I climbed into my bed. When I reached for the light, she said, “Please leave it on.”
No sooner had I lain down than she pressed against me, smelling of my deodorant, my shampoo, and Vicks. She raised my arm and huddled in the crook of my shoulder, her damp body against me. Her fingers touched my face, very gingerly, as if she worried that I might bite. I remembered that night so many years ago when I had found her naked in the pantry.
“What's that sound?” she said, startled.
“It's the dryer alarm. I washed your clothes.”
I heard her sniffle. Then sob. “You deserved better,” she said, looking up.
“Yes, I did.”
I stared at her eyes, remembering the little fleck in the right iris, and the puff of gray around it, where a spark had penetrated. Yes, it was still there, darker now, looking like a blemish she was born with. I traced her lips. Her nose. She shut her lids at my touch. Tears were sliding underneath them. She smiled a smile from our days of innocence. I took my hand away. She opened her lids, her eyes glistening. Hesitantly she kissed my lips.
No, I hadn't forgotten. At that moment, my anger wasn't so much with her as it was with the passage of time. Time had robbed me of such wonderful illusions, taken them away far too soon. But right then I wanted the illusion that she was mine.
She kissed me again, and I tasted the salt of her tears. Was she feeling sorry for me? I couldn't take that, ever. Suddenly I was on top of her, tearing away the sheet, tearing away her towel, clumsy but determined. She was startled, the muscles of her neck taut like cables. I grabbed her head and kissed her.
“Wait,” she whispered, “shouldn't you … ?”
But I was already inside her.
She winced.
“Shouldn't I what, Genet?” I said as I bucked, my pelvis possessing some intrinsic knowledge of the movements needed. “This is my first time …,” I managed to say. “I wouldn't know what I should or shouldn't do.”
Her pupils dilated. Was she pleased to learn this about me?
Now she knew.
Now she knew that there were people in this world who kept their promises. Ghosh, whose deathbed she never had the time to visit, was one such person. I wanted the knowledge to shame her, to terrify her. When it was over, I stayed on top of her.
“My first time, Genet …,” I said, softly. “Don't think that's because I was waiting for you. It's because you fucked my life up. You could have counted on me. Money in the bank, as they say here. And what did you do? You turned it all into shit. I wanted to make life beautiful for you. I don't understand it really, Genet. You had Hema and Ghosh. You had Missing. You had me who loved you more than you will ever love yourself.”
She wept under me. After a long time, she gently caressed my head, tried to kiss me. She said, “I need to go to the bathroom.”
I ignored her. I was aroused again. I began to move inside her once more.
“Please, Marion,” she said.
Without removing myself from within her, I rolled onto my back, holding her, flipping her, and setting her on top of me, her breasts hovering over me.
“You need to pee? Go ahead,” I said, my breath coming quick. “You've done that before, too.”
I grabbed her shoulders and pulled her to me hard. I smelled her fever, and the scent of blood and sex and urine. I came again.
Then I let go. I let her slide off.
I WOKE LATE ON SATURDAY MORNING to find her back in the crook of my arm, staring at me. I took her again—I couldn't imagine how I had denied myself this pleasure for so long.
When I awoke it was 2:00 p.m. and I could hear her in the kitchen. I went to the bathroom. It was when I returned to the bed that I saw the blood on the sheets. I stripped the bed and took the sheets to the washing machine.
She brought two cups of coffee, a serving of the casserole and two spoons to me. She was getting feverish again, the dressing gown not warm enough, her teeth chattering, and with spasms of a dry cough. I took the coffee from her. Her dressing gown came apart. She watched me remake the bed.
“Sorry,” she said. “I am bleeding because the scars … I always bleed with … intercourse. Rosina's gift to me. So that I will always think of her when—”
“Is it painful?”
“At first. And if it's been a long time.”
“What about this fever, how long have you been this way? Have you had an X-ray?”
“I'll be fine,” she said. “It's a bad cold. Hope I don't give it to you. I took some Advil I found in your cabinet.”
“Genet, you should—”
“Really, I'll be fine, Doctor.”
“Tell me why you went to prison.”
Her smile disappeared. She shook her head. “Please, Marion. Don't.”
I knew then it was a story that would do me no good. I knew I had to hear it. Later, when the two of us were seated in my library, I insisted.
HE WAS AN INTELLECTUAL, a firebrand, an Eritrean who like her had left the cause. He shall remain nameless—it's painful enough already. Suffice it to say he won the heart of her baby. (The baby's father had died in the struggle.) And then he won her heart—all this in New York, after her arrival. She felt her life was just beginning. They married. In a year she was pregnant with his child. She began to suspect that he was cheating on her. She found the whereabouts of the woman, the flat where they conducted their tryst. She broke in and hid in the woman's clothes closet and waited there for half a day till the couple arrived in the late afternoon. When her husband and his white lover were on her bed, seeking carnal knowledge of each other in a noisy, effortful way, Genet debated whether to announce her presence.
“Marion,” she said, “as I stood in that closet, with this woman's belts in baskets like snakes at my feet, it all came back to me. Everything I had been through from the time of Zemui's death till then.
“I somehow came to America, and what did I do? For the first time in my life, for the one person who deserved it the least, I gave my love completely. I loved him—what is it you said earlier?—more than I loved myself. I gave it all up for this useless man. Standing in the closet, I knew that if I tried to get vengeance, I had to be willing to lose my life. There has only been one man in my life worthy of such a sacrifice, Marion, and it was you. I was too stupid to know that when I was young. I was too stupid.
“He wasn't worth it, but now I couldn't stop myself. You see, in loving him, it had happened again, Marion—I wanted to be great. I thought he was destined for greatness as an academic, as an intellectual, and my greatness would be in being with him.
“For the first time I understood who was the proletariat. The proletariat was me, the proletariat had always been me, and now I needed to act for the proletariat. I had my straight razor in my hand.
“I began to sing in my softest voice. They could not see me though I could see them.
“I opened the door of the closet with one intention for him: to slit his thew, slit it like a stalk of henna. You can only do that when you have loved someone so completely that you have held nothing back and there is nothing left of you—it has all been used. Do you understand?” I understood all too well. “Otherwise, I'd have said to her, Take him and keep him. Good riddance. Instead, I jumped on them.
“I cut them, but not as badly as I had in mind. They escaped. I waited for the police. I felt as if I had taken off handcuffs that had been on my wrists the whole time. I had been looking for greatness, and I found it then. I was free at the very moment when my freedom would end.”
She saw my expression as I followed the story, and she smiled.
“Genet died in prison, Marion. Genet is no more. When they take your living child away, you die, and the child growing inside you dies, too. All the things that matter are gone, and so I am dead.”