Chapter 3
Names I Never Kept
In September I sat on my balcony with a notebook and tried to prove to myself that I was fine.
It was a Sunday, one of those washed, bright Sundays that follow a night of hard rain. The whole of Ntinda seemed to have been rinsed and hung out to dry. Somewhere below me a woman was singing while she scrubbed a basin, and children were kicking a plastic ball against a wall in a steady, hypnotic rhythm, and the mango tree in the neighbouring compound dripped in slow, fat drops onto a corrugated roof. I had a mug of tea, a pen, and a plan.
The plan was an inventory.
I do not know exactly what put it in my head. A week earlier, a woman had sent me a message that said only, You never even asked my last name, and I had stared at it for a long time in a state of genuine confusion, because I had no memory of which woman it was. I had scrolled up through the thread. There was a photograph. A bar. A night. It took me nearly a minute to place her, and when I did, when the whole evening came back in a single lurid frame, a leather jacket, a rooftop, a taxi in the rain, what I felt was not guilt. It was something colder. It was the feeling of opening a drawer and finding that you own a great many things you could not name.
So: an inventory. I would write down every woman since Naomi. Not to punish myself; I want that understood. To audit. To demonstrate that there was pattern, method, control. To show that a man who could account for each of his choices could not be described as lost.
I wrote 1. and stopped, and sat with the pen in the air, and drank some tea.
Then I wrote Tessa.
Tessa was the woman with braids and the T, whom I had left a note for and never seen again. She sent me a message three days later. It said: Thanks for the bread lol. Nice place. Your kettle is broken by the way, it doesn't switch off. And that was it. I did not respond, and she did not follow up, and I felt about her the way you feel about a stranger who has held a door: some sense of a debt, quickly forgotten.
I wrote Sandra, Zana? and put a question mark next to it, because I could see her, laughing, in the glow of a phone, at the bar of a club on Bukoto Street, but I could not see her surname or her workplace or the reason I had been in Zana that night. I wrote Faith, and then crossed it out because I was not sure Faith was real, and then I remembered that Faith was real, that she had been twenty-one and pregnant with her first serious doubts about her boyfriend, and that we had spent a strange hour on her balcony at three in the morning discussing whether you can ever really know anyone. I had told her, with tremendous confidence, that you couldn't, so she should enjoy herself. I felt my stomach turn slightly.
I wrote Wanjiru.
Wanjiru I remembered clearly. She was a Kenyan consultant in Kampala for a week to audit a telecom company, and she had the poise of a woman who moved through capital cities the way other people moved through their own kitchens. We met at the bar of the Serena, where I had gone with Denis from the office for someone's farewell, and by the end of the second drink she had told me, with cool amusement, that she had a flight to Nairobi on Friday and a husband at home who was "fine, very fine, a nice man, a very nice man," and that she was not looking for anything. "I'm a professional," she said. "I compartmentalise."
"That's a very useful skill," I said.
"You have no idea." She smiled over the rim of her glass. "Are you a compartmentaliser?"
"I'm a beginner."
"I doubt that."
I saw her three times in five days. I did not think of what she did to the husband. I want to be exact about this. I did not not think of it. It sat there at the edge of every evening, a quiet third person, and I noticed it and I let it stay there without looking at it directly. When I say that I was not a man who enjoyed hurting people, I mean that I was able, with practice, to organise my life so that I never had to watch it happen. Wanjiru made the husband a footnote. I made him a footnote's footnote. We were both very efficient.
On the last night she stood at the window of her hotel room in a white robe with the lights of the city spread out below her, Kololo and Nakasero glittering up the hill, and said, "You know what you are, Ethan? You're very restful. I've never met a man so uninterested in being known."
"Is that a compliment?"
"It's an observation." She turned. "I came to Kampala tired. You didn't ask me a single thing that mattered, and I've never been so grateful."
I remember the flight home from that conversation, so to speak. I went down in the hotel lift with my jacket over my arm and looked at my face in the brass panel, a smooth, well-shaped, empty face, and I thought: That's what I've become. A rest.
I sat on the balcony now and wrote, next to her name, fine. Then I crossed it out. Then I wrote it again.
Grace was different. I should say that now, so that you don't spend too long in the corridors of my early bad behaviour expecting every door to lead to the same room.
Grace Nansubuga was a nurse. She worked nights on a surgical ward at Mulago, and she was, I think, the only woman in that whole period who ever told me the truth about herself in the first hour.
