Discretion (11 page)

I had come to her apartment for lunch as we had arranged, but we did not have lunch, not then, not later. Later, I was sated. Later, I did not need food. Later, Marguerite was all I wanted, all I needed.

I had followed Marguerite to her bedroom with no conscious thought on my mind other than that I wanted to see more of the drawings that had intrigued me in the restaurant. I will confess that when she opened the front door and I saw her—her hair brushing against her neck where it fell from a ponytail, the sweet simplicity of the faded blue jeans and white T-shirt she was wearing, her bare feet (it was the bare feet that undid me)—desire cascaded over me and I ached to fold her in my arms. But she held out her hand to me in a gesture that, though friendly, was decisively formal, and I forced my mind to refocus, to remember that it was to see her drawings that she had invited me here.

I know now with the wisdom of years of plans thwarted in spite of my best efforts, realized beyond my best hopes, that life flows on its own accord. The universe, the elders tell us, is unfolding as it should. Marguerite was pointing something out to me on one of her drawings and stepped back so I could take a closer look at it. She tripped on something on the floor, perhaps her shoes, and fell backwards on her bed. I reached to help her up—that was my intent—but she was already coming forward and our bodies touched.

She did not resist me when I lowered her back onto the bed. She seemed to have sensed the inevitability of what was to happen between us. She stayed still. She did not say a word. Sound and movement came only in the end: in the low moan that escaped her lips, in the shudder that rippled through her body, coinciding with mine.

Then the battle began.

She tore at the buttons on my shirt and when they resisted her, she ripped them from the threads that bound them. With the force of her heels she shoved off my pants that were tangled at my ankles. She sank her fingers deep in the thick of my matted hair. I found arms to pull through the holes of her T-shirt, a head to tear it
off of. I ripped apart a bra, sunk my mouth into nipples, clamped skin between my teeth.

And yet I say there was no rage when we made love that first time. Greed. Desperate greed. The ravenous greed of the hungry, the starving. We had both crossed deserts, our throats parched with thirst, our bellies shriveled from want of food, and we had found sustenance in each other.

I have seen men lost for days crawl out of the desert on their hands and knees. They choked on the water we gave to them.

“Calm down. Calm down,” we told them. “There’s more. You have time to take more.”

That was what Marguerite and I had to tell each other.

“Calm down. Calm down. We have eternity to love each other.”

For I did not feel the threat of the end of my mortality then, as O’Malley had predicted I would. I felt no rage. I was complete with Marguerite. I was immortal. We had not entered a subversive pact to breed a generation to replace us. We made love for the sake of it, for the happiness of it. I felt no shame looking at the body that glistened with the pleasure I had given to it. She felt no shame looking at mine, knowing it was she who had caused my body to tremble as if with ague.

“What if I got pregnant?” Marguerite asked when we were spent, lying in each other’s arms.

We had not paused to consider that possibility. Not even for a fleeting second had I considered the future, had my mind been willing to leave the present, to go beyond it to wonder whether she was on the pill, whether she needed to use a diaphragm. But, now suddenly, I thought of the future, and I remembered the past. I remembered Nerida. I remembered I had a wife, a wife who was pregnant. I remembered I had a child, a son I adored.

But Marguerite did not want an answer to her question. It was as if it had slipped to her tongue without her being conscious of it. She would not make that mistake again. She would take a firm hold on what was in her heart, in her mind. She would prevent it from leaking into words that could come between us, that
could spoil our happiness. She would exercise this control until I pushed her, until I forced her into admitting what she knew, what she feared. But for now I let her drift into unconsciousness. I said nothing to stop her from turning on her side, throwing her arm across my chest, closing her eyes, and slipping happily into oblivion.

T
he apartment where I lived with my wife had style. Everything in it had been carefully planned, had been deliberately designed. Nothing in it was the result of spontaneity or impulse. Yet when I entered it, I could not be sure that what I saw there was a reflection of my wife’s taste, for my wife decorated our apartment for me, to please me.

Marguerite’s apartment did not have style, at least not the kind of style likely to get photographed in magazines about home decorating, but it made a statement. You knew when you were there that you were in a place where an artist lived. My wife was not interested in making statements about her personal tastes. She was interested in my welfare, in the welfare of our son, the welfare of our family.

We did not have much money, though we had things that people would have needed money to obtain. We had a beautiful apartment overlooking the Potomac River. It did not belong to us. It belonged to the government of my country. Ordinarily it would not have been assigned to us. I was not yet an ambassador. I was merely part of the retinue of an ambassador, but I was the husband of the daughter of a president, so my apartment was larger than most and
located in the stylish part of Washington where, if he wanted to, the president of my country could visit his daughter without embarrassment.

Nerida seemed surprised that others could have been jealous of our good fortune, and, indeed, she did nothing to cause them to be so. Though we had an allowance for furniture, she never bought more than she thought we needed: a bed, a dresser, a full-length mirror for our bedroom, the same for my son’s room, a mahogany dining room set for the dining room, a couch and two armchairs for the living room. She kept all the walls in the apartment white. She said it helped to simplify things, to keep our apartment from feeling too small or too cluttered. To keep me from feeling hemmed in.

