Americanah (51 page)

“That’s so disgusting,” Blaine said, as they walked past.

“I know,” Ifemelu said, although she did not quite understand why he felt so strongly about the homeless woman and her cappuccino gift. Weeks before, an older white woman standing in line behind them at the grocery store had said, “Your hair is so beautiful, can I touch it?” and Ifemelu said yes. The woman sank her fingers into her Afro. She sensed Blaine tense, saw the pulsing at his temples. “How could you let her do that?” he asked afterwards. “Why not? How else will she know what hair like mine feels like? She probably doesn’t know any black people.”

“And so you have to be her guinea pig?” Blaine asked. He expected her to feel what she did not know how to feel. There were things that existed for him that she could not penetrate. With his close friends, she often felt vaguely lost. They were youngish and well-dressed and righteous, their sentences filled with “sort of,” and “the ways in which”;
they gathered at a bar every Thursday, and sometimes one of them had a dinner party, where Ifemelu mostly listened, saying little, looking at them in wonder: were they serious, these people who were so enraged about imported vegetables that ripened in trucks? They wanted to stop child labor in Africa. They would not buy clothes made by underpaid workers in Asia. They looked at the world with an impractical, luminous earnestness that moved her, but never convinced her. Surrounded by them, Blaine hummed with references unfamiliar to her, and he would seem far away, as though he belonged to them, and when he finally looked at her, his eyes warm and loving, she felt something like relief.

SHE TOLD
her parents about Blaine, that she was leaving Baltimore and moving to New Haven to live with him. She could have lied, invented a new job, or simply said she wanted to move. “His name is Blaine,” she said. “He’s an American.”

She heard the symbolism in her own words, traveling thousands of miles to Nigeria, and she knew what her parents would understand. She and Blaine had not talked about marriage, but the ground beneath her feet felt firm. She wanted her parents to know of him, and of how good he was. She used that word in describing him: “good.”

“An American Negro?” her father asked, sounding baffled.

Ifemelu burst out laughing. “Daddy, nobody says Negro anymore.”

“But why a Negro? Is there a substantive scarcity of Nigerians there?”

She ignored him, still laughing, and asked him to give her mother the phone. Ignoring him, even telling him that she was moving in with a man to whom she was not married, was something she could do only because she lived in America. Rules had shifted, fallen into the cracks of distance and foreignness.

Her mother asked, “Is he a Christian?”

“No. He is a devil-worshipper.”

“Blood of Jesus!” her mother shrieked.

“Mummy, yes, he is a Christian,” she said.

“Then no problem,” her mother said. “When will he come to introduce
himself? You can plan it so that we do everything at the same time—door-knocking, bride price, and wine-carrying—it will cut costs and that way he does not have to keep coming and going. America is far …”

“Mummy, please, we are taking things slowly for now.”

After Ifemelu hung up, still amused, she decided to change the title of her blog to
Raceteenth or Various Observations About American Blacks (Those Formerly Known as Negroes) by a Non-American Black
.

Ifemelu woke up one night to go to the bathroom, and heard Blaine in the living room, talking on the phone, his tone gentle and solacing. “I’m sorry, did I wake you? That was my sister, Shan,” he said when he came back to bed. “She’s back in New York, from France. Her first book is about to be published and she’s having a small meltdown about it.” He paused. “Another small meltdown. Shan has lots of melt-downs. Will you go down to the city this weekend with me to see her?”

“Sure. What does she do again?”

“What doesn’t Shan do? She used to work at a hedge fund. Then she left and traveled all over the world and did a bit of journalism. She met this Haitian guy and moved to Paris to live with him. Then he got sick and died. It happened very quickly. She stayed for a while, and even after she decided to move back to the States, she kept the flat in Paris. She’s been with this new guy, Ovidio, for about a year now. He’s the first real relationship she’s had since Jerry died. Pretty decent cat. He’s away this week, on assignment in California, so Shan’s alone. She likes to have these gatherings, she calls them salons. She has an amazing group of friends, mostly artists and writers, and they get together at her place and have really good conversations.” He paused. “She’s a really special person.”

WHEN SHAN WALKED
into a room, all the air disappeared. She did not breathe deeply; she did not need to: the air simply floated towards her, drawn by her natural authority, until there was nothing left for others. Ifemelu imagined Blaine’s airless childhood, running after
Shan to impress her, to remind her of his existence. Even now, as an adult, he was still the little brother full of desperate love, trying to win an approval that he feared he never would. They arrived at Shan’s apartment early in the afternoon, and Blaine stopped to chat with the doorman, as he had chatted with their taxi driver from Penn Station, in that unforced manner that he had, forming alliances with janitors, with cleaning staff, with bus drivers. He knew how much they made and how many hours they worked; he knew they didn’t have health insurance.

