Discretion (10 page)

“No. I can see you’re not like the rest. You’re not corrupt.”

Our eyes met. “So you forgive me?”

For a second, and that was all it took, something passed between us. A recognition? A meeting of our souls? I did not have to answer her question. She knew: there would be no need for forgiveness between us.

And then the eternity of that second passed and she flinched as if she felt for the first time the heat of my hand under hers. She pulled away, but it was already too late. She had told me all I needed to know. The feelings I had when we stood before her drawings would not be in vain.

She ordered a salad and ate it quickly. Ten minutes later she announced that she had to leave. I tried to persuade her to stay a little longer. “I can’t,” she said. She was already out of her chair. “I have to go.” She fumbled with her handbag. “How can I reach you?” She looked up at me. “So I can tell you what Catherine says,” she added quickly, as if she had to explain why she had asked. But we both knew that Catherine had nothing to do with her question or with her sudden need to leave.

I wrote the phone number of my office in Washington on a piece of paper and gave it to her.

Nerida was waiting to have dinner with me as she had promised. Since we arrived in Washington, she had stopped wearing the traditional African dress except for official social functions. Now she
had on a light blue jumper over a white silk blouse. The fabric of the jumper curved softly over her rounded belly. It was my child she was carrying. Ours. Perhaps another son, or a daughter. Nerida was beautiful when she was pregnant. She was beautiful that night. I kissed her on her mouth.

“Long day?” she asked.

I nodded.

“I made your favorite. Oxtails with gravy and rice. Ayi is asleep.”

My son. I sat down and she massaged the space between my shoulder blades.

“I should have told you to stay in New York,” she said. “It has to be tiring making two trips by plane in one day.”

“Short trips,” I said. “Less than an hour and a half one way.”

“But you are exhausted. You should have spent the night in New York.”

Innocent Nerida. If only she could have read my heart then, the hands that caressed my neck would have grown stiff with her anger. She had echoed a desire that had come over me. A desire to be where I was in a dining room, to have a woman’s hands on the back of my neck, to have a woman breathe in my ear, except I wanted that dining room to be in New York; those hands to be Marguerite’s; that sweet breath, Marguerite’s; those lips that kissed me in bed that night, Marguerite’s; the breasts I cupped in my hands, Marguerite’s.

The next morning Marguerite called. Catherine had left Geneva. She had telephoned her and got a message with a forwarding phone number in Jamaica. She spoke to her in Jamaica. Catherine said she had decided to follow John’s instructions and wait for him in Jamaica. He said he would be bringing Eric to her and they could discuss the details about Eric’s custody there.

“Did she say if she knew where John was?” I needed to know if I had been caught in a lie. I needed to prepare an answer.

“If she knew, she didn’t mention it. Do you think John will bring Eric to her?”

“No.” I was relieved. I answered her honestly. “No, I don’t think he’ll bring Eric to her.”

“I don’t think so either.” Her voice was sad. The sadness penetrated my heart.

“Catherine will be okay.” I said. “She’s a fighter.”

“I don’t know …” She paused, a pause that grew into a palpable silence.

“Hello? Hello?” I called to her.

“I’m here,” she said.

“You were so quiet.”

“Poor Catherine. She told me she only wanted you to give me her love. She didn’t want to worry me. She didn’t want to burden me with her troubles.”

“Was she angry that I did?”

“No, she seemed pleased. I think she felt better knowing that I knew what had happened to her. She was relieved to talk about it. But I also think that secretly she wanted you to meet me. Something about your reaction to my name.”

I held my breath.

“What was it about my name? She said you’d tell me.”

“I liked it,” I said.

“I got the impression from Catherine that it bothered you.”

My diplomatic training rescued me. “I wouldn’t say bothered me. Intrigued me, perhaps. I mentioned to Catherine that Marguerite was the name of a woman in a story I read at the university. Catherine said you were much more beautiful than that woman. I couldn’t wait to see you.”

She laughed. “You couldn’t wait to be disappointed, huh?” It was a nervous laugh.

“I wasn’t disappointed. You are more beautiful than I could ever have imagined.”

She did not speak at once, but I could feel her holding my answer in her heart. I was not wrong. Something had passed between us when she looked into my eyes in the restaurant. The emotion that had filled my heart to bursting could not have been merely exhilaration—the overwhelming relief I experienced when at last I was freed from the bondage of a dark fantasy that had consumed me, which, in spite of the respite marriage often gave me, returned
to haunt me with that slip of the tongue that caused Catherine to remind me:
Ah, a man who understands passion for the flesh
. It was more than that. It had to be more than that. I had fallen in love with her and I was beginning to believe it was possible that she had fallen in love with me, too.

“Can I see you again?” I asked her.

“Yes,” she said. Her answer was simple. Direct.

“When?”

“When will you be in New York?”

“Monday,” I said.

“Yes, I can see you Monday.”

“We could meet for lunch. In the same restaurant if you like. I’d like to see your drawings again.”

“They took them down,” she said.

“I thought they were going to be there for one more week.”

“Me too,” she said.

“So where are they?”

“In my apartment.”

The line was quiet between us.

At last she said softly, “You can see them there if you like.”

My heart beat wildly in my chest. I could not respond without revealing my excitement.
In her apartment
.

“I’ll make lunch,” she said.

I sometimes think we live too much in the future. We waste our lives preparing for it, thinking we can give it shape, that we can control it. But often when we reach that future, it is not what we want, and we find ourselves squandering days and nights plotting another future while the present slips from us.

