Chapter 2
No Strings
Ritah had a rule about where we met, which was that we would never meet in a place where either of us could be recognised by someone we would have to explain ourselves to.
She told me this at a rooftop bar in Kisementi on the Thursday after her first message, sitting with her legs crossed at the ankle and a glass of white wine sweating gently in her hand. It was seven in the evening. Below us the traffic on Kira Road was doing its usual imitation of a slow-moving injury. She had a way of sitting completely still while everything else around her moved, and it made me want, absurdly, to hand her something to hold.
"That's a very specific rule," I said.
"It's a very simple rule." She turned the glass a quarter-turn. "People talk. Then they ask questions. Then someone's aunt has an opinion. I like my life uncomplicated, Ethan. I've done complicated."
"Have you."
"Twice." She smiled the small, chipped smile. "It's overrated."
I remember the pleasure of that moment better than I remember most of the men and women I have loved, which I am aware is not a flattering thing to admit. It was the pleasure of being understood without having to explain. She had put on the table, unasked, exactly what I had spent months learning how to say in a gentler and less honest way. She did not want to be met by my mother. She did not want a key. She wanted a Thursday, and a Sunday sometimes, and a man who would not need her to talk about how she was feeling, and she said all of this without any apology at all, in a voice like a person reading out the ingredients on a jar.
"I have a few rules of my own," I said.
"I'm sure." She raised an eyebrow. "Let me guess. You don't stay over."
I laughed, and was slightly, disgracefully thrilled. "How did you—"
"Because I don't either." She lifted her glass toward me, a small toast. "Tell me you don't do the good morning beautiful messages."
"I never send them."
"Tell me you don't say I miss you."
"I don't know what those words mean."
"Tell me you're not looking for a wife."
"God, no."
"Good," said Ritah, and drank, and set the glass down, and looked at me in a way that made the back of my neck go warm. "Then we understand each other."
We did. That was the trouble. We understood each other exactly as two people in the same locked room understand each other. Not through any deep kinship, merely because we were both standing in front of the same door and both pretending we had chosen the room.
She was twenty-eight and worked in what she called experiences, which turned out to mean weddings, corporate launches, and a wildly expensive yearly event called the Champagne Gala that I had only ever seen photographs of on other people's phones. She wore her hair short and dyed a dark burgundy, and her hands were always doing something small, adjusting a ring, straightening the strap of her bag, tapping the edge of the table in a rhythm I could never place. When she was thinking she looked at a fixed point on the horizon, as though she were checking it for structural weaknesses.
She lived in Naguru, on the fourth floor of a new block with a gate that opened by remote and a lift that smelled faintly of pine. The apartment was beautiful in the way a hotel is beautiful: clean lines, a cream sofa no one had ever eaten on, a glass table with one book placed at an angle. I noticed, the first night, that there was not a single photograph in the place. Not a mother, not a cousin, not a childhood dog. On the wall over the bed, a large abstract canvas, a blur of grey and gold, and I remember thinking it looked like something meant to be looked at rather than understood.
I noticed. I filed it. I did not ask.
Here is what I have never told anyone about that first night, and that I have told almost nobody about any of the nights: it was good. I do not mean that as a boast. I mean that it was easy, and warm, and generous on both sides, and that at the moment of it, for a period of about two hours, I was not carrying anything. Nobody was performing a grief. Nobody was being a survivor. Two adults wanted the same thing at the same hour and said so, and the honesty of that had a kind of cleanness that I had begun to confuse with truth.
That was the moment I was most convinced I was right.
Afterwards, we lay on our backs a hand's-width apart and looked at the ceiling. Outside, a car alarm went off somewhere on the road and stopped. I could hear the lift running. My whole body had gone loose and heavy, and I felt the pleasant, dangerous drowsiness of a man whose defences were briefly down.
"I need to be up early," said Ritah.
It was a quarter to eleven.
"Of course." I sat up and found my shirt. She watched me, propped on one elbow, not unkindly, with an expression I could not read. I remember that I felt strangely relieved and, underneath the relief, in a place I did not visit, faintly stung, as though I had been handed my coat a little too promptly at the end of a party I had not wanted to leave.
At the door she said, "This was nice."
"It was."
"We should do it again."
"Thursday?"
"I'll text you." She leaned on the doorframe in an oversized T-shirt, barefoot, and for a second the mask slipped and she looked very tired, very young, and very much like somebody's daughter. "Drive safe, Ethan."
