The Last Time They Met_ A Novel - Anita Shreve [52]
Regina settled in beside him. Blondes shouldn’t let themselves get that much sun, she said. Did you notice how she’s ruining her skin?
He stood on Roland’s verandah, a Pimm’s in his hand, his chest suffused with a sensation he thought, from no recent recognizable experience, must be joy. A feeling that went all the way to his thighs. At the start of the evening, arriving amid a welter of cool but paradoxically welcoming asides — Roland, aren’t Americans funny the way they walk to everything? Now this dress I like — he’d felt his attention sparingly lent, plucked from him unwillingly. And so had sought refuge on the verandah, where no one else had yet gone.
And knew himself to be in love. If, indeed, he’d ever not been. Not since a day in 1966 when a girl in a gray skirt and a white blouse had crossed the threshold of a schoolroom. It was as if he’d merely been distracted all these years, or had grown weary of loving only memories. And had, against all the odds, been returned to a rightful state. Not reminded, but restored. As a sightless man who once had sight will learn to live with his condition, adjust to his darkened universe, and then, years later, when astonishingly he can see again, will know how glorious his world once was. And all this on nothing but an unlikely meeting and the exchange of a dozen sentences — small miracles in themselves.
The verandah overlooked a garden of hibiscus and moonflowers, the latter giving off a spectral glow from the lit lanterns hanging in the trees. On the equator, the sun set at six every night of the year, a light that extinguished itself without apology or dimming, a fact Thomas found disconcerting. He missed the slow leaching of summer evenings, and even the dawns he had hardly ever seen. He also, to his vast surprise, missed snow, and occasionally he had snow dreams in the night. Eye-level now with an avocado tree ponderous with fruit — so close he could have leaned over and picked one of the scaly green pears — he remembered he’d never eaten one until he’d gone to college, the fruit far too exotic for his mother’s Calvinist table.
Roland had insisted he have a Pimm’s, a sweetish gin drink, though Thomas had wanted a simple beer. Roland was as executive at home as he was on the job, a man who made insistent pronouncements with a certitude that was baffling. Mark his words, there would be tribal anarchy when Kenyatta died. He’d tell you right now, if an African bought a European house it could be counted on to go to ruin. It was axiomatic that you could never trust an Asian. Thomas, having no opinions on these subjects, found the acknowledged — no, brandished racism — appalling. In turn, Roland thought Thomas hopelessly naive and said so. Amusingly naive, actually. An earnest American was an entertainment. You’ll see, Roland was fond of adding.
The night air floated around Thomas’s arms, bare to the elbows. In the distance, he could hear music and the fading away of a woman’s laughter. Smoke rose from the cement garage where the servants lived, raising, as it always did, the question of degree: Was the confinement of servants in a cement garage any different from slavery? Beneath this thought, also wanting to know: Where was Linda right now? What was she doing this very minute? He imagined her in a hut in the bush — why, he couldn’t have said. It was the idea of the Peace Corps, he supposed, with its suggestion of good works and mild suffering. How easily they might have missed each other in the market, might never have known the other was even in the country. It made him weak in the knees just to think of it. He saw again the shallow curve of her waist and hips, the way her breasts swayed inside her blouse. A longing he hadn’t felt since adolescence made his bones ache.
Her fingers had trembled when she’d brought them to her face; he was certain he had seen that. And yet she had seemed so calm, so preternaturally composed. Had