A Change in Altitude (3 page)

“Margaret,” she said.

Patrick told Margaret over tuna on rye that he was completing a fellowship in equatorial medicine. He’d become interested in tropical diseases in medical school and had visited Africa twice. She thought he was a beautiful man, and she was fascinated by the unusual planes of his long face. Perhaps, she thought, she had fallen in love with those planes before she’d fallen in love with the man. Before coming to Africa, Margaret had photographed his face at least a hundred times. At first, Patrick was intrigued, then merely patient, and then mildly annoyed, as one might be with a child who wants to play the same game again and again.

When Patrick asked Margaret if she wanted to go to Kenya with him, she said yes with enthusiasm. Her job at the alternative paper wasn’t progressing, and she was tired of photographing congressional meetings and folksingers in Cambridge coffeehouses. Patrick had attached himself to Nairobi Hospital, which he could use as a resource for as long as he wanted in exchange for conducting free clinics around the country when asked to do so.

Margaret and Patrick were hastily wed in a backyard in Cambridge. Margaret wore a long white cotton dress and wound her hair into a French twist. After the ceremony, they and their guests drank champagne on plastic deck chairs and an ornate sofa brought outside for the occasion. Patrick and Margaret sat in the sofa’s plush center, fending off witty barbs and occasionally gazing at the stars.

At a good-bye dinner at her parents’ house the night before Patrick and she were to fly out of Logan to Nairobi, Margaret couldn’t imagine how she could go a year without seeing either them or her twelve-year-old brother, Timmy, born sixteen years after Margaret—a happy accident, her mother had explained. She pleaded with them to come visit her in Africa. No one in the family had ever used the word
love
before, though the connection among them was fierce.

On the plane, Margaret was mildly homesick. During the flight across the alien continent, the sun rising, her face pressed to the window, her breath fogging her vision, Patrick held her hand. If he was apprehensive, he didn’t say so.

From the plane, she saw all the places she had read about in preparation for the trip: the Nile River, long and brown; Lake Turkana, once Lake Rudolf; the Rift Valley, vast and barren and unearthly; and then suddenly the Ngong Hills and the plateau on which Nairobi had been settled. In the distance, Margaret could see, rising above the clouds, Mount Kenya, and even, to the south, Mount Kilimanjaro. Before the plane set down, Patrick presented her with a silver ring, a small diamond at its center, something he hadn’t been able to manage before the wedding. They landed on Margaret’s birthday.

O
n the morning after the Mount Kenya climb had been proposed, an iridescent peacock greeted Margaret at Diana’s front door. The bird, seen so close, seemed otherworldly, fraudulent. The peacock eyed her with indifference. What must it think, she wondered, of her own dull plumage?

Overhead, a jacaranda tree had again laid down its royal carpet. The air felt cool and rinsed. Margaret had on a belted white cotton jacket over a yellow cotton dress. She would have to take the jacket off at ten a.m. At noon, she would want to be indoors. By three, she’d be fantasizing about a cold swim at the InterContinental. The jacket would go back on at six thirty, and by eleven, Patrick and she would be sleeping beneath a pair of down comforters. It was all a matter of altitude, Patrick had once explained.

Margaret inhaled the scent of burning leaves as she made her way to the car Patrick had left for her. He had taken the bus into town more than an hour earlier. The Peugeot was parked beside the cottage with the still-defunct plumbing. Margaret slid into the front seat, the floor tinged here and there with red marum. She set her straw bag on the passenger seat to her left. When she’d first arrived in the country, it had taken her nearly a week of trial runs to feel even mildly confident about driving on the left side of the road.

The scent of the smoke she’d brought with her into the Peugeot made her lean back and close her eyes. She wondered if Matthew, the gardener, burned marijuana leaves with the debris, as if the ganja were no more valuable than twigs. Absurd, Margaret thought, though she was fairly sure that something soporific was in the smoke. She inhaled deeply. The scent was both nostalgic and exotic.

A knock at her window startled her. Arthur, in suit and tie, motioned for her to roll down the window.

“The Mercedes won’t start. I’ve called for a mechanic. I need a ride to the office. I have to leave the Rover for Diana to get the kids and so forth.”

There could be no thought of refusing him.

