The Woman from the Lonely-Hearts Section of the Newspaper
by Ndinda Kioko
The woman from the lonely-hearts section of the newspaper said she’d meet us at exactly noon, so we sat in Uhuru Park, waiting. My husband plucked a strand of grass. He split it with his teeth. I considered telling him that people urinated on that very grass. Instead, I yawned. If I held everything in like a fart, maybe the day would end without a fight.
Since I’d suggested meeting the woman, our conversations, even the delightful things—how much pasta I could eat, the one story he told at the end of every day about a dog that followed him on his way to work—mutated into arguments.
A young man with an old film camera slung over his neck approached us. He spoke only to my husband, saying it’d been a bad day for business. And what a fine-looking pair we made. What a beautiful couple! Could he take our picture for half the price?
I considered the young man’s Nikeyzz shoes whose tips were caked with dry mud. Then, his T-shirt. How brown. How hideous the box patterns on it!
My husband began to chat with him, finally roused.
In no time, the two men were neck-deep in a sprawling conversation. They went on about the delayed rains. They pointed out the rust on the roof of Integrity House. They shook their heads at the naivety of the young, at a group of boys who’d erupted into the park and were now whistling at girls, at teenage lovers sprawled on the grass like pumpkin plants. They pondered over young men who’d sagged their jeans to their knees, and a group of loud girls who’d come to the park dressed like motherless children.
At one point, the photographer’s gaze landed on me. He held it there for an uncomfortable moment.
Could he see it? Could he tell?
Nearby, children chortled. A gnawing pain pushed against my rib cage, threatening to split it open. It intensified with each moment as though mocking me or testing my capacity for it. I took slow deep breaths until the tension eased, and the pain travelled all the way to my fingertips, where it was bearable.
All day, I had suppressed the pain. I’d dug my nails into the hollow of my palm until it was sore.
The photographer primed his camera, peering into the lens and adjusting it this way and that way to take our picture. He showed us where to stand and my husband helped me to my feet. I hoped he would put his hand on my shoulder or wrap it around my waist.
He was once an indelicate lover, picking me carelessly and tossing me around the way a child might with a beloved toy. Now, he was careful. He’d offer only the tips of his fingers as if afraid of squashing me. I felt the most fragile when he touched me this way. All this carefulness, the apologizing, stripped moments of all pleasure.
I never used to be one to seek out touch, but I wanted it more now that it wasn’t there. There are moments, I confess, when I feigned frailty just to feel his touch. It felt difficult, too demeaning, to outrightly ask him for it.
I closed my eyes and leaned a little, entreating him to respond, to please touch me. I waited for the cool of his palms—damp from the galling afternoon heat—to ease the pain on my bare shoulder.
A sudden wind soughed. It parted my wig. I pressed down so it wouldn’t flee. Then, that pain again. No matter. Soon, the woman from the lonely-hearts section of the paper. Soon. A little comfort against this uncomfortable day. I hoped we’d make an impression on her. I had thought about her all week, wanting her not just for my husband, but as a different kind of presence, someone who did not pity me.
The young man lifted the camera to his face, then lowered it to laugh at something he’d overheard in a distant conversation. I was getting impatient. I asked, Are we taking the picture or not?
I had yelled. A small crowd gathered. It was the way of the city; this hunger Nairobi had for spectacle. I might have yelled at the crowd, told them to mind their business and go where they were going. They pursed their lips. They shook their heads. They left.
I can’t tell if it was pity I saw on my husband’s face, or if he was simply embarrassed. Lately, it had become difficult to distinguish between pity and everything else, even desire. He rested his hand on my shoulder. A weightless touch.
The picture was taken. The young man told us copies would be ready the next day. We could pick them from his photo studio on the other side of Moi Avenue. He left.
My husband and I sat underneath the shade of a tree where the grass was already flattened. We watched the afternoon wordlessly.
Worshippers—still mouthing their god songs, holy books pressed to chests—spilled from churches in Upper Hill and into the city. Near the ice-cream cart, a teenage girl in an orange dira ran to embrace a boy who’d been waiting.
I felt that I must apologize for the rancor in my manner, for the way I embarrassed my husband.
I’m just a little tired, I said.
It’s okay, he said. I understand. I’m tired too. He wanted to know if I had changed my mind.
