Married But Available

by B. Nyamnjoh

  “Sure, Pinklie,” said Mrs Lovemore. In a moment they heard a door close and music burst forth. Mrs Lovemore did not waste a second before launching into another story.

  “There was this technician who used to fix my TV in my first year at university. He made love to me in a way that’s never been repeated. He took me up against the wall. Standing, he pressed his middle into me as my legs wrapped his waist. As I grit my teeth I remember only wanting him to press me harder up against that wall.”

  Lilly Loveless smiled slightly and, wondering if Mrs Lovemore was as firmly built then as now, tried to imagine the physique of the technician who could manage the feat she had just described.

  “The technician disappeared without warning and without trace, all of a sudden. Up to this day, I can’t say what must have happened to make him turn his back on my TV. Did he find a better TV elsewhere? One easier to fix? I still think of him every now and again.”

  Mrs Lovemore saw Lilly Loveless turn her head with an uncomfortable look, as if her eyes were following her daughter out of the room. “Don’t ,” Mrs Lovemore reassured her, “Pinklie is deep in her books and can’t hear a word of ours over that music of hers.”

  As if something had been released within her, Mrs Lovemore continued recounting.

  “I went once to this African students’ party: lots of good food, beer, music and dancing. I liked the spontaneity, and the warmth, and the camaraderie with Africa and its causes. I danced several times with Wiseman Lovemore. He was doing his doctorate at the same university as me. I liked his strong upper arms and the way he held me when we were dancing. But when his hand travelled to my bum, I reacted by pulling back and slapping him across the face. Undaunted, I heard him mention to a friend that I would be his wife. And before I knew it, soon we were sharing an apartment. He insisted on visiting my parents. After initially resisting, ‘over my dead body’ my mother and father had each said, and after many dinners together where he had the opportunity to seduce them with his storytelling, my parents were all for us getting married. They arranged for our wedding at the church where I had grown up attending Sunday school. The day came, Wiseman appeared with two of his friends, and the deed was done.”

  “How lovely,” said Lilly Loveless.

  “Wiseman finished his PhD, I tried persuading him to stay and look for jobs in Muzunguland, but he was all passion and fire for his fatherland. He said he had signed an undertaking with the government of Mimboland which had given him the scholarship to study abroad, to return home upon completion of his studies and to work for the state for ten years. He even convinced me there would be a job for me as well. His optimism was overwhelming, and I fell for it.”

  “So you came back together to Mimboland?”

  “I wish I hadn’t. He has always cherished building castles in the air, Wiseman.”

  “No sooner had we touched down in Mimboland than strange things began to happen. First our hope and optimism vanished. It took him nearly two years to be employed at the university. Me, it took a lot longer. Nothing was what it looked like. Everything could be everything else. My son fell sick, a strange sickness that defied medical knowledge. We went up and down and everywhere we possibly could, but didn’t succeed in saving our son. Not even the medicine men, diviners and witchdoctors Wiseman insisted we visit could save his life. Our son died, and with him went my love and trust for Wiseman Lovemore.”

  “I’m so sorry to hear about your son,” Said Lilly Loveless, imagining the pain Mrs Lovemore must have felt.

  “Even before the death of our son, Wiseman had changed remarkably. During the first few months of our arrival here, he was still recognisable. When his friends came asking him to go out with them for a drink, meeting or something, he always made sure I was invited as well. ‘Can I bring my wife along?’ he would ask and insist that if I wasn’t coming along, he wasn’t going. One day, he returned home to say his friends were laughing at him that I had become like a handbag to him. They cautioned him: ‘If you bring dat your handbag again, we no go talk for you.’ I waited for what he would say next. ‘I hope you understand that my friends are important to me,’ he landed. By implication, his wife was no longer that important to him.”

  “How terribly callous,” Lilly Loveless agreed.

  “I got the message. But he had been leaving other messages, only I was rather slow, or should I say, too credulous, to understand them.”

