Fleur
I MET WITH Assefa a few weeks after his release from the hospital. It had nothing to do with getting back together. Without either of us explicitly saying so, we knew we were beyond that. On my side, I’d concluded that I’d had enough of desire. My own was too dangerous. Ever since puberty it had been like some out-of-whack pinball machine, creating disasters at every flip and ping. I didn’t know which was worse—my contribution to the wreckage of Assefa’s life or what he’d done to my own trust in love.
I didn’t speak much about the latter, but surprisingly, it was Mother I most longed to confide in. Given Stanley’s moral lapse, the Fiskes were out of the question; Sammie’s hands were full with the inevitable return of Bad Jacob after a brief appearance of the nicer one; and Jillily didn’t count.
When I let spill that I’d actually met up with Assefa the previous morning at the Huntington Gardens, Mother gently asked me if we were patching things up. “Do you think you might still get married?” she asked hopefully.
I told her it was out of the question. “Mother, I can’t believe we were engaged when I knew him so little. I thought nothing could faze him. I had no idea he was so ... complicated.”
Mother eyed me oddly. “Most people are, Fleur.”
The two of us were sitting on her bed, the very same one where my tweeter had set Satan’s proclivity for disaster in motion. The bed covers were different, though, thanks to Mother’s weakness for shopping therapy. The silky duvet we spread ourselves across, propped up on our elbows, was a new find from Barney’s, appliquéd with satisfying patterns of butterflies, morning glories, and bees in dusty rose, sage, and a buttery yellow.
“Well, maybe working through what happened might be a prelude to a deeper love.”
“No,” I said firmly.
She sighed. “Well, I guess that’s why they call it first love. It’s because it’s usually followed by a second. At least a second.”
I didn’t dare tell her that Assefa had been the second. But perhaps she’d argue that Adam didn’t count, since he knew nothing about it.
Without warning, Mother pushed herself off the bed and began removing her black cashmere V-neck and honey-colored crepe slacks, groaning slightly with the pleasure of removing the constriction from her skin. I saw that her black lace bra barely contained her bulging breasts, and her belly and behind made cellulite moons around the elastic of her matching black bikini panties.
The only other time I’d seen Mother unclothed was when I’d stolen into her closet as a child for a pinch-fest and spied her through the crack in the closet door posing with her naked body in the mirror. Then, my eyes had fixed on her every-which-way pubic hair, which had contrasted so starkly with her alternating cool and fragile demeanor in the fearsome house of my father.
She’d always been a beauty, with classic features and a long, lean figure perfectly complimented by her signature sleek skirts and silk blouses, pearl necklaces and Chanel No. 5 perfume. But with the approach of middle age, she’d widened and sagged and grayed, and I’d ceased to think of her as particularly attractive, certainly not sexual. Until now. The matter-of-fact ease with which she’d flung off her clothes to get more comfortable in her royal blue sweat suit, the earthy musk that wafted from her naked flesh, the frank smile she threw me when she saw me staring at her, all spoke of a mysterious comfort with her body that I suddenly envied.
Breaking the spell, she asked, “So, what did you two talk about?” before climbing back onto the bed, giving me a quick peck on the forehead, and plumping up a few large pillows to nestle against.
Her question took me by surprise. I wasn’t sure I wanted to share everything Assefa had confided in me. He was still so raw that it would feel like a betrayal. One of the harder things to hear had been his apology for hurting me. But the worst was his halting, but nonetheless detailed, description of his Hanging Man and his obsession with Makeda.
Assefa had confessed when I picked up the phone that he was calling on the spur of the moment. He was still staying at his parents’ house—“on suicide watch,” he’d muttered bitterly—and they were only too happy to relinquish him to my care. It had been a shock to see him, looking somehow smaller than before, and he seemed a bit wary to see me, but we’d resolutely pushed through the clusters of young families milling around the Huntington’s ticket kiosk and walked past a museum shop displaying posters of their collection of incunabula, including a rare vellum Gutenberg Bible that I promised myself to return to peruse properly one day. We made our way toward the vast Australian garden, where we settled ourselves under one of the taller eucalyptus trees. The air was thick with its honeyed, minty scent, and only the occasional chwirk of a Red-tailed Hawk or a lone Black Phoebe’s tee-hee too-hoo punctuated the stillness. Our exchange went like this:
Me: “How’s your neck? (He was still wearing his cervical collar, so it was a pretty natural question, but still loaded. My voice had been, accordingly, a bit wavery.)