Do you still want to meet her, he asked. We could leave. We could forget the whole thing.
Let’s just wait, I said. Let’s wait.
I felt his shoulders sag, and he reached for another strand of grass. He pushed it into his mouth. I lifted my hand to pluck it out but only grazed the side of his neck. When he pulled my hand to his knee, I knew that he’d misunderstood me. He’d seen in my raised hand something I hadn’t intended, a tenderness perhaps. He pressed the back of my palm underneath his, and the pain I’d felt all day slowly faded.
The first time I met him, before he became my husband, I winced at the thought of loving a man like him. I thought he was a man around whom, if one needed quiet time, one had to pretend to be asleep.
After two dates at Chai Spot, these concerns receded. There was more to the man beyond his long tales. He wasn’t handsome. He wasn’t ugly. He wasn’t remarkable in any way. But he was kind, attentive. He had the right amount of ambition.
My mother used to say: Forget love. Forget beauty. Forget what you read in your little novels. You find a good man, you marry him first, then, you learn to love him. So, I did just that.
We lived a decent life, were as happy as could be. Until the pandemic.
Like most people, I tested positive twice and suspected countless times in between that I’d caught it. The second time I tested positive, the fever and cough passed after a few days, but the pain stayed and became part of me. Three years later, as the world debated masks and vaccines, I remained tethered to this pain.
We’d seen numerous doctors. Each came with their set of questions. When was the last positive? What exactly did the pain feel like? Where was it? Might I have had an old injury? They poked and prodded my body, which held on to its secrets. They could find no damage, no infection.
I wished there was something growing, swelling in me, something a doctor could operate on, a condition with low survival rates.
What would my husband’s life have looked like if he married someone whose body allowed them the simple pleasure of life? There she is, coming home in the evening a little bit drunk. She tosses her keys to the table, leaps at him and plants her lips on his. He says, Let’s go to Masai Mara! And there they are on an ordinary Tuesday, floating over the grassland in a hot air balloon, the sun licking their napes. Then as the balloon descends, just before it lands, he turns to kiss her. He might find her face already waiting. He might say: We’ve lived a good life, haven’t we? She might say, yes, her voice tender as a wound.
Although it’d been my idea to find a woman in the lonely-hearts section of the newspaper, my husband’s sister planted the seed.
She lived in a small cottage not far from the city in Kiserian, rearing cows. We visited her occasionally but mostly out of duty because she was the kind of person who kept tally of how many times people visited her. I did not dislike her, but the tallying would only be fair if she also knew where we lived.
We were sitting in her cramped living room, and for an hour she’d been telling a story about her neighbor, a German woman she suspected of running a cult. It felt unending, with a cast that kept multiplying, details she returned to, sinister gatherings she’d overheard at night. I was only half-listening. But I nodded whenever her eyes fell on me.
They come at night, she said. Even the children. You can hear them crying.
She saw me fidgeting and I thought she might snap at me. I had interrupted her in the middle of a sentence that was still unfurling. Instead, she asked if I was okay. I told her I’d been in pain.
Comes and goes, I said.
She’d been in pain too, she said, touching the back of her neck where it had been.
An age thing, she said before launching into advice about what I could eat to cure it. There was a man she knew from Kajiado who’d grown up learning the things roots could do to a body. She could give us his phone number or even take my husband to him. She tilted her head towards my husband, then returned to the story she’d been telling before. Her dismissal stung, and I excused myself to pee.
Only when I disappeared into the corridor did my husband speak. She doesn’t even sleep these days, he said. It felt like an accusation. He told her he was planning to leave his job, perhaps find an online writing job, a remote one so he could stay home with me. Many people are doing it these days, he said.
That doesn’t sound good, she said. That doesn’t sound good at all.
All I need is a laptop. I can write papers for American students, he said. It pays well.
You can’t just leave your job. I think you need to be practical.
I have always been the kind of person to invent fictions. A fragment of a conversation overheard in a bus, and I’ll finish it myself. At times, to a point of hurting myself. In my mind, my husband’s sister was telling him that there were other lives he could choose, other lives he could live. Perhaps, this one required too much caretaking. She wasn’t wrong. On some days, I could barely get myself out of bed, and holding a spoon felt like the most difficult of chores.