  “What do you mean?” asked Lilly Loveless.

  “One day I made an appointment with the ophthalmologist, the same one Wiseman had seen several months earlier for a new set of spectacles. After a few minutes in the waiting room reviewing religious publications on fornication and other topics, we were sitting eye to eye, she on her examination stool and me in a comfortable armchair. She didn’t know I knew, but I knew she was the reason Wiseman had been leaving messages saying he would be coming home late. I had seen his car parked alongside her clinic after a couple of those calls, on my own way home. As I sat, I wondered if Wiseman had sat in the same chair for an intimate examination, and to appreciate the hefty ophthalmologist, from behind was his favourite, with or without her white jacket, it wouldn’t matter to him. I noticed she was wearing trousers that day. She completed the exam and said my vision was 20/20 or perfect. She prescribed me an eye rinse for fatigue. On the way out, when I motioned towards the pamphlets on the table in the waiting room and asked if she was religious she said, ‘there’s much more to reality than meets the eye.’

  “‘I see,’ I said.”

  “‘Yes, I know you see; you see well, I just examined you. You see much better than you thought you did and you don’t need glasses like you thought you did.’

  “I too had completed my examination, of her, and in a way I was thankful Wiseman had chosen to fool around with a doctor, who was likely to impose condoms on him. And judging by her shortness of breath, she couldn’t keep him around for hours, as Pinklie was used to needing both of us at home. When I was doing laundry before that, I would find condoms in his pockets and naively think he had bought them for us, because we were being careful not to have another baby before we could have jobs. But the condoms soon disappeared and were replaced by strange infections. Pain here, pain there; I would visit a doctor and come home baffled. Gonorrhoea? I had never known another man but Wiseman since we got married. He said nothing, did not complain, and continued as if I was imagining these infections. How could I imagine the painful urination and the pain around my urethra? I wondered what happened between him and his ophthalmologist. Did they see well to do whatever they did with required safety? He seemed to have moved on and whatever he picked up made me itch.”

  “I can well imagine how frustrating this could be,” said Lilly Loveless, scribbling away.

  “I began finding letters to him written by other women. Letters that proved he had many more lives out there than I could ever have imagined. I thought my eyes had been opened before, but it was only then that it really started to happen. I still have these letters, just in case divorce should ever be necessary one day.”

  Mrs Lovemore wouldn’t let Lilly Loveless touch the letters, but she read out from them, without revealing the names of those who had written them. Lilly Loveless felt uncomfortable about not being able to see the letters. A thought crossed her mind: What if, knowing my relationship with Dr Wiseman Lovemore, Mrs Lovemore is doing everything to paint an uncaring, monstrous bastard of her husband? But then, what can I do? And, in any case, what makes me believe that Britney is more authentic in her accounts? For all I know, both could well be inventing stories for one reason or another. In fact, there’s no reason to assume that social science research has ever been any different… Lilly Loveless snapped herself out of her reflections and listened on, concluding that research is as much an invention of reality as is the very reality that it researches. If reality is faked, social science is doubly faked.

  In the first letter, it was clear that whoever wrote it was deadly furious and
wanted nothing more ever to do with Dr Wiseman Lovemore. There was a passage that particularly amused Lilly Loveless: ‘Your masturbating sessions got me pregnant you beast. Incidentally, do you wash your armpits when you take your shower (fresh lemon helps severe cases), it might help the disgusting, he-goat stench around you. That is if it’s not from your bottom, or worse still, from the numerous masturbation sessions. You never know! Stinking, insensitive, egocentric, randy, bastard.’ She would never have associated Dr Wiseman Lovemore with what the entire letter accused him of doing. But, as they say, looks can be deceptive, if the letters are authentic, that is.

