Discretion (35 page)

On Saturday Nerida said she was tired. She did not want to go out. I told her I couldn’t stay with her because I had to meet with a group of students in Long Island who wanted to join our struggle to free Mandela. I was a man habituated to caution and the habit of caution led me instinctively to prepare this alibi in case I was seen, as I once was seen by Bala Keye, taking the train to Long Island.

It was a cool fall day, but the sun blazed through the glass sliding doors in Marguerite’s house and made us warm. We lay there naked, her head on my shoulders, facing the silken bay. A lone fisherman was making circles with his boat in front of us, prodding the bottom of the water with a long stick. He was looking for his crab baskets, Marguerite had told me. When she asked her question, I was watching him silently, letting the sun and the water and the reassurance of his single-mindedness lull me into a forgetfulness, into pretending that everything was the same as before, as before Nerida had come, before she had disturbed our Eden. Now Marguerite wanted me to answer her.

“I want to know,” she said. “Why did you step out of your marriage?”

I sat up, bracing myself for the beginning of another drop down the seesaw.

“I didn’t step out,” I said.

“What do you think you did, then?” She sat up, too, and faced me.

“We … this does not have anything to do with my marriage,” I said.

“What’s happening between us has everything to do with your marriage. Why did you step out of it?”

“I don’t know what you mean,” I said. But I knew where she wanted to take me.

“It’s I who don’t know what you mean. You are making love to me. I am not your wife. To me that means you have stepped out of your marriage.”

“I don’t see it that way,” I said.

“What way do you see it?” She brought her face close to mine. “You are married. You are supposed to make love to one woman, your wife. And here you are with me.”

“I am with you, but being with you is unrelated to being with my wife.”

I was going down with her, down to that place where more and more often we were finding ourselves—the place where I feared I would lose her, where she would force me to make a choice, a choice I could not make, a choice I was not prepared to make.

“Unrelated? How can you say unrelated?”

“You are two different people,” I said.

“You want to trap me with your words. I am asking you a simple question. Why? What went wrong? You told me she was a good mother. You told me she was a good wife. So why are you with me?”

“Because I never stopped loving you,” I said.

“You want me to believe you love two women. It is as simple as that, is it? Well, good. Fine. I believe you. I believe that it is possible for a person to love two people at the same time. But what I want to know is, why did you act on it?”

“Act on it?”

“Yes, act on it. You could have kept on loving me. You didn’t have to make love to me. Why did you cross that line?”

She was draining me, wearing me out. I answered her without subterfuge.

“I don’t see the lines you see, Marguerite. I don’t see the difference you make between loving you and making love to you. If there is a line, I crossed it the minute I fell in love with you. I did not feel that I had done something wrong when I fell in love with you and I do not feel so now. I had not planned to fall in love with you. It was not my intention. It happened.”

“But you
plan
now to make love to me? Isn’t it your
intention
to make love to me?”

“Making love to you is the expression of my love for you. To me it is only wrong if it is also wrong to love you.”

“What about your vow of fidelity to your wife?”

She had returned to the question she had asked me before, the one I had not answered when she wanted to know if I thought that making love to her was a sin. I still had no answer to give her. I was a Christian, but the obsession the missionaries had with the evils of sex always eluded me. As a boy I was fascinated with their god who rose from the dead. Their mystery of an incarnate spirit was not so removed from the beliefs of my people. But it had never made sense to me that this God would create such pleasure for us only to forbid us to enjoy it. I did not agree with O’Malley’s cynical theory about God’s duplicitous intentions, that God had given us desire for sex so that we could destroy ourselves, but it was easier to accept that than to believe that sexual intercourse between two people who loved each other was sinful.

“I was faithful to my love for you,” I said to Marguerite.

She stood up. “You’re playing games with me, Oufoula.”

“No, Marguerite,” I said. She forced me to look up at her, like a boy in the confessional.

“Then answer my question.”

“What is it you want to know?”

“What was wrong with your marriage? I do not care what you
say, you would not have acted on your love for me if nothing was wrong with your marriage. Why did you step out of it?”

It was then I told her that Nerida and I no longer slept in the same bedroom, but even as I told her that, I did not think it was the truthful answer to her question. I had never stepped out of my marriage to Nerida. I was not stepping out of it now. I felt as married to Nerida as I did the day I took her as a wife. True, there was no passion between us but there was everything else, everything by which I found my place in the world, by which I defined myself. With Nerida I was husband, father, head of a family—roles that gave confidence to those who assigned me other roles: spokesman for my country, arbitrator for other countries, head of a team of Africans on a mission to save South Africa. Marguerite would not understand that though I was unaware of the truth I spoke to her when I was a young man, when I was desperately in love with her, I still wanted Nerida as my wife, and I also wanted her as my other wife.

“What went wrong?” Marguerite was asking me again.

I told her that Nerida had lost interest in sex with me.

“Why?” She sat back down on the floor next to me, the rigidity in her face softening.

I gave her the answer Ibrahim Musima had given me, the answer I no longer believed. It was the easier answer to give her.

“Menopause,” I said.

“Menopause?”

“It made her lose interest,” I said.

She laughed at me.

“Where did you get that foolish idea?” she asked me. “I’m in menopause. I have not lost interest in sex.”

“You take those pills,” I said.

“You think it’s the pills?”

“That HRT, whatever,” I said.

“It has nothing to do with it. And I have stopped taking them. There. I stopped taking them after we talked.”

“You stopped taking them?”

“You said you’ll love me, you said you’ll want me even when my teeth fall out.”

