@Two Men

“I don’t know how you do it, making love out of nothing at all.”

I can say right now, in this moment, that I completely, absolutely, devotedly love Madeline, the mother of my children. It is not something I’m always certain of. Part of my uncertainty is motivated by fear. I have often wondered if Madeline still loves me. I know she once did, when we were still in school, when my father’s name was recognizable and I had not dropped it from mine. That is not so long ago but there is a way three children make the time before they were born seem like all that happened in another time, even another century, that far.

I hope Madeline is happy. I have tried to provide everything that could make her happy, that she said would make her happy since those years when I had so little to give her.  Madeline used to say that the reason why she did not want to admit to me what she felt for me for so long was because I’m so proud. She was afraid that if she had told me then that she had fallen in love with me even before I ever noticed her, I would look down on her.

She had told me this when we had been watching some old time movies. Madeline is crazy about those black and white Hollywood movies. She was first to sleep over in my second rented house because of those classic black and white movies, coming over to see where I had moved and finding that I had finally brought myself to carry a stash of movies that my father had purchased during his student years in Pennsylvania and said I could have if I ever wanted them. I had never, until then, seen her as uninhibited as she had become, seeing them in a CD case next to my TV and DVD player, totally ignoring those then recent acquisitions, she had slumped down on her knees, nearly toppling them all over, on a weekday afternoon that I will never forget. Taxiing there.

I’m paying for her Masters’ Course right now. I have little idea where the obsession comes from but even back then when I was already sick of school, in my second year of university and she was in her final year in secondary school, she already had made up her mind that she was going to study until she made Professor. I will be lying if I do not say I thought the pregnancies and responsibilities might make her forget about all that. Aaron and Tezira did not make her abandon her dreams, they had made her more determined.  There were times in those years when I wondered if she might hate our children because it seemed like they and I were the ones holding her back.

I could not blame her for unexpressed sentiments that maybe I had got her pregnant as a trick. I know her and the last thing she wants is to live in poverty and for some of our most crucial first years, it had seemed like that would be our fate. To live a life of struggling to survive, investing our future in the wellbeing of our children who we would hold ransom in our old age to pay back for the deferment of our own dreams. She had thought I was a rich man’s son and because I had once been and did not think much of money, I had not disabused her of that impression until the realities of our lives together then did. In my moments of doubt, I think the Madeline I loved died in those years, tearing as she blew a charcoal stove to a blazing coal efficiency.

I look at Madeline sometimes now and I wonder. I wonder if Aaron and Tezira are the shield she has between me and her. I wonder if I’m the fallen hero of her old dreams, a man already in her past she has just not yet told this. I wonder, as each semester a negligible amount goes to pay her tuition fees from my business, I’m nursing the asp that will strike me fatally when she no longer has need of me. In pausing to reconsider, life is lived in the memory of choices you could have made but did not, wondering if perhaps you made a mistake. There are times when Madeline makes me think I made a mistake. Not in marrying her, not in her becoming the mother of my children, but in delaying the passage of her dreams with some of the choices I made.

Have you ever made love to a woman and she was not there with you? Sometimes I wonder if I’m to spend the rest of my life atoning for the initial disappointments I inflicted. I know I cannot leave Madeline. It is not cowardice that holds me fast to her. It is not Aaron and Tezira who keep me from leaving her. It is not because everyone knows her as my wife. It is not because her beauty is beyond compare.

In a Nokia phone stolen from me eight years ago from me walking along Wilson road, in that Nokia phone’s text messages’ folders lies the answer. If that phone still exists and has not been torn apart for spare parts. A friend had subscribed to those network quotes and had forwarded me one: In love, you must hold back. Madeline had taught me not to hold back.

I have never told her this. Insincere confession was my father’s getaway card and all my life I have striven not to be like my father. The greatest tragedy I suppose that can happen to a man is to marry a woman who is as unlike his mother as the sun is to the moon. In living my life to never disappoint my mother again I seem to have lost my wife, I sometimes think. All these are thoughts when she is not in my sight. When I cannot reach out and stroke her arm, when her side of the bed is empty and only the scent of her hair is in her pillow, not hearing her voice. In my worst sleep waking nightmares, I doubt the quality of her love. The truthfulness of it all. Everything else notwithstanding. We are not our reputation and no one understands that better than I.