Читать книгу Forever And A Baby - Margot Early - Страница 10

From 1978 to 1981, my father and I lived in the Sudan, between the ‘Atbara and Gash rivers, with a group of Rashaida, nomadic Bedouins whose ancestors had crossed the Red Sea from Arabia in the nineteenth century. With our guests, our cousins, we set out in our Land Cruiser to rejoin them. The vehicle had no mirrors and no left rear window. Desert sand, which is dust, had collected several inches thick in parts of the back. The wind and rain came in and moulded a small desert. Skye had brought her own mirror—two—but she didn’t like the sand or wind or wearing long pants and long sleeves in the heat. “What do you mean this isn’t hot? Was that a joke?” As the sun fell on the primitive track leading southwest from Kassala, I saw the dust rise, as it does in the desert, back-lit by sun, like steam swirling off a hot pool. Minutes passed before we met the other vehicle, a faded green Land Rover, and stopped to converse with the Americans inside, one of whom took out an Egyptian-made assault rifle and aimed it at my father. “A fall cannot occur without potential energy.”

—Ben, recollections of an early fall

Gloucester, Massachusetts

One week earlier

October 16

SOMETIMES, WHEN SHE was waiting—for food or visa stamps or bureaucracy at border crossings—Dru counted days. She had left her husband in Nantucket to fly to New York, then Paris, and on to Bamako, Mali, 218 days earlier. Between that day and this, she and Omar had spent thirteen days and eight nights together.

She had decided to tell someone.

Everything.

Tristan. She could only tell her twin. She couldn’t tell Keziah. Keziah would have an opinion about what Dru had agreed to do for Omar, for both of them. Tristan might have an opinion, too, but it would be like hers, as though they owned the same head.

In their language, he might say, Surfside, which meant the apartment where they’d lived with their mother after the Tobias Haverford House was sold; Surfside meant better than a tent and worse than a boat. Here in Gloucester, Dru would jump on his back like a kid. Here, no one knew the person under the faded blue, almost gray, sweatshirt hood, behind gas station sunglasses, her brother’s cast-off chinos cinched at her waist with a canvas belt.

But the Sarah Lynnda wasn’t in port, nor her captain. Not for another week.

Dru would wait. Life had resigned her to watching the sea, knowing that fishing killed more men than any other job. A solemn fatalism prevailed.

Still, she loved Gloucester, the locals, the dingy Inner Harbor. She watched chain and gears haul a boat, an elderly dragger, up the railway and down through the brick archways to a subterranean pit. A cup of coffee warmed her hand, steamed in the air. A couple came from the docks. No. A man and his grown daughter, a white woman with dreadlocks. Pregnant and carrying in front, the baby already dropped.

Dru refused these thoughts, chose others. What would it be like never to comb her hair? She imagined charity auctions, benefit balls, state dinners…. Yes, yes. Her reverie broke. The man. She studied his face, the fall of his gray hair. His cowlick. Just a ghost, a doppelgänger.

But Dru walked closer, could not help it. Because of the cowlick. His hair riding up just that way on the right side of his forehead, his bangs drooping on the other side. She had to know that it was an illusion.

Not.

Not.

He hugged the young woman, who turned and flashed him a peace sign. They hurried off in opposite directions. He went toward the docks. Dru lost sight of him behind a truck.

She searched frantically. Was it him? Did I really see him?

But the man was gone.

She landed in the present, in the facts of her life that remained the same even under a bleak sky, beside a bar with a barn-red exterior. The fact that she must go home sometime. What to tell Omar. What to say to Omar. What to feel toward Omar. What to ask Omar. Dru pushed back her hood. The plan was over. She had scrapped it. It was no more.

No longer would she wander the world searching for the Appropriate Man. She’d made up that name for him. She couldn’t call him the perfect man or the right man. Omar was those. She’d wanted Omar’s baby. That’s all I have to tell him. Again.

When her father’s boat was lost, she’d learned the nature of expectations. A baby was not a right. Period.

She held her hand to her forehead. Did she value her marriage to a man who’d suggested she have sexual intercourse with someone else in order to conceive a child? It was because of that bicycle accident in Utah, that terrible fall. At first, she’d accepted Omar’s plan, knowing she should feel gratitude. She’d planned her quest. She’d gone. First to a place where she’d meet no one but the others on her guided tour. Seeking the notoriously inaccessible. Tumbuktu.

On the Niger riverboat, packed by class with desperate humans, Dru—desperate in her own way—had admitted that she hadn’t come to find a man but for other reasons. She’d come in search of the Tuareg. She believed Nudar had been one of those nomads. And while her group camped among the Tuaregs of the Niger, a woman went into labor. Dru knew no Tamashek, but enough French to say more than sage femme. Yet Rika’s birth at sea had returned. With anger. Why must Raisha, the Tuareg mother, have no option but childbirth in a skin tent? Dru touched the cowrie-shell fertility pendant that hung beneath her shirt. The marabout had said, You must see that you’re afraid. No, Dru wasn’t afraid to practice midwifery. But her reasons for giving it up—the paparazzi, such rude intrusiveness, the lack of privacy in the life of Dru Haverford Hall—would be incomprehensible to the marabout. Dru hadn’t dared say, My family fascinates Americans because we appear unlucky. And I fascinate them because my husband is richer than all the rich men in West Africa put together. She couldn’t hope to make a woman who’d never traveled further than Bamako understand. She hadn’t stopped practicing because of meconium in Rika’s bag of waters. Despite a master’s in nurse-midwifery and 400 births, her own family’s notoriety and Omar’s wealth were enough to keep Dru from midwifery.

