The Last Time They Met

by Anita Shreve

  When she left, Thomas removed Linda’s sandals. Her feet were hard and dirty, lined at the heels. Her legs, the color of toast, contrasted sharply with the milk-white of her face; the legs and the face seemed to belong to two different people. Already, he could see, her lips had gone dry and were cracked and split at the center.

  —You need water, he said. He brought her a glass of water and held her head, but she was almost too tired to swallow. Some trickled onto her neck, and he wiped it away with the sheet. He didn’t try to remove her dress, but laid her under the sheet. She drifted in and out of consciousness, seemed lucid when she came to, saying his name and I’m sorry, which he let her do. He propped pillows against the headboard and sat with his hand on her head — sometimes stroking her hair, sometimes just touching her. Whatever storm had blown through her earlier appeared to have passed, though Thomas knew it would come again, and it might be days before she could eat. He hoped it wasn’t shellfish poisoning. (And she must have had a cholera shot, he thought.) Despite the crisis, he felt content just to sit there with her, nearly as content as he’d felt at the museum house. And thinking of the house, he remembered Mr. Salim, who might worry when Thomas did not return for the night. He thought of calling, but then realized he knew neither the phone number nor the name of the owner of the house. Checking his watch, he saw that it was too late for any museum to be open.

  The sickness woke her. She bolted up, as if startled, and then catapulted herself into the bathroom. Thomas didn’t follow, knowing she wouldn’t want him to, that she might mind the loss of her privacy the most. He hoped one day they would talk about this: (Remember that day on Lamu? When I got sick? It’s one of the five or six most important days of my life. The others being? Today, for one). Possibly they would even laugh about it. Though that implied a future. Each moment in time presupposing a future, just as it contained the past.

  The proprietress brought him a meal (practiced innkeeper: she brought food that had no smell) which he left under a tea towel until Linda had fallen asleep again. He had a headache of his own, nothing more than a hangover. She woke sometime after midnight, while he himself was dozing. When he came alert, he could hear the water in the bathtub running. He would not go in, though he dearly wanted to see her. He’d never seen her in the bath, he reflected, and then he thought of all the other things they’d never done together as well — cooked a meal, gone to the theater, read the Sunday paper. Why this overwhelming desire to share the dull agenda of daily life?

  She came out in a robe the hotel had given her and lay down beside him. Her face was gaunt and etched. He was embarrassed for his body, which was not clean. I need a bath, he said.

  —Not now, she said. Just hold me.

  He slid down, curling himself behind her.

  —It was stupid, she said. The lobster.

  —You think it was that?

  —I know it was that.

  The room lit only by the light from the bathroom.

  —You’ll take a plane in the morning, he said.

  —Peter’s meeting the bus.

  —You can’t take the bus. It’s out of the question.

  She didn’t argue.

  —I’ll have the hotel call him.

  He could feel a slight tension leave her body. She was drifting off.

  —Do you know where Peter is staying? he asked quickly.

  —The Ocean House, she said, closing her eyes.

  ______

  He lay with her until daybreak, occasionally dozing off himself. Extricating himself as gently as he could, he picked up the key and left the room and walked out to the lobby, which was empty and still. He searched for a phone book, but couldn’t find one. Not surprising. He picked up the phone — a black, old-fashioned phone — and asked for Malindi information. When he had the number, he rang it and asked a sleepy desk clerk if he would put him through to Peter Shackland’s room. He waited, tapping a pen nervously on the wooden desk.

  —Hello? A British accent apparent, even in the hello. She hadn’t told him that.

  —Is this Peter Shackland?

  —Yes. It is. British and boyishly handsome. An unbeatable combination.

  —I’m calling from the Peponi Hotel on Lamu.

  —Really? Peponi’s?

  —Linda’s had a bout of food poisoning, Thomas said. From lobster she ate, she thinks. She’s asked us to call to say she’ll be flying back to Malindi early in the morning. The plane leaves at seven forty-five. I’m sorry I don’t know when it gets in.

  —Not much after eight-thirty, I shouldn’t think. There was a pause. Oh Lord. Poor thing. Of course I’ll be there. Has she had the doctor?

  —You might have better luck in Malindi.

  —Yes, I see. Well. Is she asleep?

  —I believe so.

  —Right, then. Well, thank you. I’m sorry, I didn’t catch your name?

