On that July morning, her weekend bag already packed for Massachusetts, she was making scrambled eggs when the phone rang. The caller ID showed “unknown” and she thought it might be a call from her parents in Nigeria. But it was a telemarketer, a young, male American who was offering better long-distance and international phone rates. She always hung up on telemarketers, but there was something about his voice that made her turn down the stove and hold on to the receiver, something poignantly young, untried, untested, the slightest of tremors, an aggressive customer-service friendliness that was not aggressive at all; it was as though he was saying what he had been trained to say but was mortally worried about offending her.
He asked how she was, how the weather was in her city, and told her it was pretty hot in Phoenix. Perhaps it was his first day on the job, his telephone piece poking uncomfortably in his ear while he half hoped that the people he was calling would not be home to pick up. Because she felt strangely sorry for him, she asked whether he had rates better than fifty-seven cents a minute to Nigeria.
“Hold on while I look up Nigeria,” he said, and she went back to stirring her eggs.
He came back and said his rates were the same, but wasn’t there another country that she called? Mexico? Canada?
“Well, I call London sometimes,” she said. Ginika was there for the summer.
“Okay, hold on while I look up France,” he said.
She burst out laughing.
“Something funny over there?” he asked.
She laughed harder. She had opened her mouth to tell him, bluntly, that what was funny was that he was selling international telephone rates and did not know where London was, but something held her back, an image of him, perhaps eighteen or nineteen, overweight, pink-faced, awkward around girls, keen on video games, and with no knowledge of the roiling contradictions that were the world. So she said, “There’s a hilarious old comedy on TV.”
“Oh, really?” he said, and he laughed too. It broke her heart, his greenness, and when he came back on to tell her the France rates, she thanked him and said they were better than the rates she already had and that she would think about switching carriers.
“When is a good time to call you back? If that’s okay …,” he said. She wondered whether they were paid on commission. Would his paycheck be bigger if she did switch her phone company? Because she would, as long as it cost her nothing.
“Evenings,” she said.
“May I ask who I’m talking to?”
“My name is Ifemelu.”
He repeated her name with exaggerated care. “Is it a French name?”
“No. Nigerian.”
“That where your family came from?”
“Yes.” She scooped the eggs onto a plate. “I grew up there.”
“Oh, really? How long have you been in the U.S.?”
“Three years.”
“Wow. Cool. You sound totally American.”
“Thank you.”
Only after she hung up did she begin to feel the stain of a burgeoning shame spreading all over her, for thanking him, for crafting his words “You sound American” into a garland that she hung around her own neck. Why was it a compliment, an accomplishment, to sound American? She had won; Cristina Tomas, pallid-faced Cristina Tomas under whose gaze she had shrunk like a small, defeated animal, would speak to her normally now. She had won, indeed, but her triumph was full of air. Her fleeting victory had left in its wake a vast, echoing space, because she had taken on, for too long, a pitch of voice and a way of being that was not hers. And so she finished eating her eggs and resolved to stop faking the American accent. She first spoke without the American accent that afternoon at Thirtieth Street Station, leaning towards the woman behind the Amtrak counter.
“Could I have a round-trip to Haverhill, please? Returning Sunday afternoon. I have a Student Advantage card,” she said, and felt a rush of pleasure from giving the t its full due in “advantage,” from not rolling her r in “Haverhill.” This was truly her; this was the voice with which she would speak if she were woken up from a deep sleep during an earthquake. Still, she resolved that if the Amtrak woman responded to her accent by speaking too slowly as though to an idiot, then she would put on her Mr. Agbo Voice, the mannered, overcareful pronunciations she had learned during debate meetings in secondary school when the bearded Mr. Agbo, tugging at his frayed tie, played BBC recordings on his cassette player and then made all the students pronounce words over and over until he beamed and cried “Correct!” She would also affect, with the Mr. Agbo Voice, a slight raising of her eyebrows in what she imagined was a haughty foreigner pose. But there was no need to do any of these because the Amtrak woman spoke normally. “Can I see an ID, miss?”
And so she did not use her Mr. Agbo Voice until she met Blaine.
The train was crowded. The seat next to Blaine was the only empty one in that car, as far as she could see, and the newspaper and bottle of juice placed on it seemed to be his. She stopped, gesturing towards the seat, but he kept his gaze levelly ahead. Behind her, a woman was pulling along a heavy suitcase and the conductor was announcing that all personal belongings had to be moved from free seats and Blaine saw her standing there—how could he possibly not see her?—and still he did nothing. So her Mr. Agbo Voice emerged. “Excuse me. Are these yours? Could you possibly move them?”
She placed her bag on the overhead rack and settled onto the seat, stiffly, holding her magazine, her body aligned towards the aisle and away from him. The train had begun to move when he said, “I’m really sorry I didn’t see you standing there.”
His apologizing surprised her, his expression so earnest and sincere that it seemed as though he had done something more offensive. “It’s okay,” she said, and smiled.
“How are you?” he asked.
