Chapter 12
After Everything
I had four days to tell her, and I spent them the way a man spends money he knows he will have to account for: quickly, carefully, and without looking at the total.
On Friday she came to my flat with a bag of tomatoes, and I opened my mouth in the doorway, and she said, "Don't talk yet, I've had a day," and kicked off her shoes and lay down on the sofa with her feet in my lap. I said nothing. I told myself that it was kind. On Saturday we went to her mother's for lunch and Harriet fed me until I could not move, and Joel, thinner and quieter and working now at a friend's mobile-phone shop, shook my hand at the gate and said, very seriously, "I still owe you." There was no room in that day for a sentence like mine. On Sunday she was on deadline. On Monday I decided that a weekday evening, in the middle of a work week, was the wrong moment for it. On Tuesday I decided the same.
I know how it reads. Each excuse was reasonable. That is what makes them dangerous. A lie is rarely one large stone. It is a wall built one small reasonable brick at a time, until you notice you are standing on the wrong side of it.
Ritah I handled better, though not well. On the Friday I sent her a message that said: It can't happen again. I'm going to tell Maya. I'd like us to stay professional. She replied an hour later. Good. I'd have thought less of you otherwise. I'm sorry. Then, a minute after: For the record, I'm not. I did not answer that. I asked Mr. Lwanga on the Monday whether another architect might attend the Thursday site meetings, and he looked at me over his glasses for a long moment and said, "Is there a problem with the client?" and I said, "There's a conflict of interest, sir," and he said, "Ah," in a voice that suggested he had been expecting it for some time, and wrote something on a pad.
It was the first time I had ever moved toward a consequence rather than away from it. I was rather pleased with myself. That is how far gone I was.
It was Timo who broke it, in the end, though he did not know he was doing it.
He rang on Wednesday night. "Sarah says come for supper on Saturday, bring Maya. Josephine's learned to say dada, she says it to the fridge." He paused. "You sound strange."
"I'm tired."
"You've got the face."
"You can't hear a face on the phone."
"I've known you since you were eleven. I can hear it through a wall." A long breath. "What is it?"
"Nothing."
"Ethan."
I held the phone against my ear and looked at the ring on the shelf.
"It's nothing that's happened," I said. "It's something I haven't said."
"Then say it."
"I will."
"Tonight?"
"Tomorrow. I'll do it tomorrow."
"That's what you said about the site collapse," said Timo, flatly, and I heard a small silence in which the whole of our friendship seemed to lean close. "Listen. Every day you don't say it, it gets a day bigger. That's not wisdom. It's a fact about lies. They've got compound interest."
"I know."
"Then why is it still tomorrow?"
I did not have an answer. He let me not have it. He said "Goodnight" in a quiet, unhurried voice, and I lay on my bed with the phone on my chest and understood that I had done something I promised myself I would never do. I had discovered that the person I was hiding it from was not, in the end, Maya. It was me. If I said it aloud, I would have to be a man who had kissed a woman in a hotel room. Not a man who had nearly. I could not bear to lose the adverb.
I decided to tell her on Thursday, which would be exactly one week.
On Thursday, she told me first.
She rang at six and said, in a strange, high, breathless voice, "Can I come round? I need to say something. I've got wine. I've never brought wine to your flat. That's how you know it's serious."
I felt cold and glad at once. "Is everything all right?"
"It's all right. It's better than all right. I think. I don't know. Don't be frightening, I'll be there in twenty minutes."
I tidied the flat. I put out two glasses and a bowl of groundnuts. I stood at the window with my hands in my pockets and watched the lane, and told myself: She's coming with news. Let her say it. Then you say yours. You'll do it straight afterwards. I remember that I was actually relieved, because it meant a reprieve, an extra half-hour of ordinary air.
She arrived with a bottle of red under her arm, in a yellow dress I had not seen, with her glasses pushed up into her hair. She did not sit. She stood in the middle of my living room, holding the bottle in both hands like a trophy, and her eyes were enormous and shining and frightened.