Sometimes it is the past that consumes us. I had lived with the past too long. I had allowed a broken heart to lead me to my future. I married Nerida to heal that heart. I sought out Marguerite to avenge that heart, to find the incarnation of a fantasy that would satisfy my dark desires. Instead, I found a good person, a kind person, a compassionate person. Instead, I fell in love with Marguerite. I
did not know how that happened, or why. It simply did, and my acceptance of that fact was the beginning of a lesson life would teach me: it is the present that matters—the people and things we love in the present that we need.

Though later I would come to a deeper understanding of the present, I believed then that if we stood still and listened to the present, we would hear all we needed to hear, have all we needed to have. Marguerite had stood still in the present with me. She said yes. I said yes. We did not consider yesterday. We did not consider the consequences of tomorrow. Today was what we had. It would take us to another today. We would have lunch. In her apartment. Monday would be the present for us. It would show us the way to the other present. I did not fear that other present.

I
have seen two swans make love on a lake in the heat of the noonday sun in my country in Africa. I was in my second year teaching at the mission school. A man I knew, an Irishman, called me to his house to see them. His name was Patrick O’Malley. He was a farmer with a missionary’s calling and a patriot’s love for literature and hatred for the English. The only English poet he would concede he admired was Dylan Thomas, and he would remind me that he was Welsh. He compared him with his favorite Irish poet, William Butler Yeats. One spoke of death, the other of conception. Both sides of the same coin, he would say. They both understood the fight man has to wage against the forces that would destroy him. “Do not go gentle into that good night,” he would shout at me, quoting Dylan Thomas. “Rage, rage against the dying of the light.”

It was rage that kept us alive, he would say. Passion. “The Englishman is too cerebral to know passion. Passion terrifies him.”

I had meant the same thing when I said to Catherine that it was not the Englishman with his obsession with the intellect I was thinking of when she said her friend’s name was Marguerite.

O’Malley wanted me to see rage, he said. To witness with my own eyes what Yeats had in mind when he wrote his famous poem
“Leda and the Swan.” He wanted me to see that it is rage that engenders life. That without rage we would be like lambs to the slaughter. It is rage that allows us to keep our dignity in the face of inevitable defeat, he said. Each act of sexual intercourse is an act of rage.

“Do you think we would happily create a generation whose purpose it is to make us obsolete?” he asked me. “No, we have sex because it feels good to us. Yet we resent the trick God played on us. So we ‘Rage, rage against the dying of the light.’ ”

He had dug a lake in the back of his house that he fed with underground pipes that channeled water to it from the river. No one had objected when he stole water from the river to make a lake on which he bred white swans he had imported from Europe. But it was not only a lake he had intended to build. He wanted to crisscross the country with pipes and bring water to the interior. He wanted to show us that it was possible to grow food in the drought.

His plan failed. My people believed he would drain the river dry and incur the wrath of the river gods. Those of us who should have known better, the educated ones of us, did not contest them. Who were we to know where the gods lived? Christianity was still a generation new for us. It had yet to penetrate our myths.

Today we are laying his pipes across my country, but he did not live to see his plan become a reality. He died not long after that day he called me to his lake to witness rage, to see righteous resentment of a God who forced us into conspiracy with Him to fashion our own destruction.

Fool’s gold, he called children. We console ourselves with the lie that they make us immortal. That after we die, our seed will live on in them. He would buy no fool’s gold, he said. So he never married, he never had children. He never raised animals, as some of the Europeans did. He found no comfort in pets, no solace from dogs. Only swans comforted him. They are honest birds, he said. “One day I’ll show you.”

That day came when two of his swans were mating. He called me to his house, his voice quivering with urgency.

I remember the distance the other swans kept from the mating
pair, except for one, a female swan that circled them, her long neck curved stiff with indignation. Three times the male swan tried to drive her off. Three times she returned and circled them, and when finally he had defeated her, she did not go far. She turned, stayed still, and watched them.

We watched them, too. We watched the water churn angrily with the flapping of their wings. We watched the struggle: the rage of the male swan, the passionate resistance and eventual capitulation of the female swan.

The male swan sunk his rigid beak into the nape of the female’s neck and she beat him off. He straddled her, dug his webbed feet into the feathers on her back, and she fought him. For half an hour they turned those placid waters into their battleground, arching their powerful wings like weapons above each other. White feathers flew into the still air, the water fretted. Again and again the male pounced, and again and again the female beat him back, and then he pushed her so deep below the surface of the water, I thought he would drown her. But he did not drown her. He pulled her head up again, her skin clamped in the vise of his powerful beak.

The female seemed to know now he had conquered her. She did not resist him again. She allowed him the ritual. She seemed to know each time he plunged her head beneath the water, he would not drown her. He would pull her out again. She waited for the end, and when it came, she stayed beneath the water and let him swim away above her. She knew, his work finished, he would not look back at her again.

The swan that had seen it all seemed to pity her. She floated to her and took her to the edge of the lake. On the bank, the female stretched out her wings. Powerful shudders erupted through her body. Back and forth she twisted her long neck, the tremors through her body increasing as if she could expel the thing that had been planted in her.

“Rage and shame,” said O’Malley. “Look at the male swan. He can’t bear to face her. He knows he’s been duped into using her to destroy them both.”

I would think of these swans after Marguerite and I made love for the first time.