The Last Time They Met Read online

  —You’re quick, he said, meaning her showering and dressing. He unsnapped his napkin and placed it over his lap. The humpbacked waitress immediately brought another cup of coffee to the table.

  —I was hungry, she said.

  —I’m ravenous.

  She smiled. This might be awkward. What would be expected would be arrangements, tentative promises. Why don’t we plan to meet? one of them would have to say. I’d like to see you again, the other might feel compelled to offer. She wondered if it was possible to live episodically, not planning for the future, not even allowing thoughts of the future to enter into her consciousness. Though such thoughts might be necessary and primeval, the need to plan a vestige from the days of hoarding and storing for the lean months.

  —When does your flight leave? he asked.

  —I have to head for the airport right after breakfast.

  —I’ll go with you, he said quickly.

  —When is your flight?

  —Not until this afternoon. But I won’t stay here. I’d rather be at the airport.

  They would go home on different flights. It seemed a waste, all those hours of separate confinement.

  They ordered extravagantly, and it was impossible not to see something of a celebration in that extravagance. When the waitress had left, Thomas took Linda’s hand, holding it lightly by the fingers. The men in golf shirts at the next table looked like boys compared to Thomas. Underdressed. Ill-mannered.

  —Hull is not so far from Belmont, Thomas said tentatively.

  —We could meet in Boston for a dinner sometime, she offered.

  —You could — theoretically — come visit your aunt in Hull.

  She smiled. Yes. I could theoretically do that.

  —I’d like to meet your children, he said.

  —They’re both in institutions right now.

  Thomas raised an eyebrow.

  —I mean only that Maria is at Johns Hopkins, interning.

  Thomas nodded. Across the breakfast room, she saw the man who had lost his umbrella at the entrance to the hotel. He was dining alone and reading a newspaper. Beside her, she heard the middle-aged daughter say, And when does your own therapy start again, Mom?

  —I love raspberries, Thomas said, contemplating their rarity in that northern city in April. Cooked raspberries, especially. Jean used to make these muffins. Oat bran with raspberries and peaches. God, they were good.

  A sensation, not unlike a shiver, quickly passed through Linda. She felt with the shiver the rare sensation that she was exactly where she should be. She was an idea, a memory, one perfect possibility out of an infinite number. And whether she was inventing this notion from need or it was simply a truth floating in the universe, she couldn’t say. And wouldn’t question. She and Thomas would ride together in the taxi to the airport, a ride she would remember for the rest of her life, which she decided would be long.

  They said good-bye at the gate, not making too much of the farewell, for to mark it excessively might suggest finality, which neither of them wanted.

  —I’ll call you, Thomas said, and she did not doubt that he would. He would call her that evening, in fact, already minding a night apart. To think . . . he said, and she nodded, her face close to his. She held his hand tightly, as if she were drowning, and her helplessness seemed to move him. He kissed her for such a long time that she was certain that others now were watching them. Thomas stood at the gate as she walked down the ramp, and she could not resist turning to see if he had waited.

  She had been assigned to a window, though normally she preferred the aisle. She took her seat, noticing as she stowed her belongings that the man who had lost the umbrella (she would always think of him as The Man with the Umbrella) was seated ahead of her in first class. She wondered briefly where he lived, why his destination was Boston. She imagined him as a leitmotif in her life, passing by at odd moments — in a taxi, or walking just beyond her reach on a busy street. She wondered if he had already been in her life without her noticing: in a hotel in Africa, for example. Or at a diner in Hull. And it was impossible not to imagine that if fate had engineered her life differently, it might have been he who had stood with her at the gate, who had kissed her for so long. None of these mysteries could be known. Guessed at, surely. Believed in, yes. But not known, not absolutely known.

