Discretion (14 page)

I took the portrait from her hands, her silent challenge thickening the air between us. But I did not take it to my home in Washington. I did not hang it in the place where I lived with my wife, the place that was our sanctuary. I wrapped it in brown paper and I went to my office at the UN. I put it in a closet and I left it there. The impulse to do that did not come out of weakness or cowardice. Quite the opposite. Discretion, I reminded myself, I reassured myself, is the better part of valor.

I
think sometimes that in those days I was as in love with the life Marguerite unknowingly dared me to live as I was in love with her. She filled a need in my soul Nerida never guessed existed. She gave me glimpses of a life I lacked the courage to live. She had taken control of the reins of her life and turned them to the direction she had chosen. Since she was a child she had known she was an artist. She had pursued her conviction without compromise. I had merely followed the times and the opportunity. When the wind blew, I let myself be carried with it. I never resisted. I never sought another direction. I never asked if there was something different I could do. If there was something else I wanted to do.

With Marguerite I had begun to take chances. I had begun to seek my dream, not in my fantasies, but in reality. In real life. I had pursued Marguerite of my own volition. I had sought her out. I had deceived my wife for her. I had taken the risk of losing my wife for her.

Still, if someone had asked me why I did not want to leave Nerida, I would have said because I need her, too. If they had asked me why, I would have said because she gives me security. Because she gives me stability. Because she creates spaces where
things remain the same, where I can delude myself with the possibility of permanence.

The walls of my apartment, I would say, will always be white, my furniture will always be mahogany, the colors of the upholstery will always be earth tones, my bed will always be made, my son will always be fed and dressed and in bed if I am home too late. Dinner will always be ready. Nerida will be waiting for me. Always.

This, above all, is what marriage does, why in spite of other passions that tempt us, dissatisfactions that may cause us to stray, we return to it, we hold on to it. Marriage offers us this: the illusion of forever. It is part of that great denial of our mortality that is so much at the heart of our modern age: technology, the new god, stretching limits beyond reasonable hope and belief. We talk of advances in medicine as if the cures they offer could be permanent. We promote health clubs, health food, cosmetic surgery as if they could break that free-fall to old age. We marry, we divorce, we remarry. Why? Because marriage eases the fear of our mortality. In middle age and old age we could pretend to start again. We could make the same promises of forever. Nothing will end. We could swear an oath that the law would validate, that the church in the name of God would sanction.

Many years later, when I had seen much, experienced much, I would wonder that so many could blind themselves to this irony: We have invented an industry marketed by psychologists and analysts to cure the very ill we have used to sustain us. Marguerite would admit to falling victim of that sickness. Denial, she would confess to me, was what allowed her to love me without question.

And the illusion marriage promised is what bound me to Nerida. That and more. For Nerida offered me an anchor to Africa, to home, to history, to tradition. To the past, to the future. When I sensed a threat to this permanence I had with her, as I sensed it the day Marguerite gave me permission to lie, to break her golden rule about integrity and truth, I retreated. I ran.

I had made love to Marguerite that day, enlisted her in my conspiracy of lies of omissions, encouraged her fears of loss (which I suspected had to be the consequences of her loss of Jamaica), all
to squelch the answer to her question: “What used to make you happy?” For I did not want Marguerite to leave me. For I did not want to leave Nerida.

Marguerite said I had read too many books by the Europeans. We had made our peace over Wole Soyinka and I had read
Death and the King’s Horseman
, at first, admittedly, only to satisfy her, but afterwards because I found it as rich as any play I had read. She began to buy novels, plays, and books of poetry by African and Caribbean writers for me. I read most of them but not all, and the ones I read, I read because Nerida read them to me.

Nerida was pleased when I brought home the books Marguerite bought for me. She thought I had started taking an interest in literature again. When I said I did not think I would find the time to read because the ambassador was keeping me too busy, Nerida sympathized with me and said she would read to me in bed. So comfortable had I made myself with my world then, that I saw no contradiction, no conflict, in my wife reading to me books that the woman I also made love to had bought for me. I had not faced the details, the questions of legality, the prohibitions of my Christian religion, for my spirit was at ease with loving them both, needing them both.

I think back now and I realize that in those days when I thought wife, I thought of them both, for each of them was an aspect of wife that was essential to me. I could not think of one as my wife without thinking of the other. I could not imagine living with one without being able to be with the other.

Nerida read only the parts of novels she thought I would find interesting—excerpts of plays, and short poems—but it was enough for me to sound knowledgeable and convincing to Marguerite when I discussed them with her. The only novel that I read on my own was Chinua Achebe’s
Things Fall Apart
and that was because when Nerida pointed out I would be fascinated by what Achebe made of “The Second Coming,” a poem by Yeats, I remembered O’Malley and his swans and his interpretation of another poem by Yeats. I remembered the first time I made love to Marguerite.

We fought for hours, Marguerite and I, over what it seemed to
me was Achebe’s premise: that the Igbo clan in Nigeria fell apart because they had no unity among themselves. She, however, insisted it was because of English colonialism. The English, she said, brought their values, their philosophy, their system of law, education, and government, and, of course, their guns, and threw the Igbos into confusion. I agreed with the first part of what she said, but argued that it would not have been possible for the English to weaken the culture of the Igbos if the Igbos had remained loyal to each other and to their traditions. She was glad to hear me say this but only because it gave her a chance to repeat to me once more that I had filled my head with too many books by European writers.

