Chapter 5
Something About Maya
"I'm not asking you to like it," said Timo. "I'm asking you to stand there and hold a candle."
It was the second Tuesday of October, and we were in his garage. He was lying on a mechanic's creeper with only his legs sticking out from under a Noah, and I was sitting on an upturned crate, holding a spanner I had been handed and not told what to do with. The radio was playing the same hymn I had heard in September. I began to suspect the station only owned one.
"Godfather," I said.
"Yes."
"You want me to be Josephine's godfather."
"Sarah wants you. I want someone who won't drop her." A pause, the rasp of a ratchet. "She thinks you have a good heart under all the nonsense. That's her word. I would have said rubbish."
"I skipped the naming."
"I know you skipped the naming."
"I lied to you about a site collapse."
"There was a wall that leaned. I checked." He slid out from under the car on the creeper, and looked up at me, upside down, his face streaked with black grease. He had never looked at me so directly in the whole eighteen months since Naomi. "Ethan. I am going to say this once, so listen. I don't need you to be a better man. I need you to be at this thing. You will stand in a church and say the words. You'll hold a candle. There is a photograph, and you'll be in it, and in ten years she'll ask who you were, and I want to be able to say, He was there. That's all it is."
The spanner felt very heavy.
"Who's the godmother?" I said.
"Maya. Sarah's friend. They were at Kyambogo together." He rolled his eyes, a slow, deep, male sigh at the mysteries of women's friendships. "She's clever. She's terrifying. She'll be a good influence."
"On the baby?"
"On you." He rolled back under the Noah. "Not that it'll help."
I said yes. It seemed the only decent answer. I remember thinking, as I put down the spanner, that it would be a Saturday afternoon, in a church, with an infant and a priest and a host of relatives, and I would be too well supervised to do any harm. A safe day. A dull one. It would take three hours, and I would leave with nothing more damaged than my shoulders from a long, strained politeness.
I have been wrong about a great many days. That one is still the champion.
St. Jude's in Kansanga is a low, square, whitewashed church with a red tin roof and a loudspeaker on a pole outside. On the Saturday, it was packed. Women in gomesis and kitenges, men in borrowed suits, children in scrubbed shoes running in and out of the wide open doors as if the church were a game with a very lenient referee. The sun came in through a row of small high windows and lay on the floor in long bright bars, full of dust.
I arrived at ten to two in the only suit I owned that I was not ashamed of. I had polished my shoes. I had, I noticed, checked my reflection in a car window twice. I told myself this was ordinary courtesy.
The first thing I saw was Timo. He stood at the front in a dark suit that fitted him like a decision he regretted, holding Josephine in one enormous arm. She was six months old and looked, in the white christening gown, like a very small, extremely furious bride. She was screaming, in a high thin indignant note that carried through the church like a whistle. Timo, above her, wore an expression of mild, infinite bewilderment.
"She hates it," he said, when I reached him. "The gown."
"She's a lady of taste."
"She's a lady of lungs." He tried to jiggle her. She screamed louder. "Sarah says give her to the godmother. The godmother's late. The godmother is always late. She has a job."
"I'm here," said a voice behind me.
I turned around.
I have thought a great deal, since, about what I saw. I have tried to be honest about it, because the temptation is to tell it as a destiny, and it was not. It was a woman coming through the church doors out of the bright noon, slightly out of breath, with a handbag hooked over one shoulder and a phone against her ear and a folder tucked under her arm. She was about five foot six. She wore a mustard-coloured dress that fell to just below the knee, and her hair was cropped close and dyed, at the tips, a rusty gold. She had a small scar through her left eyebrow, a pale notch in the dark. Her skin caught the light from the doorway and held it.
I noticed, in one clean sweep, the way I had trained myself to notice, the shape of her shoulders, the curve of her mouth, the length of her legs. I noticed that she was very beautiful, in a way that did not seem to be on her list of priorities. I felt the low, familiar, well-practised warmth start up, that quick appraising flush. And I thought, with a nasty, easy, automatic confidence, All right. Here we go.
She hung up the phone. She said, into it, "No. I told you. Not until the fourteenth. I'm at a baptism. Goodbye." Then she shoved it into her bag with a small violent gesture and looked at Timo, at the screaming child, and at me.
"Sorry," she said. "The Sentinel's printing an apology on page three and I had to shout at a man about a comma."
"About a comma," said Timo.
