The Last Time They Met_ A Novel - Anita Shreve [42]
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 collective 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