Gumbo: A Celebration of African American Writing Part 53

FROM Discretion.

BY ELIZABETH NUnEZ.

I took the train to Long Island. Marguerite picked me up at her station. I brought her red roses. I would bring her red roses the next time I saw her. One week later, when she was sure I knew she loved me, she asked me not to bring her red roses again.

"It makes me feel like a courtesan. Your mistress. I am more to you than a mistress."

We had been together again for just seven days and she knew that already.

But that first time when I brought her red roses, I had taken a risk for her that was more than the risk a man takes for a woman with whom he knows he would have only an affair, a temporary arrangement, s.e.xual and nothing more.

I had had a meeting that afternoon with the U.N. amba.s.sador from the United States. It was a meeting that my team had planned for weeks. We wanted a clear understanding of the extent of the U.S. commitment to the unconditional suffrage of all black people in South Africa. We were aware of the fears of the white world. We knew of the nightmares that terrorized even their waking hours: the specter of the ma.s.ses of black people free at last. Liberated. Armed.

For decades white South Africa had unleashed indescribable cruelties upon its black fellow citizens-insufferable oppression, torture, humiliation. Now white South Africans were terrified. They knew that that kind of suffering demanded not simply justice, but revenge. This was not America. This was not England. Black people in South Africa were not in the minority. Only brute force, they believed, guns-weapons blacks could not afford-had been able to stop them from ma.s.sacring their torturers. White South Africa was afraid to shut its eyes, afraid to sleep. What if the locks to the prisons where they had penned black people were removed? What if their pa.s.ses were destroyed? The ones they had created to herd black people into slums, to rope them out of the areas where they had built their sprawling houses? Where their children played? They had let black people in, of course, to work in their kitchens, to dig their ditches, to empty their garbage, their refuse, but what if? What if?

We had met with the American amba.s.sador as much to calm the nerves of white Americans, Europeans, white South Africans as to rea.s.sure ourselves that the West would not retreat from its position of outrage at the injustices that had been inflicted on black people in South Africa. I was prepared for this meeting. I had spent weeks rehearsing what I would say, antic.i.p.ating objections, preparing reb.u.t.tals, and yet that afternoon, all I could think of was Marguerite, my mind unable to fix itself on anything else but her.

My teammates told me that I had looked at my watch three times. Brilliant strategy, they said. We let the Americans know that we were the ones running out of time. If they did not use their power immediately to force de Klerk into complying completely with our demands, we could not be responsible for what would happen in South Africa. We could not guarantee that white women would be safe. Who knows what could happen when the people get their hands on the white man's guns? On his money?

But it was not a strategy I had intended, and one man, the oldest on the team, suspected me. He was the brother of the president of my country. Bala Keye, my wife's uncle, a man I never liked, a man who never liked me. At the last minute my president had sent him to join the team.

"In case something happens to you, Oufoula. Like you're sick one day and we find ourselves in the unfortunate position where our country is not represented."

It was not an unusual arrangement for my president to make-to provide a contingency plan in case of an emergency. The only unusual part of it was that he had chosen his brother to be second in command on our team to the U.N.

Bala Keye was the youngest son of the president's father. He was a man with more ambition than talent and even less presence, and his brother knew it. Of the men who claimed they admired me but who I knew wished me misfortune, Bala Keye wished the worst for me.

I say he was the oldest man on the team, but not many years lay between us. Less than ten, enough that it seemed reasonable that he should be convinced that he had seniority over me and thus was ent.i.tled to more privileges than me, and yet sufficiently slight that he could consider me a peer, a contemporary, a compet.i.tor with whom he saw himself in contest for prizes he always lost. It was that precarious difference between our ages that was the cause of his resentment of me. That, and the fact that though the president was his brother, he had chosen me over him to be his first amba.s.sador to Ghana.

Bala Keye carried this resentment like an albatross around his neck. Even when he laughed it was easy to mistake the quivers that ran through his body and the tears that rolled down his eyes as expressions of rage rather than joy. I did not know what caused the president to change his mind and send him on this mission to the U.N. Perhaps Bala Keye begged him and the president did not have the heart or the will to refuse him. The president was past seventy-five. There were many who said he was becoming soft, docile.

It was Bala Keye who pressed me to join the team for dinner that night. We were more certain than we had ever been of Mandela's release. My team wanted to celebrate. I said I was tired. I said I had a headache. The others were sympathetic. I had worked hard, they said. Harder than any of them. But Bala Keye was insistent.

It was five-thirty before I could get him to surrender. I was running out of the florist carrying the red roses I bought for Marguerite on my arm like a bridal bouquet when I saw him. Our eyes locked in one terrible moment before he turned away.

