The Last Time They Met Read online

  —Our resident rhyming fool.

  Roland, generous golden drink in hand, sidled up to Thomas and leaned his elbows on the wrought-iron railing, a position that looked, but couldn’t be, at ease. His arms were swathed in some synthetic shirt material Roland let you know had specially been sent from London.

  —I don’t rhyme, Thomas said.

  —Really not? I didn’t realize.

  Roland took a sip of his drink and brushed a greasy forelock from his forehead. His smell was rank with an overlay of cologne. Not to mention his lethal breath, evident at a yard. The British didn’t bathe but once or twice a week; well, no one did out here.

  —Where can one get your books, anyway?

  —There aren’t any books.

  Thomas was certain they’d already had this conversation, months ago.

  —Oh. How disappointing.

  Roland’s trousers, also of some synthetic material, were tight against his thighs and belled over his shoes. He wore a heavy silver watch with an expansion band too big for him.

  —Broadsides? Pamphlets? Roland asked, with seeming insouciance.

  —Literary magazines, Thomas said, immediately regretting the note of pride.

  —I suppose there’s a market for that sort of thing in the States?

  Thomas wondered where Roland’s lover was tonight. Jane, whose husband led safaris and was often conveniently away from home. Whose husband complained loudly at parties about not being allowed to shoot the game anymore.

  —None.

  —Oh, dear, Roland said with faint dismay. Regina must do well? He meant financially.

  Thomas thought about, and then decided against, revealing that he was putting Regina through school.

  —There’s a Ugandan fellow here runs a magazine might be of use to you, Roland said, making a sour face and leaning conspiratorially toward Thomas. Of course, it’s a grotty little magazine, mind you, and the fellow is a bit of a slime, but, still, I suppose any publication is better than none?

  Roland put his back to the railing and surveyed his own party.

  —And what were we being so reclusive about all alone on the verandah, if one may ask? Roland asked, giving himself permission. He smiled and took a sip of his drink. The man’s condescension was insufferable. The we put Thomas over the edge.

  —Actually, I was thinking about Jane, Thomas said.

  * * *

  Arab furniture from the coast mixed with English antiques to produce a fussiness that needed editing; though there was a magnificent secretary Thomas had admired once before and did again tonight. He examined the books that lay behind the leaded glass cabinets. Nothing surprising, just the usual: Dickens and Hardy, T. E. Lawrence and Richard Burton. He might ask Roland tonight if he could borrow the Burton. An African in a white uniform took his glass and asked, in melodic Kikuyu accent, if he’d like another Pimm’s. Thomas shook his head, the medication for the migraine mixing with the alcohol, making him both high and groggy. Desperate for sleep.

  In the corner, Regina was talking to a boy. She had worn her hair in a twist, a style she knew Thomas liked. Her sleeveless red dress revealed arms tanned from long afternoons spent at outdoor clinics. Her neck was damp from the heat, tiny dots of moisture on her skin. Once he had craved to make love to his wife. When they’d met in a hardware store in Boston — she wearing a yellow T-shirt and overalls, looking for a hoe; he standing at the checkout line with a plunger in his hand — he’d noticed her porcelain-fine skin and her astonishing breasts outlined beneath the bib of the overall and had felt compelled to capture her attention. He’d followed her to her car, feigning an interest in gardening that hadn’t survived the evening. In bed that night at her apartment (wallowing in bed, he thought now), he’d confessed he’d known nothing about gardening, and she’d laughed and told him he’d been as transparent as glass. She’d been flattered, however, she added, which he hadn’t understood until months later when he’d learned how much she hated her large body. And by then, it was too late. He thought the words, too late. A fatal construction he’d never really put together until now. Already the chance meeting with Linda was rearranging his thinking.

  Regina bent to the boy, hair whipped blond by constant wind and sun, who had come out to say hello to the guests. Looking shy and miserable, though Regina was good at coaxing a smile and might manage one soon. He seemed a sweet kid, only ten years old. In another year, Roland would send him to England to boarding school. It struck Thomas as an extreme measure to take to give a child an education, Roland’s culture sometimes as foreign to him as the African. Regina beckoned to Thomas to join them.

  —You remember Richard, Regina said in a bright voice used by adults in the presence of children.

  Thomas put out his hand, and the boy shook it, the delicate bones nearly lost in Thomas’s grip.

