The Last Time They Met

by Anita Shreve

  In the market, he let his eyes adjust to the gloom. The stench was even worse now, and he was trying to breathe through his mouth. The people and stalls in the market took shape, photographs emerging from a bath. He saw a woman in a kanga, the cloth wrapped tightly around her hips. She had a lovely, muscular ass. Ndegwa had looked at African women, whereas he, Thomas, was noticing the long, narrow waist of a white woman, the way her cotton blouse billowed over the kanga. And then his chest was so tight, he had to suck the fetid air to breathe.

  It was not possible, he thought. Even as he knew it was.

  The pain stayed, but his head cleared. The disturbance in his vision subsided. She had her back to him, her long slender back. A basket over her arm. She was bent slightly toward a display of pineapples, examining them for ripeness. A long row of silver bracelets on her right wrist jingled as she moved her hand. Her legs were bare from mid-calf to foot. He looked at the slim, tanned legs, the dusty heels, the leather sandals, well worn. Was it possible he was mistaken? Never. About this he could not be mistaken. The hair a miracle, blonder than he remembered. Tied in a loose knot at the back of her neck.

  Now the woman was paying for her pineapple. She turned and moved in his direction. For a moment, she looked quizzical, straw basket in one hand, the wallet in the other. Her face was leaner, not as rounded as he remembered. Even in the gloom of the market, he could see the gold cross. He heard the gasp.

  —Thomas, the woman said.

  She took a step forward.

  —Is it really you?

  He put his hands in his pockets, afraid that he might inadvertently touch her. Her presence a grenade, detonating.

  —Linda.

  His mouth already dry.

  She smiled tentatively and cocked her head.

  —What are you doing here?

  What was he doing in Africa? It seemed a valid question.

  —I’ve been here. A year.

  —Really? So have I. Nearly, anyway.

  Her eyes slid off his own for just a second, and the smile flickered. She wouldn’t have seen the scar before.

  —This is very strange, he said.

  An elderly man in a royal-blue jacket approached him and tugged at his sleeve. Thomas was rigid, unable to move, as though he might shatter something important. He watched as Linda reached into her wallet and took out shillings. The beggar, appeased, moved away.

  She put the backs of her fingers to her nose, assaulted by one of the smells that wafted through the building. He thought her fingers might be trembling. Regina would be somewhere, waiting for him now. Regina. He struggled to say something sane.

  —My wife is with UNICEF.

  The words my wife not possible, he thought. Not here. Not now.

  —Oh, she said. I see.

  Thomas glanced at her fingers for a wedding band. Something that might have been a ring on her left hand. You’re in Nairobi?

  —No. I’m in the Peace Corps. In Njia.

  —Oh, he said. I’m surprised.

  —Why?

  —I never figured you for the Peace Corps.

  —Well. People change.

  —I suppose they do.

  —Have you changed?

  He thought. I don’t think so.

  His lips were dry, and he had to lick them. His breathing was too shallow, and he needed air. The pain in his temple was excruciating. Regina would have the medicine in her purse. He put a hand to his head, almost before he realized he’d done so.

  —You have a migraine.

  He looked at her, astounded.

  —It’s a pinching you get around your eyes.

  She who had seen dozens.

  —I don’t get them as often as I used to. The doctor tells me that by the time I’m fifty, they’ll have disappeared. He took in a great suck of air, hoping to disguise it as a sigh.

  —It’s hard to imagine living that long, she said lightly.

  —I used to think I’d be dead by thirty.

  —We all did.

  She had water-blue eyes and long, blond lashes. Shallow wrinkles already spoking out from the eyes. Her face tanned, an Indian red. After the accident, it had not been possible to be together. Her aunt and her uncles had forbidden it. He had besieged her house for days. Until, finally, they had sent her away. He still didn’t know where she had gone.

  He had sent four letters, none of which had been answered. And then it was fall, and he had enrolled at Harvard. She had chosen Middlebury. He’d made himself give it up then, accept her silence as his punishment.

  A decade had changed her. She looked a woman now. Her breasts were loose inside her blouse, and he struggled not to look at them.

  —We live in Karen, he said.

  She nodded slowly.

  —It’s west of here. He waved his hand in a direction that might be west.

  —I know the place.

  —I never got the chance to tell you how sorry I was, he said. I tried to write you.

  She looked away. Her chest was red in the deep V of her blouse. — For the accident, he said. It was inexcusable. If I hadn’t been driving so fast. If I hadn’t been drinking.

  She glanced quickly back at him. I was there. I was as much a part of what happened as you.

  —No, you weren’t. I was the one who was driving.

  She put a hand out and touched his wrist. The touch so electric that he flinched. Thomas, let’s not do this. That was years ago. Everything is different now.

