The Making of Me: Hard as Egusi

L, from what I understand, was nothing like my father. L could have been my father, and, sometimes, when mom stares at my eyes and calls me her Siamese Cat, I swear it's possible. That something happened between them although she says the relationship was platonic and that that was precisely the great tragedy of that time in her life, the lack of touch that existed in it. I don't know; I really don't know. I've never seen a picture of L.

This is how I imagine what happened after L, what happened with Roger, my father:

Four consecutive months ravaging one hotel room after another, right after she was back from Africa with L -- trying to ignore her heart, tricking it into adventure and keeping it from aching. Mom had met Roger at a bar, had told him, over a glass of cheap champagne, the only one she could afford, that she had just returned from West Africa. He said he traveled there often, and so she went home with him. Or, to a hotel, rather. She didn't see his house for five months. In a dimly lit luxury-hotel room with chocolates carefully lain on their pillows, they drank champagne priced ten times higher than the one she'd sipped from at the bar. How many circles life can take, she'd thought. How if you don't hang on to the horns of the bull, you better say goodbye because it'll butt you right off.

Roger was the kind of person that made promises, and you believed him. There was no subtext to anything he said, everything was right there, out in the open. Except everything was a lie. "I love you. You're a jewel, a gem, I want you in my bed, in my life." She let him have her. For nothing. Four months of exorcism, sex; a grinding, rough patting and eating of each other, and six months after the whole affair was over, her belly was almost as hard as Egusi, protecting me, protecting me.