Chapter 11
The Old Me
The experiment ran for three months, and it was the most humbling thing I have ever done, because nothing in it was dramatic.
I want to say that clearly. Stories like this one want a montage: a man doing brave things in a swelling light. There was none. There was Sunday, when I called at five o'clock, as agreed, and she answered on the fourth ring and said, "Hello, godfather," in a wary, dry voice, and we talked for eleven minutes about a leaking tap. There was the Wednesday she let me cook, and the Thursday she said, "Not tonight, I'm tired," and I said, "Okay," and did not add anything to it, and lay awake for two hours with my hands flat on my chest, listening to the refrigerator.
There was the night in April when I texted her at one in the morning, and she read it at once, because she never slept either.
I feel like leaving.
That was all I wrote. It was the third condition, and I had not yet used it. I had had a bad day. Mr. Lwanga had thrown a set of drawings across the office and said, in front of everyone, that I had lost my edge, and I had gone home and sat on my bed and felt the old door begin to swing, slowly, on its well-oiled hinge. I had wanted to open my phone and find a stranger. I had wanted it so badly that my teeth hurt.
Three dots. They vanished, and returned.
Thank you for telling me. What does it look like?
I stared at it. It was so simple. She had not said don't or why or I'm here for you. She had asked what it looked like, as one asks a doctor's question.
I typed: Like a room I know. Warm. Somebody laughing at something I said. Nobody knowing my name.
Okay, wrote Maya. That sounds awful, actually. I'd hate that room.
I laughed out loud in the dark, alone, and something in my chest that had been clenched for hours came unfastened.
Me too, I wrote.
Stay where you are. Drink some water. Tell me about the drawings.
We talked until half past three. I told her about the staircase in the Bugolobi block, and the client who wanted a marble spiral in a space the width of a broom cupboard. She told me about a permanent secretary's spokesman who had described a drowned child as an unfortunate statistical outlier. Neither of us said anything important. But somewhere in the middle, without either of us mentioning it, the door stopped swinging.
That was how it went. That was all it was. I said the true thing at the moment it was hard, and she did not make it bigger or smaller. It is the least cinematic sort of courage. I recommend it.
I did the other thing, too, the third condition. I did not do it all at once.
I wrote to Grace. I did not have her number, but I found the ward's Facebook page, and after a great deal of embarrassment I sent one message to the page. Please could you pass this to Nurse Grace Nansubuga. From Ethan Kirabo. I'm not asking for a reply. I only want to say that I was wrong in the way I treated her, that she was never nobody, and that I'm sorry I called her an old friend. I did not expect an answer. Nine days later, a message arrived from an account with a picture of a geranium. It said: Received. Thank you for saying it. Nothing more. It was, I decided, exactly enough.
I did not yet write to Naomi. I had the letter in a drawer. I had the ring on my shelf. I did not know what an honest reply looked like, and I was afraid that I would write the one she had warned me about, the one that put down a rope. I told Maya, one evening, that I had not done it, and she said, "Then you haven't finished," and I said, "I know," and she said, "Don't hurry. Just don't stop."
And on the fourteenth of June, at a table at the back of a Kisementi café, over two cups of tea that neither of us had touched, Maya put her hand on top of mine, said, "I think I'd like to try again," and looked at me with such raw, careful, terrified hope that I could not speak.
"Are you sure?"
"No," she said. "But I've noticed I'm never sure, and I've noticed it doesn't seem to matter."
I turned my hand over under hers. I held it.
I want to tell you that I was wise, that night. I was not. I was so happy I forgot what I was afraid of. And I did not notice, though I have gone back over it since with a magnifying glass, that at some point in those weeks Maya had begun to keep something from me.
It was very small. A message she turned face-down on the table. A call she took on the balcony, the door pulled shut behind her. A distracted, glittering, faintly guilty look when I asked about work. Once, in May, I came into her flat and found her at the desk with a form open on the screen, and she closed it with a click, quite fast, and said brightly, "Expenses. So boring."
I believed her. Why would I not? I had given her a whole ledger of my own lies, and she had, by the end of it, only ever told me the truth. It did not occur to me that a person who has been lied to may need a small locked room of her own. It did not occur to me that she might be afraid of what I would do with a certain kind of news.
I have thought about that a great deal. I had taught one woman to hide her plans. I was about to find out I had taught another.
The hotel extension in Entebbe had been won by Lwanga Associates in February, and by June it was on site.
