Ancestry, page 17
‘Don’t you want to meet some of the writers in the conference?’ David had asked, affronted that she wasn’t prepared to give the conference a chance and worried that his friends would conclude that she wasn’t well educated or literary. ‘I’ll meet them at the social functions,’ she’d replied.
He’d stopped himself from reminding her she’d promised with boundless enthusiasm that she really, really wanted to attend her first ever literary conference and would really, really love it.
‘I’m an illiterate lawyer who needs to learn about the literature of Oceania, your specialty, darling,’ Taimane had declared. ‘And I want to hear your paper.’ One morning of the conference – admittedly the keynote speaker and the other three papers had been, even for him, pretentious and boring – and she’d had enough. A feeling deeper than annoyance had surged up from his belly, but, as was now usual in their relationship, he’d blocked it in his chest and swallowed it. She’d sensed his rising anger but knew he wasn’t going to confront her. Besides, she had been genuine about wanting to participate in a literary conference and learn more about his work and the scholars and writers he worked with across the world.
After putting his suitcase and satchel in the boot, they got into the car. She immediately leaned across and held him and kissed him passionately. ‘I missed you,’ she whispered, and then bit his left lobe, her hot breath surging into his ear. ‘Wow, now you’ve got me all randy!’
‘Calm down,’ he said. ‘We don’t want an accident on the way home!’ They headed out of the airport through the busy traffic. It was another hot summer day. It felt good after being in Hawai‘i’s clean, tropical heat.
That first day, straight after the last conference session, Taimane had taken him back to their hotel, where she’d put on her black bikini, white bathrobe and jandals, all the time hurrying him out of his clothes. They’d elevatored down into the crowded lobby area and walked out, through the other tourists weaving through the corridors and onto the hotel’s spacious back lanai and swimming pool. He’d felt exposed, his skin unused to being naked in that heat after being cooped up all winter.
There’d been few swimmers round the pool – most people were down on the beach under brightly coloured beach umbrellas, or sunbathing on the sand, or out in the waves surfing and swimming. A cool breeze wove round them, and he’d hoped she’d stay on the lanai so he wouldn’t have to suffer the scrutiny of the beach crowd, but, face flushed with joy, arms outstretched, Taimane had jumped down onto the white sand. And he’d followed her. The sand had felt pulpy and wet and warm around his feet, as he’d stood surveying the stretch of mythical Waikīkī.
‘Did you get the chance to have a holiday?’ Taimane asked, snuggling into his side and slipping her hand between his legs. He tried to pull away, but she said, ‘No, you don’t, keep your sexy eyes on the road, darling, or you’ll crash us.’
‘I took some friends to Waimānalo and swam and picnicked there for the day. They loved it …’
‘Like we did, eh?’ He was hardening. ‘Wow, darling!’
After their first swim at Waikīkī, during which she’d felt as if her whole body and breath had been cleansed of its physical and emotional impurities, they’d returned to their luxurious room, where she’d quickly sketched out a schedule on hotel stationery for what she’d called their ‘holiday in paradise’. She’d known David would protest like he always did, but with a little persuasion (and allowing him to believe the final schedule was really his), she knew he’d come round.
As she’d predicted, David had protested: ‘What about my missing out on most of the conference?’
‘But darling, how many papers are there that you really can’t afford to miss?’
He’d scrambled and could only come up with two.
‘See, and those are on tomorrow in the afternoon. Yours is in the morning.’ She knew she’d won. ‘So, darling, we’ll spend tomorrow at the conference and then have a two-week holiday.’
‘Two weeks?’
‘Why not? I’ll ring my office and tell them. And you’re on mid-semester break.’
Within minutes, she’d left their hotel room and booked their schedule with the tour company in the lobby.
‘How’s work?’ He tried distracting himself from Taimane’s marvellous grip. The thick traffic ahead on the motorway, the summer light flashing off the vehicles, threatening to blind him.
