Read Online Discretion by Elizabeth Nunez - Free Book Online Page B

Catherine had concluded, I was indeed the son of Adam. I, too, could not resist the forbidden fruit.

9

    I called Marguerite the very day I received Catherine’s letter, obsessed with my dark desire to see her, afraid that if I waited one more day, reason would overrule me, return me to that safe, secure place where my world was in order, where things were in place, where my life was peaceful, calm, unruffled. Where I believed I was happy. Where I lived in my cocoon with Nerida and our son.
    Marguerite answered the phone on the first ring.
    “Hello?”
    I had to reach deep in my throat to find my voice.
    “Marguerite? This is Oufoula Sindede. Catherine’s friend. Catherine Simpson’s friend.”
    “Wait,” she said. “Wait a minute.”
    I waited, and while I waited I let myself be sucked downwards into the vortex of the forbidden. I shut my eyes and let it all come back to me—those days and nights locked in my room in the mission school when Mulenga had deceived me, made me a cuckold with her lust.
    I saw Marguerite through those eyes, the eyes of my former self, myself before Nerida. I saw her naked, her body dripping wet from the shower. I saw her put down the phone, race across the room fora towel. I saw her breasts, two ripe mangoes plump and firm, their nipples brown and erect, shifting with her movements, her skin the color of butterscotch, curving around a small waist, rounded hips, parting at that triangle above her thighs, and I sucked in my breath with my desire for her, my years of longing for her.
    “Hello? Hello?” She was calling to me again, but I had lost my voice winding through the dark caverns of my fantasies.
    “Hello? Are you there?”
    I coughed.
    “God, I hope it’s not the flu.” Her voice was not the voice I expected, the voice I had waited to hear. It was a sweet voice, a caring voice, a sympathetic voice.
    “No,” I said quickly. “No, not the flu.”
    “It’s been going around.”
    I coughed again.
    “Take two Tylenol,” she said. “Not aspirin. They could upset your stomach.”
    A white heat burned through me. I fought against her. The woman I created when Mulenga deceived me would not have cared, would not have said,
Not aspirin
. She would not have noticed my cough. I did not want to surface to the present where this woman was, to the real, to the mundane where she wanted me to be.
    “It’s not the flu,” I said. “It’s a dry throat.”
    She must have detected the irritation in my voice. “Hmm,” she said, and nothing more. Then, just as I was beginning to think I should apologize (I did not want to lose her), she said my name and my world became right again.
    “Oufoula.”
    My name never sounded so dark, so seductive, so rich with possibilities.
    “Oufoula. Yes, I know who you are. Catherine Simpson’s friend.”
    Was all well with her friend? she wanted to know.
    She did not speak again of my throat, the flu, or a remedy for the flu.
    “Yes,” I said, “but I have a message from her to you.”
    “A message? It’s not serious?”
    “No,” I said.
    “What is it?” she asked.
    “It would be better if I told you in person.”
    I was cunning. But had Catherine not wanted me to meet her?
    “Then it is serious.”
    “Serious, not devastating.”
    “How soon can we meet?”
    I told her I would be in New York the next day. I had not planned it. I did not know when I picked up the phone to call her that that was what I would do, but I knew it then. I knew that one more day was all I could wait to see her.
    “I’ll make dinner.”
    “No.” I almost shouted the word at her.
    “It won’t be any trouble.”
    “No. Not in your apartment.”
    In the daylight. In a place where there are people
.
    She stumbled over her words. “I mean … I thought …”
    I had embarrassed her. This was not how I expected Marguerite to be. When I caught Mulenga on top of her lover, she did not blink an eye. She looked directly at me. She held my eyes. “Oh, Oufoula,”