  Her kanga was only a single piece of cloth she had wrapped at her waist like the African women did. A slight tug, and it would slide to her sandals. He couldn’t think about that now.

  —I just want to know where they sent you, he said. I’ve always wondered.

  She withdrew her hand. I went to stay with Eileen in New York.

  He nodded slowly.

  —Then I went to Middlebury.

  He took a long breath.

  —There’s so much to catch up on, she said. As any woman might. Trying, he knew, to make it normal.

  —How’s your aunt? he asked. For the moment, acquiescing.

  She pressed her lips together. She shrugged. Her relationship with her aunt would always be complex. The same, I guess.

  —Why didn’t you answer my letters? he asked too quickly — unable, after all, to keep it normal.

  She put a hand to the side of her head and tucked a stray strand of hair behind her ear. I didn’t get any letters.

  —You didn’t get my letters?

  She shook her head.

  His chest felt squeezed.

  —So, she said. A small frown disappearing. You’re shopping?

  —Oh, he said. Confused. I did the shopping. Well, my part. Although I should get some cashews. Hoping she wouldn’t notice the Tusker on his breath. It wasn’t even noon.

  From the corner of his eye, he could see Regina approaching. Carrying a straw basket filled with food in her arms. Panic swelled inside of him. It seemed important that he speak to Linda before Regina got there.

  —Linda, he said, but then he stopped. Words, heartless and fickle, failed him.

  Her eyes flicked up at his, and he held them.

  Regina stood beside them, and there seemed a terrible pause. Linda smiled in Regina’s direction. Hello. I’m Linda Fallon.

  Thomas struggled toward the surface. He glanced at Regina and wondered if Linda’s name would register. He hoped it wouldn’t. Linda, this is my wife, Regina.

  Regina set down her straw basket and shook Linda’s hand. Regina’s pink sleeveless blouse stained beneath her arms, her hair wild and sticky about her face. She looked at Thomas, at his empty hands. She had worn shorts, and, disloyally, he felt embarrassed for her.

  —Didn’t you get the fruit? Regina asked. Even now, a slight whine.

  —It’s in the car.

  She studied him. You have a migraine?

  Linda looked away.

  Thomas sought and failed to find a normal voice. Linda’s an old friend. F
rom Hull.

  Regina turned to the stranger. Really? Are you on safari?

  —No. I’m in the Peace Corps.

  —In Nairobi?

  —In Njia.

  —Oh, really. What do you do?

  —I teach.

  —Oh, wow. The wow automatic, without emotion. Behind Linda, the shopkeeper was packing up his leftover fruit.

  —They’re closing up, Thomas said. Racked between wanting the two women to separate as soon as possible and wishing to make his conversation with Linda last forever. He had so many questions he wanted to ask her, questions he’d been asking her for years.

  Linda let them see that she was checking her watch. I’ve got to run. Peter’s waiting for me to go to lunch.

  The name a slug to the center of his chest. That there was a Peter might have been expected, but the name shocked him even so.

  Linda turned to Regina. It was so nice to meet you. She glanced at Thomas. There was nothing she could say. She smiled instead.

  Thomas watched her walk away, all the blood in his veins following her.

  He bent to pick up Regina’s basket. Giving himself something to do to cover the hole inside him. Regina was silent as they made their way through the stalls and into the noonday sun.

  —Roland and Elaine want us for dinner, she said.

  Roland, Regina’s supervisor, was an asshole, but Thomas was relieved there would be a party. He didn’t think he could bear a long night in the cottage with Regina. Not this night.

  —Wasn’t that the gal you used to go out with in high school?

  Willing himself to sound casual, even bored. For a couple of months.

  —And didn’t you have some sort of car accident with her?

  —She was in the car.

  Regina nodding. I remember now. You told me that.

  Thomas put the basket in the trunk. He opened the driver’s-side door and slipped inside, the seat so hot it burned his thighs. The parking boy was watching him, waiting for a tip. Thomas rolled down his window, and the boy was on him in a flash.

  Regina settled in beside him. Blondes shouldn’t let themselves get that much sun, she said. Did you notice how she’s ruining her skin?

  He stood on Roland’s verandah, a Pimm’s in his hand, his chest suffused with a sensation he thought, from no recent recognizable experience, must be joy. A feeling that went all the way to his thighs. At the start of the evening, arriving amid a welter of cool but paradoxically welcoming asides — Roland, aren’t Americans funny the way they walk to everything? Now this dress I like — he’d felt his attention sparingly lent, plucked from him unwillingly. And so had sought refuge on the verandah, where no one else had yet gone.