Assefa: (With a rueful smile, his hand flowing up to inch two fingers under the bottom of the collar.) “Oh, not too bad, really. Considering.”
Me: (Leaping in like an idiot, but there you have it. Nothing in life happens without a leap or two.) “Oh, Assefa, was it what Stanley said?”
Assefa: (Giving a slight grimace before offering a non sequiturish) “Fleur, can you ever forgive me?”
Me: “I do. I will. Well, anyway, I want to.” I paused. “But I really wouldn’t have forgiven you if you’d succeeded. Assefa, how could you?”
Assefa: (putting up a hand.) “Stop. Please. My parents are already driving me mad with their questions. But I have to admit, I feel strangely relieved. And not just to be alive.” I shoved that one into a cupboard in my mind. One not too far back, since I knew I’d want to pull it out and examine it as soon as I was alone. “But, listen, Fleur,” Assefa went on, “there is one weight still heavy on me. I am ashamed for what I, how I ... treated you that last night.”
Me: “It was my fault. I should never have—”
Assefa: (Interrupting) “No. It is not your fault. We must be truthful with each other, or we have nothing. I nearly raped you. Maybe more than nearly. I don’t know what I— That music. I just—”
Me: (Totally confused.) “The music? What are you talking about?”
Which is when he really began to talk, and I really shut up and listened. I was able to bear it only because I was secretly pinching my outer thigh the whole time. He told me he couldn’t remember his childhood without thinking about Makeda. He admitted that he remembered more about her than Bekele and Iskinder, more than even his mother and father. The expression on his face when he spoke her name nearly killed me, but it also filled me, strangely, with a kind of desire. Not for Assefa himself—that seemed to have been swallowed by a particularly dense department of the void—but for Makeda. As if I’d caught an invisible virus from Assefa. I wanted to see her, touch her, get inside her skin. Better yet, be her.
But Assefa was saying, “Fleur, the worst of it was—well, not the worst, but when I was there in Ethiopia, I thought about you. Some devil had decreed I would never be satisfied. Never be a whole man. I could not have her, and—”
This was what I was dying to know: “But why couldn’t you? Did she reject you?”
“No. She didn’t. She didn’t have to.” A shadow came into his eyes. “She’d had a botched genital mutilation as a girl.” Then he whispered, “As if any of them aren’t.” A terrible dizziness overtook me, but, relentlessly, Assefa continued. “It was done to her during the war that my family escaped by having left. She was captured. By our own people.” He gave a bark of laugh that made me want to get up and run away. “It ... ruined her capacity for pleasure. Or at least her desire for it. Here I’d been imagining that the country my parents had ripped me from was some kind of Eden.” Assefa’s voice grew hard. “Instead, it is a shit pile of poverty, ignorance, violence.”
It must have been his sorrow speaking. I was far too ignorant about Ethiopia, but I knew that the home of the Blue Nile was brimming with richness and beauty. There was no way such a large and diverse land could be encapsulated in a few bitter words. Whether or not the Ark of the Covenant was actually kept at Aksum, Ethiopia was where the oldest human fossils remains had been discovered. It was the birthplace of our species. I’d never been there, but I sensed—no, knew—it was something special. I knew it from the graciousness of Assefa’s parents, from the streaks of shiny color woven into Abeba’s white netelas, from the bitter-fruit taste of bunna and the longing in tizita and the way Teddy Afro’s “Aydenegetim Lebie” made me feel. I knew it from Assefa’s seriousness of purpose and his wry wit. But still. “Genital mutilation?”
Assefa took pity on me. “I’m sorry. That was cruel. But you wanted to know.”
“I do. Well, I think so, anyway.” I’d also thought I must be mutilating my outer thigh, but no matter. “But I—”
“What, Fleur?”
“ Assefa, we never had a chance, did we?”
“Because of my neurosis?”
“Neurosis? No. Because neither of us have any idea who we are yet.”
When I told Mother at least that part of it, she laughed. “Oh, my sweet, sweet girl. By the time you get to my age, you realize that we keep thinking we know who we are and discovering we’re something else. The damned thing won’t stay still, no matter how much we want it to.”
I wasn’t so sure I agreed with her. Mother was Mother, and Gwennie was Gwennie, and Stanley was ... well, maybe Mother was right. But I didn’t like it. It made the void even more voidish. I didn’t like it one bit.
