“What does that mean, sir? ‘I
am
a Sai then’?”
The man turns to look at him, surprised by the inflection. Kehinde, surprised also, looks down at his hands. He presses them together, holding left hand with right, thumb to palm, trying to rub out the burning beneath. There is something in the smug, dismissive manner of this stranger that calls up aggression, a strange thing itself, to feel anger, simple anger, this burning sensation, this urge to do violence to some yielding thing. He is so rarely angry he finds himself nervous, alarmed by the feeling, the heat in the hands. He is certain that the stranger can sense his aggression, but the man just keeps talking, still laughing, “
Chalé
. Go and see that one, the house in the compound. The first one, he drew it. An
ah
-teest like you. Then came the boy, that your father, an
ah
-teest. His mother would send him to watch me, you see. They said he was coming to learn how to doctor, but no: he was just like his father. Just drew. Drawing and drawing,
tss
, all the day drawing. Never learned about bodies, never learned about wood. They were
ah
-teests. Like you.” He looks closely at Kehinde. “You see. Now you’re crying. You Sais, all the same.”
Their classmates used to ask him if twins were telepathic, if the one could feel in real time what the other sibling felt. This was in high school, when they first grew their dreadlocks, when Taiwo stopped combing, he cutting his hair, when they’d walk around campus in oversized sweaters and Doc Marten boots, clothed in black, and blank stares, when they still didn’t know what to say to each other but knew even less what to say to the world, and so stuck to each other in gathering quiet like guilt-ridden robbers who’d pulled off the heist, always watching the other for signs of defection, sitting side by side, knitting a silence with breath. Of the two of them he was the slightly more approachable, would try to engage on behalf of them both, could see that their classmates and teachers were curious, very genuinely, to know whence these Sai twins had come—but they lacked the vocabulary, simply hadn’t the
language
, in the suburbs, in the nineties, to know what he meant. “A year in Nigeria,” in their language, was “experience,” a sophomore year abroad, a vacation run long; “my father left the family” was a custody agreement, a Back Bay apartment, a stepmom named Chris. He and his sister still spoke the same language, like newborn twins babbling in conjured-up words, an odd language known only to them (and their uncle perhaps) that they spoke by not speaking at all. In this new way they were aware of their twinness, performed it in a way that they hadn’t before, with their clothes and their hair and their genderless affect and constant togetherness. He knew why they asked.
But the question upset him. The tone of the questioners. As if they could sense what was wrong with these Sais, never mind whence they came. “No, we’re not telepathic.” He’d smile. “We’re just close.” Never told them the truth. That often he’d excuse himself to go find a bathroom to sit there and weep for no reason at all, only to speak with her later and learn she’d been crying at precisely the same moment for good reason elsewhere.
So it is now as he bursts into tears without warning: hard, chest-rattling, deep-water sobs. Without speaking (unable), he goes to the bench by the door and drops down as a spinning coin falls. End of journey. Bent over, his face in his palms, with his legs squeezed together, his feet curling in. He has no way of knowing about Taiwo and Fola entwined in a knot by that house on the beach but feels sorrow far greater than one heart could muster and knows not to try to abate the loosed tide. All of it comes and sits calmly beside him: the face of the woman he thinks he may love, and the face of the sister he touched though it broke him, the blanket of quiet, the body, the loss, the loose word that slipped out in New York that one evening, the word meant for Bimbo, a statement of fact, and the face of his father that night in the Volvo, “an artist like him,” not a stranger at all. The whole thing is over in three or four minutes—the heart bursting inward, split, splintering apart—but it feels like an hour has passed when the last sob has risen and Kehinde looks up. The man is gone.
ix
Benson phones his driver to ask where he’s gone to. The driver explains, nervously, he’s here at the beach, by the path that the fishermen beat to the ocean, where he brought the pretty woman who was looking for the girl. This solves the mystery of Fola and Taiwo. Benson asks the driver to return to the car. Sadie, Ling, Olu stand waiting, bewildered. Kehinde appears, walking up the middle of the road. The driver comes jogging from the other direction. The
beep-beep
of car doors unlocked, blinking lights. Benson, Kehinde, Sadie, Ling, Olu alight, with the latter three climbing to the third row this time, as if sensing that Kehinde should be by himself for the moment; the driver starts humming again. They drive the short way to the path to the ocean where Fola and Taiwo stand waiting on the road. Fola has an arm around Taiwo’s bare shoulders. Both Olu and Sadie emit sounds of surprise. Fola takes the seat between Taiwo and Kehinde and holds both their hands with the rest of her strength.
