonight,” I said.

“Did you just find out?”

“No,” I confessed, shame forcing the truth from me at last. “I’ve known it for two days.”

My words traveled without sound the distance to her heart. When she spoke to me again there was the same compassion, the same forgiveness in her voice as there was when I made her say what I was too much of a coward to say: that it was my wife who had arrived. My wife who was the colleague.

“It must have been hard for you to tell me.”

“Marguerite, you must believe me, I love you.”

I wanted to tell her that nothing had changed. That everything was the same. I wanted her to know I adored her.

“I know you do,” she said, but her voice was sad, lifeless.

“I will call you, Marguerite. Tonight, no matter what. I love you, Marguerite.”

No matter what
.

When she put down the phone those were the words that drummed in my head.
No matter what
. No matter the inevitable. No matter that I knew what was going to happen. What I could not stop from happening.

I waited for Nerida at the airport, my head pounding with the impossibility of it: of Nerida’s head on the pillow where Marguerite had laid hers; of Nerida’s body on the bed where Marguerite and I had made love; of Nerida’s presence in the apartment that was Marguerite’s and mine.

Marguerite had sat on the edge of the bathtub and watched me shave. I had seen her brush her teeth, swab cotton pads across her eyes and mouth, remove makeup from her face. The apartment was our home, our sanctuary. I had said I loved her there. She had said she loved me there. I could not imagine it. I could not make my mind conceive of Nerida in that place.

I
t is odd how strange familiar people can seem—different—as if you had never known them, as if you had never seen their secret parts, seen them after they had removed their clothes, their makeup, the things they did to camouflage their flaws, to disguise the parts of themselves they hid from the world; as if every movement of theirs, every expression, every curve and line of their bodies was not as known to you as your own, as indelibly printed on your memory as your own.

I had woken more than ten thousand mornings with Nerida, slept with her as many nights, and yet at the airport the person who broke away from the stream of passengers herded through the exit corridor from the plane was a stranger to me.

She hurried toward me, this person, wearing the traditional clothes of my country: the blue print sarong I had known Nerida to wear and that I loved, the matching headdress wrapped exquisitely around her head framing a face I knew, a face I loved, the same bright smile I had seen on Nerida’s lips, the same graceful stride that was distinctly hers, the same polished black skin, wide eyes, purple-stained mouth. She was as beautiful as I remembered Nerida to be, the fullness of her hips and breasts not unattractive to me.

When Marguerite had asked to see a photograph of Nerida I had not shown it to her, but it was not because I did not think Nerida beautiful. It was because I wanted to protect her. Because I loved her. Because in some foolish way I wanted to spare her the pain she would feel if she knew that Marguerite was witness to how time had not been as kind to her. It was because when I saw Marguerite, her body slim and youthful, her face as lovely as it was when first I saw her, I felt embarrassed for Nerida.

I walked now toward this woman who was smiling at me, opening her arms to me, and I thought: I could not have made love to this woman and have forgotten. I could not have lain naked next to her and find it now so impossible to recall.

We talked in the car, this woman and I. We talked about my work. We talked about Mandela. My lips formed words to answer questions I barely heard, my mind struggling to quiet my heart, to remind it that this was my wife, Nerida, the mother of my children, the woman I loved, the woman who had loved me for more than twenty-eight years.

I wore pajamas to bed that night. I had not worn pajamas to bed once since I had been with Marguerite. I wore them now as armor, as a barrier to separate myself from Nerida. They were still folded and pressed as Nerida had instructed our housekeeper to do. I unfolded them and put them on.

Nerida’s eyes followed me, but her thoughts, had she guessed the ones on my mind, remained silent on her tongue. My son had a new girlfriend, she said.
National Geographic
had approached one of my twin daughters to publish the photographs she had taken of the last of the African nomads of the Sahara; my other daughter was still at the top of her class. My son was, too. Nothing had changed. My children were good, successful. They were still making us proud.

When I was in Africa, I boasted of my children. I would talk of them for hours if my listener allowed me. I would tell of their achievements, I would show off their photographs. Yet except for that first evening when we had dinner together, neither Marguerite nor I talked much about our children, though we loved them.

I think now that this is what happens to men like me, men past fifty, men who wake up to mornings that no longer offer the promise of challenge, men for whom the slide down to familiar routes is inexorable, for whom domestic routines have become predictable. We make icons of our children, then. We kneel at their feet and worship them. They give meaning to our meaningless lives, purpose, when we look into the future and darkness beckons us:
Come. There is nothing left to conquer. Your victory days are over
.