My wife knew that though I slept and worked within concrete walls in my country in Africa, only a door separated me from the vast openness of the grasslands. She wanted to give me this feeling of space in Washington. She gave similar reasons for the potted plants in the living room and the earth tones of the fabric that covered our furniture. She said they were closer to the colors I had left behind in Africa. Sometimes I wondered what colors she would have chosen if she were not choosing colors for me. I did not know what colors she would have preferred. I did not feel the need to ask her. I liked the way our apartment looked. It made me feel at peace. Calm. It was the way my wife had planned it. She was making a home for a husband who provided the food on her table and the financial support for her child. In this view of the role of a wife, Nerida was traditional. The hunter deserved rest when he returned home from the kill. How surprised her old suitors would have been to know that there was no need for them to have been intimidated by her just because she had been to university!

Marguerite had not created rooms with me in mind. She decorated them for herself. Color was splashed everywhere. Her bedroom was pink, her bathroom orange, her kitchen yellow. Only the walls of the outer room that served as her living room, dining room, and studio remained neutral. And yet they were not white like the walls my wife had painted for me. Dove gray, Marguerite called the
color of her outer room, and she kept it from being somber with huge canvases of her art, most of them paintings in bright colors.

She said the ones I saw in the restaurant, the black-and-white etchings, were part of a new phase for her. She had just started experimenting with shadings of black and white. Chiaroscuro, she said the technique was called. One could use color to achieve a similar effect of light and dark, but she preferred to work with black and white. “For a change,” she said, smiling at me and indicating the bold colored paintings on her wall. But she was not ready to hang those black-and-white etchings in her apartment just yet. They were still evolving, she said. “Anyhow they can be painful to look at. Maybe,” she added, “that was why nobody wanted them.”

I knew she said that as a concession to me. When she had first asked me what I thought of the paintings I saw in the restaurant, I said they were sad.

Marguerite had put wicker baskets everywhere in her apartment—on top of shelves, at the sides of kitchen chairs, in corners of the room, under the bathroom sink. She filled them with bunches of dried wildflowers and roses, most of them pink and red. She used a futon for her couch, huge pillows for armchairs. Some were covered in orange, yellow, and red batik prints, some were in solid colors, some were striped.

She worked in the front of the room, her back to the only window in the apartment. Cans of paintbrushes, soaked in water, were lined neatly on the floor next to her easel, which held her latest painting, but it was always covered when I was there. The rest of her work that was not on her walls was stacked against her bedroom wall. This was the only order in Marguerite’s apartment: the order in which she catalogued her work, in which she defined her space to work, in which she organized the tools of her work. Yet I did not feel closed in there. I did not suffer from the claustrophobia and confusion Nerida feared would come from the juxtaposition of different patterns, the placement of one color against another, the disorder of pillows piled on the floors.

Less than a week after Marguerite and I made love for the first
time, I was back in her apartment again. I gave Nerida some explanation about needing to be at the UN for two days, so that I could spend a night with Marguerite. If Nerida had any doubts about the legitimacy of my trip to New York, she did not voice them then, nor in the weeks that followed when more and more I found excuses to stay overnight in New York. It was not long before Marguerite’s apartment felt like home, my second home, and Marguerite my wife, my second wife. I was as much at ease with the explosion of color, the jumble of baskets, flowers, and furniture there as I was with the quiet order of the rooms Nerida had prepared for me, the subtle arrangement of shapes and shades meant to soothe me. But soon I began to grow less at ease, less comfortable, less certain of my place with Marguerite, less secure of her than I was of Nerida, and I found myself wondering if she knew the secret that was not voiced between us. If she had guessed, suspected, that I had a wife. If the comfort I felt was a false comfort, the ease I assumed, a false ease—make-believe woven by desire, by love, by longing gratified. Made real because I had wished myself into believing it real, into thinking Marguerite was my second wife, her apartment my second home.

Marguerite never asked me where I was or what I did when I was not with her, but now I wondered if it was because she did not want to know. If it was because she was afraid of the answers I would give her.

I came to New York and I left New York and it seemed in that space in between, before I returned to her again, she would bury me deep in some place in her heart where I lay dormant, frozen, never being quite real for her until she saw me again. Often the first thing she did when we met was to press her ear against my heart and listen to my heartbeat. It was as if she needed to reassure herself that I was alive.

She never telephoned me, though, of course, the only phone number I had given her was my office number in Washington. But she never used it, except for that one time she called to give me news of Catherine, and then, of course, that was before I went to her apartment. That was before we made love.

Often I did not know until the very last minute when I was required to be at the UN in New York. Often my longing for her would become so intense that my head would ache and a hollow pit would open in my stomach. I would call her then, perhaps giving her notice of just a few hours, but even at those times she would be waiting for me without questions. Waiting if I came directly to her in the morning from the airport or late at night after work at the UN. It was as if time stood still for her and there was no time between the time I left her and the time I returned to her. Yet I knew she had not spent her days and nights in a vacuum waiting for me. There was always a new drawing she had to show me, or a painting she had begun or was finishing.

I told myself that because she was an artist, she liked the arrangement we had—the long periods of two and three weeks of absence between the brief days we spent together. She told me that she had been offered a position teaching art full-time at a small college but she had turned it down. She needed unobstructed time for her art, she said. She could not do as some of her friends did—draw or paint for a few hours in the morning and then go to work. That was not how her ideas developed. She needed a full day. The reassurance of no obligations, the freedom from commitments. It was only then her imagination was freed to construct images she could not conceive with her conscious mind. The mere idea that she had something to do or someone to see that day stymied her ability to dream. Her body was the instrument of her talent, she said. She had to release it from the world so it could serve her art.