The Fall of Saints (2 page)

Although O&O paid me miserably, I stayed with the firm because the owner had promised he would help me get an H1 visa and eventually a green card. The other way to get a green card was to settle down with an American citizen, but my relationships were always short-lived.

The longest and latest was a two-year stint with Sam, a white American, the man from the banks of Ohio, as I used to call him, a commuter relationship sustained via email, Facebook, Internet chats, texting, and occasional sexting, though plagued with uncertainty: We would promise to meet up and talk about our future face-to-face, but whenever we did, we talked about everything else, and only after he had returned to Ohio or I to New York would I remember that we had skirted the issues of marriage and green cards. I broke it off—or, more truthfully, Zack made memories of that relationship fade into a land of it-never-happened. I did not even bother telling Zack about Sam.

Despite our different histories—he with family origins in Estonia, a former Soviet satellite, and I from Kenya, a former British colony—I felt that Zack and I complemented each other. He took control; I let him and felt safe in his certainty. He loved telling and retelling stories drawn from his life; I loved listening and talked little about events in my life.

Once, in a café on lower Broadway with David West, Zack’s childhood friend and now colleague at Edward and Palmer, I asked about the limp he carried so well walking or on the dance floor. Zack told a harrowing story of how he’d survived a hit-and-run; his left leg had to be reconstructed with the recovered pieces of his broken bones. David laughed and told a less dramatic version: Zack fell off his motorbike as the two raced each other. Zack was lucky to get away with a fracture and a slightly shorter leg after surgery. I was about to laugh good-humoredly at the different versions when I saw Zack stand up and look at David with cold steely eyes, hissing, “You say I’m lying?” David apologized and mumbled something about memory being unreliable. Zack sat down, smiled at me, and apologized to David for overreacting. Then he laughed, apparently at the absurdity of the situation. We joined the uneasy laughter.

The incident, or rather the steely look, should have given me pause. Instead, I moved into his Manhattan bachelor pad in the winter. In the summer, we moved to a plush home nestled in a cul-de-sac in an affluent neighborhood of Riverdale, on the northwest side of the Bronx. With its tree-lined streets and quaint mansions on gentle slopes, the area combined the best of city and country living. The backyard gave way to a small garden in which I immediately planted herbs and tomatoes. It was here in the garden, on a morning of sunshine with the music of a hummingbird from a nearby hedge, that he knelt and asked me to marry him. I accepted.

We celebrated our wedding, conducted by a justice of the peace in our backyard, with a dinner party for a few friends, among them Melinda, David, Joe, and Mark. The conspicuous absence of my own friends reflected how deeply I had lost contact with the African community abroad, and how unsocial I was in New York. Zack offered to fly in my friend Ciru Mbai, a researcher at Cape Town University in South Africa, but she declined because she was finishing her PhD dissertation. Jane Kagendo, whom I had known since our school days in Msongari, Kenya, accepted Zack’s offer of a ticket, but at the last minute she texted to say that she was in the middle of what she called “a weird and complicated case” involving some sort of alternative clinics and could not make it. Zack wondered what I knew of these clinics that would keep my friends away, but I had no clue what Jane was talking about and assured him he would meet her one day.

I brushed off the disappointment. I was too happy to let anything bring me down. The evening started quietly, but as it wore on, and aided by a few drinks, my guests became animated. Their stories revolved around themes of marriage: vows of sickness and health till death do us part, that kind of thing. David told of an inseparable Bronx couple with a nose for the latest gossip about any- and everyone in the Bronx. Though they were husband and wife, they were more like twins.

“But they are twins,” Zack interjected, heightening our interest in the ubiquitous couple. He waited for a few seconds, savoring our curiosity. “They are designer twins,” he said, explaining that the pair had renewed themselves through cloned body parts grown to their specifications.

This raised cries of no, no, some arguing that despite the 1996 case of Dolly, technology had not reached a level to make a human out of cloned body parts. David, who may have learned not to contradict Zack, said that while it was possible, it seemed to him that the pair had simply taken on each other’s personality. “That’s what long life can do to a loving couple,” he said, looking in the direction of Zack and me.