"I have to tell you something," she said, "and I want you to hear the whole thing before you say anything. Because I've been hiding it, and I hated hiding it, and I think I hid it because of you, and that's not fair, and I know it's not, and I'm sorry."
"Maya."
"In February, I applied for a fellowship." She was speaking very fast. "It's a regional thing. The East African Investigative Journalism Fund, in Nairobi. Six months embedded at a big desk, mentoring, a real budget for a big story. Land, my land story, the Wakiso thing. It could go regional. It could go on a shelf. It's the kind of thing you get once. I didn't think I'd get it. There were four hundred applicants."
I said nothing. I felt the floor of the room tilt, very gently, and settle.
"They rang on Monday," said Maya. "I got it."
There was a silence, and in it a great many things happened at once. I saw her face, lit and terrified and waiting, and I saw, very clearly, what she was waiting for. She was waiting for a wall. She was braced for it in every muscle. She was standing in my living room with a bottle of wine like a woman about to be hit by a car. And in the same instant I heard, from the far end of two years, a voice in a dim flat saying: I thought we were building a life together. I didn't realise you were already planning to leave it.
I did not say it.
I want you to know that I did not. It was the best thing I have ever done, and it cost me, in the moment, nothing at all. I crossed the room. I took the bottle out of her hands and set it on the table. Then I held her face between my two hands, and said, "Maya. That's extraordinary."
She stared at me.
"That's the best news I've ever heard. Four hundred people. And you." My voice was shaking. It was joy, real joy, the sort you can't fake, so clean and enormous that it frightened me. "You've been sitting on that for three days?"
"Since Monday. And before that, since February."
"Since February."
"I didn't tell you because," she stopped. Her chin trembled. "I thought you'd, I thought it would happen again. I thought your face would go."
"Is it going?"
"No." She laughed, and it broke. "No. It's, you're smiling."
"I'm so proud I can hardly stand."
She put her arms round my neck and pressed her face into my shoulder, and I felt her whole body shake. I held her. She was crying, at last, in great hiccuping gulps, and she said into my collar, "I thought I'd have to choose. I thought I'd have to choose between you and it, and I hated that I was even thinking it, and then you just, you just—"
"There's nothing to choose."
"It's six months."
"I know."
"It might turn into more."
"I know."
"You're really not going to—"
"No," I said. "I'm not."
And it was true. That is what I need you to understand. It was entirely true. In that moment I would have driven her to the airport myself. I would have carried her bags. I had, quite suddenly and without noticing, come to the place Naomi's letter had described, the far side of the wall, where you can want a person to have the whole sky. It was a clear and dizzying feeling, like standing on a high place and finding you are not afraid.
And that was when I knew I could not stand in it dishonestly.
She pulled back and wiped her face on the heel of her hand and laughed, shakily, glowing, and said, "Right. Wine. I want to celebrate." She reached for the bottle.
"Maya. I have to tell you something."
She stopped.
"It's not about the fellowship. It's nothing to do with it. I've been trying to say it for a week." My mouth had gone dry. I could feel the room narrow around us. "I wanted to say it before you told me yours. I wanted to have already done it. But I haven't. And I can't let you say what you just said, and be as kind as you've just been, and have it sitting there."
The light went out of her face like a lamp being lowered. She did not move.
"Tell me," said Maya.
"On Thursday. In Entebbe. I got caught in the storm and I stayed at the lodge." I said it as plainly as I could, looking straight at her, as I had promised myself I would. "Ritah came to my room at midnight. She kissed me. I kissed her back. It was a few seconds. Then I stopped, and told her I had to leave, and I drove home. That's all that happened. But I kissed her back, and I didn't tell you, and it's been a week."
The silence went on for a very long time.
Outside, a boda changed gear on the hill. The refrigerator hummed. A clock I had never noticed ticked once, and again, on the wall.
"A week," said Maya.
"Yes."
"Thursday to Thursday."
"Yes."
"You sat across from me for a week." She said it slowly, in a small, level, astonished voice, as one reads a number off a meter. "You ate my mother's lunch. You held Josephine. You had my feet in your lap. And it was there the whole time."