“Get in. One good deed deserves another.”

Margaret moved her straw bag. Arthur slid in, putting his arm across the back of his seat, a proprietary gesture that caused him to have to face Margaret. Arthur reestablishing the alpha male. She knew with certainty that if Patrick entered a car with a woman not his wife behind the wheel, there would be no proprietary arm. Patrick, unlike Arthur, would face pleasantly straight ahead.

They passed the duka and its gathering of African men in pressed shirts and pants, most smoking, many laughing. The men, Margaret knew, worked as servants and were meeting for a morning break after having done the shopping for the day. Most would have been up since four thirty, preparing meals for dogs and families. Were the Africans in the area mostly Luo, like James? She would have to ask. Already Margaret understood that though the country was deeply misogynistic and acutely aware of class as defined by money, the true animosity that kept man from man or woman from woman was tribal. Turkana, Nandi, Kalenjin, Kisii, Kipsikis, Kikuyu, Luo, Masai, and others. In Africa, a native man with dark skin was identified by tribe.

“I think it’s fair to say you haven’t mastered the roundabout yet,” Arthur commented, eyebrow raised, as Margaret stopped for a matatu, listing and overloaded, moving into their lane.

“They’re counterintuitive.”

“To Americans. You call them something else.”

“Rotaries.”

“I think you need more practice.”

“Thank you for noticing.”

He made a
pshaw
sound that was distinctly British and couldn’t be spelled. It meant
Don’t be silly. Don’t be ridiculous. Don’t be so touchy
.

“Where can I drop you?” Margaret asked.

“At Mather House. I hope Diana told you that Saartje and Willem are coming to dinner tonight? We’re meant to discuss the climb.”

Arthur gestured toward the road Margaret should take.

“She did, and I’m on my way to buy boots.”

“You’ll conquer Mount Kenya.”

Margaret was taken aback. “I don’t think I’m capable of conquering anything, least of all a mountain. In any event, I didn’t come here to conquer.”

“Where are you from?”

She glanced briefly in his direction. He was studying her, as she had suspected.

“I grew up in a small town north of Boston. Went to college near Boston. Been living in Boston ever since.”

“Why Boston?”

“It’s close to my family, and it’s a city.”

“You’re not for the rural areas, then.”

Margaret laughed. “I guess not.”

“Never been to Boston,” he said in that accent of his that suggested a manufacturing town in the north of England. “Spent a lot of time in Arizona, though.”

“Arizona?”

“Diana’s parents moved there about ten years ago. They have a kind of mini-estate—I suppose you’d call it a ranch—just outside Phoenix. Diana’s father plays golf. They went for his health. The climate. He’s developing emphysema. Still smokes a pack a day. Prides himself on having cut down from three.”

Once again, Margaret glanced in Arthur’s direction. He was staring out his window. There was about him a quality of smugness that might attract a European woman but might put off an American.

She had conquered her third roundabout in twenty minutes when Arthur gestured. “It’s just there.”

She entered a circular driveway on the outskirts of the city that led to an office complex. It resembled a school built in the 1960s—concrete and utilitarian, without any attempt at charm. “Well.” Arthur seemed reluctant to leave the car. “You’re off to buy boots.”

“Yes.”

“Go to Sir Henry’s.” Arthur took a small notepad from an inner pocket of his jacket. He wrote down the address and handed her the slip of paper. “Ask for Tommy. He’ll take care of you. Tell him Arthur sent you.”

There it was again.
Take care of you.

“That’s it?” Margaret asked. “Just
Arthur?
”

“He’ll know who it is.”

*   *   *

Askaris stood guard in front of the shops on Kimathi Street. Margaret tipped a parking boy eight shillings, the equivalent of a dollar, to watch her car. She passed a Scandinavian store in which an African man was polishing silver. A sign in the window read
50 Shillings
but seemed unattached to any object. Next to the Scandinavian shop was a store called Crystal Ice Cream. The special that day was a serving of vegetarian Samosas. A man hawked and spit on the sidewalk, and Margaret had to maneuver around the glob. Farther along, another man was selling curios. She stopped merely to be polite but found a small gold-colored teapot and wondered to whom she might give it. At the bank stood a flank of askaris with drawn pangas and what looked to be ferocious guard dogs on leashes. Margaret noted that the many Africans who wanted to get into the bank passed the dogs with excessive caution.

