Ida and I marry and start a family. Viola, our first. Just one year later, our son, George. We are content. The children are dear. We have a live-in nanny, who minds the children and allows Ida and me to pursue our true interests. I will never leave my wife and children. Together we fulfill a demand from society I will always meet. Meanwhile, a life with Tom, too, requires some creativity, and the license to stretch boundaries. Tommarries and neither of us speak to each other of this or that.
Driven to be a leader in the community, I am the first to bring a Model-T home. It’s 1912. Such joy and power to motor around the neighborhood. Windows down, the wind beating against your face. Reminds you how vital and fleeting life is as we race through it.
So, here I stand a decade later, arm-in-arm with Tom. Ida and the kids on holiday with her parents. Increasingly, I struggle with my love for Tom, family, and community. Tom and I can never be open about our love. And Ida will never ask.
I have landed on a precipice that straddles two worlds. As years pass, this grows exhausting. To watch each step and consider every word so as not to mix my two worlds. My love remains strong, and I remain faithful to Ida and Tom.
The cost? There is one. I withdraw, so slowly that I can barely detect it. Divide my heart. Determined to remain loyal husband, father, and lover. With time I lose the ability to flip back and forth. In my forties and growing older, I have less patience and energy with each passing day. It takes more effort to live a dual existence. I am disappearing.
Hoping for a Miracle by Ben Murigu
I used to believe in honesty—that it was innate, proper, and that it paid in the end. I don’t anymore. Not after my own mother disowned me last month, decided that I was no longer worthy of her affection and attention because I was clearlya silly selfish bum unwilling to bless me with grandchildren as lovely as the twin girls Sylvia now has.
My name is Maxwell Mugo Muthoni, though everyone I know calls me Max. I’m an only child, forty-seven, Nairobi-bred, master’s educated—and I have no idea what the hell I’m doing with my life.
* * * *
I’m seated on my black leather sofa in the living room of my Roysambu apartment on a drizzly Tuesday night in mid-September, and there’s a plus-sized Maasai hunk in my bed. Snoring post-coitus.
Horace Salbabi.
He’s kind. That’s the first thing that I noticed about him three months ago when we met at a friend’s dinner party in Lavington—the kindness in his brown eyes, the way he listened when I spoke, the gentle way he touched my arm, the sexiness of his laugh.
We’ve been seeing each other regularly since then. He leaves his toothbrush here now, wears my precious Arsenal home-jersey sometimes, and knowsexactlyhow I take my coffee.
Last week Monday, when he came back from a weekend-long business trip in Naivasha town, he finally said it: he wasseriouslyin love with me.
* * * *
I have a well-paying job—a senior architect at a high-end firm in Nairobi’s Upper Hill that designs gated communities in Ngong and its environs. I’ve got clout: friends in high places, relatives who care about me. I own this nice two-bedroom digs with a view that catches the sunset just right. I exercise, jog for two hours every morning. And I read, a novel every fortnight. I’m not an alcoholic or addicted to drugs, illegal or not.
By most measures, I’m doing fine—no, better than fine.
But when it comes to love, to relationships, to the question of how I’m supposed to build a meaningful life with another human being, another man—I’m completely and utterly lost.
* * * *
I was twenty when I first had sex with a man.
Jamie Nguru was his name, and he was twenty-six. We met at a club in Kilimani—the kind that everyone knew about but no-one talked about openly. This was in December of ‘99.
Things were a lot different then: much more dangerous, much more hidden, but also—and I know this might seem strange—more electric because of it. The excessive secrecy made everything more intense, more immediate. More spectacular.
Every touch was a rebellion. Every kiss was a declaration.
We were rebels, and it felt great.
* * * *
A surgeon’s son, Jamie Nguru taught me what my body could do, what it could feel. He was patient and experienced, and he knew all my bones by name—every muscle, every joint, every cartilage. It was impressive.
For three wild months, I was smitten; I knew for sure that I was his and only his, and that I was in love with him. Madly.Deeply. Truly.
But then one night I showed up at his posh little place in Parklands unannounced and found him naked in bed with someone else—a skinnymhindidude in silver rimmed specs—and I bolted in a jealous rage.
It was only years later, after time and experience had combined and wizened me up, that I realized my folly: he’d nevereverpromised me exclusivity; I’d just stupidly assumed it because I’d been gifted his spare key in anger after a spat with his twin Cindy.
I cried for a week.