A few days after the visit, I started thinking about what she said. I was thirty-eight now. My body no longer felt like mine. When the pain first started, it was only a mild inconvenience, lasting one hour, two hours. Now, it was a companion, something that lived in my mind too. It was now the central focus of our once-shared life, and my husband orbited around its demands and discomforts.
What if it became too much for a body to bear? What if it killed me? Death did not worry me. One’s own death is nothing. No one has ever come back to tell us what it’s like. What worried me was grief. The grief over a dead lover? Now that is an unbearable thing. One lost all sense in this kind of grief. I saw what it did to my grandmother when the nose of her husband’s car dived into a river. She slowly disintegrated. For months, my grandmother stood on her husband’s grave each morning and thumped her chest, daring death to come for her too. One Sunday night while we slept, death fulfilled her desires. A heart attack, the doctor said.
I wanted to know that if anything happened to me, my husband would continue living.
The truth was that our lives had become enmeshed, perhaps to unhealthy levels. Although we already lived together before the pandemic, we led solitary lives. I had my weekend routine, ate when I was hungry, watched whatever I wanted. But the endless days of lockdown changed us. We did everything together until the outside world became alien. Friends I rarely saw said, You need to go back to having a life. The streets miss you.
When I told my husband there was some sense in what his sister was saying, and about a woman from the lonely-hearts section of the paper I wanted him to meet, he was in the bathroom hunched over the sink, brushing his teeth. He yelled, toothbrush still in mouth, about how I must be losing my mind. What was I doing, listening to his sister? What had gotten into me? Pain has never killed someone, he said.
I didn’t respond. Was he right? Was I losing my mind?
He said he was getting late for work. If he stayed even a moment longer, there would be traffic everywhere. We’d talk about this when he came back. He was about to slam the door behind him when he realized he was still holding the toothbrush and wasn’t wearing any shoes.
That evening, I smelled cheap Kenya Cane on his breath. It was the first time he’d come home drunk. Later, in bed, he said, Okay, is this going to make you happy? Is this what you want? Tell me it’s what you want me to do. I’ll do it.
The woman from the lonely-hearts section of the newspaper spotted us first. She was taller and older than I imagined. She withdrew her hands quickly when we shook them. When she laughed, there was an overwhelming whiteness of teeth. It surprised me that a woman like that had placed an ad in the lonely-hearts section of the newspaper. Loneliness didn’t belong to women with teeth like that.
Sweat trickled from the back of her ear. It washed off her makeup, a dark brown bleeding into the collar of her dress. She had made an effort to look good, matching the flowers on her dress with pink earrings. It was a hard pink to look at, demanding attention then blinding the eye. I typically never worried about clothes, but I suddenly felt underdressed. Perhaps I should have braided my hair or worn a different dress, the mustard one with pockets. What could be more formidable than a mustard dress with pockets? The one I had on was a little too navy blue.
She was accompanied by a little boy, which surprised me. Tall enough to reach my knees, he was probably six years old. He wore a black suit and had draped a kite around his neck. His shirt was buttoned all the way to his neck and he kept reaching for the top button, trying to loosen it. Each time he did, I felt as if the collar were strangling my own neck. In the few text messages we exchanged with the woman from the lonely-hearts section of the newspaper, she hadn’t mentioned a child. She hadn’t spoken much about herself either, and I understood. I had withheld a part of our story too. I told her I knew a man, who was my friend, who was shy. The truth had sounded a little too complicated.
She told us her name was Maria Salome. It sounded made up. She praised herself for the ease with which she’d found us. I had wanted to be at the park earlier to anticipate her moves, the way a hunter does. She’d be a guest walking into our living room, a space that already belonged to us.
When I invited Maria Salome to sit, she gathered the boy to her lap. Her voice was nervous and taut enough to bruise a lip. For a moment, I found comfort in her nervousness.
I had prepared a catalogue of questions. Was there much traffic getting here? Did she have trouble finding us? What part of the country did she come from? Did she have family? It all felt silly now. She was already too eager to share herself.
She was a history teacher at a small private school in Rongai. She’d been to places, seen the Table Mountain in Cape Town, two American states, the church of Lalibela in Ethiopia. I didn’t know the Lalibela church, hadn’t travelled outside the country. But she had decided we were the kind of people who might have heard of these places, who might be impressed by her having travelled there. She said she had a twin sister who died young.
