Discretion (28 page)

“We are not talking about men and women, Marguerite,” I said, and pulled her to me. “We are talking about you and me, and I, Oufoula, say to you, Marguerite, that I love you, not your skin.”

She closed her eyes. “Let me get old, Oufoula.”

She said it as if begging for something I would willfully withhold from her and, perplexed by this sudden change, the pleading evident in her eyes when she reopened them, I responded quickly, “We will get old together, Marguerite.”

But that was not the answer she was looking for. “I don’t want to have to make myself young to please you,” she said.

“You don’t have to. I love you the way you are. Because of who you are.” I brushed my lips across her forehead.

“And will you still love the real me when my skin is wrinkled?”

“Oh, Marguerite.”

I was about to add more protestations, swearing my love for her, when she sighed and pushed herself away from me. “We play your game,” she said. Her lips curved downward, sadly.

“Game?”

“We wear the makeup, the fancy clothes. We diet. We let doctors cut us up. I take HRT. But there is always someone younger, firmer, that TV gives men to dream about.”

“Marguerite.” I pulled her back to me. “I have no interest in someone younger. It is you I love.”

“And will you still want me when I am dried up like a prune?”

“I will love you forever.” I held her tightly to my chest. “When you are old, when you are gray …”

“Grayer.”

“When you’ve lost your teeth. Forever.”

She laughed, but she repeated the word after me. “Forever,” she said.

We both believed that was true.

I
t was past noon when we got out of bed. Marguerite wanted to show me the swans. They were the same swans, she said, that were there when she moved into the house three years ago. They lived in a bend in the bay near the canal. Her neighbors told her they had been there for years. Ten, at least.

“Swans mate for life. Did you know that?” she asked me.

We were looking at them through the wide glass panes of her living room door. They glided across the bay in front of us, one behind the other. So serene. So tranquil. Who could have guessed the terror they could unleash on the waters?

“For life,” Marguerite repeated.

I did not know if she was thinking of my marriage just then, or what she could have been thinking of my marriage. But when she said
for life
, I immediately thought of Nerida. That was how long my commitment was to her. I remembered so without regret.

Marguerite was standing behind me. She wrapped her arms around my waist. “Will you love me for life like the swans?” She pressed her lips to my back.

I clasped my hands over hers. “For life.”

I heard her let out her breath and then she laid her cheek against my spine. “Did you ever see them make love?”

“Once,” I said.

“It’s frightening.”

I told her about O’Malley. How when I was a young teacher in my country, an aging Irish farmer quoted Yeats to me and invited me to his house to witness the mating of his swans.

“He said they make love like that because they are angry with God for tricking them into making babies whose sole purpose is to replace their parents when they die.”

“ ‘Thou wast not born for death, immortal Bird!/No hungry generations tread thee down.’ ”

“Keats,” I said.

“We were reading his poem in school when my mother died. I thought I was to blame for her death. I was the hungry generation that had tread her down. She had centered her life on me. Everything for me. I had never stopped to think what it had cost her to send me to the best schools in Jamaica, to buy paint and brushes for me when she hardly had money to buy a dress for herself. All I thought of then was me, me, me. The world was me.”

“Teenagers think that way, Marguerite. You were no exception.”

“Yes, I know that. In my head, I know that. Not in my heart,”

“Your mother would have been proud of you today. Look what you have made of yourself.” I turned her around to face me. “Look at yourself, Marguerite. You’ve raised a son in college, you have a master’s degree, you teach in college, your work is exhibited in an art gallery, you were honored at the university in Jamaica. You are going to be a major art force. Marguerite, the world’s greatest artist!”

She laughed and brushed me away. “I didn’t mean to sound sorry for myself.”

“Everybody needs to feel sorry for themselves every now and then.”

“Well,” she said, “at least we don’t have the problem of the swans. We can make love without rage. My eggs are all used up.”

“But not my sperm.”

She laughed again. “Your sperm better be if you plan to be with me.”

“Poetry. Pure poetry.” I grabbed her.

We made love on the floor of the room that was also her studio. It was gentle sex. Lighthearted sex. When my climax came it rippled through me like a babbling stream tumbling across smooth pebbles. It left my body limp, loose, relaxed. Marguerite rolled on top of me and buried her head in my shoulder. We slept that way for more than an hour. I woke with the sun blazing down on my head from the skylight. Refreshed.

“Do you want to see my work?”

Marguerite had woken up before me. She was opening the wooden doors to the closet where she stored her work. She had put on a short white silk kimono and had pulled her hair in a plait behind her head. She seemed to me at that moment child, mother, virgin, lover. An innocence wrapped in the years that had deepened the furrows between her eyes and set an expression around her mouth that spoke of her determination, her tenacity, her endurance. Now in the sunlight, only hours since I had traced the map of her body, traveled across each inch, remembered, I saw lines around her mouth I had not seen before, lines clouded by my excitement in seeing her again, my joy, my ardor for her. Now I saw them and I loved her for them.

She pulled out her paintings and drawings and lined them against the wall, witnesses of her sacrifice. What a toll her marriage had exacted from her art! They were stunning, more beautiful than the ones I had seen in the art gallery. More moving.

“I haven’t shown these yet,” she said. “I call this collection Memories.”

The images in the paintings before me were vivid, sharp, the details drawn out as if they had been in front of her when she painted them. One was of the sea, the beach shaded by sea grape trees and
coconut fronds, two of the open market in Kingston. These were the ones that struck me most. I had known such market scenes. Middle-class black women, the new bourgeois of the decolonized countries, their bodies rigid with a newly acquired superiority and an insecurity they could not disguise, standing in front of vendors, the farmers from the countryside, who sat on wood stools, piles of ground provisions and bright colored fruit in front of them, their faces expressionless, blank, devoid of any emotion. These women, face facing face, I had often thought forced the observer to question ordinary notions of freedom and oppression.

