Thirty Girls. Susan Minot
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my subject, she said. At all.
What’s your subject?
Desire.
It sounded totally pretentious, but what the hell.
And death.
Death should fit, he said mildly.
Death always fits. She smiled.
They both faced forward. In the front seat Lana was whispering in Don’s ear. Jane saw her tongue come out and lick it.
Things are hectic in Uganda, Harry said.
Have you been?
Not yet.
We haven’t exactly figured out how we’re getting there.
I am working on it, Lana said. I might have a possible driver.
Good, Jane said and a for a moment felt a pang of homesickness, which was odd since she did not want to be home in the least. She wanted to be as far away from back there as possible. Clutching at straws, she said.
You’ll figure it out, Harry said. You look like the kind of person who does.
She turned her squished neck to him to see if he meant it. Jane was sufficiently bewildered by what kind of person she was, so it was always arresting when someone, particularly a stranger, summed her up. His face, very close, had a sort of Aztec look to it, with flat cheeks and straight forehead and pointed chin. Jane couldn’t tell how old he was. There was no worry on his face. He was young. His expression was, if not earnest, still not cynical.
What do you do with yourself? she said.
Little of this, little of that.
She laughed. What at the moment?
I’m thinking about going to Sudan to look after some cows.
Really?
He shrugged. Maybe. Did anyone ever tell you you have a very old voice?
Voice?
The sound of it, he said. It’s nice.
Watch out! Lana screamed. The car jerked and swerved. Gasps of alarm rose from the passengers.
Not to worry, Yuri said in a calm voice, straightening the wheel which he steered with one hand. I saw the little bugger. He was trying to get hit.
Lana Eberhardt rented a cottage off the Langata Road. It was green with a rumpled roof where furry hyraxes nested and screeched through the night. In the three days that Jane had been in Nairobi, she had learned the cottage served as a crucial landing place in the constellation of the drifting populace.
Plans were made for dinner. Pierre got into a Jeep for the liquor run. He was tall and slow-moving, as if his attractiveness to women did not require he ever rush. This manner, combined with a French accent, made everything he said sound both frivolous and direct. Don drove off taking Lana in a shiny white rental car to some people called the Aspreys to see if they’d caught fish over the weekend. Their phone was out. Some time later they returned with a large cooler stocked with fish. The Aspreys themselves followed eventually, a short swarthy man and a woman in a shiny green wrapped affair with a plain face who carried herself with such flair and confidence she looked positively radiant. They had with them a beautiful freckled woman named Babette who someone said worked in an orphanage in the Kibera slum. She was dressed blandly in shorts and T-shirt and was all the more beautiful because of it. Other guests trickled in: a man named Joss Hall biting on a cigar and his wife Marina in a long Mexican skirt. There was a silent unshaven journalist whose name Jane didn’t catch. Harry O’Day had gone and not returned. Someone said he was sorting out job prospects. Pierre arrived with the liquor and a curly-headed blond woman with a fur vest and bare arms. He spent the evening leaning close to her with merry eyes. At eleven everyone finally sat down to dinner and more people appeared and wedged chairs in. A couple could be heard out in the garden shouting at each other, and Joss Hall came striding out of the shadows, with his head low, as if avoiding blows. Jane found herself glancing toward the doorway to see if that person Harry might reappear, but he did not walk in.
First they were leaving Tuesday, then Wednesday was better, then Friday. Pierre was waiting for some film that hadn’t arrived at the dukka in Karen on Friday. Lana had found them a driver, a German named Raymond, but he couldn’t leave till Sunday. No one was in a hurry; everyone had a loose time frame. They could wait.
Jane was napping on the Balinese bed in the back garden and woke to Harry’s face. He was wearing the white hat with the zebra band around it.
You want to come flying?
What?
Go on a mission. It’s only eight, nine hours’ drive.
Jane felt away from normal life, sleeping in a borrowed dress, living in a guest room. It was easy to say yes. You just went places here. You went with a stranger. Were you interested in him? Was he interested in you? You didn’t ask, even if you wondered. Jane always had so many questions rocking about in her head, it was nice to be in a place where people weren’t asking those questions. People here just did things. You just went.
She hardly knew where she was. Some nights she ended up sleeping at other people’s houses, missing a ride after the dinner party. The night before, she’d lost her key and Harry had taken her to his friend Andy’s adobe cottage, where they slept on the floor in front of a fireplace. Another paragliding guy with a beard was on the couch. Jane had not slept much, feeling Harry’s proximity.
What do I need to bring?
Nothing, he said.
But she went to the guest room and put some clothes in a bag. She peeled bills from a wad of cash and hid the rest with her passport behind some books. Her journal fell open and pictures fanned out on the floor. Harry picked them up and handed them back to her, sitting patiently while she wrote Lana a note saying she’d be back tomorrow or the next day. She took a white Ethiopian wrap Lana had lent her and got into Harry’s truck with him.
They drove through the Nairobi traffic with the Ngongs’ slate-gray peaks zigzagging above and headed west, up hills feathered with crevasses and past scribbled bushes and thin trees, and lit out on a spine-slamming potholed road.
They passed through the crossroad din of Narok, rattling with muffler-less cars. Yellow storefronts sat in a line beside blue storefronts. There were many groceries: Deep Grocery, Angel Food, Ice Me. People walked among goats or sat on piled tires; dust rose up. Then the colorful blur passed and suddenly the open windows framed a parched beige landscape smelling of smoke and dry grass. After long stretches of uninterrupted brush and flat dirt they’d find a scattering of huts with people on the side of the road, usually children, turning with slow, aimed faces to watch the vehicle pass.
Harry didn’t talk much, but after eight hours in a car she did learn some things.
The main thing for Harry was flying. Work was what you did to pick up a few shillings between missions. He’d had a few jobs, relief work in the north, construction work at a safari camp in Malawi. At home he could usually count on being hired by a German chap who put up electric fences for private houses in Langata. He spent a while too with a bloke trying to save wild dogs in the Tsavo desert. That had been a cool job, he said, nodding.
But mainly he flew. When he first started paragliding he would drive everywhere in the truck till he realized a motorcycle was better for the out-of-the-way places. And out-of-the-way places were the point. The whole continent of Africa was open to him, he’d only scratched the surface. A recent trip to Namibia over the baked desert clay was awesome. Sometimes he went with a mate, usually Andy, but he’d also go alone. His parachute folded up into a rucksack which he strapped to his bike.
She asked him questions; he answered them.
He’d go for days or weeks. Alone, he ate raw couscous, too lazy to cook. By the end of a trip he’d be living on vitamin pills and returned with burnt skin, weighing pounds lighter. His motorcycle got stuck in muddy swamps. Once, deep sand in the desert sputtered out the motor. There was the time he broke