Discretion (36 page)

“Marguerite.”

“I don’t want to be miserable again. I don’t want to be angry. I have paid dearly not to be miserable anymore, not to be angry. Nineteen years and a costly divorce.”

“Marguerite, I—”

“You would be miserable, too, if I were in your place and I were living with my husband, whether I was having sex with him or not.”

It was then I told her how I felt when she said to me that her ex-husband had touched the back of her neck, my special place, the spot on her body that was mine.

“I felt such violence rise up in me, I would have hit him if he were near to me. I don’t know what I would have done if you had gone to lunch with him. It was only when you said you hadn’t that I began to calm down.”

“Then you understand.”

“I’ve always understood, Marguerite. I didn’t think it was fair, but I loved you and you loved me.”

“Then you know we can’t see each other again.”

“If that will make you happy, Marguerite.”

“It will make me suffer less. I have my art, my work. I was content with it before you came back. I’ll be content again.”

We put down the phone, but in less than five minutes I was calling her again.

“I can’t leave us like this,” I said. “I have to see you.”

“I won’t make love to you anymore,” she said.

“This is too abrupt. We have to go slower.”

“I won’t change my mind.”

“If I love you, I cannot make you suffer. But we have to do this slowly. You have to give us time to make the transition.”

“I won’t sleep with you again.”

“I am not asking you to sleep with me. We need to talk. I want us to talk face-to-face. I am coming to see you.”

“When?”

“Now. I’ll take the next train.”

“What will you tell your wife?”

“I must see you.”

“What will you say when she asks you where you are going?”

“Please, Maguerite.”

I was a man drowning.

“Now. Let me come now.”

She pitied me.

W
hen the door closed behind us we fell into each other’s arms.

“Just this one last time,” I whispered in her ear.

I did not have to convince her.

We undressed each other slowly. We did not make a sound. No words passed our lips. She lifted her arms and I eased her sweater across her shoulders, over her head, and up the length of her arms. I undid the buttons of her blouse one by one down the front of her chest and at her wrists. I took off her blouse and kissed the spot on the back of her neck where the bone protruded.

I unfastened the hooks of her bra and knelt down before her. I let my tongue linger on the edges of the dark flesh that circled her nipples.

She held my head, pushed her fingers deep into the thick nap of my hair to my scalp, and drew me closer.

She had worn pants. I undid the button at the waist, pulled down the zipper, and put my hands between her panties and her skin and slid them down her legs.

She was standing before me naked now, I on my knees still fully dressed. I wrapped my arms around her waist. I fought back the tears welling in the corners of my eyes.

“I wish there had been nobody but you. I wish you were the first, the only one,” she murmured above my head.

I sunk my face into the softness of her belly.

Her fingers searched my neck for the collar of my shirt. I lifted my head and she unbuttoned it. I stood up and she undressed me.

We moved toward each other with the grace of dancers: arms, legs, hips rising and falling to a rhythm we had memorized, a slow dance we had rehearsed to perfection. We moved without effort, my body sinking into hers, hers yielding to mine, neither of us willing to give way when the moment came, holding ourselves back as if we thought to surrender was to say good-bye.

Afterwards I lay next to her, my hands caressing places, it seemed, I had loved for an eternity, places I thought I would never touch again.

I fought against that reality.

“When we are old we will be together,” I said. “We will live by the sea in a house in the islands.”

“Jamaica?” She entered my dream.

“No. Somewhere in the Caribbean where you have not been and I have not been. Somewhere we both do not know. We will see it for the first time together. We’ll build the same memories. We’ll make our own history.”

“When I’m how old? Eighty?”

“Long before that, Marguerite. Long before that.”

Our bodies were warm with the love we had given to each other. We were holding on to the hours we knew were slipping away, stretching ourselves across the years we did not want to lose.

I made one last desperate attempt to change her mind, to convince her that we did not have to part.

“It could be like having a husband who traveled. I could come to you or you could come to me where I am.”

“And what about the in between? I would still know you were with your wife.”

“Marguerite, can’t you try?”

But the dream was over. Finished. “This is the end, Oufoula.” She pressed her face against my heart.

•  •  •

I could not stay in New York and know she was there. Every minute of the train ride taking me away from her was torture for me. I wanted to get off, to turn back and tell her I could not be parted from her. She could not be parted from me. But what could I tell her? I had never thought of leaving Nerida. I would not do it now. I could not imagine a life where I was not an admired husband, admired father, respected ambassador, a man praised by his president, a man in demand for his talents, a man honored in Africa.

A man about whom a griot sings.

There was nothing I had to offer Marguerite, nothing I could say to justify asking her not to leave me. Nerida would not accept my marriage to a second wife. Marguerite would not accept my having a wife.

I wanted to leave New York that day. I wanted to return to my country, where there would be no reminders of Marguerite. I told myself that when I got there I would destroy her books, take down her portrait from my bedroom wall. I would bury her deep in my heart, in my soul. I would try to forget her.