"Yes."
"You told me about her. At the start. On the phone. You told me she was the client. I said, thank you, are you okay. I said I was proud of you." Her voice cracked. "Do you know why I said it? Because I thought, that's what an honest man does. And you did it so I'd think that. You gave me the small true thing so I wouldn't look for the large one."
"That's not why I—"
"Isn't it?"
I opened my mouth. I could not, honestly, say that it wasn't. "I don't know," I said. "I hope not. I think part of it might have been."
"Part of it." She laughed, one short hard breath. "God. Even now you're telling me the complicated truth."
"I promised."
"I know you did." She sat down on the arm of the sofa, quite suddenly, as if her legs had decided for her. She put her hands flat on her knees. She was very pale under the brown, and her eyes were quite dry. "Why did you tell me now?"
"Because you said what you said. And I couldn't take it."
"So you told me at the worst possible moment."
"Yes."
"On the day I got the thing I've wanted since I was nineteen."
"Yes."
"You couldn't have waited until tomorrow."
"I've been waiting a week. That was the problem."
She looked at me. Her mouth was a straight line. Then something happened in her face that I had not expected: a tremor, at the corner, a small helpless flicker like a wince. She put the back of her hand against her lips. She stayed like that for some time.
"I'm not," she said at last, quietly, "going to pretend I'm not furious. I am. It's a physical thing. My hands are hot." She dropped them. "And I'm not going to pretend it's the same as Brenda, because it isn't. It's worse, in one way. You knew this time. You knew exactly what it would do. You had every tool. You'd done the work. You stood on my mother's veranda and told me about a pattern, and then you did the pattern with your eyes open."
"Yes."
"And better, in another. You stopped. You said no. You said I feel like leaving, and you left, and I actually, God help me, I believe that. I believe that's what you did. And I'm still angry, because you didn't say it to me."
"I should have."
"You should have rung me from the car." Her voice broke. "You should have said, Maya, I nearly did something and I'm scared. And I'd have said, thank you. That's all it needed. That was the entire assignment."
I stood there. There was nothing to say. I had said it. I had said all of it, and I saw that it had not helped, because a confession does not un-happen the week that came before it. It only makes it visible.
She was silent again. When she spoke, her voice had changed. It was lower, quieter, and there was something in it that I could not at first identify, and then did. It was not anger. It was fatigue. It was a woman putting down a very heavy thing.
"I hid mine, too," said Maya.
"What?"
"The fellowship. I hid it for six weeks. I turned a screen face down. I said expenses. I'm not saying we're the same. We aren't. But I know what it is to be afraid of somebody's face. I know what it is to say tomorrow." She shook her head. "I've been so angry at you for having done it, and then I see that I'd done it first, and for the same reason, and I hate it. I hate that I understand you."
"Maya—"
"Let me finish." She looked up at the ceiling and blinked, hard. "Here's the thing. I got the fellowship three days ago. I've been so happy I felt sick. And you stood in front of me and you were glad. Truly glad. I saw it. You didn't make it about you. Do you know how rare that is? Do you know what it meant?" Tears ran down her face and she did not wipe them. "It was the most loving thing anyone has done for me in years. And you did it at the same time as you were carrying this. And I don't know how to hold both."
"You don't have to."
"I do, though. That's the problem." She stood. She smoothed the yellow dress down over her hips, a small, precise, hopeless gesture. "I can't decide this with you in the room. Do you see? I can't. Every time I look at you I'll be deciding it around your face. And I've spent my whole life deciding things around other people's faces. My mother's. Joel's. My father's on the phone. Kevin's. I'm going to Nairobi in three weeks, and I need to go there as somebody who has made up her own mind."
"I'm not asking you to stay."
"I know you're not. That's what's so unbearable." She laughed and sobbed at once. "You're behaving so well. It's the wrong time for you to start behaving well."
"I'm sorry. I'm so sorry."