  And knew himself to be in love. If, indeed, he’d ever not been. Not since a day in 1966 when a girl in a gray skirt and a white blouse had crossed the threshold of a schoolroom. It was as if he’d merely been distracted all these years, or had grown weary of loving only memories. And had, against all the odds, been returned to a rightful state. Not reminded, but restored. As a sightless man who once had sight will learn to live with his condition, adjust to his darkened universe, and then, years later, when astonishingly he can see again, will know how glorious his world once was. And all this on nothing but an unlikely meeting and the exchange of a dozen sentences — small miracles in themselves.

  The verandah overlooked a garden of hibiscus and moonflowers, the latter giving off a spectral glow from the lit lanterns hanging in the trees. On the equator, the sun set at six every night of the year, a light that extinguished itself without apology or dimming, a fact Thomas found disconcerting. He missed the slow leaching of summer evenings, and even the dawns he had hardly ever seen. He also, to his vast surprise, missed snow, and occasionally he had snow dreams in the night. Eye-level now with an avocado tree ponderous with fruit — so close he could have leaned over and picked one of the scaly green pears — he remembered he’d never eaten one until he’d gone to college, the fruit far too exotic for his mother’s Calvinist table.

  Roland had insisted he have a Pimm’s, a sweetish gin drink, though Thomas had wanted a simple beer. Roland was as executive at home as he was on the job, a man who made insistent pronouncements with a certitude that was baffling. Mark his words, there would be tribal anarchy when Kenyatta died. He’d tell you right now, if an African bought a European house it could be counted on to go to ruin. It was axiomatic that you could never trust an Asian. Thomas, having no opinions on these subjects, found the acknowledged — no, brandished racism — appalling. In turn, Roland thought Thomas hopelessly naive and said so. Amusingly naive, actually. An earnest American was an entertainment. You’ll see, Roland was fond of adding.

  The night air floated around Thomas’s arms, bare to the elbows. In the distance, he could hear music and the fading away of a woman’s laughter. Smoke rose from the cement garage where the servants lived, raising, as it always did, the question of degree: Was the confinement of servants in a cement garage any different from slavery? Beneath this thought, also wanting to know: Where was Linda right now? What was she doing this very minute? He imagined her in a hut in the bush — why, he couldn’t have said. It was the idea of the Peace Corps, he supposed, with its suggestion of good works and mild suffering. How easily they might have missed each other in the market, might never have known the other was even in the country. It made him weak in the knees just to think of it. He saw again the shallow curve of her waist and hips, the way her breasts swayed inside her blouse. A longing he hadn’t felt since adolescence made his bones ache.

  Her fingers had trembled when she’d brought them to her face; he was certain he had seen that. And yet she had seemed so calm, so preternaturally composed. Had the chance meeting meant something to her, or would she have regarded it merely as a wistful moment, something to be put aside so that one could get on with life? It seemed impossible that either should have forgotten the other. And yet he had married another woman, and she was with a man named Peter. He pictured an anemic academic for no more reason than he wished it so. He wondered if they lived together, guessed that they did. Didn’t everyone these days, especially in this country of lawlessness and illicit love?

  He turned slightly, leaned his hip against the railing, and looked through the set of casement windows into a room that Elaine repeatedly referred to as the drawing room, another British export that seemed anachronistic in a country where nearly everyone lived in huts. Just at this party alone, he could count three affairs he knew about, and who could say how many others lay beneath this modest number? Roland, himself, was sleeping with Elaine’s best friend, Jane, and the odd thing was, Regina had said, Elaine knew about it and didn’t care. Which raised the question: with whom was Elaine sleeping? Regal Elaine, who would not have gone without. Lanky Elaine, with her hard, nut-brown face and her hair bleached nearly platinum by a lifetime on the equator. Imperious Elaine, who had been born in Kenya and had once told Thomas huffily that she was a Kenyan citizen (though it didn’t seem to have made her like Africans any better, he had noticed). She kept horses and had the thighs of a rider. She had a unique sort of beauty, but her personality was as weather-beaten as her face. Worse than Roland at hiding her contempt for Americans. She glanced up at that moment and saw that Thomas was staring at her. He quickly slid his eyes away. She might misinterpret the examination, might even flirt with him later.

  Jesus, he thought, turning back to the railing. That was all he needed.

  He’d had the migraine for hours and had been glad for the darkened room. Regina had been puttering in the kitchen and then had been reading on the verandah. In the privacy of the bedroom, he’d felt the joy even then, even through the nauseating haze of the pain. And when the unbearable had subsided, he’d been nearly euphoric with happiness. He’d played the conversation he’d had with Linda in the market over and over, the repetition of the phrases like a poem he was trying to memorize.

  Is it really you?

  This is very stra
nge.

  Have you changed?

  That was years ago. Everything is different now.

  He heard the soft click of the door to the verandah behind him. He sent up a quick prayer that it wasn’t Elaine.