“Are you all right?” he asked, freezing.
I considered. I was. “Gently,” I said, and held him in my arms to calm him. “Go slower.” I kept my eyes open and watched while he closed his, screwing up his face in some sort of internal struggle. My body was with him while my mind processed thoughts about death penalties, raping soldiers and invasive sand, and my ears listened for footsteps but heard only the lapping of the sea. Then I was looking from Geoffrey’s clenched face to the moon and stars, and with my guidance Geoffrey’s mouth had gone to my breast, and thought was nearly chased away, when he gasped, “Can I?”
I ran through the calculation I’d already made, “Yes, go on.”
He came immediately, collapsing on top of me with a groan, leaving me some laps short of a high tide. It was a complicated, busy, odd lovemaking, and I could not tell whether the sum was good or bad.
After a minute of stillness, he lifted his weight from me and rearranged me, as if packing away something fragile, “'You’re beautiful, Marcella,” he offered.
“Thank you, Geoffrey,” I replied.
I'VE BECOME A SECRET WATCHER OF FAMILY FEUD,THETV show. In the early afternoon I lie on my couch and watch American families compete over who knows most about what the average American thinks. It’s a competition to see who is most normal. I’m fascinated. As far as I can judge from Family Feud my colleagues are not normal Americans.
Without going outside, I’m learning a lot about America, including that the biggest fear of Americans is speaking in public, a surprise this, since they seem to do it so readily, including the contestants. Can there be so little else to fear? The news is full of guns and murder. But I’ve also just learned that most Americans believe that when their dogs dream, they dream mostly of cats. To give so much thought to the dreams of pets argues for a wistful tenderness. The more I watch, the more I feel I am on strange, swampy ground. I told my students yesterday that Americans were exotic, strange, impossible to understand. It was a sort of joke, to turn the tables and make a simple point, but they just looked at me with open mouths.
According to Family Feud, the circumstance that most encourages a husband to be unfaithful is the possession of wealth, which I guessed right for once, something true around the world. And I learned that everyone in America knows about something called the tooth fairy, a pagan spirit that leaves money under the pillows of children, the ghost of lost teeth. I thought that might be worthwhile for an immigrant to remember, important knowledge for fitting in. When the tooth fairy leaves money, the average American believes the normal amount is one dollar.
I haven’t found anything half as useful as Family Feud in the sociology books that are supposed to tell me what remains in America after the immigrants are melted down. The thing about this programme is that it tells you what Americans think the others do, not what they actually do: the shared myths of being American. “We asked a hundred Americans what they thought was ...” goes the miniature host, before asking the contestants to guess what the hundred Americans thought. When I first saw the programme by accident, before fascination turned into a daily addiction, I was uncomfortable, embarrassed. The two competing families jumped up and down with enthusiasm. Big beefy men and bespectacled matrons, old age pensioners even, bounced with excitement because they had got an answer right and won five hundred dollars. It was so undignified that I felt for their humiliation. Now I am less embarrassed, which proves the progress I am making.
They have names from everywhere, these families: the Mionettas, the Fongs, the Koslowskis, the Martinezes, African-Americans with British names like Smith or Davies. They all jump; they all shout and scream in the same way My efforts to make sense of my multi-cultural job description have been disrupted by my exposure to Family Feud and its perfect erasure of immigrant distinctions. They all jump and smile. They are all disappointed but brave when they fail. The Fongs turn out to be as skillful at knowing what other Americans think as the Davies or the Mionettas. The money produces the same glee. I am fascinated by this show of unanimous accord.
I admitted my vice to Julia, who was scornful, so that I felt abashed. “That’s a horrible show,” she said. “That’s not America. I can’t believe you watch that!” One of the things about Julia is how outraged she can get over small things.
"IT MIGHT HAVE BEEN A THIEF. IT MIGHT HAVE BEENsomeone he insulted. Or it might be because he was a spy, or because he asked the wrong questions. Or because someone thought he was from the World Bank. Or it might have been the Moslems, or someone who doesn’t like white people. Or it might just be something between the Europeans. It could even be over a woman. Or, who knows, a boy. Or maybe he just tripped and banged his own head. He’s foolish enough for that. Don’t you think, Marcella, that he’s foolish enough for that?”
I walked into this swamp of Zanzibar uncertainty, all stated in Mrs F’s definite voice, while carrying a heavy bowl of bottled beer into the Elephant Bar. It was early evening, before we were officially open. Mrs F was standing over the old ice-cream cabinet she used to cool the beer, talking to one of the Goan men who had nothing better to do.
“Who?” I asked.
“The English Boy.”
“Geoffrey? What about him?”
“Someone banged him over the head. He’s in the V. I. Lenin.”
I turned away to stack the bottles. My heart had jumped. “Is he badly hurt?”
“Lars says he was knocked unconscious. It’s a nuisance for Lars. He’s responsible for UN visitors here, you know.”
“What happened?”
“He was in
