Discretion (34 page)

I would tell her, I said to myself, that I loved Marguerite, that I wanted to make Marguerite my wife, that I would not leave her, that she would remain my wife, my first wife.

I felt righteousness. I felt guiltless. In the taxi to the apartment I told myself that I would say this to Nerida the moment I saw her, but even before I saw her, in the street outside the apartment building where I lived, where Nerida was waiting for me, the truth was stripping away the lies and half-truths I had used to delude myself, and in the hallway of the building I found myself face-to-face with the horror of the realization that Catherine’s prophecy for me had been fulfilled:
When you lie, you’ll believe you’re telling the truth. From the core of your being, you’ll think you haven’t lied
. It had come to pass that night. I had arrived at that state she had predicted for me. I had told myself lies and believed I had spoken the truth. My heart raced in fear of the person I had become.

I saw Bala Keye immediately when I opened the door to my apartment, and relief washed over me. He was there to rescue me.

“You look tired. Worn out.” Nerida was at the door to let me in.

I turned from her and hurried to the bedroom.

Behind the closed bedroom door I looked into the mirror. The face I saw there was the face of a man who had been snatched from the jaws of death. The pupils in the eyes were dilated, the skin ashen, the lips dry. I was a man who had been saved from suicide, a man who had been spared the fatal consequences of my mother’s tragic choice.

“Is it the meetings, Oufoula?” Bala Keye knocked on the bedroom door.

I rubbed life into my eyes. I prepared myself to enter my world, the world I inhabited with Nerida, the world that would not demand my life, that would not ask for my soul.

“Oufoula seems to be bored with us,” he said the moment I came out of the bedroom and he was sure I would hear him. “Maybe we are not sophisticated enough or educated enough.”

I tried to distract him. “Did you have dinner?”

But his eyes stayed on me. “We were waiting for you.”

“Uncle told me I should wait,” said Nerida. “He said you would be back soon.”

“Yes. I imagine it did not take long, Oufoula, that business I gave you to do?” He stood close to me and winked.

I knew what he was doing. He was turning Marguerite into a dirty secret. He was lumping her with his concubines, the women who were no more to him than vessels for his lust. Yet I did not stop him. I allowed him to tell this lie for me. I allowed him to save me. I did not let shame draw me back down to my mother’s world, where I would have lost all—my reputation, my honor, the respect I had as a family man, a devoted husband, a committed father.

“Did you finish it?” he asked me.

I nodded my head.

“Good. Good.” He turned to Nerida. “Oufoula was so bored with us at our meeting last week, he couldn’t wait for me to answer a question Awani asked me. He got up and walked right out of the room. What was it, Oufoula? Were we that boring?” He was smiling at me, an oily smile that sickened me. “Where did you have to go that was so important?”

“I had heard your answer to that question already,” I said. I looked away from him in Nerida’s direction. “Will dinner be ready soon?” I asked her.

“Of course.” She touched her uncle’s arm. “He’s hungry, Uncle. Can’t you see that? We’ll talk at dinner.” She walked into the kitchen.

“I think he went to the store,” Bala Keye answered his own question. “What was it that couldn’t wait until the meeting ended? What did you have to buy, Oufoula?”

He followed me when I went to the other side of the room.

“He came back with a brown paper bag in his hand.” He raised his voice. I knew Nerida heard him, but she did not respond. He bent toward me. “What was in that paper bag, Oufoula?” He whispered the question in my ear.

I called out to Nerida. “How much longer? Do I have time for a shower?”

“You have to be more careful, Oufoula.” Bala Keye was still hovering at my shoulders.

Nerida saved me. “No,” she answered my question, “we are going to eat now. Enough about business.” She handed me a steaming dish of rice. “Can’t this wait, Uncle?”

But Nerida knew it was not business that had caused Bala Keye to stand close to me, that had made my face turn ashen. She had become a diplomat. She had learned, perhaps from me, to be discreet.

At the table Bala Keye threw his last punches at me. I ducked but they landed on me all the same.

“You have a humble husband, Nerida. A man who does not ask for much.”

I smiled at him. “I do not need much,” I said.

“My brother says you show the world that Africa can come out of the bush. He says he made the right choice when he took you out of the bush.”

He was threatening me. It was a threat that carried no weight except for the weight of my debt to his brother, the gratitude I owed him for taking me out of the mission school, for opening doors for me to the life I now lived.

“I owe my good fortune to your brother,” I said.

“He says you represent the possibilities of Africa. My brother does things the old way, the way we used to.” He shook his head in mock regret. “Not that I think having many wives is wrong.” He cut into the meat on his plate. “I myself have three wives. I wouldn’t want to give up any of them.” He looked up at Nerida. “And you, niece,” he said, “you wouldn’t be here at all if my brother had not had a third wife.”

I knew where he was heading before he would make it plain for me.

“My brother may not be a modern man, but he wants the world to see him as a modern leader of a modern Africa. You and Oufoula, you do that for him. You, especially, Oufoula.” He pointed his fork at me. “You show the world that Africa is ready for the twenty-first century. Africa can be modern like you.”

