Discretion by Elizabeth Nunez Page A

Nerida was traditional. The hunter deserved rest when he returned home from the kill. How surprised her old suitors would have been to know that there was no need for them to have been intimidated by her just because she had been to university!
    Marguerite had not created rooms with me in mind. She decorated them for herself. Color was splashed everywhere. Her bedroom was pink, her bathroom orange, her kitchen yellow. Only the walls of the outer room that served as her living room, dining room, and studio remained neutral. And yet they were not white like the walls my wife had painted for me. Dove gray, Marguerite called thecolor of her outer room, and she kept it from being somber with huge canvases of her art, most of them paintings in bright colors.
    She said the ones I saw in the restaurant, the black-and-white etchings, were part of a new phase for her. She had just started experimenting with shadings of black and white. Chiaroscuro, she said the technique was called. One could use color to achieve a similar effect of light and dark, but she preferred to work with black and white. “For a change,” she said, smiling at me and indicating the bold colored paintings on her wall. But she was not ready to hang those black-and-white etchings in her apartment just yet. They were still evolving, she said. “Anyhow they can be painful to look at. Maybe,” she added, “that was why nobody wanted them.”
    I knew she said that as a concession to me. When she had first asked me what I thought of the paintings I saw in the restaurant, I said they were sad.
    Marguerite had put wicker baskets everywhere in her apartment—on top of shelves, at the sides of kitchen chairs, in corners of the room, under the bathroom sink. She filled them with bunches of dried wildflowers and roses, most of them pink and red. She used a futon for her couch, huge pillows for armchairs. Some were covered in orange, yellow, and red batik prints, some were in solid colors, some were striped.
    She worked in the front of the room, her back to the only window in the apartment. Cans of paintbrushes, soaked in water, were lined neatly on the floor next to her easel, which held her latest painting, but it was always covered when I was there. The rest of her work that was not on her walls was stacked against her bedroom wall. This was the only order in Marguerite’s apartment: the order in which she catalogued her work, in which she defined her space to work, in which she organized the tools of her work. Yet I did not feel closed in there. I did not suffer from the claustrophobia and confusion Nerida feared would come from the juxtaposition of different patterns, the placement of one color against another, the disorder of pillows piled on the floors.
    Less than a week after Marguerite and I made love for the firsttime, I was back in her apartment again. I gave Nerida some explanation about needing to be at the UN for two days, so that I could spend a night with Marguerite. If Nerida had any doubts about the legitimacy of my trip to New York, she did not voice them then, nor in the weeks that followed when more and more I found excuses to stay overnight in New York. It was not long before Marguerite’s apartment felt like home, my second home, and Marguerite my wife, my second wife. I was as much at ease with the explosion of color, the jumble of baskets, flowers, and furniture there as I was with the quiet order of the rooms Nerida had prepared for me, the subtle arrangement of shapes and shades meant to soothe me. But soon I began to grow less at ease, less comfortable, less certain of my place with Marguerite, less secure of her than I was of Nerida, and I found myself wondering if she knew the secret that was not voiced between us. If she had guessed, suspected, that I had a wife. If the comfort I felt was a false comfort, the ease I assumed, a false ease—make-believe woven by desire, by love, by longing gratified. Made real because I had wished myself