“The sandwich comes with chips?” Ifemelu asked the waiter.
“Yes, madam.”
“Do you have real potatoes?”
“Madam?”
“Are your potatoes the frozen imported ones, or do you cut and fry your potatoes?”
The waiter looked offended. “It is the imported frozen ones.”
As the waiter walked away, Ifemelu said, “Those frozen things taste horrible.”
“He can’t believe you’re actually asking for real potatoes,” Obinze said drily. “Real potatoes are backward for him. Remember this is our newly middle-class world. We haven’t completed the first cycle of prosperity, before going back to the beginning again, to drink milk from the cow’s udder.”
Each time he dropped her off, he kissed her on the cheek, both of them leaning toward each other, and then pulling back so that she could say “Bye” and climb out of his car. On the fifth day, as he drove into her compound, she asked, “Do you have condoms in your pocket?”
He said nothing for a while. “No, I don’t have condoms in my pocket.”
“Well, I bought a pack some days ago.”
“Ifem, why are you saying this?”
“You’re married with a child and we are hot for each other. Who are we kidding with this chaste dating business? So we might as well get it over with.”
“You are hiding behind sarcasm,” he said.
“Oh, how very lofty of you.” She was angry. It was barely a week since she first saw him but already she was angry, furious that he would drop her off and go home to his other life, his real life, and that she could not visualize the details of that life, did not know what kind of bed he slept in, what kind of plate he ate from. She had, since she began to gaze at her past, imagined a relationship with him, but only in faded images and faint lines. Now, faced with the reality of him, and of the silver ring on his finger, she was frightened of becoming used to him, of drowning. Or perhaps she was already drowned, and her fear came from that knowledge.
“Why didn’t you call me when you came back?” he asked.
“I don’t know. I wanted to settle down first.”
“I hoped I would help you settle down.”
She said nothing.
“Are you still with Blaine?”
“What does it matter, married man, you?” she said, with an irony that sounded far too caustic; she wanted to be cool, distant, in control.
“Can I come in for a bit? To talk?”
“No, I need to do some research for the blog.”
“Please, Ifem.”
She sighed. “Okay.”
In her flat, he sat on the couch while she sat on her armchair, as far from him as possible. She had a sudden bilious terror about whatever it was he was going to say, which she did not want to hear, and so she said, wildly, “Zemaye wants to write a tongue-in-cheek guide for men who want to cheat. She said her boyfriend was unreachable the other day and when he finally turned up, he told her that his phone had fallen into water. She said it’s the oldest story in the book, phone fell into water. I thought that was funny. I’ve never heard that before. So number one on her guide is never say your phone fell into water.”
“This doesn’t feel like cheating to me,” he said quietly.
“Does your wife know you’re here?” She was taunting him. “I wonder how many men say that when they cheat, that it doesn’t feel like cheating. I mean, would they actually ever say that it felt like cheating?”
He got up, his movements deliberate, and at first she thought he was coming closer to her, or perhaps wanted the toilet, but he walked to the front door, opened it, and left. She stared at the door. She sat still for a long time, and then she got up and paced, unable to focus, wondering whether to call him, debating with herself. She decided not to call him; she resented his behavior, his silence, his pretense. When her doorbell rang minutes later, a part of her was reluctant to open the door.
She let him in. They sat side by side on her couch.
“I’m sorry I left like that,” he said. “I just haven’t been myself since you came back and I didn’t like the way you talked as if what we have is common. It isn’t. And I think you know that. I think you were saying that to hurt me but mostly because you feel confused. I know it must be difficult for you, how we’ve seen each other and talked about so much but still avoided so much.”
“You’re speaking in code,” she said.
He looked stressed, tight-jawed, and she longed to kiss him. It was true that he was intelligent and sure of himself, but there was an innocence about him, too, a confidence without ego, a throwback to another time and place, which she found endearing.
“I haven’t said anything because sometimes I am just so happy being with you that I don’t want to spoil it,” he said. “And also because I want to have something to say first, before I say anything.”
“I touch myself thinking of you,” she said.
He stared at her, thrown slightly off balance.
“We’re not single people who are courting, Ceiling,” she said. “We can’t deny the attraction between us and maybe we should have a conversation about that.”
“You know this isn’t about sex,” he said. “This has never been about sex.”
“I know,” she said, and took his hand. There was, between them, a weightless, seamless desire. She leaned in and kissed him, and at first he was slow in his response, and then he was pulling up her blouse, pushing down her bra cups to free her breasts. She remembered clearly the firmness of his embrace, and yet there was, also, a newness to their union; their bodies remembered and did not remember. She touched the scar on his chest, remembering it again. She had always thought the expression “making love” a little maudlin; “having sex” felt truer and “fucking” was more arousing, but lying next to him afterwards, both of them smiling, sometimes laughing, her body suffused with peace, she thought how apt it was, that expression “making love.” There was an awakening even in her nails, in those parts of her body that had always been numb. She wanted to tell him, “There is no week that passed that I did not think of you.” But was that true? Of course there were weeks during which he was folded under layers of her life, but it felt true.
