Americanah

  “Once I was with him in London and he was mocking this guy he worked with, a Nigerian guy, for not knowing how to pronounce F-e-a-t-h-e-r-s-t-o-n-e-h-a-u-g-h. He pronounced it phonetically like the guy had, which was obviously the wrong way, and he didn’t say it the right way. I didn’t know how to pronounce it either and he knew I didn’t know, and there were these horrible minutes when he pretended we were both laughing at the guy. When of course we weren’t. He was laughing at me too. I remember it as the moment when I realized he just had never been my friend.”

  “He’s an asshole,” she said.

  “Asshole. Very American word.”

  “Is it?”

  He half raised his eyebrows as though there was no need to state the obvious. “Emenike didn’t contact me at all after I was deported. Then, last year, after somebody must have told him I was now in the game, he started calling me.” Obinze said “in the game” in a voice thick with mockery. “He kept asking if there were any deals we could do together, that kind of nonsense. And one day I told him I really preferred his condescension, and he hasn’t called me since.”

  “What of Kayode?”

  “We’re in touch. He has a child with an American woman.”

  Obinze looked at his watch and picked up his phones. “I hate to go but I have to.”

  “Yes, me too.” She wanted to prolong this moment, sitting amid the scent of books, discovering Obinze again. Before they got into their separate cars, they hugged, both murmuring, “So good to see you,” and she imagined his driver and her driver watching them curiously.

  “I’ll call you tomorrow,” he said, but she had hardly settled into the car when her phone beeped with a new text message from him. Are you free to have lunch tomorrow? She was free. It was a Saturday and she should ask why he would not be with his wife and child, and she should initiate a conversation about what they were doing exactly, but they had a history, a connection thick as twine, and it did not have to mean that they were doing anything, or that a conversation was necessary, and so she opened the door when he rang the bell and he came in and admired the flowers on her verandah, the white lilies that rose from the pots like swans.

  “I spent the morning reading The Small Redemptions of Lagos. Scouring it, actually,” he said.

  She felt pleased. “What did you think?”

  “I liked the Nigerpolitan Club post. A little self-righteous, though.”

  “I’m not sure how to take that.”

  “As truth,” he said, with that half-raising of an eyebrow that had to be a new quirk; she did not remember him doing it in the past. “But it’s a fantastic blog. It’s brave and intelligent. I love the layout.” There he was again, reassuring her.

  She pointed at the compound next door. “Do you recognize that?”

  “Ah! Yes.”

  “I thought it would be just perfect for the blog. Such a beautiful house and in this kind of magnificent ruin. Plus peacocks on the roof.”

  “It looks a little like a courthouse. I’m always fascinated by these old houses and the stories they carry.” He tugged at the thin metal railing of her verandah, as though to check how durable it was, how safe, and she liked that he did that. “Somebody is going to snap it up soon, tear it down, and put up a gleaming block of overpriced luxury flats.”

  “Somebody like you.”

  “When I started in real estate, I considered renovating old houses instead of tearing them down, but it didn’t make sense. Nigerians don’t buy houses because they’re old. A renovated two-hundred-year-old mill granary, you know, the kind of thing Europeans like. It doesn’t work here at all. But of course it makes sense because we are Third Worlders and Third Worlders are forward-looking, we like things to be new, because our best is still ahead, while in the West their best is already past and so they have to make a fetish of that past.”

  “Is it me or are you now given to delivering little lectures?” she asked.

  “It’s just refreshing to have an intelligent person to talk to.”

  She looked away, wondering if this was a reference to his wife, and disliking him for it.

  “Your blog already has such a following,” he said.

  “I have big plans for it. I’d like to travel through Nigeria and post dispatches from each state, with pictures and human stories, but I have to do things slowly first, establish it, make some money from advertising.”

  “You need investors.”