This is good, I thought. She knows grief.
How easily laughter came to her, unprovoked. It was a dry laugh that seemed to have been drained of all essence by the afternoon heat. Even in laughter, her face remained still, giving nothing but sound.
All the while, my husband combed his beard with his fingers and nodded at everything Maria Salome said. A skill he’d perfected at work, a performance for disinteresting customers who came to his desk at the bank, asking questions about this loan and that bank account. He would nod excessively, even at laughter. Sometimes he’d get carried away and nod way after conversation had already ended.
Maria Salome fell silent. She might have realized that she was the only one speaking and wanted us to give her something. I wished my husband would seize the moment. Silence had always bothered him.
He was about to speak but got distracted by the boy who was struggling to fly his kite a short distance from where we sat. My husband headed for him.
And so, we watched him: how he folded the paper with ease, without hesitating to consider his move as though his hands had done it enough times to develop a memory for it. How much of a stranger he was to me in this moment.
How much he was turned so completely into himself. I desperately wanted him to turn and look at me, away from the boy and his kite. Without realizing it, without needing anything from him, I called out his name.
He can’t hear you, Maria Salome said, her eyes fixed on him. I felt a twinge of annoyance that she’d intruded into this private moment. Her eyes lit up when her husband’s hand rested on the boy’s shoulder, when he handed him the kite.
Try it now, he said. Go ahead and try.
When the boy clutched the tail of the kite and a gust of wind lifted it high, my husband turned to Maria Salome and there was something there, a glimpse into a kind of life, so brief I thought I might have imagined it. The All-Saints Cathedral midday bell rang, and we all turned to the sound. Near the pond, a little girl held on to her mother’s leg, crying about her stained dress.
Don’t blame anyone, her mother said pointing at the ice-cream cone the girl had been licking. You ruined it yourself.
It was getting a little chilly. I called out again to my husband, asking for a sweater. Maria Salome pulled a scarf from her faux leather bag with fraying straps. She draped it over my shoulders. The scarf was as pink as her earrings. It was soft and felt good on my skin, but it lit an irritation in me.
She kept her hand on my shoulder a little too long and smiled. Was it judgement I saw on her face? I felt called to explain why I’d asked my husband for a sweater when I could have stood to get it myself, but the words remained frozen in my mouth.
My husband stood where he’d been, watching the boy. The wind had died down and the boy struggled to fly the kite. Each time he released it, the kite yielded to gravity, falling like a dead bird. I could tell that my husband was disappointed with the work he’d done on the kite.
There’s just not enough wind, Maria Salome yelled so my husband could hear. Then she turned to me and apologized.
Why are you apologizing? I asked.
I’m not stupid, she said. I know he’s your husband.
He must have heard that. He came to me, rested his elbow on my lap and kissed me quickly without looking. His lips landed on my earlobes. It was a wet kiss and made me want to pee.
We’d agreed that they would spend part of the afternoon alone. Maria Salome asked if I could watch the boy.
We won’t be long, my husband said.
Before they left, his gaze touched the side of my neck, unable to meet my eyes. The familiar pain seemed to dissolve with their steps. I found myself longing for it, wishing I could summon it back into my body. Without it, I felt void. Lonely even.
The boy and I watched them until a crowd of acrobat watchers swallowed them. I might have heard Maria Salome’s laughter trail back to us. The cold afternoon air teemed with dust. I could already feel a layer had settled on my skin. The boy sat quietly. His eyes were wide with fascination, trained on a locust hiding in a patch of grass. He leaned forward to catch it, revealing a scar on the back of his neck. When he saw me looking, he touched it gently with his small hands and pulled his shirt to reveal it fully.
My brother pushed me, he said, so eager to explain in that way of children. He went on to list the things his mother did after his brother pushed him. How much she worried about him. She never lets me sleep on my own bed, he said. How his mother applied something on his fresh wound that stung. He said he didn’t even cry. He seemed proud of his scar, proud of the fact that he did not even cry.
Now my brother wants a scar too, he said, planting his hands on the ground to laugh.
A crow flew from a tree and perched on the grass beside the boy. He tried to shoo it away. It stayed, unflustered.