"He wanted it to say may have been misleading. It was misleading. It wasn't may have." She took Josephine out of Timo's arm in a single practised movement, as if she had been doing it all her life, and the baby, astonishingly, stopped screaming. She looked up at Maya with a tiny outraged hiccup and blinked. "There," said Maya. "It's the perfume. It's peppermint. Babies trust mint."
"I've been holding her for forty minutes," said Timo.
"You smell of diesel." She looked over Josephine's head at me. Her eyes were dark brown, very direct, faintly amused. "And you're Ethan."
"That's what it says on the invitation."
"Sarah said you'd be late."
"I'm ten minutes early."
"Then she's wrong. She'll be so pleased." She shifted the baby to her other arm. She looked me up and down without any effort to conceal that she was doing it, the way you would look at a suit in a shop. "You clean up all right."
"Is that a compliment?"
"It's an observation," said Maya. "Sarah warned me about you."
I felt the corner of my mouth go up. It was reflex. "What did she say?"
"That you're a good man and a bad idea."
Timo made a strangled noise. He disappeared, with the speed of a large animal that has heard a twig snap, toward the vestry.
"She said that?" I said.
"In those exact words. I wrote them down." She patted the folder. "I like to be prepared."
"And what did you conclude?"
"That she's usually right." Josephine was patting her cheek with a wet fist. Maya did not seem to mind. "But I'm here to hold a baby, not to take a vote. So."
"So."
"So let's not make it weird."
She said it with such flat, dry, steady good humour that I laughed. It was a real laugh, a surprised one. It came out before I had decided whether I wanted to.
There is something you have to understand about a Catholic baptism in Uganda, which is that it is not a quiet affair. It is a public performance with a strict order of service and an entirely fluid sense of time. Father Kizito, a small brisk priest with a whistling voice, spent twenty minutes at the front reminding the godparents of their duties. We stood together at the font, Maya on the left, I on the right, the baby between us in a white cloud of lace. A row of candles stood on a table beside us, tall, white, unlit.
"You will be asked to renounce Satan," Father Kizito told us, in a stage whisper. "And all his works and all his empty promises. You will say I do. You will say it clearly."
"Do we get a list?" whispered Maya.
"A list?"
"Of the works. So we know what we're renouncing."
The priest looked at her with the flat patience of a man who had heard every possible question in that font. "It is symbolic, my child."
"I'm only asking. I'd hate to renounce something by accident." She glanced across at me, and her mouth twitched. "Say it's the kind of thing you'd want in writing."
I bit the inside of my cheek. Father Kizito sighed. "Ssebo, you will help her."
"I'll do my best."
"You will help her not to speak."
It was, for the record, extremely difficult. All through the service I kept catching the edge of her attention, a small tilt of her head, a private glint. When the priest asked, in a resounding voice, Do you reject Satan? and the congregation rumbled I do, she said it perfectly gravely, and then, out of the side of her mouth, without moving her lips: "I hope he doesn't take it personally."
I coughed into my fist. I felt the church swim.
When the water was poured over Josephine's small dark head, she stopped screaming for a full second, in an expression of profound astonishment, and then let out a scream so shocking it startled a pigeon in the rafters. Timo, in the front pew, put his hands over his face. Sarah cried. Maya, holding the candle, said quietly, "That's the spirit."
And then came the moment that I did not expect. Father Kizito lit a taper from the altar and turned to us and said, "The godparents will take the light."
I took the candle. It was thin and white and cool in my hand. Maya took hers. We held them out, and the taper touched mine, and the wick caught, and a small clean flame stood up in the dim air. I turned to light hers. I bent my candle toward it. Our two flames leaned together, touched, and joined. And for one second, one absurdly small second, she looked up at me over the light, and it lit her face from below, the notch in her eyebrow, the flecks of amber in her irises, a dark and steady curiosity, like a person reading the first line of something she might not finish.
"Careful," said Maya, very softly. "You'll drip."
I looked down. I had. A bead of hot wax had run down the candle and landed on my knuckle. I had not felt it.
"I didn't feel that," I said.
"You should be more present," said Maya, and turned back to the altar. Her mouth was very straight. But at the corner of it, a small unwilling dimple had appeared.
I have thought about that for years, that candle, that drip. I don't want to make too much of it. It was a small thing on a hot afternoon in a crowded church. But I know it was the first time in twenty months that I stood in a room and did not know, with certainty, what would happen next.
The party afterwards was in Timo's yard, under a huge blue tarpaulin strung between two mango trees. Trestle tables, plastic chairs, a sound system in the boot of a car. The smell of roasting goat and charcoal smoke hung over everything like a benediction. There were perhaps a hundred and fifty people. There was a great deal of dancing, in the loose, joyful, unchoreographed Ugandan style, children sliding on the concrete, aunties in gomesis with their skirts hitched to move more freely, a man in a purple suit executing what I can only describe as a lengthy argument with the floor.