“Shall we go choose the coffin?” asks Benson.
“Can we cremate? Do they cremate in Ghana?” asks Fola.
“Of course.” Benson looks stunned. “There’s a place near my clinic.”
“Today?”
“I’ll call now.” Benson takes out his cell.
The driver looks at Benson, then to Fola for instruction. “Madame?”
Fola nods. “Let’s go home.”
6.
Later, much later, the moon having risen, the day having died its spectacular death of blood reds and blood oranges, blues and magentas, a heart-stopping sunset that none of them sees—they come to the table again to eat dinner (rice, garden egg soup, minus Taiwo, who’s resting), then drift to their rooms with their hurts and faint hopes drifting softly behind them, beneath closing doors.
ii
Ling is on her side when he returns from the bathroom. He stops in the doorway and stares at her hair. Usually it comforts him to look at her sleeping, to sense that there’s some hope of rest in the world, to observe his heart slow from the pace of his fears to the beat of her breaths—but it troubles him now. The black of the hair on the white of the pillow reminds him of Sunday in Boston, the snow, of the dark and the drumbeat, the slick black on cotton the only familiar among so much strange. Three days have passed since he sat in that Eames chair and watched his wife sleeping, a mute to this mouth, but he thinks of it now and the moment seems further, much further away both in hours and miles. Or
she
does: this figure, her hip, waist, and shoulder, the familiar undulation too distant to touch. Or else
he
does. Feels distant. Feels far from this figure not ten feet before him, feels far from himself.
He wants to go back, he thinks,
home
, to that bedroom, to the apartment he found when they first moved for school, not a ten-minute walk from the house he’d once lived in, but in the other direction, across from MassArt. He loved it the moment the broker unlocked it: the stainless-steel kitchen and brilliant white walls and the blond wooden floorboards and oversize windows, the sun playing Narcissus, blond blinding light. But he couldn’t afford it. He was just starting med school then, fresh out of college (returned from Accra, with the smell of that woman still thick in his nostrils, the taste of betrayal unnamed on his tongue). A miracle, really, how it happened, years later: he was walking out of the library at the School of Public Health when he chanced upon an advert on a corkboard, same apartment. Ling’s mother had died, then, and left a small sum. He procured all the furniture at IKEA, on eBay, arranged all their photos in matching white frames, black-and-whites, he and Ling on their various adventures; he pored over copies of
Dwell
magazine; rented vans to go pick up antiques in Connecticut, did the painting himself, installed bookshelves, built desks—until the apartment was perfect, the home he’d imagined, inoculated against disorder, indestructibly clean.
He wants to go back to that order and cleanliness. He wants to go back to their tidy redoubt, to their jogs before sunrise and to-do lists on the refrigerator, their white squares of furniture welcoming them back, to their muted-toned clothing all folded and hung, to their meals of lean meat and dark greens and whole grains, to their kisses good-bye in the morning postjogging, their kisses hello in the evening, in scrubs, to the clean way they chitchat, never arguing, never lying, never asking for truths. To that place and not this. Not this tension, not Ling with her back turned toward him, not sleeping but not turning as he appears at the door to the thin-windowed room with its gray marble floor and its chipped yellow walls and its brown velour drapes (that mismatched decor he’s always found, in his travels, in bedrooms in countries where sleep is a gift, where the bed needn’t look like a present at Christmas with pillow shams and dust ruffles to drive the point home)—and not silence, demanding, in place of their chitchat, a large, messy silence, subsuming, like damp.
It hangs there like moisture, so thick he can feel it. There is no place to put it, and no place to go. He stands in the doorway and hears in this silence his heart beating, hard, to the sound of her breaths. He closes his eyes and he sees in that darkness, that deep, sparkling darkness that lives behind lids, like a slideshow: their flight, Monday evening, to Ghana, with Ling there beside him, her head on his chest, then their flight to Las Vegas, the chapel, October, their first night of marriage, the tacky motel. He remembers making love to her; a difference, already; to think the word
wife
of the woman below him, to place his wide palm on the side of her face and to hear her “We’re married,” to whisper, “I know.” It wasn’t the idea of being married that changed things—he’d never much cared for the language, the show—but the idea of a beginning, in which began every ending, the thing he’d been running from, for fourteen odd years.