Not to be outdone, Mark (whose tongue had been loosened by quite a few Jacks on the rocks), let everybody know that he was rich enough to buy immortality. He talked of his success and publicly invited Zack and Joe and everybody else to join him on new business ventures abroad. He was fascinated with Africa and saw many opportunities, he said, looking at me, as if I were somehow a confirmation.

By contrast, Joe, who owned a real estate company in wealthy Fairfield County, Connecticut, did not utter a word about his worth. He believed in man and woman’s immortality of joy in bed only, he joked, winking at Zack and me.

Melinda sang my favorite Dusty Springfield song:
The only one who could ever reach me was the son of a preacher man
. Granted, Zack was no preacher’s son, but the song was also about finding love in the most unexpected way. It was a special treat for me.

After the song, Mark embraced Melinda and looked around, as if to say,
She’s mine.
Joe told her that if she ever got tired of Mark, he would be waiting in the wings, his way of paying a compliment. Joe’s incessant flirting and endless compliments, which Melinda accepted with a smile that invited more, may have done it: Mark and Melinda were the first to leave, he literally dragging her away.

Years later, alone in my bed at night, I would go over every word uttered; examine every gesture and facial expression; recall the stories and the laughter, trying to find a piece that would point me to the Lucifer among the angels who celebrated my marriage to Zack that night.

2

I
quit my job at O&O, at Zack’s suggestion. He was a citizen, so I no longer needed the firm as my path to a green card; I was making peanuts, and he was making tons of money. Besides, we wanted to start a family: I might as well rehearse the life of a stay-at-home wife and mom. I spent my days taking care of Zack: preparing his meals, ironing his clothes, cleaning and tidying a house that needed no cleaning, there being only the two of us, except of course when we had company, but on such occasions we would hire extra help. Bored in the daytime, I looked forward to our evenings in the quest for a baby. We went at it with gusto. Every night. Really, lovemaking is great, but it is greater when pleasure combines with purpose.

Zack often made business trips to Estonia. On those occasions, I didn’t find staying at home alone much fun. Zack had set me up with a stash of money in my accounts, and to relieve the boredom, I would immerse myself in visits to Manhattan department stores and shopping malls. After a time, the novelty wore off. During the day, I felt like a Hollywood star, with all the glitz and glamour that comes from money. But at night, enveloped in a strange emptiness, I felt like a piece of wood. Zack once told me that after the collapse of communism and the return of capitalism in Russia, the wives of the nouveaux riches would spend days buying designer outfits and then selling them in flea markets as a way of easing their boredom. At times I felt like one of them but without the courage to dump my stuff on the flea markets of the Bronx and Manhattan. A pattern emerged: In the daytime, the credit card kept me company, and at night, good old gin and tonic. An expanding waistline resulted.

I was irritated to find that, after a few weeks, I could not fit into the clothes I had bought. I joined the All-Purpose Fitness Club in Riverdale, where I worked on my body with yoga, weight lifting, and biking. It was not much excitement. Then I discovered that I could achieve the same ends with the more fun-filled kickboxing. When I grew bored with that, I enrolled in Krav Maga martial arts classes. Krav Maga was not your elegant judo or aikido performance: it was rough and brutal. To my surprise, I found myself warming to the blood rush.

I was never one to keep up with events in Kenya, but now, with a lot of time on my hands, I would browse Kenyan newspapers online, only to be met with the comedy of politicians defecting from one political party to another or a politician forming several political parties. Some moments I thought long and hard about the family I never really knew. I wondered what life must have been like for my mother, pregnant with me in her teen years, banished from home, and forced to cut ties with her siblings. I resented the fact that she seemed insufficiently angry with my absentee father or with fate. For me, coming to America was like an escape from a social void, an absence of feeling that I belonged to a unified family and place. Zack was the nearest I had felt to an identity I had chosen. Nothing could fill his absence when he was in Estonia.

Melinda helped me kill time with stories: a lot about her work as Black Madonna and Black Angel but very little about Meli Virtuoso, the financial analyst. Her work schedule was flexible; she had no problems rearranging it to suit me. We always found things to do together, shopping, mainly. Shamrock was the only place I could not bring myself to go, despite Melinda’s constant invitation to be her guest. It was sacred to my union with Zack, and I could never go there without him.