"I know." She picked up her bag. She stood in the middle of the room, small and straight, with her glasses in her hair and her face wet, and I saw in her the whole of a person, a body carrying a weight and a wish, and I loved her so much that I could not breathe. "I want a clean break, Ethan. Not a punishment. It isn't. It's a room. I'm going to go into it, and shut the door, and find out who I am when I'm not either forgiving you or not."
"For how long?"
"I don't know."
"Can I write?"
"I don't know that either." She wiped her cheek. "If I want you to, I'll tell you."
"Then I won't."
"You're not even going to argue."
"No."
"Why not?"
I thought about it. The whole clean bright floor of the flat seemed to stretch away from us, and the window behind her was going violet, and the last of the light lay across the table where a bottle of red wine sat unopened between two glasses.
"Because the last time somebody I loved asked for room, I turned it into a fight," I said. "And I think that was the worst thing I've ever done. I'd rather lose you properly than keep you badly."
She stared at me. Her face went through something, one thing after another, too fast to follow.
"Don't be noble," said Maya, at last, in a cracked voice. "It's very irritating."
"I'm not being noble. I'm terrified."
"Good." A tiny, watery flicker at the corner of her mouth. "Stay terrified. It suits you."
She crossed to the door. She stopped with her hand on the latch, as she had before, as the whole architecture of this story seemed to require, and did not turn around.
"The wine's for you," she said. "I can't drink it now. I'd be sick. Keep it for when you've got something to celebrate."
"I won't have anything."
"You will." Her voice was very low. "I think you will. That's the worst thing. I think you're going to be all right, and I won't be there to see it."
She opened the door.
"I love you," I said.
It was the first time. It came out of me flat and quiet and completely without design, into the dim room, with no plan or purpose or hope of effect. I had said it once on a pavement outside a shop that sold plastic basins, and not since. I did not say it to keep her. I did not say it so that she would stay. I said it because it was true and because I could not, any longer, bear to have it in the drawer.
Her shoulders went rigid. She stood quite still.
She did not answer.
She went out and pulled the door shut behind her, softly, and I heard her go down the stairs, one at a time, unhurried, the way you walk when you have decided not to run, and I stood in the middle of my living room with a bottle of wine and two clean glasses, and a bowl of groundnuts on the table that neither of us had touched.
The consequences arrived in order, as consequences do.
On the Friday, I could not get out of bed. I lay looking at the ceiling for four hours, and at eleven I rang the office and said I was ill, and it was true. On the Saturday, Timo drove over without a word, took one look at me, and went into the kitchen and made the worst tea in Kampala. On the Sunday, Sarah rang and said, "I'm not going to say anything," and then said a great deal, in a gentle, furious, tender rush, and ended by saying, "But you told her yourself. Nobody made you. Hold on to that. It's not nothing."
On the Monday, Shamim turned up at the office, in her black coat, and took me for chicken and chips, and did not speak for ten minutes. At the end of them she said, "I'm not going to say I told you so. I'd like it noted that I'm not saying it."
"Noted."
"It's very difficult."
"I can see."
"You did the right thing in the wrong order," said Shamim. "It's very common. I see it in the firm every week. Nobody gets the order right. That's what the courts are for." She stirred her tea. She looked at me for a long moment and said, quite gently, "How do you feel?"
"Like I've been taken apart to see how it works."
"And?"
"And nobody could put it back."
"That's the correct feeling," said Shamim. "That's the only honest one. Sit in it."
I sat in it. I sat in it in a small café in Bugolobi with a plate of cold chips, and the sun came round the corner and fell on the table, and I understood that there was nothing to be done. There was no message to send. There was no gesture that would fix it. There was only the plain grey fact of what I had done, and the long, empty, uneventful work of living with it.
That evening I went home and took the bottle of red wine from the table, where it had stood for four days, and put it on the shelf above my desk, next to the candle and the ring. I did not open it. I did not know what it was for. But I set it there, and stood a while looking at the row of things: a stub of wax, a jar of pencils, a small gold band, and a bottle that belonged to a woman on her way to Nairobi.
I had been a collector once. I was beginning to remember what I had been keeping them for.