She had learned to say “Good-how-are-you?” in that singsong American way, but now she said, “I’m well, thank you.”
“My name’s Blaine,” he said, and extended his hand.
He looked tall. A man with skin the color of gingerbread and the kind of lean, proportioned body that was perfect for a uniform, any uniform. She knew right away that he was African-American, not Caribbean, not African, not a child of immigrants from either place. She had not always been able to tell. Once she had asked a taxi driver, “So where are you from?” in a knowing, familiar tone, certain that he was from Ghana, and he said “Detroit” with a shrug. But the longer she spent in America, the better she had become at distinguishing, sometimes from looks and gait, but mostly from bearing and demeanor, that fine-grained mark that culture stamps on people. She felt confident about Blaine: he was a descendant of the black men and women who had been in America for hundreds of years.
“I’m Ifemelu, it’s nice to meet you,” she said.
“Are you Nigerian?”
“I am, yes.”
“Bourgie Nigerian,” he said, and smiled. There was a surprising and immediate intimacy to his teasing her, calling her privileged.
“Just as bourgie as you,” she said. They were on firm flirting territory now. She looked him over quietly, his light-colored khakis and navy shirt, the kind of outfit that was selected with the right amount of thought; a man who looked at himself in the mirror but did not look for too long. He knew about Nigerians, he told her, he was an assistant professor at Yale, and although his interest was mostly in southern Africa, how could he not know about Nigerians when they were everywhere?
“What is it, one in every five Africans is Nigerian?” he asked, still smiling. There was something both ironic and gentle about him. It was as if he believed that they shared a series of intrinsic jokes that did not need to be verbalized.
“Yes, we Nigerians get around. We have to. There are too many of us and not enough space,” she said, and it struck her how close to each other they were, separated only by the single armrest. He spoke the kind of American English that she had just given up, the kind that made race pollsters on the telephone assume th
at you were white and educated.
“So is southern Africa your discipline?” she asked.
“No. Comparative politics. You can’t do just Africa in political science graduate programs in this country. You can compare Africa to Poland or Israel but focusing on Africa itself? They don’t let you do that.”
His use of “they” suggested an “us,” which would be the both of them. His nails were clean. He was not wearing a wedding band. She began to imagine a relationship, both of them waking up in the winter, cuddling in the stark whiteness of the morning light, drinking English Breakfast tea; she hoped he was one of those Americans who liked tea. His juice, the bottle stuffed in the pouch in front of him, was organic pomegranate. A plain brown bottle with a plain brown label, both stylish and salutary. No chemicals in the juice and no ink wasted on decorative labels. Where had he bought it? It was not the sort of thing that was sold at the train station. Perhaps he was vegan and distrusted large corporations and shopped only at farmers markets and brought his own organic juice from home. She had little patience for Ginika’s friends, most of whom were like that, their righteousness made her feel both irritated and lacking, but she was prepared to forgive Blaine’s pieties. He was holding a hardcover library book whose title she could not see and had stuffed his New York Times next to the juice bottle. When he glanced at her magazine, she wished she had brought out the Esiaba Irobi book of poems that she planned to read on the train back. He would think that she read only shallow fashion magazines. She felt the sudden and unreasonable urge to tell him how much she loved the poetry of Yusef Komunyakaa, to redeem herself. First, she shielded, with her palm, the bright red lipstick on the cover model’s face. Then, she reached forward and pushed the magazine into the pouch in front of her and said, with a slight sniff, that it was absurd how women’s magazines forced images of small-boned, small-breasted white women on the rest of the multi-boned, multi-ethnic world of women to emulate.
“But I keep reading them,” she said. “It’s like smoking, it’s bad for you but you do it anyway.”
“Multi-boned and multi-ethnic,” he said, amused, his eyes warm with unabashed interest; it charmed her that he was not the kind of man who, when he was interested in a woman, cultivated a certain cool, pretended indifference.
“Are you a grad student?” he asked.
“I’m a junior at Wellson.”
Did she imagine it or did his face fall, in disappointment, in surprise? “Really? You seem more mature.”
“I am. I’d done some college in Nigeria before I left to come here.”
She shifted on her seat, determined to get back on firm flirting ground. “You, on the other hand, look too young to be a professor. Your students must be confused about who the professor is.”
“I think they’re probably confused about a lot of stuff. This is my second year of teaching.” He paused. “Are you thinking of graduate school?”
“Yes, but I’m worried I will leave grad school and no longer be able to speak English. I know this woman in grad school, a friend of a friend, and just listening to her talk is scary. The semiotic dialectics of intertextual modernity. Which makes no sense at all. Sometimes I feel that they live in a parallel universe of academia speaking academese instead of English and they don’t really know what’s happening in the real world.”
“That’s a pretty strong opinion.”
“I don’t know how to have any other kind.”
He laughed, and it pleased her to have made him laugh.
“But I hear you,” he said. “My research interests include social movements, the political economy of dictatorships, American voting rights and representation, race and ethnicity in politics, and campaign finance. That’s my classic spiel. Much of which is bullshit anyway. I teach my classes and I wonder if any of it matters to the kids.”
