Chapter 80
Nia at fifty-five was the same person she had been at twenty-four when she had walked into the Friday writing group with Claudette and told Marcus they were talking about the same problem from different angles. She was more experienced, more recognized, more layered by the thirty years of life between then and now. But the essential Nia the directness, the precision, the ability to look at a space and immediately understand what it needed was exactly as it had always been.
She was now a partner in a mid-sized architecture firm that specialized in community and social infrastructure. She taught at the University of the West Indies one day a week. She served on two national design committees and one international one.
She was, Marcus thought, one of the best people he knew. Not the most comfortable she had never been comfortable, in the sense of easy or predictable. But good. Genuinely, thoroughly, structurally good.
They had been together for thirty years and married for twenty-eight and he still, regularly, found himself in conversation with her and thinking: this is the best conversation I am going to have today. This is the best thinker I have access to.
He told her so one evening.
She looked at him with the expression she used when she was not going to say something directly but was going to say it obliquely.
'You know what I appreciate most about you?' she said.
'What?'
'That after thirty years you still say the true thing,' she said. 'You don't manage it. You just say it.'
'Mr. Okafor told me not to be polite.'
'I know,' she said. 'You've told me approximately forty times.'
'It bears repeating.'
'It does,' she agreed.
They sat together in the evening light of the apartment, the same apartment they had moved into twenty-seven years ago, which had been repainted twice and had the furniture changed and had accumulated evidence of their children and their work and their decades of life but was still, in some essential way, theirs the specific space where they had built the specific life.
Marcus was fifty-three years old and deeply, quietly content.
This, he thought, was what arriving looked like. Not the absence of difficulty or complexity or the ongoing work. Just the sense that you were in the right place, building the right things, with the right person, and that the soil under the roots was solid.