It was the gesture of an amateur diplomat, but he had put me on notice. He had an advantage over me, his eyes told me. He could trade on it whenever he wished.

I had made two mistakes that day, because of my desire for Marguerite. I, who had been known to be meticulous, a man whose appearance was that of a happy man, a contented family man. A man whose insouciance put the enemy at ease, who concealed his anger, his rage, his hatred, a man who did not wear his heart on his sleeve, who did not leave trails to the thoughts on his mind. Yet I had looked at my watch three times at a meeting with the U.N. amba.s.sador from the United States. I had run like a lovesick puppy to the florist shop. I was seen cradling a bouquet of red roses on my arm rus.h.i.+ng to the six o'clock train to Long Island. Rus.h.i.+ng to Marguerite.

But these two were not the first mistakes I had made since I met Marguerite again. I had kissed her in the car on the corner of Thirty-eighth Street and Fifth Avenue. I had put my hand under her blouse and cupped her b.r.e.a.s.t.s. I had slid my fingers up her thighs and would have done more. Would have pressed her back against the car seat and made love to her there, in her car, had she not stopped me, had she not promised the weekend.

I would have done that though I was aware, though part of my brain was aware that I was in a car parked on the street in the middle of Manhattan. That I could be seen. That in this city, in this country where fortunes are made by the humiliation of public figures, where a president can be brought down low, hauled into a court of senators, exposed before a nation for a single indiscretion, say, fondling the b.r.e.a.s.t.s of one of those willing sycophants intoxicated by the mere proximity to power, I could have tainted the reputation of my teammates, undermined the seriousness of our commitment to our mission, a mission that had consequences not only for the liberation of South Africa but for the liberation of all of Africa-the liberation from stereotypes that still persisted though Tarzan had been unmasked for what he was: a myth to quiet the white man's fears of the power of Africa.

Had I been asked to tell the principle that guided my life up to that moment, up through all the years to that moment, I would have said, as I believed then-as I believed that day when I tore up Catherine's letter, the letter that gave me Marguerite's phone number-one should not allow one's private affairs to affect one's public affairs. I had conducted my life according to this standard. I believed chaos would follow, confusion and disorder, if one's private life spilled into matters concerning one's public life.

But now disorder engulfed me. Yet I was not afraid, for chaos had not followed, nor confusion. Never before had I achieved such clarity of purpose. Never before had any decision of mine, any action I had taken, been so completely untainted by influence other than my personal desires, my personal needs. I knew what I was doing. I was choosing to do it, freely, of my own volition.

Up to that moment, for more than half a century, I had carefully compartmentalized my life. I had put the things that pleased me, the things that rea.s.sured me, in the front parts of my mind where I could see them, where I could retrieve them. The others-the things I did not like, the things I did not want to face, or could not-I had put in boxes and sealed them. I had stored them deep in the dark enclaves of my soul. And yet they had resurfaced. And yet always they had filtered through the reality I had orchestrated: the things I wanted to forget in the daylight-my mother's suicide, my father's indifference. Mulenga. Margarete, the dark fantasy I had created from Mulenga. Marguerite of flesh and blood. Marguerite, whom I loved, whom I lost. These memories filtered through my dreams, the lies I told as truths. They did not go away.

My mother must not have been afraid of the chaos I feared up to this moment. She must have found freedom when her pa.s.sion for the man she loved spread over everything, engulfed everything, diminished everything-public expectations, public demands, her reputation, her place in her village community, her security, her future. The son she loved.

She must have been able to think her own thoughts then, feel her own feelings when the lines blurred, when the barriers came down between the things that ought to have mattered to her and the things that did. She loved me. She loved the man who slit his throat for love of her more than she loved me.

So it was that Marguerite mattered most to me now. At this moment. Not the American amba.s.sador to the U.N., not Bala Keye, not the possibility that Bala Keye could blackmail me.

Marguerite's hair was up in a ponytail when she came to meet me, the way she had worn it the first time I saw her in New York. She had on a short black and tan plaid pants skirt, a white T-s.h.i.+rt, and a gray cardigan. She looked younger than she had seemed the night before. I felt old again, uneasy. I wished I had stopped to change my clothes, to take off my gray suit, my white monogrammed s.h.i.+rt, my drab blue striped tie-my old man's uniform-but Bala Keye, my nemesis, with his envious heart, had not allowed me. In seconds, though, my uneasiness dissipated. She was fifty years old. Women less than half her age had desired me. They considered me handsome. They knew I was a wealthy man, a man in a position of great power in my country. If I had not had affairs with them, it was not because I could not, but, rather, because I would not. It was because of my commitment to my family, my dedication to my work.