From Timbuktu, she’d rushed home to find Omar absent. He couldn’t get away from Curaçao, must fly directly to Hong Kong.

Dru had left again, taking the dogs. To meet a series of men, a long line of men, and she’d ended up fiddling with her earrings or her hair or trying not to yawn. Then Key West and that bar…The carpenter she’d thought was cute reeked of Cuervo and they had nothing in common, and he kept talking about her body and how he liked her hips, how she wasn’t “a stick” and he liked a woman with some meat on her. Meat. She’d also worried that he was unintelligent, then hated herself for her prejudice. But she was selecting a father for her and Omar’s child!

Back to Nantucket—Omar for one awkward night, when she’d decided she knew what a condom felt like to a man because some invisible barrier had covered her senses, numbing her utterly. If you love me, she’d asked, how can you let me sleep with another man?

With reluctance. Because I love you.

He’d left in the morning on business. She’d said goodbye to the dogs and flown to Europe. A month in Paris, two in Scandinavia, sightseeing. Emotions absent. Back to Africa. Cairo and Aswan.

Morocco was ghastly, with all the Europeans in Arab dress. One man, a software CEO, had worn jeans and a canvas shirt, his hair in a ponytail. It was so close to completion, almost settled, and she couldn’t. Couldn’t begin to tell him the plan, couldn’t go to bed with him. He wasn’t her husband. That was the problem.

She didn’t want to do it.

She would tell Omar so. She was set to meet him in Nantucket soon—to stay—but first she needed this. To see Tristan. Have a beer and—

“Hi.”

She spun, the gears of the railway looming over her, high above. The cup fell, coffee running down the concrete.

“Sorry,” he said, folding the cup away in his pocket.

Him.

She had seen this man two months ago, at the camel market in Daraw, talking to a Rashaida sheikh. In Arabic. For Dru, in her circumstances, he’d been impossible to ignore. As now.

His hair was black, his build athletic. He wore a navy shell, thicker than a windbreaker. Brown eyes, almost black.

Nerves tingling, she backed away. Warm. Alert.

He stabbed his hands into his pockets. “I’m Ben Hall, your cousin.”

The Sudan stormed her senses, blasting memories.

“Omar asked me to look after you these past few months.” Sea-cold drowned the Sahara heat. A passing fisherman glanced at them, and she didn’t see. Look after her… He’d been following her? To watch her try to pick up a sperm donor?

And on the Niger…

No, it was impossible. Dru tossed her head back. “So where have you been?”

Whiskers coming through on his lean cheeks. “With you since New York, Paris, Bamako…” He closed his lips on Timbuktu. “We’ve been to Cape Hatteras and Key West and Greenwich—”

She held up her hand, stopping the recitation. Forget the problems of a woman traveling alone in Muslim countries. Greenwich had been a mistake, much too close to home. In her recklessness, she’d approached a lone and handsome man in the bar at the yacht club and said, I’m horny. I want to get laid. His mouth had tilted up on one side while he checked her out. Then he’d smiled tautly and edged away.

She’d realized she’d wanted him to, had said so with every word to the contrary.

Omar had provided a witness to her adventures, the one thing he’d promised not to do! She’d told him she couldn’t bear to have a bodyguard. Not for this.

She’d married him because she would have a bodyguard.

She’d married him for many reasons. And loved him because he was safe. And kept her safe.

Dru wasn’t going to ask Ben all he’d seen. “Well, your job is over, cousin.”

“You don’t remember me.”

“I do. How could anyone forget?” She shifted deliberately from the allusion to their past and what had happened in the Sudan. Everything that had happened. “My husband calls you ‘our young sheikh.”’

His mouth slanted.

Of course, that was an inherited title, wasn’t it?

“Maybe he thinks your father was a sheikh.” Flippant. Robert Hall was as unforgettable as the Sudan. And dead less than two years. “I’m sorry for your loss. Truly. And goodbye.”

He fell in step beside her. Faded jeans and running shoes. “I’ll stick close. Part of the job description.”

“I’ll bet talking to me wasn’t. It never is.” He was tall. Looking out for her. Maybe what bothered her was his face.

This unforgiving gray light had nothing to forgive in him.

A hot flush went through her, a stupid pheromone reaction.

She was scared. Scared.

The Sudan. The boy he’d been sometimes appeared in her dreams, although never in her nightmares of abduction.

And never as a man.