Fola used to tease him for calling Ling “partner,” for refusing to say “girlfriend” (“your lab partner,” she’d joke). They had no anniversary. They had no beginning. “You’re not Asian,” she said, and he loved her. Fait accompli. He’d wax philosophical about the puerility of the language, “boyfriend/girlfriend,” about the emptiness of “falling in love,” about the physiological underpinnings of desire and attraction, the senselessness of exalting the instinct to mate, and the rest of it. Really, he was terrified of endings. He couldn’t understand how people loved, then didn’t love. Loved, then stopped loving. As a heart just stops beating. (Of course he knew
how
, but he couldn’t see
why
.) Dr. Soto once told them that the reason for dating—the only real reason for dating as opposed to mating for life—was to acquaint oneself, viscerally and immediately and nonlyrically, with the fact of one’s “personal mortality,” nothing else. One of the junior attendings had just called off his wedding and was moping around the OR with a look on his face that suggested he might do himself harm with his scalpel. Dr. Soto convened them all after surgery to say:
“the only point of a relationship is to play out, in miniature, the whole blasted drama of life and of death. Love is born as a child is born. Love grows up as a child grows up. A man knows well that he must die, but having only known life does not believe in his death. Then, one day, his love goes cold. Its heart stops beating. The love drops dead. In this way, the man learns that death is reality: that death can exist in his being, his
own
. The loss of a pet or a rose or a parent may cause the man pain but will not make the point. Death must take place in the heart to be believed in. After love dies man believes in his death.”
Olu listened, laughing.
But what of the opposite?
What if love never dies, what if love wasn’t born? What if it had always existed since they touched pouring punch at the Asian-American Cultural Center Open House at Yale? What if there
was
no relationship to end? No boyfriend/girlfriend? No “now we are” and therefore no “now we’re not” down the line? This is what he had with Ling Wei, he was thinking. The dramaless life of a love unbegun.
Then they got married on a whim in Las Vegas. After, they made love with her face in his palm. That night he lay still with her cheek on his breastbone and thought of an “ending” and wanted to cry. Many years earlier he’d vowed not to do so, teeth grit in the mirror, alone in his dorm, so just stared until dawn at the pink neon heart blinking on and off, huge, on the ceiling. In the morning he asked could they keep it a secret, not tell what they’d done, let it be “just for them.” What he wanted to say was, “Don’t die, don’t go cold, don’t stop beating,” but knew it was useless. Now he stands at the door in this break in the action and thinks what he thought in the bedroom before: that he can’t bear to lose her, to let her drift further, or drift off himself in the way that he’s done, but that “forward” or “closer” are his only two options, not “back,” as he’s hoped, that they can’t unbegin.
And so he begins, “I have something to tell you.”
She looks, sees his eyes closed, and starts to stand up. He hears that she’s stirring and shakes his head. “Please. Please just listen.” (She does, sitting back, on her feet.) “You live your whole life in this world, in these worlds, and you know what they think of you, you know what they see. You say that you’re African and you want to excuse it, explain
but I’m smart
. There’s no value implied. You feel it. You say ‘Asia, ancient China, ancient India,’ and everyone thinks
ooh
, ancient wisdom of the East. You say ‘ancient Africa,’ and everyone thinks
irrelevant.
Dusty and irrelevant. Lost. No one gives a shit. You want them to see you as something of value, not dusty, not irrelevent, not backward, you know? You wish you didn’t give a shit, but somehow you do, because you
know
, Ling. You fear what they think but don’t say. And then, one day you hear it out loud. Like, your father—”
“My father’s an asshole—”
“Your father was right. I didn’t go to Haiti for that project at graduation. I came here to Ghana to see him. I lied. He kept sending these letters to ask me to visit, to come for my birthday, to just hear him out. He’d gotten this place, this . . . this ugly apartment. He said it was until he could afford to buy land. I don’t know. I didn’t stay. There was a woman, some other woman, he was living with some woman, I don’t know who she was. I know what he was. He was that man. He was that stereotype. The African dad who walks out on his kids. The way that I’d always hoped no one would see us.” He squeezes his eyes, shakes his head. “And I
know
. I stand in that house, in that hut he grew up in. The man came from nothing; he struggled, I
know
. I
want
to be proud of him. Of all he accomplished. I know he accomplished so much. But I can’t. I hate him for living in that dirty apartment. I hate him for being that African man. I hate him for hurting my mother, for leaving, for dying, I hate him for dying alone.”
