Forever And A Baby

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.”