  Thomas was ambushed by the question. John Wilson, he said quickly, borrowing the name of the airport.

  —American.

  —Yes.

  —You work for Marguerite?

  Thomas hadn’t even asked the woman her name. Yes.

  —Lovely woman. You don’t by any chance know how Linda got there, do you? She was meant to be staying at Petley’s. The hotel must have been full?

  —I think so.

  —No matter. I’ll ask her tomorrow. Thanks for looking after her, the man named Peter said.

  —Not at all, Thomas said.

  ______

  Thomas put the telephone back in its cradle. He walked through the lobby onto the verandah. The air was mild, the sea nearly flat. Peter, who was British, knew Marguerite. Peter, who knew Peponi’s, had quite possibly taken Linda there on a vacation.

  He took his shoes off. At the horizon, the sky was pink. He began to walk in the sand, cool and damp on the soles of his feet. He would not ask Linda why she hadn’t told him Peter was British; nor would he ask if she and he had made love in one of the rooms in the hotel behind him. A fishing dhow skirted the shore, and a man aboard it leaned gracefully over the side, letting go of a net.

  He would not walk out very far or for very long. In an hour and a half — less now — he would put the woman he had lost and then found again on a plane.

  February 15

  Dear Thomas,

  I want to say thank you and I’m sorry, knowing perfectly well you don’t want either my gratitude or an apology.

  I feel as though I have left all of me in Lamu, that nothing remains. I am hollowed out, empty without you.

  The several days after I flew to Malindi are barely worth mentioning. I stayed in a hotel until I had recovered enough to make the trip to Nairobi and then to Njia. In Malindi, Peter had a doctor come — a drunken quack who kept wanting to talk about the good old days — and apart from a packet of pills we never quite caught the name of, but which worked extremely well, he seemed to be pretty useless, unable even to identify what was wrong with me. Though I’m sure it was the lobster. (I think I can promise you I will never eat another lobster again as long as I live.)

  Oh, Thomas, I am dying for you. You asked me questions that made perfect sense in the context of the world only you and I inhabit, and I answered you curtly, because I didn’t want to think how all this will end. Our situation seems all the more unfair to me, since we have had so little time together. Or do I delude myself in thinking we are entitled to even a minute outside of our marriages? I wish sometimes I didn’t hate God so much; if I were obedient, life would be so much simpler.

  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. I assume this is a reference to the box in which Magdalene was thought to have carried precious ointments? (I see you’ve done your own research.) I know you too well to think you glorify men, or one man, with this gesture, so I will accept it as a token of love, which I know it is. God is in all of us anyway. Isn’t that what you said?

  The plans for Ndegwa are “hotting up,” as they say here. Will you be in Nairobi on the 5th? I will arrange an invitation all the same. There will be a cast of characters in attendance I would like you to meet, principally Mary Ndegwa, who has just published her first book of poems — trenchant and harsh and deeply rhythmic, which I like. It would not be fair to say she has benefited from all the publicity, but there it is. She seems a calm ship in a tempest, weathering the controversy magnificently. There is always the danger, when one makes a fuss over something the government has done, of poking at a nest of vipers with a stick. At this point, she risks her own freedom. I risk possible expulsion from the country (which before I met you, I wouldn’t have minded so much; now it would be a torture, and I would have to insist that you go home, too; but of course you couldn’t, could you? — not until your tour of duty is up; how strict are they about that?). Regina hates my involvement. She calls it insincere, which, though I have great admiration for Ndegwa and loathe what has happened to him, of course is true. I have no idea what I’m doing in this arena. I feel I’ve taken on this cause as one would the latest fashion, the fact that progress can only be made with gala parties enhancing this queasy realization. More to the point, Regina is afraid my involvement will get her kicked out of the country as well, or that someone in authority will take away her grant. (In a country without many precedents and subject to a certain lawlessness, one has to believe anything is possible.) Ndegwa, who languishes in an underground prison for having written Marxist poems in the Kikuyu vernacular (political prisoners are not treated well; and even being treated “well” in a Kenyan prison would be an experience from which you and I would not emerge intact), risks his life. I hope we know what we are doing.

  My Marine at the embassy, of course, risks nothing.