It was the first tender thing she had said all night, and it was so casual that I almost missed it.
I skipped the naming ceremony.
I would like to give you an honest account of this because it is a small betrayal, and small betrayals are how most people are actually hurt. The ceremony for baby Josephine was on a Saturday afternoon in Kansanga, a proper Buganda affair with an ssenga, a grandmother in a bright gomesi, a table of food, and an aunt from Masaka who had brought a goat. Timo had asked me to be there. Sarah had made me a card with a glue gun and written HAPPY FACE, NOT SAD on it in capital letters.
On the Friday night Ritah texted: I have a client thing at a lodge in Entebbe on Saturday. It's a beautiful place. It has a pool. The client is cancelling, so I have the room until Sunday. Want to see a pool?
I stood in my kitchen with the phone in my hand. I thought about Timo standing in his yard in his good shirt. I thought about Sarah with the baby against her shoulder. I thought about how it would look if I went alone: me, the one who used to be so easy, sitting in a plastic chair balancing a paper plate, being asked by three separate aunts whether I had found a wife.
Yes, I wrote. Then I sat down and typed a message to Timo that said: Work emergency. Site collapse. I am so sorry. Give Sarah my love, tell her the card was beautiful.
It was not a lie exactly. There was, technically, a site. There was, technically, a wall that had at one point in the previous month leaned in a way I had not liked. But Timo knew the difference between a lie and a fiction, and he wrote back, twenty minutes later, a single word: Ok.
Timo had never before in nineteen years replied to me with a single word.
I spent Saturday beside a pool at a lodge on the lake with a book I did not read. The water was too blue, the sky was too big, and the staff moved around us as though we were a couple, bringing drinks and fresh towels with a discreet warmth that made me feel, God help me, faintly like an impostor in someone else's holiday. Ritah lay on a lounger with her sunglasses on and her long legs shining, and she told me a story about a wedding where the groom had fainted into the cake, and I laughed, and she laughed, and the light on the water went gold and soft.
It was one of the nicest days I had had in a year. That is the honest truth. I looked over at her, and for a moment I felt so light, so uncomplicated, so unbothered by anything, that I thought, with genuine triumph: There. This is what everyone else is missing. You can have this. You can have all the pleasure and none of the price.
At four o'clock my phone buzzed on the towel beside me. It was a photograph from Sarah: Timo in his good shirt with a tiny bundle in his arms and an expression on his face I had never seen there before, a look of such ferocious, helpless tenderness that I had to look away.
Under it, she had typed: We named her Josephine Naomi.
I do not know if you have ever read a sentence and felt your whole body hear it. It was a coincidence, of course. Sarah's grandmother had been a Naomi. It was a common enough name in Buganda, a Christian name, one of those perfect old-fashioned names people keep in families like good china. Sarah had no way of knowing what I would feel when I saw it, and no reason to think about it, and it certainly wasn't a message.
But the pool was very blue, and the light on it was very bright, and for about eight seconds I could not feel my hands.
"You okay?" said Ritah, without lifting her sunglasses.
"Fine."
"You went a strange colour."
"I'm fine."
"Okay," she said, in the tone of a woman who knows a closed door when she sees one and has no interest in knocking. She settled back. "Order me another lime soda?"
I ordered the lime soda. I ordered one for myself. I looked at the lake, at the white sails going slowly across it, and I said nothing, and when the drinks came I drank mine so fast it made my teeth ache.
That, I would understand later, was the whole shape of it. Ritah and I did not lie to each other. We simply had an agreement never to ask.
We saw each other for five weeks.
I should say that they were not five weeks of continuous bliss. There were long empty stretches in the middle, days when neither of us messaged, and then a Thursday would arrive and the phone would light up with something short and unsentimental, 8?, and I would find myself, at about six, standing in the office bathroom fixing my collar in the mirror with an anticipation that embarrassed me.
I told myself the anticipation was physical. I told myself I wanted her the way you want a cold drink after a long walk. And that was true, but it was not the whole of it, and some part of me knew that even then. What I wanted was the permission. I wanted to walk into her apartment and be a man without a history. There was no one there to remember me at twenty-three, on a Kampala Road pavement, saying the word out loud to a stranger's laughter. No one there to compare me. Ritah had met me already finished. It was like being introduced as a completed building, without anyone asking to see the foundations.