“You did that for me?”

“I threw them away. I wasn’t sure of them anyhow.”

I kissed her on the mouth. She pushed me away. “Why did she leave your bed, Oufoula?” She was not finished with me.

I removed my arms from around her shoulders. “I was the one who left,” I said.

“Why?”

“I was dreaming of you.”

She was not ready for my answer. She was not prepared for her part in the answer to the question she had asked me. All her defiance left her when I implicated her in the erosion of my marriage. She leaned against me.

“We must be careful, Oufoula,” she said. Her voice was sad, her eyes misty. “We have to be cautious. We cannot let her know.”

Marguerite asked me no more questions that day but she would change places again on that seesaw when I spoke to her the next night. Before I left her house, I had made a call to my son. We spoke in French. Marguerite was sitting next to me on the sofa when I called him. She got up after we had spoken a few words to each other. I made no special note of her leaving. She had walked to the kitchen, I thought, to prepare dinner, but the next night when I called her, she would let me know why she had left, and the reason she gave me would cause a painful argument between us and lead us to that place of no return, that fork in the road that would demand that I go one way or the other, that I choose her or the life I had with Nerida.

W
hat is the meaning of
petite femme
?” Marguerite asked me soon after she answered the phone.

I sensed the danger immediately in her question.

“You know what it means.” I approached her cautiously.

“Does it mean ‘mistress’?”

“It could. But it is also a term of endearment.”

“But when a man says
ma petite femme
, he means his mistress, doesn’t he?”

“He could, but he could also mean his wife.”

“I am not your mistress, Oufoula.” Her voice was tense, strained. “I am too old to be your mistress. Too proud. I’ve worked too hard to be any man’s mistress.”

“What is it, Marguerite? What is wrong? Who said you were my mistress?”

“I heard you yesterday on the phone. I didn’t understand everything you said, but I heard you say
‘ma petite femme.’
You were telling your buddies you were at your mistress’s house. I am not your mistress.”

I could hear that her words came through clenched teeth.

“Marguerite, you are mistaken. You don’t understand. I would
not tell anybody about you. Not the people here with me. If I told anybody about you, it would be my friends back home.”

“I am not your mistress,” she repeated.

“I was talking to my son.”

“Your son?”

“I was speaking about his mother. Sometimes that is how I address her to him. Sometimes I say
‘ma petite femme’
and I am speaking about his mother.”

“You call his mother your mistress?”

“My little wife.”

I knew when I translated the words I had made matters worse, not better.

Marguerite began to cry. “This is not going to work, Oufoula. I don’t think I can handle this. I’m lying to myself. I’m a hypocrite. I can’t stand the lies I tell myself.”

“Marguerite, wait, wait till I come to your house. We can talk then. We can sort this out.”

“No. I have to say it now or I won’t get the courage to say it ever.”

She breathed in hard. Her voice was steady again when she spoke.

“I support women, Oufoula. I draw women. I paint women. Do you remember that time I told you that I believe women would have power when they stopped sleeping with other women’s men? I still believe that. I am sleeping with another woman’s man and I can’t live with myself and do that.”

“You are doing nothing wrong, Marguerite. You can’t help yourself for loving me.”

“I put myself in your wife’s place and I see how she would see me. I don’t want to cause another woman grief,” she said.

“She doesn’t know. She’ll never know.”

“I knew when Harold was cheating on me. Your wife knows, or she will know soon.”

Catherine had said that to me.
A woman knows
. John tried to deceive her in the open, at a cocktail party. He thought because he spoke to the woman’s husband in her presence that Catherine
would not know. But Catherine knew already. She knew that John and the man’s wife were lovers.

“I love you, Marguerite.”

“This has to stop. We have to stop lying to each other and to her. I can’t face myself in the mirror.”

“I’ll come over tomorrow. We’ll talk.”

“No. I don’t see the point in your coming. It’s no use. It won’t make a difference no matter what we say. You said you’ll love me forever. Now I know it won’t be forever.”

“I will love you forever, Marguerite,” I said.

“I am a backdoor woman, the woman you hide from your family, the woman you keep away from decent people. I told you not to bring me red roses, but I was lying to myself. I
am
your mistress. I will grow old alone. You will grow old with your wife.”

“You will not grow old alone,” I said, but she did not believe me.

“I am the same woman, Oufoula, that you met many years ago. I thought I could do this, but I can’t. I am ashamed to be a mistress. I am ashamed to know I am deceiving another woman. I still can’t have an affair with a married man.”

“We are not having an affair.”

“We are not married,” she said.

“What about you? Your feelings?”

“She found you first. She has rights. I don’t.”

“You are talking about yourself as if you are not human. You are human. Rights or who came first has nothing to do with your feelings.”

“Then it’s my feelings, too, I’m talking about, Oufoula. I don’t like deceiving your wife, but I can’t bear the thought of you touching her either. The worst part of that is that I have no right to think this way.”

“That’s not what is happening, Marguerite.”

“You live in the same house.”

“But not in the same bedroom.”

“You can’t tell me that you never,
ever
sleep with her.”

I did not answer her.

“That is what I mean,” she said. “When your wife was not here it
was easy to pretend. I came to your apartment, you came to my house, and we spent the night together. We woke up in the morning together. If you were married, we would not have been able to do that. But your wife is here now and I can’t spend the night with you, and I can’t call you at your apartment. I can’t pretend anymore. I have to face the fact that you are married, and I find I can’t live with that fact. I can’t be at peace with myself. I pick fights with you, I am always angry. I cry myself to sleep. I am miserable.”