We met at a friend's housewarming in Bugolobi. She was sitting on the arm of a sofa in flat shoes and a plain blue dress, looking slightly out of place in a room full of people who were all looking at each other. She had a round, calm, open face and a laugh that came up from somewhere low in her chest. She had come straight from a shift, she told me, and she had not slept for twenty-six hours, and there was still, she said, a little of someone else's blood under one thumbnail. She held up the thumb. "Sorry. Occupational hazard."
I had said something charming and stupid. She had replied, without a trace of flirtation, "You look like someone who's very good at leaving parties early."
It was the second time in a season a woman had said something like that to me. I ought to have noticed the pattern.
"Do I?"
"You keep checking the door." She smiled. "It's okay. I do it too. In my case it's the ward. In yours, I think it's something else."
"What do you think it is?"
"I don't know yet," said Grace. "Ask me in a few weeks."
That was what did it. Not her face, not the dress, not the laugh, but the phrase in a few weeks, as though there would simply be a few weeks. As though she were a person who assumed there was time.
I went home with her that night. She lived in a small rented room off Old Kira Road with a hot plate and an electric kettle and a shelf of nursing textbooks and a single potted geranium on the windowsill, which she watered from a mug. In the morning she made me tea, standing in her socks, with the sun coming in across the hot plate, and said, quite calmly, that she did not do one-night things, and that if I did, I should say so now.
"I'm not looking for anything serious," I said.
"That's okay," said Grace. "Neither am I. I'm just not going to pretend."
I should have understood, then, how much easier it would have been for both of us if I had gone home and stayed home.
I saw her for nearly two months. It is important that you know how good it was. She would come off a shift at seven, tired to the bone, and I would drive over with a boiled egg and a Rolex, and we would eat it on her bed with our backs against the wall, not saying much. She talked about her patients in a low, flat, precise voice: the old man in Bed 6 who had been told he would not go home and had told the doctor to stop talking nonsense, the girl of nineteen who had come in with a wound and no story, the way the ward at four in the morning had its own weather. She never told me her stories in order to be admired. She told them because she needed to put them somewhere, and I happened to be the somewhere.
She listened to me, too. This was the dangerous part. I do not talk about myself, not really, and I certainly did not intend to. But there is a particular way some people have of listening, a kind of patient, unshowy attention, like a light left on in a hallway, and I would find, at odd hours, that I had told her something. Not the big thing. Never Naomi. But a small true thing: that I hated the smell of hospital disinfectant because of my father's last week, that I could not eat mangoes without remembering a particular tree in Mukono, that I had once been afraid of the dark until I was eleven and had slept with a torch under my pillow.
"Why are you telling me this?" I said once, alarmed, in the dark.
"Because you wanted to."
"I didn't."
"You did," said Grace. She had her head on my chest. "That's how it works. You don't have to like it."
She invited me to her sister's birthday in the seventh week.
I have gone over this moment many times. It was a Saturday, and we were at her place, and she was bent over the hot plate, stirring beans. She did not turn around when she said it. She said it lightly, the way you drop a pebble into a well and listen for the sound.
"My sister's turning thirty. There'll be a small lunch. Nothing formal. Just family. It would be nice if you came."
The room went very quiet. It was not the sort of silence you can hear. It was the silence of a house in which a pipe has burst behind a wall.
"I can't next Saturday," I said. "I have a site."
"It's Sunday."
"There's also a Sunday site."
She kept stirring. "Okay."
"I just, look, Grace. I told you at the start—"
"I know what you told me." She turned around. She was holding the spoon, and she looked at me with an expression I will never forget, a look with no accusation in it at all, only a kind of tired exactness. "I'm not asking you to marry me, Ethan. It's a lunch. There'll be rice."
"I know."
"So you'll think about it."
"I'll think about it."
I did not think about it. I did not go on the Sunday. On the Saturday evening I sent her a message that said, Something came up at work, so sorry, can't make it tomorrow. Let's speak soon. I did not speak soon. I let three days go by. A week. She sent me one text, in the second week, that said: Hope work is okay. I read it in a meeting, on a phone under the table, and felt the whole afternoon go hollow around me. I did not reply.
Then, on a Thursday, ten days after the lunch, she wrote: I know. I've known since the second week. I just thought I could be patient. That's on me. Take care of yourself.
