Esi Edugyan - The Second Life of Samuel Tyne

“A good boy prone to misfortune,” Samuel repeated safely.

Akosua scoffed. “Heh — you are all mouth and no ears. Is that not what I said?” Remembering herself, she flinched, as much apology as she could muster.

When she spoke about herself she did so with an enunciative caution that really seemed more like stifled pleasure. She was at her most natural then, and despite himself Samuel found even his thoughts slipping into the old vernacular. They spoke in a patois of English and Twi, lowering their voices and smiling to each other lest they be caught in the act. Saul was never mentioned. Neither wanted to spoil the delicacy of these moments by talk of what was, after all, only politics. Samuel felt ludicrous, flirting with this woman he despised the very sight of, but he couldn’t deny the odd pleasures it gave him. Before long he had to concede that Mrs. Porter was a charming little bird, despite her effrontery, and always felt regretful when Maud interrupted.

When Akosua left the room, Samuel would go sombre, feeling keenly disliked. He would sit and ruminate on what they’d said before concluding that Akosua was the most severe and illogical creature on earth. Then he would resolve to waste no more thoughts on her. Yet the more he tried to cure his mind of her, the worse he’d wake during his working hours to find he’d been thinking of her. It disturbed him. He began to attack his work with the zeal of his early days, but to no avail. He could not fend off thoughts of this woman any more than he could enjoy them without guilt. He often wondered that he had ever found her plain. Her pimples hadn’t damaged her beauty; conversely, her blemishes alone kept too saintly a face human. Akosua soon distracted him from his only other obsessions: Jacob’s will, glory and death. Her voice, her wrinkling little nose, everything about her aroused him. On the night of his greatest humiliation, he sat locked in his study long after the house had dimmed, touching himself until his shame grew so intense he went to bed unsatisfied. A history had passed since Maud had touched him. Turning to her now would be like asking for an unkind favour. So he slept unsated and woke in a state of agitation. This was the measure of his days. Akosua was a kind of awakening for him; he felt both stronger and weaker, sadder but simpler in his thoughts, until finally a burning image of her within him compelled people to treat him better. Or so he believed. For during this era of fever his business matured, townsfolk smiled at him in the road, and even Maud began to relax her testy silences.

He sensed the chaos in the house but was unable to engage in it. In a dirty singlet and a pair of terry shorts, he took to going to his study during the night. The shorts, tight on the buttocks but loose up front, shifted as he walked, rubbing him into such a state that some nights he barely made it to his study to undo them. Later, when he’d emerge cold from the ash of his fantasies, he would sit and bitterly curse the woman who had led him to this lechery. But even anger and guilt could not sever routine. Only when he thought he’d been discovered was he able to stop. That night, grown daring, he’d left his study door open. And just when he was getting somewhere, he felt a shock of fear and went dead in his hand. Holding his breath, he strained to see into the darkness of the hallway. Finally convinced he was alone, he’d nevertheless learned his lesson. But every act has its punishment: that night he dreamt he had masturbated in public, in broad daylight, as a crowd of people streamed through the intersection. He awoke as though slapped, his heart spastic. Maud slept undisturbed beside him. He rose to get a glass of water and the dim light under his daughters’ door horrified him. His night-wandering ended.

The next morning, in a move that showed Samuel he was mistaken about the truce with his wife, Maud complained about the heat in the house.

“This is not the tropics — the heat isn’t free,” she said at the breakfast table, not meeting his eye. “Keep this up and when winter comes we’ll be freezing, with the electric company coming round twice a week to break our kneecaps. To think it was so hot I couldn’t sleep . That’s ne ver happened to me.”

Samuel studied his wife. There didn’t seem to be any innuendo in her tone, but the twins kept their eyes down. “Well, if you did not sleep, then you are a great actress. You snored so loud you kept the girls up.” And he looked meaningfully their way.

Maud was pleased with this, for it gave her licence to go on. Touching her halo of rollers, she said, “It’s as if you’re in your own private hell and you’re trying to roast us with you.”

Samuel at last understood his transparency, that perhaps what people were responding to was not his hidden love for Akosua, but his sad agitation. He glanced around the table, sensing an air of complicity that excluded him.

Maud finally vented what might have been occupying those three untouchable minds. “What, pray tell, has happened to our sheets and our clothesline?”

The synchrony of their heads turning towards him seemed rehearsed. With a sense of wonder, Samuel told the most sedate lie of his life: “I do not know.” And they seemed to believe him.

Minutes later Maud questioned him again, and he knew she hadn’t been outwitted. But something in him couldn’t admit to what he’d done, so ashamed was he of his boyish fit of anger. Maud already thought he’d lost his mind. And how to explain why he’d been angry without talking about his problem with Porter? So, contrary to all logic, he told an even more erratic lie.

“Did you ever think that perhaps the crows have sunk it? That the crows downed it and that the Porters cleared it from our yard for courtesy’s sake? Why are you asking a man, anyway? When I need to change the spark plugs in the Volvo, do I run to you, a woman?” The longer he prattled, the more he convinced himself of his indignation, and only the subtle look between the twins silenced him. “What are you making eyes at, eh?” he spat in their direction. “Eh? Man suffers through woman, you mark it. Man suffers through woman.” Immediately sorry at having implicated the twins, he picked at his eggs in agitation.

Maud’s voice was even. “The Porters know nothing about it — I asked them. It was Akosua who suggested I ask you about it. Like maybe she’d seen you move it or something.”

Samuel prickled at the mention of that name. He couldn’t believe the hypocrisy of that hag; it showed a lack of dignity he was unused to in a woman. Derisively, he said, “I am sure poor trash makes for trustworthy neighbours.”

“A spokesman for the Ray Frank campaign now, are you?”

“I am a spokesman for none but myself.”

Maud gave him a sickened smile. The rest of the meal was painful with repressed anger, and more than once Samuel had to restrain himself from shouting at the secretive twins. Their eye game was trying his nerves.

When they reconvened for dinner, even the twins were talking. They recounted writing fifteen pages apiece on some new voluminous project. Maud looked uneasily at them, but declared that she’d given Akosua Porter an in-depth lesson on nutrition that afternoon. And Samuel was in such good spirits that even the mention of Akosua’s name didn’t bother him. A record player that had been making the route of Edmonton’s repair shops had finally found its cure at Tyne Electronics. Its owner, an old widower of the ranching era, had taken to playing his dead wife’s Mozart over the machine’s golden ear. When the player had broken and refused to be fixed, the old man had suffered a grief no more navigable than his wife’s death. Last week he’d made the dispirited drive to Aster and, seeing Samuel behind the counter, put down the machine with the finality of a skeptic. Samuel, pleased that his miraculous hands were being lauded as far as Edmonton, treated this project with extra diligence, and that very day he had the old apparatus singing again. The widower had cried when Samuel turned it on. He gave Samuel a historic tip, carrying the player out as if it were a newborn child.