He was calling in his chips. He was saying to me that I could not
embarrass his brother. I could not betray him. I could not be so ungrateful to him. I was the modern African. I had one wife. I followed a European religion. It was said I understood the European logic. I was proof that there was a generation of new Africans ready to lead the world. We did not know that that time would come soon. We did not know that Mandela would become the president of South Africa, that four years before the decade would end, a Ghanian would be head of the United Nations.

After dinner, he draped his arm across my shoulder. “We all bear a burden for Africa,” he said, certain I had understood the message behind his compliments to me. “Yours is a light one.” His body quivered with satisfaction.

I did not know if Nerida read between his words and guessed the truth, but when she asked me to go with her to the museum the next day, I did not protest. I did not object, either, when she said we had to go to a reception at the UN that afternoon. It was only when I returned to the apartment late that night that I remembered it was Monday. On Mondays I met Marguerite after class at the New School. On Mondays Marguerite and I had dinner at Knickerbocker’s.

I
knew you would not come. All yesterday I had this feeling. I was distracted in my class. Twice I had to leave the room to go to the bathroom to compose myself. I’m not like that, Oufoula. I am a woman who has control over her feelings. You are unraveling me.”

I was out in the street before dawn to call her. When I remembered it was Monday, I was already in my pajamas. I did not wait to take them off. I pulled my pants over them and threw on my jacket. I told Nerida I needed to leave a message with the doorman for one of the men on my team who would be coming early in the morning to get it. Four times I called Marguerite before midnight, but she did not answer. I returned to my room and, unable to sleep, I waited for the dawn.

At four in the morning I was still sitting at the desk working on a paper on Mandela. Once, Nerida turned in her bed and asked me what I was doing. I told her the truth. It was that truth that made my lie in the morning convincing when I said to her that I needed to add something more to the message I had left with the doorman for Sangu last night.

“I called you four times,” I said to Marguerite.

“When?”

“When I called you the last time it was close to midnight.”

“I didn’t get home until one in the morning. I waited for you. I thought you had a meeting. Something. I thought you’d be late. I kept hoping you’d still come. When I didn’t see you at the school, I went to Knickerbocker’s. I thought you’d get there. Eventually.”

“Marguerite, I didn’t know …”

“I think the waiter felt sorry for me. He said he didn’t mind serving my table twice. He said I could order without you and he would come back again. But I couldn’t eat.”

“Oh, Marguerite.” They were the only words that came out of my mouth.

“I’m not that kind of person, Oufoula. Not now. Not since my divorce. I do not let men take over my life.”

“Marguerite, I will come tonight.”

“No. It doesn’t make sense. What will you say to her?”

“Leave that to me. Let me deal with that.”

“I like to know things. I like to plan. I don’t want another day of waiting.”

“I’ll come today.”

“No.”

“Why not, Marguerite?” I was begging her.

“You don’t know what plans they may have for you today.”

She said
they
, but we both knew whom she meant.

“I’ll change them.”

“Come on Saturday. You have your work. I don’t want to interfere with your work. I’ll have the time to do mine. You’ll do yours and then we’ll meet on Saturday. I don’t want to spend my time waiting and hoping.”

“Marguerite, I could work it out.”

“No. Let’s make it Saturday. I don’t want you to have to make too many excuses for my sake. I don’t want to cause you to raise suspicions. It would be better this way. We would both be calmer.”

How easily we had spoken of discretion. How easily we believed
that when we clothed it in flesh and blood, the abstract could still be real. Marguerite had wanted me to be careful. She would make the sacrifice, she said.
We
would. Everything would be okay so long as we kept our secret from Nerida, so long as we did not hurt her. Now she was beginning to understand the cost of our discretion. Now I wondered if she would find the price too high.

W
hy did you step out of your marriage?”

Marguerite and I had just made love on the rug on the floor of her living room when she asked me that question. I had come to her house on Saturday. It had not been difficult to get away. Nerida was happy to have me leave. I had spent the week with her doing what she wanted: going shopping, going to the movies, going to museums. Only once had I balked at one of her requests. She had asked me to take her to an art gallery.

“Why there?” I answered her swiftly, desperate to smother the memories that suddenly surfaced. “There are more interesting things we could do.”

But she insisted: “Didn’t you used to like visiting art galleries when we lived in Washington?”

It was positive proof that Bala Keye’s addition to our mission had not been accidental, that it was not the frivolous decision of a president who had gone soft in the head or in the heart. Our very first quarrel in those early years of our marriage had been over an art gallery, my insistence that we visit one, though that day not just she, but I, too, was exhausted from shopping. Such was my need
for Marguerite, for something, anything that would connect me to her.

Nerida excused me in the evenings when I joined my team for dinner with influential Africans, the ones with money who owned uranium mines and oil wells in Africa and who could threaten the pockets of powerful Americans and make them see the profit in bringing an end to apartheid. Work saved me then as it had saved me before. It distracted me, helped me suppress my longings for Marguerite, the doubts and fears that plagued me when she refused me, when she asked me to wait until Saturday, five days, before I could see her. It saved me, too, from Bala Keye. He knew that I spent my days with Nerida, my nights with him. It was difficult for him to fan suspicions, which he may have already planted in Nerida’s head, and which had caused her to demand my attention in ways she had long ago abandoned in Africa: the cocktail parties, the visits to museums, shopping. The trip to an art gallery. She still had not wanted me to make love to her and for that I was grateful.