The Last Time They Met_ A Novel - Anita Shreve [64]
—You still wear the cross, he said.
Her fingers automatically touched it. I don’t know why.
Thomas was momentarily stung. He had, after all, given it to her.
—God is everywhere in this country, she said. And yet, I hate Him passionately.
The comment was so startling, Thomas immediately forgot his hurt. The anger with which she’d spoken shocked him. He waited for her to explain.
—You can’t even look at the rain, at its excess, and not think of God, she said. He’s everywhere you turn. And viciously cruel.
Even Thomas, whose own belief amounted to nothing, worried for her blasphemy.
—So much poverty, she said. So much death and disease and heartache. You can blame colonialism, which is what everyone does. Or tribalism, as good a cause as any. But in the end, it’s God who allows it.
Thomas was impressed with the strength of her belief. To hate so passionately is to value immensely, he said.
Her cheeks were pinkened with her sudden passion, a frown between her brows. She wasn’t actually beautiful, though he and others had called her so. It was more that she was pretty. Which meant, he supposed, accessible in some undefined way.
—You see a lot of poverty? he asked.
She turned to him. They have no shoes, Thomas.
—The Kenyan elite. They, too, allow it, he said.
—You mean the Wabenzis? she asked with evident distaste, using the common nickname for Kenyans who owned Mercedes-Benzes. You mean the Africans who come in on foot and leave by jet?
She fingered her hair. It was drying, even in the humidity. She rose and went into a room he imagined to be the bedroom. She returned with a brush. She sat in an armchair and began to untangle her hair.
—It’s not our struggle, he said.
—We borrow it while we’re here.
—I didn’t want to come to Africa, he said. It was my wife’s idea. I’d just, believe it or not, learned the value of routine. He paused, embarrassed. I write, he said.
She smiled. Not surprised. What do you write?
He turned away. Poetry, he said, trying to make it a throw-away line. As if his entire life did not depend on it. I don’t feel I belong here, he said.
—It can be a weird, dissonant life, she said.
—We live in Karen, in relative luxury, when all around us. . . . Well, you know as well as I do what’s all around us.
She nodded.
—It’s not what I imagined, he said. All these paradoxes.
The neckline of her blouse revealed her collarbone. He was reminded of the sweater she had worn on the last day he had seen her. A pale blue sweater with an open collar. Her wool skirt had lain in soft folds around her shins in the car.
—What did you do after Middlebury? he asked.
—I went to graduate school in Boston. In between, I taught high school in Newburyport.
—You were in Boston and Newburyport? All that time? Thomas, incredulous, calculated the distance between Newburyport and Cambridge. An hour at best. Two from Hull.
He tried to sound casual. You lived alone? You had a roommate?
—I had a boyfriend for a time.
He willed himself not to ask about the boyfriend. I used to try to talk to your aunt when I’d see her around. For about six months, I was in Hull after I graduated. She wouldn’t speak to me. Wouldn’t even acknowledge I was standing there.
—She’s very good at that.
—I went to grad school trying to evade the draft. Then my number came up and it was a good one, so I dropped out. If you add it all together, there are probably a couple of years I can’t account for very well. I spent a lot of it drifting. I went to Canada for a while. Then to San Francisco. I was pretty heavily into drugs.
—Which?
—Dope. LSD. I still smoke dope from time to time.
She set her hairbrush on an end table. I’ve always been grateful to you, she said. I’m glad you’ve come, because I’ve always wanted to tell you that. I don’t know what would have happened to me . . .
He let her thought trail off. He did not deny the gratitude. He’d always had a keen sense of how easy it might be to lose oneself.
—Would you like some