Discretion by Elizabeth Nunez Page B

into believing it real, into thinking Marguerite was my second wife, her apartment my second home.
    Marguerite never asked me where I was or what I did when I was not with her, but now I wondered if it was because she did not want to know. If it was because she was afraid of the answers I would give her.
    I came to New York and I left New York and it seemed in that space in between, before I returned to her again, she would bury me deep in some place in her heart where I lay dormant, frozen, never being quite real for her until she saw me again. Often the first thing she did when we met was to press her ear against my heart and listen to my heartbeat. It was as if she needed to reassure herself that I was alive.
    She never telephoned me, though, of course, the only phone number I had given her was my office number in Washington. But she never used it, except for that one time she called to give me news of Catherine, and then, of course, that was before I went to her apartment. That was before we made love.
    Often I did not know until the very last minute when I was required to be at the UN in New York. Often my longing for her would become so intense that my head would ache and a hollow pit would open in my stomach. I would call her then, perhaps giving her notice of just a few hours, but even at those times she would be waiting for me without questions. Waiting if I came directly to her in the morning from the airport or late at night after work at the UN. It was as if time stood still for her and there was no time between the time I left her and the time I returned to her. Yet I knew she had not spent her days and nights in a vacuum waiting for me. There was always a new drawing she had to show me, or a painting she had begun or was finishing.
    I told myself that because she was an artist, she liked the arrangement we had—the long periods of two and three weeks of absence between the brief days we spent together. She told me that she had been offered a position teaching art full-time at a small college but she had turned it down. She needed unobstructed time for her art, she said. She could not do as some of her friends did—draw or paint for a few hours in the morning and then go to work. That was not how her ideas developed. She needed a full day. The reassurance of no obligations, the freedom from commitments. It was only then her imagination was freed to construct images she could not conceive with her conscious mind. The mere idea that she had something to do or someone to see that day stymied her ability to dream. Her body was the instrument of her talent, she said. She had to release it from the world so it could serve her art.
    I envied her. I had no such consuming preoccupation to distract me from her. My wife and my son were important to me, but they could not build a wall strong enough, or solid enough, to prevent Marguerite from filtering through my everyday thoughts, my every-night dreams. I woke up thinking of Marguerite, I went to sleep thinking of Marguerite.
    I liked my job, but I could not say it was the reason for my existence, the purpose of my life. If I had asked Marguerite who she was, she would have said an artist. If someone had asked me the same question I would have floundered through the many identitiesI have, the many things I do. I would have said I am a man, an African. I am a delegate in the diplomatic service of my country. I am a husband, a father. I am the lover of a woman I adore. I am Marguerite’s.
    And yet when Marguerite was with me, I seemed to be her consuming preoccupation. If I did not ask her about her work, she would not mention it to me. If I did not say I wanted to see what she was working on, she would not show it to me. But when she did, I knew from every movement of her body, from every inflection in her tone, from the way she bent her head from one side to another to point out this or that line to me, this or that color I had barely observed, that her art was the center