  —How do you do? the boy asked politely, eyes everywhere but on Thomas.

  —Very well. And yourself? Thomas bent slightly to the boy, who shrugged. Manners could take him only so far.

  —Richard said he’s racing tomorrow in Karen. He’s invited us to come and watch.

  Thomas could scarcely imagine the boy controlling a horse, never mind racing. Though, as Elaine’s son, he’d have grown up with horses. Once, Thomas and Regina had been invited to the Karen Hunt, an anachronism if ever Thomas had seen one: sherry on silver trays, scarlet coats, the immense underbellies of the beasts brushing the tops of the hedges. The hedges of Karen, he thought. They told a story all their own.

  —I think we might just have to do that, Thomas said to the boy, thinking, again, even as he spoke: And where is Linda now? Right this very minute?

  —You’re kind of quiet tonight. This from Regina when the boy had left, summoned by his mother.

  —Am I?

  —You’re being almost rude.

  —To whom?

  —To Roland and Elaine, to start.

  —Considering the fact that Roland just expressed deep sympathy over the fact that I’m a failed poet who needs to be supported by his wife, I don’t suppose I give a fuck.

  —Thomas.

  Beyond Regina, Elaine watched them intently.

  —It’s the migraine, he said, searching for an explanation his wife might find acceptable. It’s made the day seem not normal.

  Regina slipped a finger between the buttons of his shirt. All your days are abnormal.

  Thomas understood the finger for what it was. Regina would want to make love when they got home.

  —I know you’ve had the migraine, Regina said, whispering. But tonight’s the night.

  Thomas felt a sinking in his chest.

  —I’ve done the charts, she said, perhaps defensively.

  He hesitated just a second too long, then tried to put his arm around her. But distance or mild panic had already conveyed itself to Regina, who moved inches to one side of him. Too often, it seemed to Thomas, he unintentionally hurt his wife.

  —I assume you’ve heard the news. Her voice cool now, the barometer lowered, looking away from him and taking a sip of her drink, a rosy wine.

  —What news? Thomas, in cautious ignorance, asked.

  —They’ve arrested Ndegwa.

  Thomas simply stared.

  —This afternoon. Around five o’clock. Norman what’s-his-name, the one from the London paper, just told me.

  She gestured in Norman what’s-his-name’s direction. Noting Thomas’s surprise. It would not be fair to say that Regina was enjoying Thomas’s distress.

  —Impossible, Thomas said. For the second time that day, daunted by the impossible. I just saw the man at lunch. I had a drink with him at the Thorn Tree.

  Regina, who had not known he’d had a drink at the Thorn Tree, looked sharply up at him. They arrested him at the university, she said. There are demonstrations even now.

  Thomas, saturated, couldn’t absorb the news.

  —He must have a tremendous following, Regina said, now as watchful as Elaine.

&nb
sp; —Jesus, Thomas said, shaken by possibility become reality. He thought of the casual way Ndegwa had looked at African women. Of his joke about the worm.

  —Big enough to be news in London anyway, Regina said.

  * * *

  He waited in the bedroom of the villa, the room lit only by the moon, the bluish light outlining the odd feminine bits of furniture that had been lent to them after the robbery: the dressing table with its chintz skirt; the camelbacked settee that had some age; the heavy mahogany wardrobe with the door that didn’t quite fit and in which both he and Regina kept ridiculously few clothes. He imagined the ornate wardrobe traveling from London by ship to Mombasa, brought up by horse and cart from the coast. A woman’s treasure, a piece of furniture she’d said she wouldn’t go to Africa without. And what had happened to the woman? Thomas wondered. Had she died in childbirth? Been afraid during the long nights when her husband had been on safari? Danced at the Muthaiga Club while her husband made love to her best friend in the backseat of his Bentley? Been sick with chronic malaria in this very bed? Or had she become browned and hardened like Elaine, the boredom and dust sharpening her tongue? The house was a perk from Regina’s research grant, its unexpected luxury surprising them both when they’d arrived in the country. Regina had at first balked at staying in Karen, but the bougainvillea and the Dutch door in the kitchen had seduced her before they’d even had their gin and tonics on the verandah. Now his wife adored the house, couldn’t imagine returning to the States. Couldn’t imagine living without the servants now, for that matter: the cook, the gardener, and the ayah they would hire if only Regina could bear a child.

