His story was a sad one. He had been married once. There had been children. But it all ended one night. His wife was having an affair and he was none the wiser. It was night and he was out working.The gas was leaking and when his wife's lover struck a match to light a cigarette the house went up in flames. The lovers escaped but not the children or the house help. He made a vow not to love or marry again.

Until he met me and learnt how to laugh again, to love again, to live again.

On our wedding night he looked in my eyes and spoke words he would repeat often: "My Angel, if you cheat on me I will kill you then I will kill myself. I love you so much to share you with another man." Instead of a reply I kissed him. I knew that what I felt for him was different, it felt like love but it was not love. But then at thirty-one I was grateful to find a man to call my own. What I felt for him was gratitude. And gratitude is not so different from love. Like purple and lilac, it is all about hues and shades.

It was a serene marriage. He provided well. I lacked nothing. But it was too serene. Like a tepid pond, nothing happened.

We lived in a three-bedroom apartment. I had all I needed. He didn't want me to work, so I spent my days reading, watching movies listening to music or painting. Painting was a childhood pastime I had almost forgotten about. Now with so much time on my hands I spent hours before my easel, creating abstract images that tried to capture my state of mind.

My husband had an eye for good art and most times he found buyers for my paintings. They didn't sell for much but the money always came in handy when I went shopping, a new pastime I was cultivating.

My husband loved jazz, old blues and classical music. I loved R&B and Rap. When he was home, he would cue in his CDs, sit in his rocking chair and headphones strapped on, he would sit there for hours rousing only when it was time to change the CD, while all around him, Tu Pac and Biggie and DMX spat out anger and obscenities from the rap CDs I loved to play loud.

He tried to interest me in his kind of music. "My Angel, listen to this. Jazz is the music of matured minds. Just listen for five minutes."

He tried, but aside from Sarah Vaughn and Billie Holiday, I didn't make much progress.Bilie Holiday I loved for the underlying tone of pain and sadness that ringed her words like a high fence around a house. I felt like that house caught in the constricting embrace of that fence.

We both knew there would be no children. He did not want any more and I could give him none. A lifetime of togetherness loomed ahead of us, time enough to smoothen the rough edges. Time enough to grow into each other. Time enough for the sadness to overwhelm us, define us and re-define us.

But gratitude is a thin fabric. Harassed by the buffeting winds of life it wears out too easily. I was soon tired of the serenity and even though I did not go looking for trouble, it found me soon enough.

I could tell that it was coming but like a death row inmate waiting for inevitable fate, I was powerless to escape that which awaited me. I could sense the restiveness deep within me. My husband could sense it too, but where I understood what it was that ailed me, my husband was confounded by it all.

"My Angel, are you okay? Do you want to take a trip? Is something bothering you?" He was all solicitous concern. Ever the doctor, he wanted to cure my body, but how could he ever tell that that which ailed me sprang like a fountain from a source that lay deep inside.

He noticed it in my paintings, which though always abstract were taking a new form, all spatters of passionate red and fiery yellow. I was the daughter of the sun. I wanted to catch fire and burn.

How could I tell him that what I needed was a he-goat, nose in the air, mad with lust. How could I tell my husband, the man who had plucked me off the shelf of spinsterhood and given me a home, that my body desired the very thing he could not and would never allow me.

I was a young woman on a wide-eyed search for trouble and I found it soon enough.

Trouble was twenty-six years old with eyes that twinkled with mischief. Trouble was a graduate who drove a cab until he could raise enough money to go abroad. Trouble found me on a hot afternoon while I was out shopping.

"Drop!"

We didn't speak another word after we negotiated the fare. But the looks he flashed me in the rear view mirror spoke to me of things we could never find words for. When he parked and offered to help me take my things upstairs I knew I ought to have said no, but flush with giddy excitement, I let him.

He took my shopping bags upstairs and after he set them down on the dining table he reached for me. I could have pushed him away. I could have screamed. But no was a word I could not utter. I let him pull me down on the couch. I was a dry and thirsty land, he was long sought water. I clung to him for dear life.

A half-hour later, my whole body tingling, I stood on the balcony, his semen running down my inner thigh as I watched him drive away.