Discretion (9 page)

I did not give my wife Catherine’s letter to me, but I told her that
John was leaving Catherine for the blond woman he met in Geneva. My wife responded with a lecture to me, though she was far too discreet to use the tone of voice that would have revealed her intent to caution me, to have me learn from John’s philandering ways.

“Men are stupid like that,” she said. “They are always willing to give up the thing they have for the thing they have imagined. Nobody is perfect. Men believe in the illusion of perfection. I know this may seem odd to you, but think about it. Who are the realists, men or women? Men say they are and that we are the romantic ones, but it is they who are romantic. Women understand the necessity of compromise. They know they can never get exactly what they want. It’s men who chase windmills.

“John will be no happier with that blonde than he was with Catherine. In time that blonde will prove to be imperfect to him, too. What will he do? Find another one? Pursue one of his childish dreams again? He should grow up.”

My wife was an intelligent woman. I should have taken her words as a warning.

I went early to the restaurant. I wanted to be seated before Marguerite came in. I wanted to be in a place where she could not see me but I could see her when she entered the room. The restaurant she had chosen yielded to my plans. It was bright and sunny and otherwise open except for a wide column in the center of the room behind which I could hide. I calculated that if I pushed one end of the table further outside of the column, I could sit on the chair behind the column where I could not be observed from the doorway and yet could still be able to see the people as they entered the main dining room. I had just moved the table when the waiter approached me.

“Not that way, sir,” he said, and stretched his arms across the table to put it back in its proper place squarely behind the column.

I had to raise my voice at him to get him to understand.

“I want the table here. Here where I had placed it.”

He was a man in his sixties, someone who had spent a life waiting tables, someone who took a proprietary pride in the arrangement of the seating in a restaurant he had deluded himself into thinking of as his own. I saw the trembling begin in the corners of his mouth and I regretted my insensitivity. To appease him, I commented on the group of black-and-white framed drawings that lined the wall in the back of the room. I said I was sure he had a hand in selecting them. He didn’t deny the possibility.

“It is the work of a new artist I know,” he said.

“A patron of the restaurant?” I asked.

“She eats here all the time. I told the boss he should showcase her work, but he plans to take them down soon. Put up something more colorful. Black and white, you know.” He shrugged his shoulders. “He says they don’t work in a restaurant.”

“But you were right to tell him to display them,” I said. “They are remarkable. You have the eye of an artist.”

He beamed.

I looked at my watch. It was noon. I had called Marguerite from the airport as soon as I had arrived. I could not bear to wait the hour it would have taken me to reach the office of my colleagues in the UN and telephone her from there. It was nine o’clock when I called her.

“How will I know you?” she asked me.

“I’ll probably be the darkest and tallest man in the room,” I said.

She laughed.

“And me, you?”

“I’ll wear something red.” She paused. “A scarf. I’ll tie a red scarf around my handbag.”

My heart raced. Red. The color I had seen her wear in my nocturnal wanderings. I tried to stifle my disappointment that it would only be a scarf.

“If you want, you can go look at them.” The waiter was still standing next to my table. I did not want to offend him again. I got up and walked to the back of the room. That was why Marguerite saw me before I saw her. I was standing before a framed etching of a black woman seated on a daybed, her back bent, seemingly from
years of hardship. One arm was hung limp across her lap, the other was held akimbo on her hip as if in defiance of a fate to which she would not surrender willingly. Under the etching the artist had written: “Woman Alone in her Room.”

“You like that one?”

I turned around and saw a woman with a red scarf tied in a knot on her handbag.

Marguerite. She was nothing like I imagined her to be. She was short. I imagined her tall. Her hair was long, caught up in a ponytail. I imagined it in an Afro, loose and bushy around her head. Her eyes were bright, sparkling, honest, frank. I imagined them smoky, alluring—ultimately deceitful.