  Behind the bathroom door, he could hear the swishing of limbs in the water of the clawfooted bathtub. He knew that Regina would soon put on the black silk-and-lace nightgown he’d bought her on a homesick whim during a stopover in Paris on their way to Africa. A nightgown she’d worn every night she thought herself fertile; a nightgown that now gave off a whiff of failure, its intended allure long since worn away, like a woman’s scent fading. He wished he could somehow signal to Regina not to wear the thing — had even, oddly, thought of hiding it — but she would almost certainly misinterpret the comment, would take it personally to mean that he thought her too fat. A word he’d never used, never even suggested, her own distaste for her body so pervasive she assumed everyone shared her own distorted image. It had, he knew now, ruined her life, in the way a cleft lip or a misshapen limb might twist a future. Nothing he could say or do could erase the picture she had of herself, and he thought the damage must have been done early in her life, though he thought it pointless to blame a parent.

  He got out of the bed and stood naked at the window. He could just make out, in the eerie light, the jacarandas and the euphorbia trees, and on the air was the smell of jasmine. Returning from the party, slightly drunk, he’d been assaulted by a rush of memories, a neap tide he hadn’t been able to hold back, even when Regina had said, rusty note, Thomas, are you listening? He’d pleaded preoccupation with Ndegwa’s detainment, true enough, though it had not been the source of the nostalgic flood. In the car, he’d seen a young girl — and yes, she had been only a girl then — walking late into a classroom already filled with students and a teacher, her swagger an announcement, a surprise. Her charcoal skirt had come only to the middle of her thighs, a shocking length in school. Every boy and even the teacher had gawped at the long legs (legs as long as birches, he thought now) and at the white cotton shirt, fastened one button too short, that opened to a deep V above her breasts. (And even now a cotton blouse on a woman could arouse Thomas, a mildly disconcerting cue in a country where short skirts and white cotton blouses were de rigueur on schoolgirls.) The girl had stood in the doorway, books in hand and chewing gum, and he was certain Mr. K. would bark at her to spit it out. But even Mr. K. had been rendered speechless, able to do little more than ask her name and check it against his roll, fingers trembling as he did so. And somehow Thomas had known, even then, that the skirt and the blouse and the gum were wrong for her, a costume she was trying on. And had wondered immediately how it was that he had not seen this girl before, for he knew that she was someone he’d have followed for days until he’d made her speak to him. Her expression had not been brash, but rather cautious, and he’d realized then that under the mask she might be afraid; that she was someone who might easily be taken advantage of. He’d willed her to choose the seat next to him, one of the six or seven empty seats in the room (actually prayed for it: Dear Jesus, please let her sit next to me), and, miraculously, as if will or desire were enough, or God Himself had intervened, she had moved forward, hesitated, and then taken the seat behind Thomas. And the relief he’d felt had been so profound that he’d been, for the first time in his life, frightened of himself.

  From the bathroom, he could hear the tub draining. Regina would be pink from the hot water. He imagined her naked and tried to work up a kind of desire, touching himself without enthusiasm as he did so. Once, lust for Regina had been thoughtless and automatic, but now he had to forget the frown between her eyebrows, the whining tone in the market, the fact that she despised her body. In attempting to forget, however, he succeeded only in remembering — one set of images replaced by another, a slide show he couldn’t control. A girl jumping off a pier in the October night. A duffel bag flung high and wide into the sea. A dark warren of tiny rooms, smelling of onions and Johnson’s baby oil. Sliding a blouse over the soft bony knob of a shoulder, an image that had retained its erotic hold over him for years. A small girl carrying a tricycle.

  Regina opened the bathroom door, and the light flooded the bedroom. She wasn’t wearing the nightgown, but instead had wrapped a kitenge cloth around her hips. He would never know whether the gesture was deliberate or merely unconscious, but his heart ratcheted within his chest. She switched off the bathroom light and stood provocatively in the doorway, her breasts white globes in the moonlight. He had only seconds, if that, before she would see his hesitation and cover herself. And then the rest of the night would be tears and apologies, words that both of them would regret. In the distance, as he sometimes did during the night, he heard the sound of drums, of people singing. Kikuyu Catholics, he knew, returning from a midnight service. An awakened ibis cawed in the night, and a donkey, disturbed, made its raw and awful cry. Thomas walked toward his wife and prepared to tell her she was beautiful.