‘Fine, fine, busy! A difficult divorce case starting on Monday …’ She sucked in her breath. Her throat and eyes were parched dry and her voice trembled as she gazed admiringly down at her hand. ‘Wow, wow!’ she whispered. She knew this was one of his favourite ways of getting aroused, and when he was aroused, her desire fired, too. ‘Eyes on the road, darling. Eyes on the road!’ When she started unzipping him he reached down and grasped her hand.
‘No, not here; wait till we get home!’
His first impression of Taimane – when they’d shared the same table at his cousin’s wedding reception – was that she was demure, reserved, almost shy, stand-offish. He’d seen her once before at a Laughing Samoans’ performance at the Aotea Centre; he remembered that she’d been in the lobby before the show, drinking wine and laughing softly with a man and three other women. She was tall, wide-shouldered with slim hips and long, silky black hair and absolutely striking in her dark blue woollen overcoat, tight-fitting black puletasi and black pearl earrings that hung down almost to her neck. He’d heard she was a lawyer in a firm of three Samoan female lawyers. At the wedding, when he realised that she was avoiding him, he’d decided right then not to talk to her either.
Like most of the Samoan community, she knew who David was; there weren’t many Samoan university lecturers, and even fewer who were also writers. She’d read one of his novels and had found it compulsively engrossing but frightening and upsetting in its portrayal of the paradisiacal Samoa her mother had nourished her on. Did he need to be so anti-faife‘au and anti-church, and so gratuitously graphic with the violence and sex? She wasn’t going to read any more of David’s books! Now she had to sit opposite him, that person who obviously knew little about Samoa and was giving people everywhere a grossly false, unfair, malicious picture of her people and culture! She’d had enough of up-themselves Samoan men like him (and that high school teacher she’d just dropped, after tolerating almost six months of his egotistical behaviour)!
During the wedding breakfast, while the others at their table were busy eating and talking, the urge to penetrate Taimane’s aloofness gripped David, and he reached over and grasped her left hand.
Startled, she pulled her hand away, which startled him in turn. ‘Sorry – I’m sorry.’
‘Don’t worry – don’t!’ she automatically responded, making eye contact with him for the first time.
‘I’m David, David Tulafono.’
‘I know,’ she’d said. ‘My name’s Tai – Taimane Falemalu.’
A week later they went out to dinner at his favourite Thai restaurant in Ponsonby, near the two-bedroom apartment where he lived alone after he and his wife had separated. Within half an hour, she was surprised, breathlessly elated, to find herself talking more freely about her life than she’d ever done with any other man. David seemed wholly focused and interested in what she was saying; such a good listener, a total contrast to the arrogant, anti-Samoan writer she’d believed he was. She heard herself saying, ‘Once I thought, after reading one of your books, that you were a really arrogant person. Now, now …’ She flung her hands up, admitting how wrong she’d been. He smiled, eyes concentrated only on her, and didn’t say anything. ‘Really arrogant,’ she repeated.
She continued telling him her story. An only child, she’d been raised in Grey Lynn by her mother and grandparents, who were poorly educated but hard-working, loving, God-fearing people, who’d put her education and upbringing before anything else. Sunday school and church twice on Sunday and youth group on Wednesday nights, an A-student all the way through Auckland Girls’ Grammar and then university, and – ‘Would you believe it in this day and age?’ – she was chaperoned everywhere. She wasn’t allowed to play sport or have boyfriends, because those were distractions from her education, being successful and becoming ‘a true Samoan woman’. Whenever she stopped talking, worried that she was boring him, he would nod and ask her a question that would set the next direction to her story.
‘And would you believe it, even when all my friends and other young people around me were doing what they wanted, not once did I ever rebel against my strict upbringing! How could I? My mother and grandmother worked in a factory during the day and as cleaners at night, and Granddad drove a bus and was a security guard in the weekends. All for me.’
He found everything about Taimane captivating: her unawareness that she was physically beautiful, the iridescent glow that emanated from her whole being when she was discussing things she believed in and her voice, throaty, deep and rising from the depths of her belly, firing long shivers down his back.
It was only when they had finished their desert of fresh mangos and vanilla ice cream that she realised he’d not given much information about himself. ‘Bloody hell, I’m so sorry. I’ve been telling you tons about myself!’