Comfort came because he was beside her. Comfort. But heat spread at the juncture of her legs. Flushing. Riding through her.

It was too stupid and too impossible. Forget it, Dru, she muttered, even as she calculated how distantly they were related, the same consanguinity of Keziah, too far to mention. He was handsome. He resembled Omar slightly—dark eyes, oak skin, black hair. But the jaw was different, the long rugged lines of his face, and the aloofness that could turn wholly present in a moment with the sorcery of an interviewer, a seeker of truth. He’s sexy. Why did Omar send someone so sexy?

Why had Omar sent Ben?

Brown eyes fixed on her, while wind whipped her hair in front of her and one cool drop, wetness, hit her wrist. Then another. Rain.

She turned, but his hand caught her arm, bringing her around. The warmth through her sweatshirt made her shiver. Pulling away, she saw that his chin was hard, his eyes piercing. He kissed her mouth.

Dru put her hands up and shoved.

Her palms had barely connected with his chest when she flew backward. He caught her. Other than that, he hadn’t moved at all.

“Don’t,” she said. She was glad of her shoes, trail shoes for running the dogs on gravel, because she ran through the moisture and the rain and the smell of fish, good and bad, and the smell of this centuries-old port. She ran, wondering if Omar had told Ben to try this as a last resort. Omar, who had avoided meetings with her, the days—and nights—they’d promised to spend together. He wouldn’t. He wouldn’t. Wouldn’t avoid her. Wouldn’t want her to choose Ben, his own nephew.

She ran behind buildings and found an alley and hurdled its fish scales and grease, sprinting until she reached the docks again. Alone, unseen, she wandered until dark, searching for the gray-haired man with the beak nose and her blue eyes and Tristan’s hollow cheeks and the cowlick on the right side. The man she believed, in the wetness rising from the sea, was her father. Her father, who had somehow never died.

EARLY IN HER MARRIAGE, Dru had fallen in love with anonymity. She liked to travel, to be on the move. She found a way to be unknown and close to the memories she loved, to her twin’s existence, to her father’s grave. To the ocean. In port cities, she bought boats with Omar’s money and registered them to her loved ones. Keziah’s Sunshine Daydream hailed from Portland, Maine. Her mother’s Hot Babe was berthed in Key West. Tristan’s trawler, Cup of Gold, in Gloucester. And so on. The boats floated but did not always run. They were low on conveniences. Floating hovels. They were refuge. Her hostels and hotels.

When darkness came, she returned to the thirty-foot trawler. Somewhere, Ben Hall, journalist and trained observer, must be watching. But not for a story. She knew better, knew the quality of her family’s ties. Still—I don’t want to be followed. Why hadn’t she ordered him to stop?

Because he was Omar’s employee.

Below deck in the trawler Cup of Gold, she cooked the simplest of meals, ate and wished for a phone. She’d have to walk to the pay phone to call Omar. 53 telephone conversations. 311 calls.

She washed dishes.

Yes, she must walk, in the dark, to call her husband.

312.

She worked up to it as she dressed. A thick sweater, Nantucket wool. A wool cap that had been her father’s, moth holes mended with her own hands. Her wet trail shoes, in case she had to run. Water licked the boat. Dru hugged herself and slipped out of the cabin into the wet cold and the silver-lit night. Security lights. Snow air.

“It occurred to me a few times that I should give you some pointers.”

Dru banged her shoulder on the door frame. She locked the cabin door behind her. She liked him no better as a shadow. “Do you need some pointers? Let’s see, in Arabic, it’s ‘Ma’assalama.’ In Tamashek, it’s ‘Harsad.’ In English, we say goodbye.”

He shifted on the aft seat. “Let me start over.”

“You could leave. That would be a start. Of the end.”

“I had an idea that if you were set on this plan Omar told me about, I could—”

“Procure? Is that the word you’re looking for?” What was it about harbors that made everything echo?

He cleared his throat. “Help. Was the word.”

In the milk-black light, misty and heavy, Dru raked his jaw with her eyes. I want my husband. I want to have Omar’s baby, and it’s impossible, and maybe he’s become indifferent to me because of this, our infertility. I’m not going to discuss it with Ben Hall. She must get to a phone and hear Omar’s voice, his love for her. She must go home. Maybe before the Sarah Lynnda docked with thousands of pounds of swordfish in her hold.

Dru bundled her heavy sweater about her.

“Want to share a bottle of wine?”

Beside him in a paper bag. Big enough for glasses, too. The sea rolled beneath them, lifting the boats and the dock, everything singing. “Why?”

“Because, through the medium of conversation, you may find me irresistible.”

Wood and floatation bending and straining, stays pinging masts. A fish jumped nearby, invisible.

“I find my husband irresistible. And you are one of his employees.” She had never spoken to anyone this way. Family, no less. “Go away. Leave me alone.”

“You know, twenty years ago, in a Rashaida camp, besides failing to conceal your—”

“Shut up. We were children. And, yes, I had a crush on you.”

“Betrothed is the word. Ignoring our interesting child marriage, of course.”

