The Last Time They Met_ A Novel - Anita Shreve [69]
I am sitting at the back of the cottage under a thorn tree, which gives a twig-like illusion of shade. The wind rustles in from the chrysanthemum plains, and the fever trees are creaking. There is an enormous vulture in a branch above me, sitting patiently, so I know there must be a fresh kill nearby. I don’t want to think about what animal it might be, or about its specific killer. Superb starlings of iridescent turquoise twitter in the branches, but the vulture refuses to be annoyed. It seems scarcely credible that today is Thanksgiving. Very strange to celebrate a holiday when everyone else is at work.
I feel stunned, as I do sometimes when I emerge from a darkened schoolroom or my cottage and am hit with the light of Africa at noon: blinded by it, made dizzy, as though I’d taken a blow to the side of my head. Disoriented, slightly nauseous even, unable to eat. I walk around the cottage, touching things because you touched them. A book of Rilke. A plate that once had jelly on it. A hairbrush from which I have not yet removed the chestnut hairs. It’s a kind of sickness, isn’t it? An illness that has invaded me. Or rather the return of a chronic illness. This bout fatal, as I know it must be.
I think that words corrupt and oxidize love. That it is better not to write of it. Even memory, I think, is full of rust and decay.
I have always been faithful to you. If faithful means the experience against which everything else has been measured.
Yours always,
Linda
December 1
Dear Linda,
When I left you and arranged that we would write each other, I thought that you would not, that your overdeveloped sense of guilt would make you silent. Worse, I feared that if I got in the car and drove to Njia, you’d have vanished without a trace, like the veils of mist over the moors near your cottage. So that when I saw your letter in the box — lavender paper, delicate backward hand — I wept. There, in front of the mzees chewing twigs and the schoolboys throwing pebbles at a hyrax. No shame, none at all. Only joy and considerable relief.
Magdalene. Beautiful Magdalene. Lost and then found again. I don’t think I ever before knew the meaning of happiness.
About Regina. Should I write to you of the quiet fury with which I was greeted when I returned on Sunday night, all the more daunting for being so justly deserved? Or the equanimity — absent elsewhere in her life — with which she regards the most harrowing cases of childhood disease (Kenyan children being, despite their lot, the best-behaved in the world — some mysterious parenting secret I haven’t yet been able to discover); or her desire to bear a child of her own — all-consuming, constant, and crippling? No, I will not. I do love Regina. It is irrelevant, however. I assume you love your Peter as well — about whom you were justifiably silent on Sunday.
I remember your body on the bed. For long moments at a time, that is all there is.
You are so beautiful to me. (Do you have a mirror? I forgot to notice. We don’t. Regina does her makeup in the tea kettle.)
Proof of my own constancy: All of my poems are about you, even when they appear not to be. More to the point, they are all about the accident, in case you doubted the sincerity of my own guilt. I assume these are not available in any form at the British Council library.
I felt disloyal writing to you in my house — disloyal to you or Regina? both, I think — so I have driven in my battered and twice-stolen Escort to Nairobi, have taken a table at the Thorn Tree and have ordered a Tusker without the worm (long story). There is a strange white smoke emerging from what must be the kitchen, which I suppose I should ignore since everyone else is (though it looks as though it will poison us all). I have never had a message left for me at the message board, but, insanely, I checked it today on the off chance