  In the second letter, a woman writes:

  ‘For some reason I’ve really been thinking of you these past two days, missing you a lot and it just struck me, not just the futility of the situation but more importantly its ugliness! Much as I’ve tried, I just can’t make a good screw-mate and while I can justify myself for cheating if I’m happy, there’s no way I can justify an unhappy association such as ours. I feel so bad every time I think of your woman’s picture looking down on me and it’s just occurred to me that while my man would find a place in his heart to forgive me for cheating because it made me momentarily happy (like when we first started), honestly I doubt if he’d ever forgive me for putting myself through the agony I suffer in my relationship with you.

  ‘I therefore my dear would like to suggest that we make a clean and very final break. I know we’ve tried it before but I want to suggest that this time we really go back to before we knew each other, sever all friendship and acquaintance ties and pretend we’ve never known each other.

  ‘I cared for you a lot, Wiseman, I still do, but there comes a time when drastic steps are in order. While ours would have been a blissful few months of stolen happiness that we set out to have, it has turned out to be quite the opposite. And I’m sure that you’ll agree with me that what we have now we cannot justify ever to our own consciences, let alone to the world and that’s just what makes it ugly. Everybody can accept two people who genuinely like each other and make the best of the time they have to be happy with and enjoy each other, but when happiness goes out of it then the world cannot be expected to be tolerant and because honey, I believe we are both very decent people who can’t do anything unless we can justify it at least to ourselves, this is why I suggest we get out while we still like ourselves if not each other, pretend not only that it never happened, but also that we never knew each other for me at least that’s the only way I can have it. You will know deep inside yourself that I cared for you a great deal and you’ll always remain in that bit of my heart that you captured and it is because of my selfless feelings for you that I take the burden of ending our friendship.

  ‘I do wish you all the best in life and hope your interview for recruitment at Mimbo goes well and in my heart of hearts I’ll always be a very good friend of yours and I hope you can understand that I can’t be anything less.

  ‘Incidentally, while I would not have minded that you keep that pen, it is a present from my other very good friend and I wouldn’t be able to explain its whereabouts to myself, let alone to him, i.e. my boyfriend in Sawang, the Customs officer you love to hate. Sorry about that.’

  The third letter was from the same woman, still insisting on her pen, which must have meant a lot to Dr Wiseman Lovemore as well, for he did not return it to her when she wrote the first time. Mrs Lovemore read out the letter:

  ‘I hope you don’t think I’m making a habit of writing you letters, but I called your place this morning and besides hunting for you around the university, which doesn’t go down well with me, I don’t know how else to send you this message, which to me is very important.

  ‘I had just finished talking to, actually lying to my boyfriend. I’ve never felt so bad in my life and I don’t know why you had to put me through this. Anyway, I told him about how I’d lost my pen and actually how I suspected somebody might have stolen it and this is how he reacted: But how could you allow that? I hope they are not stealing anything else of mine in that place. Anyway I will look around for the same one and send it to you, and if I can’t get it as you know we didn’t get them easily, then I’ll send you mine.

  ‘You see we had bought two look-alike pens, different colours, chosen by me, souvenirs of a tourist town we visited in Muzunguland, very expensive for pens – Mim$300,000 each – and for me that pen holds a lot of meaning. In the same way as yours holds memories of a friendship I treasured.

  ‘If you have any compassion at all for someone you once liked, and I think you did, then you’ll give me back the pen but if you must keep it as you so insist, then treasure it for me as I myself would have. You know I’m a very sentimental person.

  ‘I enclose the case for it which has no use for me without the pen and honey, I leave the rest to you.’

  Mrs Lovemore was crying. Lilly Loveless fetched a tissue from her rucksack and handed it to her. These were painful memories, which to Lilly Loveless meant the letters must be authentic, unless of course Mrs Lovemore was one of the world’s leading actresses.

  “We could stop the interview, if you want,” Lilly Loveless suggested.

  “No, no. Let’s carry on. It is quite therapeutic to be able to share these things with someone like you who is not a member of the community here, and whom I know is leaving the country soon.”