She propped herself up and said, “I always saw the ceiling with other men.”
He smiled a long, slow smile. “You know what I have felt for so long? As if I was waiting to be happy.”
He got up to go to the bathroom. She found it so attractive, his shortness, his solid firm shortness. She saw, in his shortness, a groundedness; he could weather anything, he would not easily be swayed. He came back and she said she was hungry and he found oranges in her fridge, and peeled them, and they ate the oranges, sitting up next to each other, and then they lay entwined, naked, in a full circle of completeness, and she fell asleep and did not know when he left. She woke up to a dark, overcast rainy morning. Her phone was ringing. It was Obinze.
“How are you?” he asked.
“Groggy. Not sure what happened yesterday. Did you seduce me?”
“I’m glad your door has a dead bolt. I would have hated to wake you up to lock the door.”
“So you did seduce me.”
He laughed. “Can I come to you?”
She liked the way he said “Can I come to you?”
“Yes. It’s raining crazily.”
“Really? It’s not raining here. I’m in Lekki.”
She found this foolishly exciting, that it was raining where she was and it was not raining where he was, only minutes from her, and so she waited, with impatience, with a charged delight, until they could both see the rain together.
CHAPTER 53
And so began her heady days full of cliché: she felt fully alive, her heart beat faster when he arrived at her door, and she viewed each morning like the unwrapping of a gift. She would laugh, or cross her legs or slightly sway her hips, with a heightened awareness of herself. Her nightshirt smelled of his cologne, a muted citrus and wo
od scent, because she left it unwashed for as long as she could, and she delayed in wiping off a spill of hand cream he had left on her sink, and after they made love, she left untouched the indentation on the pillow, the soft groove where his head had lain, as though to preserve his essence until the next time. They often stood on her verandah and watched the peacocks on the roof of the abandoned house, from time to time slipping their hands into each other’s, and she would think of the next time, and the next, that they would do this together. This was love, to be eager for tomorrow. Had she felt this way as a teenager? The emotions seemed absurd. She fretted when he did not respond to her text right away. Her mind was darkened with jealousy about his past. “You are the great love of my life,” he told her, and she believed him, but still she was jealous of those women whom he had loved even if fleetingly, those women who had carved out space in his thoughts. She was jealous even of the women who liked him, imagining how much attention he got here in Lagos, good-looking as he was, and now also wealthy. The first time she introduced him to Zemaye, lissome Zemaye in her tight skirt and platform heels, she stifled her discomfort, because she saw in Zemaye’s alert appreciative eyes the eyes of all the hungry women in Lagos. It was a jealousy of her imagination, he did nothing to aid it; he was present and transparent in his devotion. She marveled at what an intense, careful listener he was. He remembered everything she told him. She had never had this before, to be listened to, to be truly heard, and so he became newly precious; each time he said bye at the end of a telephone call, she felt a sinking panic. It was truly absurd. Their teenage love had been less melodramatic. Or perhaps it was because the circumstances were different, and looming over them now was the marriage he never talked about. Sometimes he said, “I can’t come on Sunday until midafternoon,” or “I have to leave early today,” all of which she knew were about his wife, but they did not talk further about it. He did not try to, and she did not want to, or she told herself that she did not want to. It surprised her, that he took her out openly, to lunch and to dinner, to his private club where the waiter called her “madam,” perhaps assuming she was his wife; that he stayed with her until past midnight and never showered after they made love; that he went home wearing her touch and her smell on his skin. He was determined to give their relationship as much dignity as he could, to pretend that he was not hiding even though he, of course, was. Once he said cryptically, as they lay entwined on her bed in the undecided light of late evening, “I can stay the night, I would like to stay.” She said a quick no and nothing else. She did not want to get used to waking up beside him, did not permit herself to think of why he could stay this night. And so his marriage hung above them, unspoken, unprobed, until one evening when she did not feel like eating out. He said eagerly, “You have spaghetti and onions. Let me cook for you.”
“As long as it doesn’t give me a stomachache.”
He laughed. “I miss cooking. I can’t cook at home.” And, in that instant, his wife became a dark spectral presence in the room. It was palpable and menacing in a way it had never been when he said, “I can’t come on Sunday until midafternoon,” or “I have to leave early today.” She turned away from him, and flipped open her laptop to check on the blog. A furnace had lit itself deep inside her. He sensed it, too, the sudden import of his words, because he came and stood beside her.
“Kosi never liked the idea of my cooking. She has really basic, mainstream ideas of what a wife should be and she thought my wanting to cook was an indictment of her, which I found silly. So I stopped, just to have peace. I make omelets but that’s it and we both pretend as if my onugbu soup isn’t better than hers. There’s a lot of pretending in my marriage, Ifem.” He paused. “I married her when I was feeling vulnerable; I had a lot of upheaval in my life at the time.”
She said, her back turned to him, “Obinze, please just cook the spaghetti.”