She glanced at the scrap of paper Arthur had given her. Sir Henry’s, she calculated, must be at the other end of Kimathi. She crossed the street and strolled, looking for the address. When she came to the intersection of Kenyatta and Kimathi, she saw men lying on the grass divider, some asleep. Barely avoiding them, other men in white shirts and ties were watering the grass and the bases of the palms. She walked by a gentleman in a white kaffiyeh, followed by several women in the long black bui-bui that covered them head to toe, their faces veiled. Margaret could not imagine the discomfort the noonday equatorial heat might cause beneath that thick fabric.

In front of a shop called the Village, she eyed a simple four-bead necklace. The asking price was two hundred shillings. In the reflection from the window, she could see a tall, thin Masai with large holes in his ears pass behind her. He wore only a red blanket and carried a spear. Beyond him was a white teenager in a lime-green T-shirt pausing on a motorcycle at a light. The light turned, and she sped off.

An African woman at the charity sweepstakes booth barked in English and reminded Margaret of auctioneers in America. When the woman leaned back, Margaret saw that she was pregnant. Behind her was a Woolworth’s in which one could buy cooking pans, secondhand books, used tires, and Cuisinarts. Margaret went inside and bought a guidebook to Mount Kenya. As she left the store with her purchase, she saw a mother and her three children sitting on the sidewalk with their backs to the wall. The woman was in the same dress she’d worn every time Margaret had seen her. The baby, who had on a dirty shirt and nothing else, stood up, squatted, and shat on the sidewalk. Beside the woman was a tin cup with a few shillings in it. Margaret still held her change in her hand and dropped it into the tin.
“Asante sana,”
the woman said with little energy. Before, when Margaret had passed by and put something in the cup, the beggar had put her hands together as if in prayer, repeating
“asante sana”
until Margaret was out of earshot. Patrick had warned her never to give money to the beggars, that by doing so, one could stir up a mob scene, other beggars rushing toward the point of donation.

An unexpected thirst caused Margaret to make a detour and cross the street to the New Stanley Hotel, a tall, white building filled with tourists. She noted cameras, safari jackets, binoculars, maps. As families waited for the zebra-striped minibuses to arrive, she heard English from the tourists, Swahili from the porters. In one family, the father, an older man of about fifty, counted the number of film canisters he had in his pockets. His wife had on a polyester blouse. The couple had two sons, one a teenager who looked bored already. The other, a boy of about ten or eleven, was dancing up and down, eager to see the lions.

In another familial grouping, a Midwestern woman was worrying her teeth with a toothpick. She said she was in a tizzy from the effort of trying to pack the contents of her four suitcases into two, the limit while on safari.

“I’m still not calmed down,” she said.

“What day is the inaugural address this year?” the man next to her asked.

“The inaugural address?”

“Jimmy Carter? In America?”

“How should I know?”

Another man set a suitcase among the others to be collected.

“I just brought this tiny suitcase,” he said. “What you see me in is what I’ll be wearing for three days.”

What Margaret saw him in was a pair of blue sneakers, brown-and-white patterned trousers, and a red polo shirt with white piping.

“I hear there’s more ivory there,” he said.

More than where?
Margaret wondered.

She had a tall glass of iced tea at the Thorn Tree Café. She couldn’t remember when iced tea had ever tasted so good. She fingered the mint and read the notes tacked onto the message board beside her.
Shenaz, I am needing my washing machine back. Peter Shandling, if you get this message, please call Mark at New Stanley House. Needed: Cocktail waitresses for Swiss embassy party on the 19th. Ask for Roger at the InterContinental.

At the Thorn Tree Café, an African woman was not allowed to sit at a table without a man. If she did, she would be asked to leave. It didn’t matter if the woman was a banker or an editor or owned her own shop and felt as desperate as Margaret had for a tall glass of iced tea. If the woman was an African, it was assumed she was a prostitute.

A dark man in an embroidered kaffiyeh wore a jacket with a Nehru collar. Margaret was having trouble observing the man because he was openly staring at her.