Discretion (33 page)

We boast of our children, of the future they could give us, when the inevitability of that end terrifies us. We ward off the darkness with the light of their possibilities. We bore others with our incessant talk of them, even of our children who have disappointed us. For they, too, mask the truth we cannot face. They, too, can give us the illusion of vigor, of purpose, of meaning. They, too, can substitute for passion when passion has eluded us.

But I had passion now with Marguerite. I did not need an illusion, a substitute. I could set my children free. I could let them fly. Marguerite gave meaning to my life, purpose to my existence.

I listened to Nerida, thinking this. Thinking that perhaps this was the glue that held our marriage together. Thinking it was our son, it was our daughters. Thinking that this was our end. We had reached it. Thinking that I wanted more. I wanted passion, real passion, not a substitute, not an illusion. Thinking I did not know how I would be able to sleep next to her when it was Marguerite I longed for, how I could bear to have her body touch mine when it was Marguerite I desired, when it was she I wanted in bed with me. Thinking I did not know what I would do if Nerida wanted to make love to me.

But Nerida did not want to make love to me. She did not want me to make love to her. She wanted only what she had wanted in the last few years—my friendship. And she wanted to remind me that we shared a family. She wanted me to know I belonged to her.

Perhaps Bala Keye had advised her to do this—to speak to me about my children, to remind me that she was their mother. She was my wife. I was their father. I was her husband. I was bound to
her by family, by tradition, by my love for Africa, by everything that was important to me. Yet my awareness of these ties, these obligations, did not lessen my love for Marguerite. I adored her. I was desperate for her.

I had called Marguerite from my cellular phone at the airport while I waited for Nerida. Our conversation was brief. We did not speak of Nerida. I told her I would take the train to see her the next evening. We both knew I could not stay the night.

But Nerida had plans for me the next evening. She told me of them in the morning. Bala Keye had arranged a dinner party for her. All the African ambassadors to the UN and their wives would be there, she said. She did not seem surprised when I told her that I did not know of these plans.

My life had been so different with Marguerite. In the past six weeks I had grown accustomed to intimate dinners at her home or in small restaurants in Manhattan. I had forgotten these spectacles. I had managed to excuse myself from them except for the cocktail parties, and even those I treated as extensions of my work. I used them for meetings to make connections that would be useful for my work, for my country. I rarely socialized beyond these obligations, and no one made demands on me. But I was now the husband of Nerida, the daughter of a president. There would be expectations.

I called Marguerite to tell her I could not be with her. Her voice was even quieter than it had been on the phone the night before.

“When do you think we can see each other?” she asked me.

“Tomorrow,” I said.

Tomorrow was Saturday. I told her I would take the train to her house in the morning.

“I’ll make lunch,” she said.

But Saturday came and I did not have lunch with her. I could not. Bala Keye had arranged for Nerida and me to go with him to Washington. Jesse Jackson was speaking at a rally for Mandela that day. Nerida wanted to be there. It was impossible to refuse her.

Marguerite did not answer the phone when I called to tell her
that I could not meet her for lunch. Like a coward I was grateful. Like a coward I left her the message I was afraid to deliver in person: that I had to go to Washington, that I had to accompany my wife. I did not think I could bear to hear the sadness in her voice, the doubt that was surely growing in her heart.

Answering machines have this usefulness. They give us reprieve when we lack the courage to face the response we know will bring us discomfort; worse, will cause us pain: sighs, tears we are responsible for, accusations we deserve. But there would be no tears from Marguerite, no accusations, only acceptance, an acknowledgment of the unspoken truth: that I could not go to lunch with her because I was with my wife and my wife had asked me to go with her to Washington.

The night I came back from Washington my dream of Marguerite returned again. I woke up with a start, my heart bounding in my chest.

“What? What?” Nerida sat up on the bed and put her arms around me.

I flinched from her touch.

“I have to get some air,” I said.

Before she lay back down again, she asked me, “Is it the same dream, Oufoula?”

She did not wait for my answer. She shut her eyes and pulled the blanket over her head.

But it was not the same dream. I dreamt of Marguerite but I dreamt of her as she was with me now. I was holding her in my arms. She had raised her head to kiss me, but the moment our lips met she began to fade. Frantic, I tried to bind her to me, to hold her, but her body passed through my arms like a ghost and then vanished altogether. I woke up in terror.

I called Marguerite from the street, huddled against the wind in the marble doorway of a store on Fifth Avenue. It was two o’clock in the morning. I had on a pair of black slacks and a gray sweater. Over these, I wore my navy trench coat. I could have been a drug dealer with the phone on my ear, my back to the street, a thief or a common criminal. The police had profiles on men who looked like
me, black men with dark skin seen in places they were not expected to be, at times that would have brought them there for one reason alone. No one would have believed I was an ambassador, that in parts of Africa I was a valuable man, that I was the head of a distinguished delegation of Africans who had come to the UN to secure the freedom of Mandela, the freedom of Black South Africa. But my safety and my reputation were insignificant to me now next to my need to speak to Marguerite, to hear her voice, to know she was alive. To know she was still mine.

Five weeks ago I would not have taken that chance. I would not have gone out late at night without my driver. But five weeks ago I had not fallen in love again with Marguerite. Five weeks ago I had been able to live without her. Now I could not imagine how I could.

“Oufoula. Where are you?” Despair tinged her voice, anxiety giving way to loss of hope.

“In Manhattan. In the street outside my apartment.”

I heard her sigh.

“I woke up from a dream of you,” I said. “I could not go back to sleep until I talked to you.”

“I haven’t been sleeping either,” she said.