It was at that pause, that moment of formulating his reply, that the sharp finger of doubt first jabbed into the credibility of the life Taimane had storied to him, but he dispelled it immediately.
‘There isn’t much to tell.’ He looked away from her. ‘I was married for eight years, have an eight-year-old daughter, Gaualofa, and have been teaching at Auckland University for eight years.’ He laughed. ‘My life works in eight-year cycles!’ They laughed some more and he noticed that her eyes glistened like diamonds.
He couldn’t sleep for a long time that night, trying to deny his doubts about her life story. Of one thing he was irrefutably sure: Taimane was the first woman since his separation that he had felt more than lust towards. He wanted to know more about her; even perhaps be with her beyond an affair.
When the automatic garage door closed behind them, they didn’t even bother to take out his luggage as they rushed into the house and onto the sitting room sofa. As they fucked wildly, her crying out, ‘Hawai‘i, Hawai‘i!’, vivid memories of their holiday in Hawai‘i and their lurid lovemaking – on the beach, in the car, in their hotel rooms and once, almost in public view, on the cliff at the highest point on Waimea Canyon – as they’d travelled round O‘ahu, to Hilo and around the lava fields of Kilauea Volcano and the Big Island, and on to Kaua‘i fuelled the intensity and variation and duration of their love-making.
‘Now do you agree that ditching that literary conference and doing Hawai‘i and those sexy volcanic fields was worth it, darling?’ she laughed, as they showered afterwards.
‘Too right, too bloody right!’ He rubbed body gel over her back.
‘And for your sake, I hope you didn’t have a holiday like that this time!’ She turned and rubbed her lathered face into his chest. ‘Did you?’ she asked, pretending she was still joking.
‘Of course not,’ he replied, knowing Taimane was serious and suspicious – but he wasn’t going to reveal it. ‘There were some awesome papers and some of my close friends were there.’
He hadn’t slept much on the plane, so David retreated to bed after their shower while she went into her study and tried to work on the divorce case. Instead, she found herself recalling in hypnotising detail their car trip into the National Park and up through those amazing lava fields ablaze with light and heat waves, to the edge of the Kilauea crater. It was like she was watching a silent black and white movie being projected from her eyes.
‘See the fissure down there where the molten lava and fire are coming out?’ he’d asked as they had stood at the edge. ‘That’s Halema‘uma‘u, home of Pele, the akua of volcanoes.’ As the acrid smell of sulphur had grown stronger, she’d cupped a couple of tissues to her mouth and nose.
Following their Thai dinner, the compulsion to be with each other was undeniable. So they usually met after work for drinks or dinner, or spent long periods talking on the phone. Not once did either invite the other to their apartments.
Once, David asked her where her grandparents were now. He caught the hesitation in her eyes, in her hands, and then Taimane said, ‘Oh, once I was settled into my law job, they decided to go back to Samoa and live. My mother and I built them a modest house there, and they’re very happy living on their New Zealand super in the community they grew up in. Mum and I also send them money every month.’ The need to know more was urgent, but he tried to sound nonchalant as he asked after her mother.
Oblivious to his suspicions, she answered, ‘She’s living with her sister, my aunt Fausia, and other ‘āiga in our home, which I had totally renovated two years ago.’
Trying again to quiet his doubts, David offered information about himself; that both his parents had died in a car accident when he was ten and that he’d been raised by his uncle and aunt in Ponsonby.
Taimane reached over and grasped his hand. Before she could ask, he added that his uncle and aunt, who had a grown-up son and daughter, had been marvellous parents – better even than his biological ones. She caressed the back of his hand. ‘Had been?’ she asked softly. He nodded once, and told her his aunt had died of breast cancer four years before and his uncle of a broken heart a few months later. With both hands she gripped his, tightly, and gazed at him, tears in her eyes. ‘Of a broken heart? What a wonderful, wonderful story, David!’
And she meant it. He reached over to her and she thrust her head forward, cupping the side of his head with her hand, and they kissed for the first time. Long, searching, urgent.
