The Last Time They Met (20 page)

Authors: Anita Shreve

Tags: #Contemporary, #Fiction, #Romance, #Adult

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?

H
e 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 politics. 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.

He was made to wait an hour and a half, but, curiously, he did not feel impatient. He thought of Linda, endless occupation, exhausting every detail of their short meeting in the market: the surprise on her face when she’d seen him, the manner in which she’d looked away when Regina had said the word
migraine,
the way her fingers had trembled. He drank several gourds of the pombe, and knew himself to be distinctly drunk, which felt inappropriate to the occasion. From time to time, one of the African mzees blew his nose onto the ground, a custom Thomas could not get used to, even after a year in the country. He tried to make a poem as he sat there, but could form only disembodied and alien images that he knew would never coalesce into a single entity. He needed very badly to piss, and asked,
Wapi choo,
of the mzee beside him. The man laughed at his Swahili and pointed to a small shack a hundred feet from the house. Thomas was not surprised to find a hole in a cement floor, the smell so foul he had to hold his breath. Glad for Regina’s sake that she hadn’t come with him.

When he returned to the bench that had numbed his butt, Ndegwa’s sister was waiting for him. His walk was surprisingly steady as he followed her into the darkened hut, and he was all but blinded by the sudden darkness after the sunlight. Ndegwa’s sister took the blinded man by the hand and led him to his seat. Thomas remembered the feel of the red vinyl before he could even see it.

He would not have recognized Ndegwa’s wife. A tall headdress of purple-and-gold kitenge cloth hid the contours of her hair and head. Her body was sheathed in a caftan of similar colors. Thomas was, however, reassured to see the red platforms poking beneath the dress, the rhinestone ring on her finger. She sat
—
he thought,
regally
—
with a glass of water on a table in front of her, and as she spoke, she took small sips. She did not seem the distraught wife of a political martyr or even a forensic scientist who’d had to excuse herself because her breasts were too big. Rather, she held herself as one who had inherited too soon a mantle of power, like the teenage son of a dead king.

Thomas crossed his legs and folded his hands before him. He struggled to find appropriate words for the occasion.
I’m sorry that your husband has been detained,
he said.
I’m hopeful that this will sort itself out quickly. If there’s anything I can do.

—
Yes.

The
yes
matter-of-fact, as if she had expected the offer.

—
I saw your husband yesterday,
Thomas continued.
At the Thorn Tree Café. He told me he might be arrested. I had no idea it would happen so soon.

Mary Ndegwa was silent and very still. Thomas tried to imagine her life on her mother-in-law’s shamba: would there be a hierarchy, a chain of command? Both women reduced to lesser status when Ndegwa came home on weekends?

—
He told me that if he was arrested, I should visit you,
Thomas said.

—
I know this,
she said.

Thomas, disoriented, nodded slowly.
You’ve been expecting me, then?

—
Oh, yes.

And yet he himself hadn’t known until this morning that he would come. A lizard slithered on the wall. Mary Ndegwa adjusted her bulk on the settee.

—
How is your son?
Thomas asked, the breasts reminding him of the child.

—
Baby Ndegwa is just all right.