Embassy Wife

by Katie Crouch

  “He’s a teacher,” another girl said. “Yes?”

  “Sort of.”

  “We like the white teachers. The missionaries are no fun. Thorns in their asses.”

  “No, this one’s an aid worker.”

  “Aid workers are supposed to buy us beer with aid money.”

  “Get us more beer, aid money!”

  Yet making friends with her friends didn’t solve anything. In fact, it seemed to push her away even more. Whereas before her avoidance of him had seemed casual, now it was so noticeable it seemed to be an occupation. She sent JoJo to collect money at the end of the meal and served his beer and food from as far away as possible, so that his plates had to be passed down by three or four sets of hands.

  He wondered now, lying in Swakopmund in his middle-aged body, if she really was as he remembered her. Could anyone actually be this exquisitely wrought, liquid amber ghost? Her skin always cool, despite the blistering climate? Her voice sparked a physical reaction—water, running down his back. Her dresses were modest and old-fashioned, but they were thin, so that when the wind blew, he could see the outline of her hips and legs. Once, as she unloaded her tray, her sleeve slipped down from her shoulder and he caught sight of the strap of a snowy white bra against her dark skin and his whole body shuddered, as if his own mother had walked over his grave.

  He knew he deserved to be ignored by her, the one woman he couldn’t bear to leave alone. How many times had he slept with girls back at school, smart girls, nice girls, and not bothered to call them after? There was a girl from his study group, the one who gave him a blow job in the library; he never let her catch his eye again. There was the Harvard girl the weekend of the Head of the Charles who said she was a virgin; after sex he retreated back to Brown without calling and sent James to console her at parties the rest of the weekend. Everyone acted like an asshole sometimes, which made it okay then. But now, with aching certainty, he saw the truth: he was in purgatory, utterly obsessed with a waitress named Esther, with her huge eyes and her tiny waist that flowed out to round hips like a guitar.

  “Can I please just buy you a broodjie?” he asked one day after her shift.

  “I’m not hungry.” Her voice trickled out, pooling in his ear.

  It was her friend Amber who saved him, finally. She was a fine girl, a funny girl, pretty as well, though no loveliness could bloom properly in the other woman’s shadow. Amber made it clear she was willing where Esther was not. She liked Bruce Springsteen and told dirty jokes about farm men and their animals. She was even friends with the Afrikaans men, yelling at them in their language and making them laugh. Mark appreciated Amber. She drank beer with him one night after the others had gone home. Esther had gone; only JoJo was left to serve, slamming beers onto the tables as the late-night revelers recoiled to dodge the sloshing. In the middle of a story about how she cured her own malaria with cucumber skin, she put her bare foot on his knee.

  “I’m sorry,” he said, considering. “It’s just—”

  “You want Esther.”

  “But not just in that way.” He stopped himself. Then what way?

  He wanted to sit next to her and play with her fingers at the combi stop. He wanted to press his face into the back of her neck. He wanted to bring her to Highland Park and have her watch him play soccer with his brothers on Thanksgiving morning. It was impossible. He was out of his mind.

  “How about the ocean?” Amber said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “If you take both of us, she’ll go,” she said, signaling JoJo for another beer.

  “She won’t,” Mark said.

  “She will,” Amber said. “We’ve never seen it. The ocean, I mean. It will be good, to go with you. We couldn’t go just together. With a white man, no one will touch us.”

  “What do you mean? What would happen if just the two of you went?”

  Amber opened her mouth, then chose to take a sip of beer instead.

  “It will be better,” she finally said. “If you go.”

  The proposal to Esther, and, presumably, the acceptance, happened offstage. Mark didn’t know what she said or how she did it, but a few days later Amber showed up at his little house behind the Pick n Pay.

  “She’ll only come if you don’t pay for us,” Amber said pointedly.

  Mark paused, confused. “Can you guys pay, Amber? For a combi and food and a place to stay?”

  “Are you stupid?”

  “So, no?”

  “She can’t think you are paying, meneer,” Amber said. “But I can’t think how the weekend will cost less than three thousand.”

