Discretion (29 page)

We began calling each other husband and wife soon after that. It was not something we had planned, agreed upon beforehand. It happened. And it felt natural. The way it was supposed to be.

We agreed we would see each other as often as we could while I was in New York. She did not ask me when that last day would be. I did not tell her. We established a routine that felt right for us. I would meet her after her classes on Monday and Wednesday nights. We would go out to dinner and she would spend the night with me in the city. On the other days of the week, we called each other twice, in the morning when we woke, and at night before she went to bed. On Friday nights I took the train to her house and stayed the weekends with her. Sometimes on the weekend, while she painted, I sat at her table working on speeches I had been
asked to give at rallies that were mushrooming all over New York in support of Mandela and the end of apartheid. Most had been organized by black political groups in Harlem, some by university students. Even the mayor’s office called our delegation.

Sometimes I discussed strategy with my teammates on the phone. I did not speak in English when I spoke on the phone. I spoke in Housa or Mossi or in French, eventually only in Housa or Mossi unless I was forced to do otherwise. Marguerite had studied French. She was not fluent, but sometimes she understood. One day she joked that she knew what I had said and she would sell my secrets to the CIA.

“Would you do that to your husband?” I asked her.

“Of course. I’m a loyal naturalized American citizen.”

I knew she was not serious. Still, more and more I found myself speaking in Housa or Mossi when I used the phone from her house, not because I thought Marguerite would betray me, but because I was a cautious man, a man who by habit had learned to watch his back. A diplomat by nature, Marguerite would remind me.

Often when I was at Marguerite’s we went for long walks along the edge of the bay when the tide was out. I knew that it was safe for me to walk with her there. No one had followed me on the train to Long Island. Bala Keye seemed content to have dinner with me twice a week. Those were the evenings I did not spend with Marguerite. He did not question me about the weekends, and I lulled myself into believing he had plans of his own that did not include me. That I had been mistaken about that long second when his eyes locked into mine as I ran out of the florist shop clutching the red roses I had bought for Marguerite. Such was my desire to be with Marguerite that I let myself think this way.

I convinced my office to give me a cellular phone. That way, I said, I could keep in touch with my colleagues wherever I was. Nobody could tell where you were from a phone call unless they wanted to track you.

I felt safe, secure in Marguerite’s home. I held her hand when we took our walks. Often I put my arm around her waist. At times she rested her head against me, her hand draped across my back. I
had never walked this way with Nerida, not even when I courted her. I liked the closeness I felt walking with my arm around Marguerite. I liked the intimacy.

One morning, while I was shaving, Marguerite came into the bathroom. She wanted to take a shower but when she saw me, she turned to leave. I pulled her into the shower with me. “That is how it begins,” I said.

The second I said those words, I thought of Nerida. It had started this way between Nerida and me five years ago—innocently—with no intention on my part, conscious, that is, never to sleep in the same bedroom with her again. But I was cautious now. I knew now a word, a simple act, could trigger off a habit that could be irreversible. I knew it could take an insignificant thing, such as an inconvenience, a minor discomfort.
A crowded bathroom
. I did not want an inconvenience or a minor discomfort to set in motion a series of actions that could culminate in the day when Marguerite would never want to take a shower with me, hold my hand, let me kiss her on the bone on the back of her neck. I was just beginning to know, just beginning to love these intimacies. I did not want to lose them.

But it was not a habit formed to avoid an inconvenience, a minor discomfort that had led Nerida to refuse me her bed. I had voiced my fear to Ibrahim Musima: Perhaps Nerida had not lost interest in sex, only in sex with me.

I had told myself that I left her bed because I loved her—because I did not want to disturb her, rouse her from her sleep. But it was a dream I had had of Marguerite that had awakened me, that had forced me to consciousness drenched in sweat. And it was Nerida’s presence, solicitous, sympathetic, caring, that had driven me away.

Nerida must have seen the revulsion in my eyes, my disgust as I flinched from her touch. Perhaps more. Perhaps she had heard me speak Marguerite’s name. She had told me that sometimes I talked in my sleep. Mumbled, she said. She could never discern the words. Perhaps she had discerned this single one. Perhaps Marguerite’s name had slipped out of my dreams clear, distinct. Intact.

Nerida was the woman I had married, the woman I loved, the
woman who bore my children, yet I did not want her near me. I did not want to feel her breath on my skin when I was yanked from my dreams of Marguerite. Perhaps this is what she knew. Perhaps she knew I wanted to be alone with my dreams. That it was
she
I did not want.

When I said I would sleep in another room for her sake, she did not oppose me. But afterwards, weeks after I had taught myself to camouflage my revulsion, to hide it with apologies, regrets that I had awakened her, she refused me. Perhaps she refused me because she did not trust me. Because she did not believe I would make love to her with my whole heart, with my soul free to love her. We became partners after that, friends. Parents to our children. It was an arrangement that seemed to suit her. It did not always suit me.

“This is how it begins,” I repeated to Marguerite. “It takes only the first time.”

I pulled Marguerite into the shower with me. Water cascaded down my head and into my eyes. I shut them. Marguerite teased me.

“Open them, Oufoula. Open them. Didn’t you learn how to swim with your eyes open under water?”

M
arguerite had not come out of her marriage unscathed. She had developed a problem in her stomach that began soon after her divorce. It started with spasms that rippled across her stomach and which, she said, seemed to cut off the supply of blood to her head and leave her feeling as if her head were stuffed with cotton balls.

