“Hello? Ifem?” That voice she had not heard in so long, and it sounded both changed and unchanged.
“Ceiling! How are you?”
“You’re back.”
“Yes.” Her hands were trembling. She should have sent an e-mail first. She should be chatty, ask about his wife and child, tell him that she had in fact been back for a while.
“So,” Obinze said, dragging the word. “How are you? Where are you? When can I see you?”
“What about now?” The recklessness that often emerged when she felt nervous had pushed out those words, but perhaps it was best to see him right away and get it over with. She wished she had dressed up a bit more, maybe worn her favorite wrap dress, with its slimming cut, but her knee-length skirt was not too bad, and her high heels always made her feel confident, and her Afro was, thankfully, not yet too shrunken from the humidity.
There was a pause on Obinze’s end—something hesitant?—which made her regret her rashness.
“I’m actually running a bit late for a meeting,” she added quickly. “But I just wanted to say hi and we can meet up soon …”
“Ifem, where are you?”
She told him she was on her way to Jazzhole to buy a book, and would be there in a few minutes. Half an hour later, she was standing in front of the bookshop when a black Range Rover pulled in and Obinze got out from the back.
THERE WAS a moment, a caving of the blue sky, an inertia of stillness, when neither of them knew what to do, he walking towards her, she standing there squinting, and then he was upon her and they hugged. She thumped him on the back, once, twice, to make it a chummy-chummy hug, a platonic and safe chummy-chummy hug, but he pulled her ever so slightly close to him, and held her for a moment too long, as though to say he was not being chummy-chummy.
“Obinze Maduewesi! Long time! Look at you, you haven’t changed!” She was flustered, and the new shrillness in her voice annoyed her. He was looking at her, an open unabashed looking, and she would not hold his gaze. Her fingers were shaking of their own accord, which was bad enough, she did not need to stare into his eyes, both of them standing there, in the hot sun, in the fumes of traffic from Awolowo Road.
“It’s so good to see you, Ifem,” he said. He was calm. She had forgotten what a calm person he was. There was still, in his bearing, a trace of his teenage history: the one who didn’t try too hard, the one the girls wanted and the boys wanted to be.
“You’re bald,” she said.
He laughed and touched his head. “Yes. Mostly by choice.”
He had filled out, from the slight boy of their university days to a fleshier, more muscled man, and perhaps because he had filled out, he seemed shorter than she remembered. In her high heels, she was taller than he was. She had not forgotten, but merely remembered anew, how understated his manner was, his plain dark jeans, his leather slippers, the way he walked into the bookshop with no need to dominate it.
“Let’s sit down,” he said.
The bookshop was dimly cool, its air moody and eclectic, books, CDs, and magazines spread out on low shelves. A man standing near the entrance nodded at them in welcome, while adjusting the large headphones around his head. They sat opposite each other in the tiny café at the back and ordered fruit juice. Obinze put his two phones on the table; they lit up often, ringing in silent mode, and he would glance at them and then away. He worked out, she could tell from the firmness of his chest, across which stretched the double front pockets of his fitted shirt.
“You’ve been back for a while,” he said. He was watching her again, and she remembered how she had often felt as if he could see her mind, knew things about her that she might not consciously know.
“Yes,” she said.
“So what did you come to buy?”
“What?”
“The book you wanted to buy.”
“Actually I just wanted to meet you here. I thought if it turns out that seeing you again is something I’d like to remember, then I want to remember it in Jazzhole.”
“I want to remember it in Jazzhole,” he repeated, smiling as though only she could have come up with that expression. “You haven’t stopped being honest, Ifem. Thank God.”
“I already think I’m going to want to remember this.” Her nervousness was melting away; they had raced past the requisite moments of awkwardness.
“Do you need to be anywhere right now?” he asked. “Can you stay awhile?”
“Yes.”
He switched off both his phones. A rare declaration, in a city like Lagos for a man like him, that she had his absolute attention. “How is Dike? How is Aunty Uju?”
“They’re fine. He’s doing well now. He actually came to visit me here. He only just left.”
The waitress served tall cups of mango-orange juice.
“What has surprised you the most about being back?” he asked.
“Everything, honestly. I started wondering if something was wrong with me.”
“Oh, it’s normal,” he said, and she remembered how he had always been quick to reassure her, to make her feel better. “I was away for a much shorter time, obviously, but I was very surprised when I came back. I kept thinking that things should have waited for me but they hadn’t.”
“I’d forgotten that Lagos is so expensive. I can’t believe how much money the Nigerian wealthy spend.”
“Most of them are thieves or beggars.”
She laughed. “Thieves or beggars.”