  Mark told her to wait and ran to the bank. At that time, three thousand was less than two hundred dollars. Mark didn’t have a ton, but he did have his “dead grandmother money” that could be accessed in times of emergency, which this was. He came back with three thousand Namibian in an envelope. Amber looked inside and nodded, satisfied.

  “Meet us at the combi stop tomorrow at seven,” she said.

  Mark didn’t sleep at all. He paced the lone room of his house, choosing which three of his eight shirts to take. He got to the stop half an hour early, trying to remain calm as he sipped coffee from his thermos.

  When they weren’t there at five till the hour, he knew they weren’t coming. He’d been cheated out of three thousand NAD. Well, fuck it, he thought. What did the money mean to him? Fuck all of them.

  Then he saw them coming around the corner, holding matching rucksacks, the kind local kids were given by the government for school. Amber smiled and waved. Esther didn’t smile, but she nodded, slightly. He held his breath as he watched her come closer. She was slow, deliberate. She wore the same dress he often saw her in, but she had added a thick leather belt around her tiny waist. Was it for him? No, of course not. She came closer and closer until she was standing right next to him—the closest he’d ever been to her.

  “Hi!” he said, too loudly. “I was afraid you wouldn’t make it.”

  “We want to see the beach, hey,” Amber said. She was cranky and looked tired. “It’s my trip. Of course we’re here.” She sat on the edge of the bench, leaving Esther and Mark to sort each other out.

  “Thank you for coming with us,” Esther said. She sat in the center of the bench, leaving an empty spot beside her.

  At twenty-two, Mark had done many things in his life people had thought courageous. At eight he’d jumped into Lake Michigan in late fall to pull his little brother to safety when the kid had toddled off Navy Pier. At Brown, he’d stood up for the one gay member of his crew boat, squelching any sort of snide remark. He’d come to Namibia, knowing nothing about what he was getting into. All of this was nothing compared to taking a seat next to Esther. He felt as if he were an explorer, setting off unarmed to map uncharted lands.

  “Can I…?”

  She shrugged and nodded. He sat, leaving room between them. She didn’t move away.

  * * *

  Many years later, in the same-but-different hotel, Mark got distastefully, wonderfully, and expensively drunk. Sitting in front of his television watching cricket—a game he neither understood nor wanted to—he ordered gin after gin from room service, punctuated by a mediocre burger and chutney-flavored Simba chips. He woke up at nine the next morning, facedown in his boxers, his mouth tasting like the fur of a dead cat. Prickling with hungover shame, he splashed water onto his face and called his wife back.

  “Hey,” Amanda said, her voice disinterested, flat. “How is it?”

  “What’s wrong?” His heart skipped a beat. The enormity of his secrets was becoming unbearable.

  “Nothing. Just Meg, being aloof. Where does a nine-year-old get off being aloof?”

  “I don’t know,” he said.

  “How’s your research?”

  “Not very good.”

  “Make some action items,” she said, suddenly all business. It was the only time he could get her attention, it seemed. When he was somehow failing her expectations.
“Get it done.”

  “Okay.” He felt overwhelmed with relief at her bossiness.

  “Meg, I told you to get your lunch box. What are you—”

  “I love you,” he said. But she’d already ended the call.

  He showered and went downstairs to the bakery, which was trying very hard to be hip and French but still served telltale items such as impala carpaccio and tongue. He’d dreamed of her all night, unpleasant dreams in which he could see her and touch her but then she morphed into different sorts of animals. Not African animals, but cats and gerbils. He fucking hated dreams. It was time to go to the morgue.

  It was a cool and bright morning. There was no wind or fog, so he decided to walk. In this unusual weather, the post-and-beam and stucco buildings looked neat and well kept, and Mark felt, if he squinted hard enough and used his magical thinking, he really could be in a town in Germany. The fantasy dissipated as soon as he left the tiny tourist district. Within half a block the buildings and houses became bleak and run-down; barefoot children and their angry mothers spilled onto the street.

