The Fugitivities, стр. 38

to his roommates. They listened and they offered their advice. “The women here are not trustworthy,” Ghislain said. “You have to be very careful. Don’t get involved in something you can’t control, or you’ll have problems and the police will come and deport you if they can, and if they can’t, they will harass you so much you’ll want to leave anyway.” Apollinaire said that he had never been with a white woman, that he wasn’t interested in white women, that every time he had ever interacted with a white woman it had only further confirmed his feelings. Ghislain passed around a joint. Claude said women were not something you could know about one way or the other. You had to accept that and flow with it day by day and not judge them because, in the end, you can only judge yourself.

One evening, Laura invited Nate to dinner at her new apartment, a fifth-floor walk-up in an old building on the rue des Cinq-Diamants. You could see most of the place from the entryway. It was more of an attic with a kitchenette and a shower. She had a little oval window with a view of rooftops and potted chimneys and a patch of sky. It reminded Nathaniel of a painting that he had seen at the Musée d’Orsay.

Laura made grape leaves stuffed with ground lamb and rice in a mint yogurt sauce. They drank a bottle of burgundy with the meal, and a second one kept them talking late into the night. After clearing the dishes, she went over to the window where he stood and put her hand on his back. As he turned, she raised herself on her toes, leaned forward, and kissed him. It was a good kiss. Nathaniel found himself surprised at how safe he felt. He had wondered if he would actually be capable of feeling at peace in her arms. But he did. He had also feared a certain intimidation on her part. But she was without hesitation, as if the pleasures she would give and receive would have always been self-evident. If anything, he was the one who was slightly intimidated by her feistiness. How she strapped herself around his torso, pressing her dark nipples to his chest, nipped him with puckish kisses, came with unassuageable ferocity.

When he woke up, Nathaniel felt a cold breeze running along his arm. Laura was asleep, curled under the blanket like a teardrop. He got up. It had rained, and there was a puddle forming along the wall and the baseboard. He closed the window and glanced around the apartment. He ran some water and did the dishes. Then he brought the wine bottles down and slotted them one by one, with shattering cries, into a giant municipal-recycling container. He spotted a bakery. Laura looked confused when she opened the door to let him back in. “I brought you some breakfast,” he said. He took the warm pastries out of their paper pouch and set them on the table. They spread spoonfuls of confiture along the innards and talked.

They decided to go for a walk in the Parc Montsouris. Nathaniel was convinced that the people they passed were staring at them. He thought for a long time about how to put this to Laura and wondered whether she was seeing the same thing. But by the time he had put together the words to ask her, they had crossed all the way through the park and arrived at the station where he would have to take the train back out to the suburbs. The way she held him as they kissed made putting it off indefinitely desirable.

—

“No life is really meaningful without good food. Without eating well. Without fish and rice and mango and okra, the world would be a mistake,” Ghislain said. “There is no greater food to be found anywhere than in Cameroon, a land, thank god, blessed with the best fish and the freshest fruits in all of Africa. I must teach you how to cook real dishes from Yaoundé, which, if you prepare them only once for your lover, she will never leave you. Like Roger Milla, you will score every time!”

“What Ghislain is saying is wise, leke mo bax,” said Apollinaire, “but not entirely true. The greatest food in the world, it is well known, comes from Senegal, which makes the finest sauces and the most raffiné cuisine in all of Africa. And the real way to a woman’s heart is to make yassa with fresh catch from the Casamance caught by the excellent fishermen of Ziguinchor. Or a chicken mafé with a spicy peanut sauce that they also love in Mali. Or a delicious lamb dibi if she is more of a city girl and you want to show off the savors of the capital. Basically, love in a marriage should resemble a long meal, pleasantly sauced and served with care. That is, grosso modo, all there is to the good life.”

“Taking a woman out to dinner can be expensive,” said Claude. “If you cook for her you will save money, but she will also love you more because good in the kitchen means good appetite, which means good sex and good health, and if you can have all those things in your life at once then you must be doing something right with your life, because God bestows his favors and blessings on the just.”

Nathaniel and Laura spent many nights together. And many days too, days when they were supposed to be in lecture but remained marooned in her blankets pleasuring each other in the quiet part of the afternoon when folks were still at work, and the traffic was light, and they could hear the leaves outside whisking greenly. He would hold the curves of her belly. Smell her olive-black hair, pressing into the pillow beside him like his picture in the history book of an old Roman aqueduct.

One day, on a square near the Métro