  “I don’t want your money,” she said, a little sharply, keeping her eyes levelly on the sunken roof of the abandoned house. She was irritated by his comment about an intelligent person because it was, it had to be, about his wife, and she wanted to ask why he was telling her that. Why had he married a woman who was not intelligent only to turn around and tell her that his wife was not intelligent?

  “Look at the peacock, Ifem,” he said, gently, as though he sensed her irritation.

  They watched the peacock walk out of the shadow of a tree, then its lugubrious flight up to its favorite perch on the roof, where it stood and surveyed the decayed kingdom below.

  “How many are there?” he asked.

  “One male and two females. I’ve been hoping to see the male do its mating dance but I never have. They wake me up in the morning with their cries. Have you heard them? Almost like a child that doesn’t want to do something.”

  The peacock’s slender neck moved this way and that, and then, as though it had heard her, it cawed, its beak parted wide, the sounds pouring out of its throat.

  “You were right about the sound,” he said, moving closer to her. “Something of a child about it. The compound reminds me of a property I have in Enugu. An old house. It was built before the war, and I bought it to tear it down, but then I decided to keep it. It’s very gracious and restful, big verandahs and old frangipani trees in the back. I’m redoing the interior completely, so it will be very modern inside, but the outside has its old look. Don’t laugh, but when I saw it, it reminded me of poetry.”

  There was a boyishness in the way he said “Don’t laugh” that made her smile at him, half making fun of him, half letting him know she liked the idea of a house that had reminded him of poetry.

  “I imagine one day when I run away from it all, I’ll go and live there,” he said.

  “People really do become eccentric when they become rich.”

  “Or maybe we all have eccentricity in us, we just don’t have the money to show it? I’d love to take you to see the house.”

  She murmured something, a vague acquiescence.

  His phone had been ringing for a while, an endless, dull buzzing in his pocket. Finally he brought it out, glanced at it, and said, “Sorry, I have to take this.” She nodded and went inside, wondering if it was his wife.

  From the living room, she heard snatches of his voice, raised, lowered, and then raised again, speaking Igbo, and when he came inside, there was a tightening in his jaw.

  “Everything okay?” she asked.

  “It’s a boy from my hometown. I pay his school fees but he now has a mad sense of entitlement and this morning he sent me a text telling me he needs a cell phone and could I send it to him by Friday. A fifteen-year-old boy. The gall of it. And then he starts calling me. So I’ve just told him off and I’ve told him his scholarship is off, too, just to scare some sense into his head.”

  “Is he related to you?”

  “No.”

  She waited, expecting more.

  “Ifem, I do what rich people are supposed to do. I pay school fees for a hundred students in my village and my mum’s village.” He spoke with an awkward indifference; this was not a subject that he cared to talk about. He was standing by her bookshelf. “What a beautiful living room.”

  “Thank you.”

  “You shipped all your books back?”

  “Most of them.”

  “Ah. Derek Walcott.”

  “I love him. I finally get some poetry.”

  “I see Graham Greene.”


  “I started reading him because of your mother. I love The Heart of the Matter.”

  “I tried reading it after she died. I wanted to love it. I thought maybe if I could just love it …” He touched the book, his voice trailing away.

  His wistfulness moved her. “It’s real literature, the kind of human story people will read in two hundred years,” she said. “You sound just like my mother,” he said.

  He felt familiar and unfamiliar at the same time. Through the parted curtains, a crescent of light fell across the living room. They were standing by the bookshelf and she was telling him about the first time she finally read The Heart of the Matter, and he was listening, in that intense manner of his, as though swallowing her words like a drink. They were standing by the bookshelf and laughing about how often his mother had tried to get him to read the book. And then they were standing by the bookshelf and kissing. A gentle kiss at first, lips pressed to lips, then their tongues were touching and she felt boneless against him. He pulled away first.

  “I don’t have condoms,” she said, brazen, deliberately brazen.

  “I didn’t know we needed condoms to have lunch.”