“It’s true. And they don’t just spend a lot, they expect to spend a lot. I met this guy the other day, and he was telling me how he started his satellite-dish business about twenty years ago. This was when satellite dishes were still new in the country and so he was bringing in something most people didn’t know about. He put his business plan together, and came up with a good price that would fetch him a good profit. Another friend of his, who was already a businessman and was going to invest in the business, took a look at the price and asked him to double it. Otherwise, he said, the Nigerian wealthy would not buy. He doubled it and it worked.”
“Crazy,” she said. “Maybe it’s always been this way and we didn’t know, because we couldn’t know. It’s as if we are looking at an adult Nigeria that we didn’t know about.”
“Yes.” He liked that she had said “we,” she could tell, and she liked that “we” had slipped so easily out of her.
“It’s such a transactional city,” she said. “Depressingly transactional. Even relationships, they’re all transactional.”
“Some relationships.”
“Yes, some,” she agreed. They were telling each other something that neither could yet articulate. Because she felt the nervousness creeping up her fingers again, she turned to humor. “And there is a certain bombast in the way we speak that I had also forgotten. I started feeling truly at home again when I started being bombastic!”
Obinze laughed. She liked his quiet laugh. “When I came back, I was shocked at how quickly my friends had all become fat, with big beer bellies. I thought: What is happening? Then I realized that they were the new middle class that our democracy created. They had jobs and they could afford to drink a lot more beer and to eat out, and you know eating out for us here is chicken and chips, and so they got fat.”
Ifemelu’s stomach clenched. “Well, if you look carefully you’ll notice it’s not only your friends.”
“Oh, no, Ifem, you’re not fat. You’re being very American about that. What Americans consider fat can just be normal. You need to see my guys to know what I am talking about. Remember Uche Okoye? Even Okwudiba? They can’t even button their shirts now.” Obinze paused. “You put on some weight and it suits you. I maka.”
She felt shy, a pleasant shyness, hearing him say she was beautiful.
“You used to tease me about not having an ass,” she said.
“I take my words back. At the door, I waited for you to go ahead for a reason.”
They laughed and then, laughter tapering off, were
silent, smiling at each other in the strangeness of their intimacy. She remembered how, as she got up naked from his mattress on the floor in Nsukka, he would look up and say, “I was going to say shake it but there’s nothing to shake,” and she would playfully kick him in the shin. The clarity of that memory, the sudden stab of longing it brought, left her unsteady.
“But talk of being surprised, Ceiling,” she said. “Look at you. Big man with your Range Rover. Having money must have really changed things.”
“Yes, I guess it has.”
“Oh, come on,” she said. “How?”
“People treat you differently. I don’t just mean strangers. Friends too. Even my cousin Nneoma. Suddenly you’re getting all of this sucking-up from people because they think you expect it, all this exaggerated politeness, exaggerated praise, even exaggerated respect that you haven’t earned at all, and it’s so fake and so garish, it’s like a bad overcolored painting, but sometimes you start believing a little bit of it yourself and sometimes you see yourself differently. One day I went to a wedding in my hometown, and the MC was doing a lot of silly praise-singing when I came in and I realized I was walking differently. I didn’t want to walk differently but I was.”
“What, like a swagger?” she teased. “Show me the walk!”
“You’ll have to sing my praises first.” He sipped his drink. “Nigerians can be so obsequious. We are a confident people but we are so obsequious. It’s not difficult for us to be insincere.”
“We have confidence but no dignity.”
“Yes.” He looked at her, recognition in his eyes. “And if you keep getting that overdone sucking-up, it makes you paranoid. You don’t know if anything is honest or true anymore. And then people become paranoid for you, but in a different way. My relatives are always telling me: Be careful where you eat. Even here in Lagos my friends tell me to watch what I eat. Don’t eat in a woman’s house because she’ll put something in your food.”
“And do you?”
“Do I what?”
“Watch what you eat?”
“I wouldn’t in your house.” A pause. He was being openly flirtatious and she was unsure what to say.
“But no,” he continued. “I like to think that if I wanted to eat in somebody’s house, it would be a person who would not think of slipping jazz into my food.”
“It all seems really desperate.”
“One of the things I’ve learned is that everybody in this country has the mentality of scarcity. We imagine that even the things that are not scarce are scarce. And it breeds a kind of desperation in everybody. Even the wealthy.”
“The wealthy like you, that is,” she quipped.
