She walked in with this man, her lover. A married man with three children, I was told later. She fussed over him like a wife does (or is it mistresses that fuss?). She made him orange juice first, freshly squeezed, and then tea, hovered over him, and made recordings of Chopin and Brahms for him, lolling on my carpets. He liked classical music. Could she be in love this time, I wondered, with a man who looked anchored and tethered in a starched white shirt and tie, unavailable? It was written all over his face. Greeting him was clumsy—not the usual How’s the wife? How’re the children? How’s work? but … How’s life?
Perhaps she was a timely distraction. What was in it for her? She seemed to have her eyes wide open and feet planted firmly on the ground. Perhaps he had stumbled in her path at a time when she needed a man in her life. When it came to goodbyes she wouldn’t look back. There would be no messy emotions, no awkward entanglements, no strings or covenants.
He called her every morning on getting to the office. She made his day, he said, with as much originality as possible. She on her part did not interfere with his family life. He dropped the children off at school, paid the electricity bill and cashed a cheque for his wife at the bank before getting to the office. After work, he drove to her love nest and she sent him home dutifully to his wife when the clock struck ten and when all respectable men should be home. They knew the terms. He was decent, a family man, and a father.
Why should I entertain this adulterous pair in my home? I protested to myself initially. She was a link in the convoluted extended family chain, with an audacious claim to my space, but he was not. But they were a compelling distraction and I found myself acting the spellbound audience to their superbly orchestrated drama. Will he? Won’t he? Will she? Why he? She was so utterly relaxed in his company, this travelling companion, this proverbial part-time lover. She went out of the way to fill in the gaps left by his wife. The dresses short enough to provoke desire but just long enough to ward off unwanted attention. The special perfume, which he alone would recognize and sniff her out in a crowd. She picked a rose from the vase on my dining table and gave it to him. I began to enjoy their company in a curious sort of way like being in the midst of a West Indian carnival, the steel band urging you to dance. They were so nice to each other. It seemed like good times all the way.
They were leaving that afternoon. She brought out the food flask and went about packing lunch for her lover. He had a touch of ulcer in the stomach, she said, and wasn’t to go for long periods without a snack. She meticulously arranged the rice and stew and vegetables in the food flask. There was water in the cooler and orange juice in a separate bottle.
I looked on amused. So this is what every mistress aspires to be! A wife! To have a man to pamper and take care of, with an I-know-you-better-than-your-wife-does claim to his person. And the magazines are never tired of telling us we should be as tantalizing and mysterious as mistresses!
‘It’s not that I want him to be with me all the time,’ she confided. ‘It’s just that I wish I knew where he goes every weekend.’ I searched my mind for expert advice.
‘Be prepared to put in ninety-five per cent,’ I said with wifely wizardry, ‘and expect five per cent in return. Did your mother know where your father went each day? Did she needle him about his day-to-day activities?’
She came in with a flourish the next time, like a newly wedded wife, he, close behind her like the bridegroom who had just acquired a spouse. I was mildly surprised that they were still together and that her pace of living had room for Part Two of the love episode.
No sooner had she come in, she started preparing his late-night snack (he had ulcer, remember?). With an artistic hand she trimmed the edges of the bread, put slices of cheese and a fried egg in between and stacked the sandwiches. The flask had hot water for his cocoa.
‘What’s for breakfast?’ she enquired jokingly as she climbed in the car beside him for their rendezvous at the Night Club.
‘I’ll have to ask the chef,’ I replied laughing.
During each visit she spent long hours in the kitchen catering to her lover’s tastes. ‘Hey, that’s what a wife’s supposed to be doing,’ I taunted her. She was in a black shift with gold buttons. She launched on a tirade over his wife on that occasion.
‘Wife! I’m not trying to run her down because she is his wife. But the woman is downright lazy! What does she do with her money? He takes care of everything in the home. If he doesn’t buy soap, there’s no soap in the house. She doesn’t even bother about her looks. I have never met her, but they say she is very shabby. If the car breaks down on her way to work, she leaves it on the road and goes to look for him, instead of getting a mechanic. What kind of woman is that? And you know him … He is a person who does not open his mouth to talk. He just allows things to be as they are.’
The orange juice, the sandwiches, the crayfish stews got richer to make up amply for what he was missing in his wife. He seemed to be carrying a cross—wife, children and extended family. She needed to be there to make his life bearable.
It was an afternoon in March when she arrived with her lover. He wore a blue-checked sports shirt unbuttoned sufficiently to reveal the gold chain and the hairy chest. He read newspapers in the living room and watched video films. She busied herself turning my kitchen upside down on his account. It was a pleasant confusion when she was around. She rummaged around frying eggs, cooking spaghetti—everything had to be in style, extravagant and in abundance.
When all was done, she opened my cupboards, brought out the best crockery and cutlery and served the man. Her quaintly self-mocking domestic routine amused the household. They could never be man and wife, I consoled myself, doing things for each other every day, bearing the hurts, rejections, misunderstandings and still sitting down to a meal together over red roses.