“What marriage?” She snorted. “And the engagement was conditional at best. The bride price you offered was paltry. An intentional insult.” But her eyes steamed. Children bickering in the aftermath of trauma. Their innocence blocking out what they’d seen and heard. She closed her eyes.

“When Haamda told our fortunes before—”

She cut him off. “Who? I don’t remember.” He was courteous not to take her bride-price remark further, not to follow it up with an allusion to Omar’s wealth. Especially tonight when Dru wore her watch—but not her rings. She would put them on when she returned from the phone. “For your information, I won’t be looking for any more men or meeting them. Except my brother, if he comes in soon.”

She listened to the harbor.

He watched her. “That leaves me.”

Him? She moved closer, so he could hear her, and sat on a wet aluminum chest. “No. My husband has hired you, perhaps as a last resort. He probably finds you trustworthy, sufficiently intelligent and adequately attractive. Also, you live a reckless life in dangerous locations and are likely to die prematurely, not that anyone wishes it. You resemble him faintly, even with no blood relationship, and we’ll probably never see much of you. The fact that you’re family is another plus.” She paused, not looking at him. “Our family has a genetic predisposition for dissembling. Even, I imagine, the journalists. Especially them.”

Dru met his gaze. Poets recorded these echoes of the eyes.

“If you’ll give me your keys and direct me to a corkscrew, I’ll open the wine. Don’t make me drink it alone.”

She stretched out a leg to dig in the pockets of her jeans. The hand that took the keys from hers was a strong, lean shadow. His movement past was athletic darkness, muscle unseen.

Dru shivered. No thoughts. Nothing to think about. Just some wine after dinner with a man who obviously wasn’t much of a drinker, living as he did in North Africa and the Middle East, sometimes crossing down to Mali or Niger for a story. As much a nomad as his father, Robert Hall.

He brought the bottle and glasses to the deck. “It’s warmer below.”

“And cleaner up here.”

It was a merlot, poured by those strong, lean hands. Smooth, olive brown, she saw. The wine was good.

She didn’t thank him.

“Omar,” he said, “never suggested that I should make love with you.”

Her toes were cold, and she wiggled them in her wool socks and running shoes. Omar seldom used that expression, found other ways to speak of intimacy. She missed Omar deliberately, missed his intelligence. She remembered their first year together, how he’d begun to explain finance to her, explained it in philosophical terms all his own. The tutelage had never ceased. He understood the sciences—and human nature. His were the genes she wanted to reproduce.

But no chance. His fall had stolen the chance of their conceiving together. It had happened on their honeymoon, while bicycling in Utah’s canyonlands on their honeymoon, both of them impressed by how fit he was at sixty-one. They hadn’t known that the fall had rendered him sterile, although they’d wondered. And discovered this year.

Omar’s line had ended.

She said, “Don’t you think that men perceive children as the means to continue their line, while women are more involved in being pregnant and giving birth and nursing and having and raising a child?”

“In love, you mean?”

Lightly deflecting the slur on his gender.

He drifted from her briefly. “And, given your plan, how could Omar be thinking of his line?”

She studied him, sensing an undercurrent. He stared over the stern and the dock at the water, and she studied his profile. A nose that reminded her of his first cousin, Keziah. Black hair. Lean face. Was it his chin that made her think of Omar? He’d gotten a great spill of dark beauty from their mutual ancestor, Nudar, and the Cape Verde sailor her daughter had married.

He’s handsome. He’s very handsome.

Anger curled inside her, stalking her, and pounced. It ran with the wine in her veins. The missed rendezvous with Omar. His near-insistence that she keep looking. The anger shredded her hesitation and doubt, and she turned off her internal calculator, lost the numbers of days since she’d left Nantucket and the other tabulated days with their uncertain meanings. Her line, a matrilineal line. Nudar’s line. Ben Hall was part of that.

“Recommend yourself to me.” No more surreptitiously studying strange men or offering herself in a way meant to bring rejection. On the deck of a defunct trawler, in an old sweater and torn chinos, she became Cleopatra, Mata Hari, Scheherazade, Isis, every powerful woman and goddess of myth and legend and history. She owned her power to seduce, to invite a proposition, to reject it if she chose. To accept what was worthy.

She asked, “Why do you want to do this?”

Ben straightened a little, suddenly farther away. He brought his glass to his lips. Drank half. Held the glass. “I would enjoy it. I think you would, too.”

She winced, felt the expression on her face, the drawing back of her shoulders. “That’s the best you can do?”

He refilled her glass, and she heard the wine fall in. “I’ve known Omar my whole life,” he said. “In some ways—” unsteady “—I’m in his debt. And you want a baby.” He paused. Stopped. Murmured, “Hard to talk about.” A brief silence. “In February, I was in the Aïr Mountains with a Tuareg family I know. The boys are teenagers. They go into the mines and come out covered with uranium dust.”