  From her briefcase, she took out a book and opened it, though she was too distracted just then to read. In her raincoat, with her white blouse and black skirt underneath, she might have been a lawyer, returning from a deposition; a wife flying home after visiting relatives. Outside her window, the cloud was low to the ground, and she told herself, automatically, that take-offs were safer than landings. A flight attendant shut the door and, shortly afterward, the plane began to move. Linda said a prayer, as she always did, and thought of how Vincent had been cheated of years, of how hard Marcus would have to work to free himself of addiction. She thought of Maria’s need to have her own life, and of her aunt sitting with her missal beside her. She thought of Donny T. with his dollars, and of a woman named Jean whom she had never known. Of Regina whom she had wronged, and of Peter, nearly forgotten. She thought of Billie, cheated beyond words. And, finally, of Thomas, her beloved Thomas, wrenched from arrogance with a crushing blow.

  What was left but forgiveness? Without it, she was suddenly certain, what there was of her life would be a torture, right down to the death agonies of the nursing home.

  A bell dinged, and there was silence. And in the silence, a word formed. Then a sentence. Then a paragraph. She searched for a pen in her purse and began to write in the margin of her book. She wrote down one side and up the other, defacing one book with another. She wrote until her hand hurt, until a flight attendant brought her a small meal. She put her pen down and glanced through the window. It was miraculous, she thought. The plane was emerging from the mist to a universe of blue sky and mountainous cloud.

  PART TWO

  Twenty-six

  The mango was alien and fleshy and reminded him of a woman, though he couldn’t decide which part. The color running from lizard salmon to grass green, a mottled palette that changed overnight if you left it on the sill. Moody, like Regina. The skin was thick and tough and hard to penetrate; the flesh fibrous and succulent, glistening with juices. The flavor was divine. There was a knack to eating the things he hadn’t mastered yet, a way of peeling the skin and removing the stone and cutting the fruit into decorous slices to place on a white china plate; but the best he could manage was to stand over a sink and suck on the flesh. He liked to think about Regina naked in a bathtub, the juices running from the tips of her nipples. The fantasy fading inside a minute: Regina would never eat naked in the tub. Wouldn’t allow the mess.

  Jesus, it stank in the market. It was the meat, covered with flies, in the dukas by the walls. The scent bloody, a fresh kill, a carcass still oozing. Worse was the smell of the meat cooking, not like any steak or chop he’d ever eaten. He was certain it was horse flesh, though everyone denied it. A woman, barefoot, with a child tied in kitenge cloth to her back, was standing next to him and opening her palm. Not speaking, just waiting with her hand out. He reached into the pocket of his shorts and pulled out a handful of shillings. She mumbled, Ahsante sana, and moved on. He brought pockets full of shillings to the market now. It wasn’t just the guilt, though there was plenty of that — it was the hassle of refusing. Of having to walk on, pretending to be preoccupied, the beggar still following you, muttering, Tafadhali. Please, mister. Easier to have a pocketful of money. Giving in to the beggars annoyed Regina no end, made her long-suffering and patient, as if she had to repeat instructions she’d given a hundred times already. It didn’t help, she said; it didn’t solve the problem.

  Solves my problem, Thomas thought.

  Us and Them. It never went away. He’d been in the country almost a year now, and it was still Us, still Them. And the Us was, as far as he could see, patronizing and clueless and faintly ridiculous in its collect
ive earnestness. He hadn’t met a single American he thought was making a dent — Regina included — though that supposed there was a problem in which one needed to make a dent, that Africa itself was a problem. It was an endless and tiring debate: did Kenya really need or want Americans in their country? Yes, to the former. No, to the latter. Though you really couldn’t go around advocating that position. You needed tunnel vision for conviction. Like Regina had. Whereas he, Thomas, lacked vision, tunnel or otherwise. Texture interested him. The physical world. The possibility of rapture in the here and now. Sexual subtext. And words. Always words. He was distrustful of a future he couldn’t see. The drop off the earth. The blank screen.

  He put the mango in the straw basket. He was supposed to be buying the fruit while Regina bought the meat. Regina was miffed he hadn’t done it earlier in the week, for making her do it on her day off. Regina, who saw harrowing cases of amebic dysentery and schistosomiasis, children starving to death right before her eyes. Regina, who had clarity. Already she was talking of returning after her degree.

