Chapter 10
What Do You Call This?
I told Timo first, because he was the only person who had earned it.
He was under a Corolla when I arrived at the garage, at eight on the Monday morning, with the radio on its one hymn and the boys arguing over a bucket. I stood by the wheel arch until he slid out on the creeper, looked up at my face, and said, "Ah."
"I need to tell you something."
"Go on."
"It's long."
He looked at me for a moment. Then he wiped his hands on a rag, and turned to the yard and shouted, "Kato! You're in charge!" to a man asleep under a different car, and jerked his head toward the small office at the back.
It has a plywood desk, a calendar from a tyre company, and two chairs, one of which has three legs and a brick. I sat on the one with the brick. I told him everything. I told him about the queue, and the fee, and the Psalms in my father's room. I told him about the phone, and the corridor, and Dr. Kalule's grey beard, and the hall in Wandegeya. I told him what I had said in my doorway. I told him about the rooftop with two glasses and the phone walking across the tablecloth. I told him about the car park.
He did not interrupt once. At some point he had stopped wiping his hands and was simply holding the rag, very still, like a man holding a lantern in a wind. When I got to the car park, he shut his eyes.
"You were there," he said, when I finished.
"Yes."
"That night. The night I sat on your floor with the waragi. You'd been there a month before."
"Five weeks."
"And you let me say I'd fight her." He opened his eyes. They were wet. "I said I'd go to Leeds and queue in the rain."
"I know."
"You laughed."
"It was the only time I did."
He nodded slowly. He put the rag on the desk and rubbed his face with both palms, hard, as if trying to wake up. "I'm not angry," he said. "I want you to know. I'm just, I'm doing sums. Two years. You've been carrying that for two years and I've been telling you jokes."
"They helped."
"Did they?"
"Some."
"Ethan." He leaned forward, elbows on his knees. "Why didn't you tell me?"
"Because you'd have said the right thing."
"That's a terrible reason."
"It's the only one I have. If you'd said it, it would have been true, and I'd have had to hold it."
Timo looked at me for a long time. Then, to my astonishment, he laughed, softly, helplessly, with his head down. "You're an idiot," he said. "You're the stupidest clever man I have ever met." He stood, and came round the desk, and put a hand the size of a shovel on the back of my neck and shook it, gently, once. "Now what?"
"I'm going to ask her to listen. Once. And then I'll leave her alone."
"Will you lie?"
"No."
"Will you leave things out?"
"No."
"Even the ugly ones."
"Especially those."
"Good." He let go. "Then you've already done the hard part. The rest is just being sick in front of her."
I wrote the message eleven times, which seemed to be my number.
In the end it was five lines. Maya. I'm not asking you to take me back, and I'm not going to argue my case. I'd like to tell you the whole truth once, in person, all of it, including what I haven't told anyone. After that I won't contact you unless you ask me to. If you'd rather not, I understand completely. Ethan.
I did not put a full stop after my name, or a kiss, or a heart. I looked at it a long time. Then I sent it and turned my phone face down and did not touch it for six days.
That is harder than it sounds. I checked it in my sleep. I moved it to the other side of the room. On the Wednesday I put it in a drawer and stood outside the drawer like a man guarding a prisoner. On the Thursday, at four in the morning, I took it out and looked at the screen, and it showed two ticks, blue, read, and beneath them nothing.
I understood, standing in my kitchen, that this was what it was to be on the other side of the door. It was what I had done to Grace. It was ten days of a message read and unanswered. I sat on the kitchen floor with my back against the fridge and thought of a woman in a blue dress watching a screen, and the sound I made was not a laugh.
On the Friday evening, at ten to six, she replied.
Saturday, 10am. Mama's salon veranda. She's in Masaka for a funeral. Don't bring anything.
That was all. It was not warm and it was not cold. It was an appointment.
The veranda looked smaller in daylight.
I had been there once at dawn, in a grey light, and remembered it as a wide, dim stage. It was only a concrete strip in front of a house, with a row of plastic chairs, a rack of hair-dryers under a green tarpaulin, and a pot of geraniums that someone had watered. The sign on the gate said HARRIET'S HAIR AND BEAUTY — WALK-INS WELCOME, and underneath, in a smaller hand, Closed Saturday for family reasons. A hen was picking at the dust.