“I didn’t know you went back so often,” I said.

“To Jamaica? Only twice, and the second time was when I returned last week.”

“These are so accurate. One would think you painted them there.”

She turned her head from one side to the other, reexamining them. “I never forgot those faces,” she said.

There were three other paintings, all of women, one older than the other two. Like Marguerite, they all had the same brown skin, the same dark thick hair and high cheekbones, but their eyes were fierce, combative. I remarked as much to Marguerite.

“My mother, my aunt, my grandmother. They were daughters of the Maroons,” she said.

I knew what she meant. The Africans of the resistance in Jamaica. The slaves who revolted. The ones who hid in the underground caves and plotted uprisings. But these black women did not look like Africans, not those from the west coast of Africa, where the Europeans made their raids on human flesh. The color of their skin was too light, the curls in their hair too loose.

“They look different,” I said.

“My great-grandfather was Portuguese. He married an African.”

I turned away abruptly from the paintings when she said that. Later she would rebuke me and I would know she had not missed the coldness that had steeled my eyes. But I had seen the relics of Portuguese brutality in East Africa—in Angola, a country torn apart by civil wars, wasted by greed and selfishness. I did not want to know the woman I loved had Portuguese blood.

“Did your husband see these?” I drew her attention back to the paintings of the market vendors.

“No, none of them. I did them all after I left him.”

“He was a stupid man to lose you.”

“No, he was quite ordinary. An average man. He thought I worked to augment his income. He saw my art as a ticket to a paycheck. Once I was teaching, once I had a real job, he didn’t see any point in my doing any more paintings than were necessary for me not to get fired. He didn’t understand that I worked for our food and shelter, yes, but mostly to buy canvases and paint and brushes. Mostly to free myself from worrying about money so I could paint. I am the classic example, I suppose. I teach so I can paint and draw. I don’t paint and draw so I can teach. Harold did not understand that. He tried to make me feel guilty. I was inadequate as a wife, he said. A wife would cook dinner, a wife would campaign with her husband, a wife would entertain his friends, a wife would be available. I could do those things some of the time but not all of the time. I was miserable. Eventually I began to resent him.”

I was not unsympathetic. I had come close to making the same mistake. More than once I had felt threatened by her devotion to her art, a commitment, I feared, that could replace me in her heart. Still, I judged him.

“He deserved your resentment,” I said.

“Maybe not. He didn’t ask of me more than another man would.”

“He didn’t love you,” I said.

“In his own way he did.”

“It was not enough. A man who loves you wants you to be happy even if it costs him time away from you.” I did not have the grace to feel embarrassed by the irony of my words.

“Harold did his best.”

“You say that like you feel sorry for him.”

“I didn’t love him. Maybe I never loved him.”

“You married him.”

“A man deserves to be loved. Everybody deserves to be loved. Harold knew I didn’t love him. I say he resented my art, but I think
that if he thought I loved him he would not have resented it as much.”

She was sitting on the floor, her legs crossed into each other, looking blankly at the bay.

“You can’t blame yourself, Marguerite, for not loving someone,” I said.

“No, but I can blame myself for being with someone when I loved someone else.”

I put my hand under her chin and turned her face to mine. Her eyes were dripping tears.

“Oh, Marguerite, I’m so sorry. So sorry.” I sank my face in the thickness of her hair.

“I married him to forget you. When he touched me, it was you I was thinking of.”

I rocked her back and forth against my body.

“At the beginning I could only bear going to bed with him if I thought it was your lips I kissed, your arms that embraced me, your legs wrapped around mine.”

In the beginning it had been so for me, too, and even later, in spite of my contentment with Nerida. Many times it was Marguerite I thought of when I made love to Nerida, when I held her.

“I will never leave you, Marguerite. Never. Nothing will ever part me from you. You are my wife now. You were always my wife.”

She did not ask me what I meant, nor did I ask myself. It was a statement I made that felt right, that felt good. I did not want to examine it, put it under a microscope to raise doubts, to ask the question, how? How could she be my wife when Nerida was my wife? How could I make her my wife when I was a Christian? How could I remain a Christian when I wanted to keep Nerida as my wife?

I did not probe. I did not analyze. I did not remind myself I had already found the answer to the question that had haunted me from the moment I first fell in love with her—when I was young and she was young. The question that stayed with me until without consciousness, without an awareness that I knew the answer, I pushed her into voicing it for me.

I did not remind myself that in the days after the deaths of my firstborn son, my firstborn daughter, I knew that thousands of years of culture, of a way of life, of a system of beliefs, had not been wiped away, eradicated from my soul. I knew that in spite of the missionaries, I was African, my view of family was African, and as an African I felt no contradiction in my soul, no conflict in having her as my wife and Nerida, too.

I did not remind myself of this because I did not want to remember the consequence of my acceptance of this. I did not want to remember that I believed then that I was to blame for the tragedy that followed. I did not want to remember that I believed it was my ingratitude, my hubris, that caused my son to be killed, my daughter not to be born.

I had tried afterwards to live the Christian life, the monogamous married life, yet still I desired Marguerite. Yet still I loved her. Now I would not probe. I would not analyze. In my dream had not my dead children loved Marguerite? I saw them holding her hand, smiling at her, loving her. Surely our love was not the cause of their deaths. It was their fate, as Marguerite had said to me, to die when they died, for my wife to be crossing the street when she did. I accepted the words that came from my mouth:
You are my wife
. I accepted them as my reality, and so did Marguerite.