It was because of my love for Marguerite.

No woman who ever tempted me compared with Marguerite. No woman had been able to make me take the risk of losing my wife, my family, my position, my prestige-all I had.

Still, when Marguerite ran toward me, I broke out in a cold sweat. I was a man looking into a mirror of himself, terrified of the reflection there. A man who seemed to have no fear of what could await him, who did not care how his life could change now that he would have in reality the woman who had consumed his dreams for more than twenty-five years.

Once, pa.s.sion had made me a prisoner in my room until a fantasy saved me. Once, pa.s.sion had bereft me of a mother, caused her to take her life. I remembered all this as Marguerite approached me, but I could not turn back. That man in the mirror would keep on walking into that fire before me. Nothing I could say or do would deter him, not even the knowledge that the flames would devour him.

Marguerite reached up and kissed me pa.s.sionately on my mouth. "I was surprised when you told me you were going to take the train," she said. She took the red roses from my hand as if I had given her a business card. I should have guessed then that the roses had not pleased her. "Where's your driver?"

"I take trains, too, you know."

"A man in your position?" She dug her fingers in my ribs and tickled me.

My tension broke. "Yes, a man in my position." I laughed with her. "But only for you."

"Well, I hope you don't mind driving in a beat-up old car."

I opened the car door for her. "So long as you're my driver," I said.

"And you go where I take you?"

Her smile and her question were the smile and the question of a woman of confidence, a woman who knew she could take me wherever she wanted and I would follow. The man in the mirror did not care. He would go with her willingly, anywhere.

Marguerite lived in a little house with white wood s.h.i.+ngles, facing the Great South Bay in a small town on the South Sh.o.r.e of Long Island. She said it was the servants' quarters that was once connected to the dilapidated Victorian house that stood next to hers. It used to be the summer home of some rich Manhattanite, she told me, in the years before they discovered the Hamptons. She had gutted the interior and opened the roof with skylights. There were only three rooms in the house: a small bedroom, a kitchen that faced the street, and a large room in the back that opened to the sea. We had to walk through the kitchen to reach it.

"It's the secret of the South Sh.o.r.e." Marguerite stood next to me at the huge sliding gla.s.s door that extended from one end of the large room to the other.

The water surprised me. I would not have guessed it was there. We had driven through a residential area of tiny clapboard houses separated by squares of manicured lawn. The cars parked in the driveways and on the streets were domestic American cars, not the usual boxy foreign cars one a.s.sociated with the rich, the people who could afford to live near the sea.

"n.o.body guesses it either. A lot of streets here lead to the water-to the bay or the ca.n.a.l."

The water in front of us was still. Quiet. Two boats moved slowly across it. In the diaphanous twilight I could make out a dog and a man in one, two children and their parents in the other. "It seems so calm," I said.

"Because it's a bay, not the ocean."

"Does it ever flood?"

"Well, for one, we're built about eight feet above sea level. See the bulwark at the end of the lawn? And for the other, we're protected by that barrier reef in front of us." She pointed to a thin strip of land on the other side of the bay. "It protects us from the Atlantic, though sometimes the ocean breaks through, but not as far west as where we are. More to the east where the rich people have their houses."

"You don't seem to be doing too badly yourself," I said.

"I was lucky. The couple who bought the big house couldn't afford the servants' quarters. They needed the money, so they sold it to me at a bargain. It was a mess when I got it. It cost me more to fix it up than I paid for it. There are always banks that will lend money to someone with a full-time job."

She walked to the kitchen and I followed her.

"So you're still working full-time?"

"I'm tenured. You don't give that up. I teach at night. It still gives me time for my art in the day. Then I have the summers."

She opened a drawer under the kitchen counter and pulled out a tablecloth. "I put this on my drawing table and voila," she said. "A dining room table."

It was the simple elegance of that ivory linen tablecloth accomplis.h.i.+ng just what she wanted it to do that reminded me suddenly of Nerida. For the second time in two days I would find myself noticing how similar they were, and, perhaps, it was that thought more than anything else that calmed my anxieties finally.

There was no likeness, of course, in their physical appearance, but they had the same character-the same values, the same goals for the children. Now, as I could see, the same taste. Gone were the bright colors, the careless scattering of pillows I had found liberating in Marguerite's old apartment. But I was a different man now, with different needs. An older man. I wanted to gather in my nets. I wanted to hold on to the things I had. I wanted to bind to me the people I loved. The muted colors in my home suited me, reflected my mood. The colors in Marguerite's house were muted, too, the furniture spa.r.s.e and neatly arranged. They pleased me.

