I Think of You: Stories (17 page)

Lying on the bed, I hold the cluster of grapes above my face and bite one off as Romans do in films. Oh, to play, to play again, but my only playmate now is Lucy, and she is out by the pool with her cousins.

A few weeks ago, back in Cairo, Lucy looked up at the sky and said, “I can see the place where we’re going to be.”

“Where?” I asked as we drove through Gabalaya Street.

“In heaven.”

“Oh!” I said. “And what’s it like?”

“It’s a circle, Mama, and it has a chimney, and it will always be winter there.”

I reached over and patted her knee. “Thank you, darling,” I said.

Yes, I am sick, but not just for home. I am sick for a time, a time that was and that I can never have again. A lover I had and can never have again.

I watched him vanish—well, not vanish, slip away, recede. He did not want to go. He did not go quietly. He asked me to hold him, but he couldn’t tell me how. A fairy godmother, robbed for an instant of our belief in her magic, turns into a sad old woman, her wand into a useless stick. I suppose I should have seen it coming. My foreignness, which had been so charming, began to irritate him. My inability to remember names, to follow the minutiae of politics; my struggles with his language; my need to be protected from the sun, the mosquitoes, the salads, the drinking water. He was back home, and he needed someone he could be at home with, at home. It took perhaps a year. His heart was broken in two; mine was simply broken.

I never see my lover now. Sometimes as he romps with Lucy on the beach or bends over her grazed elbow or sits across our long table from me at a dinner party, I see a man I could yet fall in love with, and I turn away.

I told him too about my first mirage, the one I saw on that long road to Maiduguri. And on the desert road to Alexandria
the first summer, I saw it again. “It’s hard to believe it isn’t there when I can see it so clearly,” I complained.

“You only think you see it,” he said.

“Isn’t that the same thing?” I asked. “My brain tells me there’s water there. Isn’t that enough?”

“Yes,” he said, and shrugged. “If all you want to do is sit in the car and see it. But if you want to go and put your hands in it and drink, then it isn’t enough, surely?” He gave me a sidelong glance and smiled.

Soon I should hear Lucy’s high, clear voice, chattering to her father as they walk hand in hand up the gravel drive to the back door. Behind them will come the heavy tread of Um Sabir. I will go out smiling to meet them and he will deliver a wet, sandy Lucy into my care and ask if I’m okay with a slightly anxious look. I will take Lucy into my bathroom while he goes into his. Later, when the rest of the family have all drifted back and showered and changed, everyone will sit around the barbecue and eat and drink and talk politics and crack jokes of hopeless, helpless irony and laugh. I should take up embroidery and start on those Aubusson tapestries we all, at the moment, imagine will be necessary for Lucy’s trousseau.

Yesterday when I had dressed her after the shower she examined herself intently in my mirror and asked for a French plait. I sat behind her at the dressing table blow-drying her black hair, brushing it and plaiting it. When Lucy was born, Um Sabir covered all the mirrors. His sister said, “They say if a baby looks in the mirror she will see her own grave.” We
laughed but did not remove the covers; they stayed in place till she was one.

I looked at Lucy’s serious face in the mirror. I had seen my grave once, or thought I had. That was part of my Africa story. The plane out of Nigeria circled Cairo airport. Three times I heard the landing gear come down, and three times it was raised again. Sitting next to me were two Finnish businessmen. When the announcement came that we were rerouting to Luxor, they shook their heads and ordered another drink. At dawn, above Luxor airport, we were told there was trouble with the undercarriage and that the pilot was going to attempt a crash landing. I thought: so this is why they’ve sent us to Luxor, to burn up discreetly and not clog Cairo airport. We were asked to fasten our seat belts, take off our shoes and watches, put the cushions from the backs of our seats on our laps and bend double over them with our arms around our heads. I slung my handbag with my passport, tickets, and money around my neck and shoulder before I did these things. My Finnish neighbors formally shook each other’s hands. On the plane there was perfect silence as we dropped out of the sky. And then a terrible, agonized, protracted screeching of machinery as we hit the tarmac. And in that moment, not only my head, but all of me, my whole being, seemed to tilt into a blank, an empty radiance, but lucid. Then three giant thoughts. One was of him—his name, over and over again. The other was of the children I would never have. The third was that the pattern was now complete: this is what my life amounted to.

When we did not die, that first thought—his name, his name, his name—became a talisman, for in extremity, hadn’t all that was not him been wiped out of my life? My life, which once again stretched out before me, shimmering with possibilities, was meant to merge with his.

I finished the French plait and Lucy chose a blue clasp to secure its end. Before I let her run out, I smoothed some after-sun on her face. Her skin is nut-brown except just next to her ears, where it fades to a pale cream gleaming with golden down. I put my lips to her neck. “My Lucy, Lucia,
lambah,
” I murmured as I kissed her and let her go. My treasure, my trap.

Now when I walk to the sea, to the edge of this continent where I live, where I almost died, where I wait for my daughter to grow away from me, I see different things from those I saw that summer six years ago. The last of the foam is swallowed bubbling into the sand, to sink down and rejoin the sea at an invisible subterranean level. With each ebb of green water the sand loses part of itself to the sea; with each flow another part is flung back to be reclaimed once again by the beach. That narrow stretch of sand knows nothing in the world better than it does the white waves that whip it, caress it, collapse onto it, vanish into it. The white foam knows nothing better than those sands that wait for it, rise to it, and suck it in. But what do the waves know of the massed hot, still sands of the desert just twenty—no, ten feet beyond the scalloped edge? And what does the beach know of the depths, the cold, the currents just there, there—do you see it?—where the water turns a deeper blue.

FIRST ANCHOR BOOKS EDITION, MARCH 2007

Anchor Books and colophon are trademarks of Random House, Inc.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

The stories “Knowing,” “1964,” and “Returning” were originally published in the book
Aisha
by Jonathan Cape, Ltd in 1983. The stories “Mandy,” “Satan,” and “I Think of You” were originally published in the book
Sandpiper
by Bloomsbury Publishing Plc in 1996. The story “Chez Milou” was originally published by
SohoSquare
in 1988. The story “Melody” was or ig inally published by the
London Review of Books
in 1 9 8 8.

The story “Sandpiper” was originally published by
Granta
in 1994.

Excerpt from “Sandpiper” from
The Complete Poems 1927–1979
by Elizabeth Bishop. Copyright © 1979, 1983, by Alice Helen Methfessel. Reprinted by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux LLC.

International Copyright Secured.

The Cataloging-in-Publication Data is on file at the Library of Congress.

eISBN: 978-0-307-48615-8

www.anchorbooks.com

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