“The doctor told me that I had developed mechanisms for survival when I was married. After my divorce, when I did not need them anymore, they unraveled. He described my intestines as twisted rubber bands that got tighter and tighter each time I put aside my painting to be the wife Harold wanted me to be. Now the twisted rubber bands are unraveling.”

I would not have known about this if one night, when I was at her house, I had not felt her leave the bed and heard her footsteps fade into the kitchen. She came back to bed with a slice of bread in her hand.

“What is it?” I asked her.

“I have to keep something in my stomach at all times,” she said. And she told me about her pain. She said that when it got worse, her doctor referred her to a gastroenterologist.

“He told me he had seen a lot of nuns with my problem. It took me a while to realize what he meant. And, of course, what he meant was that I needed to have sex. That’s what men think about divorced women. If we had sex—and of course if we had stayed with our husbands in the first place, we would have had lots of sex—our problems would vanish. Maybe he was propositioning me.”

I had thought of asking Marguerite if she was involved with anyone after her divorce. I thought the better of asking her now. If she was, it was over. I had to be satisfied with her silence.

The next time I felt her sit on the edge of the bed, I stopped her before she got up.

“I’ll go,” I said.

She tried to hold me back but I paid no attention to her. She was still protesting when I returned with the bread.

“I could have gotten it. You didn’t have to go. I didn’t want to wake you up.”

I had said the same words to Nerida those nights when I woke from my dream, sweat pouring down my forehead. She did not have to get up. She did not have to mop my brow. She did not have to bring me water.

Now I said to Marguerite, “Do you think it’s only women who want to serve the ones they love?”

This was what Nerida wanted. This was what I had denied her. This was why she knew I did not want
her
to comfort me. This was why she knew it was not
her
arms I wanted around me, not
her
lips I wanted on my mouth, not
her
body I wanted next to mine.

Marguerite, I knew, was quite capable of getting out of bed and walking the few feet from her bedroom to her kitchen. But I had served her. I had proven to her I loved her, in her terms. In women’s terms.

I looked at the happiness spread across Marguerite’s face and understood for the first time that it is the little things that count for women, not the big things. For women, love is expressed through sacrifice, the tiny small inconveniences they willingly put upon
themselves for the sake of our happiness: the food they cook for us, the clothes they wash for us. They want us to measure these things not by their intrinsic value but by the sacrifices they entail. They had put our needs, our pleasures, before theirs. It is not the food, the clean clothes, they want us to appreciate. It is they themselves.

I had brought flowers for Marguerite that were not red roses; at other times perfume. Once a gold necklace, then diamond earrings. Nothing counted as much to her as that slice of bread, my willingness to get out of bed for her, to let her rest, to put myself in discomfort for her, to deny myself for her.

Marguerite sank into my arms, the slice of bread clenched between her fingers. I had denied Nerida this joy, the pleasure I now felt in having served Marguerite, in seeing in her eyes her gratitude, the reassurance of her love for me. Nerida must have felt rejected when I refused her offer of love. I must have caused her to doubt my love for her when I did not let her give me comfort, when I turned my back on her and left our bedroom.

There were other times when I experienced this kind of confidence that is only possible when the person you love not only allows you to express your love and devotion to her, but mirrors these same feelings for you in her eyes.

Once, when Marguerite spent the night with me in my apartment in Manhattan, she had to leave early to attend a faculty meeting the next morning. We had both forgotten to set the alarm on the clock the night before, so accustomed were we on such days to leisurely mornings together before I would have to leave for the UN, she for Long Island. It was late when we woke up. Marguerite riffled hastily through her overnight bag, flinging a skirt and blouse on the bed before dashing into the bathroom. I noticed immediately that the blouse was rumpled. I set up the ironing board and plugged in the iron. I was ironing her blouse when she came out of the shower. Marguerite could barely get the words out of her mouth to thank me, so choked was she with emotion.

“No one has ever done something like that for me.
Ever
,” she said. “Look at you. My god, if your colleagues from the UN could
see the distinguished Mr. Ambassador!” She wrapped her arms around my waist and hugged me tightly to her body as if she never would let go.

I must have looked odd, clad only in my underpants, hunched over the ironing board, all six foot two inches of me concentrating on getting the creases out of her blouse. Perhaps my colleagues would have laughed at me. They would have wondered if I had not gone soft. But I did not care. I was willing to go soft for Marguerite.

It is the little things, too, that count for men, but we do not use the measurements women use. We are territorial. Like the cheetah, we mark the boundaries of our possessions. A look, a touch, a word said unwisely that threatens to intrude, to encroach on the territory we marked is enough to unhinge us, to cause us to pull out our weapons.

I had loved to kiss the back of Marguerite’s neck. I had considered it mine, along with the basin her waist made between her hip and her ribcage when she lay on her side next to me, along with the well that cradled her navel. Sometimes when we walked, I would rub my fingers on my spot on her neck, or push her hair aside when it was down and kiss her there. I loved to do that most—to move her hair and kiss my spot, though I loved to kiss it, too, when she wore her hair up in a ponytail or a chignon and bared her neck for me.

One evening, when I met her after her class, she told me that her husband had just touched her there. I did not think she knew the pain she caused me.

“Harold came to see me in my office,” she said. “I was on the phone with my back to the door and I felt someone touching me on my shoulder. I waved the person away but I did not look back. I was in the middle of a conversation and I did not want to be disturbed. Then the person touched my neck and I turned around. It was Harold.”