He paused. He often paused before he spoke. She thought this exquisite; it was as though he had such regard for his listener that he wanted his words strung together in the best possible way. “I like to think I don’t have that desperation. I sometimes feel as if the money I have isn’t really mine, as if I’m holding it for someone else for a while. After I bought my property in Dubai—it was my first property outside Nigeria—I felt almost frightened, and when I told Okwudiba how I felt, he said I was crazy and I should stop behaving as if life is one of the novels I read. He was so impressed by what I owned, and I just felt as if my life had become this layer of pretension after pretension and I started to get sentimental about the past. I would think about when I was staying with Okwudiba in his first small flat in Surulere and how we would heat the iron on the stove when NEPA took light. And how his neighbor downstairs used to shout ‘Praise the Lord!’ whenever the light came back and how even for me there was something so beautiful about the light coming back, when it’s out of your control because you don’t have a generator. But it’s a silly sort of romance, because of course I don’t want to go back to that life.”
She looked away, worried that the crush of emotions she had felt while he was speaking would now converge on her face. “Of course you don’t. You like your life,” she said.
“I live my life.”
“Oh, how mysterious we are.”
“What about you, famous race blogger, Princeton fellow, how have you changed?” he asked, smiling, leaning towards her with his elbows on the table.
“When I was babysitting in undergrad, one day I heard myself telling the kid I was babysitting, ‘You’re such a trouper!’ Is there another word more American than ‘trouper’?”
Obinze was laughing.
“That’s when I thought, yes, I may have changed a little,” she said.
“You don’t have an American accent.”
“I made an effort not to.”
“I was surprised when I read the archives of your blog. It didn’t sound like you.”
“I really don’t think I’ve changed that much, though.”
“Oh, you’ve changed,” he said with a certitude that she instinctively disliked.
“How?”
“I don’t know. You’re more self-aware. Maybe more guarded.”
“You sound like a disappointed uncle.”
“No.” Another one of his pauses, but this time he seemed to be holding back. “But your blog also made me proud. I thought: She’s gone, she’s learned, and she’s conquered.”
Again, she felt shy. “I don’t know about conquering.”
“Your aesthetics changed too,” he said.
“What do you mean?”
“Did you cure your own meats in America?”
“What?”
“I read a piece about this new movement among the American privileged classes. Where people want to drink milk straight from the cow and that sort of thing. I thought maybe you’re into that, now that you wear a flower in your hair.”
She burst out laughing.
“But really, tell me how you’ve changed.” His tone was teasing, yet she tensed slightly at his question; it seemed too close to her vulnerable, soft core. And so she said, in a breezy voice, “My taste, I guess. I can’t believe how much I find ugly now. I can’t stand most of the houses in this city. I’m now a person who has learned to admire exposed wooden rafters.” She rolled her eyes and he smiled at her self-mockery, a smile that seemed to her like a prize that she wanted to win over and over again.
“It’s really a kind of snobbery,” she added.
“It’s snobbery, not a kind,” he said. “I used to have that about books. Secretly feeling that your taste is superior.”
“The problem is I’m not always secret about it.”
He laughed. “Oh, we know that.”
“You said you used to? What happened?”
“What happened was that I grew up.”
“Ouch,” she said.
He said nothing; the slight sardonic raise of his eyebrows said that she, too, would have to grow up.
“What are you reading these days?” she asked. “I’m sure you’ve read every American novel ever published.”
“I’ve been reading a lot more nonfiction, history and biographies. About everything, not just America.”
“What, you fell out of love?”
“I realized I could buy America, and it lost its shine. When all I had was my passion for America, they didn’t give me a visa, but with my new bank account, getting a visa was very easy. I’ve visited a few times. I was looking into buying property in Miami.”
She felt a pang; he had visited America and she had not known.
“So what did you finally make of your dream country?”
“I remember when you first went to Manhattan and you wrote me and said ‘It’s wonderful but it’s not heaven.’ I thought of that when I took my first cab ride in Manhattan.”
She remembered writing that, too, not long before she stopped contacting him, before she pushed him behind many walls. “The best thing about America is that it gives you space. I like that. I like that you buy into the dream, it’s a lie but you buy into it and that’s all that matters.”
He looked down at his glass, uninterested in her philosophizing, and
she wondered if what she had seen in his eyes was resentment, if he, too, was remembering how she had so completely shut him out. When he asked, “Are you still friends with your old friends?” she thought it a question about whom else she had shut out all these years. She wondered whether to bring it up herself, whether to wait for him to. She should bring it up, she owed him that, but a wordless fear had seized her, a fear of breaking delicate things.
“With Ranyinudo, yes. And Priye. The others are now people who used to be my friends. Kind of like you and Emenike. You know, when I read your e-mails, I wasn’t surprised that Emenike turned out like that. There was always something about him.”
He shook his head and finished his drink; he had earlier put the straw aside, sipping from the glass.