“Instead of indigo.” She drank wine, and the rich velvet in her mouth and throat nourished the legend inside her, invoking her as a tribal queen who would choose the finest of the young men to continue her line. He’d be ritually sacrificed at the end of the year, and she could choose another…Her fancy drifted away, back to the Tuareg who wore uranium dust instead of indigo.

Ben might not have heard her comment, or maybe he thought it too obvious to mention. The Tuareg were the blue men of the desert, the nomads of the southern Sahara, whose wealth was their robes. No water for soaking huge garments, so they pounded the indigo dye into the cloth until it shimmered, rich purple-blue, and their garments stained their skin as well. Some of them were light as the Berbers. Some black. The women danced the guedra; some called it a trance dance, others a love dance.

She and Keziah had wondered if Nudar could have been one of them, living in Algeria back then, captured by another tribe, sold in Morocco….

“I’d lived there for a year, working,” he said. Quiet. “Two men employed by Omar came to find me. But the government doesn’t like westerners near the mines. I received a message from Agadez, the nearest town. Omar’s men wanted to know could I meet them? I hesitated. Might not be allowed to return. But what Omar wanted had to be important. I went. Met his men at their camp. ‘Omar asks you to please come to him.’ I came to Nantucket, and Omar told me about your plan—”

“His plan.”

“Your mutual plan. He asked me to look out for you.”

She heard the unspoken. This silliness had taken him from where he preferred to be, from an injustice and a tragedy that must be observed and told and, if possible, stopped. The teenage boys should be building their herds—but the Tuareg herds she’d seen were scanty, a few goats. She said, “What qualifies you? To look after me?”

Even in the dark, his embarrassment was there. In silence.

She read his mind, his memory. No. He had been just a boy then, in the Sudan. Surely he didn’t imagine he could have done anything to stop what had happened. Though…

She tried to lose interest and instead pictured him in the desert, not as a boy but a man. She drank more wine and saw him with a press pass, entering countries on journalist’s visas, speaking with foreign soldiers, photographing a revolt. A smile, her mouth misbehaving. “You still haven’t recommended yourself to me.”

“In my spare time, when I’m not interviewing courteous but dangerous men or taking notes on the screams of prisoners undergoing torture, I perform the duties of leading my family of three women and twenty-nine children and teenagers, some of whom have married each other and given me grandchildren. The tents of my family are working laboratories. While I’m away from home, carrying salt across the Sahara in camel caravans, my wives and daughters remain behind in their tents, sewing patches for the hole in the ozone layer. As we cross the desert, pausing only to pray and eat, my sons and I study the problem of cold fusion. I own nineteen camels, six tents and four Humvees. Finally, from living a life of devotion, I have discovered how to make a woman have an orgasm during every sexual encounter.”

“I’m sorry he brought you here for this. It was trivial.” Her father popped into her mind. She’d seen him earlier. Been sure of it. The incident that afternoon seemed far away.

“Babies are never trivial.”

“So I’d better get pregnant and have one, considering that you went to all this trouble?”

“You misunderstand me.”

“Where does sleeping with another man’s wife fit into your piety and devotion?”

His teeth scraped his bottom lip. He reached for his wine-glass and lifted it. “To your keen insight.”

“A heretic?” she murmured.

He gazed at the water, where it faded to black and vanished.

Dru dropped the topic. She loathed being asked about her religious beliefs—or discussing them. But she knew the world in which he moved. Faith was assumed in dress and actions, sometimes ordained by law. She asked another question for the second time, a different way. “What’s in this for you?”

“You really don’t remember our marriage in the Sudan. With the Rashaida.”

“What are you talking about? No, I don’t remember.” She rolled her eyes. “And there’s plenty I do remember. Do I have to ask again?”

What was in it for him.

“Fulfillment of desire.”

“For a one-night stand.” She didn’t know how he’d gotten closer, their knees almost touching.

“For things you can’t imagine.” His black lashes hid his eyes.

She reached for the bottle, but he roused himself and poured. Sipping, she examined the label. A twenty-five dollar bottle of wine. “You want to sleep with Omar’s wife. That must be it.”

“I want you to have my baby.”

Of all the lies, this was the greatest. “It wouldn’t be. Let’s get that out of the way. This is the end of your contact with me, Omar and the baby. This is a one-night stand. For all intents and purposes, I’m using birth control. Nothing will happen. Except sex.”

“Is this your time?”

“Let me paint another picture. I am the queen of a matriarchal society. You will briefly enjoy a position as my consort.”

“Many positions.”

She rolled her eyes again. “Then,” she finished, “you go. Forever. You still haven’t said what’s in this for you.”

“I’m trying to help. Omar is a second father to me.” He paused, expressionless. The wine made her see Ben looking for himself in her eyes. “Omar wants a child,” he said. “He wants you to have a child. I’m a sperm donor.”

“You took two hundred and eighteen days to volunteer.” She hadn’t meant to speak in numbers, had meant to erase them.

He had to notice.

Black eyes like Omar’s, like Nudar’s. Horsetail lashes, long, thick and black. He wasn’t drunk and she was. His eyes spoke. “Sometime I will tell you about those 218 days.”

