Americanah

  She would end up with one of the many men in Abuja who lived idle, oily lives in hotels and part-time homes, groveling and courting connected people so as to get a contract or to be paid for a contract. On Obinze’s last trip to Abuja, one such man, whom he hardly knew, had looked for a while at two young women at the other end of the bar and then asked him casually, “Do you have a spare condom?” and he had balked.

  Now, sitting at a white-covered table in Protea Asokoro, waiting for Edusco, the businessman who wanted to buy his land, he imagined Ifemelu next to him, and wondered what she would make of Abuja. She would dislike it, the soullessness of it, or perhaps not. She was not easy to predict. Once, at dinner in a restaurant in Victoria Island, somber waiters hovering around, she had seemed distant, her eyes on the wall behind him, and he had worried that she was upset about something. “What are you thinking?” he asked.

  “I am thinking of how all the paintings in Lagos always look crooked, never hung straight,” she said. He laughed, and thought how, with her, he was as he had never been with another woman: amused, alert, alive. Later, as they left the restaurant, he had watched as she briskly sidestepped the puddles of water in the potholes by the gate and felt a desire to smooth all the roads in Lagos, for her.

  His mind was overwrought: one minute he thought it was the right decision not to have come to Abuja with her, because he needed to think things through, and the next he was filled with self-reproach. He might have pushed her away. He had called her many times, sent texts asking if they could talk, but she had ignored him, which was perhaps for the better because he did not know what he would say if they did talk.

  Edusco had arrived. A loud voice bellowing from the restaurant foyer as he spoke on the phone. Obinze did not know him well—they had done business only once before, introduced by a mutual friend—but Obinze admired men like him, men who did not know any Big Man, who had no connections, and had made their money in a way that did not defy the simple logic of capitalism. Edusco had only a primary-school education before he began to apprentice for traders; he had started off with one stall in Onitsha and now owned the second-largest transport company in the country. He walked into the restaurant, bold-stepped and big-bellied, speaking his terrible English loudly; it did not occur to him to doubt himself.

  Later, as they discussed the price of the land, Edusco said, “Look, my brother. You won’t sell it at that price, nobody will buy. Ife esika kita. The recession is biting everybody.”

  “Bros, bring up your hand a little, this is land in Maitama we are talking about, not land in your village,” Obinze said.

  “Your stomach is full. What else do you want? You see, this is the problem with you Igbo people. You don’t do brother-brother. That is why I like Yoruba people, they look out for one another. Do you know that the other day I went to the Inland Revenue office near my house and one man there, an Igbo man, I saw his name and spoke to him in Igbo and he did not even answer me! A Hausa man will speak Hausa to his fellow Hausa man. A Yoruba man will see a Yoruba person anywhere and speak Yoruba. But an Igbo man will speak English to an Igbo man. I am even surprised that you are speaking Igbo to me.”

  “It’s true,” Obinze said. “It’s sad, it’s the legacy of being a defeated people. We lost the Biafran war and learned to be ashamed.”

  “It is just selfishness!” Edusco said, uninterested in Obinze’s intellectualizing. “The Yoruba man is there helping his brother, but you Igbo people? I ga-asikwa. Look at you now quoting me this price.”

  “Okay, Edusco, why don’t I give you the land for free? Let me go and bring the title and give it to you now.”

  Edusco laughed. Edusco liked him, he could tell; he imagined Edusco talking about him in a gathering of other self-made Igbo men, men who were brash and striving, who juggled huge businesses and supported vast extended families. Obinze ma ife, he imagined Edusco saying. Obinze is not like some of these useless small boys with money. This one is not stupid.

  Obinze looked at his almost-empty bottle of Gulder. It was strange how lost of luster everything was without Ifemelu; even the taste of his favorite beer was different. He should have brought her with him to Abuja. It was stupid to claim that he needed time to think things over when all he was doing was hiding from a truth he already knew. She had called him a coward, and there was indeed a cowardliness in his fear of disorder, of disrupting what he did not even want: his life with Kosi, that second skin that had never quite fit him snugly.