I stood at the edge of it with a plate of matooke and beef and a beer, and I was, briefly, absolutely at peace.
"You're doing it," said a voice beside me.
"Doing what?"
"Standing at the edge of the party holding a beer and looking like you're waiting for a bus." Maya had appeared at my elbow with a plate of her own and a bottle of Krest. She had taken off her heels and was standing barefoot on the warm concrete. "It's a very specific posture. I've seen it at a hundred functions. Nobody who does it is ever waiting for a bus."
"What are they waiting for?"
"An excuse." She ate a piece of goat. "To leave."
I looked at her. It was the third time in six months a woman had told me exactly what I was doing. I ought, again, to have noticed.
"Did Sarah tell you that too?"
"No. That's from my own research." She wiped her fingers on a napkin. "I do it. I do it all the time. It's just that I do it in a different colour."
"What's your colour?"
"Mustard." She gestured at her dress. "Camouflage. Nobody suspects."
She laughed, then, a proper, low, unguarded laugh, and I watched her throw her head back and expose the length of her throat, and felt the automatic warmth in my chest sharpen into something I recognised very clearly. Desire. Direct, honest, physical. I wanted her. I wanted to know what it was like to put a hand on the small of that back. I did not hide it from myself. Why should I? It was a clean, uncomplicated appetite, and I had a long, professional experience of how to deal with it.
I moved a step closer. I leaned on my left elbow against the trunk of the mango tree, and let my voice go low.
"So what does a godmother do, exactly, when the ceremony's over?"
She looked at me. She looked at my elbow. And then, very slowly, she raised one eyebrow, the one with the scar.
"You do that," she said.
"Do what?"
"That. The lean. The voice. You dropped it about a half-octave." She said it with an air of scientific interest. "It's quite good. I can see how it works. I just don't think it's aimed at the right person."
The heat went up my neck. I straightened.
"I wasn't—"
"You were. It's fine. I'm not offended. I'd be more offended if you hadn't." She took a swig of her Krest. "But I should tell you, in the interest of efficiency, that I'm not available for whatever it is. I've just come out of something and I'm taking a year. It's a policy."
"A policy."
"I have a lot of them. They're written down." She smiled, a small quick sideways smile, and it did something to her whole face, made it quite abruptly younger. "It isn't personal. You seem very nice. And you're very good-looking, which I'm sure you've been told. But I'd like to find out what my own opinions sound like before I add anybody else's. That's all."
I did not know what to say. I have been rejected before, in my life, in the ordinary way. But I had never been refused so pleasantly, so completely, with such total absence of games. It was like walking into a room and finding the door already open and the chair already offered, and a sign on the table that said: Please sit. You are not staying.
"Okay," I said.
"Okay?"
"I don't know what else to say."
"That's usually the correct answer." She nudged my arm with her elbow. "Come on. Talk to me like a person. What do you do when you're not being a godfather?"
We talked for two hours.
I had not planned to. I had planned, if I had planned at all, to make a small courteous exit at six and drive home and think no more about it. But I found myself, instead, sitting on an upturned crate at the back of Timo's yard with the noise of the party thinning out behind us, watching the light go orange and then violet in the leaves, answering questions.
She had a habit of asking one thing at a time, and then waiting. Really waiting. Not the way most people wait, with their next sentence loaded. She waited with her whole face, leaning forward slightly, elbows on her knees, the notch in her eyebrow catching the last of the light.
"What do you do that you'd do for free?" she said.
"Sorry?"
"For a living. Everyone has a job. But there's usually one part of it they'd do even if nobody paid them. What's yours?"
I thought about it. I could not remember the last time anyone had asked me a question that I did not already have a polished answer to.
"Staircases," I said.
"Staircases."
"I like drawing them. Not the big, showy ones. The dull ones. The ones in a block of flats, between the second and third floor, that nobody looks at. You have to get the rise and the run exactly right, or people trip without knowing why. They just feel off. A good staircase is one that you climb a thousand times and never once think about."
"That's a very odd thing to be proud of."
"I know."
"No, I mean it." She was looking at me with an expression I could not read. "It's a job about the thing nobody notices."
"That's the whole point."
"Huh," said Maya. She turned her bottle in her hands. "I'd like to see one."
"See what?"
"One of yours. A dull staircase." She shrugged. "I'm curious. I'm a journalist, it's an illness."