Her shoulders trembled. The fabric of their pants touched. She wondered who he was inside. She wanted badly to know. And that was dangerous.

He’d abandoned his wine.

“What did you think?” she asked. “What did you think when he told you his plan?”

His head swiveled. Saw her. “That he has more faith in twelve billion dollars than I would.” Faith that money would hold her.

“He has faith in our love.”

No comment.

So be it. If Omar wanted something…She couldn’t guess. But he had decided on this plan in love; she’d agreed for the same reason.

“I would like,” she said, “to see inside your mind. I remember when you could hit an upright twig at thirty yards with a slingshot. In the desert.”

“You remember a lot.” He gazed at her for too long, as though he understood things she didn’t. “What do you think is in my mind?”

She didn’t know. “Maybe…you’re hardened. Maybe…you go to look at difficult things, as you’ve said, and you’re silent and moved but you write what you feel. I read the piece in Harper’s. It wasn’t just journalism or essay-writing. Philosophy, too.”

“And what’s in your mind?”

She stared at the cabin, feeling the lock on her mouth, on the expression of her heart and her body. “It is the mind of Omar Hall’s wife. Hedge funds and hedgerows—on Orange Street, that is.”

“You’re a gardener?”

“I don’t want to talk about this.” Her throat ached. She was freezing and didn’t care. The wine was good. But it didn’t let them communicate, didn’t let her speak with his soul as she wanted. She would never criticize Omar. You couldn’t know when you were seeing your loved ones for the last time.

Or when you would see them again. She remembered the face of the boy in the Sudan, the eyes in the tent.

He emptied the bottle into her glass. The boat rocked, sang with the others to the sigh of the dock. “You saw the birth of Raisha’s child.”

The Tuareg mother in Mali. She didn’t ask him where he’d been, how he had followed them over the desert, across the Niger, along the river with the nomads, to Timbuktu. Or if he’d seen her flee the tent, drenched in sweat. For 204 days, she’d been in solitary confinement with the truth. Many truths.

“I want to know you.” He paused. “I think we can be friends.”

Her stomach hummed with heat, blood flushing her, seeping, pounding, while her skin reached for the hot quivering vibration. She smelled saltwater, fish, diesel and the scent of a man, carried on his garments. He moved closer on the aluminum locker. Closer.

“Tuareg is an Arabic name,” he said. “The nobles call themselves variations of Imighagh, from their verb iobarch, which means to be free, to be pure, to be independent. All those things.”

She breathed them in. All those things her counted days had come to be about. Tears gathered in her head and hid themselves, exerting pressure she ignored, except to think, I must be a midwife. I can’t be a midwife. I must be free. I’ll never be free. “Do you think Nudar was Tuareg?”

“I doubt it. I want to show you part of how they court. Ideally this would occur in your home, with your parents sleeping nearby. We mustn’t wake them.”

“Can we wake Omar?”

His nose neared hers. “It’s this.”

Her arms on his shoulders, his around her. He didn’t kiss her, and she wanted it. His scent infused her, carried through the damp air. She breathed him; he breathed her. No! No! She wasn’t a woman who did this, who would ever think of doing this. She would walk away from any man who made her consider doing this.

Because this was the moment of choosing whether or not to commit adultery, with her husband’s blessing.

Backing out of the tent, then away from the desert sun, she drank more wine. Wiped her brow under her hat. The wool itched her skin.

He wanted to be friends. It was the only way this could work. More, and she’d be unhappy when she returned to Omar, dissatisfied with him. Less, and she could not trust. She spoke to a friend. “I’m not sure I want to do this. I’m not sure I can.”

He took her empty glass from her. “Breakfast? I’ll shop. And cook.”

Why not? The trawler was private.

Dru tried to read her watch, from Cartier’s, a wedding gift from Omar. Eight-thirty. “I need to phone Omar.” Shaking. Shaking so hard. And not at the prospect of walking to the phone. “You’re family. It might not be…what he wants.”

He showed no reaction. They stood, still shadowed by the canopy. The skin at his throat was dark. Some black chest hairs, where Omar was hairless. “You might think,” he said, “of what you want.”

She released a cable to step down to the dock. But looked back first.

His eyes waited. He knew she might be afraid of the dark. Or, indelibly, of abduction. He would let nothing harm her. With a careless stroke of his gaze, he slayed her fear. His footsteps beside her on the dock were lazy, companionable, the angels of comfort. His warmth reached her through three hundred cubic inches of cold mist.

She could read the blueprint of a kind man.

Briefly, sweeping her hand over a wet and splintered railing, she wished he was cruel. Because she wanted to accept what he offered. And that was reckless.

She stumbled over chewing gum and cigarette butts. Her fears gathered and pressing on her, chanting in the key of doom that she should not. She should not. Dru walked through the chorus, losing his scent somewhere, until she saw the light above the telephone.

