“You could use some small, private happiness.”
“Right,” Eleanor muttered, “mail order.”
“At least buy yourself a new dress.”
“What’s wrong with this one?”
“It’s too long and dark and the neck is much too high. And at your age, should you still be wearing bangs?”
“I’ve always worn bangs!”
“Exactly. And do you realize that you do not have to look at the world the way you have been taught? There are perspectives from which starving people in Africa do not matter a toss. Because your dowdy sympathy is not helping them, and it is certainly not helping you.”
They ordered coffee and Calvin cheerfully popped chocolates. “I am advising that you don’t merely have to get married,” he pursued. “There are intellectual avenues at your disposal. You can allow yourself to think abominations. There are a few ineffectual restraints put on what you may do, but so far no one can arrest you for what goes on in your head.”
“I don’t see what kind of solution that is, to get nasty.”
“This is a short life, Eleanor—thank God.” He spanked cocoa from his hands. “And what happens in it is play. Rules are for the breaking. If you knew what I thought about, you’d never speak to me again.”
She ran her thumb along her knife. “Are you trying to frighten me?”
“I hope so. You’re better off avoiding my company. It has even occurred to me—this we share—that I should no longer be here myself.”
“You mean Africa?”
“I do not mean Africa.”
“What are all these atrocities in your head you think would put me off?”
“For starters, I’m no longer persuaded by good and evil.”
“That’s impossible. You can’t live without morality.”
“It’s quite possible, and most people do. They manipulate morality to their advantage, but that is a process distinct from being guided by its principles. Moreover—” His fingers sprang against each other and his eyes were shining—“I don’t like human beings.”
“Thanks.”
“Astute of you to take it personally. Most people imagine I mean everyone but them.”
“You’re trying awfully hard to ensure I don’t dine with you again. Why isn’t it working?”
“Because you agree with me on much of what I’ve said, and especially on what I haven’t. All these dangers you skirt, Eleanor—cynicism, apathy, fatigue: the pits in which you fear you’ll stumble—they are all yourself. You are an entirely different person than you pretend, Ms Merritt, and I suppose that is frightening. Though my advice would be, of course: jump in the pit.
“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