I could not tell if her breasts were like the mangoes I had envisioned when I spoke to her by phone the day before. She was wearing a long, white, sleeveless, loose shirt. It did not cling to her bosom and make the outlines I wanted, but I saw her arms. They were the color of butterscotch—like the color of her face—warmer than the skin of the woman in my fantasies, more alive, more radiant, more luminous. She wore a dancer’s black leggings, white sneakers, and gray socks, yet in that simple outfit she was more elegant than any of those fashionable women I had seen on the streets of Georgetown, and a hundred times more beautiful.

“Oufoula, right?” She did not wait for my response to her question about the drawing. She shook my hand. I confirmed my name. “My God, I didn’t think you’d be so dressed up,” she said.

Suddenly I felt embarrassed by my suit—my diplomat’s gray jacket and pants, white shirt, striped burgundy tie. I should have known better when she said a restaurant in the Village. I could have taken off my jacket, loosened my tie. But I was dressing for Margarete. Margarete who would have worn a low-cut dress, strappy high-heeled sandals.

“I should have picked a more fancy place,” she said.

“This one is fine. Really. I like the ambiance,” I said.

She smiled. I liked her smile. It was nothing like the smile of the deceitful Margarete.

“The ambiance?”

“The drawings here.” I turned to them.

“So you like art?”

“When it’s good.”

“Are these good?”

“Sad,” I said.

The other drawings next to the etching in front of which I was standing were all similar—black-and-white images of black women, heroically stoic in the face of misfortune. I was struck by one other: a woman with a baby in her arms, two toddlers tugging at either side of her skirt, three older children standing behind her, a boy, not more than ten, with the disturbing eyes of a man.

“Don’t you think that’s reality?” she asked.

I was startled by the irony of the word she had chosen.

“Reality?” I had not anticipated it. Not from the Marguerite I had come to meet.

“Yes, reality. There are women who live these lives, you know. We want to pretend this world does not exist, but it is real for some women.”

It was as if she had read my soul, known that I was a man who lived in two worlds.

“Don’t you think the drawings portray the reality of women’s lives?”

“Sad,” I said again. It was all I could think to say.

“Ah, but you are missing their strength. These women are not submitting to hardships in their lives.”

I examined the first etching again.

“Yes,” I said. “I thought that’s what that arm on the hip meant.”

She was pleased with my answer. “I like you. A man with perception. An instinct for art and a knowledge of women. Okay, I’ll confess. I had a reason for having you meet me here.” I turned toward her expectantly. Her eyes were shining. “This is my work,” she said.

On my way to the restaurant I had rehearsed much different words for her to say to me, but now it did not matter that she had not said them. Now the simplicity of her admission, those four words shimmering with the pride of girlhood dreams now fulfilled, stirred in me emotions I had never before felt: a tenderness toward
her that made the muscles on the sides of my neck quiver, a sudden overwhelming desire to protect her, from whom I did not know. People who could harm her? She was not much younger than my wife, twenty-three perhaps. In my country, a woman of her age would have been married. She would have had children, a husband to care for her, a wide arc of aunts, uncles, brothers, sisters, cousins, a mother, a father, grandparents added to the ones she already had. Women who had not achieved this status by Marguerite’s age were to be pitied. They were among the undesired. Yet Marguerite seemed unaware she could be perceived this way. She said,
This is my work
, as if her art meant everything to her, as if it conferred pride and confidence in her worth as a human being, as a woman for whom gender was no limitation.

I would not call the emotions I felt at that moment love, though it would not be long before I would say with certainty that I loved her. Tenderness toward her, yes; admiration for the courage it must have taken for her to rise above doubt and disapproval, yes; but gratitude also. For when her face became transformed with her joy and pride expressed in those few words, she transformed me. The Margarete of my fantasies vanished. A heaviness was released from my soul: the liberation of a lovebird. It broke out of the prison of its cage. It stretched its wings and soared. I would not need it to sing to me again, I would not need it to console me.