She dialed, followed the recorded prompts to enter her card number. Where was Ben? Even under the security lights, she couldn’t find him. He must be near, would not have left her. Privacy. In the cold, under the skeletons and monsters of steel, under a dry-docked leviathan, Dru listened to the phone in Nantucket ring. He won’t be home. Again.

Sergio answered. Then Omar was on the phone.

She felt half-warmth at the sound of his voice. And flatness, distance. Had part of her gone on leave from their marriage? She asked, “Do you really want me to do this?”

His soft laughter reminded her of nights of talk, Omar discussing the stars and the sight of snow on quahog shells and the antiquity of sharks and the intelligence of apes, then slipping past her to philosophy and quantum theory and the history of money and its future and the connections between all these things. “Aren’t you really asking if I don’t want you to do it?” His accent was all Massachusetts. Nantucket. Some people even called him an Islander.

Dru didn’t. She was.

She said, “I’ve met Ben.” Her heart pounded. Was Omar afraid, too? Did he know, had he known all along that she would find Ben attractive? Had he—“Did you ask him to be the donor? Did you plan it, Omar?”

“I asked Ben not to let you see him. But if you want him…”

“You know who I want.”

“That is a gift in my life. In many cultures, love is considered a sickness, something to be avoided. Marrying for love is frowned upon, because love, particularly sexual love, is unstable, and marriage must endure. So, go forth, Dru, if you want to bear a child. If you develop feelings for the man with whom you conceive this child, even for…my nephew, Ben, they will go away when you return to me. The Chinese cure for lovesickness includes a steady regimen of sex with a person other than the desired object.”

“I don’t want to be lovesick. And he’s a family member.”

“It’s nothing. Choose who you want.”

Her fingers grew stiff, icy, around the receiver. “I guess this is how you create a fortune. Taking this kind of risk.”

His voice roughened, a sign of life to her. “I’m sixty-six years old, and you want to make love with my handsome young nephew. This, Dru, is the gamble of my life.”

She could tell him she loved him, promise to always love him and say good night. She should. She was cold. But if she let him go…would it ever be the same? “Is that why you’re doing it? For the risk?”

“I want a baby. With you. And you have been a midwife and aren’t now because of my circumstances, and I won’t be responsible for your never bearing a child of your own.”

Her sigh echoed under the railways. “You aren’t responsible. We could adopt.”

“I want to raise a child who is part of you, Dru.”

“Are you sure you didn’t ask him to do it? As a last resort, if no one else would have me?”

A moment. “The possibility that no one would want you has never crossed my mind. I’m going to Curaçao for a few days. I’ll be hard to reach. If you need anything, please ask Sergio.”

“I love you.” She said it almost desperately.

“And I you. Good night, Dru.”

Not my love, not dearest. He was telling her, Go. Go do it.

“Omar?”

“Yes.”

“Our marriage is a pearl. I feel as though I’ll mar it if I do this thing.”

“A marriage shouldn’t be so frail.”

Really. He was guiltless as a conqueror. “Omar, is our marriage monogamous?”

“Finance is my mistress, Dru. Give me this gift. A child. And, Dru, it’s good to enjoy it.”

She hung up. Heard the water beyond the mist.

“What did he say?”

She jumped.

He leaned against a steel piling, needing a shave, his long lean face ending at that cleft chin.

Her cheeks hardened to thin sheets of ice. “Were you listening?”

“With limited success.”

She strode past him, toward the docks. He followed, his footfalls silent. Without looking, she knew he was there and said, “You think nothing of sleeping with married women?”

“You would be my first. You’re very traditional.”

Was she? “I’m an Islander. I suppose you’re not,” she said. “Traditional.”

No reply.

She walked. Heard her own breath. Never his. The moon appeared through clouds, a paler, more genuine sister of the security light. The dock creaked beneath her feet.

Such a frightening sound, behind and around her—her own breath.

At the trawler, he caught her forearm.

Warmth. Hard grip. Sliding to her hand.

Their fingers touched in darkness. He pulled her to him, close enough to smell, then her breasts against his chest. Omar was broad, with a different kind of power. She touched these new shoulders. Each hand fumbled, jerking slightly, removed from her will. She shouldn’t touch him.

“Is it because you live in the desert?” She tilted back her head. “Have you not had a woman in so long?”

He watched her, reading her.

“Just tell me,” she said. “Have you been traveling with some Oxford scholar or married the daughter of a chief?”

“No chief has offered me a daughter.” He dropped his eyes, raised them. “As to the former—no.”

“You’re a virgin?”

The certainty of his hands denied it. He kissed her forehead.

Omar wants this. Wants me to do this. And Ben wants to help—for Omar.

His lips pressed between her eyebrows and touched the bridge of her nose. They nuzzled like animals, and she felt that stirring beneath his jeans. Strong and warm. His mouth touched hers, gently biting her lower lip.

For Omar?

Ben Hall didn’t need to give his sperm to her and Omar. His wanting money was unlikely. Omar trusted him, and she’d never known a man so cautious with his trust.

Her body settled against that form under his jeans. Wanting. She should ovulate in a day, maybe two.