  —I don’t understand. It’s a Sunday.

  —I promised Ndegwa.

  —Promised him what?

  —That I’d visit his wife.

  —What good will that do?

  —None, probably. It’s just a promise, Regina.

  —Why didn’t you tell me you’d had a drink with the man?

  He walked to the car, always surprised that it was still in the driveway. Inside the house, Regina was fuming and might be still when he returned later in the evening. He’d invited her to come along, but, either truly stubborn or simply needing to study, she had refused his half-hearted offer. Yet not before she’d told him (arms crossed, her mouth aggrieved) that she had planned a picnic in the Ngong Hills for later in the day, a picnic that would now obviously have to be scrapped. He had winced for her lie, though he’d been relieved when she’d said finally that the trip would simply take too long. He had wanted desperately to be alone.

  He left the jacaranda-shaded driveway and made his way along Windy Ridge Road toward the center of town, marveling, as he often did, at the hedges of Karen — thick, impenetrable walls that hid estates from less-privileged eyes. Karen, named for its most famous citizen, Karen Blixen (I had a farm in Africa. . . .), had once been an almost exclusively white enclave, a kind of mini-Cotswolds with rolling farms and white-fenced stables and an Anglo-expatriate fondness for racing horses and excessive drinking. Now, scattered amongst the signs at the ends of driveways were African names as well — Mwangi and Kariuki and Njonjo — wealthy Luo or Kikuyu or Kalinjin, an African elite, the money often made mysteriously through p
olitics. And always, at the ends of these driveways, the ubiquitous signs: Mbwa Kali. Fierce Dog.

  The Escort lurched along the Ngong Road into Nairobi, its tattered muffler announcing itself rudely to anyone at the racecourse or in the Ngong Forest. He negotiated the streets of the city, quiet now on a Sunday morning, and left Nairobi for Limuru, the scenery a kind of diary of time spent in the country: the Impala Club, where he played tennis with the Kenyan executive for Olivetti; the Arboretum, where he and Regina had once fallen asleep after making love; and the house of a UNICEF administrator, where he had gotten drunk nostalgically on scotch. He had been out to the Ndegwa shamba only the once, and he hoped he would remember the way to the outskirts of the central Highlands, once called “the Happy Valley” for the sexual license and alcoholic excess of the Anglo-Kenyan expatriates who had owned the large wheat and pyrethrum plantations. The Mau Mau rebellion and Independence had put an end to the party, the vast farms broken into smaller plots, on which bananas, cassavas, beans, potatoes, and tea now grew. The green of the tea plantations was a color that awed Thomas every time he saw it: a seemingly iridescent emerald that contained within it the essence of both light and water.

  In Limuru, he bought a packet of Players at a duka and asked directions to the Ndegwa shamba, noting the practiced manner in which the shopkeeper gave them, as if repeating the well-traveled way to a tourist shrine. Thomas remembered the road when he saw it, little more than a twisting curb on a terraced hill. He parked amidst an array of vehicles: black bicycles with rusty fenders and wicker baskets, a Peugeot 504 with sheepskin seats, a white van that looked like a bakery truck. Beyond the vehicles was a circle of men, sitting casually on benches, like brothers or uncles sent out after a meal by the women in the kitchen. They moved aside for Thomas, his presence not remarkable, and continued their conversations without interruption, mostly in Kikuyu with bits of Swahili Thomas recognized and even phrases in English when only English would do. Methyl bromide. Irrigation systems. Sophia Loren. Most were mzees, old men, with dusty sports jackets plucked from Anglican jumble sales, though one tall African had on large gold-rimmed sunglasses and a beautifully cut suit with a Nehru collar. He hardly moved a muscle, his poise impressive. The scene reminded Thomas of a wake. From time to time, women brought out matoke and irio and sukimu wiki from the kitchen. Thomas declined the food but accepted a gourd of pombe, a beer of bananas and sugar he’d had before. Cool drafts of air drifted over the terraces, and in the distance, on another precipice, a waterfall fell silently. He was awed by the strangeness and the beauty of the scene, the colors rich and saturated. A man, appearing in the doorway of Ndegwa’s house, was escorted out by another of Ndegwa’s sisters. The woman looked at Thomas, but then ignored him in favor of the African with the exceptional poise. Thomas understood then that the men, like himself, were waiting for an audience with Ndegwa’s wife.