Bala Keye oozed sympathy for me. He would arrange for me to go back to Africa the next day, he said. He did not argue with me when I told him I was no longer essential to the team. We had the world on our side now, he said. It would not be long before Mandela was freed, apartheid come to an end.

He had waited years for this moment to see the lights put out of my eyes. He would assist me, he said.

“It is for the best. It is the right thing to do for you and Nerida. The strength of our country is in the family. You have a good marriage, a loving wife. Successful children. You are an example to our people. You make our ancestors proud. You do not break your connection to them.”

He chose his weapons well. He used history, tradition, continuity to blind me. He knew I would fall face forward on the tips of those swords willingly.

“Your grandchildren will look back and see this thing you have done today. They will know of your sacrifice. They will learn to be Africans. They will be grateful to you.”

He spoke as my loyal confidant. He would keep my secret, he said. He did not name it. He did not need to name it. I knew he had found out about my love for Marguerite. His body trembled with the pleasure he took in turning my words against me, the speeches I had given on loyalty to Mother Africa in spite of the inconveniences, the inefficiencies I claimed to love. He said he had told Nerida many times that no matter how far I traveled or for how long, she had nothing to worry about. There was nothing outside of Africa
—no one
—that could pull me away from Africa or from her.

I wanted to return to Africa alone. I told him that Nerida could follow me later.

“Yes,” he said. “You need the time to clear your head. To clean your spirit. I will tell her there was an emergency at home. I will tell her my brother needs you. I will arrange it.”

I called Marguerite from the airport.

“I’ll phone you when I get to Africa,” I said.

“Don’t,” she said.

“I must call you.”

“Don’t call me.
Ever
.”

“Ever?”

“I don’t want to wait by the phone. I don’t want to think every time it rings that it could be you. I don’t want to have expectations.”

“But I must hear your voice.”

“It will be a living death for me. I prefer to know it’s completely over now. I could mourn and move on.”

“I could never move on,” I said to her.

“You will in time.”

“I didn’t for twenty-five years.”

She lowered her voice to a whisper. “I want you to suffer.” Her passion was searing.

“You do not mean that, Marguerite.”

“I mean it with all my heart. I want you to suffer. I want you to hurt so hard, you won’t be able to sleep nights, you won’t be able to eat. You’ll walk around like a zombie, missing me.”

“Oh, Marguerite.”

“I will suffer. I want to know that when I am suffering you are suffering, too. I want to know you’ll feel the same pain I will feel. It will give me comfort knowing that. Knowing I am not alone. It won’t be so hard for me if I know that.”

“Marguerite.” My voice cracked.

“There will be nobody after you, Oufoula. You were the first and you are the last man I will love.”

“We will be together again, Marguerite. I know it.”

Her laughter cascaded over her tears. “Yes,” she said.

The image of the female swan on O’Malley’s lake flashed through my head at that moment. I saw her beating her wings in the still air, twisting her long neck, tremors erupting through her body. But the male swan had planted his seed in her. Nothing she could do would expel it from her loins. She would carry him with her wherever she went.

I
t is six months now since I have seen Marguerite. I am in my house. I am in Africa. In Africa I am a crab scuttling backwards, a man past his prime trying to teach himself the lessons of his youth. A man trying to accept the wisdom of the decision that was made for him, trying to convince himself he has escaped the chaos, the confusion, the destruction of all he had worked for, all he would have lost, all that would never have been his again, had he let his private life seep into his public life, had he chanced eruption there.

I am Oufoula who wants to make himself believe that parting from Marguerite was the right thing to do.

I have taken her portrait off my wall. I have given away her books, but everywhere I turn I see her—her small body, her smiling eyes, the mouth I want to kiss.

I know when I put my head on my pillow tonight I will dream of her. I have not ceased to dream of her. I do not want to stop those dreams. I want to see her. I want to talk to her. I fear, yet I welcome the pain that will come when I wake in the morning and know she is not with me. That pain has become my friend. It makes her real to me. It makes me know I have not imagined her.

Nerida called our children home from the university when she
returned from New York. She said I walked through the house as if I saw ghosts. She said my children would bring me to life again. But I was already in the land of the living dead, the land where my mother lived before she walked to freedom, and it was not my children I wanted. It was Marguerite. It is she alone who can bring me to life again.

When the days are drier, I go to my house in the country, the house I had built on the lands my ancestors had won in the wars. My father is dead now. Years ago his wives moved to the south to plant sorghum on the arable lands they inherited there. I had razed my father’s concrete barracks and cleared the ground where his houses once stood. I had swept them away as so much rubbish, the way he had swept any feelings he may have had for me. But my need is such now, my suffering so intense that I look for wisdom in the indifference my father had shown to me, in the coldhearted, callous way he had dismissed my mother’s unhappiness, her fatal desperation.

Perhaps my father was right not to protest when my mother left him, not to interfere when I was taken from him. He opened the palms of his hands. He let go of her, he let go of me. “What will be, will be,” he said.