“I feel a great responsibility for Kosi and that is all I feel. And I want you to know that.” He gently turned her around to face him, holding her shoulders, and he looked as if there were other things he wanted to say, but expected her to help him say them, and for this she felt the flare of a new resentment. She turned back to her laptop, choked with the urge to destroy, to slash and burn.
“I’m having dinner with Tunde Razaq tomorrow,” she said.
“Why?”
“Because I want to.”
“You said the other day that you wouldn’t.”
“What happens when you go home and climb into bed with your wife? What happens?” she asked, and felt herself wanting to cry. Something had cracked and spoiled between them.
“I think you should go,” she said.
“No.”
“Obinze, please just go.”
He refused to leave, and later she felt grateful that he had not left. He cooked spaghetti and she pushed it around her plate, her throat parched, her appetite gone.
“I’m never going to ask you for anything. I’m a grown woman and I knew your situation when I got into this,” she said.
“Please don’t say that,” he said. “It scares me. It makes me feel dispensable.”
“It’s not about you.”
“I know. I know it’s the only way you can feel a little dignity in this.”
She looked at him and even his reasonableness began to irritate her.
“I love you, Ifem. We love each other,” he said.
There were tears in his eyes. She began to cry, too, a helpless crying, and they held each other. Later, they lay in bed together, and the air was so still and noiseless that the gurgling sound from his stomach seemed loud.
“Was that my stomach or yours?” he asked, teasing.
“Of course it was yours.”
“Remember the first time we made love? You had just been standing on me. I loved you standing on me.”
“I can’t stand on you now. I’m too fat. You would die.”
“Stop it.”
Finally, he got up and pulled on his trousers, his movements slow and reluctant. “I can’t come tomorrow, Ifem. I have to take my daughter—”
She cut him short. “It’s okay.”
“I’m going to Abuja on Friday,” he said.
“Yes, you said.” She was trying to push away the sense of a coming abandonment; it would overwhelm her as soon as he left and she heard the click of the door closing.
“Come with me,” he said.
“What?”
“Come with me to Abuja. I just have two meetings and we can stay the weekend. It’ll be good for us to be in a different place, to talk. And you’ve never been to Abuja. I can book separate hotel rooms if you want me to. Say yes. Please.”
“Yes,” she said.
She had not permitted herself to do so earlier, but after he left, she looked at Kosi’s photographs on Facebook. Kosi’s beauty was startling, those cheekbones, that flawless skin, those perfect womanly curves. When she saw one photo taken at an unflattering angle, she examined it for a while and found in it a small and wicked pleasure.
SHE WAS at the hair salon when he sent her a text: I’m sorry Ifem but I think I should probably go alone to Abuja. I need some time to think things through. I love you. She stared at the text and, fingers shaking, she wrote him back a two-word text: Fucking coward. Then she turned to the hair braider. “You are going to blow-dry my hair with that brush? You must be joking. Can’t you people think?”
The hair braider looked puzzled. “Aunty, sorry o, but that is what I use before in your hair.”
By the time Ifemelu drove into her compound, Obinze’s Range Rover was parked in front of her flat. He followed her upstairs.
“Ifem, please, I want you to understand. I think it has been a little too fast, everything between us, and I want to take some time to put things in perspective.”
“A little too fast,” she repeated. “How unoriginal. Not like you at all.”
“You are the woman I love. Nothing can change that. But I feel this sense of responsib
ility about what I need to do.”
She flinched from him, the hoarseness of his voice, the nebulous and easy meaninglessness of his words. What did “responsibility about what I need to do” mean? Did it mean that he wanted to continue seeing her but had to stay married? Did it mean that he could no longer continue seeing her? He communicated clearly when he wanted to, but now here he was, hiding behind watery words.
“What are you saying?” she asked him. “What are you trying to tell me?”
When he remained silent, she said, “Go to hell.”
She walked into her bedroom and locked the door. From her bedroom window, she watched his Range Rover until it disappeared down the bend in the road.
CHAPTER 54
Abuja had far-flung horizons, wide roads, order; to come from Lagos was to be stunned here by sequence and space. The air smelled of power; here everyone sized everyone else up, wondering how much of a “somebody” each was. It smelled of money, easy money, easily exchanged money. It dripped, too, of sex. Obinze’s friend Chidi said he didn’t chase women in Abuja because he didn’t want to step on a minister’s or senator’s toes. Every attractive young woman here became mysteriously suspect. Abuja was more conservative than Lagos, Chidi said, because it was more Muslim than Lagos, and at parties women didn’t wear revealing clothing, yet you could buy and sell sex so much more easily here. It was in Abuja that Obinze had come close to cheating on Kosi, not with any of the flashy girls in colored contact lenses and tumbling hair weaves who endlessly propositioned him, but with a middle-aged woman in a caftan who sat next to him at the hotel bar, and said, “I know you are bored.” She looked hungry for recklessness, perhaps a repressed, frustrated wife who had broken free on this one night.
For a moment, lust, a quaking raw lust, overcame him, but he thought about how much more bored he would be afterwards, how keen to get her out of his hotel room, and it all seemed too much of an effort.