Tears. But not as for Taiwo and Kehinde, the dam giving way and the tide rushing out. They begin without noise and he stands without moving, as strange as they feel, left to flow, on his face. He leans on the doorframe, too tired to keep speaking, and hears in the silence the bullfrogs outside. He doesn’t hear the creak of the bed as she leaves it. He feels her small hands on the sides of his face. “Maybe it was the best he could do,” she says softly. “Maybe what he did was the best he could do.” He nods, though it hurts to. He opens his eyes now. She smiles at him, wiping her tears off, then his. He touches the hand that she’s placed on his cheekbone. She thinks that he wants her to stop and pulls back. But he presses his palm to her hand, to his jawbone. “I want to do better.” He kisses her lips.
He can sense her surprise as she turns her mouth upward, the way that she used to when they were at school, when he’d walk her to her door on Old Campus and pause in the lamplight to consider the shape of her mouth. Feeling his gaze, the pink lips would drift up, as if moving of their volition, not their owner’s, not his. He’d kissed girls in high school but never like this, with their lips playing puppet, his eyes playing string. And had never had sex (is the truth he’s never told her, half embarrassed, half touched by his own lack of breadth. He always assumed that he’d want other women, come to desire other bodies as the months turned to years, but he didn’t, and hasn’t, as the years blur to decades. His first is his only). He touches her neck. He feels the pulse quicken beneath his four fingers. He feels his heart speed to the pace of her breath. “I want to do better,” he whispers, through kisses—her chin, then her neck, down the length to her chest. Placing his palm along the curve of her lumbar and applying enough pressure to make her arch back, he kisses her sternum, the cotton-clad nipples, the one then the other, then lifts up her shirt. He presses his palm to her breastbone, five fingers, and kisses the dip of the clavicle, once. The sounds that she makes are small lights on the runway; he flats the palm down to her waist, cups her groin.
“Make love to me,” she whispers. “Make love to me, make love to me.” She grabs his smooth head with such force that he gasps, looking up at her face, a pale mask of pure agony, such want and such need that she looks like someone else. He lifts her up easily with one of his arms, sets her down on the bed, and removes her few clothes. She unbuttons his trousers with rushed, famished movements and pushes them down to his knees with her feet. He presses her wrists down with one of his hands, both her arms stretched above her. “Make love to me. Please.”
In a moment he will: piercing body with body, pushing firmly through labia, palm to her mouth (though the moaning is his as he thrusts to her center), the slippery-pink tissue peeling willingly apart. His body will feel foreign at first, somehow larger, too large and too strong, like a thing that can hurt; for the first time he imagines himself, in his lover, as those words that he spoke, as an “African man.” He will start to pull out of her, afraid he is hurting her, afraid of the noises that slip past his palm, but Ling won’t allow it—and, clutching his buttocks, she’ll pull him yet deeper, in, farther, down, down. For now he just kneels there and pauses to see it: Ling’s body in this bedroom that isn’t their own, both their faces distorted by sorrow and longing and overhead lighting and truths newly told, but the forms still familiar to his fingertips, the landscape: bones, breasts, hips, rib, pubis, navel, birthmark, flesh, hair, skin: the woman’s body, a
body
, nothing sharp-edged or sterile, everything rounded and destructible and soft, and so home.
iii
Taiwo is on her side when he returns from the garden. He thinks she is sleeping and leaves the light off. He sets down his cell phone beside the pink flowers, on the small wooden nightstand, and kicks off his shoes.
“Who was on the phone?” she asks, not turning over. “I could hear you through the window.”
“My assistant,” he says. “We’re doing a show with those paintings you saw, of the Muses, in Greenpoint. A gallery show. They’re not done yet, I know, but I think I might like them. I think you might like them.” He is nervous. He stops.
“They’re incredible, K.”
She rolls over to face him, her cheek on the pillow, her hands just beneath—but he hears something else. Three other words, in her voice, in his head, just a snippet. Her thought among his. He feels his heart swell to have heard what she’s thinking, this briefest transmission, but something. Reception. Three words in silence, in the space between beds, her low voice in his head as he once used to hear. He looks at his sister, or tries, in the darkness. She looks at him back, a sad smile on her lips. They don’t state the obvious: that both have been crying. They look at each other with raw, swollen eyes.