Discretion (12 page)

I envied her. I had no such consuming preoccupation to distract me from her. My wife and my son were important to me, but they could not build a wall strong enough, or solid enough, to prevent Marguerite from filtering through my everyday thoughts, my every-night dreams. I woke up thinking of Marguerite, I went to sleep thinking of Marguerite.

I liked my job, but I could not say it was the reason for my existence, the purpose of my life. If I had asked Marguerite who she was, she would have said an artist. If someone had asked me the same question I would have floundered through the many identities
I have, the many things I do. I would have said I am a man, an African. I am a delegate in the diplomatic service of my country. I am a husband, a father. I am the lover of a woman I adore. I am Marguerite’s.

And yet when Marguerite was with me, I seemed to be her consuming preoccupation. If I did not ask her about her work, she would not mention it to me. If I did not say I wanted to see what she was working on, she would not show it to me. But when she did, I knew from every movement of her body, from every inflection in her tone, from the way she bent her head from one side to another to point out this or that line to me, this or that color I had barely observed, that her art was the center of her universe and I, a fortunate occupant.

That was not my place in her world, but the center was her place in my universe. Since that first day when I clung to her, a man found his way through the desert ravenous for drink and food, since that afternoon when a yearning I used to feel, for what, I did not know, was suddenly recognizable, understood, fulfilled, everything in my life took its reference and meaning from her. She had become the star by which I measured my place in the world. My compass. I would say this and wonder if she would have approved my saying so. I would hear that and wonder if she would have agreed. I would smell this perfume, sometimes perfume on my wife, and I would say to myself, I must get this for Marguerite. I would see a dress on a mannequin in a store, a dress on a passing woman, and would compare how it fit her with how it would fit my Marguerite. Always, it fitted my Marguerite better. Always, it curved around her breasts more softly, dipped more deeply into her waist, fell more demurely above her knees.

I was not dissuaded that Marguerite never used perfume, that she rarely wore dresses. I would imagine her even in ways I had not seen her. Ways perhaps I wanted to see her.

Perhaps I imagined my Marguerite this way—with perfume, wearing a dress—because I saw her in the future with me, at a cocktail party at the United Nations, at a dinner party at the ambassador’s house. And yet I had not imagined that I would leave my
wife, though when I kissed her, I thought of Marguerite’s lips on mine. When I made love to her, I felt Marguerite’s heartbeat next to mine. When I put my son to bed, I saw the contours of Marguerite’s face on his—her deep-set eyes, her high cheekbones, her determined chin.

When people made appointments with me, I thought like this: Yes, Wednesday. We could meet on Wednesday. It was six days before I would see Marguerite. Or, No, not the seventh of the month. It was the day when I would be with Marguerite. Yes, in New York. Any day in New York. I could be with Marguerite. My life ebbed and flowed around her, the days I could be with her, the nights I could spend with her. But it was not so with her.

She may have gained time for her art when she turned down that full-time job she was offered, but not without a price, one she willingly paid, though it was painful for her. It had denied her the one luxury she had yearned for: a trip to Jamaica to revisit her homeland. She would have liked, she said, to see coconut trees again, beaches where sea-almond trees grew, cashew nuts that hung from fleshly red fruit like nipples on the udders of cows. Grass as green as emeralds, sky blinding with the color of turquoise. She would have loved to see donkeys straddled by old men in straw hats, stray dogs sniffing the heels of women balancing yam and cassava on their heads. She would have loved to hear cane fields whispering in the wind, waterfalls making music over granite boulders, the timpani of rain on galvanized rooftops. She wanted to meet cousins who had probably forgotten her, uncles and aunts who were grateful for her sake when she was given the opportunity to go to America. But she would forgo all that for her art. She had forgone the money a job could have given her for all that. She did it for her art.

My heart sunk when she told this to me, for I glimpsed then the strength of my competitor. I understood my ranking in relation to it.

