Is that how she saw me, as someone who fretted over her unnecessarily? Is that what a ‘Southern’ man signified to her? Finally I eked out some sort of congratulations, said, ‘Excuse me,’ and got out of the house.
I walked down the men’s road. A cluster of pigs were muscling each other for a scrap of food beneath one of the houses and making a racket. There was very little light in the sky, but whether it was sunrise or dusk, I wasn’t sure anymore. I had been spun around by them. I was seven hours away from my work, and had been for who knew how many days. Nell was pregnant. She and Fen had made a baby. When I was with them it was easy to convince myself that she hadn’t fully made her choice yet. She played her part in that. Her eyes burned into mine when I had an idea she liked. She followed every word I said; she referred back. When I had written down Martin’s name on the graph she’d passed her finger over the letters. I felt in some ways we’d had some sort of sex, sex of the mind, sex of ideas, sex of words, hundreds and thousands of words, while Fen slept or shat or disappeared. But his kind of sex with her produced a baby. Mine was useless.
Where the houses ended the road broke in three directions: straight to the next hamlet, left toward the water, and right to the women’s road. At this intersection up ahead, I saw two shapes against the trees, a man and a woman. They were not touching. If I hadn’t known better I would have said the man was white, not because of his skin color, which I could not see in the nearly complete darkness, but in the way he stood sloped and heavy with his weight out in front. As I got closer I could hear they were arguing, the girl in a pleading tone, and when the man saw me he started toward me, then stopped short. He turned back and said something to the girl and they moved on quickly up the women’s road. Xambun. It had been Xambun. And for those few steps he’d taken toward me, he’d thought I was Fen.
I went down to the beach. It was empty, the water unnaturally far away. The canoes were lined up, mine included, high up the beach. Fen’s pews. Had he begun interviewing Xambun without telling Nell? I paced for a while, then stood in one place too long and something crawled up the inside of my trouser leg and I shook it out. Scorpion. I stepped on it heavily and the crunch of its carapace and brittle bones was deeply satisfying. I moved quickly up the sand, back to the house. Their lamps were still lit. I put my hands on the ladder and heard their voices. I moved under the house to hear them more clearly.
‘I can see it, Nell. I can see it right in front of me and I can hear it in your voice and I can feel it under my skin. I’m not inventing anything.’
‘This is what you do. That’s why you’re a Northerner. You want to keep people under lock and key. One real conversation with someone else and—’
‘Oh,’ he began in falsetto, ‘you’re a Southerner and I’m a Southerner and he’s an asshole. I recognize this. That was me three years ago. And now I’m Helen on the fucking quai.’
‘You’re extrapolating all—’
‘That’s right. I am extrapolating, Nell. And brilliantly, like the trained scientist that I am. This whole thing is a way for the two of you to screw right in front of me.’
‘That is ridiculous and you know it.’
‘I will never be one of your castoffs, Nellie.’
‘Don’t’
‘I’m not—’
‘I mean it.’
‘Goddamn it, Nell.’
When I came in, Nell was straightening up our grid papers. She didn’t look at me.
‘There you are,’ Fen said.
‘I’m going to get some shut-eye,’ Nell said.
I ached for sleep as well, but wanted to keep him from lying down beside her for as long as possible. I poured us each a drink and took the sofa, which faced their bedroom. Nell brought a lamp with her, wrote something briefly on her bed, and blew out the light. Fen watched me watch her. It was too dark to see anything, but I knew her already, knew her breasts and the narrow of her back, the rise of her bum and the knot of her calf. I knew the break in her ankle and scars on her skin and her short round toes.
He told me about a letter he’d gotten from a friend in Northern Rhodesia. The friend had told him a story about his shoes being stolen and the village-wide hunt for them. It was a long story with the shoes ending up in the trunk of an elephant, and Fen told it badly.
‘That’s funny,’ I said.
‘It’s absurd,’ he said. But neither of us was laughing.
When he stood to go to bed, I told him I’d be gone in the morning. In fact, I thought I’d leave after they were asleep. She would be safer, I concluded, if I were not around to enrage him.
He sat back down. ‘No. No. You can’t go.’
‘Why not?’
‘I need you here. We both need you here. We need to keep going with this theory.’