I found out that she was twenty-five and worked for the Kampala Sentinel as a data reporter, which meant she spent her days with spreadsheets and maps and public records and, occasionally, a hostile permanent secretary. She was working on a series about land titles in Wakiso, about how the same plot could be sold four times to four families, and about the men in offices who made it happen. She spoke about it with a cold, contained, blazing fury that I found extraordinarily attractive. Not the fury exactly. It was that she seemed to be angry on behalf of people who did not know they were entitled to be.
"I'm not a hero," she said, when I said something to that effect. "I hate that. I'm a person with a spreadsheet. I get angry and then I check the numbers. It's the checking that matters."
"And the anger?"
"Is a useful smell," said Maya. "It tells you where to look."
Her mother had a salon in Ntinda, right behind the shopping centre. She said this with an air of faint doom. "You live in Ntinda, don't you? Sarah said. She'll cut your hair if you're not careful. She'll cut it and comment on it and ask if you're married."
"I'll steer clear."
"You'll fail. She has spies." She sighed. "She's the most stubborn woman in the East African Community. I get it from her. Don't tell her I said so."
She had a brother named Joel, who was nineteen and, in her words, between things. He had dropped out of a diploma in June, and was now doing something involving a phone and a lot of borrowed money that she did not ask about. She said this lightly. But I saw her hand tighten around the bottle. I saw her look away, for a moment, at the far edge of the yard, as though the subject stood there, patient and enormous, waiting for her to come back.
"Sorry," she said. "That's a lot. I don't normally—"
"No. It's fine."
"It isn't. I've known you two hours and I've told you about my brother."
"You told me about your brother because I asked."
"You didn't ask."
"I asked the questions that led to the brother."
"That's a technique," said Maya, narrowing her eyes. "Is that a technique?"
"It's called being interested."
I heard the words as they left me. I had not meant to say them. It was one of those small, dry, throwaway phrases, the sort you hand someone to lighten a moment. But she was looking at me, quite still, and there was no answering joke in her face.
"Is it," she said slowly. "That's unusual."
Something shifted, then, in the air between us. I couldn't say what. It was a small thing. It was the quiet that comes after a tap is turned off. Somewhere behind us the sound system had begun to play something slow, and a group of women were singing along in an untidy, gorgeous chorus, and the sun had slipped behind the neighbour's roof, and the last of the light lay long and copper across the yard.
I looked at her mouth. I looked at it for a moment longer than I should have, and I knew that she knew. I saw her eyes drop to mine and back. And I felt the automatic thing again, the low, warm, well-oiled pull. Now, said the old voice. Now. Lean in. She's already halfway there.
She was not, though. That was what stopped me. She was sitting perfectly still with her bottle on her knee, looking at me with a kind of open, guarded, interested calm, and it came to me, with a small strange shock, that she was not waiting for me to make a move. She was waiting to see what I would do instead.
I sat back.
I do not know why. I have thought about it often. It was not virtue. I would like to say it was. It was a sort of instinct, like putting your foot down and finding a step where you expected the floor.
"What do you like about the job?" I said. "Really. Not the anger. The part underneath."
Maya looked at me for a long moment. Then she smiled, slowly, a smile that started somewhere behind her eyes.
"That's a good question," she said. "Nobody's ever asked me that."
Timo found us at half past seven. He stood over the crates with a plastic cup of orange soda and an expression of tactful, elaborate innocence, like a man who has walked into a room and pretends not to have seen a very small fire.
"Sarah says the cake," he said.
"We're coming."
"She says you're both to be photographed."
"I'm sure she does."
"I'm just the messenger." He raised the cup. "Don't shoot."
We stood for the photograph at the head of the long table, the four of us, and the baby. Timo and Sarah on one side, Maya and I on the other, Josephine held by her godmother in a cloud of white lace, and a cake between us the size of a small building, with a marzipan angel on top. Someone's uncle held up his phone. "Closer," he said. "Godfather! Closer to the godmother! Ah, the godfather is shy!"
"He's not shy," said Maya, without turning her head. "He's a professional."
I felt her shoulder against mine. It was a small, warm, deliberate pressure, not for the picture, exactly. Just a fact. I stood very still. There was the smell of her, mint and something dark, coffee maybe, and the smoke of the charcoal in her hair. I thought: this is a photograph in which I will be standing next to a woman I do not know.
The uncle counted to three.
In the picture, when Sarah sent it to me later, I am looking at the camera and smiling the smile I have had ready for years. But Maya is looking at the baby. And I am not quite looking at the camera. The photograph, if you look closely, has caught me in the middle of a sideways glance, at something, at her, at the light on the side of her face, and my expression has slipped, only a little, from the practised thing to something I had not seen in myself in some time.