  No, he hadn’t done the shopping, he’d told his wife, because he’d spent the week writing. And he’d seen, around her mouth, the effort it had cost her not to say (raised eyebrow, wry smile), All week? Her support wearing thin in the face of no income, no success. Worse, all the poems, written in Africa, were relentlessly about Hull. Did it take a decade for experience to seep into words? Would he go home to Hull only to write about Nairobi? No, he didn’t think so. Africa resisted comprehension. He couldn’t begin to understand the country and therefore couldn’t dream about it. And if you couldn’t dream about a thing, you couldn’t write about it. If he’d been able to write about Africa, he thought, Regina might have forgiven him.

  What she wouldn’t forgive, he knew, was the pleasure the writing gave him: sensual and tactile, a jolt that ran through him when it worked. Always, he was writing in his head; at parties, he craved to be at a desk. He sometimes thought it was the only honest conduit he had to the world around him, all other endeavors, even his marriage (Jesus, especially his marriage), lost in the excessive caution of failed expectations and injured feelings. But pleasure taxed Regina’s notions of work: that one should sacrifice and be in a constant state of mild suffering. To appease her, Thomas sometimes spoke about the agony of writing, of the struggle to overcome writer’s block. Jinxing himself, he was certain, by inviting its eventual onset.

  He wrote in the bedroom of their rented house in Karen, the house a sprawling stone-and-stucco villa, made to look British with parquet floors and leaded-glass casement windows. A canopy of cardinal and fuchsia bougainvillea clung to the eucalyptus trees overhead, all intertwined into one great vivid parasite. A cactus garden had been planted in the back, and it was a carnival of grotes-queries: long, slithery green and yellow projectiles with dagger-like weapons that could kill a man; trees with pear-like fruit at the end that the birds plucked before you could get to them; ugly, bulbous stumps that changed, from time to time, into lovely heart-red velvety blossoms; and giant brown euphorbia trees with supplicant arms, hundreds of them, bent upward to the navy of the equatorial sky. Along the border of the pebbled drive that led into town, dozens of jacaranda trees swayed in the air and met in the center overhead. Each November, they laid down a thick carpet of lavender petals that Michael, the gardener, would sweep into piles and burn. The scent was like marijuana, only sweeter, and could make Thomas think he was stoned, even when he wasn’t. At night, the trees would shed another purple carpet, and returning from the duka early in the morning with a packet of Players (and milk for his cereal if he remembered), Thomas would walk through the fallen blossoms in a state of near bliss.

  He woke with the birds and listened to sounds he’d never heard before: the trills of tiny weaver birds; the cat-like wail of peacocks; the screeching of ibises; and the rhythmic moaning of something he couldn’t name but that might simply be a dove. Once, he’d seen, through the bedroom window, a tree come shockingly into bloom. Its leaves had been bluish-gray, and on that day it had given birth to an explosion of small yellow puffy balls as big as marbles, thousands upon thousands of them all at once, so that almost instantly a lemon-colored haze had filled the room. It had been one of the small miracles he’d come to expect in Africa. One of God’s modest performances.

  The performances were everywhere: a Masai warrior wearing only a red loincloth to cover his nakedness, leaning on his spear as he waited for the elevator at the Intercontinental, all the while fiddling with his calculator; a late-model Mercedes parked in front of a mud-and-wattle hut; a chemistry professor at the university who didn’t know his own birth date or even how old he was, and was always slightly amused that anyone should care. Even the landscape was contradictory. Waking in the rarefied air of Nairobi under his down sleeping bag (it was fucking freezing at night) and then driving thirty miles west, he would descend into a desert so oppressive and hot that only thorn trees could grow. The thorn trees were the best example of Darwinian selection Thomas had ever seen, self-protective in the extreme.

  He added pawpaw and passion fruit to the mango in the straw basket and handed it to a slight Asian man behind a makeshift counter. Thomas wouldn’t bargain, though the man might expect it. Regina considered it a point of honor to bargain, part of the Kenyan cultural experience. Not bargaining, she argued, contributed to inflation. Plus, it made Americans look like easy marks. Well, they were, Thomas answered, so why pretend otherwise? And what was wrong with being an easy mark anyway? Wasn’t Jesus an easy mark if it came to that? Though Thomas, not very religious, was hard-pressed to continue this argument.