  Located behind the police station, the morgue was no exception to the shabbiness of the neighborhood. A small, squat building, it knew no end of sorrow. Almost no one left this place, Mark thought, with news they wanted to hear.

  The office, however, unlike the hospital, was clean and efficient, seemingly run in a different sort of Namibian bureaucratic style. No one was waiting. The middle-aged Black woman was pleasant and quick and helped him right away.

  “I’ll be right back,” she said, her heels clicking away down the hall. As Mark waited, he thought again of Esther’s face, those worn dresses. She had a thick blue leather bracelet, intricately etched, that she said was made by a Himba woman way up north, on the border of Angola. Would she still have it? Would she even remember who he was?

  Before he could ruminate further, the woman came back with a file in her hand.

  “I’m sorry,” she said, sliding the file over to him.

  “For what?” he asked dumbly, before, with a sickening thud, he understood. “I can open it?”

  “Yes.”

  “Are there—”

  “There are no pictures. Don’t worry, sir.”

  The file contained one piece of paper: a death certificate. Esther Kaaronda had died on February 21, 1997. Cause of death was blunt force from a traffic accident.

  “So … she died,” Mark said. He seemed unable to physically feel anything. “She really did die.”

  The woman nodded empathetically. “According to this record, yes.”

  “Could it have been someone else, maybe?”

  She put her hand out gently, taking the file back.

  “Usually the police require positive identification, sir. I don’t think so. I’m sorry.”

  She was good at saying that. I’m sorry. But Mark could tell she only meant it as much as she could allow herself. It was the same sort of sorry one got at the deli after receiving the wrong type of sandwich.

  “It’s okay,” Mark said. “Good to know, at least.”

  “I would think so, yes.”

  “All right, then,” he said, lingering. He had come such a long way. Was this really the end? The woman smiled at the awkward pause between them.

  “Goodbye,” she said, and went back to the file room and shut the door.

  Mark returned to the street, blinking in the harsh glare. His entire body was coursing with adrenaline, but at the same time, his limbs seemed paralyzed. She was dead. Dead. He repeated the word in his mind, but nothing changed. Maybe he would be fine with this. Yes. It was okay that she was dead, wasn’t it? He had a family already. And maybe her life would have been awful. It had been so long ago, anyway—

  A combi rumbled past. The van they’d been in looked just like that, Mark thought. It had flipped and hurtled through the air and she would have been so scared, and then—

  A sob escaped his throat. He stopped and bent over, his hands on his knees, and threw up.

  * * *

  A few hours later, after he’d checked out and paid the enormous bill, Mark shuffled through the streets looking for a present for Amanda. He still felt sick, but like any bad news—say, the death of his father—it was beginning to settle in, like a thorn one’s skin learns to live with. Still, as he trolled the shop windows, he had to stop and take a few deep breaths.

  The coolness of the morning was gone now, replaced by throbbing desert heat. He ducked into a shaded alley and found himself standing in front of a window filled with modern jewelry. One necklace, a thin silver chain with a stunning green stone on a pendant, seemed like something Amanda would wear.

  He stepped inside to look at it more closely. The shop smelled of the chemical-laden pine gel adored by all Namibians—a neon goo that cost twenty NAD and was strong enough to clear out clogged drains.

  “That’s a chic choice,” the shopkeeper said as he peered closer. “Tanzanite. Namibia is famous for them. The mine is just two hundred kilometers from here. Karibib side.”

  “Oh. I…” He looked up. “Hey, wait. I know you. You work at the Strand.” He felt enormous relief at recognizing the woman, a relief that he realized, of course, was misplaced. “You were … helping that old guy at the bar.”

  “Oh.” The girl looked a bit distressed at the association. “Yes. That was me.”

  “Double shift?” Mark asked, standing up from the counter self-consciously.

  “This is my good job.” She rolled her eyes. “I just work at the hotel because my parents want me to. They think the hotel is better.”

  “What do you think?”

  “I think it’s boring,” she said. “I’m going to quit.”