“Oh, I’m sure it does. I’d love to take one of your classes.” She had spoken too eagerly. It had not come out as she wanted. She had cast herself, without meaning to, in the role of a potential student. He seemed keen to change the direction of the conversation; perhaps he did not want to be her teacher either. He told her he was going back to New Haven after visiting friends in Washington, D.C. “So where are you headed?” he asked.
“Warrington. A bit of a drive from Boston. My aunt lives there.”
“So do you ever come up to Connecticut?”
“Not much. I’ve never been to New Haven. But I’ve gone to the malls in Stamford and Clinton.”
“Oh, yes, malls.” His lips turned down slightly at the sides.
“You don’t like malls?”
“Apart from being soulless and bland? They’re perfectly fine.”
She had never understood the quarrel with malls, with the notion of finding exactly the same shops in all of them; she found malls quite comforting in their sameness. And with his carefully chosen clothes, surely he had to shop somewhere?
“So do you grow your own cotton and make your own clothes?” she asked.
He laughed, and she laughed too. She imagined both of them, hand in hand, going to the mall in Stamford, she teasing him, reminding him of this conversation on the day they met, and raising her face to kiss him. It was not in her nature to talk to strangers on public transportation—she would do it more often when she started her blog a few years later—but she talked and talked, perhaps because of the newness of her own voice. The more they talked, the more she told herself that this was no coincidence; there was a significance to her meeting this man on the day that she returned her voice to herself. She told him, with the suppressed laughter of a person impatient for the punch line of her own joke, about the telemarketer who thought that London was in France. He did not laugh, but instead shook his head.
“They don’t train these telemarketer folks well at all. I bet he’s a temp with no health insurance and no benefits.”
“Yes,” she said, chastened. “I felt kind of sorry for him.”
“So my department moved buildings a few weeks ago. Yale hired professional movers and told them to make sure to put everything from each person’s old office in the exact same spot in the new office. And they did. All my books were shelved in the right position. But you know what I noticed later? Many of the books had their spines upside down.” He was looking at her, as though to experience a shared revelation, and for a blank moment, she was not sure what the story was about.
“Oh. The movers couldn’t read,” she said finally.
He nodded. “There was just something about it that totally killed me …” He let his voice trail away.
She began to imagine what he would be like in bed: he would be a kind, attentive lover for whom emotional fulfillment was just as important as ejaculation, he would not judge her slack flesh, he would wake up even-tempered every morning. She hastily looked away, afraid that he might have read her mind, so startlingly clear were the images there.
“Would you like a beer?” he asked.
“A beer?”
“Yes. The café car serves beers. You want one? I’m going to get one.”
“Yes. Thank you.”
She stood up, self-consciously, to let him pass and hoped she would smell something on him, but she didn’t. He did not wear cologne. Perhaps he had boycotted cologne because the makers of cologne did not treat their employees well. She watched him walk up the aisle, knowing that he knew that she was watching him. The beer offer had pleased her. She had worried that all he drank was organic pomegranate juice, but now the thought of organic pomegranate juice was pleasant if he drank beer as well. When he came back with the beers and plastic cups, he poured hers with a flourish that, to her, was thick with romance. She had never liked beer. Growing up, it had been male alcohol, gruff and inelegant. Now, sitting next to Blaine, laughing as he told her about the first time he got truly drunk in his freshman year, she realized that she could like beer. The grainy fullness of beer.
He talked about his undergraduate years: the stupidity of eating a semen
sandwich during his fraternity initiation, constantly being called Michael Jordan in China the summer of his junior year when he traveled through Asia, his mother’s death from cancer the week after he graduated.
“A semen sandwich?”
“They masturbated into a piece of pita bread and you had to take a bite, but you didn’t have to swallow.”
“Oh God.”
“Well, hopefully you do stupid things when you’re young so you don’t do them when you’re older,” he said.
When the conductor announced that the next stop was New Haven, Ifemelu felt a stab of loss. She tore out a page from her magazine and wrote her phone number. “Do you have a card?” she asked.
He touched his pockets. “I don’t have any with me.”
There was silence while he gathered his things. Then the screeching of the train brakes. She sensed, and hoped she was wrong, that he did not want to give her his number.
“Well, will you write your number then, if you remember it?” she asked. A lame joke. The beer had pushed those words out of her mouth.
He wrote his number on her magazine. “You take care,” he said. He touched her shoulder lightly as he left and there was something in his eyes, something both tender and sad, that made her tell herself that she had been wrong to sense reluctance from him. He already missed her. She moved to his seat, reveling in the warmth his body had left in its wake, and watched through the window as he walked along the platform.
When she arrived at Aunty Uju’s house, the first thing she wanted to do was call him. But she thought it was best to wait a few hours. After an hour, she said fuck it and called. He did not answer. She left a message. She called back later. No answer. She called and called and called. No answer. She called at midnight. She did not leave messages. The whole weekend she called and called and he never picked up the phone.