Okay, this is actually not yet finished but I wanted to take advantage of the no-points submitting thing. Anyways, there will be a scene between these two in which Christine and her boyfriend have dinner with her family, which will show how much she's changed, etc, and then there'll be a short scene after the last one that I have typed up. Mainly I want to know what everyone thinks of the second scene - not the just-off-the-airplane scene but the bedroom scene.
Comments appreciated!
Africa is still roaring in her head as she steps off the plane in Detroit. The whistle of a snake-eagle as it hunts for reptiles rises high above the singing of the wind that journeys over the plains, east to west. In the waiting crowd she sees the slowly starving bodies of the Massai people of southern Kenya. She still sees the parched yellow grasses of the savanna, the crooked acacia trees, the twisted baobab rising monstrous over all else. She sees giraffes curling long purple tongues around high-up twigs and straddling their legs to get at the water hole dug over time by the elephants, which wallow nearby in the mud. She sees troops of baboons loping across the savanna with pups swinging from their bellies, a cheetah dragging a freshly killed antelope into a stunted tree, the pride of lions that gazed at her incuriously as she passed them by on her rented Jeep. Then her vision is taken up by a human, a blond-haired, blue-eyed human smelling of aftershave and very faintly of beer and tobacco and saddle-leather. She blinks. He smiles down at her.
“Still wrapped up in dreams of Africa, I see,” he says. “I know I didn’t bring a sign or anything, but I’ve called your name at least a dozen times, Christine.”
She hears him, but the monkeys and lions and elephants in her head still clamor for her attention.
“How was it?” he asks. “I missed you.”
She shakes her head, clearing it for a moment of African noises.
“It was great,” she says.
He holds out an arm, which she takes, and they hug.
“I want to hear all about it,” he says.
“That would take a very long time,” she replies, smiling.
“We have a long drive home. You can start telling me, at least.”
She opens her mouth as they head through the airport, but she doesn’t know where to begin. With the multitude of animals she saw? With the people she met? Or perhaps she should just go in chronological order.
“Ask me about it,” she says as they climb into his Chevy.
“I just did. How was it?”
“No, ask me something specific. Ask me - ask me the names of the animals I learned, like their African names, or ask me what a snake-eagle sounds like, or ask me - ask me the color of the sky there.”
He grins.
“The sky’s a different color there?”
“Well - not exactly but it’s - closer. It’s a deeper blue. I don’t know, the sky there’s closer somehow. And the stars, you can see so many stars than you can here, even more than you can see out by us, and they kind of throb, they’re so bright, and...”
She talks nonstop for maybe twenty minutes, but then she stops. You can’t hear about Africa, she thinks; you have to experience it. There’s no other way.
“Christine?”
“Hmm? Oh, sorry. I just...”
“Ran out of things to say?”
She smiles.
“No. I could never run out of things to say about Africa. I just...don’t know what to say.”
She stares out the window, watching America pass by. Yellow traffic lights swing from their wires, and there are so many cars - not just one beat-up old Jeep trundling across a savanna, but a myriad of sleek, shiny vehicles of every model and color, flashing in the sunlight as they race along the roadways. Concrete and asphalt are everywhere. She sighs. Her boyfriend keeps looking over at her as he drives.
“You okay?” he asks.
“Everything’s so - synthetic, here.”
“It always has been. This is America. Synthetic is what we do.”
“But I never noticed before,” she says.
Then she falls silent and doesn’t speak again the rest of the way home.
-here be the future family-dinner scene-
The insomnia still grips her a month later. She no longer tosses and turns, just spends her nights lying awake, staring at the darkened lamp on her bedside table and listening to her boyfriend’s breathing. Tonight she cries, too. Big silent tears ooze from the corners of her eyes and drip to her nose and then to her pillow. She whispers his name into the darkness.
“Mmm?”
But at the sound of his stirring as he slowly wakes up, she loses her nerve and dries her eyes, saying nothing.
“Christine?” The mattress creaks as he turns over to look at her. “You okay?”
“Matthew—” she says, and stops.
“What is it?”
Tears start sliding down her face again.
“Do you still love me?” she asks.
His bedside lamp clicks on and he sits up.
“Of course I do,” he says. “Why would you even ask?”
“I know I’m - different.”
“You’ve always been different. That’s why I liked you.”
“No, I mean - not different from other people,” she says. “I mean I’m - I’m different from who I used to be.”
“Babe, look at me.”
She shakes her head, squeezing her eyes shut to stem the tears, but her body shakes with repressed sobs. He pulls her close and strokes her hair.
“I love you. Of course I love you. Come on, Christine, don’t cry. Talk to me. Please? Christine, please, tell me what’s wrong.”
She quiets in his arms after a while and finally says, “I’m just not happy here anymore. Everything’s so, I don’t know, fake, and people are so dishonest, and they just complain—‘oh, I can’t pay my cell phone bill this month! Oh, gas is so damn expensive! Oh—!” Why can’t they understand how lucky they are to have cell phones and cars and roofs over their heads? They think this is the whole world, and it’s not, it’s just not - the world is so much bigger, and they don’t - And,” she says, calming down again, “I do. I do know.”
“I know. It’s okay,” he says in an automatic sort of way.
“I can’t stay here anymore,” she says, “in America. I can’t be happy here anymore.” She’s silent for a moment. Then she says, “I’m going back.”
“To Africa?”
“Yes. I bought a plane ticket yesterday.”
“Yesterday,” he repeats. He stops stroking her hair. “But...you just got back. I don’t understand...how will another trip—?”
“It’s not another trip. I’m going to live there.” She sits up and looks at him. “And I want - I want you to come with me.”
He looks at her blankly.
“What would we do there?” he asks.
“Well - I could - I could teach. They’re always looking for people to teach the African people about hygiene and nutrition, you know, so they can be healthier and stuff. And you could work as a tour guide for safaris. They do safaris by horseback now! You could take people out on horseback and show them - show them...”
He looks at her sadly, and when she speaks again a sort of desperateness creeps into her voice.
“You will come with me, won’t you?”
He leans over to his bedside table and digs in a drawer. She lays a hand on his arm.
“Matthew?”
He straightens up with a small black box in his hand. He gives it to her. She stares at it.
“Open it,” he says. She does. A diamond ring twinkles at her from the velvety interior of the box.
“I wanted to give it to you when you got back,” he says, trying to sound off-hand. “I spent the whole summer figuring out exactly how I wanted to do it, and I was all ready when you got back, but, you know, I thought you might tell me to take it back and get something simple that didn’t come from a diamond mine in a deprived country or something, so—”
She bursts into tears and falls against him, sobbing into his shoulder. He pales and holds her, rocking her with his lips against her hair. Finally she looks up at him, and her eyes are red-rimmed and bright.
“Why are you giving this to me?” she asks. “I can’t – I’m leaving. And you – you’re not coming with me, are you?”
He lets out a sigh and wipes her eyes.
“No. I’m not,” he says. “I’m American and I’ve never – you were always the one who wanted to go on adventures. I just – I love you, and I know you aren’t happy here, but I can’t – I can’t come with you.”
He slides the ring on her finger, kisses her forehead, and says, “But I want you to keep it. You know – just in case you change your mind.”
She buries her face in his chest and sighs, exhausted from crying. In a muffled voice she says, “I love you.”
He kisses her hair and is silent. She feels the farthest away from him she’s ever felt, and she doesn’t know what to do about it. She begins thinking she’s making the wrong choice. But she can’t stay in America.
