Part 54 (1/2)

She had taken off my s.h.i.+rt. My fingers were now under her T-s.h.i.+rt, unfastening her bra. She pulled her arms through her sleeves, and I lifted her T-s.h.i.+rt over her head.

”Did you ever dream of me?” I asked her.

”Many times.”

”And did you want to make love to me?”

”Many times.”

I slid off the band that held up her hair and kissed her behind her ears.

”Even when I was married,” she said, ”I dreamed of you.”

I cannot blame what followed on these words she said to me. I cannot say that because she mentioned her marriage, I was reminded of mine, and because I was reminded of mine, my body refused me. For the truth was I had not forgotten my marriage. I was the son of a long line of men who had had many wives, a man who had come to Christianity after he had pa.s.sed the age of myth. So Marguerite had often told me before.

So it must have been.

So it was that I felt no guilt when I kissed Marguerite, no guilt when I lay naked next to her. And so it had to be that when my body failed me, when it could not do what my heart, my soul, every fiber of my being desperately pleaded with it to do, I could not say it was because I was married, because Marguerite reminded me that I already had one wife.

”Did this ever happen to you before?”

I could hear the tremors in her voice.

I lay on top of her naked, impotent. ”No,” I said.

Tears gathered in the corners of her eyes. ”It must be me. It must be me, then.”

”No. No.” I pulled her on top of me and hugged her. ”It's not you. It's me.”

”It's happened to me before,” she said. ”Harold . . .”

I put my finger to her lips. ”It's not you. You are warm and beautiful and lovely.”

”It happened with Harold,” she said.

”I am not Harold.”

”He said it was me.”

”It's not you. How could it be you? Look at you. You're a sensual woman. Your skin is the color of the Sahara. Brown, warm, smooth. Not a blemish, not a mark. You smell like the desert. Like a flower in the desert.”

”He said it was me,” she repeated.

”Harold was a fool.”

”He said I was hard to love.”

”Harold was wrong.”

”He said-”

”You are lovable, Marguerite. You are easy to love.”

”Then why?”

”It happens to men, you know. More than we are willing to admit. I'm just nervous. Anxious. It's been too many years. Tomorrow,” I said. ”You'll see tomorrow. I'll be okay tomorrow.”

I had told her the truth. I was anxious and nervous. But it had not happened to me before. Not in twenty-eight years of marriage to Nerida.

This was the fear every man lives with: the day he would lie on top of a beautiful woman and be betrayed by the body that had always served him. And yet I did not think that this was happening to me-the impotence men of my age feared. I knew that the stories we told of our wives' declining libidos were a camouflage to mask our anxieties, our fear of losing our own s.e.xuality, our potency. We sought rea.s.surance from each other. We wanted to convince each other that the end had not come. And I did not think the end had come for me that night. I knew that when my heart had stopped racing, that when with each touch of Marguerite's hand on my body my toes would stop tingling, my spine would stop quivering, I would have control of my body again.

”Let's sleep,” I said. ”It's too much for one day. After so long.”

After so long. Not only with Marguerite, but also with Nerida. But I did not tell her that. That it had been six months since Nerida had let me in her bed. I was overexcited, overstimulated. My desire for her too intense, my mind racing too fast for my body.

Yet I knew that when my body failed me, it was not only because anxiety had reduced me to jelly, not only because I had waited so long, wanted her for so long. Remnants of a hard-learned reticence had returned to plague me. When I lay naked, stretched out on top of her, trying in vain to make love to her, it came back to warn me: This thing I had taught myself to shun. I remembered the pa.s.sion that took control of me with Mulenga, the pa.s.sion that had driven me into my room in the mission school, a prisoner of my fantasies. The pa.s.sion that drove me into my work when Marguerite ordered me to leave her apartment, the pa.s.sion that sometimes made me a stranger in my house.

The pa.s.sion that had cost my mother her life.

The pa.s.sion that made the man who loved her put a razor to his throat.

”You are beautiful,” I whispered to Marguerite. ”Desirable. Too desirable.”

She curled into my arms. ”Tomorrow,” she said. She kissed the hair on my chest. ”I love you,” she whispered.

Her words would make me sleep until morning, would make me forget. They allowed me to sleep without dreams that would wake me in a sweat. I had her with me now, the curves of her body locked into mine like the pieces of a puzzle. We were whole again. I was safe. The pa.s.sion would not undo me.

In the morning I reached for her. The trembling under my skin had subsided, my blood ran warm again through my groin. We made love as we had before when we were young-with the same energy, the same intensity, the same pa.s.sion. I remembered she liked my tongue in her navel. She remembered I liked hers in my ears. I remembered she loved when I kissed her neck. She remembered I loved when she licked my chest. When the moment came, she stretched out taut beneath me and pushed me away, shouting the same words, ”Get off. Get off.” They had the same meaning. I braced myself and held on to her until the moan that had begun in the back of her throat rolled out to her lips, gathered force, and she screamed. Screamed with the pleasure of it. Begged me not to stop, not to let go. ”Wait. Wait. Not yet. Not yet.” And when I joined her, our voices became a symphony of the past restored.

Afterward, she lay on her side next to me. My hand traveled across the sand dunes of her body, the crest of her b.r.e.a.s.t.s, the slope down to her waist, the incline up her hips. I kissed each inch I touched. I buried my face in the basin that cradled her navel.

”I like this,” I said. ”I like this valley. I could lose myself in this valley.”

She kissed the top of my head and turned my face upward to hers.

”And I love this,” she said. She covered my eyes with her mouth, first one eye, then the next, and she ran the tip of her tongue down the spread of my nose and across my lips. ”And I love this.”

No one had ever kissed me like that. Not Nerida. No one. No one had ever made me feel so worthy, so handsome. She said she loved my wide nose, my thick lips, my nappy hair, my blue-black skin. I had a cla.s.sical face, she said. Like a piece of African art.

”Tell me,” I asked her, grateful, wanting to give something back, ”tell me your secret. How do you stay so beautiful, so young?”

”I am beautiful and young because you think I am beautiful and young.”

”No.” I looked into her eyes. ”I tell you this objectively. Without bias. A man would have to be blind not to see how young you look, how beautiful.”

”I'm short,” she said. ”Short people seem younger than they are.”