I did not notice it then. It was Timo who pointed it out, months later, over a beer. He said, Look at your face. I said, What about it? He said, That's the first time I've seen it in two years.
I asked him what he meant. He shrugged and said, You look like a man who hasn't decided yet.
I left at nine. She walked me to the gate, barefoot, her shoes in her hand, and we stood under the street lamp for a minute, in the buzz of moths.
"So," said Maya.
"So."
"I'm supposed to say that it was nice to meet you."
"I'm supposed to say the same."
"It was, though. Actually." She looked at her shoes. "I didn't expect it to be. Sarah's matchmaking is normally a disaster."
"Is that what this was?"
"God, no. She'd never. She's terrified of me." She smiled. "But she does get ideas. I saw her looking at us during the candles. It's a look. I've learned to avoid it."
"Noted."
"Look. Ethan." She rubbed her forehead, a small awkward gesture, and I realised for the first time that she, too, was slightly nervous. "I meant what I said. About the year. It's not a line. I'd like to be your friend, if that's a thing. If it isn't, that's fine. But I'd rather say it now than find out later that we wanted different things."
"Friends," I said.
"Is that all right?"
It was a perfectly reasonable request. It was, in fact, a perfectly kind one. I had heard it, in one form or another, from women all my adult life, and had always known how to answer it, with a graceful, practised, half-hearted of course, and to file the name under not this one. I was quite sure that if I said yes, I would never see her again.
"It's all right," I said. "I'd like that."
Which was not what I intended to say. But I said it, and I found, standing under a street lamp on a dirt road in Kansanga with the taste of smoke in my mouth, that I meant it.
"Good," said Maya. "Give me your number. For the godfather-godmother WhatsApp group. Sarah's already made one. It's called Josephine's Village. There are forty-two people in it and someone's already posted a video of a goat."
I gave it to her. She typed it in. Her thumbs were quick. A small noise came out of my phone in my pocket, and she nodded, and put hers away.
"Drive safe," she said.
It was the same thing Ritah had said. The same three words, from a different mouth, in the same yellow light. But it did not sound the same. It sounded, to my absurd surprise, as if she wanted to be sure.
I drove home through the Kampala night, with the windows down.
I passed the flyover at Kabalagala, with its bright bars and its street food and its steady stream of boda lights, and the long black slope of Muyenga on my left. My hands were loose on the wheel. I felt strangely alert, and slightly foolish, and very awake. I thought about the wax on my knuckle. I thought about her voice saying you dropped it about a half-octave, and I found that I was laughing quietly, alone in the car.
She's going to be another one, I told myself. Because that's what I always said. That was the standing order. A woman who says no is, in the end, only a woman who has not yet been asked in the right way, and a man who treats her as anything else is being sentimental. I had a system. I had a proven method.
But I had felt her not lean toward me. I had felt her sit still, and wait.
And I could not, for the life of me, remember when a woman had last waited to see what I would do instead.
At the top of Ntinda hill, at a red light, my phone buzzed in the cup holder. I looked at the screen. An unknown number, a photograph, no message. It was a picture of a staircase, in what looked like the back stairwell of an office building, grey concrete, a yellow handrail, a fire extinguisher on a hook. Beneath it, one line:
Is this one bad?
I looked at it for a full ten seconds. The light turned green. Someone behind me hooted. I did not move.
I looked at the picture, at the risers, the nosing, the dull concrete run. It was too steep. The tread was too short. Anyone climbing it would feel, without knowing why, a little unbalanced, a little unsettled, as if the stairs had been built by someone who did not quite believe that people would use them.
I typed: Terrible. Who built it?
Three dots. Then:
The Sentinel. It's my office. I climb it twice a day.
I put my head back against the seat and laughed out loud in the dark, alone at a green light, while a taxi driver leaned on his horn and shouted something in Luganda that I did not hear.
There was something about her. I would not say it. I would not, that night, say a single true thing about it. I told myself it was novelty. I told myself it was the challenge, the refusal, the interesting angle of a woman who did not work the way the others worked. A fresh problem, I thought. Curiosity, that's all. It will run out.
I sat at the green light in the middle of Ntinda at half past nine on a Saturday night, and I typed back: Send me the address. I'll come and tell you exactly what's wrong with it.
I did not know that I had just put down the first stone of something that would take me two years to understand. I only knew that for the first time in a very long while, I wanted to be somewhere on Monday.