I thought about Maria Salome kissing my husband lightly on the lips, and him kissing her awkwardly at first, then holding her face, reaching for more. What did they talk about? What kind of person was he, with her?
I wanted to run towards the crowd that swallowed them, splitting it open, finding them seated on a bench and putting a stop to it all.
Other pieces of that afternoon: a man in wellington boots, a sound- less boom box balanced on his shoulder, the woman in a red dress too tight for her strides, the boy attempting to walk with the laces of his shoes tied together, that woman holding a bottle of Fanta Orange to her face to cool it.
The sun was already setting when they came back. I had dozed off and the boy was deep asleep on my lap. There was a spring in my husband’s step, and before they reached us, they paused to finish their conversation. Maria Salome was speaking, too low for me to hear.
The boy woke as soon as he heard his mother’s voice. She gathered their things: her scarf from my neck, the boy’s shoes, the kite.
A heavy cloud passed above us, then there was light again. Two men walked past us, sharing the load of a broken wheelbarrow without wheels. They were lost in a story, laughing loudly with their bodies as if what they balanced between them was weightless.
We have to go, Maria Salome said. It’s getting late.
He’s a good man, she whispered to me. A very funny man.
I managed a fake smile. Her laughter was light as she waved him goodbye, and the usual awkwardness he had around new people seemed to have washed away.
Take care of yourself, she said. They both turned to me.
Once the boy and the woman were gone, we sat silently. I hunched over and wrapped my arms around my legs. My husband pulled a khanga from the bag and draped it over my legs for warmth.
A girl and a boy sat across us, giving us their backs. The girl gathered her long braids and tied them carelessly. They unraveled as soon as she let go.
What happened, I asked him.
You said you weren’t going to ask, he said. I just want to know, I said.
Let’s not talk about it, he said.
I expected him to ask if I was in pain, if I needed something. Did I need to get home? Was I tired? But he seemed absorbed in a place I couldn’t reach.
Do you think it’ll rain, he asked.
Outside the needs of my body, was this the only thing we could talk about?
He raised his eyes to the sky. I could tell by the scattering clouds it wasn’t going to rain.
I think it might, he said. It might.
We sat until a gentle darkness began to fall over the city like a black mist. The streetlights came on, then those in city buildings—one by one—until the city was fully lit.
As we walked to Malindi Dishes, the pain returned. I bit into my lip to suppress it, but my husband saw this. We stopped from time to time so I could rest. In the crowded streets, I felt each light brush as though my skin was being pared.
Outside a Kenchick Inn, the smell of chips and fried chicken overwhelmed me. He held me by the shoulders as I threw up in a small space between parked matatus. People stopped to watch, and I apologized to him for the spectacle. By the time we made it to the restaurant, I was too tired to eat.
It was raining when we arrived home. When my husband tried to help me up the stairs, I declined. Inside, the house was cold and cheerless. In bed, he reached for the Panasonic radio on his side. Its faint humming occupied us until he fell asleep. His gentle snores deadened the sound of the radio. I treasured these snores, a piece of himself left behind whenever I couldn’t sleep. A small kindness he was unaware of. I turned so that his face was buried into the back of my neck, then I pulled his hand to my mouth and tasted the salt on his palms.
My husband turned in his sleep and I saw his lips move, as if quarreling with someone in his dreams. I tapped him lightly on the shoulder. He was awake now.
Are you okay, are you okay? he asked.
Then he began to cough and prolonged it the way a child sometimes does when imitating someone, or when in need of attention.
He stood and disappeared into the dark of the corridor. There were nights when my husband thought I was asleep and I’d hear him masturbating, the tap water running to drown his noise.
When he came back to bed, he was roused. He made his need known, tapping me lightly on the shoulder. This mute language of desire. I considered saying I was too tired, but I feared it might be the last time we’d be together.
The sex was brief. Unlike recent times, he wasn’t gentle when he touched me. At first, I liked it. I coiled about him, my bones rising to meet his.
But I was distracted. In a nearby church, the lament of night worshippers rose and dropped, mimicking my husband’s movements above me. I asked him to stop. He finished as soon as I spoke, as though my voice was all he needed to finish. He slept almost immediately after.
Outside, keys clanged as a neighbor attempted to open his door. Light from a passing car rested on our bed. I turned. I could almost see my husband’s face. Then it was dark again.