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salubrious.
    They told her there was a
tubab
living nearby who would surely put her up. Without the faintest idea of what a
tubab
might be, Annie found herself being led in a large posse bearing her bags along winding jungle tracks to a small mud house set among baobab and papaya trees. The
tubab
who answered the door—she later found out it meant white man—was Robert.
    He was a Peace Corps volunteer and had been there a year, teaching English and building wells. He was twenty-four, a Harvard graduate and the most intelligent person Annie had ever met. That night he cooked her a wonderful meal of spiced fish and rice, washed down with bottles of cold local beer and they talked by candlelight till three in the morning. Robert was from Connecticut and was going to be a lawyer. It was congenital, he apologized, eyes wryly aglint behind his gold-rim specs. Everyone in the family had been lawyers for as long as any of them could remember. It was the Curse of the Macleans.
    And, like a lawyer, he cross-examined Annie about her life, forcing her to describe and analyze it in a way that made it seem as fresh to her as it did to him. She told him how her father had been a diplomat and how, for the first ten years of her life, they had moved from country to country whenever he was given a new post. She and her younger brother had been born in Egypt, then lived in Malaya, then Jamaica. And then her father had died, quite suddenly, from a massive heart attack. Annie had only recently found a way of saying this that didn’t stop the conversation and make people study their shoes. Her mother had resettled in England, rapidlyremarried and packed her and her brother off to boarding schools. Although Annie skimmed over this part of the story, she could tell Robert sensed the depth of unresolved pain beneath it.
    The following morning Robert took her in his jeep across on the ferry and delivered her safely to the Catholic convent where she was to live and teach for the coming year under the only occasionally disapproving eye of the mother superior, a kindly and conveniently myopic French-Canadian.
    Over the course of the next three months, Annie met up with Robert every Wednesday when he came to buy supplies in town. He spoke Jola—the local language—fluently and gave her a weekly lesson. They became friends but not lovers. Instead, Annie lost her virginity to a beautiful Senegalese man called Xavier to whose amorous advances she remembered to say yes, loudly, and mean it.
    Then Robert was transferred up to Dakar, and the evening before he went Annie crossed the river for a farewell supper. America was voting for a new president and the two of them listened in deepening gloom to a crackling radio as Nixon took state after state. It was as if someone close to Robert had died and Annie was moved as he explained to her in a voice choked with emotion what it meant for his country and the war many of his friends were fighting in Asia. She put her arms around him and held him and for the first time felt she was no longer a girl but a woman.
    Only when he had gone and she met other Peace Corps volunteers did she realize how unusual he was. Most of the others were dope-heads or bores or both. There was one guy with glazed, pink eyes and a headband who claimed he’d been high for a year.
    She saw Robert once more when she went back up toDakar to fly home the following July. Here people spoke another language called Wolof and he was already fluent. He was living out near the airport, so near that you had to stop talking whenever a plane went over. To make some virtue of this, he had got hold of a huge directory detailing every flight in and out of Dakar and, after two nights studying it, knew it by heart. When a plane flew over he would recite the name of the airline, its origin, route and destination. Annie laughed and he looked a little hurt. She flew home the night a man walked on the moon.
    They didn’t see each other again for seven years.