The next afternoon in the middle of a lecture he was giving to his graduate class on Sia Figiel and her views on how Samoans defined I, the self and the individual, bewildering doubts about her life story again clogged his attention. For a moment – during which his students looked up at him, puzzled — he lost the thread of his discussion, retrieving it only when he decided he had to satisfy those doubts immediately.
That afternoon, he started gathering information about her, and felt highly relieved he wasn’t experiencing any guilt doing it. To his relief, the first informants he rang reinforced much of the story she’d given him. He remembered her mother’s name and rang her, pretending he was a New Zealand Herald journalist doing a feature story on Taimane and two other Pasefika lawyers as outstanding examples of the new generation of Pacific lawyers in Auckland.
As the woman answered his questions, he didn’t want to believe the obvious discrepancies between her story and Taimane’s. Taimane had claimed that her mother and aunt and grandparents were poorly educated, yet her mother was speaking fluent, lucid English. How had her daughter done at Auckland Girls’ Grammar? he asked. Auckland Grammar? No, the woman said, her daughter had attended Massey College, where she was still the head of maths.
His breath snagged in his throat. The father, who had been absent from Taimane’s stories (he’d assumed it was because she was ashamed of him), turned out to be a highly respected paediatrician who was still practicing. And instead of being an only child, she was the youngest of four. As for doting grandparents, they had died before Taimane was born.
There was nothing in her family and history to be ashamed of, so why the lies? A lacerating mixture of betrayal, anger and bewilderment threatened to choke him. David went to the long windows of his office that overlooked the harbour and took long slow breaths. He persuaded himself that Taimane would soon tell him why she’d lied about her family. Right now, all that he was, even his lust, needed Tai. Yes, absolutely. So he decided to discontinue his investigation, and he knew he’d never reveal his findings to her.
It was almost seven, and David had been sleeping since he got back from his trip. As Taimane watched him from the doorway, the light from the corridor fell across the bottom of their bed and up over him. He was on his stomach with the sheets tangled round his legs.
So much of her and her life had changed over the three years she’d been with him – and for the better. He wasn’t going to wake for dinner; she’d let him sleep through the night, so she turned and went into the kitchen, where she made an avocado, tomato and ham sandwich and lemon tea and sat down at the dining table – he insisted that they always do that.
As she ate, she remembered the first time she and his wife Ariel had met. She was now sure Ariel had deliberately planned it. In the Foodtown supermarket on Williamson Avenue of all places! She was selecting a bag of seedless grapes when someone wearing the strong scent of Poison came and stood beside her. Taimane almost stepped away when she recognised Ariel from photos she’d seen of her. ‘Oh, hello,’ Ariel said, smiling. ‘What a surprise.’ Taimane would never understand David’s attraction to blonde Pālagi women – it was strange, considering his staunch, outspoken views about racism, colonialism and the rights of indigenous people.
She didn’t know what to do, and heard herself mumbling, ‘Good to meet you. Gaualofa is a very well-behaved child.’ Ridiculous thing to say; why talk about Ariel’s daughter?
‘Thank you,’ Ariel said. ‘You don’t mind looking after her in the weekends?’
‘No, no!’ She replied. ‘She’s a good girl and David loves having her with us.’ The separation agreement between David and Ariel gave him the right to have Gaualofa the last two weekends of every month and some of the school holidays. Since shifting in with David two years before, Taimane had established, if not an intimate, fully trusting relationship with Gaualofa, one that was workable. At first Taimane had found it painfully difficult sharing David with a child he doted on. She didn’t know much about children or care very much for them; especially prepubescent girls who couldn’t stop talking and whining and demanding things. Once, when Gaualofa refused repeatedly to clean her room, Taimane had grabbed her shoulders and ordered, ‘Do it now!’ David slid into the room and, embracing his sobbing daughter, carried her out, shouting over his shoulder, ‘Don’t you bloody well treat my daughter like that again!’ Since then – and after a few more confrontations with Gaualofa, which only ever resulted in nasty arguments between her and David, and the bitter realisation she could never compete with Gaualofa for his affections – she left the parental control and responsibility to David.