I did not answer that, either.
I want you to understand something. I did not do this cruelly. I did not enjoy it. I lay awake for two nights afterwards with the message on my screen and the whole terrible tenderness of it sitting on my chest like a hand. But when the third night came I found a new sort of quiet, a numbness that arrived like a relief, and I told myself that I had done the honest thing. She had wanted more. I had told her I could not give it. It was, when you examined it, the only decent outcome.
I did not examine it. That was the point of a good rule. It saved you the trouble of examining anything.
I wrote Grace on the notebook now and did not write anything next to it. The ink sat there on the page, small and neat and accusing. A crow landed on the neighbour's roof and screamed at nothing.
Lydia.
I would have to be more careful about Lydia, because Lydia was the one who almost worked.
She was a sculptor. She had a studio in Kamwokya in the back of an old warehouse, a huge, high, echoing room lit by a skylight and smelling of wet clay and turpentine, and she worked there in a canvas apron with her hair tied up in a scarf and forearms dusted grey to the elbow. She was thirty-one. She had been to art school in Kampala and then a year in Cape Town and had come home, she told me, "because I got tired of being the interesting African." She talked fast and swore easily and had a way of holding a sentence up to the light before she finished it.
We met at a gallery opening in Kololo. I was there because Mr. Lwanga had a friend who was showing something, and I stood in front of a large, heavy, black-glazed piece, a sort of curved wall that did not quite close, and I heard myself say out loud, to no one, "It's not finished."
"It's not supposed to be," said a voice beside me.
I turned. A woman with clay under her fingernails and a glass of warm white wine was looking at the same piece with a face of pure irritation.
"You made this?"
"God, no. It's dreadful. It's a very expensive way of saying look how sad I am." She sipped. "But you said it's not finished, and I liked that. Most people say it's beautiful. Nobody ever notices when a thing is deliberately left open."
"It leaves a gap," I said. "There, at the base. Where the curve doesn't meet. You'd need a keystone. Or a counterweight. Otherwise it wouldn't stand."
"It doesn't stand. It's propped up with a steel rod at the back. I checked."
I laughed, and she laughed, and for the next three hours we stood in the corner of that gallery talking about structure. What holds a thing up. What a wall is for. Whether a building can be honest, whether a house can lie by pretending to a strength it doesn't have. She was the first person in over a year who talked to me about my actual work with genuine hunger. She asked what I was proudest of. I told her, and heard my own voice speeding up, and did not care.
I went back to her studio the next week. I told myself it was for the conversation. I sat on a stool while she shaped a piece of grey clay, and she asked me to hold out my hands, and she studied them, frowning, and then began to press the clay into their shape, and I felt something so unfamiliar I did not have a word for it. Not desire. Not exactly. It was being looked at with attention. Being seen as a thing with structure and weight and a specific history.
"You have big hands for an architect," said Lydia. "They should be delicate."
"They're not."
"They're careful." She glanced up. "That's better."
We were together for three weeks and it was, by a wide margin, the most alive I had been since the winter Naomi left. I'll tell you exactly how it felt. It felt like having a window opened in a room I had sealed. We argued about Brutalism. We argued about whether a person could be moral in a country where every building was a bribe. She sent me photographs of things she had seen and thought I would like, a crack running through a wall in Mengo, a child's drawing of a house with too many chimneys. I sent her sketches. Late at night we talked on the phone for hours about nothing, about her grandmother's Luganda proverbs, about the smell of rain on hot tin.
I caught myself, on a Tuesday, sitting at my desk with a smile I had not planned, thinking about how I might explain to Lydia a detail from a building on Bombo Road, and I felt something drop away inside me, like a step that was not there.
You are doing it again, said a very small, very cold voice. You are getting attached to a person.
I told myself I was not. I told myself this was intellectual. This was friendship with sex in it, which was a thing adults did. I told myself these things for eight days.
On the ninth day, Lydia said: "My mother's turning sixty in October. She's having a party in Masaka. You should come."
I was lying on her studio floor, on a thick old mattress under the skylight, with the smell of clay in my hair. It was late afternoon. She was sitting with her back against the wall smoking a cigarette she did not really want and looking at me with an expression that was so open, so unguarded, so willing, that something in my chest began to close, one hinge at a time.
"Sixty," I said.