There were small revelations, like drops from a slow tap. She could not sleep without a fan on, even in the rain. She spoke to her mother once a week, briefly, in a clipped, formal Runyankore that dropped a full degree in temperature as soon as she hung up. She sent money home on the last Friday of every month and refused to say to whom. She kept a small yellow notebook in her handbag and wrote in it when she thought I was not watching, tight neat lists, numbered, crossed off with a hard line. Once I saw the top of one and read the word Dubai underlined twice.
I asked her about it exactly once.
"It's just a thing I'm thinking about," she said, and turned the notebook face down. "Don't make it a thing, Ethan."
"I'm not making it anything."
"You're making the face."
"I don't have a face."
"You have a face like a man trying very hard not to have a face." She kissed me on the corner of the mouth, briskly, like a nurse. "Nobody's asked you to be interested."
I said nothing. I felt, briefly, the whole floor tilt, the way it does when you realise that the person you thought was a mirror is actually another person, with another agenda and another set of locked drawers. Then I put it away. It was easy enough. The whole arrangement was built around a set of easy things to put away.
The Sunday lunch at Shamim's happened in the fourth week.
Shamim Nabirye had been my friend since our second year at Makerere, when she had been in the year above me, studying law, and had told me to my face on the steps of the Freedom Square that my portfolio was "aggressively fine." She was thirty now and a paralegal at a family-law practice in Nakasero, which meant that, professionally, she spent about forty hours a week watching people take apart the thing they had once been sure would last. It had not made her bitter, exactly. It had given her a large, precise, sardonic vocabulary and a tendency to say so how are the lawyers going to divide the dog when people got engaged.
She lived in a shared house in Muyenga with two other women and a cat named Judge. On the Sunday, the four of us, Shamim, Timo, Sarah with Josephine asleep in a sling, and I, sat around a wobbly wooden table on the veranda eating pilau off enamel plates. It was hot. There was a green-and-yellow bird that came and went in the mango tree, and a radio on inside playing something with a mournful saxophone.
I had been a little afraid of Timo's face when I arrived. He greeted me with a handshake and an ordinary "Ethan," and nothing else, which was worse.
"How was the site collapse?" said Sarah, from the far end of the table.
I looked at her. She looked at me. She had the baby in her lap and a blank, angelic expression.
"It was... contained," I said.
"I'm so glad." She spooned rice onto Josephine's tiny palm, though Josephine was far too young to eat rice. "You were missed. That's all I'll say. Everybody asked. My auntie from Masaka said, where is the handsome one, and I said, he's at a collapsed site, and she said, the poor boy."
Shamim did not look up from her plate. "I've heard a lot about the site."
"You've heard nothing about the site."
"I've heard she has a pool."
I dropped my fork.
"Timo," I said.
"I didn't say a word," said Timo mildly, to the pilau. "I don't know how she knows."
"Sarah told me. Sarah's cousin manages that lodge. She saw you." Shamim leaned back in her chair and looked at me with enormous satisfaction. "Don't look so wounded. It's a small country. It's nine million people and one aunt."
"It's not a thing," I said. "She's someone I'm—seeing."
"Seeing," repeated Shamim.
"Casually."
"Casually seeing." She turned to Timo. "Is that the phrase now?"
"It's an evolving phrase," said Timo.
"What's her name?"
"Ritah."
"Ritah what?"
I opened my mouth. I closed it.
I did not know. Five weeks. Eleven nights. A thousand small pieces of her: the chipped tooth, the fan, the yellow notebook. And I did not know her surname. It had simply never come up, the way you do not ask the name of the taxi driver who takes you home. I sat there on the veranda with a plate of pilau in the mid-afternoon sun and felt a slow heat climb up my neck.
"Never mind," said Shamim, kindly, and that was the worst part. She was not mocking. She was doing what she always did, which was to lay a fact on the table quietly and let you look at it. "It doesn't matter. What does she do?"
"Events."
"Where does she come from?"
"Somewhere west."
"What does she want?"
"What do you mean, what does she want?"
"I mean what does she want, Ethan," said Shamim. "From it. From you. From the next year of her life."
"She wants what I want. She wants no strings."
Shamim put down her fork. She looked at me across the enamel plates and the wobbling table and the bright afternoon with an expression I would come, in time, to know very well. It was not judgement. It was the face of a woman who had watched a great many people say no strings in a great many rooms, and knew that the phrase was almost always a sentence with a missing word.