  Kennedy is due to arrive on the 5th. My Marine is all atwitter. There will be a special reception that afternoon, and that night the gala, after which Kennedy will go on safari (the point of his journey, I suspect). The next morning, he’ll have an audience with Mary Ndegwa (or is it the other way around?). I will be standing in the wings, trying to remain alert and useful, but all the while thinking only of you.

  Amnesty International has written me. They have, as I suspected, already lodged a formal protest.

  I would like someday to write of Ndegwa’s courage. Did I tell you that we were born on the same day in the same year, eight thousand miles apart from each other? Astonishing to think that while I was delivered to the sterile hands of my mother’s physician, Ndegwa was born on a sisal mat in a mud hut, delivered to the hands of his father’s first wife. I remember that when I met Ndegwa, I used to think of us as two parallel lines that had arrived by design in Nairobi. He grew up during Mau Mau and didn’t start school until he was ten because of the chaos of that era. When he was a child, he witnessed the execution of his father over a self-dug grave. By the time we’d met, he’d caught up to me in terms of schooling: indeed, he’d far surpassed me. At the university, I learned a great deal from him of a purely classical nature, which I hadn’t expected to do. I’d like to create a portrait of him, highlighting the contrasts between his past as a sheepherder and his current status at the university; his legal battles to avoid paying a dowry of sheep and goats to his father-in-law for his wife; his practice, though secretive, of polygamous marriages; his revelation to me that wife-swapping is a time-honored Kikuyu custom; and his pervasive malaise regarding the risks and losses entailed in traveling too fast through history.

  Yet I know I am not the one to write this portrait. Always, there was a barrier between us, a kind of inability to cross the border between our cultures, a demarcation that seemed studded with the barbed wire of misread symbols, separated by a wide gulf of differing experiences. Again and again we would lose our way. We would seem to make it to the very point of entry, when suddenly the ground would lurch beneath us, leaving us on separate sides of a fault, slipping past each other.

  Write immediately. Tell me you will come, or that I may go to you.

  I love you.

  T.

  P.S. Today’s headline: FOOD AND FUEL RUNNING OUT.

  February 24

  Dear Thomas,

  I received your letter and the invitation to the embassy party in the same mail. And have thought of little else since. I know that I should not go anywhere near Nairobi on that weekend, that I should flee to Turkana or Tsavo instead, that I should try to be as far away as possible. But, as luck or fate would have it, Peter wants me in town then because an old friend from school is coming to the country, and he would like me to meet him.
If I decided to go to the party, I would have to bring Peter with me; I couldn’t really go without him. Perhaps even his friend as well, depending on the circumstances. I assume that would not be a problem? I really would like to meet Mary Ndegwa and lend my support to the cause, though it will be you I come to see.

  I can’t promise anything.

  I write to you from Lake Baringo. Peter has long wanted to visit this godforsaken place, and I agreed to go with him for the weekend. We have been at each other’s throats lately — entirely my fault, and due to my distraction — and I hoped that this might ease tensions. (It does not: nothing seems to help, except the one thing I cannot do, which is to sleep with him. I would, I think, do it purely out of kindness at this point, though I’m afraid it would make me too sad. Why must love reduce one to sordid confessions?)

  There is more to be frightened of at Lake Baringo than anywhere I have ever been. The land is unloving and unwelcoming. The dirt is hard and gray-brown with only thorn trees for vegetation. What little green exists is dust-colored as are the very black bodies of the tiny children, which makes them look ancient. The lake, with its island in the center, is brown and ripe with crocodiles. Last night, Peter swam while the sun sank, and this morning, I heard the sound of something large splashing in the water. A hippo, I suspect. Yet everywhere, even on this landscape where nothing young should flourish, there is life — noisy, cacophonous, teeming and quick. Just now, I am watching a lizard slither across the screen, eating mosquitoes. Cormorants, like old jesters, tread cumbersomely along the branches of the thorn trees outside our “cottage,” which more closely resembles a wooden tent with a screened-in porch than a true building, the mesh of the screens just large enough to let in all manner of flying insects. My table is piled with beer bottles and mosquito coils, my writing paper and my pens. Across the road, four women in faded red cloth are brushing knots from their hair. It is almost unbearably hot. Only the faintest swish of air moves dryly over the hairs on my skin. There seems enough air to breathe, but barely more than that. The heat enervates, the light stuns, the mosquitoes carry malaria. There is little relief.