"She's very fierce. You'd like her. She thinks all men are useless, but she'd make an exception for someone who can fix a roof." She smiled. "Don't panic. It's just a party."
"I'm not panicking."
"You're doing a thing with your jaw."
"It's just, I don't know, I might have a site—"
"Ethan." She was not smiling now. She blew out smoke. "Are you going to do the site thing?"
I heard it. That was what was so terrible. I heard the clean, dry click of the mechanism, the door swinging shut in a well-oiled frame. I was watching myself do it from a distance, the way you watch a car begin to skid. I knew exactly what came next. I could see the whole thing unspooling: the flat courtesy, the withdrawal, the let's speak soon. I could see it, and I did not, for the life of me, know how to stop.
"I think we're moving a bit fast," I said.
"We've been together three weeks."
"It's a big thing. Meeting family."
"It's a party, Ethan. There will be goat."
"You know what I mean."
"I do know what you mean." She stubbed the cigarette out in a saucer. She stood, in her stained apron, and walked to the far end of the studio, and stood looking up at a half-finished head of clay on a stand. She had her back to me. "I'm going to say something, and I'd like you not to interrupt."
"Okay."
"You only ever come to life when it's about ideas. Buildings, walls, whether a thing is honest. You're brilliant at that. And I think it's because ideas are safe. Nobody can leave you. You can go back into a wall and be perfectly fine." She turned round. "I think you kept me interesting so you wouldn't have to let me be close. I think you decided I was an intellectual thing. It's very clever. It's almost the best trick I've seen."
I said nothing. My jaw hurt.
"It's not my mother's party," said Lydia. "You'd have said the same thing about any milestone. The point is not the goat."
I did not answer her. That was the tragedy of it: I could have. I could have said, You're right. I could have said, I'm frightened. The words were in my mouth. But something older and colder than either of us had already taken the wheel.
"I think we should stop," I said.
I watched her take it. She took it standing very straight, with her big scarred hands loose at her sides, and then she nodded, twice, a small tight professional nod, like a person receiving a bad quote.
"Okay," said Lydia.
"I'm sorry."
"Are you?"
"Yes."
"I think you are," she said. "That's the awful part."
I saw her once more. Six weeks later she had an exhibition at a small gallery in Kamwokya, and she had sent me an invitation, a handwritten card, and I had meant to go. I had meant to go with a whole heart. I had a shirt ironed. On the evening, I sat in the car outside the gallery with the engine running and watched people go in, laughing, holding glasses, and I could not make my hand open the door. I sat there for about half an hour. In the end I drove home and sent her a message that said, So sorry, work, so proud of you.
She never replied. Later, Shamim told me that the head Lydia had been working on, the half-formed one on the stand, had been in the show. It was a head with no face. Just an oval of smooth grey clay, the features not yet begun, with a pair of hands cast very clearly along the sides. Big, careful hands.
It was called Unfinished (E.).
I put down the pen.
The sun had moved on the balcony and hit the page. Down in the yard, someone had turned on a radio, and a woman's voice was reading the Sunday football scores in Luganda with the vast, rolling joy of the completely uninvolved. My tea had gone cold. I looked at the list.
It went on for nearly a page. I counted them. Nineteen. Nineteen in eighteen months. Some of them I could describe down to the sound of the laugh; others were only a name and a location, a bar or a taxi, a set of hands on the wheel of a stranger's car in the rain. I had written next to most of them a single word, fine or fun or ok, and next to a few of them, the ones I remembered too well, nothing at all.
The whole page was a kind of confession, and I read it the way a person reads the terms and conditions before checking the box.
Nobody hurt, I had said. That was the principle. I had never lied. I had never promised. I had never told a woman I loved her, or that I was going to call, or that I would be there on the Sunday. I had kept a clean sheet. I was, in the most technical and defensible sense, an honest man.
Why then did the page look like a list of the dead?
I took the notebook inside and stood in the kitchen, and then I did something I had not intended to do. I opened my phone and scrolled, past Grace, past Lydia, past the string of numbers and names, until I reached a number I had not called in five weeks.
Patience Auma owned a bar called Auma's, at the bottom of a lane off Ggaba Road in Kabalagala. It was not a fashionable bar. It had plastic chairs and a jukebox that only played one album, and it stayed open until whenever Patience decided she was tired. I had wandered in one Wednesday in July, out of the rain, and she had put a beer in front of me without asking and said, "You look like you've lost a very expensive umbrella."