It was a big job, the biggest the firm had had in years. A lakeside lodge with forty new rooms, a spa and a conference wing, for an owner named Mr. Ssekandi who lived mostly in Johannesburg and communicated, as far as I could tell, only through a representative. I was the project architect. It was Mr. Lwanga's way of telling me that I had, after all, not lost my edge, and I had been so proud of it I had told Maya the same evening, over a plate of chips.
On the first Monday, I drove to Entebbe with a roll of drawings and a hard hat on the back seat, and found a woman standing at the gate of the site in a white shirt and tailored trousers, with a tablet in one hand and a very expensive pair of sunglasses pushed up into short burgundy hair.
"Mr. Kirabo," she said. "The architect."
I stood beside my car. For a moment I did not know what my face was doing.
"Hello, Ritah."
"You've shrunk." She looked me up and down with frank, delighted interest. "No. Sorry. You've gone quiet. You used to walk like you were late. Now you stand there like a man reading a menu." She held out a hand. "Ritah Karungi. Guest experience director, Lakeshore Reserve. I'm the person you'll be dealing with."
Karungi. I shook her hand. I thought, with a small absurd twist, So that's what it was.
"I didn't know you were back."
"Since March. Dubai was a bit of a bore, actually. Ceiling too low." She smiled the chipped smile. "I was going to write. I thought it might be strange."
"It's not strange."
"Isn't it?" She raised an eyebrow. "Well. We're professionals."
That evening I called Maya from the car, before I had even started the engine, and told her. I said, "The client's representative is Ritah. The one from last year. The first one." I said, "I wanted you to hear it from me, and not from anyone else." There was a silence on the line. I could hear her breathing.
"Thank you for telling me," said Maya at last, in a very level voice. "Are you okay?"
"I think so."
"Do you want to be on the project?"
"It's the biggest job of my life."
"That's not what I asked."
I looked at the lake through the windscreen, flat and silver in the dusk, with a line of white egrets on a floating log. "I don't want to be on it because I'm afraid," I said. "So I think I should be on it."
"Okay." A pause. "I'm proud of you for saying that. I'm also, just so you know, a bit jealous. I'm going to be a bit jealous for a while. I'll tell you when it gets loud."
"Thank you."
"It's not a favour," said Maya, and I heard her almost smile. "Go and measure something."
I would like to say that I felt nothing. I did not. I felt exactly what a man feels who has walked past a door he used to live behind. It was not desire. It was a kind of clean hollow ache for how simple it had been. Ritah stood at the edge of a pit in a hard hat and gave orders in a low, crisp voice, and the foreman, a big, sceptical man named Mukasa, obeyed her without argument. She was brilliant at it. She remembered every name. She could look at a quantity schedule and find the error in it before the surveyor had turned the page.
For three weeks we saw each other twice a week, on site, in the presence of other people, and nothing at all happened. I was courteous. She was scrupulous. We talked cladding and drainage. She did not once refer to the rooftop in Kisementi or the pool. But some days, when I looked up from a drawing, I found her watching me from across the site with an expression I could not read, thoughtful, faintly amused, faintly hungry, as one looks at a house one once thought of buying.
And I knew what she was doing, because I had once done it. She was waiting. She was a woman who could wait a very long time.
On the last Thursday of June, we had a site meeting that ran late. It was a day of heavy cloud, low and purple, with the smell of rain coming over the lake in long wet gusts. By five the foreman had sent the labourers home. By six we were in the temporary site office, a portakabin with a hand-lettered sign, going through a delivery schedule, and the first fat drops had begun to hit the tin roof one at a time, like someone testing a drum.
"You should stay," said Ritah, without looking up. "For dinner. The kitchen's open, the lodge is nearly empty, and the road to Kampala floods at Abaita Ababiri in a storm. I've seen a Noah go under."
"I'll be fine."
"You won't." She glanced at the window. The rain had thickened to a solid grey curtain. "You'll be in a queue of taxis for four hours. Stay. I'll put you in one of the finished rooms. It's the least the client can do."
I looked at the window, and the rain, and I considered.
I should tell you exactly what I considered, because the whole question of this book rests on it. I did not think, she wants me. I did not think, this is the moment. I thought: It's just dinner. I thought: I've told Maya about her. I've been honest. I've done all the right things. I'm allowed to have dinner with a client. I thought: If I run, it means I'm still afraid.
That last one was the cleverest. It has a shine on it. It is the reasoning of a man who has learned all the right words, and can now use them to walk directly into a river.
I texted Maya: Storm. Road's flooded. Stuck in Entebbe, having dinner at the lodge with the client. Will call later. x
She sent back a single line, a minute later. Drive safe. Don't drown. x And a small blue whale, for reasons I did not understand.