  “Well, it’s nice that you want to please your parents.”

  “I want them off my back, you mean.”

  “Okay.” Mark shifted on his feet. “I don’t know. My daughter would do anything to piss me off.”

  She gave a ladylike snort. “I doubt that. How old is she?”

  “Nine … No, ten.”

  “Don’t know her age, eh? That’s a fail.”

  Mark looked at this girl more closely. She was tall and thin, like a fashion model. Pretty cheekbones, slightly crooked nose. She could tell he was studying her, and, instead of shying away, she put her hand on her hip and posed.

  “What’s your name?” he asked.

  “Anna.”

  “Nice to meet you,” he tried. She shrugged and moved to the window. “This store seems to do well, though. Is it yours?”

  “Okay, boomer,” Anna said, smirking. “Why would I have to work at a hotel if I owned a fancy jewelry store?”

  “Right.” Mark blinked rapidly at the retort. “Sure. They sound like good parents. What do I know? So how much is that necklace?”

  Anna didn’t move, but looked over at him, her lips twisting a bit. “It’s six thousand Namibian. I’d give you a discount, but it’s not my shop.”

  “Can you wrap it? Like a present?”

  “Sure,” Anna said. He wasn’t sure, but he thought he could see an almost imperceptible raise of an eyebrow.

  “Good. Let’s do it. It’s for my wife.”

  “That’s cool,” Anna said, slowly moving back toward him. Something about the way she held her hands brought the horrible morning back to him. He turned away, trying to get ahold of himself.

  “Are you fine?” Anna asked. He could feel her curiosity, could see her staring at him out of the corner of his eye. He went to the window, pretending to look at the sky.

  “Do you think it will rain today?” he finally managed. His voice shook a little, but other than that he was all right.

  “No, boomer,” the girl said, giving it up. “It’s the desert, hey?” She pulled out the wrapping paper in a sleepy manner.

  “I’m not a boomer, actually.”

  “What? You’re not old?”

  “Not boomer-old. Those are people born as a result of the return of American soldiers from World
War II. I was born in the seventies. That makes me…”

  Anna gave a loud, pointed yawn.

  “… uh, Gen X, I think.”

  She shrugged and lifted the necklace out of the case.

  “Look, can I ask … who was that man at the bar in the hotel?”

  She glanced up, then focused on her work again. “Troy Ferreira. He owns Ferreira Properties, which is, like, half of Walvis.”

  “He seems pretty nasty,” Mark said, coming back to where she was and leaning on the counter.

  “He’s fine,” Anna said. “He’s investing in my jewelry line.”

  “No offense, but I don’t think that’s a very good idea.”

  Anna stared at him for a moment, considering, then treated him to a slow, dazzling, yet condescending smile. It reminded him of something. Probably because he was often treated like an idiot these days.

  “Mr. X, I don’t know if you’ve thought about it, but it’s sort of hard to start a jewelry line? You need money, hey? Mr. Ferreira has money.”

  “Mr. Ferreira is gross,” Mark said.

  “Whatever. It’s not me he’s interested in,” Anna said, crossing her arms over her chest. “It’s money.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I have a gem connection. Rubies. Amethysts. Not diamonds, but everything else. You can only get them from a guy I know. I can get them for much less than they are worth in the States, or Europe, or even South Africa.”

  “How? I mean, why does he give you the price?”

  “He likes me,” she said. “And I buy a lot of gems.”

  “What kind?”

  “I told you,” she said impatiently. “Amethyst. Topaz. Smoky quartz. Spessartite.”

  “Come on,” Mark said. “You made that last one up.”

  “Google it, X-man.”

  “Okay.” Mark paused, drumming his fingers on the glass case. When she frowned at him, he took his hands away and shoved them into his pockets. “Like, how much does he invest? And how much does he get back?”

  “He gave me ten thousand NAD,” she said. “He got back thirty thousand.”

  “Really?” Three thousand return for a one thousand U.S. dollar investment, Mark thought. Well. I have a thousand dollars.