“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,
“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.”
There was a tiny part of me that wanted to say,
I felt compassion for her of a sort that I hadn't felt before: it was a feeling better than love, because it released me, it set me free of her.
51. The Devil's Choice
IN RETROSPECT, my illness began that Sunday morning in the crystalline moment of waking to a silent house in which I knew I was alone and she was gone. Forty-three days later, the first shudder of nausea arrived, an ocean surge as if a distant Vesuvius had collapsed into the sea. Next an ancient fog, an Entoto mist full of shifting shapes and animal sounds descended on me, and by the forty-ninth day I had lost consciousness.
How remarkable that a life should turn on such a small thing as a decision to open a door or not. I ushered Genet in on a Friday. She let herself out two days later without a good-bye, and nothing would be the same again. She placed a pinwheel cross at the center of the dining table, a gift for me, I presumed. That St. Bridget's medallion she wore on a necklace had been her father's, and it had belonged to a Canadian soldier named Darwin before that.
The tale of her ex-husband lingered like a nasty flu. I'd insisted on hearing the story. I discovered that Genet was capable of selfless love— just not with me. Still, in my home I'd found a momentary equilibrium with her, or the illusion of it, as if we were again like children playing house, playing doctor.
I HURRIED HOME each night after work, hoping to find her waiting on my stoop. My heart would sink when I glimpsed the yellow sticky I had left for her inside the screen door, telling her the key was with my good neighbor, Holmes, and to feel at home. Once inside, I felt compelled to retrieve my note, checking to be sure I had, in fact, written on it. I confess, I even left a stub of a pencil by the door in case she felt inclined to compose a reply.
By Friday, a week after I first dragged her into my home, the sight of that yellow square of paper screamed,
I wasn't angry with Genet. She was consistent, if nothing else. I was angry with myself because I still loved her, or at least I loved that dream of our togetherness. My feelings were unreasonable, irrational, and I couldn't change them. That hurt.
Sitting in my library that night, having done more damage to a bottle of Pinch in four hours than I had in the year since I bought it, I replayed our last exchange. She'd been curled up in the chair I now sat in, wearing my dressing gown, the gown that I now wore. I came to her with tea— that signature move of fools, one of the stigmata by which you shall know us.
“Marion,” she said, for she had been gazing at my library, my eclectic little collection. “Your father's apartment in Boston, the way you described it … it sounds so much like this.”
“Don't be ridiculous,” I said. “I built these bookcases myself. Half the books here have nothing to do with surgery. Surgery isn't my life.”
She didn't argue. We sat quietly. At one point I saw her gaze flit to the rug on the floor between us—there was an intruder sitting naked on those synthetic fibers, a dark silent man with razor cuts to his body. His presence put a damper on our conversation.
When I announced I was going to go to bed, she said she'd be right along. She smiled. I didn't believe her. I thought I'd never see her again. But I was wrong. She joined me under the covers. We made love. It was tender and slow. It was the very moment when I thought, At last, she is going to stay, but in fact it was her good- bye.
TWO WEEKS AFTER SHE LEFT, I felt at odds with my house. I found my library oppressive. In the kitchen, I took out my dinner, which was a foil packet labeled FRIDAY in my handwriting; it was the last of what I had cooked, frozen, and packed in aliquots many weekends ago. Now I saw this categorizing of my freezer food as a sign of the true chaos inside my head.