Dinner was on the terrace, under a canvas awning, with the storm going on behind it like an argument in a neighbouring room. The lake had vanished. There was only a wall of water, lit now and then by lightning, so that for a moment the whole world went white and flat and every wave stood up like a hand.
Ritah was in a long dark dress. She had changed in her office, and taken off her hard hat and her shoes, and looked, in the lamplight, quite different, softer, younger, more tired. She ordered a bottle of wine and did not ask me whether I wanted any. She poured a glass for me and slid it across.
"I'm not drinking."
"Since when?"
"Since a while."
"Ah." She considered me. "Is that a thing?"
"It's a decision."
"Good for you." She did not press. She lifted her glass and drank, with a slow, careful pleasure. "I wanted to say something. And I'd like you not to mistake it."
"Go on."
"You were the only one, in that whole year, who never asked me anything." She turned the stem of the glass. "Do you know how much I liked that? And how much I hated it?"
"I didn't know you hated it."
"Of course you didn't. That was the point." She smiled, a little crookedly. "I went to Dubai because of a man. A married man. He wanted to leave his wife for me and I thought, no, that's not the arrangement. I ran so far I ended up in a different time zone. I thought that if I made myself a person nobody could ask questions of, I'd never have to answer one." She shrugged. "And then I met you, who was doing the very same thing. It was like meeting my own reflection in a bar. It was, honestly, the most restful five weeks of my life. And then I left, and I've thought about you more than I've ever thought about anyone."
She said it with no drama. She said it looking at the rain.
I sat very still. Thunder went over the roof.
"I'm with someone," I said.
"I know. Sarah's cousin, again." She laughed softly. "It's a small country. I'm not asking you for anything, Ethan. I'm just, telling you a thing I've wanted to say for a year. It's not a move. I promise you. If it were a move, you'd know."
"Would I?"
"You'd have noticed I'd taken off my shoes."
I laughed, and she laughed, and for an hour it was easy. It was all easy. It had the ease of a room where every piece of furniture is in the place you would put it. We talked about weddings, and cladding, and the man who had once fainted into a cake, and the sound of the storm was a wall behind us, and the lamp swung a little in the wind. I found that I was warm. I found that I had stopped watching the door.
That was my mistake. I had prepared for the fire, and not for the warmth.
The rooms in the new wing were finished only in the shell. They had walls and a bed and a bathroom without a mirror. She gave me the key to number nine, on the second floor, with a balcony over the lake. "The power's out at the far end," she said. "The generator only covers the lobby. There's a torch on the bedside table."
"Thank you."
"Sleep well, Mr. Kirabo."
I lay on the bed in the dark with my shoes on and looked at the ceiling. The storm had eased to a steady drumming. I sent Maya a message. Safe. In a room. Goodnight. x. She answered at once: Goodnight. x. I held the phone against my chest and felt nothing but tenderness, and a certain smugness, like a man who has passed an exam.
At ten to midnight, someone knocked.
I knew who it was. I want you to see that I knew. I had known since she said sleep well, in the corridor, in her stockinged feet. I lay for perhaps ten seconds and did not move. I could hear my own heart.
You don't have to open it, said a small clear voice. It was not the cold voice. It was a different one, softer, and younger, and it was very like the voice of a boy in a queue. You don't have to.
I opened it.
She stood in the corridor with a torch in one hand, its beam pointing at the floor, and the other hand on the doorframe. Her dress was creased. Her hair was damp from the rain that had blown in through some broken shutter. She looked at me, and she was not smiling.
"I couldn't sleep," she said. "I thought you might want a drink of water."
She was holding nothing. Neither of us looked at her empty hand.
"Ritah."
"Just tell me to go," she said, quietly. "Say it, and I will."
The corridor was very dark. Somewhere at the end of it, a shutter banged in the wind.
I want to tell you what I felt. I want to be honest, since I have promised that I would. I did not feel virtuous. I did not feel a bright, clear resolve. I felt something old and warm and enormous rising in me, very fast, like a tide. It was the remembered ease. It was the woman who asked nothing, the room where nobody knew my name, the whole soft dark country of no consequences. It was the old me. He stood beside me in the doorway with his hand on my shoulder, in his good jacket, and whispered, very tenderly, This is the easy thing. This is what you're good at. Nobody's watching. Nothing has to mean anything.
