“Alternatively, you can claim, no Dr. Piper, I really am a prim, right-thinking spinster, and I will die of malaria in the bush helping improve maternal health. As well you may.”
The waiter brought the bill, folded in leather and presented on a silver tray like an extra treat. Eleanor asked, “How do you make a living now?”
“Spite.”
“I don’t know that paid.”
“It doesn’t pay for one’s victims, that’s definite.”
She considered fighting over the bill, or suggesting they split it, but somehow, with Calvin, she’d let him pay. For how many bills had she grabbed, how many had she divided painfully to the penny? She felt a rebellion from a funny place, one she did not know very well, but about which she was curious.
“Good,” he commended, signing his name. “You didn’t. That,” he announced, “was from the pit.”
“You said you don’t like people. Do you include yourself?”
“First and foremost. I know what I am. I told you, I shouldn’t be here. But that kind of mistake, it’s been made all through history.” He helped her with her jacket. “Sometimes, however, I remember what I was. I can get wistful. It’s disgusting.”
“You mean you were different before USAID kicked you out?”
“Once I was division head, my friend, I was already an error. No, before that. Perhaps another time.”
“I thought I was supposed to avoid you.”
“You won’t. I can rescue you, which you require. But my airlift will cost you, cost you everything you presently are. You can content yourself that means losing little enough.”
“You’re being unkind, Calvin.”
“I am being sumptuously kind, Ms Merritt.”
Eleanor considered abandoning the sticky carving under the table, but couldn’t saddle the staff with its disposal. Dutifully, she hauled it out, as if the heavy dark lump inside her had become so tangible that it sat by her feet at dinner.
Calvin gave her a ride to town. Eleanor mentioned there was a good chance Pathfinder would transfer her to Nairobi.
“I know,” said Calvin. “They are going to put you in charge of Anglophone Africa. Otherwise I might not have bothered to see you tonight.”
“What a lovely thought.”
“It was. You don’t tend to notice when you’re being flattered.”
He dropped her at the Intercontinental. In parting, he was a perfect gentleman—regrettably.
Family Planning from the Tar Pits
It was nearly a year before Eleanor was transferred to Nairobi, and not a very good one. She neglected to visit her clinics with her former regularity, and spent many an afternoon with a wet towel around her neck rather than drive to Morogoro to deliver pills that clients persistently took all at once.
Furthermore, Tanzanian villages, and Dar itself, were beginning to waft with the gaunt, empty-eyed spectre of widespread HIV. Weak, matchstick mothers would arrive at Pathfinder’s clinics and there was absolutely nothing to do. The irony of trying to prevent more births in towns where up to half the adult population was dying was not lost on Eleanor, nor was it lost on her patients. Contraception in these circumstances transformed from a perverse Western practice to flagrant insanity. And it shattered Eleanor to watch families bankrupt themselves on bogus witchdoctor therapies, even if she conceded that her own people’s medicines were no more effective.
Through the long, white days with little to distract her, she did think of Calvin. She abjured herself to expect little, despite his mystical talk. So many wazungu, after a steady newspaper diet of possessed grandmothers, curses of impotence and whole villages running riot from the spirits of the ancestors, began to talk a pidgin witchcraft of their own.
She pondered the contradiction between the icy things he said and the warmth she felt in his presence, as if Calvin’s coldness calloused the same helpless sympathy she fell prey to herself. There are people who find it easy to be generous in theory but can’t be bothered by the real problems of anyone who smells bad; there are others attracted to being hard in theory but who will involve themselves, impulsively, in finding you a house. That, if she didn’t miss her guess, was Calvin.
Eleanor employed a mental exercise—with that car, not always hypothetical—that sorted her friends out in a hurry: it is past midnight, she is driving back to her prefab, she is still miles out. The Land Rover stalls; the battery is old, scummy and shorting out. She has a radio, but you do not call the AAA in Tanzania. Whom does she raise on shortwave? And whom, even if it means curling up in the seat till morning, does she not? Oddly, she knew she could call Calvin, who would arrive jolly as you please with a crate of beer, to make a night of it. She thought he was a nice man. To the very end, she would maintain he was a nice man.
“Duplicitous” as her organization had so recently been described, the idea of family planning as a means of population control in a country where contraceptive prevalence remained below 5 per cent was absurd, so Eleanor didn’t think in terms of demographics any more. She regarded herself as providing an everyday service, even if Pathfinder did get its support from agencies with bolder designs. She consoled herself there were times in her own life that she was grateful for the Pill, and to extend this opportunity for pleasure without consequences seemed a reputable calling, if not very glamorous. For she no longer imagined she was preventing worldwide famine or raising the standard of living for the poor. In lowering the sights of her work, she found it duller, but no longer ridiculous. She had helped a few unmarried girls escape the wrath of their families; a handful of already overworked mothers—and in this country women did everything—find a contraceptive they could hide from their husbands, whose precious manhood would be insulted if they discovered their wives used birth control.
In Eleanor’s case, the pills had worked a bit too well. As she drew into her late thirties, the age at which many of her clients became grandmothers, even her own workers felt sorry for her. Among some tribes of East Africa a childless woman was a contagion, isolated in a separate hut outside the village, not allowed to touch pregnant wives, and sometimes stoned for being hexed. In Eleanor’s darker moods the word barren would take on an interior complexion as she scanned the hot, dead landscape, unsure why she was here, her face so dry—she was out of moisturizer again. She submitted good-naturedly to nurses’ teasing about visiting gentlemen from USAID or Ford, but the men never stayed longer than a few days and were odiously well behaved (or simply odious). It was when the teasing stopped that the situation got under her skin, the downcast shaking heads when one more prospect had fled. These were the times, in private, when she snapped pens that didn’t write, threw the phone to the floor and pulled maliciously at condoms, stretching them at her desk and burning holes in the rubber with smoking matches.
It’s funny how you just assume you will get married.
No, if you were born when Eleanor was, you don’t say married; you say, or