Marguerite had folded her easel and stacked it against the wall to the side of the gla.s.s front door.

"When I work, I put it in the middle of the room under the skylight," she told me. "That way, I get the light from the sun above me and in back of me."

There was a wooden closet with large doors next to the easel. She told me she stored her tools there and her work. Apart from a striped gray and white couch that faced the bay, and her drawing table with two chairs that stood behind the couch, the only other furniture in the room was a matching pale gray armchair and a pine wood c.o.c.ktail table on which she had placed a stack of large art books and an antique bronze metal jug filled with sunflowers.

I had noticed the sunflowers immediately when I entered the room. I knew she would not replace them with the roses I had given her. She had put my roses in a gla.s.s vase. After she set the table, she placed them on top of the linen tablecloth. They looked garish. Out of place. Vulgar. And yet I would bring her red roses two more times, until she stopped me. Until she told me that red roses were the flowers men brought to their mistresses-the peac.o.c.k's plumage meant to announce to the peahen the peac.o.c.k's readiness to straddle her: biology, the animal instinct, set irreversibly in motion.

"I'm not as colorful as I was before," she was saying to me now, as though she sensed my need for an explanation, some way to understand the change in her, to interpret the pale palette of colors before me.

"The sea tamed me. I couldn't compete. Only blend."

She said she kept her work in the closet to prevent it from being bleached by the sun. Most of it she took to her office. She had hung only one in the room. It was a large framed painting of bamboo trees. She had mounted it on the back wall, away from the windows on either side of the room.

"There was a pinkish carpet on the floor. At least I think pink was its original color, not red. Most of it had turned ivory, except in the places where I suppose there was furniture. I ripped it all out and sanded the floors. The wood turned out to be in good shape."

"It looks great," I said.

"I thought of staining it darker so it wouldn't look so raw."

"I like it," I said.

She smiled approvingly at me.

The furnis.h.i.+ngs in her bedroom were spa.r.s.e, too, simple: a bed with a plain white spread, a pale green rug on the bare wood floor, a night table covered with a white cloth edged with white embroidery. On the table was a clay pot of purple African lilies and a silver reading lamp next to a stack of books. Opposite the bed, bookshelves, some buckling under the weight of too many books, lined the walls from ceiling to floor. There was no TV in the room. She kept it in the kitchen, she said. It distracted her when she cooked.

"Maybe I shouldn't be distracted." She laughed.

We sat down to eat. She had made poached salmon. It was a fish Nerida knew I loved. She had prepared it the way Nerida knew I enjoyed it.

"I can make this better, I promise you."

"Let me taste it," I said. I put some salmon on my fork and brought it to my mouth. "Perfect. It couldn't be better. Perfect." I touched her hand. "Like you, Marguerite. Like everything about you."

After dinner I searched the bookshelves in her bedroom looking for the books she once wanted me to read.

"Do you remember our quarrel over Achebe?"

She joined me. "Things Fall Apart." She pulled it from the shelf.

"You were right, you know." I took it from her hand. "I was a callow fellow. I expected too much from Africa. I was too ready to blame Africa alone for its problems."

"I was also too young, too idealistic. I didn't want to believe that colonialism had done such damage. I didn't want to believe that it affected our minds, that it could distort our thinking. Fanon was right. Though the Europeans have gone, we still have to battle racism. The one we have internalized. Have you read him?"

I nodded. "A Martiniquan gave me a book of his."

"Black Skin, White Masks"?

"Yes, that's the one. But we should be easy on ourselves. We were both young, Marguerite. We didn't know better." I handed her back the Achebe novel.

"Do you still have the books I gave you?" She turned to put it on the shelf.

"They are in my bedroom," I said. "Opposite to my bed on my bookshelves. Like yours are." She was standing in front of me. I put my arms around her waist.

"Do you read them?"

"Sometimes," I said. "The times when I missed you."

She leaned her head against my chest. "Did you miss me?"

"There were times I missed you so much, I could not bear to have anyone around me."

She faced me and put her arms around my neck. "And did you dream of me?"

"More times than I would want to tell you."

She kissed my neck. "I want you to tell me," she whispered. "Tell me how many times you dreamed of me."

"There were nights I could not sleep, waking up from a dream about you."

She kissed my mouth. "For twenty-five years? You dreamed about me for twenty-five years?"

"Twenty-five years. I never forgot you."

She unb.u.t.toned my s.h.i.+rt. "And what did you want to do when you dreamed about me?"

"I wanted to make love to you."

"Like we used to?"