And I wanted it. That is the part I must not soften. I wanted it with my whole body, and I did not want it because I loved her, or instead of loving Maya. I wanted it the way a man who has been fasting for months wants bread. That was the horror. It was not a moral failure. It was appetite, plain and enormous, and it did not care who I loved.
She came in. I did not stop her. She put the torch on the bedside table and its beam went up the wall and made a small pale circle on the ceiling. She turned, and put her hand flat against my chest, and I felt my heartbeat under her palm, and knew that she felt it too.
"Ethan," she said.
She kissed me.
I kissed her back.
I have gone over that second so many times that it has worn smooth, like a stone in a pocket. It was three seconds. Perhaps four. It was warm, and familiar, and tasted of wine and salt. My hands were on her waist. I felt the whole slope of the last two years go out from under me, and I thought, with a strange, clear, dizzy detachment, so this is what it is to fall.
And then, as I stood there with my eyes closed, I saw a hand.
It was not Ritah's. It was a brown hand with a pencil, resting on a notebook, in a circle of candlelight. It was a hand held out on a concrete veranda, palm up, waiting. I saw a small scar through an eyebrow. I heard a level voice say, Tell me when it swings. Not after. During.
I stepped back.
I did it so suddenly that Ritah's hand slipped from my chest and hung in the air. We stood a foot apart in the dark, both breathing hard, the torch making its little circle above us.
"I feel like leaving," I said.
It was absurd. It was a sentence for a text message, spoken aloud in a hotel room to the wrong woman. But it was the only true one I had, and I said it, and it came out cracked and trembling.
Ritah looked at me. I watched her face change. The hunger went out of it, slowly, and something else came in, something I could not name, that looked, in the pale light, almost like grief.
"Ah," she said softly. "There it is."
"I'm sorry."
"Don't be." She bent, and picked up the torch. She switched it off. In the sudden dark I heard her let out a long breath, half a laugh. "I thought you might. I didn't think I'd mind so much."
"I shouldn't have opened the door."
"No. You shouldn't." A pause. "But you did close it. That's something, isn't it? I can't say I've seen many men do it."
She went out. I heard her bare feet on the concrete, receding, and the far, dull click of a latch. I stood in the middle of the room in the dark with my hands shaking and the taste of her still in my mouth.
I did not sleep. At one, I put on my shoes. I went down the dark stairs, past the empty lobby, past a night watchman asleep under a blanket, and out into the car park, where the rain had almost stopped and a huge, cold, glittering wet lay over everything. I drove home along the flooded road, through water up to the hubcaps at Abaita Ababiri, past three stranded taxis with their hazards blinking, and did not feel the road at all.
I want to tell you what I told myself on that drive. It is the most important thing in this chapter, and it is the smallest.
I said: Nothing happened.
I said it aloud, in the dark car, with the wipers going. Nothing happened. You stopped. You left. That is what it means to have changed. And it had the quality of a fact, solid and clean, a thing you could put your weight on. I felt almost proud. I had walked into the fire, and walked out again, and here I was, on the road, in the rain, unburned.
And then, quietly, from a great distance, the other thought arrived. It was not loud. It sat down beside me like a hitch-hiker, and stayed.
You kissed her back.
I gripped the wheel.
It was four seconds.
It was four seconds you chose.
But you stopped.
After.
I told myself that I would tell Maya in the morning. I had the sentence prepared. I rehearsed it through Kajjansi and Kisubi and the long dark run past the swamp. Ritah kissed me. I kissed her back, for a few seconds. Then I left. It was not a hard sentence. It was true, and short, and it contained a verb. I said it twice, aloud, to test it.
And then I thought of her face. I thought of her voice on a landing in the rain: You took my trust and put it in your pocket. And I thought of the way she had said, on the veranda, If you'd told me, I'd have said thank you. And I told myself that this time it was different. This time I would tell her, when it was safe. When I had it straight. When I could put it in a way that showed how much I had grown. I would tell her when I could tell her as a triumph.
It was the oldest trick in me. It had a new coat on.
I got home at half past two. The flat was cold and dark. I stood in the middle of the living room, and I looked at the shelf above my desk, at the stub of white candle, the jar of pencils, the small gold ring. I looked at the sentence I had rehearsed, and I found that I could no longer say it, even in my head.
Nothing happened, I told the empty room.
It was the first word of every lie I have ever told. I knew that. I stood there in the dark and I knew it perfectly well.
I went to bed, and I lay awake until the light came, and in the morning, when Maya rang at eight to say how was the flood, I said, brightly, "Awful. I'll tell you about it tonight."
I did not tell her that night.