  Kenya was nothing if not a country of contradictions — unnerving and sometimes harrowing. On a Sunday, not long ago, traveling with Regina for her research to the mental hospital at Gil Gil, he’d driven the Ford Escort down the hairpin turns of the escarpment and descended into the floor of the Rift Valley, the butt end of the car shimmying wildly on the corrugated dirt road. Regina had worn a dress he particularly liked: a thin, blouse-like dress of mulberry cotton that fit tightly across her breasts and hips. Regina was voluptuous, a fact she loathed about herself. A fact he had once adored. And might still had she not tainted the adoration with her own physical self-hatred.

  She had thick black curly hair that resisted taming and was often wiry around her face. Her eyes were small, and deep vertical concentration lines separated her thick brows. But in the car, with her sunglasses on, she’d looked almost glamorous that day. She had worn lipstick, which she rarely did, an ice-pink frost that had distracted him no end.

  The hospital had been a series of cement-and-tin buildings arranged like an army barracks, men lying or sitting on the tarred courtyard in tattered blue shirts and shorts, their only clothing. Cleanliness seemed next to impossible, and the stench had been nearly unbearable in the heat. The men had reached out to touch Thomas and Regina as they passed, hissing when they did so, as if they’d burned themselves on white skin. In the violent ward, men had hung naked from the barred windows. They were schizophrenic or tubercular, or were inflicted with leprosy or syphilis; and the guide, a Luo man dressed in a pin-striped suit and snowy white shirt (seemingly impossible in that landscape of dust and delusion), had informed Thomas and Regina that they were all officially considered psychotic. Laughing genially, their host had shown them the kitchen, which stank of rotting garbage. A patient, chanting to himself, wiped the floor in a swaying motion with a nearly black rag. The pineapple cutters, allowed the use of knives, were locked in cages while they worked. In the female ward, the women wore green shifts and had their heads shaved once a week. Most were lying on the hot black tarmac, listless or asleep. One woman had pulled her dress up over her head and was naked from the waist down. When the tour was over, they’d taken tea with their host in delicate bone cups in a room furnished with English antiques — a reserved and formal occasion with many strained silences. Even Regina had been quiet, cowed by the simple excess of the suffering, and baffled
by the genteel nonchalance of the administrator. When they’d gotten home, they’d both crawled into bed, too exhausted to speak. Neither one of them had eaten for days afterward.

  Thomas glanced around the market for his wife and was guiltily relieved when he couldn’t find her. He checked his watch. He would take the fruit out to the car, then walk over to the New Stanley for a quick Tusker. The sun hurt his eyes, and he fumbled for his sunglasses. Another perfect day of blue sky and cartoon cloud. The parking boy he’d hired to watch his car was sitting on the fender of the Escort. The parking boys ran a scam like a protection racket: give them a few shillings and they’d watch your car, a signal to the thieves (other thieves, that is) to stay away. Refuse them the shillings, and they’d stand by your car as a sort of testimonial to its availability.

  He flipped the boy a ten-shilling note for another hour. Cheaper than a meter if you thought about it. He bought a newspaper from a vendor outside the market and glanced at the headline. MP TOLD: WEAR TROUSERS TO DEBATE. He would have one drink, stay no longer than fifteen minutes, and then buy a pound of cashews for Regina on his way back. Together, they would go home in the Escort for what was left of the weekend.

  He hadn’t wanted to believe that Kenya was dangerous and had balked at the idea during the training sessions, which had focused relentlessly on survival, as if Thomas and Regina were soldiers engaged in guerrilla warfare. And of course they were, this particular war born of poverty and not of politics. So great was the difference between the rich and the poor in the country that travelers were occasionally hacked to death with pangas. Great-coated askaris with swords stood guard at the ends of the driveways of the European houses. Tourists were robbed so often in the streets and on buses, the joke about the contribution to the GDP was growing old. Corruption rippled through the government and blossomed at the top. Thomas hadn’t believed it then, but now he did. Already he’d been robbed seven times, twice of his car. Once, the entire contents of the house had been stolen, even the curtains and the telephone cord. Regina had been crushed to lose her Maridadi cloth and her Kisii stone sculptures, and he’d been panicky about his poems until he realized he’d memorized every one of them.