I had started out towards her spurred by a painful memory and by my sudden feeling of aloneness in the crowded cafeteria. But, in the wind and the rain, my face tingling after the warmth inside, I gave myself up wholly to the anger that Janice had generated. I imagined that she was looking at me through the space I had cleared on the wall of the cafeteria, and defiantly I postured for her. I became tribesman and fellow warrior to two people I had never seen before. I thought mother and child splendidly rebellious out in the rain by themselves. I felt angrily splendid and rebellious, too, as I walked in the rain towards them. I opened my shoulders, straightened my spine, lengthened my stride. I strode confidently towards Carol as though she was waiting for me.
She must not have seen me approach for she jumped almost out of her skin when I said, “Sister!” to her. She turned. Beneath her open raincoat, I saw the wet cloth of her dress sticking to her breasts and to her slightly rounded stomach. Her hips were wide. Like Sarah’s. I felt quickened, as though she had just opened a dam of sexual desire, fed by the memories of Sarah and Ekua, which until then I had suppressed, and fed now, too, as she stared at me, by the promise that her body had just made to me.
She turned and walked away. I followed her at a distance, because I did not want to frighten her. I raised my voice above the wind and the rain.
“Sister!”
She turned sharply, angrily, to face me. I stopped where I was. I could hardly see her face through the slanting, driven lines of rain. Without getting closer to her, I said once more, “Sister!”
She turned away again and went to her son who was jumping up and down and swinging his arms and shouting joyfully in the rain, paying no attention to his mother and me. She took him by the arm, still jumping, and led him unprotestingly away.
I stood where I was, embarrassed, as if Janice had seen all that had taken place between Carol and myself. My clothes were drenched. The wind drove the rain into my face.
Sheepish, unacknowledged but aroused, feeling even more angry than Janice had made me feel in the cafeteria, I watched my future wife walk away from me. By the time it occurred to me to follow her, she had disappeared.
CHAPTER FOUR
For more than a year I searched the city for her, and so learned to know it as if I had been born and spent all of my life in it. I gave up my study group and discovered that it was a relief to end my ambivalent relationships with my colleagues. I attended fewer and fewer classes at the university. From Alaska, to which he had recently been transferred, Selwyn called often to repeat his exaggerated stories about women and himself. I always, now, cut these telephone conversations short. I was no longer in the mood to listen to his adventures, real or imaginary. I had my own adventures to pursue. It was as if I had come to America not to become a psychiatrist but to track down and capture Carol. And when, a little over a year after I first saw her, I saw her again in an amusement park, riding in a teacup of tulips with her son, I had to sit down to contain my excitement. I was lucky. It was a Monday, mid-morning. The park was relatively empty so I had to be careful not to let Carol see me following her.
It must have been her day off. Careful not to expose myself, I watched her for hours as she moved with her son from ride to ride, visiting the small zoo, eating hot dogs. When, finally, she and her son left the park, I followed them, discreetly, to a building not far from the one reserved by the university for its mature students in which I lived.
From the opposite pavement, I watched them enter the building, saw Carol and the doorman smiling as they spoke to each other. I saw him pat the boy’s head. As soon as Carol and her son left him, I crossed the street and asked the doorman, who looked questioningly at me when I entered the building, if Mr. Selwyn was in.
“No Mr. Selwyn lives here, sir,” the doorman said, and walked with me out of the building.
I began to walk to and from the university every day along the street where Carol lived. I seldom saw her. When I did, I nodded and smiled a greeting. I looked carefully for signs, of which she gave none, that she recognized me. One day in December, I turned into her street and saw her walking with her son, ahead of me. I hastened to catch up with them. I greeted them and slowed my pace. I patted the boy’s head and asked him his name (it was David). I reached down, slipped my hands under his armpits, and hoisted him to my shoulders. He cried out with pleasure and surprise. I held his heels against my chest, felt his weight upon my shoulders. His arms were warm about my head. I looked at his mother and saw that she was smiling. I decided at that moment to befriend him. I would take him for walks, to movies, parks and museums. We would attend basketball and football games together. I would make him my ally in my campaign against his mother. I would pretend that I was to him the father I could not be to my sons.
I followed his mother into her apartment building and set David on his feet again before the elevator. I turned away from his beaming face, upturned to thank me, as his mother had bidden him, and said to Carol, “My name is Eugene, Eugene Coard.”
She smiled, too, and said, “I’m Carol.”
Immediately afterwards she pulled out a flier from her briefcase and handed it to me. She said, “I hope you can come.”
I saw that it was an announcement for an anti-apartheid rally, but the elevator had arrived before I could reply. Its doors opened noisily and David scampered into it. His mother followed him.
“Please come,” she said, as the elevator began to close.
I raised my voice and promised that I would.