  She hit him playfully. Her entire body was invaded by millions of uncertainties. She did not want to look at his face. “I have a girl who cleans and cooks so I have a lot of stew in my freezer and jollof rice in my fridge. We can have lunch here. Would you like something to drink?” She turned towards the kitchen.

  “What happened in America?” he asked. “Why did you just cut off contact?”

  Ifemelu kept walking to the kitchen.

  “Why did you just cut off contact?” he repeated quietly. “Please tell me what happened.”

  Before she sat opposite him at her small dining table and told him about the corrupt-eyed tennis coach in Ardmore, Pennsylvania, she poured them both some mango juice from a carton. She told him small details about the man’s office that were still fresh in her mind, the stacks of sports magazines, the smell of damp, but when she got to the part where he took her to his room, she said, simply, “I took off my clothes and did what he asked me to do. I couldn’t believe that I got wet. I hated him. I hated myself. I really hated myself. I felt like I had, I don’t know, betrayed myself.” She paused. “And you.”

  For many long minutes, he said nothing, his eyes downcast, as though absorbing the story.

  “I don’t really think about it much,” she added. “I remember it, but I don’t dwell on it, I don’t let myself dwell on it. It’s so strange now to actually talk about it. It seems a stupid reason to throw away what we had, but that’s why, and as more time passed, I just didn’t know how to go about fixing it.”

  He was still silent. She stared at the framed caricature of Dike that hung on her wall, Dike’s ears comically pointed, and wondered what Obinze was feeling.

  Finally, he said, “I can’t imagine how bad you must have felt, and how alone. You should have told me. I so wish you had told me.”

  She heard his words like a melody and she felt herself breathing unevenly, gulping at the air. She would not cry, it was ridiculous to cry after so long, but her eyes were filling with tears and there was a boulder in her chest and a stinging in her throat. The tears felt itchy. She made no sound. He took her hand in his, both clasped on the table, and between them silence grew, an ancient silence that they both knew. She was inside this silence and she was safe.

  CHAPTER 52

  Let’s go and play table tennis. I belong to this small private club in Victoria Island,” he said.

  “I haven’t played in ages.”

  She remembered how she had always wanted to beat him, even though he was the school champion, and how he would tell her, teasingly, “Try more strategy and less force. Passion never wins any game, never mind what they say.” He said something similar now: “Excuses don’t win a game. You should try strategy.”

  He had driven himself. In the car, he turned the engine on, and the music came on too. Bracket’s “Yori Yori.”

  “Oh, I love this song,” she said.

  He increased the volume and they sang along; there was an exuberance to the song, its rhythmic joyfulness, so free of artifice, that filled the air with lightness.

  “Ahn-ahn! How long have you been back and you can already sing this so well?” he asked.

  “First thing I did was brush up on all the contemporary music. It’s so exciting, all the new music.”

  “It is. Now clubs play Nigerian music.”

  She would remember this moment, sitting beside Obinze in his Range Rover, stalled in traffic, listening to “Yori Yori”—Your love dey make my heart do yori yori. Nobody can love you the way I do—beside them a shiny Honda, the latest model, and in front of them an ancient Datsun that looked a hundred years old.

  After a few games of table tennis, all of which he won, all the time playfully taunting her, they had lunch in the small restaurant, where they were alone except for a woman reading newspapers at the bar. The manager, a round man who was almost bursting out of his ill-fitting black jacket, came over to their table often to say, “I hope everything is fine, sah. It is very good to see you again, sah. How is work, sah.”

  Ifemelu leaned in and asked Obinze, “Is there a point at which you gag?”

  “The man wouldn’t come by so often if he didn’t think I was being neglected. You’re addicted to that phone.”

  “Sorry. I was just checking the blog.” She felt relaxed and happy. “You know, you should write for me.”

  “Me?”

  “Yes, I’ll give you an assignment. How about the perils of being young and good-looking and rich?”

  “I would be happy to write on a subject with which I can personally identify.”