She was already there.
She sat in the same chair, in jeans and a white shirt, with her glasses on and her hands folded in her lap. She had a notebook on her knee. She had not brought a pencil, and I found that I minded that, quite sharply, and knew what it meant. She had not come to take notes. She had come to listen.
"Sit," said Maya.
I sat in the chair beside her, not too close. There was a gap between us the width of the arm of the chair, the same gap. Neither of us mentioned it.
"I'll say the rule," she said. "I've thought about it. You talk. I don't interrupt. When you've finished, I'll ask questions, and you'll answer them without making them nicer than they are. If at any point you soften something to spare me, I'll stop you. If I stop you twice, I leave."
"That's fair."
"It isn't fair. It's what I need." She looked ahead at the gate. "Go on."
I told her.
I will not give you all of it again; you have had it. I gave it to her in a different order, because I was not telling it to a friend across a plywood desk. I began where I should have begun in November. I said: There was a woman named Naomi Atim. I loved her for five years. I was going to ask her to marry me. It was very strange to hear the name aloud in the open air, in my own mouth, in front of a sleeping hen. It did not break anything. It sounded like the name of a person.
I told her about the year after my father. I told her about the phone, and the messages at three in the morning, and the internship in Nairobi, and what I had said. I did not make myself gentle. I said, I read her messages. I followed her. I accused her in front of thirty people of sleeping with a man old enough to be her father. I said, She had done nothing except hide a good thing from someone who had taught her to hide.
I told her about the rooftop and the car park. My voice went thin in the car park. I let it.
Then I told her about the rules. Don't stay. Don't keep. Don't say. I told her about Ritah, and the missing surname. About Wanjiru and Tessa and the rest, and that there had been nineteen, and that I could not recall six of their names. About Grace, and what I had done with a lunch. About Lydia's exhibition. About Patience, and what she had heard me say in my sleep.
I told her about Brenda, and the yellow curtains, and the message at half past four.
"I read it in her kitchen," I said. "I knew what I'd done. I knew it was the wrong thing, before I'd even left the building. And then on the landing, when you asked, I could have said it. I had the whole sentence. I chose not to, and I'd like to say it was because I was afraid of losing you, and that's true, but it isn't the deepest reason."
"What's the deepest reason?"
"That telling you would have made it real. Every woman before, I'd never had to look at afterwards. If I told you, I'd have to look."
She said nothing. Her hands, in her lap, had gone white at the knuckle.
"That's everything," I said. "Except one thing, which isn't a fact. It's what I understood last Sunday night. Do you want it?"
"Yes."
"I thought I'd stopped believing in love. I said it for two years. But I hadn't. I believed in it so completely that I couldn't bear to be refused, and so I made myself a man who couldn't be. Every woman I left, I left first. It was the same thing every time, and I called it freedom." I swallowed. "I'm not saying it as an excuse. It doesn't make Grace's lunch any better. I'm just telling you what I found."
The hen wandered off. Somewhere behind the house, a radio was playing a football commentary, and a man was saying and he's through, he's through in a high, exultant Luganda.
She took a long time.
"Right," said Maya. She uncrossed her ankles and put both feet flat on the concrete. "Questions."
"Was I a challenge?" she said.
"At first, yes."
"Say more."
"You said no on the first day. I thought, she'll come round. It's a horrible thing to say. It's true." I made myself look at her. "That lasted about two weeks."
"What ended it?"
"You painted yourself out of the frame. You didn't play the game. It stopped being about winning almost at once. I don't know when."
"You slept on my floor."
"That was the night. Probably."
"Hm." She wrote nothing. "Second. When you're with me, do you think about the others?"
"Sometimes. Not wanting them. Comparing. It's the opposite. I notice how different it is, and I get afraid it will stop being different."
"Why would it?"
"Because it always did."
"Third." She was quiet a moment. Her voice, when it came, was very low. "I've been asking myself something all week. I'd like your honest answer, and if it's ugly, I'd like the ugly one. Am I actually someone you love, or am I just the woman you haven't got tired of yet?"
The question went into me clean, like a blade into a wall it has been aimed at for years.