I did. It was held at noon in the park not far from where she and Janice had spurned me. The early December day was bright and unusually warm. The park was full of office workers sunning themselves, but the crowd standing before the microphones was small. Carol and another woman were handing out leaflets and collecting donations in cans. When she saw me she smiled and said, “I’m so glad you came.”
I put a twenty dollar bill in her can.
“That will be a big help,” she said. “Thanks. Everybody seems to think apartheid is over because Mandela is out of jail. They don’t attend rallies anymore. They hardly make donations. Look how small the crowd is!”
I was following her through the small crowd as though she and I were a team working together and I was her protector. Her friend was already moving among the people spread out over the grass in their business clothes, as they were obviously accustomed to do when the weather permitted. When Carol headed towards them, I began to follow.
She said, “Please. Stay here. The crowd’s so small.”
I stood at the edge of the sparse crowd listening to the angry, metallic denunciations coming from the microphone and watched her move among the people in business suits on the grass. I told myself there was nothing more to do. I had come; Carol had seen me. The angry noises from the microphones were grating on my ears. When Carol disappeared for a moment behind a group of men standing on the lawn, I left.
I didn’t see her again for three weeks. Winter, much, much colder than usual, so people said, had set in. We were both bundled up against it and, at first, I did not recognize her behind the muffler wound about her face and beneath the ski hat she wore. As we walked towards her apartment, I asked about David. She said, “He’s with my mother in Alabama. I’m too busy to take care of him by myself.”
I noted the “by myself”. It made her seem more alone and available. I had seen no ring on her finger. Yet she lived in married student housing. I feared that she might be happily married. I preferred that she be separated, divorced or just another woman with a child to remind her of her naivete or foolish thoughtlessness.
I asked, “What about his father?”
“He’s out of the country.”
“Oh. Is he in the military?”
She didn’t answer. I took note of that, too.
Over the next few months, I learned where her favourite spot in the library was and where I was most likely to find her in the cafeteria, sitting alone at a table, a book of political science o
pen in front of her. She was preparing for orals. But she had reservations about her discipline. She asked me more than once, “What is the point of studying this, when one has no power to change a political system that is corrupt and oppressive?” We had many cups of coffee together, but she refused all my requests for her to come to my apartment, never once asked me to hers, and declined to attend movies, a play, a performance by the reunited Peter, Paul and Mary, or to have dinner with me.
One day, after I made my way through a sudden snow storm to the cafeteria so as to have coffee with her, and we were making small talk about the miserable weather, she blurted out, “I am, as of now, officially a divorced woman.”
“What?”
“I just spoke to my attorney. I’m now no longer married.”
There was no anger, resentment or relief on her face. There was only, behind its surface blankness, a very deep unhappiness. For the first time I understood how difficult the task I had set myself was. I didn’t know what to say so I asked, “Was he a student, too?”
“Student and professor. But he’s in South Africa now. That’s where he came from.”
I said, “That explains.”
She nodded.
“Jason always said it was easy to demonstrate and hold rallies here. He wanted to do something more difficult. He went back to South Africa to join the guerillas.” She paused, then added, “They were still fighting then. He came home from a seminar one day and said he was tired of being a mercenary, tired of preparing white Americans to continue to assume their privileged positions in this society. He was beginning to despise himself.”
She took a deep breath, then exhaled. She sipped her coffee. I didn’t know what to say. I waited for her to continue.
“He wanted us to go to South Africa with him. But what would I do with a three-year-old in Africa while his father was a guerilla? Jason said he had to go, whether we went or not. He was feeling too guilty. He couldn’t continue to live half-safe and always dependent here while his countrymen were being killed.”
She sipped her coffee, tried to compose herself. “So he went alone. Back to Africa. To fight for a future for his children. That’s what he said. He left me and David here, as if there was no future in America for him to help David prepare to fight for.”
She began to cry, silently. She made no attempt to wipe her tears. “How could I have begged him to stay so he could despise himself?”
She tried to smile. The tears ran down her face. “I’m not jealous anymore. I don’t feel that David and I are not important because Jason left us. I don’t ask myself anymore whether I was only a convenience for him while he was in America. And I don’t tell myself that if I had loved him, truly loved him, I would have gone back to Africa with him. I no longer feel inadequate. He did what he felt he had to do. I only want him to be safe.”
And, after another pause, “I loved him very, very much.”
I said, “Dulce et decorum est…”
Carol did not let me finish. “He doesn’t deserve to die,” she said. “He was a good man. A good husband and father. You know? He was a refugee! He had no passport! At the time, he could not legally re-enter South Africa. I thought David and I would never lose him, that it was only a matter of time before he became American.”
She shook her head slowly, wonderingly. She wiped her tears. “He could never have lived here, I see that now. He was too rigid. He didn’t know how to compromise, to make concessions. He would not settle for less than what he thought he deserved. That’s why I admire him. He was a good man. I only want him to be safe.”