This was no mirage before me, no dark fantasy I had contained in my dreams when Mulenga deceived me. This was not Margarete, a character I had taken from a book and distorted to serve my sexual fantasies. This was Marguerite, a real person, a flesh-and-blood person. She was real. I was real. I was in a real place, in a real time, with a real Marguerite, a beautiful, real Marguerite. Not a seductive Marguerite. An honest Marguerite with honest black hair, honest dark brown eyes, honest butterscotch skin. A kind Marguerite with a heart and a soul. No one who made those drawings could not have a heart and a soul.

The thought flashed through my mind that this was a woman with whom I could be alone in the sunlight or in the dark. A woman I did not have to fear. She would not arouse in me dreams
that could lead to my destruction. She would not take me to the brink of the abyss.

I regretted I had not accepted her first invitation. I could have had dinner with this woman alone in her apartment.

“So you must tell me, is my work any good?”

She was looking directly into my eyes. There was no subterfuge there, no trickery. No plot to bait me so I would fall into a trap she had laid for me.

“I don’t mean to put you on the spot,” she said when I had not answered her. “I meant to ask you when you could be honest. When you didn’t know it was my work.”

“No,” I said. “It would not have mattered when you asked. Your work is good. I like it.”

She left it like that. She did not press me for more. I liked that she did not press me for more.

At the table she refused wine and asked the beaming waiter for sparkling water. I observed this. My Margarete would have asked for wine.

“So what did Catherine want you to tell me?”

“Catherine?” I had almost forgotten.

“That’s why you’re here, isn’t it? What does she want me to know?”

“John has left her.”

“The bastard. I knew he would.”

Exactly. Exactly the word I would have used for him. But I would not have said it aloud. Not to someone I had met just twenty minutes ago. The diplomatic service teaches you the wisdom of such caution. Discretion is our badge of courage.

“And what’s to become of Eric?”

“John wants to keep Eric.”

“He’s that kind of bastard,” she said. “Where is Catherine now? Still in Geneva?”

“Yes,” I said.

“And Eric?”

“With John.”

“Where?”

I thought it prudent to not tell her that John was in New York. Did I fear she would take action? A woman who could portray such strength in the face of defeat in her drawings, who did not hold back her tongue to name a bastard when she recognized him, could do such a thing. She could prove an embarrassment for me if she approached John and told him the source of her information. I lied, and as I lied, I acknowledged to myself that she was a better person than me.

“That’s the problem. Catherine doesn’t know where he is,” I said.

It was not a total lie. Catherine did not know where exactly John lived. New York City was a big place.

“I’ll call Catherine in Geneva.”

Ashamed of my earlier lie, I told her Catherine had a new number. I gave it to her.

She seemed surprised. “I told Catherine diplomats were corrupt. You are an exception.”

I looked away from her.

“No, I mean it. You didn’t have to give me Catherine’s new number. Diplomats don’t like to get involved in such intimate matters, the domestic squabbles between a husband and wife. You’re different.”

It is sometimes to the advantage of people with skin like mine, especially in my profession, that we do not change color, not always perceptibly that is, when we are embarrassed, when we are guilty of allowing an innocent person to make an assumption which we know to be false, but which presents us in a favorable light. The blood gets hot, but the skin guards its secret. It was to my advantage that day, for the truth was I did not want to get involved.

“Like what you said about my drawings,” she said. “You did not carry on. You did not praise me more than was necessary.”

Grateful that she had not pursued the subject of diplomats and their inclination to corruption that reminded me so vividly of Catherine’s warnings to me, I responded quickly, “But I like them.”

“Yes. It was just refreshing to hear unadorned honesty from a
member of your profession. Knowing how to give praise must be a qualification for the diplomatic service, no?”

I did not answer her, and she sensed my discomfort immediately.

“I don’t mean it in a bad way.” She reached for my hand. My skin tingled where she touched me.

“Diplomats have to lie or they won’t get anything done. No agreements or treaties. I know that.”

She was speaking in general terms but it felt as if her words were meant for me alone. As if she was saying to me she understood me.

“You’re being kind.”