I did not answer at once. I want you to notice that. The old me had a reply for this. A warm, low, swift reply, with a hand on her arm. You're different. It's never been like this. Every woman in a certain kind of story is told it, and half of them believe it, and it is, more often than not, exactly as true as the man's next month.
"I don't know," I said.
Her head turned.
"I don't know. I'm not saying it to be cruel. I'd have said you're different a week ago and meant it and been wrong to say it, because a man who's spent two years lying to himself can't be believed about his own heart. If I say it now, it's just another line." I found my hands were shaking and put them under my thighs. "What I know is what I did last week. I've had a message from Brenda. I haven't answered. I haven't opened Grace's thread, because I don't have one. I didn't write to you for six days even though I wanted to every minute. I didn't lie to you today. Those are facts. I don't know if it's love. I know it's not what I did with the others, and I don't think I can tell you more than that and be honest."
"That," said Maya slowly, "is the first thing you've ever said to me that I completely believe."
"Is it?"
"Because it's not flattering."
She got up. She walked to the edge of the veranda and stood with her back to me, looking at the geraniums. Her shoulders were very straight.
"Do you know what the worst part of this week has been?" she said. "It wasn't Brenda. It's a bad thing to say, but it wasn't. It was the hours in between, when I imagined every one of them. Nineteen women, and I had a face for each. I'd never met them, and I was jealous of them. Of Tessa. Of a woman called Faith whose surname you can't remember. I lay in bed and thought, I'll never be able to compete with that."
"You don't have to."
"That's not what I mean." She turned. Her eyes were red-rimmed and dry. "I don't want to compete with every woman you've ever wanted, Ethan. I'm not going to. It's a stupid race, and it's not one you win by being the best at it. If the only reason you're with me is that I'm the one you currently want, then I'm just a very good week. And I'm twenty-five years old and I have a mother and a brother and a father who rings for money, and I've been the strong one since I was twelve. I can't be somebody's week."
"I know."
"And I want to say a second thing, and I want it to be very clear." She came back and stood in front of me. "I am not going to fix you."
"I'm not asking—"
"I know you're not. You wouldn't. But it's the story, isn't it? He was broken, and then he met her. Sarah would love it. My mother would put it on a cake." She shook her head. "I won't do it. I won't be the reason a man becomes decent. If you get well, it has to be for you, because you want to, in a way that would still be true if I walked away tomorrow. Otherwise it's just a different way of leaning on somebody."
That went in deeper than the first.
"You're right," I said.
"I know I'm right." She sat, heavily, and put her face in her hands for a moment, then took it out and let out a long breath. "God. I hate that I want to hold your hand."
I said nothing. I did not move. I put my hand on the arm of the plastic chair, palm up, an inch from her knee, and left it there. I did not look at it, and I did not look at her.
She looked at it for a long time.
She did not take it.
"What do you call this?" she said.
We had been silent a while. A woman had gone by in the lane with a basin on her head, and a boy on a bicycle had rung his bell at the hen. The sun had come round to the edge of the veranda. I was beginning to feel the coolness go out of the day.
"What?"
"This. What's happening. I'm asking you, because people call things. I've been called things. Kevin called it just a phase. Doreen calls it a situation. Sarah says fate, because she's a romantic. You said you don't know if it's love." She turned her head. "Is it lust?"
"I've thought about that."
"And?"
"I know lust. I've spent two years with it. Lust is a very honest thing, and it doesn't last past the door. It wants a night." I was choosing each word, the way you place stones in a stream. "It's not that I don't want you. I do. That would be a stupid thing to hide. But I'll tell you what I noticed. When I lay awake last week, what I missed wasn't that. It was you reading me the story about Agnes by candle. It was the paint on your cheek. It was the way you say terrible about a staircase. I wanted the ordinary. I don't know if that's what love is. I think it might be what love looks like from the outside, but I don't want to sound like a man who's worked it all out."
"You said, once, on the phone. You said something about wanting someone badly enough."
I stared at her. I had said it. Some night in December, in the dark, half-asleep, a stray sentence: Maybe that's all it is, wanting somebody badly enough. I had forgotten it entirely.
"I think I was wrong," I said.