  “Thanks. I assure you that your secret is safe with me.”

  Mrs Lovemore told Lilly Loveless how tired of and embarrassed she was of repeatedly treating herself for STDs, so that she decided to discontinue all sexual contact with her husband. It was hard for him to take, but she told him all she knew, what she had found out on her own. She told him to have himself checked. If all the STDs she had contracted were from him, and if he hadn’t sought medical attention all this while, it was possible he had incurred irreparable damage to his organs.

  After calling off with her husband anything to do with sex, Mrs Lovemore did not immediately embark on another relationship. For one thing, she could not afford to handle men together with her quest for employment. Her husband eventually got his job with the university, but things did not improve for her.

  “Now that you’ve declared a ghost town on our sex life, I declare a ghost town on my wallet,” he told her jovially, but he meant it.

  She threatened to report him to all those who mattered, the Muzunguland embassy included.

  He laughed and told her to go right ahead. Then cheekily, he added: “If you want a plot to farm, I can arrange one for you. There are other Muzungu women tilling the soil already, like our own women do. The sooner you start facing reality the better.” He left her crying, to join his friends or mistresses.

  As usual, he would return with empty pockets, but with the audacity to inquire what there was to eat. To Mrs Lovemore, it wasn’t so much the fear of losing someone he loved, but rather the fear of being ridiculed by his cherished friends and drinking mates that made it so difficult for her husband to accept her decision to jilt him. He therefore kept insisting that it wasn’t quite over, that he was a man and was simply behaving the way men do in Africa, and that she should look within herself for the modesty it takes for a Muzungu woman to marry an African and live in Africa.

  “He just couldn’t understand that he was no longer the essential thing in my life. Our relationship had ceased to work.”

  “He wouldn’t accept it?”

  “No, not at all. It’s male pride, I suppose.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “There is nothing a man wants more than something he can’t have, even if this is something he has given up before.”

  “How true!” Lilly Loveless agreed. “Men are very jealous animals.”

  “It was during this particularly difficult time that I realized that quite a few other Mimbolanders, some right here in Puttkamerstown, were married to what they love to call here whiteman-woman.”

  “And how are things with these marriages, if I may ask?”

>   “I hate to generalize, but it takes a lot of understanding, single-mindedness and determination for a Mimboland man to sail against the formidable cultural forces that make them totally insecure when they are not playing man the way little boys do.”

  “You mean the: ‘Don’t you feel secure in these big arms of mine’ sort of thing?”

  “Yes, exactly.”

  “There’s this woman, Nicole, who finally had to leave for back home, not for want of trying to keep her marriage. She had married this Mimbolander during their student days in Muzunguland, the same way I did Wiseman.”

  “And they returned home to Mimboland? So you had a shoulder to cry on?”

  “Not for long. After three children with this woman, her Mimbolander husband suddenly had this irresistible urge to marry a second woman, which he did. She was younger of course. Nicole tried to put up with things for a while. Her husband would go so far as to sleep with his second wife and then show up in his first wife’s bedroom. He would caress her cheek as she lay in bed. She would look at him, knowing what he had just done, and say, ‘What exactly are you after?’ And he would reply, without even blinking an eye, ‘Dessert.’”

  “How creative of him!” exclaimed Lilly Loveless.

  “You mean how callous of him,” corrected Mrs Lovemore.

  The two women smiled at each other.

  “Either way, life must continue,” Mrs Lovemore added. “At a point, Nicole couldn’t take it any longer. ‘My love is too precious to waste on someone who betrayed me,’ she told her husband, and left. So, while Nicole eventually opted to return to Muzunguland with her children…”

  “How interesting,” interrupted Lilly Loveless. “The other day, someone told me it is very difficult to have the funeral of a Muzungu woman in Mimboland, because they always leave before they are buried.”

  “Was it a man?”

  “Yes, someone whose friend was married to a Muzungu woman who just got up one day, packed her things and left, just like Nicole.”