Marguerite’s story was similar to mine. She, too, was rescued by missionaries. She, too, was an only child. She, too, had lost her mother, but she was not abandoned, she was not rejected. Her
father was also dead. When the missionaries came, she had no father to say without feeling:
Take him. He’ll return
.

The Catholic missionaries in Jamaica recognized that Marguerite had talent and recommended her to nuns in Chicago who gave her scholarships to do her bachelor’s degree and master’s degree in art at Loyola University. By the time she was twenty-three, one year before I met her, she had graduated from Loyola, had already sold one painting, and the etchings I had seen in the restaurant had been on exhibit in a small gallery in New York.

She lived on grants, she told me, that were awarded to her by the government and private endowments for her art, and on the income she earned teaching two classes, two nights a week, at the New School, on Tuesdays and Thursdays. I arranged my work so that I was never in New York on Tuesdays and Thursdays. I did not think I could be in the same place where Marguerite was and not be able to see her.

There were days when I was relieved that she had her art to distract her. Those were the days I was driven either by guilt or by jealousy. I had a wife I loved, whom I knew I would not divorce. I thought Marguerite too young, too full of promise, to deny her what I had—a spouse and a child. On those days, guilt forced me to find contentment with the times we spent apart, but those days were few. For most of the time I was tortured by thoughts of the opportunities my absences could make possible. Marguerite was a beautiful woman. I knew other men would desire her. I was tormented by images of her in the arms of another man, kissing another man, making love to another man. I would find relief only by remembering that she spent her time shut up in a studio with her drawing pencils and her paints and her brushes. I was grateful for those times, then, grateful that her work demanded so much of her attention, required so much from her.

There were other days, days when I doubted Marguerite loved me, when I could not understand why she was not plagued by thoughts of me in my absence, as I was of her. When I could not understand how she could erase me from her mind like chalk from
a blackboard each time we said good-bye. How she could empty her head so completely of me and fill it with her art alone.

I bought books to help me understand, to assuage the doubts when they arose. I wanted to know how talent was nurtured, where inspiration came from. When did it come? How did the artist court it? But the most I understood from my reading was that the creative force was nebulous. Fickle and elusive. Those who worshipped at its feet would have to be its willing slaves. They would have to be ready, brush in hand, canvas on the easel, waiting for it to come. That when it came, they would have to relinquish their all to it. It brooked no distraction, no movement from it to the conscious, this muse. It was a jealous master, and I was jealous of it.

“Don’t you miss me when I’m not with you?” I asked Marguerite one fateful day when jealousy so consumed me, I could not contain it, when it made me a slave and I had to serve it.

“You are always with me,” she said.

“But don’t you mind when I’m gone?”

“You are always in my heart.”

“Aren’t you curious? Jealous?”

“Jealous? Jealous about what?”

“What I do when I’m away from you,” I said.

I knew I was nearing the edge of the cliff when I asked her these questions, but I couldn’t stop myself. My insecurities were deepening. My doubts and fears about her affection for me reaching the low point where I was willing to throw caution to the wind and face the precipice. If she had asked me to jump to the rocks below, I would have. If she had asked me if I was married, I would have admitted it all. I would have said I have a wife. I have a son. I have a baby on the way. But she never asked. She never pushed me over that edge.

“It’s men who worry about what women do when they are apart,” she said. “It’s in your genes. It’s all biological.” She laughed.

“Biological?” My emotions looped like a yo-yo. I was giddy with relief—she had put me firmly back on safe ground again—but my fears intensified. She seemed so indifferent. Mulenga, too, had
been indifferent when I’d uncovered her lies. There had been no trace of remorse in her eyes.

“Yes. Women always know for sure that their children are theirs. Men can never be certain.”

“Ah, there are blood tests now,” I said.

“That’s my point. That’s the only way to know for sure, but long before blood tests, men had that insecurity planted in them genetically.”

“And there’s resemblance.” She was making me uncomfortable.

“Haven’t you seen siblings who bear little resemblance to each other? I have. I have cousins, children of the same parents, some are light skinned, some are dark. You’d barely know they were related.”