Her loyalty to the man who had walked out on her and her son was impressive. But I remembered that Ekua – standing big-bellied, silent and non-accusing – had seemed loyal, too. As time passed I had even stopped feeling grateful for her silence and inaction. I had begun to despise her for her unprotesting acceptance of what I had done to her. I considered her weak, spineless and too sentimentally manipulated by the memory of our relationship. I convinced myself, arrogantly, that I had nothing to fear from her. But Ekua had been neither weak nor cowardly. She had not been rendered incapable of action by a sentimental memory. Ekua, it seemed, had merely been biding her time. As I looked now at Carol’s teary face, I asked myself how I might subvert her apparent loyalty to the man who had abandoned her and her child and turn it into a bitterness and anger from which I could benefit.
Carol said, “I didn’t go with him to the airport. I couldn’t bear to see him off. I thought he was going there to die and I didn’t want to be his accomplice. I said goodbye in the apartment and took David with me to the park. I could hear the planes from there. Then it began to rain and I couldn’t hear the planes taking off and landing anymore. I wanted it,” she paused and looked at me and tried to smile, “to rain forever.”
She stood up and put her book of political science in her briefcase, put on her overcoat, her scarf and her gloves. She said, “Thank you for listening.”
“You’re welcome,” I said.
I understood that I had interrupted something important that day in the park. But Carol had made no mention of me, and I could say nothing – without giving myself away – to entice her to do so. Standing next to her, I felt as unacknowledged as I had felt when I had walked confidently up to her and she turned her back on me.
I said, “I’ll walk you home.”
Outside, I lowered my head against the wind-driven snow, threw an arm about Carol’s shoulder and pulled her close to me. She did not resist.
“If only,” I thought. “I could make her feel about me the way she feels about Jason…!”
CHAPTER FIVE
I tried to find out from Carol as much as I could about Jason. I wanted, by choosing carefully from his life as she revealed it to me, and even more carefully from my own as I had so far lived it, to construct and offer her a life she could admire by comparison. But Carol never willingly mentioned the South African again. Nor would she answer my increasingly indirect questions about him. So I was forced to create, for her admiration, a version of the life I would have liked, truthfully, to claim I had so far lived, a life that would reveal that I, too, like her ex-husband, was a good man, a good husband and father.
From this version of my life, I excluded all of the history that mattered, the personal experiences of which I was ashamed, but which no newspaper could reveal and only those closest to me could know about. I included in it all my public triumphs, the academic and professional achievements that did not really matter and which she could easily have learned from reading the newspapers of the countries where I had lived, or from speaking to people who did not know me intimately. I completed this composite of myself with other flattering and invented attributes and, daily, throughout that long, unusually cold winter, fed bits and pieces of it to Carol.
So, in time, she learned that I had given up an important position with a prestigious medical group in London in order to study psychiatry in America. But she did not know that my marriage had facilitated this appointment or that, after my divorce, I had been forced to resign from it. I told her the divorce was because of Sarah’s promiscuity. Like Jason, I said, who could have continued to live in America only by despising himself, I would have despised myself if I had continued to live with Sarah. I quoted regularly from letters I was supposed to have received from England. I described the experiences, which I made up and attributed to my children, as though I had been there to witness them. I repeated again and again to Carol, as though my repetitions might make possible what I knew neither Sarah nor Ekua would ever be forgiving enough to permit, that once I had completed my studies, my son would come and live with me.
And because Jason was African, I spoke of the pleasure of eating out of the same dish with my fingers, communally with Africans in England. But I had eaten with Africans other than Ekua only once, soon after I had arrived in London. I had asked my West African host, a first-year medical student like myself, for a fork and a knife and my own plate. While
he and his other African guests stood around a table and ate from a common bowl with fingers they had carefully washed, and laughed and spoke to one another in their own language, I sat on a chair, my plate on an embroidered napkin on my lap, and ate by myself. The cutlery was pure silver, the plate fine bone china; I knew this because my father, returning as a lawyer after a year in England, had brought back a set of the same kind, though after his death my mother had been forced to sell it.
After a while, a young woman left the others and came over to me. She was tall and slender. Her hair was cropped. When she smiled, her strong, even teeth flashed out of her smooth, black face. Below her loose, embroidered white bodice, she was wrapped in a multicoloured cloth that reached to her ankles. She wore sandals. In her quaint West African English accent, she told me that her name was Ekua and that she was a student nurse from Ghana who had been in England for only two weeks. I told Carol nothing about Ekua’s kindness that night. I told her nothing of my other son, Ekua’s and mine, who bore my name but whom I had never seen. And, of course, I never mentioned Beatrice.
After feeding Carol these carefully edited stories about my past all winter, one day in early March, when the weather had lost its grinding edge and there were intimations of spring in the air, when Carol and I were sitting in our overcoats in the cool sun outside the cafeteria, I, pretending fluster and apprehension, asked her to marry me. I had caught her by surprise. But she quickly recovered herself, smiled uncomfortably and asked, “Are you serious?”
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