"She sounds," she said slowly, "like you in a wig."
Sarah made a small explosive noise into the baby's hair. Timo turned a laugh into a cough. I stared at my friend and felt the first flicker of anger, a real one, hot and reasonable.
"That's not fair."
"I'm not being fair. I'm being observant. Two people who don't want anything from each other, who never ask, who leave at eleven o'clock. That's not a relationship, darling, that's a very expensive handshake."
"What's wrong with that?"
"Nothing. If you're happy."
"I'm happy."
"Then I'm delighted for you," said Shamim, and reached across the table for the water jug, and poured me a glass, and set it down in front of me the way you would set down a glass for a man who had just said something and did not know how much of it he believed.
I drank it. The mango tree was rustling. The bird had gone.
Later, when Sarah had taken the baby inside and Shamim had gone to look for the cat, Timo and I sat on the veranda steps with the last of the tea.
"You didn't come," he said.
"I know."
"I'm not angry."
"You sound angry."
"I'm not." He turned the tin mug in his large hands. "I just wanted my friend there. The one from before. That's all. I didn't need him to be happy or sad. I just wanted him in the room."
"I'm here now."
"You're here now," Timo agreed. He was not looking at me. "That's the difference between you and Sarah's goat. The goat came."
I laughed, and he did not. And that is how I knew.
On the Thursday of the fifth week, Ritah ended it.
I use that verb carefully, because she would not have. There was no scene. I arrived at her building at eight with a paper bag of samosas from the shop on the corner, a small offering I had never brought before, and she opened the door dressed to go out, in a black jumpsuit and gold earrings, with a suitcase behind her.
"I'm going to Dubai," she said. "The company has a position. Six months, maybe longer. I found out on Tuesday."
I stood in the corridor with the samosas. They were warm through the paper.
"Congratulations," I said.
"Thank you."
"That's, uh. That's great. When?"
"Tonight. The flight's at midnight." She smiled a little, with an apology in it. "I'm sorry. I would have told you. I didn't want it to be a whole event."
"No. God. No." I laughed, and it came out bright and wrong. "It's fine. It's what we said. No strings."
"No strings," said Ritah.
We stood there. Somewhere below us the lift began its whine upward, carrying someone's night.
"Ethan," she said. "Can I say something? And you'll listen, and then you'll forget it and never think about it again, which is fine."
"Sure."
"You're good at leaving. It's a real skill. You do it so kindly that nobody can be angry with you." She looked at me directly, and her eyes were not unkind. They were tired. "I'm the same. I know it when I see it. But it's a bad skill to be good at, and I don't think either of us will know what it cost until we're too old to change it. That's all."
"That's a very dark thing to say to a man holding samosas."
"I'm sorry." She laughed, and did the one thing she had never done: she reached up and put her hand flat against my face, palm to cheek, for exactly as long as it took me to feel the warmth of it, and then she took it away. "Keep your samosas. Eat them before they go cold."
Then she took her suitcase and walked past me to the lift, and I stood there, and the doors closed on her hoops and her burgundy hair, and I heard the little chime.
I ate the samosas in the car outside her building with the engine off. I ate all six. They were good, actually, sharp and hot and peppery, and it seemed to me an incredibly stupid thing to be doing, sitting in the dark in my own car in Naguru, weeping over pastry that I told myself, with great firmness, I was not weeping over.
Don't be dramatic, I thought. It ended exactly as you'd have wanted it to. Cleanly. No mess. No phone calls. No one hurt.
That was true. It was also true that I sat there for forty minutes.
At half past nine I started the engine and drove home. On Jinja Road, the traffic had thinned to a slow smear of tail lights. A boda passed me with two girls on the back, laughing, their headscarves streaming, one of them with her arms flung wide as if to take the whole night in.
For a moment I hated them. Not them. The ease of them. Then I turned up the radio, and did not notice what was playing, and did not think about the yellow notebook, or the missing surname, or the sentence that had been lodged in me since Shamim's veranda, and I told myself, firmly and finally, that the arrangement had been a success.
Two people. No strings. Nobody hurt.
I drove home. I made no eggs. I did not look under the bed.
But I lay awake until after two, listening to the refrigerator, which had begun, that spring, to hum in a key I could not stop noticing.