Little Bee

I miss my finger most on deadline days, when the copy checkers have all gone home and I’m typing up the last-minute additions to my magazine. We published an editorial once where I said I was “wary of sensitive men.” I meant to say “weary,” of course, and after a hundred outraged letters from the earnest boyfriends who’d happened to glance at my piece on their partner’s coffee table (presumably in between giving a back rub and washing the dishes), I began to realize just how weary I was. It was a typographical accident, I told them. I didn’t add, it was the kind of typographical accident that is caused by a steel machete on a Nigerian beach. I mean, what does one call the type of meeting where one gains an African girl and loses E, D, and C? I do not think you have a word for it in your language—that’s what Little Bee would say.

I sat in my pew, massaged the stump of my finger, and found myself acknowledging for the first time that my husband had been doomed since the day we met Little Bee. The intervening two years had brought a series of worsening premonitions, culminating in the horrible morning ten days earlier when I had woken up to the sound of the telephone ringing. My whole body had crawled with dread. It had been an ordinary weekday morning. The June issue of my magazine was almost ready to go to the printers, and Andrew’s column for The Times was due in too. Just a normal morning, but the soft hairs on the backs of my arms were up.

I have never been one of those happy women who insist that disaster strikes from a clear blue sky. For me there were countless foretellings, innumerable small breaks with normalcy. Andrew’s chin unshaved, a second bottle uncorked on a weekday night, the use of the passive voice on deadline Friday. Certain attitudes which have been adopted by this society have left this commentator a little lost. That was the very last sentence my husband wrote. In his Times column, he was always so precise with the written word. From a layperson, lost would be a synonym for bewildered. From my husband, it was a measured good-bye.

It was cold in the church. I listened to the vicar saying where, o death, is thy sting? I stared at the lilies and smelled the sweet accusation of them. God, how I wish I had paid more attention to Andrew.

How to explain to my son that the warning signs were so slight? That disaster, when it is quite sure of its own strength, will announce itself by hardly moving its lips? They say that in the hour before an earthquake the clouds hang leaden in the sky, the wind slows to a hot breath, and the birds fall quiet in the trees of the town square. Yes, but these are the same portents that precede lunchtime, frankly. If we overreacted every time the wind eased up, we would forever be laying down under the dining-room table when we really should be laying the plates on top of it.

Would my son accept that this is how it was with his father? The hairs on my arms went up, Batman, but I had a household to run. I never understood that he was actually going to do it. All I would honestly be able to say is that I woke up with the phone ringing and my body predicting some event that had yet to happen, although I never imagined it would be so serious.

Charlie had still been asleep. Andrew picked up the phone in his study, quickly, before the noise of the ringing could wake our son. Andrew’s voice became agitated. I heard it quite clearly from the bedroom. Just leave me alone, he said. All that stuff happened a long time ago and it wasn’t my fault.

The trouble was, my husband didn’t really believe that.

I found him in tears. I asked him who it had been on the phone, but he wouldn’t say. And then, since we were both awake and Charlie was still asleep, we made love. I used to do that with Andrew sometimes. More for him than for me, really. By that stage of our marriage it had become a maintenance thing, like bleeding the air out of the radiators—just another part of running a household. I didn’t know—in fact I still don’t know—what awful consequences are supposed to ensue if one fails to bleed the radiators. It’s not something a cautious woman would ever allow herself to discover.