I became desperate for her reassurance. “But I trust you,” I said.

“Why shouldn’t you? I’ve given you no reason not to trust me.”

“And you? Do you trust me?” I was skirting on the edges of danger again, but I had to know. She had greeted me with such open affection when I came to her apartment, though I had been away more than two weeks. She asked no questions. She accepted my presence as if I had been there the day before and no significant time had elapsed between then and the time I saw her last. While I was tortured with suspicions, she seemed unconcerned, unaffected by my absence.

Men say this is what they want: a woman who does not nag them, who does not keep track of everything they do. A woman who gives them space to breathe. But we lie when we say this. Either we are certain of the every movement of our wives or girlfriends—where they are at this or that time, who they are with at this or that time—or we have ceased to care, and it no longer matters to us what they do or with whom. We do not love them. But I loved Marguerite and I was tormented by thoughts of what was possible when I was not with her. I asked her if she trusted me, risking discovery of the secrets I concealed for the uncertainty in her voice—hesitation in her answer that would let me know she cared, that she loved me, that she, too, found sleep difficult when we were not together. But her answer came swiftly, without the slightest pause.

“Of course I trust you. Why not?”

I was enflamed with jealousy.

•  •  •

I would return to this topic again—of whether or not she was disturbed by my frequent absences—and when I did, I would set in motion the beginning of my end.

We were in the park at Washington Square near her apartment. Marguerite loved to walk. She would stop and observe things I barely noticed: a streetlamp with a broken pane, a park bench with a missing slat, a tuft of grass struggling to grow between the stones. The crowds that pressed around singers with their guitars, mimes with their clown faces, dancers, their bodies twisting to the latest craze, had no appeal to her. She preferred solitary faces or the faces of lovers lost in each other’s gaze.

I was becoming accustomed to the sudden turn of her head when we passed by someone she found interesting—someone peeling an orange on a park bench, two men huddled over a chessboard, two lovers embracing. I knew when her voice trailed she had shifted her attention to a particular slant of a body, expression on a face, or unusual coloring—skin, hair, eyes. I was learning to be patient. I was trying to understand that it was the demands of her art, not her disaffection for me, that caused her distraction.

At first when she used to ask me to go walking with her, I was wary. I worried I would meet someone who knew me or knew my wife. Someone who could put an end to the happiness I had with Nerida and my son. But my fears soon gave way to my desire to please Marguerite. She would say to me, after we made love, that she wanted to celebrate her happiness with life. She wanted to breathe in air without walls, she wanted to see trees, even the ravaged ones there were in Manhattan. She wanted to look into faces. She would so move me with her innocence and freshness, I would feel old, though I was only thirty, just six years older than she. I would take risks then to regain my youth with her. I would take risks because the risks I took made her happy.

Yet she did not know I took risks. That she, too, took risks. That each time I stepped out of her apartment with her, came out of a restaurant, a cinema, an art gallery, we could have been discovered.
That she, too, risked the end of the happiness she wanted us to celebrate.

The conversation I had with Marguerite that day in the park seemed harmless enough. Yet it would plant the seeds for my unraveling to my end, our end, Marguerite’s and mine. It was unusually hot and still. Marguerite’s apartment had no air conditioner, and the air in the room hung heavy around us. I could barely breathe. Even if it were one of the days I feared discovery, I would have gone to the park with her.

“Have you ever read Wole Soyinka?” she asked me suddenly, pulling me down on a bench next to her.

“Soyinka?”

“Yes, Soyinka. Have you read
Death and the King’s Horseman
?”

I shook my head.

“My god, you’ve become so Europeanized. You’ve filled your head with European literature. Art, you know, enters the soul. I hope you have not allowed the Europeans to replace your myths with theirs.”

I frowned. That was when she asked me how old was I when the missionaries took me from my village to their school in the city. I said I was seven.

“Good,” she said. “Seven is the age of reason. You had already passed the age of myth.”