She invited me to her church to hear her sing as Black Angel. She told me that many visitors—the “Jesus is my savior” type—flew all the way from Africa, South Africa, and Kenya to hear the gospel music. There was a Kenyan lady reverend who came to the church in the belief that the choristers were real angels. She insisted on meeting one of them. Melinda offered herself and kept up the illusion that her voice was a direct gift from angels who came to her by night. There are too many crazy reverends, I thought.

Zack had told me that once, in Estonia, he met a Kenyan woman bishop on a mission to convert people from communism. Completely unaware of the fall of the Soviet empire, she had an elaborate moral scheme to smuggle her Christian converts into the West and wanted him to join her.

When Zack resumed his routine between Edward and Palmer during the day and Riverdale at night, we were back on the social circuit and to our nightly quest. And what nights! It was as if each touch whetted our appetite for more. He kissed me, slowly and everywhere, each night working me to new heights from which I would descend into an incredible free fall. Years into our marriage, my stomach still tied itself in knots at the thought of how each night would bring new ways to satisfy our mutual hunger. Tenderness in wildness.

Except that our quests did not bear fruit. Whenever we felt like we had created life, I would buy a self-testing kit, with the same result. A year of fruitless quest took its toll: At night, purpose took over from pleasure. Bedtime increasingly became a time and place of anxiety. The real blow came when a visit to my gynecologist and a battery of tests revealed that, for some reason, I conceived in the tubes, not in the womb, and life would not stay. Childlessness was threatening my marital bliss. I contemplated surrogate motherhood, but Zack was against having another woman carry his seeds. It was me or nobody. It was flattering, though not a solution to my desire to have his baby.

Joe came to the rescue. Among the men who came to the wedding, I liked Joe the best. We hit it off right away. Stocky, medium-sized, with a scar across his face, he loved cigars, women, and fast cars. Zack seemed to rely on him more than he did the others. He was at our place one evening when we poured out our hearts to him. He shrugged off my inability to have babies and suggested adoption. I don’t know why we had avoided thinking of this alternative. After Joe left, we continued turning it over, and by the time we nodded off, we had agreed to adopt a child.

Zack suggested Kenya, the land of my birth, as the source, and I was very moved. But would Kenya give us a biracial child? We wanted a baby who reflected our racial identities, and as long as it fulfilled that condition, we did not care where it came from, Africa or America. Through Melinda, Mark suggested the Kasla adoption agency, in Chinatown, claiming that it was known to meet needs such as ours. Zack and I filled out numerous application forms; he handled the whole thing and told me when Kasla had sent a copy of the dossier to the agency’s sister company in Kenya. Zack often told me not to judge a book by its cover. For example, Mark’s scowling face hid a kind heart.

Zack revived the offer of house help that I had rejected soon after we moved to Riverdale. I hired Rosie, a tall, robust plus-size Ghanaian. I gave her good wages and saved her from having to do three or four jobs. It was not entirely out of charity. I wanted somebody who would be there for me and the baby. It turned out to be a good investment. Rosie entered into the spirit of the moment and supported my hopes. We whiled away the time with gossip and stories. Her own love life was sour: all the good Ghanaian men were taken. Life for her was work in the daytime and loneliness at night. Rosie would never hear of dating someone who was not Ghanaian, least of all a white guy. Love between white men and black women was not true love, she said. “It’s more of a mutual curiosity,” she claimed, following up the assertion with a loud laugh that moved her chest up and down. “It has worked for me,” I countered, “and for me, Zack is more than a curiosity, he is hot.” “Well, yes, you are the exception to the rule,” she said, “mostly it doesn’t work,” though she never cited a personal experience.

In no time Rosie became the sibling I did not have in Kenya. I told her how I came to America, an eighteen-year-old who had never left her Ndenderu home in Nairobi, and entered Worcester State University in Massachusetts, where an African was indeed a curiosity. On my first walk outside the campus, I ran to the first black person I saw in the streets who told me that New York was more multicultural. I was not disappointed: At City College, I didn’t have to answer questions about a country called Africa, or explain that I had not played with elephants as a child or that we did not live in trees. Rosie had encountered similar questions, even in New York. Our stories of survival, working several jobs here and there, dreams of having an extra dollar to buy ourselves a tiny luxury, were similar, the difference being that I had landed a wealthy husband.