  “Okay, Edusco,” Obinze said, suddenly feeling drained. “I am not going to eat the land if I don’t sell it.”

  Edusco looked startled. “You mean you agree to my price?”

  “Yes,” Obinze said.

  After Edusco left, Obinze called Ifemelu over and over but she did not answer. Perhaps her ringer was switched off, and she was eating at her dining table, wearing that pink T-shirt she wore so often, with the small hole at the neck, and HEARTBREAKER CAFÉ written across the front; her nipples, when they got hard, would punctuate those words like inverted commas. Thinking of her pink T-shirt aroused him. Or perhaps she was reading in bed, her abada wrapper spread over her like a blanket, wearing plain black boyshorts and nothing else. All her underwear were plain black boyshorts; girly underwear amused her. Once, he had picked up those boyshorts from the floor where he had flung them after rolling them down her legs, and looked at the milky crust on the crotch, and she laughed and said, “Ah, you want to smell it? I’ve never understood that whole business of smelling underwear.” Or perhaps she was on her laptop, working on the blog. Or out with Ranyinudo. Or on the phone with Dike. Or perhaps with some man in her living room, telling him about Graham Greene. A queasiness roiled in him at the thought of her with anybody else. Of course she would not be with anyone else, not so soon. Still, there was that unpredictable stubbornness in her; she might do it to hurt him. When she told him, that first day, “I always saw the ceiling with other men,” he wondered how many there had been. He wanted to ask her, but he did not, because he feared she would tell him the truth and he feared he would forever be tormented by it. She knew, of course, that he loved her but he wondered if she knew how it consumed him, how each day was infected by her, affected by her; and how she wielded power over even his sleep. “Kimberly adores her husband, and her husband adores himself. She should leave him but she never will,” she said once, about the woman she had worked for in America, the woman with obi ocha. Ifemelu’s words had been light, free of shadow, and yet he heard in them the sting of other meanings.

  When she told him about her American life, he listened with a keenness close to desperation. He wanted to be a part of everything she had done, be familiar with every emotion she had felt. Once she had told him, “The thing about cross-cultural relationships is that you spend so much time explaining. My ex-boyfriends and I spent a lot of time explaining. I sometimes wondered whether we would even have anything at all to say to each other if we were from the same place,” and it pleased him to hear that, because it gave his relationship with her a depth, a lack of trifling novelty. They were from the same place and they still had a lot to say to each other.

  They were talking about American politics once when she said, “I like America. It’s really the only place else where I could live apart from here. But one day a bunch of Blaine’s friends and I were talking about kids and I realized that if I ever have children, I don’t want them to have American childhoods. I don’t want them to say ‘Hi’ to adults, I want them to say ‘Good morning’ and ‘Good afternoon.’ I don’t want them to mumble ‘Good’ when somebody says ‘How are you?’ to them. Or to raise five fingers when asked how old they are. I want them to say ‘I’m fine, thank you’ and ‘I’m five years old.’ I don’t want a child who feeds on praise and expects a star for effort and talks back to adults in the name of self-expression. Is that terribly conservative? Blaine’s friends said it was and for them, ‘conservative’ is the worst insult you can get.”

  He had laughed, wishing
he had been there with the “bunch of friends,” and he wanted that imaginary child to be his, that conservative child with good manners. He told her, “The child will turn eighteen and paint her hair purple,” and she said, “Yes, but by then I would have kicked her out of the house.”

  At the Abuja airport on his way back to Lagos, he thought of going to the international wing instead, buying a ticket to somewhere improbable, like Malabo. Then he felt a passing self-disgust because he would not, of course, do it; he would instead do what he was expected to do. He was boarding his Lagos flight when Kosi called.

  “Is the flight on time? Remember we are taking Nigel out for his birthday,” she said.

  “Of course I remember.”

  A pause from her end. He had snapped.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “I have a funny headache.”

  “Darling, ndo. I know you’re tired,” she said. “See you soon.”