“Hey, Jorge, how’s it going?” Blaine pronounced it the Spanish way:
Hor-hay
.

“Pretty good. How are your students over at Yale?” the doorman asked, looking pleased to see him and pleased that he taught at Yale.

“Driving me crazy as usual,” Blaine said. Then he pointed at the woman standing by the elevator with her back to them, cradling a pink yoga mat. “Oh, there’s Shan.” Shan was tiny and beautiful, with an oval face and high cheekbones, an imperious face.

“Hey!” she said, and hugged Blaine. She did not look once at Ifemelu. “I’m so glad I went to my Pilates class. It leaves you if you leave it. Did you go running today?”

“Yep.”

“I just talked to David again. He says he’ll send me alternative covers this evening. Finally they seem to be hearing me.” She rolled her eyes. The elevator’s doors slid open and she led the way in, still talking to Blaine, who now seemed uncomfortable, as though he was waiting for a moment to make introductions, a moment that Shan was not willing to give.

“The marketing director called me this morning. She had that really unbearable politeness that is worse than any insult, you know? And so she tells me how booksellers love the cover already and blah blah blah. It’s ridiculous,” Shan said.

“It’s the herd instinct of corporate publishing. They do what everyone else does,” Blaine said.

The elevator stopped at her floor, and she turned to Ifemelu. “Oh, sorry, I’m so stressed,” she said. “It’s nice to meet you. Blaine won’t stop talking about you.” She looked at Ifemelu, a frank sizing up that was not shy to be a frank sizing up. “You’re very pretty.”

“
You’re
very pretty,” Ifemelu said, surprising herself, because those were not the words she would have ordinarily said, but she felt already co-opted by Shan; Shan’s compliment had made her strangely happy. Shan is special, Blaine had said, and Ifemelu understood now what he meant. Shan had the air of a person who was somehow
chosen
. The gods had placed a wand on her. If she did ordinary things, they became enigmatic.

“Do you like the room?” Shan asked Ifemelu, with a sweep of her hand, taking in the dramatic furnishing: a red rug, a blue sofa, an orange sofa, a green armchair.

“I know it’s supposed to mean something but I don’t get it.”

Shan laughed, short sounds that seemed cut off prematurely, as though more were supposed to follow but did not, and because she merely laughed, not saying anything, Ifemelu added, “It’s interesting.”

“Yes,
interesting
.” Shan stood by the dining table and raised her leg onto it, leaning over to grasp her foot in her hand. Her body was a collection of graceful small curves, her buttocks, her breasts, her calves, and there was in her movement the entitlement of the chosen; she could stretch her leg on her dining table whenever she wanted, even with a guest in her apartment.

“Blaine introduced me to
Raceteenth
. It’s a great blog,” she said.

“Thank you,” Ifemelu said.

“I have a Nigerian friend who is a writer. Do you know Kelechi Garuba?”

“I’ve read his work.”

“We talked about your blog the other day and he said he was sure the Non-American Black was a Caribbean because Africans don’t care about race. He’ll be shocked when he meets you!” Shan paused to exchange the leg on the table, leaning in to grasp her foot.

“He’s always fretting about how his books don’t do well. I’ve told him he needs to write terrible things about his own people if he wants to do well. He needs to say Africans alone are to blame for African problems, and Europeans have helped Africa more than they’ve hurt Africa, and he’ll be famous and people will say he’s so
honest
!”

Ifemelu laughed.

“Interesting picture,” she said, gesturing to a photo on a side table, of Shan holding two bottles of champagne high above her head, surrounded
by tattered, smiling, brown children in what looked like a Latin American slum, shacks with patched-up tin walls behind her. “I mean interesting literally.”

“Ovidio didn’t want it displayed but I insisted. It’s supposed to be ironic, obviously.”

Ifemelu imagined the insisting, a simple sentence, which would not need to be repeated and which would have Ovidio scrambling.

“So do you go home to Nigeria often?” Shan asked.

“No. Actually I haven’t been home since I came to the States.”

“Why?”

“At first I couldn’t afford to. Then I had work and just never seemed to make the time.”

Shan was facing her now, her arms stretched out and pushed back like wings.

“Nigerians call us
acata
, right? And it means wild animal?”

“I don’t know that it means wild animal, I really don’t know what it means, and I don’t use it.” Ifemelu found herself almost stammering. It was true and yet in the directness of Shan’s gaze, she felt guilty. Shan dripped power, a subtle and devastating kind.