The deck was damp, the cabin door dewy. She unlocked it, opened it. She should say just the right thing, in just the right tone. But she wished she could tell him she was scared to death.

The sole bowed and bent beneath her weight. The utilitarian table, flipped up and out of the way. Nothing like a stateroom, just slim berths throughout and a wider berth forward of the galley. “That’s it,” she said, under a bare bulb.

The light made them naked, even in their clothes, everything so unreal, especially the stranger touching her lip.

“It doesn’t have to be good,” she said. “For me.”

“Doesn’t your orgasm increase the chance of conception?” Throwing aside his shell. Unbuttoning his plaid wool shirt. T-shirt underneath.

Her legs turned watery. She switched off the light. The boat was dark, except for the geometric patches of blue-gray from the dock lights and the portholes.

“It’s unnecessary.” Squeaking words. “I’m fertile; I’ll ovulate soon. And I’m really not interested in your patented techniques learned on the women of Africa.”

Ghostly blue and black dyed his face. The tilting of his lips was less than a smile. He nudged her toward the narrow berth. A bulkhead beside it had separated, a cheap panel peeling down like banana skin. All smelled damp and old. Only the mattress was new.

“You don’t have any diseases, do you?”

A faint shake of his head. He watched her. “You like me?”

Dru swallowed. “Enough.” She discarded her sweater. “I don’t want you to make love to me. Just sex. I wish I had a turkey baster with me. Why not artificial insemination?”

The hard mattress brought her too close to him.

“I wish I knew,” she said, “what’s in it for you.”

His lips tracked her jaw. His hand held her side, fingers spreading, guiding her down. “I can wait till you figure that out.” His nose near hers.

“It’s so appealing to be wanted as a one-night stand.”

“This is not a one-night stand. You’re coming back to the Sahara with me. My first three wives will be jealous and cruel to you, but you won’t be spending much time with them, anyhow. You and I will make love all day.”

His kiss warmed her lips, parting them. Their legs twined, the teeth of two combs fitting together. His skin swallowed her voice. “We weren’t going to do it…like that.” The words collided, falling on each other, never quite standing up, defeated by coursing blood, mating rites.

He said, “It’s the only way I know.”

Making love.

He was full of lies.

Dru searched her memory. Did Omar ever press his mouth to her as he spoke? Had they ever spoken this way? She was wild at his smell. At hard limbs. At a man her age. Her ears filled with shrieking winds, the sound of desire. It was evil, so cruel, to want anyone but her husband, the only man she’d ever known.

Evil to think, even for a second, It’s never been like this.

Hot shivering.

Permission. Omar had given it.

She sat up, shaking rapidly, jerking in blurred time. Her body had not been hers. Almost. It was now. Mine. Dru despised Omar, then imagined, then believed, she knew what he wanted—for her to know this about herself, to come to the point of refusing his Trojan horse. “Sorry. I can’t.” She scrambled her vibrating, quivering body over Ben’s and put her feet on the floor. Yes. The sole. Standing. Swaying. The hollow tinkling of water on the hull amplified. Unable to speak for trembling. “I w-won’t m-m-make l-l-l-love to anyone b-b-but m-m-my husband.”

He was half up. His powerful body eased out of the berth. She followed his face, but he never rose. He dropped to the warped and peeled linoleum, kneeling, stretching himself toward her on the sole like an unwashed man praying in the desert, not for the end of a sandstorm or for nightfall or shade or a drink of water or five times a day for God, but for goodness.

She had learned posture at the age of four and then how to keep her weight low and her head high, how to put grace in every gesture of her hands, every turn of her head. She had learned the dances of the Berbers and their nomadic relations, the Tuareg, of the Bedouins, of the Indians and Egyptians. There were dances for women and dances for men, dances for weddings, pregnancy and birth, sickness and death.

His dark head was bowed, and she recalled the advice of the Chinese, their remedy for lovesickness. For Omar, she must go home and dance the guedra, not the trance dance but the love dance. And then make love with him.

She did not thank Ben Hall. She said, “You should go.”

Slowly, he rose.

“I’m sorry this happened,” she said.

He nodded, lips tight. Briefly, he spoke in Arabic. He called her sister. He told her he loved her.

He told her goodbye as the Arabs do.

Which was to wish her peace.

THE KNOCKING INTERRUPTED her drowsing. She opened her eyes to light from a day she knew, without looking at the portholes beside her, was gray.

“Dru?”

The pants she’d worn the night before were heaped against the locker. She dragged them on and let her long T-shirt do as a top. Climbed from her berth and crossed the decrepit linoleum in her bare feet. To open the cabin door further and let him in.

She squinted at the object he held up.

And swallowed. “Where did you get that?”

“The hospital. The supermarket doesn’t get their turkey basters for a few weeks.” His cheeks darkened. “I told a nurse that it’s…a home project.”

If he’d blushed like that, no wonder the nurse had parted with the Tomcat catheter.

He murmured, “So…Sabah il-kheyr.” Good morning. “Let’s make a baby.”