  He hung up and thought about the day their baby, slippery, curly-haired Buchi, was born at the Woodlands Hospital in Houston, how Kosi had turned to him while he was still fiddling with his latex gloves and said, with something like apology, “Darling, we’ll have a boy next time.” He had recoiled. He realized then that she did not know him. She did not know him at all. She did not know he was indifferent about the gender of their child. And he felt a gentle contempt towards her, for wanting a boy because they were supposed to want a boy, and for being able to say, fresh from birthing their first child, those words “we’ll have a boy next time.” Perhaps he should have talked more with her, about the baby they were expecting and about everything else, because although they exchanged pleasant sounds and were good friends and shared comfortable silences, they did not really talk. But he had never tried, because he knew that the questions he asked of life were entirely different from hers.

  He knew this from the beginning, had sensed it in their first conversation after a friend introduced them at a wedding. She was wearing a satin bridesmaid’s dress in fuchsia, cut low to show a cleavage he could not stop looking at, and somebody was making a speech, describing the bride as “a woman of virtue” and Kosi nodded eagerly and whispered to him, “She is a true woman of virtue.” It surprised him, that she could use the word “virtue” without the slightest irony, as was done in the badly written articles in the women’s section of the weekend newspapers. The minister’s wife is a homely woman of virtue. Still, he had wanted her, chased her with a lavish single-mindedness. He had never seen a woman with such a perfect incline to her cheekbones that made her entire face seem so alive, so architectural, lifting when she smiled. He was also newly rich and newly disoriented: one week he was broke and squatting in his cousin’s flat and the next he had millions of naira in his bank account. Kosi became a touchstone of realness. If he could be with her, so extraordinarily beautiful and yet so ordinary, predictable and domestic and dedicated, then perhaps his life would start to seem believably his. She moved into his house from the flat she shared with a friend and arranged her perfume bottles on his dresser, citrusy scents that he came to associate with home, and she sat in the BMW beside him as though it had always been his car, and she casually suggested trips abroad as though he had always been able to travel, and when they showered together, she scrubbed him with a rough sponge, even between his toes, until he felt reborn. Until he owned his new life. She did not share his interests—she was a literal person who did not read, she was content rather than curious about the world—but he felt grateful to her, fortunate to be with her. Then she told him her relatives were asking what his intentions were. “They just keep asking,” she said and stressed the “they,” to exclude herself from the marriage clamor. He recognized, and disliked, her manipulation. Still, he married her. They were living together anyway, and he was not unhappy, and he imagined that she would, with time, gain a certain heft. She had not, after four years, except physically, in a way that he thought made her look even more beautiful, fresher, with fuller hips and breasts, like a well-watered houseplant.

  IT AMUSED OBINZE, that Nigel had decided to move to Nigeria, instead of simply visiting whenever Obinze needed to present his white General Manager. The money was good, Nigel could now live the kind of life in Essex that he would never have imagined before, but he wanted to live in Lagos, at least for a while. And so Obinze’s gleeful waiting commenced, for Nigel to weary of pepper soup and nightclubs and drinking at the shacks in Kuramo Beach. But Nigel was staying put, in his flat in Ikoyi, with a live-in house help and his dog. He no longer said, “Lagos has so much flavor,” and he complained more about the traffic and he had finally stopped moping about his last girlfriend, a girl from Benue with a pretty face and dissembling manner, who had left him for a wealthy Lebanese businessman.

  “The bloke’s completely bald,” Nigel had told Obinze.

  “The problem with you, my friend, is you love too easily and too much. Anybody could see the girl was a fake, looking for the next bigger thing,” Obinze told him.

  “Don’t say ‘bigger thing’ like that, mate!” Nigel said.

  Now he had met Ulrike, a lean, angular-faced woman with the body of a young man, who worked at an embassy and seemed determined to sulk her way through her Nigerian posting. At dinner, she wiped her cutlery with the napkin before she began eating.

  “You don’t do that in your country, do you?” Obinze asked coldly. Nigel darted a startled glance at him.

  “Actually I do,” Ulrike said, squarely meeting his gaze.

