The Last Time They Met_ A Novel - Anita Shreve [86]
I hardly remember the night we spent together, but I remember very well our brief time in that lovely house you managed to get hold of. (I realize now I never asked you how.) What an extraordinary room! Open to the sky, as if we had nothing to hide. Jasmine petals on the pillow, which I cannot help but think of as a token someone might have left on a wedding night. How I would like to go back there, to spend days without end in that house, which surely must be the most unique residence in all of Lamu. Or are they all so beautiful and sensuous?
I wake in the mornings. I go to my job. I think of you. I come home in the evenings, and I drink too much. I try to drown sensation. I try to numb agitation. Peter comes and goes and waits for me to recover, though I haven’t the heart to tell him I will not recover. We haven’t slept together since Lamu, which he attributes to my illness. There, I have given you this. You needn’t tell me about you and Regina. I don’t want to know. If you haven’t slept together, I will feel guilty and sorry for her. If you have, I’m not sure I could bear the images.
We are really not so different, you and I.
But our problems seem petty in the face of what we see daily, don’t they? Just yesterday, I met a woman named Dymphina, who is twenty-four and has three children that until a week ago she hadn’t seen in over a year. She lives in a one-room shack attached to a long wooden building in Nairobi. She leaves her children with her mother in Njia so that she can find money with which to pay her children’s school fees, or as she puts it, to seek her fortune. That fortune amounts to $40 a month she makes as a servant in a European household. She labors from six in the morning until seven at night, six days a week, to make that $1.50 a day. Of the $40, she sends $20 back to her children, and pays $10 for the single room that has neither electricity nor running water. She often worries at night because drunken men from nearby bars try to force her locked but flimsy door. I met the woman when her mother brought her to my schoolroom; the mother wanted me to help her daughter because she was ill. “My titties hurt,” Dymphina said.
To mind that I cannot see you should be nothing in the face of this. Why, then, am I able to think of little else?
I am sending with this letter a box I bought in Malindi. It is not alabaster, though I am pretending it is.
Love,
L.
February 20
Dear Linda,
I have waited and waited for some news of you, sick with worry that you were still ill, that you were not recovering. Convinced that I would never hear from you again. That you would take the debacle on Lamu for what it seemed, but was not: punishment for loving each other.
I must see you again. Will you let me come to Njia? Is there a time that you know Peter will not be there?
I am hardly a sane man. I smoke too much and drink too much as well. It seems the only antidote. Regina notices my distraction, but takes it for ordinary dissatisfaction with life, which she has seen before and assumes is more or less the norm. I can hardly speak to her or to anyone else. I’m too impatient; all I want to think about is you.
I work. I write about you. Oddly, not about you here in Africa, but in Hull. I do not understand Africa. I see this thing or that thing (a lobelia in bloom; a tourist berating an Asian shopkeeper; a hyena lurking at the edge of the forest), and it is as though I watch an exotic, imagistic movie. It does not include me. I am not a principal player. I am in the audience. I suppose that allows me to critique the movie, but I don’t feel capable of even that.
Thank you for the Kisii stone box. I will treasure it always.