into the room. Mary’s jet lag prevented Dare from realizing his fantasies of a passionate reunion, which had grown more pornographic the longer they were apart. She brushed her teeth, swallowed an Ambien, and walked out of her clothes. In two minutes she was asleep. He wasn’t disappointed. For now it was enough merely to look at her peaceful face, to hear her breathing quietly beside him. He dwelled on what she’d said. He knew he shouldn’t make too much of it, but maybe her father’s death had changed her outlook on how she wanted to lead her life. Whether it had or not, he concluded that he could procrastinate no longer; it was time to present his plans for the future and ask if she wanted to share in them.
She was still asleep when he woke up. Leaving her a note that he would be back in an hour, he dressed and went out, walking quickly down Kimathi Street, past a newspaper stand and a bank of phone booths, to a jewelry shop he knew. Fifteen minutes later he came out with a box in his pocket. His pace was slower as he returned to the hotel—he was rehearsing what he would say and marshaling his courage to face the possibility that she would turn him down.
He opened the door and was stopped cold by the sight of her, sitting up in bed, the sheet drawn to her throat, a saucy look on her face.
“Life’s for the living, and death’s for the dead,” she said before he could speak. “I need to apologize for conking out on you.” She whipped the bedsheet off her naked body. “C’mere, captain.”
His fantasies were fulfilled, but at a cost. He felt like Samson after Delilah gave him a haircut, and all the fine words he’d practiced had deserted his mind. Smoking a postcoital cigarette, he lay contemplating his convex belly and his knobby white legs, forked across the bed.
“What are you thinking?” Mary asked.
“That my mama used to say I was ugly as homemade sin.”
“So, manufactured sin is prettier?”
“Hell, I don’t know, but it’s always seemed to me that any woman who has anything to do with me has got to have something wrong with her, and the ones I was married to sure proved it.”
She wound one of his curls around her finger and yanked. “I see you haven’t lost your talent for saying exactly the right thing.”
“You know what I mean. What are y’all doin’ with me? It makes no sense.”
“Baby, if love made sense, the human race would be an endangered species.”
“C’mon, I’ve got to know.”
She plucked the cigarette from his hand, took a puff, and gave it back to him. “Let’s go back to the day I met you. That flight to Somalia. If you hadn’t reacted the way you did, Tony and I could’ve been killed. And no, it isn’t that I feel I owe my life to you. All this hasn’t been gratitude. What I thought then was, ‘Well, here’s a man. Nothing to look at, but he knew what to do and he did it.’ ”
There it was again—his competence.
“I’m not gettin’ any younger, and one of these days I’m not gonna know what to do, or if I do, I won’t be able to do it. What happens then?”
“Don’t worry about that. That’s what started things off, but that isn’t it. What it is, is this—being with you, I don’t think only about myself and what I need, I think about you and what you need. And don’t ask why, because I don’t know.”
He could not have asked for a better cue, but he said nothing.
“That’s my side of the story,” she said with an inviting glance. “Yours?”
“Look in the mirror, that’ll tell you.”
“Wrong thing, Wes. Wrong again.”
“Oh, hell. It’s the same as with you. I don’t think about me.”
She sat up, laughing and patted his scalp. “That’s better. Wasn’t so hard, was it? So now that we’ve made sense of it, let’s call room service. All this making sense has made me hungry.”
“We’re on the afternoon flight to Loki,” he said. “How about lunch at the Aero Club?”
He’d suggested the Aero Club, not for its proximity to the Wilson Field terminal, certainly not for the excellence of its fare, but to give himself time to recover his nerve. The club was crowded, except for three empty tables in a corner. He took one after they’d gone through the serving line.