I knew she was intimating that I, too, had not been loyal to my traditions. Marguerite was romantic about Africa. She wanted to see Africa through the rose-colored glasses of the young people I saw in the streets of New York and Washington who wore dashikis and African beads and insisted on a purity of tradition that was no longer possible, who wanted Africa to freeze in time for them, who could not understand that irreconcilable opposites could coexist, do coexist. Africa had a past, but was also entitled to a future. I could be African and yet a man of the modern world. I could remain loyal to my traditions and yet admire and desire the accomplishments of the European world.

“Africa is in my heart,” I said, “but my heart beats in the present. If I took Africa out of my heart, my heart would stop beating. I would die.”

But in her youthful enthusiasm, Marguerite did not believe it was possible for an African to love Africa and still love the literature of the European. She had left Jamaica at too early an age to understand that. She had forgotten that when we were young we lived in colonial countries and that in colonial countries we lived two lives: the life at home and the life among the Europeans. She had forgotten that in school we read only their literature. The Europeans were training workers to serve them: hands and feet to do their labor; minds of young people like me to perform clerical tasks for them in their civil service. They did not take risks with what they
would have called subversive literature, literature by the people. By the time I understood their intent, it was too late for me to revolt against them. I had already fallen in love with their literature. I had found universal truths there that spoke even to me, a black boy born in the bush in Africa. I made their literature mine. I claimed it. It belonged to the world and I was in the world. I was human.

It was one such book, a novel, that led me, subconsciously, so I thought once, to push Marguerite into the discovery of my lies, the admission of hers. It was from Dostoyevsky I learned that the guilty returns to the scene of his crime. Like Raskolnikov in
Crime and Punishment
, I too found confession seductive, the danger of being found out irresistible and cathartic.

I had spent two nights with Marguerite and was packing my bags to return to Nerida. It felt good leaving Marguerite, returning to Nerida, knowing I would be back again with Marguerite. It was perhaps this feeling of anticipation without guilt of being with Nerida and our son again, and the absence of sadness in saying good-bye to Marguerite because of the certainty I had of seeing her again, that led me to ask Marguerite foolishly if she also agreed with the tradition still existing in some parts of Africa that a man was permitted to have more than one wife.

Marguerite was in the kitchen when I asked her that question. I was in the bedroom. She did not answer me. I repeated the question and gave it context, shouting though I knew it was not necessary. The wall that separated us was too thin and the door was open.

“You said the European literature I read has made me forget my traditions. I wanted to know if one of them you thought I should not forget is that a man usually had more than one wife.”

It was after I personalized the question that I realized the danger I had placed myself in. But Marguerite seemed oblivious to the possibility of danger to herself. Or perhaps by then she had perfected the art of denial. She may have heard me the first time, and her initial hesitation to respond was probably a reflexive action, the human instinct we share with animals to brace ourselves when trouble approaches us. But reason prevailed when I asked her again,
the control she used to squelch the questions that would have made it difficult, if not impossible, for her to continue her relationship with me.

“I don’t think it’s such a bad tradition,” she said.

I came out of the bedroom. “You don’t?”

“No, I don’t.”

I sat down on the stool in front of the counter that separated the kitchen from the living room and stared at her, my mind paralyzed by the impossibility of a thought that had come so recklessly to me—the sudden awareness of a possibility that must have been always with me.

“Don’t look at me like that,” she said. “Why should you be surprised that I would think that way? Jamaicans haven’t lost their connection to Africa, you know.”

“I would think from your drawings I saw in the restaurant—”

“What about my drawings?” she cut me off.

“Well, you seem so concerned about women.”

“I
am
concerned about women.”

“Women’s pain,” I said.

“That precisely.”

“And still you would think that it’s not a bad tradition for a man to have more than one wife?”

“I think so precisely because I feel women’s pain. I’ve seen too many women grieve for their children when their live-in boyfriends or their husbands find a new love interest. It’s one thing for a woman to throw a man out if there are no children, but if there are children, I think the man should not leave and the woman should not put him out.”

I looked away from her. I did not want her to read my eyes. “And what about the new woman, his love interest, as you call it?”

“That’s a separate thing. I’m not talking about that. I’m talking about the relationship between a man and his wife if there are children. The man leaves his wife, divorces his wife, and what then? What happens to the children? They are left without a father. He may start off seeing them a lot in the beginning but eventually when his new wife has children, he begins to see less and less of
them, he begins to give less and less to them. It becomes easy for him to think of his new wife and new children as his only family.

“His new wife encourages that view, society endorses that view, and it becomes convenient for him to have that view. When people ask him about his wife and his children, they mean his new wife and his new children. As his financial situation improves, the new children benefit. They live in a bigger house than the other children, they go to better schools, they have more opportunities, they travel, they meet important people who put in a good word for them to the colleges they want to go to or the jobs they eventually get. Divorce too often means deprivation to a set of children who did nothing to deserve it. To me there is no greater pain for a woman than to see her children denied their birthright, especially if there was something she could have done to stop it.”