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