They could, however, carry out their connubial act at periodic intervals in someone else’s home. That was all the husband she needed and that was all the petting he could take from her. When they drove out of the town, they went their separate ways, he to his family, and she to the empty concrete bungalow in the government residential area, with damaged fly-screens on the veranda and ceiling stained by rain-water.
He kept up the semblance of untiring love, it seemed to me, in a relationship that had ‘missed the road’. ‘Anything might happen’ was the closest he came to reassurance when she looked at him with suspicion. She broached the subject of having a child (doesn’t every woman want to be a mother?). ‘Your life has been peaceful,’ he said cleverly, piling tenderness on concern, ‘I wouldn’t want to inflict a child on you.’ He got out of it that time. She sensed the meaning and ordered him out. He came back the following week. ‘Who wants a child, anyway?’ she said, slipping into the patent leather shoes and swinging her hips out of the door. That was what he wanted to hear. He wished to leave no trace, no fingerprints, no sign of his having been with her. No endearments in public, he had cautioned her at the start of their relationship—‘I am a family man.’ She accepted his conditions though it irked her that the plastic rose in cellophane which she had sent him had to be hidden in the bottom drawer of his desk at work, and the card with the cushioned and quilted heart, stuffed amidst memos in his briefcase. They had, however, celebrated the first anniversary of their friendship with gifts and a meal at a Chinese restaurant. She had positioned herself, with time, as the band-aid, the balm to massage his withering ego and sustain him through midlife crises.
At breakfast, she was in the kitchen with a bottle of Coke and a chunk of bread, contemplating her next move. The conversation kept going back to Armstrong’s irresponsible wife who scrimped on soap and toilet paper, and sent the children to bed with garri and water. So what was new?
It was our tenth wedding anniversary. I tried the crayfish stew and spaghetti laced with corned beef on my husband. My gold-fringed card on the table was gushing with sentiment. His was spare. Love for him was a benign presence like allowing the dog to lie in the kitchen and not kicking it.
It was June. The rain blotted out the maize farms, the corrugated zinc roofs and the blue hills beyond. She and her lover came in under one umbrella, their cheerful prattle reaching me long before their entwined bodies entered the kitchen. Armstrong was bare-chested as usual, I noticed through a malarial haze. He was most deferential like he was responsible for my fever. I felt an intense irritation that he was a fake, phoney, a conman, a hyena in club-gear.
She was buoyant and porous, without a care in the world, a gaily coloured gypsy shawl thrown over her pink linen blouse with careless abandon. Her hair was done in a thousand braids, a style that must have taken at least eight hours of patient sitting. I was only half aware of what was going on as they both took over the house. Chickens were hacked out of the freezer, the aroma of smoked sardine and ginger, which may have seemed inviting when I was well, nauseated me. It was Armstrong’s tastes and needs and his ulcerous appetite that were being satiated to the full.
The lover, in the meantime, read Time and Newsweek in the lounge, and looked up occasionally at Schwarzenegger’s stunts on video. He had domesticated himself into a cosy brother-in-law or someone equally respectable in the eyes of the household. He threw one leg over the arm of my upholstered chair and discussed politics. The children had stopped their whispering and tittering in corridors and had accepted him as Uncle Armstrong. From time to time she ordered them into the kitchen to hand-squeeze a batch of oranges for Armstrong, for his midday juice, or to assist in some chore that was to make life more comfortable for him.
‘So when is the big day?’ I teased, holding the throbbing sides of my head.
‘What big day?’ she asked, ‘Me?… I can never be a wife. You know that!’
‘What do you think you are now? As slavish and mulish as a wife! All these three-course meals, sandwiches and ulcer remedies!’
‘It’s only because it’s temporary. In two days’ time his wife will be sweating over the kitchen stove while I will be free. Going about my business. No man breathing down my neck.’
‘You sound as if you don’t enjoy it.’
‘I enjoy my freedom … I admire you wives,’ she patronized, ‘for your faithfulness. But it will drive me crazy.’
The house assumed prison-like proportions as my fever raged. When I was a child, illness left me shrinking like a punctured balloon while my pillow grew bigger and bigger. Now, my head was like a giant slab of lead, my stomach squeamish. I had no inclination for food or books or sporting lovers under my roof. The heavy damask curtains shut out air, light and human warmth. There was an eerie silence in my room while the rest of the world hummed with activity. What about spare ribs tonight, she asked, sticking her head through a crack in the door. It meant Armstrong felt like spare ribs, how about having some tonight? I had looked at the two of them through rose-coloured spectacles, a romantic pair in an unreal world, like the monarch butterflies of Mexico, excellent fodder for a short story. But it was becoming an expensive story with no dramatic turns or climaxes. I began to tire of Armstrong the lover—beneath those sporty clothes was a devious lout, I concluded. I began to feel sorry for his wife, the rejected woman, perhaps an attractive lawyer or teacher, on a couch in the husbandless living room with a faraway look in her eyes. Three little children in front of the television set. Maybe.