She was thirty-two. She had a nine-year-old son called Joshua who did his homework at the end of the bar, sat on a crate, with the intense scowl of a small judge. She was divorced, and had a wide slow smile, and a voice like warm gravel, and she saw everything. I don't know how to explain her. Everything about her was an inch too far from the surface of what I could handle. She would not be flirted with. When I tried the usual line, she looked at me for a long moment and said, "Baby, I've been hit on by men in better jackets than yours. Drink your beer."
We ended up together anyway. I still cannot say how. It was after closing. Joshua had gone home with his aunt. Patience stacked the plastic chairs, one by one, and I stood and watched her, and at some point I started helping, and then it was three in the morning and the two of us were sitting on the bar with our shoes off, sharing a last warm Nile Special, and she said, "I'm not going to ask you what you're running from. I don't do that. People tell me when they're ready."
"I'm not running."
"Sure." She clinked the bottle against mine. "Then you're walking very fast."
I saw her on and off for six weeks. She had no interest in being anyone's project. She did not want to fix me, or be fixed, or be a chapter. She was busy. She was kind in a rough, abrupt way, like someone handing you a blanket by throwing it. I think I loved her company. I have never been sure how far that word can be pushed.
And there was the one night. I've never told anyone this. It was late August. I had come to the bar after a fourteen-hour day, and the whole city had been ground to powder by a downpour, and the bar was empty, and Patience had said, "You look dead. Go upstairs and lie down."
It was a rule I had never broken. I did not sleep over. I did not stay. I had, in eighteen months of variations on that theme, put my head down on exactly one pillow that was not mine, and it had belonged to a woman who no longer answered my messages.
I went upstairs. I lay down. I slept, God knows how, like a felled tree.
In the morning she was sitting on the edge of the bed with a cup of tea, looking at me in the grey light through the curtain. Not smiling. Not unsmiling. Watching.
"What?" I said.
"You talk in your sleep."
"I don't."
"You do. Not much. It's very quiet." She handed me the tea. "It's a name. I've heard it four times now, in the last hour. You say it like you're asking a question. Nomi? Like you're calling her back in from another room."
The tea went hot in my hand.
I said, "I don't know who that is."
"Okay." Patience sipped her own. She looked, for a moment, almost gentle. "I'm not jealous. I'm not that kind of woman. I've got a son and a bar, I don't have the hours." She said it lightly. Then she set the cup down and looked at me properly, and there was no lightness in her at all. "But I'll tell you something, Ethan, for free, because I like you. You're not over her. You're not even near over her. You don't sleep with women, baby. You sleep around her. It's like a man walking a long way round a hole in the road because he doesn't want to fall in. But he's still walking around it. Every time. It's still the middle of everything."
"You don't know what you're talking about."
"Maybe not."
"I'm perfectly fine."
"I'm sure you are," said Patience Auma, and picked up the empty cup, and stood, and went to the window to open the curtain and let in the full flat morning, the tin roofs and the smoke and the far pale line of the hills. She stood with her back to me. "You should go home now. I have to open up."
I went home.
I did not go back. She did not call. In the weeks that followed I told the story to myself in various forms. A bartender with a theory. A woman with her own baggage. She couldn't accept that a man might simply be uninterested in settling.
I rehearsed this so many times that it began to sound true. And it would have stayed that way, I think, if not for the sound of a name I had not said aloud in eighteen months, spoken in another person's mouth in a grey room in Kabalagala, in my own voice.
I stood in the kitchen now with the phone in my hand and the number on the screen. My thumb hovered over it. Outside, the woman in the yard had stopped singing. The football scores had ended.
Ask her, said the voice. Ask her what else I said.
I did not. I put the phone down on the counter, quite gently, the way you put down something that might go off.
I went back to the balcony and looked at the notebook, and I saw the thing I had not planned to write. I had left the page half empty. There, at the bottom, under Patience's name, was a blank line.
I picked up the pen, and I wrote a single word in capitals, the way you would label a room on a floor plan.
NAOMI.
I stared at it for a long time. Then I tore the page out of the notebook, and folded it in half, and in half again, and I did not throw it away. I went into the bedroom and knelt down on the floor beside the bed. For the first time in twenty months, I reached under it, to the left, and I put my hand on the cool red lid of the tin.
I held it there.
Then I pushed it back where it had been, and stood up, and went to work.