  “How about security? I want to do something on security. Have you had any experience on Third Mainland Bridge? Somebody was telling me about leaving a club late and going back to the mainland and their car tire burst on the bridge and they just kept going, because it’s so dangerous to stop on the bridge.”

  “Ifem, I live in Lekki, and I don’t go clubbing. Not anymore.”

  “Okay.” She glanced at her phone again. “I just want to have new, vibrant content often.”

  “You’re distracted.”

  “Do you know Tunde Razaq?”

  “Who doesn’t? Why?”

  “I want to interview him. I want to start this weekly feature of ‘Lagos from an Insider,’ and I want to start with the most interesting people.”

  “What’s interesting about him? That he is a Lagos playboy living off his father’s money, said money accumulated from a diesel importation monopoly that they have because of their contact with the president?”

  “He’s also a music producer, and apparently a champion at chess. My friend Zemaye knows him and he’s just written her to say he will do the interview only if I let him buy me dinner.”

  “He’s probably seen a picture of you somewhere.” Obinze stood up and pushed back his chair with a force that surprised her. “The guy is a dog.”

  “Be nice,” she said, amused; his jealousy pleased her. He played “Yori Yori” again on the drive back to her flat, and she swayed and danced with her arms, much to his amusement.

  “I thought your Chapman was non-alcoholic,” he said. “I want to play another song. It makes me think of you.”

  Obiwon’s “Obi Mu O” started and she sat still and silent as the words filled the car: This is that feeling that I’ve never felt … and I’m not gonna let it die. When the male and female voices sang in Igbo, Obinze sang along with them, glancing away from the road to look at her, as though he was telling her that this was really their conversation, he calling her beautiful, she calling him beautiful, both calling each other their true friends. Nwanyi oma, nwoke oma, omalicha nwa, ezigbo oyi m o.

  When he dropped her off, he leaned across to kiss her cheek, hesitant to come too close or to hold her, as though afraid of being defeated by their attraction. “Can I see you tomorrow?” he
asked, and she said yes. They went to a Brazilian restaurant by the lagoon, where the waiter brought skewer after skewer stacked with meat and seafood, until Ifemelu told him that she was about to be sick. The next day, he asked if she would have dinner with him, and he took her to an Italian restaurant, whose overpriced food she found bland, and the bow-tied waiters, doleful and slow-moving, filled her with faint sorrow.

  They drove past Obalende on the way back, tables and stalls lining the bustling road, orange flames flickering from the hawkers’ lamps.

  Ifemelu said, “Let’s stop and buy fried plantain!”

  Obinze found a spot farther ahead, in front of a beer parlor, and he eased the car in. He greeted the men seated on benches drinking, his manner easy and warm, and they hailed him, “Chief! Carry go! Your car is safe!”

  The fried plantain hawker tried to persuade Ifemelu to buy fried sweet potatoes as well.

  “No, only plantain.”

  “What about akara, aunty? I make am now. Very fresh.”

  “Okay,” Ifemelu said. “Put four.”

  “Why are you buying akara that you don’t want?” Obinze asked, amused.

  “Because this is real enterprise. She’s selling what she makes. She’s not selling her location or the source of her oil or the name of the person that ground the beans. She’s simply selling what she makes.”

  Back in the car, she opened the oily plastic bag of plantains, slid a small, perfectly fried yellow slice into her mouth. “This is so much better than that thing drenched in butter that I could hardly finish at the restaurant. And you know we can’t get food poisoning because the frying kills the germs,” she added.

  He was watching her, smiling, and she suspected that she was talking too much. This memory, too, she would store, of Obalende at night, lit as it was by a hundred small lights, the raised voices of drunk men nearby, and the sway of a large madam’s hips, walking past the car.

  HE ASKED if he could take her to lunch and she suggested a new casual place she had heard of, where she ordered a chicken sandwich and then complained about the man smoking in the corner. “How very American, complaining about smoke,” Obinze said, and she could not tell whether he meant it as a rebuke or not.