"Why?"
"Because I wanted Naomi badly enough to guard her until she couldn't breathe. That's not love. It's a rope." I heard my own voice go strange and level. "If wanting were the measure, every jealous man alive would be a poet. I think, I think it might be almost the opposite. I think you want someone badly enough, and then you have to not, sometimes, for their sake. You have to open your hand."
"That's very neat."
"I know. I don't trust it either."
"Good." A faint, tired, unexpected smile. "Keep not trusting it. It's the most attractive thing about you."
She got out her notebook, then. She looked at it, and put it away without opening it.
"Here's what I can do," she said. "I'm not going back to what we were. I can't. Something's broken, and it isn't a thing you fix by being sorry, it's a thing that gets rebuilt slowly by someone doing the same small thing a hundred times. I can't see you as my boyfriend. I can see you. I can meet you. I can be, I think, on the whole, your friend, and see."
"That's more than I hoped."
"It's not a gift. It's an experiment." She held up one finger. "Conditions. One: you don't see anyone else. Not because I own you. Because it's the honest thing, if you want to know whether you can do it. Two: if you ever want to run, if you feel the door swinging, you tell me. Not after. During. I feel like leaving. Just that. I don't need you to fix it. I need you to say it out loud so it stops being a secret." She held up a third. "Three: you do something about all this. Not for me. There's a thing you haven't finished. I don't know what, but you'll know."
"Naomi."
"I don't know. Maybe. Maybe Grace. Maybe your mother." She shrugged. "You'll know."
"And you?" I said. "What do you need from me that I haven't said?"
She was quiet. Then, in a smaller voice: "That you don't make me the hero. And that you tell me when I've got something wrong. I have a habit of being a wall. I'd like someone who says so."
"You do the wall?"
"I invented it," said Maya, and there was the faintest crack in the composure, a shaky, cornered laugh. "I've got a patent."
She walked me to the gate.
It was past one. The hen had gone under a bush and the geraniums had lost their shade. Neither of us had eaten. She stood with one hand on the latch and looked at the lane, the red dust and the tin roofs and a distant boda whining up the hill.
"Ethan."
"Yes."
"I don't know if I'm going to be able to do this." She said it quite simply. "I want you to know I might not. I could wake up on Tuesday and think, no. It won't be a punishment. It'll just be the sum."
"I know."
"You'd be all right?"
I thought about it. I thought about it honestly, standing at a gate in Ntinda with my throat closed and the sun on my neck.
"No," I said. "I'd be terrible. I'd probably want to call you forty times. And I wouldn't. And I'd be all right in about a year."
She looked at me for a long moment. Something moved across her face, and I could not read it.
"That's the truest thing you've said today," said Maya. "And the worst."
"Sorry."
"Don't be." She opened the gate. "Call me on Sunday. Not before. I'll let you know if I don't want you to."
I stepped through. The dust on the lane was warm through my shoes.
"Maya."
"Mm."
"Thank you for listening."
"It wasn't a favour." She had begun to close the gate. "You'd have done it for me."
I walked to the end of the lane. I did not look back. I want to tell you that I was calm, and I was not. I was shaking, and my mouth was dry, and I felt as one feels who has taken off a heavy coat in a cold room and cannot decide if the lightness is relief or exposure.
At the corner I stopped by a stall and bought a bottle of water and drank half of it standing. A woman selling roasted maize looked at me curiously.
"Are you all right, ssebo?"
"I think so," I said. "I don't know yet."
"That's the best kind," said the woman, and turned her cobs over on the charcoal.
On the walk home I did something I had not planned. At the top of Ntinda hill, by the shopping centre, I took out my phone. I opened the message from Brenda, Did I say something wrong?, and I wrote back, plainly, without an emoji: No. I did. I'm sorry for the way I left, and for not answering. I wasn't honest with you, and I'm not going to see you again. You deserved better than that. I hope you find someone who stays.
I looked at it. It was not gracious. It was not clever. It was only true. I sent it.
Then I put the phone in my pocket, and walked on through the noon heat, past the vegetable women and the barber shops and the crowded, ordinary, unfinished city, with the taste of dust in my mouth, and I did not, for the first time in two years, arrange my face.