  Kosi patted his thigh under the table, as though to calm him down, which irritated him. Nigel, too, was irritating him, suddenly talking about the town houses Obinze was planning to build, how exciting the new architect’s design was. A timid attempt to end Obinze’s conversation with Ulrike.

  “Fantastic plan inside, made me think of some of those pictures of fancy lofts in New York,” Nigel said.

  “Nigel, I’m not using that plan. An open kitchen plan will never work for Nigerians and we are targeting Nigerians because we are selling, not renting. Open kitchen plans are for expats and expats don’t buy property here.” He had already told Nigel many times that Nigerian cooking was not cosmetic, with all that pounding. It was sweaty and spicy and Nigerians preferred to present the final product, not the process.

  “No more work talk!” Kosi said brightly. “Ulrike, have you tried any Nigerian food?”

  Obinze got up abruptly and went into the bathroom. He called Ifemelu and felt himself getting enraged when she still did not pick up. He blamed her. He blamed her for making him a person who was not entirely in control of what he was feeling.

  Nigel came into the bathroom. “What’s wrong, mate?” Nigel’s cheeks were bright red, as they always were when he drank. Obinze stood by the sink holding his phone, that drained lassitude spreading over him again. He wanted to tell Nigel, Nigel was perhaps the only friend he fully trusted, but Nigel fancied Kosi. “She’s all woman, mate,” Nigel had said to him once, and he saw in Nigel’s eyes the tender and crushed longing of a man for that which was forever unattainable. Nigel would listen to him, but Nigel would not understand.

  “Sorry, I shouldn’t have been rude to Ulrike,” Obinze said. “I’m just tired. I think I’m coming down with malaria.”

  That night, Kosi sidled close to him, in offering. It was not a statement of desire, her caressing his chest and reaching down to take his penis in her hand, but a votive offering. A few months ago, she had said she wanted to start seriously “trying for our son.” She did not say “trying for our second child,” she said “trying for our son,” and it was the kind of thing she learned in her church. There is power in the spoken word. Claim your miracle. He remembered how, months into trying to get pregnant the first time, she began to say with sulky righteousness, “All my friends who lived very rough lives are pregnant.”

  After Buchi was born, he had agreed to a thanksgiving service at Kosi’s church, a crowded hall full of lavishly dressed people, people who were Kosi’s friends, Kosi’s k
ind. And he had thought of them as a sea of simple brutes, clapping, swaying simple brutes, all of them accepting and pliant before the pastor in his designer suit.

  “What’s wrong, darling?” Kosi asked, when he remained limp in her hand. “Are you feeling well?”

  “Just tired.”

  Her hair was covered in a black hair net, her face coated in a cream that smelled of peppermint, which he had always liked. He turned away from her. He had been turning away since the day he first kissed Ifemelu. He should not compare, but he did. Ifemelu demanded of him. “No, don’t come yet, I’ll kill you if you come,” she would say, or “No, baby, don’t move,” then she would dig into his chest and move at her own rhythm, and when finally she arched her back and let out a sharp cry, he felt accomplished to have satisfied her. She expected to be satisfied, but Kosi did not. Kosi always met his touch with complaisance, and sometimes he would imagine her pastor telling her that a wife should have sex with her husband, even if she didn’t feel like it, otherwise the husband would find solace in a Jezebel.

  “I hope you’re not getting sick,” she said.

  “I’m okay.” Ordinarily he would hold her, slowly rub her back until she fell asleep. But he could not get himself to do so now. So many times in the past weeks he had started to tell her about Ifemelu but had stopped. What would he say? It would sound like something from a silly film. I am in love with another woman. There’s someone else. I’m leaving you. That these were words that anybody could say seriously, outside a film and outside the pages of a book, seemed odd. Kosi was wrapping her arms around him. He eased away and mumbled something about his stomach being upset and went into the toilet. She had put a new potpourri, a mix of dried leaves and seeds in a purple bowl, on the cover of the toilet tank. The too-strong lavender scent choked him. He emptied the bowl into the toilet and then instantly felt remorseful. She had meant well. She did not know that the too-strong scent of lavender would be unappealing to him, after all.