The visit that followed was somewhat subdued. He watched Wimbledon tennis on TV. He promised to buy her an iPad on that trip, she said. He was hurt that she didn’t ever ask him for anything. ‘How do I know you love me if you don’t depend on me!’ he said. She wore a green silk dress and an embroidered Indian jacket over it. Her hair was permed. He looked wispy and frail beside her, pale and asthmatic. She ate continually from the moment she stepped in the door, a mango first, followed by some chocolates she found in the fridge, and then rice and pepper-stew. He will tire of her if she doesn’t watch her weight, I thought to myself. There was a restlessness about her, she seemed constantly to be several jumps ahead.
They breezed in at the start of the harmattan, when the yellow flowers covered the hillside, a last burst of blossom before the prolonged dry season. She looked a bit blasé about life in general but still hadn’t lost the ardour to cook for her lover. She started with great enthusiasm, which wore off after the elaborate palm-nut kernel stew had been prepared. There had been grand plans for goat-head pepper soup (for Armstrong’s supper) but all she seemed capable of doing was throwing an egg in hot oil and slamming it on a slice of bread.
She repeated that wives were tied hand and foot to their husbands but she was free as the wind. She could take off when she wanted to, and come back as she pleased. She wore a cool, summer outfit, a Middle-Eastern kaftan in a swirl of pastel colours. It was a gift from Armstrong, she said, something special he had purchased on his travels, wrapped in tinsel and sent to her office as a surprise. We went shopping. She tried to fit Armstrong into every fancy shirt she saw hanging at the shop window. And then, as we drove around the traffic island with the gasping, concrete fish in the middle, we saw it. There, below the Coca-Cola advertisement, on the pavement hung a dozen kaftans in identical styles and a riot of colours!
It was three days to Christmas. I had baskets of tomatoes sitting around the kitchen, waiting to be puréed. I was cleaning and cutting a chicken at the sink when they walked in. Armstrong retired to the study to look for foreign newspapers while she started the cooking, laboriously, climbing over my tomatoes and cluttering up my sideboards. He likes his food cooked in special ways. No, they couldn’t join us for lunch. The black-eyed beans had to have a touch of crayfish, and a couple of Maggi cubes thrown in. The onions and tomatoes had to be blended and fried, not chopped up. ‘I pity his wife,’ I provoked, ‘if he is that choosy about his meals.’
The next morning, over akamu and kosai, she startled me by saying that she was preparing herself to be free of Armstrong the veterinary surgeon. He was too much of a family man, that was his problem. Christmas, Easter, Ramadan, Independence Day—he insisted on spending time with his family. After all … his wife … and she stopped. What of his wife, I asked, perking up. Was she still as loose as ever? Her eyes brightened. ‘What do you say to a man who caught his wife with someone else—red-handed—yet won’t ask her any questions?’
I could see that she had run out of stories. Old stories kept resurfacing with fresh details and new emotions. She had a pageboy hairstyle with a bang that she kept sweeping back. Black satin blouse over mini skirt, with a walkman attached to her hips and headphones plugged to her ears. ‘Is this new?’ I signalled.
‘My new boyfriend—he gave it to me,’ she mouthed, tapping her toes to the music being piped into her ears. The new man was a pharmacist. The indigestion since the previous visit had brought about a meeting. He was crazy about her, she said. Armstrong sat reading the newspapers. When the meal was ready, she served him an enormous mound of pounded yam and spinach stew, and followed it up with a single orange on a plastic plate, seductively cleft. She sat herself across from him like a fond wife and smiled mysteriously.
On the way to the car, she picked a rose—‘For my love,’ she said.
‘Which one?’ I asked.
The New Year saw her in leg warmers and polyester skirt. She made her way to the kitchen tucking in a sausage roll she picked up on the way. I was having my kitchen units painted. The painters were everywhere, climbing up, crawling under—she seemed to be quite unmindful of their presence. She started dicing, chopping, shredding and frying as she rested a massive elbow and thigh against my newly painted kitchen units. The black polyester skirt acquired a huge smudge of white where her thigh peeped through the slit in the skirt.
‘O my God!’ she screamed, turning to the painter. ‘I’ll sue you for this. You’ve ruined my skirt.’ Then she stuck her leg out to him and indicated that he clean the paint with whatever was at his disposal. The painter first tried the skirt, then let his hand run over her thigh as he rubbed the paint off gently. Armstrong had in the meantime stretched himself on the couch in the living room.
Her theory now was that you should get rid of a man before he asked you to quit. So she was on the path towards easing Armstrong, her man on the moon, out of her life. It was only a matter of time. She had given up hoping that his wife would drop dead or that he would acquire the guts to abandon her. She talked about Yinka the pharmacist who played polo and drank pure mineral water in the club. She served Armstrong his spaghetti garnished with fried plantain and turned around and continued her story of Yinka—‘He’s a wa-a-arm person,’ she said. Of course, he wasn’t totally unattached. There was this fiancée of his who was childish and temperamental and he was growing tired of her anyway.
‘The places she visits,’ she said with a meaningful look. ‘I wouldn’t be seen dead in them.’ She had developed a taste for jazz as that was Yinka’s favourite kind of music.
She curled up like a large pussycat, head resting on Armstrong’s lap and watched junk movies for the rest of the day. I made Armstrong a cheese sandwich and packed his supper in the food flasks.