“I am miserable without you.”

“I am suffering, too.”

“I have to see you.”

“Don’t make any promises,” she said, her voice breaking my heart.

“I couldn’t do anything about today. Did you hear my message?”

“I was here when you called.”

“Why didn’t you pick up the phone?”

“It would have made no difference. You were still going to Washington.”

“There were plans made I could not change.”

“We had plans, too.”

“Oh, Marguerite.”

“I understand, Oufoula. I understood from the beginning. I knew the situation I was in. I knew how things would go.”

“I’ll be there tomorrow.”

“Let’s not make plans.”

“I’ll take the eight o’clock train.”

“If you can.”

“I’ll be on it.”

“I don’t want to hope, Oufoula.”

“I’ll be there.”

“I’m painting tomorrow. If you come, you come. If not, it won’t matter.”

But it mattered. It mattered to me and I knew it mattered to her. Her surrender frightened me. The sudden plunge my heart took to the pit of my stomach frightened me.

“Tomorrow,” I said to her again. “Tomorrow.”

B
ala Keye had new plans for Nerida and me the next day. This time I did not let his plans interfere with mine. It was Sunday. I told Nerida I had important business to take care of. My mind was not calm enough to compose an excuse that would give the appearance of truth, that could quiet the questions I saw looming in her eyes:
Why Sunday? What is so important for you to leave me in the apartment alone Sunday?
I told her firmly I had to go and I left before her uncle arrived, before Bala Keye could unravel me with his eyes, with my duty, my obligations, my responsibilities.

Marguerite picked me up at the train station. In the car we did not speak. I did not touch her. Inside the house we ravished each other. I sucked her lips into my mouth. With one hand, I reached under her shirt for her breasts, and with the other, I slid my fingers into the waistband of her skirt. She fell to her knees on the floor.

There, in that narrow corridor between her kitchen and her bedroom, I ground myself into her. She cried out but she did not stop me. She raised her hips to me and pressed her hands into the small of my back. When my final shudders died, I lay on top of her, spent, drained, exhausted.

“Nobody needs to know,” Marguerite murmured into my chest. “It is a sin only if she knows. If she gets hurt.”

We began, then, to weave an intricate web of deceit, a web we designed because it made us feel good, made us feel righteous, because it assuaged our consciences, because we could use it to protect ourselves from the daggers that pricked our souls, the guilt that tortured us.

I offered her the salve we diplomats used when the truths we concealed did not allow us to sleep at nights. “Discretion,” I said to her, “is the better part of valor.”

She seized it and made us heroes.

“It takes courage to do what we are doing,” she said. “Sacrifice, also. I want to let the world know I love you. I want to shout it out in the streets. But I won’t. We won’t. For her sake, we won’t.”

When I got ready to leave her house she examined me, searched my clothes for strands of her hair, smelled the back of my neck for the scent of her body. But she had been careful. She had made me take a shower. She had given me a bar of Ivory soap.

“It’s unscented,” she said. “My soap will leave perfume on you. We have to be responsible.”

I did not make it to the front door. Before I could, we fell into each other’s arms, desire—perhaps it was fear—propelling us to make love again, to hold on to each other again. But she set the alarm on the clock, and when it rang, she prepared me for Nerida again: the shower, the inspection for loose strands of her hair, the scent of her perfume, the odor of her skin on mine.

“You’ll still be on time for dinner,” she said.

I left her house at four.

On the train, I made myself believe it could be done—that I could still remain married to Nerida and keep Marguerite as my other wife. All it would take would be valor, the strength of character to be discreet.

I could not deny it: I had broken the sixth commandment. The Old Testament would have condemned me. But what was sin in those dark days but public chaos, anarchy, that resulted when private ambitions, greed, desires broke free from their moorings and
spread a tidal wave of destruction across quarreling tribes earnestly trying to be a nation? There had to be laws and punishments inflicted so that treaties could be drawn, peace made. Contained.
Thou shalt not kill thy neighbor; Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s goods
. Thy neighbor’s goods were also his wife.

Marguerite and I would cause no such rift in the solidity of my marriage. We would keep our love contained within its private moorings. Nobody needs to know, she said. It would be a sin only if
she
knows.

I was so buoyed by the logic of this argument that in a giddy fit of self-delusion I leapt to a more fantastical one; one, paradoxically, more real because I had built it on a logic that required Nerida’s complicity. When the train pulled into Penn Station I had formulated it, sanctimonious now: Yes, one may be pardoned and retain the offense if the offense is not really an offense. If it hurts no one.

It was Nerida, I reasoned, who had never abandoned our traditional beliefs. It was she who believed our dead children had joined the ancestors, that their spirits lived with us.

Nerida had become a Christian for my sake. When we swore before the Christian priest that we would be faithful to each other, we had not made an oath before
her
priest. My Christian beliefs were not
her
beliefs. She was the daughter of her father’s third wife. Her mother lived in a house next to the houses of her father’s two other wives.

I reminded myself that we no longer slept in the same bedroom, that sex had become a burden to her, that she endured it only for my sake. Had Ibrahim Musima not explained the reason to me? I was skeptical then. Later, I felt guilty. Later, I believed I was to blame. Later, I knew Nerida had discovered that I was not free to love her with my whole heart, with my whole soul.

But now I wanted to believe Ibrahim Musima. I chose to believe Ibrahim Musima. It would be a relief to Nerida if I had another wife. Perhaps this is what she expected, what she was saying when she closed her doors to me: We were friends, partners. She was the first wife. She already had that honor. It was enough for her. She was tired. She would be happy to have me take a second wife.