I began a denial but there was no point. Fern was always very hard to lie to.
“It must be a truly strong feeling you have for him, to risk so much. So much. Last time you were here, you know, I suspected it, and the time before—but somehow it is still a shock, to have it confirmed.”
“But I don’t have any feelings for him!”
All the fight went out of his face.
“You imagine this makes me feel better?”
Finally, shame. A suspicious emotion, so ancient. We were always advising the girls in the academy not to feel it, because it was antiquated and unhelpful and led to practices of which we didn’t approve. But I felt it at last.
“Please don’t say anything. Please. I’m leaving tomorrow and that’s it. It just started and it’s already over. Please, Fern—you have to help me.”
“I tried,” he said, and walked off, in the direction of the school.
? ? ?
The rest of the day was torture, and the next, and the flight was torture, the walk through the airport, with my phone a grenade in my back pocket. It didn’t go off. When I walked into the London house everything was as before, only happier. The children were well settled—at least, we didn’t hear from them—the last album was well received. Photographs of Lamin and Aimee together, both looking beautiful—back at Jay’s birthday, from the concert—were in all the gossip rags and were more successful, in their way, than the album itself. And the baby had its debut. The world was not especially curious about logistics, as it turned out, and the papers considered her delightful. It seemed logical to everyone that Aimee should be able to procure a baby as easily as she might order a limited-edition handbag from Japan. Sitting in Aimee’s trailer one day during a video shoot, eating lunch with Mary-Beth, personal assistant number two, I tentatively introduced the topic, hoping to wheedle some information out of her, but I needn’t have been so careful, Mary-Beth was more than happy to tell me, I got the whole story, a contract had been drawn up by one of the entertainment lawyers, a few days after Aimee met the baby, and Mary-Beth had been there to see it signed. She was delighted at this evidence of her own importance and what it suggested about my position in the hierarchy. She took out her phone and flipped through the pictures of Sankofa, her parents and Aimee smiling together, and in among them, I noticed, was a screenshot of the contract itself. When she went to the bathroom and left her phone in front of me I e-mailed the screenshot to myself. A two-page document. A monumental amount of money, in local terms. We spent about the same on household flowers in a year. When I brought this fact to Granger, my last ally, he surprised me by considering it a noble case of “putting your money where your mouth is,” and spoke so tenderly about the baby that everything I had to say sounded monstrous and unfeeling in comparison. I saw that rational conversation wasn’t possible. The baby cast a spell. Granger was just as much in love with Kofi, as we called her, as everybody else who came near her, and God knows she was easy to love, nobody was immune, certainly not me. Aimee was besotted: she could spend an hour or two just sitting with the child on her knee, staring down at her, without doing anything else, and knowing Aimee’s relationship with time, its value and scarcity to her, we all understood what a mighty measure of love this represented. The baby redeemed all kinds of deadening situations—long meetings with the accountants, tedious dress fittings, PR-strategy brainstorm sessions—she changed the color of a day simply by means of her presence in the corner of whichever room, on the knee of Estelle or rocking in a Moses basket on a stand, chuckling, gurgling, crying, untarnished, fresh and new. The first chance we got we’d all crowd around her. Men and women, of all ages and races, but all of us with a certain amount of time racked up in Aimee’s team, from worn old battle-horses like Judy, to middle-rankers like me, to young kids straight out of college. We all worshipped at the altar of the baby. The baby was starting from the beginning, the baby was uncompromised, the baby wasn’t hustling, the baby needn’t fake Aimee’s signature on four thousand headshots heading for South Korea, the baby didn’t have to generate meaning out of the broken shards of this and that, the baby was not nostalgic, the baby had no memories and no regrets, it did not need a chemical skin peel, it did not have a phone, it had no one to e-mail, truly time was on its side. Whatever happened afterward, it wasn’t out of any lack of love for the baby. The baby was surrounded by love. It’s a question of what love gives you the right to do.
Eight