The Last Time They Met_ A Novel - Anita Shreve [80]
She understood the slip and lightly corrected him. That wasn’t sex, she said.
He sat beside her on the bed and wanted to make love again. Wanted to touch her shoulders and feel between her legs. Would a honeymoon be like this? he wondered. He didn’t know, not ever having had a true one of his own, Regina weeping almost constantly for the loss of the baby just the week before the wedding. A kind of wake it was. The grieving, however necessary, badly timed. Though truth to tell, he’d been relieved, too aware of pretense.
—You promised me a walk, she said, touching him.
______
They walked through the town hand in hand, looking at the Islamic carvings and the Swahili silver jewelry, seeing neither the carvings nor the jewelry, but only the past, the recent past, the wife or the husband of the other, imagined marriages, houses and apartments never lived in, and once, poignantly, a future with a child, though the future was a blank to them, unknowable and unimaginable. He could not stop himself from thinking only one day and only one night, and was on the verge, once or twice, of crossing the line between what was likely and what was possible. But did not, for fear that any plan that involved the hurt of others would frighten Linda off. It was a calculus problem he couldn’t solve — how to be together without catastrophe — and as with calculus, which had been his nadir, he felt his brain go hard and empty with resistance.
They had lunch at Petley’s, neither of them hungry, ordering too much food — pweza; supa ya saladi; kuku na kupaka (lobster cocktail; watercress soup; chicken in coconut sauce) — lingering after most of the other diners had left, staying long after a confused waiter had taken away their barely touched plates. They sat with too many drinks (she surprisingly overtaking him), until he looked up and saw that the help were waiting to leave for their breaks. He stood, slightly woozy from the alcohol (really four scotches?), and suggested they walk to Shela, an insane idea in the middle of the day after the drinking, with no shelter to speak of along the way. When what he really wanted to do was go back to the bedroom with the jasmine blossoms ground into the pillows and sleep with her body pressed close to him.
They followed hand-lettered signs for Shela and caught a ride on a military truck that made its way through sand-clogged roads. They sat on benches at the back of the truck, and briefly she fell asleep with her head in his lap. One of her shoulders was burned by the time they had arrived at the beach, the scarf having lost itself at a jeweler’s counter or at Petley’s. They sat on the verandah of Peponi’s, the only beach hotel, and drank water and ate grapefruit — hungry after all — the sense of fog in the brain dissipating in the shade.
—How did you get here? he asked, having been too preoccupied to have imagined her arrangements.
—I came up from Malindi.
—That must have been an adventure.
She looked away, perhaps knowing the question that would come next even before he did.
—Why Malindi?
She hesitated. Peter is there, she said.
That she had been with Peter on the coast should not have been remarkable at all — no more remarkable, say, than the fact that he had left Regina only that morning — but it disturbed him nevertheless.
Linda did not elaborate. She took a sip of water. It was bottled, but the water at the museum house hadn’t been. In her thirst, he remembered, she’d drunk nearly a pitcherful.
—That’s why you have to go back tomorrow? he asked, knowing better than to ask. The answers would hurt no matter what they were, the only acceptable answer being that she would never leave him.
But she, perhaps wiser in this regard than he, or seeing the future more clearly, said nothing. And asked no questions of her own. Her hair, which had come loose when they had made love, had been put into a twist again, and he saw, from the inexpertness of the hastily made knot, how painstakingly